Tales from the Inbox: Marta's Second Castaway

2947-06-18 - Tales from the Inbox: Marta's Second Castaway

I am sure that by the time this article hits ingest queues, yesterday’s news broadcast from Admiralty Headquarters and clips of Admiral Tosi’s formal address to the Confederated parliament this morning will have already reached most everyone. The wave of Ladeonist-linked sabotage that followed the announcement throughout Confederated space is likely old news by the time Tales from the Inbox appears on your media-screen. It seems hard to believe, even for those of us out here close to the tip of the spear, that the Confederated Worlds are at war.

Two small colonies on the Coreward Frontier have gone dark in the past five days – their orbital installations perhaps victims of Ladeonist attacks or Sagittarian raids, it’s too early to say for sure – and Håkøya is on high alert. The Admiralty asserts that at least four Sagittarian cruiser-analogues have crossed the Gap and are now running amok in the Frontier. We are likely in no more danger than the citizens of Maribel, but there has been some unrest here as well – Håkøya has no history of Ladeonist ideological infection, but its relatively wealthy population with a large percentage of retirees from the Colonial Reach never expected to be on the front lines of a proper shooting war. Even if this conflict is, as it seems to be, little more than a second Brushfire War, the risk to life and property is understandably making some here quite upset.

As you can imagine, spacers of every stripe have been flooding the Confederated Navy recruiting offices here in Håkøya and elsewhere, hoping for easy commissions and a chance to see action against the Sagittarians. My understanding is that the only recruiting drive currently active is for the Naval Marines; the situation is obviously not so dire that civilian spacers are being given shoulder-boards and frigate captaincies just for signing up. The Sagittarians are a threat to the Frontier’s widely scattered population, not to the Confederated Worlds.

Tales from the Inbox will not become a forum for front-lines reporting, so do not expect to see this sort of update in the preamble to every week’s entry. Ashton is working with one of the local behind-the-scenes techs on hiring a dedicated war correspondent for Cosmic Background, someone with the connections to actually leave port with the Fifth Fleet, and an announcement as to the person chosen will be made as soon as possible. Most likely, that reporting will be available on our vidcast episodes rather than in the text feed, but details have not been confirmed yet.

This week’s entry is unrelated to the war news, and that may come as a relief to most of you. Marta K., the submitter of the first piece featured on this forum (Tales from the Inbox: One Violet Acre), is back – or rather, she was back a month ago when the message which became this entry arrived in my inbox. She reports encountering yet another stranded spacer (apparently she has a knack for that sort of thing) on a routine Frontier colonization-survey run. This time, things didn't go quite as well.

The lack of traffic in orbit around K2893074 B had convinced Marta that she was the only outfit in the entire system long before she entered orbit. The rugged planet destined to bear the name “Austberg” as soon as the Aust Colonial Trust’s first wave of colony-building ships arrived remained as empty and silent as it always had.

The Trust had paid Marta handsomely to make one final sweep of the system and the world before their investment was committed. A pirates’ base in a hollowed-out asteroid or the presence of dangerous xenofauna not noticed by the first survey would convince them to take their ships and colonists to another system. As one of the most experienced surveyors on the Frontier – indeed, Marta’s career as a surveyor spanned the bulk of the Frontier’s history – the organization trusted her to find any last-minute risks to the timetable.

“Marc, give me a full sweep of the surface. Highlight anything that doesn’t match the original survey.” It had been nearly fifteen years since the planet had been visited by another surveyor, but Marta didn’t expect many problems. An uninhabited planet generally didn’t change in that short a time.

“Order acknowledged.” The shipboard computer’s smooth, cultured voice put Marta’s hoarse, crass Frontier drawl to shame, but she liked its chocolate baritone all the same. In the viewport, the planet twisted and then crept to one side as the ship adjusted its orbit. Knowing the scans would take more than five shifts to finish, Marta unbuckled her crash harness and got up, intending to re-watch a season of her favorite vidcast drama while Marcus Ferdinand circled the little world, drinking in data through every instrument.

Just as she reached the hatch behind the control consoles, Marta heard a pinging noise behind her. She expected dozens of minor anomalies, the results of small asteroid impacts, volcanic activity, and similar; a smart surveyor usually took a shift’s worth of leisure before even looking at a list of sensor anomalies. Only amateurs sat at the controls, jumping on every weird result as it came in. There was no rush, after all.

Even knowing this, Marta turned around and sat back down, calling up the oddity which had caused the survey software to emit a pinging noise. Most likely, it was a recent lava flow, or the torn landscape caused by a violent quake. Anything big enough to be caught so quickly was bound to be natural.

The console’s center screen blanked, then showed a charred scar cutting through the pseudo-trees populating a wide, steep-sided valley. Forest fires, too, could confuse the software, and this one appeared quite recent, perhaps less than a year. Marta was about to classify the finding as natural surface evolution when she saw a bright spot at the center in the false-color imagery – something at the epicenter of the fire bore the high albedo of artificially worked metal.

“Stars around.” Marta canceled the search pattern and focused the sensor array on the spot. Sure enough, the reflective object resolved itself into a ship lying broken on the surface. If her sensors were correct, the ship was about the size of a small cargo hauler, and clearly not designed to make planetfall.

It had been only eighteen months before that she’d found her ex-husband’s sorry excuse for a survey craft in a parking orbit and landed to rescue him from his failures to perform proper equipment maintenance; for whoever had crewed the starship below, there would be no good-natured rescue.

Ten minutes later, Marta had her environmental suit on and was almost ready to detach Banshee from its parasite berth beneath Ferdinand’s main hull. The hardy surface-exploration launch would let her overfly the crash site and look for survivors, though she held out little hope of finding any. A starship didn’t just crash-land; someone had maneuvered it into the planet’s atmosphere, knowing their vessel had no fittings to make a planetary landing, and knowing its hull plating was not designed to function as a heat-shield for re-entry. That the wreck was mostly intact was a testament to its crew’s skill and desperation, but any who survived the crash probably perished in the fire, or starved in the alien wilderness afterwards.

Banshee clattered free of its anchor points, and Marta pointed its nose toward the ground, settling in for the stupendous roar of re-entry fire wreathing a craft designed to fall from orbit safely. As soon as the little launch had slowed enough that the atmosphere around its nose no longer burned spontaneously, she deployed its aerofoils and banked toward the crash site.

From three miles overhead, little was visible that wasn’t visible from a hundred. Marta circled lower, observing the way the ship had come down. Its nose and forward comms array were intact, suggesting the helmsman had pulled up just before impact, sacrificing most of the cargo holds to save the hab and communication modules at the bow. Marta, aware of how difficult that must have been, felt sorry she’d never meet the spacer who’d pulled it off.

Circling the wreck even at low altitude revealed no signs of life. The land around the ship had been burned to cinders, and nothing moved against the ashen gray soil or between the jagged stumps of burnt xeno-flora. Offering a spacer’s prayer for the souls who had been lost with the ship, she spotted a clear spot to land in the shadow of the comms array jutting from the hauler’s prow, and keyed in an approach sequence. Veteran surveyor or no, she trusted the computer to land the launch far more than her own hands.

Stepping out of Banshee and into the ashen hellscape where once a quiet forest of alien trees had stood, An honorable spacer did their best to salvage the ship’s logs from any wreck, and Marta meant to do just that. Perhaps the reason for the disaster was revealed by the computer records of the vessel’s final hours, and the families of those lost would want some closure for their missing relatives.

As she trudged forward, Marta spotted movement out of the corner of her eye. Whirling, she drew her sidearm out of sheer reflex, wondering what sorts of scavengers the local ecosystem might have bred. Seeing nothing amiss, she continued forward warily. Her desire to bring lost spacers’ souls to rest was not worth being eaten by a predator that didn’t even have a scientific classification yet.

When she rounded the last clump of charcoal stumps and saw the tattered square of solar-tarp hanging off the side of the ship, Marta didn’t at first register its meaning. Only several steps later did she recognize that a survivor would have had to hang it up, and to string the wires that hung from its voltage studs and coiled around in the ashen dirt below. Someone had survived, after all.

“Hello?” Marta turned in place, keying her enviro-suit’s external loudspeaker. “Is anyone here?”

There was no answer, but again Marta spotted movement at the edge of her vision.

Turning to face the movement again, she debated holstering her gun as a show of good faith, but only for a moment. Suddenly, she wanted to forget her mission of mercy and make a run for Banshee. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but horror stories of stranded spacers losing their minds on uninhabited planets was another matter. “Come on out.”

Again, her voice was swallowed by the place without answer.

Taking a step toward the last place she’d heard the sound, Marta’s booted foot fell on something that crunched. Looking down, she saw that she had stepped on a bone – a brittle human femur, dry with age and long since stripped of all flesh. Its entire length was stippled with gnaw-marks, probably caused by a scavenger bold enough to explore the crash site.

Something darted through the ash-choked landscape, and this time Marta got a better look at it. The scuttling thing was alien indeed – hunched and bent, it scrabbled from cover to cover on leathery, hairless limbs. A mane of scraggly, dark hair hung in clumps over its head, back, and neck. A scavenger, she decided. The survivors were truly long gone.

The creature peered out from behind cover, its hooded eyes boring into Marta’s own. Siezed with fear she could not immediately explain, she fired her pistol wildly toward the spot and ran for Banshee at full speed.

Only when she was airborne did she realize what it was that had so unnerved her. The face which had peered ash-streaked out at her had not been that of an animal. Worse still, she knew that the tooth-marks on the femur were too big to be those of a small, scavenging animal. The teeth that had made them were somewhat larger, rounded and very even.

Details

Tales from the Inbox: Visitation in the Void

2947-06-11 – Tales from the Inbox: Visitation in the Void

An anonymous member of the audience sent me an interesting file-cache which purports to link Sagittarian activity with sightings of KR-type vessels operated by Ladeonist radicals. I don’t have any way of verifying this information from Håkøya, but I have passed it along to Ashton at Centauri; hopefully with the data-feed aggregation of the Core Worlds, he can see if there’s anything to this theory. Perhaps the Ladeonists see in the Sagittarians a force which has a hope of annoying the Confederated Worlds? It’s an interesting idea, but not one which we have any hard evidence for as of yet.

This week’s entry of Tales from the Inbox features a nightmare scenario for any spacer: After an accident aboard the mercenary squadron carrier Sergio Lando, Johan M. found himself alone on the silent ship, the rest of the crew having swarmed into the launches and limped from their dying transport to a nearby world.

His story is odd, as he freely admits his sanity was not quite intact during the ordeal or afterwards. Many marooned spacers facing death have claimed to be visited by spirits in the void, and perhaps this is nothing more than an extension of that legend brought to life by a stressed and sleep-deprived imagination.

Perhaps, on the other hand, something did visit Johan. He is happy to admit that he is such an inexperienced spacer that without what the “ghost” said about vacsuits, he’d never have thought of breaking into the EVA lockers, and it is exactly this tactic which saved his life for the five weeks which he remained marooned before his crew returned for their belongings. Though Lando was a total loss, I am told that the mercenaries have since acquired a new carrier (which for such people usually means a ninety-year-old, stripped-down cargo hull) and are refitting it.

Johan kicked the half-disassembled terminal in frustration, then became even more frustrated as the impact pushed him backward slowly across the compartment, rotating lazily until he managed to catch one of the handgrips which had protruded from the bulkhead panels with the loss of A-grav power. A better circuitry technician might have been able to coax the terminal to life with Sergio Lando’s emergency power network, but Johan was a bookkeeper, not an electrician.

Of course, he didn’t have the opportunity of calling for the help of one of the dozen-odd techs of the normal crew. They had left, along with the rest of the crew and the normally hard-bitten and unflappable combat squadron. Lando’s corridors had become as lifeless as its reactor.

Based on what he could glean from the fragment of ship’s datasphere still online, Johan knew he’d been unconscious for almost fifteen hours after the blast, and that thirty-one hours had elapsed since he’d come to. That the big ship’s pressure hull and rad-shielding had survived a reactor containment excursion had been something of a miracle; that the dazed crew had elected to abandon ship in the company’s flotilla of launches and assault craft likely seemed only too prudent at the time.

The only problem was that, in their frenzied rush to escape a dying starship, Johan’s compatriots had left him behind. Since he was separated from his comm at the time of the blast and had taken pains not to have his movements noticed, there had been little hope of being found in his unconsciousness before Boss McKay cut his losses and launched the last boats.

After he’d stopped shouting incoherently out a viewport at the empty space through which Sergio Lando would now likely drift forever, Johan had decided that the situation was not entirely hopeless. A hasty evacuation would mean that much of the company’s equipment and stores were left behind, and McKay had come up through the mercenary ranks after a short career with a dubiously-legal salvage crew. He wouldn’t leave a hundred k-creds of perfectly good kit sitting in a derelict forever. All Johan needed to do was survive until someone came back to strip the hulk, and he would be rescued.

The cold comfort of this likely rescue had faded quickly, of course. Without main power, Lando could not run its atmospherics, and even the best insulation would surrender precious warmth to the interstellar void without the reactor’s waste heat to replace it. With full larders stocked for a crew of fifty, Johan had no fear of starving, and the water reservoir would last more than a month even if he didn’t get the wastewater recycler working. Air and heat were the only two problems that he had to conquer.

If only he was a born spacer like the rest of the company, there would have been no problems, but Johan had none of the skills of his starfaring coworkers. He had been hired because of his ability to balance the books to keep everyone (especially the strike-jocks) in the dark about the company’s financial situation, either good or ill. Boss McKay found his riotous crew far easier to manage if there was not daily drama regarding the outfit’s bottom line. Johan spent most of his shifts making weeks of both extreme profit and extreme loss seem to be average, unremarkable times, even though such times were all but impossible to find in the mercenary business. He’d never so much as popped the access panels on a terminal before, and now he needed to wire the emergency batteries into a number of systems designed to work only on the main reactor-power circuit if he was going to survive.

Smacking the bulkhead with one palm, Johan glared at the terminal across the compartment again. Without A-grav, cabling bobbed free in the open air, resembling the tentacle-arms of an Earthly anemone. Before he touched the atmospherics, he’d wanted to get enough of the datasphere online to retrieve walkthrough instructions on what he was about to do, but even this simple task had failed in a serpent’s nest of color-coded cabling. After all, Johan had never even learned what a red cable with black rings meant. A task carefully designed to be easy for a systems tech had defeated him completely.

As the marooned book-keeper considered whether to stake his life on a fifty-fifty chance of frying his only hope of getting instructions, or to bed down and hope that a few hours’ delay wouldn’t result in a slow death by asphyxiation, the whole ship shuddered slightly. Normally such tremors and vibrations would have failed to even rise to his attention, but Johan looked around wild-eyed, knowing that no system or person capable of causing it remained on board. Was it a precursor to further outbursts by the damaged reactor? Was he about to be blasted into a smear of unrecognizable goo by a cataclysm of strange-matter emissions?

The shudder repeated itself, and this time Johan realized the source was forward, away from the simmering wreck of the reactor. Somehow, this did not comfort him. Stewing in his own fear, he picked his way from handhold to handhold, heading for the access tunnel which would let him pursue the sound. It seemed to repeat every thirty seconds, and as he followed it Johan wondered whether some piece of heavy equipment had come loose and was bouncing about in a compartment.

The tremors led Johan to the cruise bridge, a wide compartment with a horseshoe belt of smart-glass allowing the crew within to see the empty vastness through which they flew. With only the weak emergency lights on, some of the stars beyond the glass glowed pitilessly into the empty command deck. There was nothing loose on the bridge large enough to make such a racket.

Just as Johan turned to leave and check the compartments one deck below, the tremor occurred again. He could hear more this time; a scraping of metal against metal carried through the structure of the ship rather than through the air. Nervously, he turned back to the armor-glass, peering out into the void around the ship’s blunt prow, and waited.

“Knock knock.”

At the sound of a voice behind him, Johan screamed and spun in place, body unable to leap as violently as his heart only because his feet did not touch the deck in zero-gee. Behind him, drifting calmly in the middle of the bridge, was a pale-skinned woman in an unfamiliar type of space-suit, helmet missing.

“No need for that.” The pale woman kicked off one of the crash-padded bridge chairs toward him. “What happened to your ship?”

“I…” Johan pressed his back against the cool armor-glass. The woman wasn’t armed, but he had every certainty that she could kill him. There was an insubstantial quality to her voice and ivory-pale skin which suggested more death than life, even as living mirth danced in her eyes and twisted her thin lips into a wry grin. “Reactor… problem. Don’t know much more.”

“Interesting.” This answer seemed to be a confirmation for the intruder. “Mind if I have a look at the problem?”

“You can… fix it?”

She laughed, and the sound carried enough of that same combination of lifeless cold and boundless life that Johan almost kicked off the window and bolted. “Nope. I just want to look and see how it failed.”

“I…” Johan knew he should ask why, but the question died before he formed it. “I suppose.”

“Excellent.” The woman put a hand on the glass next to Johan’s head to stop her forward drift, and for an instant her face was inches from his. “I’ll leave you to your repairs, then.” She pushed off and headed for the doorway at the back of the bridge. “Bye now!”

Johan almost watched dumbstruck as she disappeared, but his survival instinct kicked in just in time. “Wait!”

She spun around, but kept drifting away. “I can’t stay long, Skipper.”

“I can’t fix the ship. I’m going to die.”

The woman laughed again. “Probably not any time soon, with all those fully charged vacsuits in the EVA bay.”

“Suits..?” Johan hadn’t considered this. The atmosphere in the ship would soon grow cold and stale, but each suit battery and atmosphere canister would last several days.

“Good talk, but I really can’t stay.” The woman kicked off the door-frame as she left the room. Johan heard her kick off one more bulkhead outside. A strange sizzling sound followed, then silence reigned. Once again, Johan was alone.

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Tales from the Inbox: Seeker's Symbiosis

2947-06-04 – Tales from the Inbox: Seeker's Symbiosis

I didn’t think it worth a standalone text feed item, but Captain Bosch finally responded to my datasphere messages. He cannot give any news as to the condition or disposition of his squadron at this time, but he did suggest that he expected to return to Håkøya soon. Though he could not be specific, he definitely implied there was some yet-unresolved danger to his ships which needed to be overcome before the squadron could return to the near side of the Gap. 

If you are a congregant of the United Spacers’ Chapel, and I know there are many in this audience of that faith, consider offering up a prayer for his command. In the message I received, he asked specifically for this audience to remain in prayer for his command and for the whole Confederated Navy. Security concerns prevented his saying more, but the tone of the message was somewhat grim, suggesting some sort of trouble. Could administrative fallout from the Great Purge be affecting the Navy’s ability to supply his ships so far from a primary naval base? 

On a lighter note, recordings of Sagittarian ships nosing around on the near side of the Gap appear to have come to nothing. I have seen no reports of further sightings after the first wave, and while reports from the Sagittarius Frontier continue to come in, most of them are months old. Today I want to focus on another tale sent in by Jaska N., a Hegemony-bred spacer whose alliance with a unique xenosapient named Ina has graced this feed before. After some curiosity was expressed on our audience engagement hub about what happened next, he decided to send in more of his story. I have lifted only a portion of the new account which answers some of the most often-heard questions from the community hub. 

While Jaska himself does not specifically describe the events of his service with the Hegemony Navy which wrack him with guilt and terror to this day, many veterans of the Confederated Navy bear similar psychic scars, and the kind of event likely to cause such trauma can be easily imagined. A military spacer’s life on the Rimward side of the treaty zone would be all too familiar to our own Navy veterans. 

Jaska woke in near-perfect darkness, warm except where cool, hard-tipped fingers rested on his chest and where an arc of blank glassy enigma lay on his shoulder. He had bedded down for the night shift alone, but as was increasingly usual, he had not remained so through the whole night. 

“Ina.” Jaska gently but firmly pushed the xenosapient’s head off his shoulder, and a flicker of indistinct light woke behind her featureless mask. “We’ve talked about this. You have your own bunk.” 

Ina lifted herself up enough that the thin thermal blanket fell aside, and the cool air of the little ship’s crew cabin invaded Jaska’s comfortable warmth. A series of indecipherable symbols flitted across her face too quickly for him to read, then she lay back down and pressed the side of her head against his ear. “You should not be alone.” Her purring voice, the product of scale-like constituents rubbing against each other like crickets’ legs, nevertheless managed to sound like a human woman’s voice. 

“Look, we both know I’m over the rad-sickness.” Jaska wanted to get up and stand apart from her, but he couldn’t do so and still expect an answer more complex than the three letters at a time she could display on her face. “The excuse that you’re concerned about my health expired a week ago.” 

“I said that you should not be alone, not that I am worried you continue to be ill.” Ina had of course nursed Jaska back to health after helping her find a radioactive xenoflora specimen nearly killed him. She seemed to have known beforehand of the negative effects the radiation would have on human tissue, and to have experienced something like guilt for some time afterwards, but he tried to keep in mind how little the lithe, feminine humanoid guise reflected Ina’s true nature. “What haunts your sleep, Jaska?” 

Jaska shook his head, pried Ina off himself, and rolled out of the bunk, blinking as the cabin automatically brightened. For an alien who had spent more time as a prisoner and curiosity of Rattanai pirates than a traveling-companion of Terrans, she was far too perceptive. “Things that are twenty T-years old. Don’t worry about it.” 

Ina, unable to use her voice without pressing some part of herself against Jaska’s ear, sat up on his bunk and let her long legs dangle off the side. Though composed of a few thousands of scale-like individuals working in concert, she didn’t seem to know how to take the shape of anything but an attractive, slim human female. Most likely, her form was reactive to whoever she was around – Jaska’s tendency was obviously to respond best to a human female, so that was what she looked like. It was most likely a simple reflex. 

“THA-TLO-NG?” Ina, displaying three letters at a time on her faceplate, queried. 

“Just about.” Jaska wandered across the tiny cabin to the controls to check the little ship’s autopilot. They were still on course, with plenty of fuel, atmospherics, and nutrient reserves to make it back to civilization. “I’m all right.” 

Before Jaska realized that she had left the bunk rack, Ina’s arms and serpentine, barb-tipped tail were already wrapped around him, and her head was already buried into his shoulder. “I can help.” Her purring voice sent a shiver down Jaska’s spine, and he tried to remind himself that she had almost killed him in pursuit of a radioactive plant whose purpose had never been explained in detail, and that all her pseudo-sexual affection was aimed toward a very different sort of intimacy. If she said she could help, she probably could – but he dreaded learning how. 

“Don’t.” Jaska pried her arms off himself. She was far less dense than a human, and under normal circumstances far weaker. She could of course flow her components around his intervening hands if she chose, but that rarely happened. “This isn’t something you can fix so easily.” 

The letters “YES” appeared on Ina’s otherwise blank face. “ICA-NTA-KEA-WAY-” 

“Nothing.” Jaska finished the sentence being patiently spelled out. “You have permission to take nothing from me. Not even the nightmares.” 

“BUT-” 

“I know in your own way you’re trying to help.” Jaska turned away and keyed the forward display to open its shutters. With bright lights in the cabin, no stars were visible beyond, but he stared out into the void anyway. “We humans help each other by sharing loads, not taking them away.” 

Ina remained silent for several seconds. When Jaska turned around, he saw that she had fallen into the pilot’s acceleration couch, one leg slung lazily over the arm-rest. Though she could make no normal expression, he could tell she was waiting for him to say more. To tell the story which spawned his nightmares. 

Jaska sighed. He had, after all, suggested it. He wasn’t ready to tell the story, but it would do him more good than to have Ina try to take away the trauma. “I suppose.” Walking past her, he leaned on the back of the chair, looking down at the blank-faced creature which had volunteered to hear his confession.  

Ina craned her head to look at him curiously, contorting in an unconscious attempt to look more appealing to his eye. Would she understand why the memory hurt so much? Would it matter if she didn’t? 

Jaska took a deep breath, then began. “It all began when I was in the service. We were answering a colonial distress call on the Rimward Frontier...” 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Siren Stone

2947-05-28 – Tales from the Inbox: The Siren Stone

Apologies for the late delivery; the system we have developed to ensure reliable delivery of Tales from the Inbox and other text feed items is online, but a few hours to propagate the data across the HyperCast network from multiple distant sources are required. In the future, Tales from the Inbox will continue to arrive a few hours later than its previous ingestion timestamp, but we are working to tighten that gap somewhat.

Today’s entry was sent in by none other than Nojus Brand, back in action after his run-in with a chitinous predator on the arid world of Barsamia a few months ago. Evidently he lost all the footage of his most recent brief, dangerous expedition to a solar flare – but he wanted to make sure to let everyone in both of our audiences know that he’s back with new dangers in mind.

Nojus paused to glance out the tiny, radiation-proof window in the side of his landing craft several times before he finished suiting up and checking the seals. The world outside was nothing like the tropical hothouses, frigid crags, and baked deserts he usually frequented on his little expeditions, and for once, he felt a little bit uneasy.

The uneasiness, he told himself, had nothing to do with the nearly fatal outcome of his most recent outing, or with the long shadows cast by the dead, corroded hulls of two much larger landing craft which he had chosen to set down beside. No, it was something else. The picturesque, untamed wildness that marked most of his destinations had become a familiar and even comforting factor in Nojus’s travels, and now that he had found an entirely new type of peril, the sense of danger lost long ago had made a creeping return. This time, he would have to tackle an environment without his Reed-Soares Personal Survival Utility.

“Warning.” The lander’s comm, still tuned to the frequency of the beacon installed beside the two dead landers, spoke in the recorded voice of a previous visitor to the system. “The surface of Golgotha A is a Class 2 hazardous environment. Do not land without proper precautions. Warning…”

Tromping over to the control panel, Nojus switched off the volume. The beacon would repeat five times, then go silent for ten more minutes, as it had been doing for at least fifty years. Most Class 2 hazards needed no beacons, of course; the hostility of such places was usually detectable from orbit. The first of three planets in the Golgotha star system, however, hid its horrors well; all that the first explorers had seen was a barren orb with a nitrogen atmosphere, crust studded with valuable mineral formations.

Later expeditions, seeing the hulks of abandoned landing-ships studding the surface near the most promising mineral fields, must have proceeded with greater caution. This caution had done them no good; for two whole centuries, nothing that landed on Golgotha A ever rose to orbit again.

The Elliway Expedition, first to return from a ground survey of the aptly named Place of the Skull, had survived thanks more to luck than to Captain Elliway’s incorrect theories about the fates of all who had come before. One of the junior researchers had stumbled on the vacsuited corpse of one of her predecessors and discovered that every electronic component - shielded or otherwise - in the dead explorer’s possession was hopelessly fried. After a bit of exploratory simulation, she had warned her compatriots, and Elliway had lifted off only hours after arriving.

Armed with the data brought back by Elliway’s crew, Nojus would not be the first to safely spend time exploring Golgotha A, but he suspected he was its first tourist. His equipment had all been modified to minimize risk, with the replacement of all ferrous and conductive parts with composite and ceramic. With luck, that would stave off the fate which had befallen many explorers before him.

Camera drones would of course carry the same risks as any other equipment, so when Nojus activated his cameras, they extended off the roof of his landing craft on a pair of long, articulated booms. Panning them in opposite directions, he recorded several seconds’ footage of the gray desolation and the corroded landers. Introductory voice-over work could wait until he was back in the relative safety of orbit.

“Day one on Golgotha A.” The suit microphone picked up the words as usual. “I’m about to open up and take a step outside.”

Taking a deep breath, Nojus stepped into the airlock. His suit-gloved hands were empty, and his right hand hung uselessly at his side, missing the presence of a survival multitool. It couldn’t be helped; Reed-Soares’s smart-metal construction used a large amount of iron, and just like the rest of his kit, all iron had been left in orbit. A few “dumb” composite tools housed in an external compartment would have to do on Golgotha A.

The magnificent desolation outside the lander was something Nojus suspected only the first humans to have landed on Earth’s moon would have found familiar. Grey, powder-fine dust covered the flat plain of the landing site, which stretched to the horizon in all directions except where craggy mineral formations rose into sheer bluffs. The thin atmosphere bore enough wind to scatter footprints, but the ruined remnants of partially-unpacked research equipment lay scattered around the wrecks of long-dead explorers’ landers. Most of the expeditions seemed to have wandered about the landing area for several hours before meeting their doom.

“Beautiful scenery.” Nojus remotely pointed one of the boom cameras at the nearest stand of mineral formations, so the viewers could see how the massive formation glittered and threw off tiny rainbows when the ruddy Golgotha sunlight struck it. “I recommend a visit.” This, he punctuated with a laugh; his viewers would know better. He hoped they would, anyway. Only he was crazy enough to go for a hike on such a perilous planet.

The laugh seemed hollow and empty, like the landers’ hulks in the foreground. “Right. Let’s go take a walk to that formation.”

Nojus took only a few steps before his boot turned over a fist-sized chunk of crystal underneath the dust. Stooping, he picked it up, fingers tingling in knowledge of what he was holding. The grayish crystal formations studding the planet were beautiful and would serve as an ore of several valuable metals, but like the sirens of legend, they enticed with one hand and slew with the other. The crystals had doomed every expedition to Golgotha A, manned or automated.

“See this?” Nojus held up the crystal for the boom camera he knew was following his progress. “If I were wearing a standard suit, I’d be dead right now.” He hurled the crystal off into the distance, away from the pieces of corroded equipment at the landing site. “But I’ve come prepared for this place. No iron in any of my equipment.”

The crystals were deadly because of their odd interaction with iron, of course. Baked by their red-dwarf primary’s eons of irradiating solar flares, the unique mineral had a high-energy crystalline lattice which, though quite stable, would break down quite violently with the right reactant.

Metallic iron was, of course, exactly the reactant the crystals desired. The electromagnetic emissions of this breakdown were violent enough to fry electronics of all kinds and stun the human nervous system, especially since the reaction ate away at the ferrous alloys of standard shielding. Even the tiny crystal chips blown by Golgotha A’s wind, blown against the side of a landing craft, were enough to wipe out an entire expedition, and this was likely the fate of the first explorers to set foot on the world.

“Nobody knows if there’s life on Golgotha A.” Nojus continued, for the benefit of the audience. “Soil testing has proved inconclusive. If there is, it’s probably underground.”

He turned then to stare at the camera. “And if there are predators here, I mean to find them.”

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