Planet Leviathan

^{Chapter 2} Bumpy Road Home

Stacia had approximately five to ten minutes to contemplate the direction her life had taken before the pod hit the ground, at which point either its retro thrusters would fire and slow it enough for her to survive (at least long enough to get out), or its emergency braking would fail and she would become a splatter of gore and twisted metal at the bottom of a smoking crater. Not exactly the best and easiest time to get introspective, but hey, she was used to working with what little she had.

According to the Galactic Marine Command, Leviathan was definitely, positively, one-hundred percent not a prison planet. A prison, they said, implied cells and people being locked away. Leviathan, according to them, was simply a place for them to send the people who’d been given the ability to crush skulls like aluminum cans, yet had proven themselves “unsuitable” for reintegration into society. The residents of Leviathan had the entire run of the planet. There were regular food and supply drops. It was the most humane way to deal with these people. Hell, it was a paradise, practically, a utopia.

No one with anything better than a grade school education actually believed that.

The planet, while looking perfectly fine and habitable from orbit, was prone to unpredictable earthquakes thanks to the presence of two moons in orbit, one of which wasn’t exactly spherical and therefore prone to erratic flights through the sky. Beyond that particular piece of geological information, the public didn’t know a lot about what life on Leviathan might be like. Nothing that went down to the planet’s surface was ever supposed to come back. The exiled marines, with their augmentations, were considered to be so much of a threat that orbital gun platforms would shoot anything that came up out of the planet’s atmosphere.

No matter what the brass tried to say, Leviathan was one giant cell, and the guards were trigger-happy.

The pod’s inner readout started a countdown, four minutes until landfall, and with it the magnetic locks holding her in a semi-crucified pose let go. Stacia immediately stretched as much as the limited room in the drop pod would allow. The readout blinked with various threat detectors and warnings, but she ignored them. The pod would do as it was supposed to do and deliver her to the surface safely, or it would explode. Her actions wouldn’t sway the odds in either direction. Instead, she prepped herself with the assumption that she would survive, and that she would immediately be in danger upon leaving the pod. Just another combat drop. She’d done them one hundred and thirty-nine times before, leaving her pod to find herself face to face with aliens, mutants, genetic monstrosities, robots, and, in one very odd and memorable incident, a cybernetic rhinoceros. This, however, would be the first time she would ever find herself up against other Galactic Marines.

You’re not a Galactic Marine anymore, she reminded herself. You lost the right to call yourself that as soon as you opened up on Borealis. The thoughts brought back a hollow, empty feeling that had threatened to overtake and drown her for the entire trip to Leviathan. She was supposed to be a Galactic Marine. That was all she had ever wanted to be, all she had ever known since applying for early training as a teenager. Now it was gone, the one thing that had been absolutely core to her identity. Who was she supposed to be now?

I’ll find out when I get down there, she thought. Borealis, you better believe you’re going to get what’s coming to you.

So. No time for feeling sorry for herself, then. Wherever she landed, she needed to be ready to come out of the pod fighting, just in case. Normally, on a combat drop, she would have her rifle and at least two side arms, not to mention a pack loaded with ammunition. For obvious reasons, they hadn’t wanted her to have one when they were loading her in the pod, but she had hoped there would at least be something stashed in here with her to give her a fighting chance. The readout, however, informed her that her entire cache of weapons and supplies, stowed under her seat, consisted of a combat knife, five meals worth of emergency rations, a very basic first aid kit for those few exposed fleshy bits she still had left, and a small tool kit for armor maintenance. Not much at all, even for someone who had been trained in survival. Still, it would be enough for her to stay alive while she got the lay of the land and found the nearest settlement. Then, assuming she survived that long, she could get on with her personal mission of finding Stanton Borealis.

Two minutes remaining. Stacia rooted around under her seat until she had all her supplies ready in their rucksack. The knife she pulled out and kept ready, shoving it blade down into the cushion of her seat so that it wouldn’t go flying free if the landing was less than perfect. She didn’t have to worry much about accidentally slicing herself thanks to the armor, but it could always go flying and get her in the face, or even lodge its way into one of the crevices between pieces of her armor. Again, she cursed the shoddy job the surgeons had done. She wasn’t the perfectly maintained killing machine anymore.

Why did I let this happen? she thought.

One minute remaining. No, she wasn’t going to let this get to her. This was no different than any other combat drop.

The pod shook violently as its retro thrusters kicked in. She’d done enough drops to know there was something very wrong with the pod. The readout in front of her indicated that there must be a leak somewhere in the thrusters’ fuel lines, because the fuel levels dropped faster than they should.

The pod would likely be moving slower when it got to the ground, but it wouldn’t be the easy stop Stacia regularly felt. This was about to hurt. Probably a lot.

She engaged all the inertial dampeners and safety features that she could from the control panel, then braced for impact.

The pod didn’t hit the surface with the force of a bomb like she had seen with some unfortunate marines in the past. But she felt the impact jar her skeleton. She probably would have bitten off the tip of her tongue is she hadn’t clenched her jaw in preparation. The small space inside the pod instantly filled with airbags, deploying with a force that would have probably done more damage than the crash itself if not for her armor. It was still enough that for several seconds she felt smothered, like a giant canvas pillow had been shoved over her nose and mouth. Even through all this, she felt the pod rumble and crunch. Before the airbags blocked her view, she had a glimpse of the readouts all going dark, along with the interior lights.

Then, nothing. Several seconds of quiet.

“Open doors,” she said to the pod’s minimal AI computer. There was no response, not even so much as an “I cannot do that.” The computer was probably completely dead.

So this is how life on Leviathan begins, she thought. And yet something tells me this isn’t even the worst thing I’ll have to deal with in the next five minutes.

Even though every single other thing in the pod had ceased working on impact, most of the air bags stayed at full inflation, threatening to smother her in the choked confines of the pod. She fumbled around in the suffocating darkness until she found where she had shoved the knife, thankfully still wedged firmly into the cushion. She grabbed it and sliced at random through the synthetic canvas surrounding her. Escaping air hissed against her face, along with something else, something that felt more foreign than the stale oxygen that had filled the airbags. Heat, coming in on a steady breeze, along with a thick odor of vegetable rot and some kind of exotic animal musk that she couldn’t identify. As the airbags fell away, she saw a crack in the door seam, apparently the source of warmth and smell. Either that was the temperature and stench of Leviathan, or else she had landed on some creature that was now burning from the heated pod’s impact.

Stacia maneuvered herself as well as she could within the cramped space to kick at the door. For a normal, un-augmented human, the door probably wouldn’t have budged at all. For Stacia, it still remained more or less closed for five or six kicked before it started to budge and bend at the top corner. It seemed to be jammed against something from the outside. Allowing her neural implants to inject her with a small amount of synthetic adrenaline—she didn’t want to use much at all, since she didn’t think she would easily be able to resupply herself—she kicked several more times with both legs until one of the hinges broke. The door bent and slumped at an angle, still held up by something from the outside, but there was enough of an opening now that she could see outside.

The pod rumbled slightly, likely one of the many small tremors that periodically troubled the planet, and the door slumped a little more, allowing her to see that it was the ground itself that had jammed the door closed. Under ideal circumstances, a drop pod would hit the ground with exactly enough force to drive the thorny bottom point into the ground for stability, but not so much that the door sunk into the ground with it. Instead, the loose rock and soil went halfway up what should have been the opening. Through that top half, Stacia could see a spread of about ten to twenty feet around the pod where the soil had spread out in an impact pattern. Beyond that, the ground was covered in waist-high plants that might have been similar to grass if they weren’t three times as thick and seemed to wave themselves against the wind as though slightly sentient. The air was thick and muggy and full of unidentifiable buzzing sounds, undoubtedly Leviathan’s versions of crickets and locusts. Some distance beyond, there were thick, spiraling structures covered in small green polyps that opened and closed at random like mouths trying and failing to eat the air itself. The sky beyond was orange-ish in color, the sort of hue she would have assumed was a sunrise on Earth.

That was all the small opening would allow her to see for now. In terms of alien worlds, it wasn’t the strangest she had ever seen. Her second ever combat drop had been onto a planet that didn’t have a sun at all. The life forms that had lived there were beyond strange, to the point where, from what little she had been able to see of them, her language didn’t even have the words capable of describing them.

I can work with this, Stacia thought to herself. So far, it’s nothing I can’t handle.

There was another tremor, this one slightly stronger than the last. A thought occurred to her, causing her to resume kicking at the door in an effort to make the opening wide enough for her armor-enhanced body to crawl through. Sure enough, she felt the tremor again, still stronger.

That wasn’t the earthquakes. Something was coming her way. Something very, very large.