Dark Planet by Charles W. Sasser Page A

first to find a voice. She sounded shook. “The … the Blobs know we’re here.”
    I shivered, although the temperature in the pod must have been over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Sergeant Shiva and Ferret drew their Punch Guns.
    “That was no Blob,” Gorilla said in a low voice. “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t sentient. It left no signature on the LF indicators. Captain, we all heard it, but there wasn’t anything here.”

C·H·A·P·T·E·R
 
THIRTEEN
    M aid attempted to explain it once she recovered her composure. “We’re under OPSEC. All commo is locked down. The only way I can explain it is that we must have picked up a dead transmission that has been floating around space for heaven knows how long. Otherwise, I’m picking up nothing.”
    “We aren’t in space now,” Gorilla said.
    He exchanged his reentry helmet for the special combat one that fed environmental data directly into his large brain for analysis. After a moment, he reported a negative.
    “Same on the LF,” he said. “No other life form within the vicinity.”
    There simply was no room in the pod for a stowaway, and certainly no place for it to hide in such a compact environment.
    “Sergeant Kadar, your assessment?” Captain Amalfi requested through the intercom. He sounded distrustful, his misgivings unquestionably fueled by the talk he had had with Lieutenant Snork aboard the
Tsutsumi
. The sown seed growing.
    I had already scoured the pod and the immediate vicinity outside the ship, using my particular Talent. Whatever presence I previously sensed was no longer among us. In fact, the environment seemed scrubbed, so non-threatening that it made me even more uneasy.
    “I … Negative,” I responded.
    “Nothing?” Captain Bell Toll pressed. “Can you explain it?”
    My senses were telling me … something. Like in a language I could not quite comprehend.
    “I am as baffled as anyone,” I admitted.
    “Fu-uck,” Blade’s rough voice barged in. “Why the fuck did we even bring him along?”
    If someone removed that particular vulgarism from his speech, it would reduce his vocabulary by half.
    Captain Amalfi professionally relegated the odd event to the back of his mind since it couldn’t be explained at the moment. With cool efficiency, he punched our target coordinates into the pod-turned-submarine, checked the systems and said, “Dive! Dive! Dive!”
    Submerging, the submarine “flew” through the water within a vacuum created by its own remarkable speed, making a sound approaching that of a constant, but low-volume sonic boom. We encountered no more of the eel-shaped creatures or, at our speed, any other aqua life that showed up on the viewscreen as anything other than small, disappearing blurs.
    In spite of our meteor-like arrival and the surface storms, we had landed within a relatively short distance of our land debarkation point. Thanks to the computers. Sonar revealed a deep glacier-formed harbor and a river emptying into it. The water became darker, murky, turbulent at the river’s mouth, reducing the effectiveness of the viewscreen and forcing us to rely on the ship’s nerve center to avoid obstacles and underwater stone banks. The skipper reduced speed to a crawl. We proceeded up the river like a blind fish. My senses tingled like raw nerves.
    Captain Amalfi pulled power. “Okay, DRT-bags. We’re here. Now we go overland.”
    The craft sank to the bottom. Atlas shot core anchors into the riverbed to hold the pod securely in place and out of sight. The crew prepared in a businesslike manner to go ashore in a hostile environment. The edginess, the pre-mission jitters – whatever it was – appeared to have dissipated. The team returned to its old bantering character. Even I felt more at ease.
    Chameleon cammies were activated. They were of a remarkable lightweight material that assumed the nature of the surrounding environment. Clad in helmet, hood, and mask, you could stand in a forest and