The orb exploded in a blast of sound and light, blinding those looking directly at it. The marines followed, their helmets darkened to absorb the light. They fired as they advanced, killing the stunned defenders almost trivially. It was over in moments, skill and professionalism proving their worth.
“Clear,” Taylor shouted as she swept the leftmost corner. The marines replied in kind as they moved through the hold. “Ok, Ivanov and Nguyen with me. Jacobs and Han, you secure the engine room. We have proof now the ship is hostile. Take prisoners if you can, but the priority is to take the ship.”
Chapter Six
Michael pressed his nose to the glass as the Seeker searched for the ideal landing spot. Everything below looked so pristine, a perfect untouched wilderness. Trees rustled as the Seeker flew over them, the arrival of people already impacting the environment. It could easily have been the wilds on any one of a thousand worlds, were it not for subtle reminders that it was all constructed. A suspiciously straight river here, a strange isolated mountain there. There was an unmistakable sense that everything had been placed, rather than growing naturally. It reminded Michael of playing certain video games, the ones where you got to play God. He always got bored eventually in those, it was too easy to create perfect little worlds that just looked after themselves. He wondered if that was what had happened here, that the builders of this place had perhaps simply gotten bored.
The trees gave way to a vast plain, one that stretched out towards the ocean ahead. Michael realised for the first time there was no beach, no stretches of radiant sand.
“Hey, uh, there’s no sand. At the coast. That’s weird right?” Michael lifted himself away from the glass, wiping off the smog that had formed from his breath with the cuff of his jacket.
“It is unusual.” Mellok was stood to the side of the glass, taking his own look at the world below. They could easily have projected images from the ship’s sensors onto screens and holograms, but it simply didn’t feel the same as looking at it in person. “It’s highly unlikely there are any tides in this place, but there should at least be something, from the wind and rain. Perhaps some unseen system is removing it? Maybe the stone isn’t really that, but some other unknown substance? It’s hard to say, Knower.”
“I’m not sure on this place,” Brekt said, still sat in his co-pilot’s seat. “It feels fake. It’s like a garden, just massive. It feels wrong.”
“You’re just being a big baby,” Aileena said, her hands wrapped around the controls. “Besides, you never camped in the garden as a kid?”
“Didn’t have a garden, not really. My parents were farmers, closest thing we had to a garden was the fields. That or the barns and trust me you don’t want to be bedding down in there. Viort don’t make good sleeping partners. Too many tentacles.”
“Right well, fair enough. The monastery had quite a big garden. Well, I say garden, but it was full of combat robots. They would have us camp there and try not to get caught. For training.”
“What happened if you got caught by the robots?” Michael asked.
“Then they would give you a very good reason not to get caught again.” Aileena looked stony-faced, memories of something horrible rising to the surface.
“We had a garden when I was a child,” Mellok said. “A rather large thing. Took several gardeners to maintain. I remember my mother fretting about it during a particularly cold winter. Apparently, some of the flowers did poorly in our environment at the best of times.”
“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “When you say estate, you mean large country home, not scummy council houses?”
“I wouldn’t say large. The garden was only a few miles across.”
“Miles? Miles across?” Michael shook his head. He knew Mellok had a lot of money, that was how he had recruited Aileena and Brekt after all, but Michael had always considered Mellok a monk of some sort. This revelation about the feathered alien’s rich upbringing tainted his image a little in Michael’s thoughts. It immediately brought to mind a certain sub-set of people Michael had come across in university. They were the kind of people who saw no issues in telling a person who could barely afford cheap ramen that they should be eating vegan and organic instead. These were the same people who proudly shouted about their green credentials but still travelled to every music festival by car and then left the tent in the field.
“There,” Brekt said, changing the subject. “See that island? We’ll camp there.”
Mellok and Michael returned to the front of the glass, each craning their necks to try and spot what Brekt was talking about. Up ahead was a lake, within the centre of which was a large island, half wooded on one side. The trees reach the shoreline, giving way as one half of the island rose above the water, finally flattening out into a grassy area that ended in a sheer drop into the lake.
“We’ll land on the plateau, the one side is natural protection, on top of the lake itself. We can try and scavenge supplies in the forest, and we can use the ship to cross the water. Suits us perfectly.”
“Unless anyone else has a differing opinion, I’m bringing the Seeker in,” Aileena said. The others just shook their heads in agreement. “Go sit down. It should be a nice soft landing, but you never know with our luck.”
Michael followed her advice, walking the ramp to the upper level and sitting into a chair. He felt himself sinking slightly as the gel took his weight. The console before him blinked happily, waking up automatically as it detected his presence. Not that Michael knew how to use it. He had intended to try and learn, to get the basics of alien technology under his belt, but simply hadn’t found the time. Constantly dealing with arguing factions aboard the Sword had consumed the last three months of his life, any ideas of self-improvement evaporating.
The light from the fake star above was oddly warm. Not just in temperature, but in tone. It felt like an enormous lightbulb was hung over the landscape, rather than a roiling ball of nuclear fire. In a way that’s exactly what it was, the circling object nothing more than a cosmic lamp. It wasn’t helping the overall sense that the planet was counterfeit. Everything the eye touched felt wrong, just slightly off in a way that was imperceptible aside from a vague sense of uneasiness. Even the soil and grass was strange underfoot. It was curious that people from three vastly different worlds, with different ideas on what a planet should be, all felt the same thing. It was almost like the planet had been designed by committee, landing on a result that no one would ever be truly happy with.
The Seeker had settled onto the plateau easily, the grassy area atop it flat enough for the ship to rest on the legs that had emerged from the bottom. In fact, it was bizarrely flat. Michael was confident he could put a spirit level on the surface and find it was perfect.
Around the Seeker, Brekt had begun unloading supplies, mushrooms stored in the same crates the Merydians had provided them in, though the contents were new. Meggok had worked out a way of growing them, and the fungi spread quickly through his makeshift garden aboard the Sword. Where exactly he had gotten the fertiliser for them from Michael hadn’t asked, but the supply had seemingly risen with the population of the ship.
The rest of the supplies scattered about were things salvaged from the ships unable to make the full jump journey. A dozen differently designed bottles held safe drinking water, whilst a large sheet of cloth had been folded atop the pile. Brekt was currently trying to assemble a frame with branches cut from the nearby trees, one he intended to drape the cloth over to build a makeshift shelter. It didn’t seem necessary to Michael, they had the Seeker, after all, the thing had a kitchen, beds, bathrooms. He felt like they had all the shelter they needed right there, the Seeker being akin to a flying house. Brekt had been insistent though, and the others had just let him carry on.