The shuttles descended towards the patch of sand to the north of the settlement, away from the lake. Simon heard the mutterings from the watchers and knew what they meant; the shuttles were landing, accidentally or otherwise, right in one of the most unsafe places on the planet. That sand would probably take the shuttles — it wasn’t quicksand — yet it was almost certainly infested. The crawlies, or snakes, or great worms would attack them at once. Simon considered shouting a warning, and then changed his mind. If they were from the Empire, who gave a damn what happened to them?
“Nice place you’ve brought us to, sir.”
“Shut up,” Neil said, as he checked his weapons and suit. According to the files that had been extracted from the orbital station, most of the rebels from the various underground movements had been dumped in a handful of locations, along with plenty of criminals and madmen. They’d flown a recon mission over the settlement, yet his most optimistic estimate suggested that the settlement’s population would be a thousand at most. If all the settlements had comparable populations… what had happened to the remainder of the rebels?
The shuttle grounded itself in a patch of sand, allowing the Marines to troop down the ramp and onto the ground. Neil was silently grateful that he couldn’t smell the penal world’s atmosphere. The suit’s atmospheric monitoring programs reported that there were high concentrations of various gases in the air, not enough to be lethal, but certainly enough to create a foul smell. The sand felt odd under their armoured feet, yet they weren’t sinking in it. He led the way towards the settlement — the village — in the distance, wondering why the involuntary colonists hadn’t expanded their domain out towards the jungle in the distance. Neil was no expert on geography, yet surely they could have expanded…
A red light flashed up in his HUD, a second before… something burst out of the ground and came right at him, jaws opening wide to reveal very sharp, very white teeth. It clamped onto Neil’s arm and emitted a howl of pain as its teeth shattered on the armour, although red icons in his HUD warned that the teeth had actually dented the armour, somehow. Neil reached out with his other arm, pulled the creature off his armour and examined it thoughtfully. It was a long snake-like creature, with bulging eyes — he imagined that they looked surprised — and a massive jaw. Neil wouldn’t have cared to meet one of them without his armour. Those teeth could have bitten off a human’s head without even noticing. The files on the planet hadn’t been very detailed when it came to wildlife and he was starting to understand why. Anyone who went down to catalogue the planet’s wildlife probably ended up being eaten by it.
He took the creature’s head in one armoured hand and squeezed, hard. The snake’s skull popped, like a grape, leaving the remains of its body trashing about in the sand. Neil muttered a command for his Marines to deploy sensors to watch for other creatures, only to recoil in shock when the first results started to come in. The sand might have looked harmless, but underground there were hundreds of creatures, swimming through the sand towards the armoured Marines. There was barely a second’s warning before another creature roared up and started to drag a Marine into the sand, before his comrades could rescue him and kill the creature with a burst of plasma fire.
“Run,” Neil ordered. An armoured suit could move at nearly a hundred kilometres an hour, at least on flat ground. Newer snakes burst up all around them, only to run into plasma fire as the Marines terminated any threat rapidly and brutally. None of them had served in such an environment before, yet they had adapted quickly; Neil was proud of them, in his own way. “Get up to the village and…”
The moment they stepped onto the stony ground, the attacks faded away and ended, as if they’d never been. Neil looked back towards the sand, where they’d left dead creatures in their wake, only to see nothing. The local wildlife had taken the bodies of the dead and sucked them down under the surface, where he suspected that they would be devoured by their own kind. He checked the sensors and wasn’t surprised when they concurred. The alien world seemed to have no place for compassion, or even courage.
He turned back towards the village. “Wait here,” he ordered, and started to walk up towards the gates. The settlers should have nothing that could stop an armoured suit, but he hadn’t come to make war on them. He had to talk to them, somehow, and they were likely to be feeling paranoid. Or perhaps they were laughing, he added in the privacy of his own head; the Marines probably hadn’t looked very impressive when they’d been running across the sand.
The gates opened as he approached, revealing a single man, aged before his time. Neil honestly couldn’t place his age; he looked to be around thirty, yet he seemed to act as if he was far older. Grey hair and an unhealthy pallor in his face suggested that the settlers didn’t have a proper diet, let alone proper medical care. Neil had been on worlds that had been deliberately settled with the intent of using as little modern technology as possible, but even they had proper medical care. The penal world, of course, hadn’t been given anything of the sort. No one gave a damn about what happened to the people on the surface. They’d been sent to the penal world to die.
“Welcome to Haven,” the man said. There was a weary resigned tone in his voice, as if he expected that the Marines had come to lay waste to his world. “What do you want here?”
Neil smiled inwardly. The man was direct, something he appreciated. He cracked open his visor — after running a final check on the local environment — and opened his armoured suit, allowing them to see his face. The stench — a stench of rotting eggs and fish, reminiscent of part of the Marine training camp — hit him like a hammer, but somehow he refrained from gagging. He needed them to believe him. It would be so much easier if they believed him.
“We’re not from the Empire,” he said. Explaining about the mutiny and the rebel fleet — to say nothing of the popular front and the various underground groups out along the Rim — would take too long. “We’re here to take you away from this world, if you would like to leave.”
The man stared at him. “Are you mad?”
“No, sir,” Neil said, trying to project confidence and certainty into his voice. “We rebelled against the Empire and we are looking for recruits. Do you want to stay on this planet or come with us?”
He wasn’t sure what reaction he would receive. There had never been a breakout from a penal world before, yet there had been some dark stories in the Marine Corp’s archive, suggestions that perhaps not all of the convicts would want to leave. Or, perhaps, that the strong men who ruled the penal worlds wouldn’t want to give up their power — or, perhaps, that they simply would not be believed. The men and women who had been dumped onto the hellish world would not expect anyone to come for them. They had known that they would spend the rest of their lives on the planet’s surface.