Johns sat in his quarters eyeing the metal table in front of him, sipping on a glass of potato vodka, his stomach in knots. Aaron had been the first man that he had lost in a decade. It hit him as hard as any ever had. Had he made the wrong call? Clearly, Kazi Security wasn’t a trained fighting force. Should he have not sent them out there?
He took solace in the fact that Aaron’s death and learning of the eggs had only made the situation more serious. They had to burn back the remaining two growth sites and do it quickly, before those things grew into whatever a mature one of those things looks like. Who knew how big they would get? It was a thought that had been running through his mind since they had first discovered the egg. But now it really mattered. Those things would kill them indiscriminately. They were at war.
There had been hundreds of those creatures at the second crash site. How many had yet to hatch? If there was one thing he was certain of, they couldn’t wait any more before taking care of the other sites.
After getting back to Kazi Depot and going through the sanitation protocol, it had occurred to Johns that in the heat of the moment, they had all dropped their backpack-connected flamethrowers and had switched to the guns even though their tests had shown that the Goo and the creatures it spawned died to fire. That was part of what was eating at him. Even he had opted for the rifle over the flamethrower. He should have known better. Had he sent his team out there unprepared?
He had. That was the conclusion that he ultimately came to. He should have told them to use the flamethrowers as a weapon. All their flamethrowers together could have burned through the flock of creatures. Or at least driven them back. Aaron would still be here, maybe.
He had always done this — second guessed himself when he lost someone. It had been that way during the war so why should it be different now? Still, something felt even worse in the pit of his stomach this time. Maybe he had gotten soft. But he had to avoid going down the rabbit hole.
Johns was used to adversity. Shit, if anyone could deal with this, it was him. He knew that. If he had survived the war then the public onslaught that followed it, he could handle a few hundred tiny aliens.
Returning home at the end of the Osarian Rebellion had been a dizzying experience. He had returned to the capital a hero. His command of the 5th Infantry Regiment, the unit that had taken back the city of Tillon from the Rebellion to effectively end the war, had ensured the public credited him with the victory. He remembered walking down the ramp as he pulled into the port in the capital and hearing his name called by the crowds. He had felt overwhelmed by a welcome that he felt he didn’t deserve. He remembered raising the arms of his Lieutenants, goading them to cheer their names too.
When they had arrived at the Osaran Army intake center the debriefing had started immediately. It had been intense. For hours, they had poured over the events that had led up to the end of the war and recorded statements from Johns. He had assumed that all surviving members of his regiment were receiving the same treatment.
It had taken hours before Johns had been allowed to see his family. When he finally met them in the small meeting room that they had set aside for him, he hugged them for what felt like hours. During the war, he had never truly expected to come home. Things were just too fucked up.
That moment was a big one in Johns’ mind. That was his ideal. Back home with his family, everyone happy.
But that was before things went to shit and he ended up on this god forsaken forrest planet.
Johns pushed the thought out of his head. Now was not the time. There was too much at stake. If he let himself climb down that hole he might not find his way back out for weeks, and Kazi deserved better than that.
He swished a finger of neat potato vodka around in his glass, the only liquor that was readily available on Kazi. He wasn’t much of a drinker. Just on days like this. He had been, years ago. As a recruit he had been maybe the most prolific drinker in his unit. But as men who drink heavily get older they typically go one of two ways, in Johns’ experience — they either take to the bottle, or they move away from it. He had moved away from it.
The tablet on the desk in front him lit up.
INCOMING CALL FROM SARA RUTHERFORD
A pattern interrupt, bringing a smile to his face. He was fond of her, attracted to her, even. It wasn’t a sexual attraction. She was pretty, there was no doubt about that. But she was much younger than he was. Too young. Johns was attracted to Sara in a life-spirit sort of way. She had a young woman’s drive and naivety. Bubbly, but serious when it counted. She was confident, maybe too much so. But she was adept, he had to give her that. She was handling all of this like a pro.
“What now?” Johns said as he answered, making sure the glass of vodka was pushed out of the shot.
“We have some new imaging in from the sites. We need to go over it. Now, preferably.”
“Alright,” Johns said, detecting the same hurriedness in her voice. “Meet me at Command in ten minutes.”
“Yes sir.”
When Johns walked through the doors of Command, he could see through the glass doors that Sara was already sitting in the conference room, face-down in her tablet. She saw him as he made his way through the deck and waved him into the room hurriedly.
“What’s the emergency now?” he asked as the glass doors shut behind him.
“It’s not good,” she said, eyeing him out of the tops of her eyes as she scanned the tablet.
“To be expected.”
He sat down next to her and she pulled up an image that Johns immediately recognized as the first crash site at the Communications Station.
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“This is what the site looked like the day after our burn team left,” Sara said then flipped the screen to a new image with a wave of her finger. “And this is it two days later, which was yesterday, the day we visited the second site.”
Goo was creeping out of the impact site, starting to work its way toward the top of the crater.
“So we didn’t get it all?”
“Apparently not. But that’s not the worst of it,” she said, flipping to the next image. “This is today, the drones just made their first pass right before I called you.”
Johns’ eyes widened. The Blue Goo had not only crept out past the outer reaches of the crater, but was nearly nearly back to the size it was when they had originally burned it down. The thick membrane covered much of what was left of the Station that had stood there, but wasn’t yet approaching the outermost reaches of the structure.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Johns said. “That quick? It’s accelerating?”
“It does appear to be, at that site at least. If it had grown at this rate the whole time it would have been quadruple the size it had been when we burned it down the first time.”
“Well...great. What do we do?”
“I...uhh...I don’t know. That’s your job, isn’t it?” Sara said.
“I don’t think this is anyone’s job.”
They sat in silence for a moment while Johns weighed his options. It was a tough position to be in. Sara continued to flip through the images and sat awkwardly while he ran through the options in his head. Every thirty seconds or so he would whisper something out loud as he argued with himself internally.
“Well...I have to call for help.”
“From Osara?”
“Yes. I should have done it from the beginning but I need to do it now in case things go sideways. It’ll take them a few weeks to get here even if they left immediately.”
“I see,” she said. They sat for a few seconds of silence, each waiting for the other to speak. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”
She got up from her chair in the conference room and Johns watched as she walked out the glass doors, making sure that they shut fully behind her before nodding and heading out of the Command Center.
Johns wondered who he should be calling on Osara Prime. Protocol dictated that his calls should go to Main Command, but his reputation with them was shot and he needed to be sure that he would be taken seriously.
He could send his message directly to President Raymond Duke. He would have to record it here and then send it from the Capella’s lightbeam to transmit it. He knew Raymond would accept the message, given their history. He would also know that if Johns was reaching out to him after all of these years that the situation was pretty serious, he hoped.
After juggling the options around in his mind for a few minutes, he decided reaching out to Raymond Duke was the best option they had for a positive outcome. He might get reprimanded for breaking protocol but what were they going to do? Fire him? The safety of the civilians on Kazi took precedence.
Johns could feel his stomach tense up with anticipation for the call. For years he had thought about what he would say to Raymond Duke when he finally had the chance — how he would lay into him. How he would let him know how he felt about the way things turned out. How he had been blamed for something he couldn’t control. How Raymond, his close friend, had betrayed him to further his own political aspirations in the wake of the war. Of course, Raymond Duke knew all of this. He had been the one that orchestrated it. Johns never imagined that this call would come under circumstances like these. His airing of grievances would have to wait.
He picked up his tablet and navigated to the messaging screen. He positioned it to point toward his face, making sure that the angle and backdrop looked sufficiently professional before hitting the record button. He let out a deep heave of a sigh, then pressed it.
“This message is intended for President Raymond Duke. It is being sent through proper military channels at eleven-oh-eight Osara Standard Time from the Command Center in Kazi Depot,” he said.
“President Duke,” Johns began, the formality of his tone catching Raymond in the gut. “I apologize that it has taken me so long to report in. By now I assume you have discovered that Kazi was struck by three objects exactly 4 days ago.
All three impacts struck in different locations in our northern hemisphere. I am sorry to report that one of the impacts directly hit our Communications Station. As a result, our communications are down and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We currently have teams working on restoring power and rebuilding a communications network. I will use the lightbeam of the OSN Capela to transfer this message.
“I am sorry to report that Station A was completely destroyed, and all inhabitants have been listed as killed in the impact. Due to the landing pad being destroyed, we weren’t able to launch much of a rescue effort. Although, with the level of devastation at the crash site, we don’t believe there was much chance that anyone survived anyway. We estimate 2,329 casualties in total. We’ve sent teams to each station on Kazi to maintain order and tend to the wounded. I am happy to report that all other stations are shaken, but doing well. Each has their own backup power and enough supplies to cover them for at least a few months. We are coordinating supply-sharing runs in the meantime. I have transferred several video files to you that display the crash site at Station A”
“Furthermore,” Johns continued. “The object that hit us was not a meteorite or typical space debris. We believe the objects that hit us were three separate biological entities of unknown origin. Based on our calculations and the size of the craters, they were between 250 and 400 feet long.
If these three impacts had each been meteors or pieces of a single meteor that broke up upon entry we would have expected far more devastation. Large amounts of dirt thrown into the atmosphere. Likely weeks before we had sunlight. Fortunately, that was not the case. While a significant amount of debris was kicked up into the atmosphere, the organism’s landing appeared to be clean. Perhaps it slowed down before connecting,” Johns said, his expression stern and unwavering.
As you might have noticed from the videos and images that I sent with this message, a strange blue-colored film was discovered to be covering the impact area. The substance is a thick, mucus-like membrane that covers the entirety of the crash site and most of the areas surrounding it. At first we had hoped that the blue mucous was the remains of the animal itself, but have since learned a bit about it and have a working hypothesis as to what it actually is. We believe the membrane is a vehicle for breaking down organic matter to feed the growth of the organism. All three crash sites have shown significant growth."
Johns continued, explaining how they had learned that heat and fire were able to destroy the organism, and how they had dispatched a team to Crash Site A to burn things back. Then, he told him about discovering the eggs and the creatures that they had run into when they had arrived at Crash Site B. He told him about Aaron and how the team had barely escaped the flock of creatures that had descended on them, and that they had discovered the Goo regrowth at the Communications Station. It all sounded so crazy so say out loud.
“The situation has quickly gone from bad to worse. As things stand right now, I think we’ve got a handle on the situation and with some luck we’ll have these sites burned down within a few days. But I’d like to make a formal request for emergency help. If you could send some supplies and infantry units here that would be enough, hopefully. Even if we can take care of the crash sites, we’ll need help getting our infrastructure together to rebuild a Communications Station when this is all over. Thank you.”
Johns ended the recording.