In the end the door never opened -- the gamejumper simply disappeared.
One instant it was there and they were strapped into their seats, and the next they were falling from a small height to a field of thick green grass.
Everyone landed heavily from the unexpected fall except Anna, who twisted her body like a cat in the instant she had to react and landed on her feet. Surrounding them were scattered, ancient trees, reaching towards a low clear sky. They were standing at the bottom of a long, low hill. The air was warm and smelled of summer. At the top of the hill was a ruined house, blackened from fire, the windows like a skull’s eyes.
What the fuck, was all Neb could think. It seemed like Earth and yet there was something slightly off about it, something not quite right about the light, the gravity, the smells. The grass smelled almost like Earth grass. Like someone else’s idea of grass.
‘GAMMA POSITION! GAMMA POSITION!’ Buzz roared, wasting not a second. He was the first person to his feet after Anna, his side-arm already in his hands, scanning in every direction. The crate had appeared nearby and landed right side up, a relief given how heavy it was. Everyone drew their pistols and took a defensive position. Gray was assigned to the case in this scenario -- open space, no evident contact -- and she ran to the case and pushed on the latch.
It didn’t budge.
She slammed her hand into it. Nothing.
She looked up at the others, wide-eyed.
Mallory was there a moment later. He leaned hard on the latch, huge biceps bulging, but it did not move a millimeter.
‘Mallory get the fucking crate open right fucking now!’ Buzz yelled.
Neb felt his mouth go almost instantaneously dry. He had his sidearm in his hands and was scanning the perimeter just as he had been trained. In combat you don’t rise to the occasion, Buzz had said to them several hundred times, you fall to the level of your training. The pistol felt heavy to Neb but as familiar as a part of his own body.
Mallory fumbled around in the grass until he found a rock, then smacked it into the case latch. It didn’t open, but the noise reverberated across the countryside like a clarion call announcing their presence. We’re here. We can’t open our crate. Come and kill us. But they had to take the risk -- every single piece of equipment that might help them survive was locked in that crate. Mallory struck the latch again, and then again, but it was unmoving.
Neb stared at a distant spot, heart pounding. His eyes had been caught by something. Had he seen a flash of movement up near the ruined house? Or was he just imagining things under the stress of the moment?
‘Stop hitting it,’ Buzz ordered Mallory. He had come over to examine the latch. There were scratches on it from the impacts of the rock. Buzz felt the latch with his hands, rocking it this way and that, trying to find some angle of approach. He emanated his usual calmness.
Neb stared at the ruins. An alien world, some part of his mind was screaming. You’re on an alien world! But he ignored it. He may not have seen movement but there was something about the ruins that was catching his attention -- something deep in his subconscious trying to surface, but in the stress he was feeling it could not find a way through.
‘There are bigger rocks at the ruins,’ Gray said, pointing, her voice calm. Everyone was on hyper alert. Without their weapons they were sitting ducks. This nightmare scenario was not one they had ever even considered.
Stolen story; please report.
Neb could see the rocks that Gray meant at the top of the hill. Was that what his mind had been trying to tell him? But no; not that. Something else. He frowned in concentration, and an image came to him: His old university, the stone central tower overlooking a grass quadrangle. He had spent hours and hours there learning about the Main, turning slowly from a boy into a young man. Why was he thinking of that now? Get it together, he ordered himself.
The team had already been in position for more than five minutes. In every plan they had laid out they would have heavy weapons and support systems deployed and be seeking tactical advantage by now. Instead they were standing there, completely off balance, anxious and uncertain, on a hair trigger.
Buzz pushed the point of his combat knife into the crack of the latch, and hit the base of the knife with Mallory’s rock. It made a clanging sound, but the latch remained jammed. Everyone else watched their perimeter, but their sidearms seemed terribly, comically inadequate.
‘This is fucking unbelievable,’ Jasper said. He was pale, eyes wide. ‘Those dumbass engineers.’
‘Have some fucking balls, solider,’ Buzz snapped, and the words seemed to physically straighten up Jasper. He scanned left and right with his sidearm twitchily.
Neb couldn’t take his eyes off the ruins. Crazy as it seemed, there was something about them that was familiar in some way. But how could that be? What was he trying to see?
Buzz struck the butt of the knife again and then again, moving it around slightly, trying different places on the latch like a very unconventional locksmith. Clang… clang… clang… Nothing changed or yielded. It was as if the latch had been welded into place.
‘Fuck,’ Buzz said, stepping back. ‘Mallory, Grey -- get me a bigger fucking rock. Doubletime.’
Gray was in motion in an instant, streaking through the long grass towards the ruins. Mallory was not far behind her. The ruins were only about two hundred yards distant but it seemed to Neb that the two soldiers made tortuously slow progress up the hill. The others gathered around the crate in a defensive configuration and found themselves standing in an incongruously pleasant moment, a warm breeze brushing the grass and touching the tree branches. The place was in the full bloom of summer.
‘Eyes,’ Buzz snapped. It was easy to get pulled into the slow-moving drama of Mallory and Gray’s run to the ruins. Moments passed slow and heavy. Then Mallory and Grey were on their way back again. Mallory’s run was ungainly from the weight of a heavy stone that had once been used in the construction of the old manor.
Manor. The word stood out to Neb like a flashing light. Manor. But what about it? There was something he was trying to remember. Something critical.
But the feeling slipped away from him an instant later. He saw movement near the ruins, for sure this time. A flitting black shadow against the bright sky beyond.
And Mallory was screaming: ‘CONTACT! WE HAVE CONTACT!’
‘HUSTLE! HUSTLE!’ Buzz roared. The others spread out, the bulk of their attention towards the ruins, Gray and Anna watching the rear and flanks. But no matter how well they organized, they were terribly exposed -- out in the open, their sidearms so small they felt basically unarmed.
‘Goddammit Mallory get down here!’ Buzz roared, veins popping. Mallory was huffing and puffing and giving it everything he had, but he was ultimately a man designed for power over speed. The rock he carried was big and heavy, and his huge arms strained. He reached Buzz and almost dropped the stone, sweating profusely.
‘Hostiles,’ he gasped. ‘Brow of the hill behind the ruins.’
‘People?’
‘Bugs… Fucking huge things… Six legs… Sort of like…’
But he had no need to describe them any further because the things came over the top of the hill in a wave, insectile and scuttling, six long legs with thick heavy bodies sitting on top. They were gray-black but glowed with some phosphorescent green substance that gathered in pools around their eyes and ran in rivulets down their backs. One of them had red-orange coloring. They had huge snapping mouths that opened wide, like a crocodile. And they were howling, a hideous unearthly keening, like the screams of the dying.
‘Fuck me,’ Meathead yelled. ‘We need our goddam weapons!’
Buzz picked up Mallory’s rock and slammed it against the latch of the case full force. Then again. And again. The terrible howling came closer and closer. Buzz struck again, but it did not yield. He was at risk of breaking it, but no-one said anything. What else was there to do?
‘GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!’ Buzz roared, and slammed the rock down with everything he had, his strength doubled by fear. With a screech of metal, the latch slid open. The incoming creatures were almost upon them.
Everyone leaped forward as Buzz flung back the lid.
Then Buzz looked up at them, his face aghast.
The crate was empty.