2952-12-18 – Tales from the Inbox: The Dirtside Job
The last we heard of captain Svetlana Cremonesi of the Tycho Spike, she was trying to save Nestor Palazzo from ferrying a group of Gilhedat on their diplomatic mission. Though she was not entirely successful in this effort, Mr. Palazzo does seem to have benefitted from her intervention all the same.
When I reached out to see if she had any new accounts of her travels as a light-duty spacer here in Sagittarius, her first response was a rather colorful refusal, which I am not permitted to publish because of our editorial rules on profanity.
Evidently she changed her mind, because a few days later this story found its way into my inbox. It reveals tantalizingly little about her current activities, but much about her current fears, which still revolve around unwelcome life-forms getting aboard her ship.
An unfamiliar alarm woke Svetlana from troubled sleep. As usual, she was vertical and pulling on her trousers before she was even fully awake to marvel at the fact that she had never heard this particular alarm sound before, in her decade of operating Tycho Spike.
“Hells, what now.” Svetlana hopped over to the desk console and smacked the surface to wake the display. As she wrestled with the catches that fastened a standard set of spacer’s smart-fabric fatigues, her eyes roved across the ship status panel that appeared there. At first, the board looked normal - nothing was on fire, nothing important was unpowered that should be, and nothing was powered that shouldn’t be.
It was the outside temperature reading – thirty Celsius – that snapped Svetlana back to her senses. Her ship wasn’t on an automated course between station and system jump limit, or vice versa. Nor was it docked to the side of one of Confederated Sagittarius’s many stations, awaiting cargo.
No, she had landed on a planet – a habitable planet at that – and that explained the unfamiliarity of the alarm. She hadn’t actually landed Tycho Spike since the first year she’d owned it, after all. It must be related to external conditions, not to the ship’s internal status.
Sure enough, when Svetlana called up the detailed alert list, it was full of “PERIMETER BREACH SENSED” - a clear enough phrase, though even in its clarity she was confused. She hadn’t realized her ship had a ground perimeter sensor system installed.
A few more commands called up the external camera feeds, and soon she was looking out four digital windows onto the rolling, mauve-colored grassland that went on for miles around her landing site. She’d gotten a decent look at the place from orbit, but had landed after dark, so this was her first real look at the world she’d landed on.
Svetlana had to admit it was beautiful, even though normally she didn’t go in for any place that threatened to get her boots dirty. Supposedly the place was on the Survey colonization list for after the war, and she hoped whichever ship-full of clod-shovelers landed here first were wise enough to respect what they had been given.
She had only a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of the world, though. At least two dark shapes were weaving through the tall grassy plants toward the ship. When visible light offered no clue as to what they were, she switched to thermal, but that was no good either, showing only bright, hot ellipses.
At first, Svetlana thought these might be emissaries of her employer – this was no pleasure trip, after all – but something in the way they moved suggested wild animals, not people. Normally, those would be no threat to her or the ship, but this was an unfamiliar world, one for which Survey had never published a biosphere report. What was out there could be almost anything.
Svetlana grabbed her gun-belt and fastened it around her hips. She’d heard all the usual watering-hole stories of alien peril: acid-spitting horrors that could eat holes in a small ship’s hull, titanic megafauna which could tear metal like tissue paper, hive-mind drones kamikaze-diving into air-vents and access ports by the thousands, and of course the ever-popular monsters composed largely of phased matter, capable of sidling through solid bulkheads to rend the unsuspecting crew within. No doubt such fears were misplaced on such a pleasant world as this, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.
As Svetlana configured the hull loudspeakers to shriek an alarm every time the proximity alert went off, one of the creatures briefly revealed itself in a clearing. It was long of body and low to the ground, slinking forward with its narrow muzzle lowered as if smelling its way. She saw no eyes, nor ears, nor fur; the body seemed almost a sculpture of liquid obsidian, rippling with the motion of every tendon and muscle. She shuddered at the idea of running into something like that unawares. Hopefully her employer’s goons knew the local hazards better than she.
Even as she thought this, the chime of incoming comms sounded. Svetlana brought up the lights, rubbed the remaining sleep out of her eyes, then hurried forward to the cockpit to take it from there, in case a video transmission was requested.
Sure enough, the incoming request was from Piers Jerome, her current employer. His ship, the Leyla Robbins, was entering orbit, and had presumably spotted her transmitter.
Jerome’s chubby face and insincere grin filled the center viewpanel as soon as Svetlana slapped the “accept” control. “I’m surprised you beat us here, Captain Cremonesi.”
“It wasn’t hard to find.” Svetlana shrugged. “I got here day before yesterday and didn’t see you for three shifts, so I decided to land.”
“Shame you don’t have high-end gravimetric sensors. We were already in-system by then.” Jerome clapped his hands together. “We will be planetside in about two hours.”
“I’ll be waiting.” Svetlana hesitated. “Going to be all kinds of fun transferring cargo in normal-gee. Plus there’s a good bit of local wildlife skulking around down here.”
Jerome waved one pudgy hand. “Xenolife shouldn’t give us much trouble. Nothing on this world is classified as sapient.”
“I’m more concerned about it being classified as hungry.” Svetlana started as another perimeter alarm sounded. “But we’ll figure that out when you get here. Tycho Spike out.”
