Chapter 3 (Patreon)

“I said,” Maddox drawled slowly, “fancy taking a dip with me?”

“That’s what I thought I heard,” Bruce replied, trying not to look at the portal humming angrily on the ground a couple of feet to his left.  “I just assumed that it was a mistake because it’s an absolutely idiotic thing to say.”

“We live in strange times,” Maddox responded, reaching into one of his armored pockets to withdraw a length of narrow but durable polyester rope ordinarily used for emergency field repairs.  “Look, I don’t want to jump in there either, but both of us will be going at once.  At least if you die horribly, you won’t be lonely.”

Bruce sighed, keeping his mic on so that the team leader could hear his exasperation as he motioned at one of the rotted corpses.

“Maddox.  Never mind that we’re in the middle of a building so strange that the anomalies have anomalies, we’re in a room full of corpses with battle damage on the walls next to a writhing pool of energy our systems can’t recognize.  We would be idiots not to go back to Eagle Base and report our findings right now.”

“And then what happens?”  Maddox asked, tying the rope around his left wrist.  “VP Aldridge screams at us for wasting company resources and sends us back out.  Just think about the resources MarsCorp has available.  Hydroponic techs, robtocists operators for the factories, geologists, engineers, computer scientists, security, and us.  There’s no xenoarcheology department.  All we have are exploration teams.  It might be one of the other scout teams that ends up getting sent in, but we’re supposed to handle everything from setting up outposts, to surveying territory, to prospecting for new mining drills.  This is one hundred percent our problem.”

“I can send a microdrone in first,” Trey offered helpfully.  “That way we can at least have some idea as to whether the energy is just going to disintegrate anything  that touches it.”

“There we go,” Maddox’s helmet bobbed.  From experience, Bruce could tell that the team leader was nodding and grinning.  “We send a drone in, and if it’s safe we follow and retrieve it.  Maybe poke around a little bit to see what’s going on here.”

Bruce nodded begrudgingly.  He was more than willing to weather Diana Aldridge’s wrath over jumping into the disc of purple light regardless of what happened to the drone, but ultimately, Maddox was the team leader.  Disobeying a direct order was a problem unless the order clearly threatened his life or expensive company equipment.

Trey crouched down, opening up one of the storage compartments in his arm and putting a fist sized tracked robot down on the shiny black floor of the pyramid.  He tapped a couple of buttons and its onboard engine whirred.

It was still strange that Bruce could hear the tiny electric motor as the treads began to churn.  Even with the extra atmosphere inside the pyramid, their exploration suits were built to shield them from dust storms, radiation, and extreme temperatures.  That meant enough insulation to block out the entire outside world.

The drone buzzed toward the edge of the portal, teetering for a second before it tipped over into the crackling purple light below.  Then, the moment it touched the disc of energy, Bruce tasted a flash of yellow and it was gone.

“Okay,” he said nervously.  “It just evaporated a five thousand dollar robot.  Great.  It’s dangerous.  Can we go home now?”

“Trey?”  Maddox asked, turning to look at where the tech specialist was frantically tapping away at his pad.

“One second,” Trey responded, his voice distracted.  Finally, he looked up.  “Guys, you aren’t going to believe this.”

Maddox made a motion for him to continue, and Trey stood up, pad slipping forgotten to his side.

“I’ve lost track of the drone now, but for a second I was getting readings from it and, well.  I think it’s out of range.  It barely took it a second to get out past Jupiter.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s faster than light speed,” Bruce cut in.  “Your instruments are probably malfunctioning.  Hell, you wouldn’t even have a way to transmit to it more than a mile or two away.”

“That’s that thing,” Trey said excitedly.  “They are reporting a malfunction right now, but that’s because in the nanosecond before I lost track of the drone, it was reporting as both five feet and a couple light seconds away.  Simultaneously.

“Two places at once?”  Maddox asked carefully, walking over to Trey and beckoning for the man to extend his hand.  “Any signs of environmental hazards or the structural integrity of the drone failing before you lost track of it?”

Trey put his hand out, letting Maddox tie the other end of the polyester rope to him as he spoke.

“Nothing.  I only got readings from it for about a tenth of a second, but as best I could tell there weren’t any radiation, temperature or pressure spikes.”

“There we go Bruce,” Maddox said, turning back to face him as he let a hundred or so feet of rope fall to the floor between him and Trey.  “We can’t know that it’s completely safe, but that’s the best we’re going to get.  Either we jump in now or go back to Eagle Base, get screamed at for a day, have our pay docked, and jump in on Thursday.”

Bruce wracked his brain, trying to find a fault with Maddox’s logic.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t one.  Maybe additional testing would reveal that the entire operation was unsafe so that they could call it off, but in all likelihood Eagle Base wouldn’t have much better equipment than Trey.  MarsCorp was more interested in finding and mining minerals than it was exotic energy research.  There might be a couple of more sensitive radiation detectors back under the dome, but deep in his bones, Bruce knew that it wouldn’t change anything.  Whatever the disc of energy actually did, it didn’t emit any radiation that Trey or his suit could pick up

Finally, Bruce sighed.  There was no getting out of it without going mutineer, and the surface of an alien planet with 40 hours of oxygen and electricity wasn’t exactly the best place to go rogue..

“If I come out of this with an extra set of arms and a taste for human flesh,” he warned, “I’m eating both of your brains first.”

“It’s only fair,” Maddox replied cheerfully.  “Now Trey, I want you to hold onto the rope I just tied to you.  If it severs when we step into the energy vortex, wait ten minutes.  If it doesn’t break, give me two tugs in ten minutes and I’ll head back out.  If I tug twice, start pulling on the rope,I need help getting out.  If I ever give three tugs, both of us are dead, just run for it.”

The tech specialist gulped as Maddox turned his attention back to Bruce.

“Ready?”  The question hung heavy in the air.

Bruce glanced at the pit of fizzing and sparking purple light.  Taking a deep breath he walked right up to its edge.  Maddox joined him a second later.

He looked at his team leader, the familiar butterflies of fear fluttering in his stomach as they warred with the adrenaline pumping through his veins.  Distantly, Bruce wished he had some of the ‘go juice’ that the armed forces had used before he went private.  One spike of that and any sleepiness, anxiety, or worry would just disappear.

“Okay Maddox.” It was Bruce’s voice, but it felt like someone else was talking.  “Let’s earn some hazard pay.”

Bruce jumped.  It wasn’t much of a jump, just a little bunny hop.  For a second he felt weightless, floating in Mars’ lighter gravity.  Then, his toes touched the crackling energy plane of the portal and it felt like his entire body was sucked into a straw that stretched into infinity.

He tasted orange and smelled gravity.  Helium-3 atoms giggled as they scurried across Bruce’s skin, playing hide and seek in the cracks and crevices between the strands of carbon that made up the protein chains of his body.

Bruce opened his mouth to take a breath only to find that it no longer existed.  The helium tittered and scurried away abandoning the dissipating stream of atoms and animating energy that had been his body.

The worst of it was that he no longer had eyelids.  There was nothing to shield Bruce from the riot of colors, concepts and emotions that assaulted his confused senses.  He could feel himself moving at incredible speed, but there was no sense of beginning and end.  Duration, distance, and direction.  None of them meant anything in the chaotic millisecond that Bruce found himself trapped in.

Then every sense detected it at once.  His missing eyes saw it clawing toward him, slack bellies and gnashing teeth.  His skin felt it, a dark cold embrace that sought to take everything from him.  He even smelled it, the scent of a predator that activated forgotten memories that told him to run for the nearest tree or cave.

Hunger.

Unbounded and unlimited hunger.  There wasn’t any malice or anger behind it.  Just the uncontrollable and all consuming need to feed combined with the horrifying realization that to the sensation, everything and everyone was nothing more than food.

And Bruce was hurtling right toward it.

The world shattered but in reverse.  Shards of color zipped together from the corners of his vision, slotting themselves together like a puzzle.

Then, Bruce’s ears popped.  He barely had a chance to recognize that he possessed ears again before he fell to his hands and knees.

The floor was smooth, hard, and cool under his hands.  Bruce couldn’t tell if it was metal or some sort of ceramic, but the makeup of the ground paled in importance next to two facts.  First, he was alive and his body was more or less in good condition absent some bruising on his knees from the fall.  Second, his hands were bare against the greyish floor.

Bruce scrambled to his feet, sucking in air as he frantically took in his surroundings. He was in a room that mirrored the one from the pyramid.  50 feet to a side and mostly featureless except for a purple circle of hissing and crackling light built into the floor that he had just been spit out of.  The only real difference was the lack of decaying bodies and a pedestal made from the same substance as the floor and walls a couple of feet away from the portal.

He jumped to his feet, looking frantically for his mag pistol, but it was nowhere to be found.  Like his suit, it was gone, replaced with nothing more than a white muscle shirt and a pair of shorts that looked suspiciously like the pair he used for PE.

A hacking cough ripped Bruce’s attention away from his predicament.  Maddox was on the ground, shaking in time with the coughs and wearing what certainly appeared to be a navy and white tracksuit.

Bruce jogged over to his team leader, noting that despite the smooth surface of the floor, his bare feet didn’t have any trouble gripping it.  There wasn’t any instability or slippage that he would associate with sheer surfaces, a tiny blessing in the face of a tsunami of confusion.

He reached down as Maddox finished his coughing jag, offering the other man his hand.  For a second, Maddox blinked up at him with unfocused blue eyes before he finally settled on Bruce’s face.  His spare hand slapped the floor as he felt around fruitlessly for his own mag pistol.  Eventually, Maddox gave up, grasping Bruce’s arm and letting him help the prone man to his feet.

“No guns,” Bruce said, grabbing Maddox by the shoulder to steady him as he lifted him to his feet.  “No suits either.”

“I was about to say,” Maddox replied, a hint of his trademark grin on his face.  “I’m pretty sure your current attire isn’t exactly up to regulation for a surface exploration mission.  I hope you have a good explanation or I’ll have to put a note on your permanent file.”

Bruce just snorted.

“You should talk, Maddox.  You look like you’re about to drop into a squat and smoke a cigarette.”

“Hey now,” Maddox responded, putting a hand on his chest as he feigned indignation.  “That’s racist.  I’ll have you know that my Mother is Russian!”

“Really?” Bruce asked, raising an eyebrow.  “I thought your first name was Darren.  You’ve never talked about Russia or even Eastern Europe the entire time I’ve known you.”

“She was adopted by my grandparents and shipped to America when she was two,” Maddox answered, grinning back at Bruce.  “I don’t know a single thing about my Russian heritage other than that I like borscht and vodka, but that doesn’t make you any less racist.”

“Sure,” Bruce replied, rolling his eyes. “I’m racist against you for being Russian.  You got me.  Now can we go home?  We proved that the unknown energy was a portal to God knows where.  I don’t know if there’s anything more we can do without proper equipment.  We can’t even keep a proper record of our observations without a computer or a pen and paper.”

“There’s one more thing we can do,” Maddox said mischievously, nodding in the direction of the podium.

Bruce followed his gaze, eyes widening when he saw what had drawn his team leader’s attention.

“Hell NO Maddox.  You literally just got done telling Trey and I how stupid of an idea this is.”

On the podium, quiet and unassuming, was a line or two of alien writing above a red square button.

“That’s different,” Maddox sniffed.  “I’m the team leader so I’m responsible if the two of you screw up.  If I mess up on my own, that’s my problem.”

“I doubt that it will make me feel any better to know it's your fault when the walls of the room start moving in on us and crush both of us to death,” Bruce replied dryly.  “Seriously, that button might as well have a sign above it saying ‘push me.’  It’s the most obvious trap in the world.”

“Or,” Maddox said slowly, holding up a hand to stop Bruce from interrupting him, “and hear me out here.  There is a sign saying ‘push me’ because we are actually supposed to push it.  Not everything needs to be a trap Bruce.  It could just be a warning to travelers that they need to wipe their boots to clean off the red sand before they continue further into the facility.”

“Neither of us are wearing boots Maddox,” Bruce replied sullenly.  “We don’t have anything but these ridiculous outfits.”

Maddox grinned back at him, a glint of cheerful madness in his eyes.

“I’m gonna push it.”

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