Wreck of the SESV Soft Den, Medical Vessel of the Silver Empire's 7th Fleet, GC 3478, June 8th, 1914 Hours—
Kevan sat at the edge of the broken crawlway, his feet dangling in the air, trying to douse himself with the last rays of the sun before night fell in a vain attempt to bring some light to his day. It wasn't really working, and he found himself slumped forward, his elbows planted on his knees and his back bent like he couldn't bear a heavy burden, and it was now crushing him.
To his right side and a little back was a duffle bag placed next to a backpack, both of which were loaded with supplies. It was the fruits of his labor as he clambered around the metal tomb beneath him. He had already feared it was the case, but now he was convinced there were no other survivors in this wreck.
The reason for that was literally laid out before him. Whatever happened to the ship from the time he jumped in and woke up inside the regeneration tube, the result was catastrophic for the crew.
The aftermath of the ship's crash looked to Kevan like when a child takes their mountain of dirty clothes to the laundry room, leaving a trail of clothes littered along their path. This section of the ship, as Kevan was confident that there was another section somewhere else, came down on a diagonal line along the slope of this mountain near its base. From what he could see, the ship bounced and tumbled before sliding over the rocky ground and a few small clumps of trees until it came to a stop where it sat now. Or thudding to a halt, as what was effectively the bow of the ship was attempting to wrap itself around a large rock.
That wasn't a guess. A rock had stopped the thousands of tons of starship in its path. As a descriptor, rock might be slightly misleading for the stone monolith the starship hit. Even that wasn't great, but it was the best Kevan could think of. If he wanted to turn around and look at the stone's peak far above, he would have to crane his head so far back there was a decent chance of him falling onto his ass.
But what he was sure was the single biggest stone he had seen in his life didn't really matter after he spent a few seconds taking it in. In fact, he spent more time looking at the long strips of the ship's hull that were splayed over the stone's surface by the force of the collision. It was like what happened when you threw putty at a wall… but with a starship. A starship hundreds of yards long and wide looked like a toy compared to a rock… The size made it kind of hard for him to wrap his head around it.
Once he was able to push the thoughts away, he could focus on what really mattered, and that was the path of destruction laid out before him. The ground was torn up like a giant plow had ripped up the soil. But instead of just tearing up the ground, it left a lot of steel chunks scattered around the trench at random along the way. Some looked large enough for him to climb into, while others were small, reflecting just enough light to catch his eye. Far in the distance, trees were broken and bent like toothpicks, and Kevan was pretty sure he saw some of the large rocks making up the cliff face of the mountain with fresh grooves carved into their surface like the ship had slammed into them.
The more Kevan inspected the crash, the more he realized that he shouldn't be alive, and he didn't know what to do at first. He had looked around for most of two days, searching what was left of the ship. While he found many useful items in its halls and discovered a surprising amount of medical and enhancement equipment that was still intact, it just emphasized the glaring holes for the items he didn't find.
Like items that would be found in an armory. While pistols were all over the place, allowing anyone to grab power armor, a shimmer blade, or a pulse rifle was asking to have a hole blown through the hull. So, while there were multiple armories on the Soft Den, even though it was a medical vessel, there were none on Kevan's section. But even if he happened to find an armory, he doubted he could make it into the vault. Those compartments were built to remain intact while the ship was destroyed around them.
While having larger weapons was something he hoped for, largely because Kevan watched the Swarm push the fleet fighting overhead back and saw them send down pods — not generally a good sign — it wasn't what he considered essential. What Kevan was really searching for was a distress beacon.
Even with the fleet retreating, they would eventually send out a low-level reconnaissance of crashed ships or escape pods so long as they weren't completely destroyed. It didn't matter where you came from; no spacer ignored a distress call or wreck, not while they had the ability to search the area.
Given how the battle appeared to have gone, it might not be today or next week, but a starship or landing craft will eventually fly over. If no beacon was active, the odds were low that they would spot the wreck and then decide to fly down and take a look, especially given the number of wrecks that must be littering this planet.
Kevan would be willing to bet that number was in the thousands. Given the greeting from the green woman, it sounded like the entire Coalition might have been pulled through along with the Swarm. Or at least a large part of it.
And yet, for some reason, starship designers didn't make a habit of putting distress beacons in every empty corner of a passage. Even on a ship that could be considered a skyscraper, space was a luxury, and filling up that space with unnecessary items was moronic as it would have to replace something else that could be more useful. So, while a distress beacon could be found in places like escape pods, starfighters, and the armory, it was not placed in spots like the emergency medical bags scattered everywhere on the ship.
Which fucking sucked because Kevan found more of those stupid bags than he could possibly carry, and none of the bodies around him needed any healing. Not needing healing kind of went with being a corpse. While it was possible to heal the fresh ones with nanites, it didn't matter. The mind — or, for those like Kevan who dealt with the more mystical sides of life believed, the soul — would not return even if the body became whole.
Funnily enough, that particular knowledge didn't help Kevan when clambering through the wreck, pulling the dead into mostly empty rooms before positioning them to look peaceful before sealing the chambers. Their eyes all seemed to be staring at him with accusation. Like he was the one who killed them.
It was the least he could do, and doing more could cost Kevan his own life, but he still didn't feel that great about it. A nagging thought in the back of his head said he should do more. He knew that was stupid, as he was literally having issues keeping up a brisk walking pace with the raised gravity. He also had tasks that needed to be performed if he wanted to live.
That didn't stop the thoughts, though… But at this point, anyone of those ghosts aboard the ship who wanted him to carry their putrefying bloated bodies up flights of ladders and through cramped tunnels only to have to lower them down the side of a ship he was not sure he could climb down let alone back up safely, so they could be buried in the ground, all while being in this high gravity, well, fuck them. They're selfish pricks… That thought kind of did help, Kevan thought, a slight smile touching his lips, the warmth of the sun finally seeming to sink into his body.
All he had left to do was to find a damn beacon and then set it off in a defensible place and wait and hope this world didn't have a creature that liked the smell of humans and wanted to try it. To get that beacon, all Kevan had to do was follow the trail of destruction. Probably.
Down that path were all the parts of the ship that broke off, and given that whatever happened went down too fast for anyone to respond, there should be an escape pod somewhere. Or pieces of one. "All I got to do is go for a walk," Kevan said while watching the sun descend behind the mountains.
A roar thundered over the valley, washing over Kevan and bouncing off the sides of the mountains until its origin was lost. Even with it near nightfall, Kevan saw a flock of birds burst into the sky from the nearby forests, filling the air with caws of fear and accusation.
The instant the roar washed over Kevan, he froze where he sat, one of his legs extended out as it was on the upswing of his swaying. He forced his leg to hang in the air as his body started shivering. It wasn't from the strain of holding up his leg. It was fear. Fear had flooded Kevan's mind. The primal fear that kept humans huddled in dread around a fire as their eyes flicked to every shadow and noise around them when a howl ripped through the night.
That was what Kevan felt. It was like something immense was standing behind him, taking deep, heavy breaths along the nape of his neck. Kevan could feel the hot moistness of its breath on his skin as it panted. He could even smell the fetid stench of rancid meat lacing each gust of its large lungs. Kevan absolutely knew, down to the deepest parts of his bones, that if he moved, the predator would pounce. A predator that was so threatening and powerful that, at any moment, it could swipe out its paw and swat away his existence like the insect he was.
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Seconds grated by, and a need to breathe grew inside Kevan to the point that he could no longer resist its demand. With the swelling of his chest, the spell holding him in place was broken, and Kevan whipped around, hopping to his knees and thrumming his hands against the broken deck in preparation to get to his feet. But he couldn't get up, not while the monster looming over him in his mind had yet to be found, as standing up might just draw its attention.
No matter where his eyes darted, nothing but shadows and twisted steel greeted his gaze. He knew that would be the case, but his knowledge didn't stop his reactions. In fact, it made it worse as some part of his mind screamed at him that the predator had just moved out of his sight before he could turn around.
That instinctual fear drove him to shuffle backward for a half-second. Time seemed to slow, and Kevan felt his legs slip over the edge of the broken maintenance crawlway. He immediately slapped his hands down onto the metal, trying to dig his fingernails into the surface to stop his fall. The only result was feeling like his fingernails were being pulled out as they slid along the steel, as Kevan was far too low of a tier for steel to be like putty in his hands.
So, instead of a quick tumble turning into a moderate fall and impact, his outstretched hands slowed his tumble, and he got to feel the sharp, jagged edge of the crawlway slice through his jumpsuit and into his stomach and chest before finally falling to impacting the deck below. As he lay looking up at the walkway, feeling a stinging burn from his navel to his right pec, Kevan could only regret his decision in life.
Kevan tilted his head to the side, his brows furrowing as he tried to pick out what he was hearing. It was like the thundering of rapids, except it was growing louder with each beat of his heart. The noise washed over him, and another shiver ran down his spine as he realized what it was. Thousands of voices were screaming in outrage.
More accurately, they were roaring in unified fury. There was so much emotion in the roars that Kevan felt like he was being beaten over the head with it. And he was one of the ones the anger was focused on.
Flipping onto their stomach, Kevan jumped into a crouch and gave a quick look around. He was in a corridor covered in carbon scorching from electrical blowouts and grime from the tumbling crash. Deeper into the corridor, he could faintly make out what he assumed to be a closed blast door, and there was another a couple dozen feet to his front.
Well, there was what was left of a blast door. Of the three sections that made up the door, the two that came from the bottom corners were still intact, but the top section was ripped off along with this section of the ship. Moving to the doors, Kevan huddled behind them as the roars of rage bombarded him.
Finally, his curiosity about what was happening overcame his fear of becoming the target, and he slid up the steel wall until his head was poking over its ledge. And he saw nothing. Kevan should have really expected it.
He spent an hour sitting on the ledge above, occasionally looking down, and he didn't remember a blast door positioned at the edge of the next jagged shelf of the ship. He saw a corridor dozens of feet out that he never bothered to trace back in detail and see what was along it. "Get your shit together!" Kevan hissed to himself before wiggling over the door and skittering down the hallway on all fours to stay under the cover of the broken walls. However, the empty doorways leading to nonexistent rooms and open-air didn't help with his efforts much.
As Kevan approached the edge of this level of the wreck, he flopped to his stomach and immediately regretted it as he felt the long scrape on his chest. "Stupid floor, always getting in the way when no one wants it to," Kevan muttered, lifting his body up the barest amount before inching forward.
Finding a low point in the twisted lip of the deck to put his head in, Kevan looked down and was surprised. Apparently, this section of the ship jutted out farther than the next dozen levels below it, and even the last few that finally moved past it weren't that much longer. The effect was that he was far higher than he thought because he could not see the lower levels from his perch on the walkway above.
Kevan couldn't stop a shudder from running through his body as he imagined the tentacle of a leviathan lashing out to hit the ship, ripping the ship in half. You can pack all the technological advancements you want into a starship, but when you get hit with a weapon comparable to the scale of planetary bodies, solid hits shatter all your efforts.
With a clear sight of the nearby ground for the first time, Kevan saw that the wreck seemed to be at the bottom of a gentle depression that leveled out before reaching the base of the rock the ship was wrapped around. The depression was filled with bare hard-packed soil with the occasional stones poking out of it. The sight was kind of weird, as the ground above was covered in grass and bushes. Further past the depression, deeper into the valley, Kevan could make out the forest next to a lake he had seen before, a couple miles away. On the other side of the ship was a rocky mountain slope with a splattering of lonely trees.
As his eyes moved away from the scenery, his heart sank. He wasn't going to be able to search the trail of destruction the ship left. The mountainside and what looked like this portion of the valley was covered with… something.
Kevan didn't know what the creatures were, but he knew two things about them. First off, there were thousands of the obsidian, slick looking creatures, which made sense, given the noise they were making. The second thing was that they were fast, agile creatures. That was easy to see with how fast they were moving and watching them bound over everything. Given the increasing darkness, distance, and how they were packed together, getting a good look at any one of them was impossible, so he couldn't say any more about them. But he had already seen more than enough.
He had no intention of discovering more than he already had. Scuttling around, Kevan started crawling back down the hallway, throwing a look of yearning up toward where his safe crawlway was. He wasn't going to be able to get back up there tonight.
************
Command Dropship Inside the Perimeter of LZ Alpha, Under the Dreadnought Luna, GC 3478, June 8th, 1945 Hours—
"Tell me the situation, Lieutenant Colonel Marow," The image of Captain Gray asked from the projector on the side of the shuttle. Lieutenant Colonel Jason Marow had to suppress a sigh of exasperation as he turned to snap a quick salute, keeping one eye on the battle map.
You could only skirt giving a report to your commander for so long. Even with entirely reasonable delays in giving a report, such as expanding and stabilizing their perimeter — though it still wasn't as secure as he would have liked — a lull in the surprisingly lively combat landing had finally come, and it was time to pay the piper. "Sir, we have established a rough perimeter of two and a half miles around Luna's position. I would not go so far as to call it secure, as seismic sensors are detecting what we think are large creatures under the ground, and there is this cat-like animal that can escape all but the most focused scans harassing us, but we are well on the way of securing this… mountain top. I believe we will be able to start linking up with the other teams within two days. Doing it any faster will stretch our lines too thin, as we just don't have the personnel."
Marow didn't know he could be so irritated by the word mountain top. Or that it could blossom into such a massive headache for him. You think of a mountain top, and you usually think of images of a point smaller than a half dozen feet across. Maybe a couple hundred if it's some kind of plateau. Or a mile if you think of some impact crater or a large caldera of a volcano.
This "mountain top" could accommodate a starport and still have room for a city around it. Probably two or three cities. That wasn't a guess. There were hundreds of ships making up their makeshift fleet parked around the ring of the mountaintop, and if he was honest, they looked a little spacey to adequately cover the external perimeter. They would get the hoards of Swarm, but individuals were all but guaranteed to slip by their not-so-functional sensors. That would be their reality for a while, as the gravitation distortions they were creating affected what the ships could see close up, making them need to put up sensor platforms everywhere, further slowing everything down.
It also didn't help that each ship needed to be a certain distance from each other. The trick with the Gravity Wells that the miracle workers in the starship's engineering rooms were performing to hover a mile off the ground, caused interference with each other when they got too close. It apparently caused some kind of feedback loop that resulted in the generators exploding. There were half a dozen crashed destroyers around the mountaintop to emphasize the lesson.
So the ships needed to be spread out, and each needed to be protected from the ground, as there are creatures, Swarm or otherwise, capable of bringing down starships from the dirt. And no captain wanted to strain their Gravity Wells by giving their hotshot pilots the go-ahead to perform maneuvers. That didn't even mention that flying low over an unsecured planet is begging for a hole to be punched through the hull.
The only option left to them was to secure an entire mountaintop, which was roughly twenty-five miles around, with a battalion or two fewer space marines than the minimum they should have had. And even then, he wouldn't really be happy. If there was one thing they learned from the four days since they made landfall, it was that this world was a monster paradise. Even the constant probing Swarm attacks were hardly a problem, as the creatures were having trouble getting through the locals to get up here. Which was the only spec of light in the situation.
It gave plenty of room for the smaller ships with only a couple platoons of space marines as a contingent of troops to form and hold a perimeter around their ships, while the larger contingents worked to connect the lines, supported by the starfighters and starships.
Captain Gray didn't look happy, but no commander of an operation ever was. "Were on the clock, Lieutenant Colonel, we detected a significant increase in the number of the leviathans overhead. They're constantly dropping pods around us, so an attack should happen within the week. You'll have to cut some corners and take risks you otherwise wouldn't to speed this up." Marow opened his mouth to protest the order and the loss of life it would mean, but Gray held up his hand and gave a sad sigh of resignation. "I know what you will say, but we don't have a choice. We must have a solid defensive line. Any isolated groups will be cut down in moments and open a weakness to be exploited. Our ships can't properly use our short-range sensors with the Gravity Well interference, so we need a proper sensor net on the ground. All the ship fabricators are at your disposal, Marow. You have a lot of work to do, and I won't take up any more of your time."
"Captain," Marow said as the holo disappeared. Then he released a sigh, allowing a single moment for his weakness to poke through under the weight of command. Then he straightened his ever so slightly hunched shoulders and turned his attention back to the tactical map. All in all, it was a typical message from his commander during combat. The space marines needed to do the impossible faster, and another wrinkle in the plan had formed.
"Ain't nothing new here," Marow muttered, slightly irritated that the Captain wasted his time to tell him things were business as usual. But then... things wouldn't be as usual.