Galactic Calendar 259872/ 2000 [ Sol Year 4387/ Day 155 of 365. Sol standard year]
Days after of Crash landing/ 3
Uninhabited Island / Clearing of Escape Capsule # 405
Galactic Standard Time / After 1300
Jessie
<>------------------------------------------------<>------------------------------------------------<>
Jessie felt his rage build as he got madder and madder. No matter what he did, the tech just wouldn’t work! “This is insane!”
Looking at his at his work, Jessie released a sigh. Somehow, the grid just wasn’t accepting the new console. The more he tried to connect, the more that he failed. He looked over the report on the condition of the machine, and he still found nothing that explained this. The selling point of this type of machine was that it was “This doesn’t make sense at all! Have you found anything at all? Some kind of bug in the code that we could destroy! Anything that might make this easy to understand why?”
Dalila shook her head as she looked at her tablet. “No, nothing. I checked and double-checked everything! The programs, the wireless network, but there’s nothing here! I don’t understand, it should accept this!”
Jessie could only nod as he looked at the console again and tried to think of a solution to this problem. “So let’s start from the top. Everything should work, right? What don’t we have? What haven’t we done?”
Jessie looked around, trying to find something, anything that might spark an idea. He tried to think, letting his mind wander. So far, the insulation has been completed by the book. They had done everything according to the fire within the console for stars sake! If there was anything that the company had made different about this thing, it wasn’t in any of the paperwork.
He held his head and groaned. “This is beyond annoying! This is something that I never thought would happen to me. Everything works, but it doesn’t. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with the code?”
“Yeah! This doesn’t make sense!” Dalila snarled as she looked at her tablet. ”Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
Jessie kept quiet, looking out at the opening in the shield. To be honest, this was so far beyond anything that he had ever experienced. To have a working piece of tech not work without a single fault? “Things like this only happen in bad movies!”
“Tell me about it!” Dalila said with a snarl.
Jessie nodded and looked at the console. “Let’s try this again from the top. We might connect this time.”
Dalila looked at him and then she just sighed. “Well, it’s not like we have any other ideas.”
As the console and the programs turned on, nothing happened for a moment. Then the shield emitter sparked and then it went offline again.
“What is this!? I mean really!” Dalila snarled.
The sound of a shot caused them to turn. By the edge of the shield Zevortro fired into the forest. “Saw something! Looked big! Any chance the shield will be up soon?!”
“Not yet!” Dalila called out.
Jessie looked at the forest and let the nanite strains in his eyes magnify the image. He could see fur through the gaps in the trees. For a second he almost wanted to go and help, but he stayed where he was. The shield was the most important thing, and they needed him here.
“What’s taking so long!?” Terra snarled from behind him.
The two of them looked up and saw Terra standing there looking at them.
“You said it would only take half an hour! But what is this!?” Terra said with a hard edge to her voice.
Jessie only sighed and shook his head. “Somehow, the thing won’t connect to the other systems. We’ve gone over all the programs, and the parts, nothing! This should work!”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Terra looked at the console, a strange look on her face. “But did you check how the programs themselves are interacting with the parts?”
Jessie blinked and then he looked at Dalila whose mouth had dropped open. He barely ignored the urge to curse. A way to find the problem, so basic that they had skipped over it to focus on the more technical approach. There was a lesson here, and one that he didn’t think he would need to learn.
“Dalila,” Jessie said dryly.
Dalila didn’t look up from her tablet only waving at him. “Give me a minute to look over this.”
“Come on, we’ll back up the guards since this is a one-person job,” Terra stated as she walked towards the hole.
Jessie only spent a moment looking at Dalila who didn’t look at him. He walked after Terra, and they stopped ten feet away from the breach. He took a deep breath and then sighed. “I should have done that. Look into the interactions, not what we did. So stupid.”
Terra only looked out at the forest before she just chuckled softly. “Oh, so you were looking for the problem from the technical side then? Not the actual function of the device?”
“Yeah,” Jessie said with a bitter smile. All he could feel was embarrassment that he had made such an error.
“What the VOID!? What is this!?” Dalila exclaimed as she stared down at her tablet in shocked horror.
Jessie and Terra both shared a look and as one they moved. They were by her in a second, looking over her shoulder. As Jessie saw what was on the screen he felt his blood freeze as Terra gasped in shock.
“This is!!! But how? Where!?” Terra asked.
Jessie felt the same as she did. According to the screen, the console couldn’t link up because of enemy action attempting to get into the network. The screen said something about a protected approach to keep the enemy from getting into the system. He felt his mind slow down as past events flashed through his mind.
“It says that it’s going into protected mode. We need to connect to one of the other stations to get a ‘handshake’ to get into the network. There are only two ways that I know of that this might accept. One, use a Quantum Entanglement Communicator,” Dalila said bitterly.
“Impossible. Aren’t those things too power-intensive to use? One that can transmit words needs as much power as the ship uses in a week for a minute of talk!” Terra said, shock in her voice.
“The military has a small one for sending code. The range is only five hundred miles and it happens too fast to see. But since we don’t have that, there’s only one way. Wired cable,” Dalila said softly.
Jessie finally broke out of his mental shock.
“No way. This is impossible! Is it a drone aircraft? Does it have stealth tech? Is it a robot? Are there even cables that could do this in the capsule?”
“I think so, yes! There are!” Dalila exclaimed with hope in her voice.
Jessie looked at her and felt a smile grow on his face. “Perfect! All we need to do is get it to one of the other stations! Then we can reactivate the shield!”
All in all, they were finally able to fix the damage. And they had learned that something was spying on them. The most deadly threat was the one that you can’t see, and they could see the threat now. All they had to do now was bring the shield back up and then they could track down the spies. But a scream of fear came from behind them, as roars sounded from the same direction. Then they heard the sounds of blaster rifles firing in quick succession.
“It’s not falling!” Bryke roared over the shots.
“Then fire at the legs!” Zevortro's voice rang out.
They turned as one, all three of them dreading what they would see.
<>------------------------------------------------<>------------------------------------------------<>
Zevortro
<>------------------------------------------------<>------------------------------------------------<>
Zevortro and Bryke just kept firing at the monsters, killing some of them. The others all started to run back into the forest, and Zevortro gritted his teeth. He couldn’t believe that they had such bad luck, why was this swarm attacking them!? The beasts were all the same, all of them nightmares! They were eight feet tall and on all fours. They looked like green bears with brown stripes. But they had brown manes like lions, and their eyes were a solid black.
When they had attacked., he and Bryke had reacted fast. Both of them had aimed and fired at the first one, hoping to break the charge. That one had taken five shots to the face and it still kept coming. Only after they had switched targets did the front monster fall. The others had tripped over it, creating a pile-up. After that, the other deckhands had all joined their weapon fire to his and BRYKE. Together they had killed one of them, and the rest had retreated.
But Zevortro knew that the leader of this group wasn’t dead. All that had died was just the leader’s vanguard.
“How many was that!? Five, four?!” Bryke asked with a hard edge to his voice.
Zevortro looked at the bodes and scowled as he counted them. “There are only five corpses. And that meant we killed at best a fourth of them. The rest are just going to keep coming.”
As Bryke cursed, Zevortro looked at the sides and scowled. They had too big of an area to defend. If one of those things made it into the perimeter, then they would fall! So they had only one chance, keep fighting and keep stopping them. He had to hope that they would be able to create a plan to defend the breach, but how? They had limited numbers, and they had no idea how many of the bear things there were!
Ten of the bear things suddenly charged at them, two groups of five. Both groups were attacking from opposite sides, and they were aiming for the edge of the shield.
As he saw that the enemy had realized the limits of what they had to defend, he felt fear. There was only one answer, these things were able to think. That had to mean that they were able to plan. And that meant these things might be aware. And they probably wanted to eat them! There was no way to handle this, those things were too fast for him to react to both!
Terra suddenly appeared and fired four blasts in quick succession toward the right. Zevortro blinked, shocked that she was here. The blasts hit the ground in front of the charging beasts, and from the blasts formed a wall of ice a deep Arctic blue.
“I’ve got this side, handle the other!” Terra roared as she fired her weapon.
Zevortro blinked and he felt his face form a savage grin. “Thanks, EVERYONE! HANDLE THE RIGHT!”
As they fired at the charging beasts, he heard roars of pain from the beasts, and he grinned. That meant that the wall held. And as he fired another shot at the legs of the right beasts, one of them fell. As the others tripped over the fallen one, blue blasts fired and hit the downed beasts. As icicles grew, they impaled the one that was one. As both of them roared in pain, the last three beasts ran back into the forest. As the two impaled beasts moaned in pain, Zevortro felt his heart clench.
Before he could do anything, two more blue blasts hit them and their moans stopped.
He looked at Terra who stared at the corpses she made, silent as the grave, and she met his gaze.
“Nice shot,” Zevortro said, nodding at her.
“I needed to treat their bodies with respect. The respect that I would want my own body treated,” Terra said. Then before Zevortro could say anything, she turned and fired at the ground beyond where the shield had been. In moments, there was a large wall of ice at least twelve feet tall blocking the forest from the clearing.
Zevortro blinked in shock, his mouth dropping open. “I….. you’re able to do that now?”
“Well,” Terra said with a shrug, a smile on her face. “I didn’t see a reason why I couldn’t. Lucky I was right.”
Zevortro felt his mouth drop as Bryke started to laugh.
“Good job girl! Better to be lucky and fast than slow and smart! That’s what my dad used to tell me!” Bryke said, a smirk in his voice.
Zevortro nodded as he looked at the shield before they all heard the sounds of something slamming into the wall. “Yeah. But we better find a way to keep that up!”