The Blue Beyond – Episode 1

Chapter 1

Kazi Depot, Planet Kazi,

Osara System, Ballas Branch

The world of Kazi was considered a colony, but wasn’t much more than a glorified research outpost. It was a small planet, home to about ten thousand among its three stations.

Its surface was still largely unexplored, made up of equal parts dense extraterrestrial rainforests and ocean. The rainforests were located on a single gigantic continent, much like Earth’s Pangea. An astonishing amount of life flourished on Kazi, and that life had fuelled a generation of research.

But the real draw of Kazi was not its animal kingdom, but its flora. Vegetation on Kazi grew at a rate nearly one-thousand times faster than any found among the sixy-eight colonized systems in the Ring Network. If you had chopped back the Kazian equivalent of a rhododendron, you’d wake the next morning to find it back to its original size.

Since the gate to the Osara System had first opened, the planet had been something of a destination for young researchers looking to cut their teeth.  Many had theorized that the plant life might yield some type of Fountain of Youth-esque discovery. It hadn’t, of course. But it had delivered advances in sustainable farming that had benefited systems throughout colonized space, a point of pride in the Osara System.

But outside of research, there was no reason to settle on Kazi. For those that worked the other jobs that had popped up to support the researchers, Kazi was a dead-end.

Nickolas Johns was one of them, the Head of Security on Kazi, which meant that he was responsible for securing Kazi Depot, the planet’s main station, along with the Communications Station and Research Lab. Each station was about twenty miles away from one another, connected by an underground train system.  

As the Head of Security, his primary jobs were protecting the research and policing the population — in that order. The entire planet was a government funded program, meant to pry every drop of research they could glean from the planet.

In truth, he didn’t feel like much more than a well-paid babysitter. Kazi Security was technically Osarian Military, but Kazi was so disconnected from daily life back home on Osara Prime that the unit itself had devolved into something more casual over the years. There was no oversight, outside of Johns himself, and it was hard to make him give a shit.

Johns was stocky, well-built from a decades-old weightlifting habit, with salt and pepper hair, and a persistent five-o’clock-shadow.

While you wouldn’t think a population whose primary purpose was researching extraterrestrial plant life would cause much trouble, Johns kept surprisingly busy. A planet with very little in the way of reliable entertainment meant that people got up to all kinds of things they otherwise wouldn’t if they were occupied.

Today, the unique brand of bullshit consisted of a bar fight. Even though there had to have been fifty people in the bar at the time of the incident, miraculously, no one could remember seeing much of anything at all.

The bar was dingy. Its metallic walls were tinged red and somehow smelled of mildew. Or maybe it was the old tapestries that hung on them to cover the stains and age. There were three bars on Kazi, all in offshoots that spiderwebbed off the main Kazi Depot corridor. This bar, aptly named The Commotion, was by far the most problematic on the weekends.

The main corridor was the primary thoroughfare in the station. It housed all of the commercial shops, restaurants, and offices within Kazi Depot. Every single place of business was contained in the one-mile-long, quarter-mile-wide corridor or down one of the connected offshoots. The rest of the station was dedicated to storage areas, research facilities, official offices, and residential quarters.

“And you didn’t see anything?” Johns said as he leaned over the table, trying to muster the intimidation that a lifetime in the Osarian Marine Guard had drilled into him.  

“No sir, I did not,” a fat man, wearing too-tight, ketchup-stained shorts said.

“Even though you were sitting right there?” he said, pointing at a chair with vigor. Next to the chair was a circular area with a pool of blood in the center that had been surrounded by bar stools and enclosed in caution tape.

“Yes, sir. I was watching the game,” the fat man said. Johns could smell the liquor on his breath.

A sly smile crept across Johns’ face. He made sure not to break eye contact, holding the man’s gaze for several extra seconds until the exchange had become sufficiently awkward.

“So let me get this straight. You’re sitting here. A fight breaks out somewhere behind you, but you don’t turn around to see who it is? The game’s on. You’re just watching the game. Right? The fight starts to get a little more heated….some punches are being thrown. Judging by the amount of blood, someone may have been stabbed — not ten feet from where you’re sitting — and you still don’t turn around to see what the hell is going on? You’re just watching the game? Don’t lie to me man.” Johns said.

“Like I said, I was watching the game,” the man said. “By the time I turned around to see what the fuss was, he was already laying there in his own blood and everyone is losing their damn minds. Honestly, I didn’t see who threw the punch.”

“But you did know that it was a punch? He didn’t slip and fall?”

“Couldn’t say….I was watching the game.”

Johns blew a puff of air out of his nose and shook his head, turning his back to the man. Every weekend it was the same shit. That was what it was like out here in the branch systems.

It was going to be a long day, he could feel it. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Long days meant that something was happening, which was a good change of pace. This wasn’t the life that he had chosen, that option had been taken from him. But he had made it his own. Even on days like today.

Rick Sims, Johns’ partner and Second in Command of Security on Kazi Depot, had just finished interviewing his own potential witness at the back of the bar as Johns strolled over. Rick shot him a glance with a slight shake of the head that signaled that he too was having trouble finding anyone willing to talk about what they had seen.

If this fight had spilled out into the hallway, they wouldn’t have any problem figuring out what happened. Cameras were watching every metal inch of Kazi Depot, except in some private businesses. By law, they were allowed to dictate their own security and surveillance policies. Of course, this being The Commotion, the barman had informed them when they arrived that they didn’t record anything, as Johns was well aware.

“Well, we aren’t going to get anything here,” Rick Sims said.

“Yeah, I know, I’ll put in the request to pull the video from the hallways. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll catch the asshole running out of here with blood on his hands. At the very least we can identify some faces that ran out when it happened and talk to them. Medical should be sending over any names with injuries that match soon” Johns said.

“Could have handled that back at Command over a beer.”

“Good point. Why are we even here?”

“Well, I did pull that blonde waitress witness at the bar brawl last month. Supposed to see her this weekend, in fact,” Rick said, slicking his hair back and giving his mustache a part. “But I’ll send for the cleanup team for the blood.”

They’d find the fighters and give them a citation, eventually. It wasn’t like the culprit could leave. The next supply shipment and ride home, back to Osara Prime, wasn’t due for months.

“Hungry?” Rick asked as he stared at the strange technological circus in front of them.

“I guess. Where are you thinking?”

Rick looked around the bar before throwing his hands up and giving a shrug. “They have decent mushroom steak sandwiches here.”

Johns rolled his eyes. “Alright. You know I don’t trust the kitchen here.”

“Oh, live a little my man. Everything gets nuked anyway.”

Kazi’s 28-hour day contained four seven-hour shifts. Research was ongoing at all times, but the bulk of Kazi’s population was made up of the restaurant workers, data vendors, mechanics, security personnel, doctors, entertainers, and other micro-industries that had popped up around the small colony.

A group of weathered regulars had already assumed their ceremonial positions along the bar, and Rick and Johns cozied up beside them.

One man was clearly drunk, slurring his way angrily through a story.

“You boys been here all night? See the fight?” Johns asked, figuring he might as well give it a try.

“No, ‘fraid we just got here,” an old man with the patchy beard said.

Johns thumbed through the hologram menu that appeared in front of him on the bar countertop.

“You guys on duty?” the long-haired bartender asked as he strolled up to their end of the bar.

“Regrettably,” Rick said. “No booze for us.”

“Alright then. Food?”

“I’ll take the faux-ham and chips, please. Light on the mayo, extra mustard,” Johns said as he disposed of the menu with a flick of the finger. Rick ordered the mushroom beef steak.

Johns and Rick had long agreed that the false ham was the closest thing to the texture of meat. Made of pressed slices of salt, filler, and mushroom meat substitute, then artificially flavored to taste like ham — it wasn’t exactly mouthwatering, but there weren’t a lot of options on Kazi. It did the trick.

Johns had been lobbying for years to let them butcher some of the native wildlife, but the researchers had repeatedly informed him that it was dangerous to ingest meat from new biosystems. Still, he’d often suggest hunting some of the local wildlife so that he could watch the scientists squirm at the thought.

The food came and Johns and Rick made their way through their meals, saying nothing and instead opting to listen to the hilarious conversations the old drunks were having to their left. They argued about nothing in particular, effortlessly shifting from one topic to the next.

Jjust as he was stuffing the last bite of his faux ham sandwich into his mouth — Johns felt something. He wasn’t sure what it was at first. Maybe bass from music. For a brief moment, he considered asking the bartender to turn it down. But no, it wasn’t that. It was different. Deeper. More guttural. And it was growing.

It started as a low, bassy rumble that he felt in his feet. Over a few seconds, the low grumble grew, and Johns could feel it in his legs and arms. It became hard to hear. He jumped in his seat.

Then a new shrill sound. It pierced his chest. Rick turned, almost as if in slow motion, and gave Johns a panicked look.

It was the station alarm.

Chapter 2

Kazi Depot, Kazi Planet,

Osara System, Ballas Branch

The deep rumble and sound of the alarm was so loud, so incredibly all-encompassing, that for a moment, Johns had felt as if he had ceased to exist. Like his body had been plucked from existence and was now floating in some sort of other space between the dimensions.

The old drunken man had dropped immediately to the floor. Others, he believed based on their facial expressions, had started screaming, but he couldn’t hear anything over the alarm — just opened mouths and panicked faces. The high-pitched wail reverberated off of the metal walls of Kazi Depot, its pitch bending up and down.

The alarm system was wired to sound throughout all three stations. They weren’t fucking around either. Every single living soul on that planet would hear it.

Johns glanced down at his com unit to confirm that it wasn’t a test or a mistake. The mandatory warning sign that filled his screen told him this was the real deal.

In the more volatile decades in the history of the Osara System, the alarm system had been designed to signal an incoming attack and allow the residents to take refuge in the bunkers, where the critical research data storage units were housed.

Kazi had never been a point of military interest, but the separatists had made a point throughout the war to blow up cultural points of relevance, and the three stations on Kazi had always fit that bill. The idea was to protect the data and research — and as many people as they could, realistically. Fortunately, that day had never come and the war had long since ended. Since, the alarm system had only been used during a few emergencies, and not since the explosion at the Research Lab over a decade ago.

Johns leaped to his feet and un-holstered his weapon. His mind automatically switched to analyzing potential scenarios. What was causing this? There were a few things that would cause an automatic trigger of the alarm system. An explosion somewhere was the most likely cause. Perhaps some sort of biological mishap or virus at the research lab. That was the nightmare scenario.

Maybe some sort of natural disaster. Flooding, maybe. But it wasn’t the rainy season.  And facilities had all been built out of reinforced neosteel composite, which can withstand just about anything that you throw at it.

“SIR?” Rick mouthed, unable to raise his voice over the alarm system that echoed off of the walls of the station.

“COMMAND,” Johns screamed in an attempt to be heard over the piercing shriek of the alarm, but slow enough so that Rick could read his lips.

Rick nodded.

Immediately, the hallways outside of the bar filled with a rush of panicked civilians making their way toward the bunkers. The last time the alarm had sounded, nearly one hundred people had died in an avoidable explosion. Johns could tell that those memories had been hanging in the back of their minds.

It was chaos. Johns should have expected that no one would follow the evacuation procedures. But the alarm sounding was such a rare and jarring occurrence, he didn’t blame people for being a bit panicked.

The offshoot corridors were thin, with maybe enough room for four people to comfortably walk next to one another. Trying to jam the entire station into them all at once was like stomping mud through a drain.

Johns and Rick shoved their way toward the main corridor, the opposite direction of the bunkers. People pushed in every direction, concerned only with getting to wherever they were headed.

Johns watched as an older man fell and was trampled several times before pulling himself closer to a garbage can that had been chained to the side of the hallway, where Johns helped him to his feet. He nodded his thanks and disappeared into the sea disorganized panic as the alarm deafened them all.

Johns and Rick pushed against the crowds as they made their way down the narrow hallways, making headway as they tried to make their way the three-hundred yards or so to the main corridor. They had to get there. At least it would give them some room to maneuver.

People knocked into them and pushed them. Fighting against the flow of traffic was slow going, and Command for was on the opposite end of the station from where The Commotion had been.

Johns was used to chaos. It had been awhile though, and he had put the memories of the war into the farthest reaches of the back of his brain.

At one point, Johns had toppled over a younger woman that had unexpectedly emerged from a doorway. He had stayed just a few seconds, looking her over and holding her steady on her feet to make sure she hadn’t broken anything before he started swimming through the sea of people again.

It was as hot as the Osarian sun amongst the sea of bodies. They couldn’t have been moving more than a dozen of meters per minute. The thicker the crowds got, the more their patience waned. Johns was certain that somewhere in the station, someone was being trampled to death right then. At times her worried if the tight pack of bodies in the thin corridors wouldn’t lead to them all getting stuck. He could feel his ribs pushing into his chest as the hallway compacted.

A sprint to Command at the other side of Kazi Depot should have taken about fifteen minutes, but Johns was certain it took them longer than that to get halfway up the narrow hallway. Traffic was at a standstill. Although the alarm was still sounding, Johns barely heard it anymore. He barely heard anything, just an intense ringing in his ears. There was no telling if it had damaged his hearing or if his brain had just started to filter out the noise.

When they were about three-quarters of the way to the main corridor, Johns felt a familiar vibration in his feet. This vibration, however, grew much more quickly than the vibration from the alarm had. It grew until it encompassed his entire body, then for a brief moment, it felt as if his body wasn’t there at all. Like his bones had turned to gelatin. A deep grumbling started to cut through the noise of the alarm and grew with confusing acceleration. It built until Johns was certain that the planet itself was cracking under the strain, then grew some more. Johns brain rattled against the sides of his skull. Rick screamed beside him, bracing himself against the corridor walls. It was as if tens of thousands of bombs were being set off simultaneously in some nearby place. For a moment, he was certain that he would die. He only thought of Anna.

It had been maybe twenty seconds before the rumble had reached its frightening crescendo. The building was shaking so violently that Johns covered his head with his arms, preparing for the eventual onslaught of steel and concrete that would rain down onto him, but it never came. He felt legs give out beneath him and he fell to the ground only to find Rick laying next to him. The walls seemed to bend to a point that he wondered if they might snap in half, leaving them all exposed to the open Kazian environment. He could see the floor waving like a sea beneath him.

Seconds later, a second explosion sounded. With it, a new round of screams echoed throughout the hallway. Like Johns, they too were probably fearing that this may be the end. This one was even louder. More powerful. Closer. They lost power. Finally, the alarm stopped ringing. Everything was dark. Johns could feel debris falling around him on all sides. Every window that lined the walls on either side of the corridor shattered.

Then, everything went quiet.

The dust had only settled for a moment before a third explosion shook Kazi Depot, this one a bit less powerful. The station shook again, and Johns couldn’t think of anything but her. He should have done better. If he died here, he’d die with her hating him.

He laid there on the cold metal floor of Kazi depot. Thick dust hung in the air, much of it shaken free for the first time in decades. People coughed and moaned throughout the hallway. Some time passed as they waited for the building to finish swaying beneath them. How much time, Johns wasn’t sure. Could have been one minute, could have been ten.

The backup generators kicked on. The floodlights gave an eerie glow, as people lay sprawled across the floor on the ground, holding on for dear life. Several people appeared to be badly hurt, a few may be dead. The corridor was still standing, but there was no guarantee that the rest of the building was.

Johns stood. He helped Rick up from the ground, then watched as he struggled through the crowd with scarlet red blood dripping from a giant gash in his right arm that smeared and flecked onto passersby.

“EVERYONE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE BUNKERS,” Johns screamed as he pulled Rick to his feet. “FUCKING CALMLY!”

The crowd must have been waiting for direction because everyone started moving in unison. Fear tends to do that sometimes. Johns helped get the injured to their feet and escorts to either the bunker or med bay, depending on their condition.

It occurred to Johns at that moment, that they might be under attack. A terrorist bombing, maybe. And there was nothing that they could do about it. Kazi Depot didn’t have any sort of orbital defense system, if they were hucking something from space. If they were planetside, they could maybe deal with it.

As Johns and Rick made their way down the corridor toward Command, softer explosions sounded, noticeably fainter or farther away or quieter than the first three. Steam shot out through the floor from pipes that had burst below them, giving the ground a wet, misty vapor that hung up to their knees.

They exited the slim hallway into the main corridor and Johns felt the residual claustrophobia leave his body. The Main Corridor acted as the central hub for Kazi Depot as a whole. The train system that connected the three stations was accessible to the south end, which ran from one end of the station to the other. It was fifty meters wide, lined on both sides with restaurants, salons, shops, grocery stores, watering holes, pawnshops, and a variety of other stores.

Examining the corridor allowed them to assess the damage. It wasn’t too bad. Some pieces of the ceiling had fallen and smashed the dining tables below them. There was what appeared to be a crowd gathering around a man who had been killed by falling debris maybe one-hundred yards down the corridor. Several of them tried to flag Johns down, but there was no time for that now.

“Is he dead?” Johns asked.

“Yes,” a woman who had come jogging over answered.

“I’ll send someone to deal with it. I can’t do it right now,” Johns said as they took off in a jog toward the northside of the corridor, on the end of the station that butted up directly against the forest.

There were still many people running through, but the width and expansiveness of the main corridor gave everyone much more room to move. No one was being trampled, but there was still the buzz of panicked commotion.

Within minutes, they’d arrived at the giant neocomposite steel doors of the Command Post, completely out of breath. Johns panted as he placed his face in front of the sensor that measured his facial features and analyzed his retina, while placing his hand on the sensor below it before the Command Post door opened with a whoosh.

The circular room was filled with stations and displays that controlled the various systems within Kazi Depot proper, the research lab, and the communications station. Security. Oxygen systems. Airlock controls. Communications. Logistics. Anything and everything ran out of this room.

Already, the room was buzzing. Security personnel, researchers, and management types buzzed around the room, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Some scrolled through data, while others accessed various video feeds. A few stood in shock, trying to understand what was going on around them.

Johns and Rick caught their breath for a few seconds by the door and then began to make their way across the large room.

“Aye, boss is ‘ere,” a red-bearded man said from across the room.

Immediately, Johns was swarmed. They came at him from all sides. Each one shrieking about a different problem. Something had happened, that was clear. But trying to decipher what it was among the ten different conversations he was engaged in wasn’t going to work.

“STOP!” Johns screamed.

The room fell silent.

“Thank you. Now Officer Raimes, tell me what the fuck is going on.” Gerald Raimes shifted uncomfortably.

“Erm. Here, follow me,” Raimes said as he led Johns over to the display above his workstation and began to filter through the files. “About ten minutes ago, we detected incoming space debris on course for a direct hit within the minute.”

“Our early detection systems didn’t catch it?” Johns asked.

“Appears not. Not until it was on top of us anyway. What happened about ten minutes ago is that we were hit. Three times. At first, we thought it was a meteor that had slipped through the atmosphere and broke up on the way down. But…,” Gerald said as he brought an image up onto the display and stepped back from the screen, holding his arms out with palms flat toward the image.

It took Johns a moment to make sense of what he was seeing. The screen showed an image, presumably taken from a drone. The image wasn’t a meteorite, at least not one that Johns had ever seen. Johns squinted and leaned in over Raimes’ shoulder to get a closer look. Not even close. It was long and pointed. Flaps of something hung down from what appeared to be the top of the object, with long appendages behind it, pointing toward the sky.

It appeared to be a long, squid-like creature. The photo was blurry due to the creature’s high speed, but the shape was fairly consistent with what Johns’ brain registered as a squid. Johns could make out four to five obvious tentacles trailing behind the squid as it descended.

Several gasps came from the people crowded behind him as he leaned into the monitor to get a closer look.

Johns stared for a moment, trying to make sense of what he was looking at. Rick’s mouth hung open.  

“Jesus. And the site?” Rick asked.

“We have our drones en route now,” Raimes said. Johns nodded, making side-eye contact with Rick.

“Well this is new.”

Chapter 3

Command Center, Kazi Depot, Kazi Planet,

Osara System, Ballas Branch

The moments after the image of whatever had crashed into the crust of Kazi had popped up on the screen were chaotic. Johns had feverishly sat down and started scrolling back and forth through the frames, searching for a sign that it wasn’t what he thought that it was. It wasn’t much help, as whatever it was had only been captured in a few frames — each blurrier than the last — but still looked decidedly like a giant squid in each.

As soon as it became clear that they couldn’t trick themselves into thinking they were seeing something else, one young brown-haired girl immediately burst into tears. Johns was happy to see that despite that they may have just discovered that a space-faring alien species had dive-bombed into the planet, that there were still several young men that were willing to console her. He was equally unsurprised to see that one of them was Rick.

“Shut down this space. No one leaves,” Johns yelled as soon as he was decently convinced of what he was seeing on the screen. A young tech a few seats down from him nodded and the Command doors closed and latched with loud thuds.

This, whatever it was, had to stay confined. For now at least. Johns was already regretting not clearing the room before he looked at the footage. He imagined that when this was all over, he’d receive a ding on his record for skirting emergency protocol, not that he cared at this point.

“Please connect me as quickly as you can to Command on Osara Prime,” Johns said when he was convinced that no one would be leaving and sending the entire station into a panic. He waited for a moment, tapping his feet while he waited to be patched through on the large screen dead-center on the far wall of Command.

“Sir, it appears that communications are down,” the tech beside him said. “Not only that, I don’t have visibility of the system at all. It’s probably the mainframe itself.”

Johns nodded, staring at his desk for a moment. “Officer Raimes,” he said.

“Sir,” he replied, stepping up next to him.

“I want you to make contact with security personnel at all major checkpoints in the three different sites. Tell them to start organizing a way to count the dead and injured.”

“Yes sir,” Raimes said with a head nod, and off he went to start crafting the message. Officer Raimes had been on Kazi for more than six years now. He was one of their most reliable security officers, and a likely future replacement for Johns, should Rick not want the job, which he might not. At least that seemed to be what Raimes was betting on. Otherwise, Johns had no idea why he was still here.

After a moment to consider his next move, Johns called all of the senior Kazi leadership that was present in the room into the conference room located at the back of Command. They shuffled in, and eight people sat around a wooden octogonal table with Johns standing near the front of the room.

“We all know what everyone’s thinking,” Johns said after everyone had been seated for a moment. “But let’s pump the brakes. We don’t know what this is.”

“I don’t know, looked like an alien to me, boss,” Rick said.

“Maybe it did. Still, the bottom line is that we don’t know anything. Not yet. It could be inanimate.”

The people seated around the table side-eyed each other. Before Johns could read the room and respond, a young blonde woman in a lab coat poked her head through the door.

“Sir, just wanted to let you know that we have identified collision sites for three objects,” she said.

“Show me,” Johns said, turning around toward the full-wall display behind him.

“Oh…alright…I’ll pull it up for you,” she said as she turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” Johns asked.

The young woman turned around confused, glancing nervously at the room of senior officials staring back at her.

“To my station?”

“What’s your name?”

“Sara.”

“Sara what?”

“Rutherford. Sara Rutherford.”

“Hello, Sara — and what is your position?”

“Well, I‘ve only been here a few weeks. I’m the new Head of Research on Kazi.”

They had expected her to arrive months ago, but the re-supply ships she had planned to hitch a ride with had kept getting postponed and she had ended up coming over on a flyby vessel from Ona on its way out of the system.

“Perfect. Please come in. That’s as senior as they come. You should have been in here already.”

Sara stared for a moment, said something inaudible to a tech outside of the conference room, then shut the door reluctantly behind her. A map of the main continent on Kazi popped up on the wall display behind Johns.

Three different circles were highlighted across the main continent on Kazi, between 30 and 60 miles away from Kazi Depot. The closest circle was placed directly over the top of a dot that read “Kazi Communications Station” below it on the map. The other two collision sites were to the Northwest and Northeast of Kazi Depot, near the northern side of the peninsula.

“It appears as if one of the objects struck the Communications Station directly,” Sara said, pointing her index finger toward the dot on the map.

Johns removed his hat and ran his fingers through his thinning hair briskly. “How many people do we have at the Communications Station?” Johns asked Officer Raimes.

“Around five-hundred sir,” Raimes said, sucking the air out of the room.

“Alright. Our priority is them. We need to put a team together to go to the Communications Station and see the damage first hand,” Johns said. “We may have injured civilians there. We also need to get our communications systems back up and running as soon as we possibly can to report back to Osara Prime, as it’s likely they are unaware of the strikes at this time.”

Raimes raised his hand.

“This isn’t school. Just talk,” Johns snapped.

“Sir. We have the OSN Capela on the launchpad. She’s in the middle of repairs, not seaworthy at the moment. But she has a light beam, we can use that for off-world communications,” the young man said.

Johns snapped his fingers in Raimes’ general direction. “Yes, good thinking. Go there. Make sure it’s working. Don’t send anything yet though. We need to assess the situation first. No need to report in when there is nothing to report.”

“Yes sir,” Raimes replied.

“And the Capela – what would it take for her to be seaworthy if we needed?”

“Oh. Uhh…I’m not sure. We’ve been waiting on some parts from Osara Prime for months. I see the pilot and crew around all of the time.”

“Good. Figure out what they were waiting on. It would be nice to have a getaway ship if this whole thing goes south.”

“Hold on now,” an older man with a white beard said. “We don’t know what this is, you’re right about that. But do we really want to send a team out there without getting an understanding of what we are dealing with first? We should at least let Osara Prime know about the Communications Station.”

“We have our drones out ahead to scout,” Johns said. “That will give us an idea. We’ll send a team out, see what we can do to help the survivors. As far as what we need to tell those assholes on Osara Prime… we will in due time. Letting them know what we know now is only going to lead to assumptions…and I wouldn’t count on those assumptions to work out in our favor. We’ll go to them with something a little more concrete.”

“Even so, this could have been a hostile strike…or…I’ll say it — this could be an alien invasion. We may need to evacuate,” the old man said, clutching his fist on the top of the table.

Johns paused, thinking for a moment. “What do you think?” he asked as he nodded toward Sara, all eyes in the room training on her. She pointed at her chest to make sure that he was talking to her, which Johns affirmed with a nod.

“I don’t think that I am qualified…”

“No one here is qualified for this,” Johns said, interrupting her. “Do you believe this is an intentional strike of some kind? If someone…or something… were to attack us, it would make sense to take out our communications capabilities.”

Johns had always made a habit out of putting people on the spot. The truth was that he knew what he was going to get from the people at the table. Most of the men here were former military or high in the corporate world. They had their interests to protect. They would say that sending a team out to check things out was the right choice. He wanted a fresh perspective.

“We have no reason to believe it is intentional but we also can not rule it out,” Sara said.

“Yes, that is what he said. And how can we figure that out?” Johns asked.

“Figure out if this was an intentional strike?”

“Yes, that. Also — anything. Figure out anything.”

“Well…we have to study it. We’ll need to go to the crash site and see what happened. We need to see if there is anything left of the organism. For all we know, it was obliterated on impact. But there should be something we can take a look at. Also, this other crash site,” she said as she pointed toward the northeasternmost red circle. “Was close to the Research Lab. There may be injuries there as well. Hopefully, we haven’t lost any research.”

Johns nodded before doing a double-take. Exactly what he would expect from someone who just landed a Head of Research position. He racked his knuckles on the desk in front of him, thinking.

“Send the drone ahead of us and transport any data back to my terminal,” Johns said to Rick. “I’ll put together a small team and we’ll go assess the damage. If the strike wasn’t direct we may have hundreds of people trapped in the station injured. While we are gone, ready as many puddlejumpers as you can for evacuating civilians. Also, send more drones to the impact site near the Research Lab to have a look as well. In the meantime, send everyone available to tend to our own wounded. There were a lot of people trampled in those corridors.”

“Ummm, sir,” said Alan Greenway, Head of Kazi Logistics. “We have no way of knowing what state the landing pad is in at the Communications Station. It may even be destroyed. We may not be able to land anywhere close to the station if that is the case.”

Johns rubbed his chin. He was right. If the landing pad was gone — and judging by the map there was a very good chance of that — then they weren’t going to be able to evacuate anyone easily.

“Alright. We’ll have the drone take a look at the state of the landing pad. We’ll follow the drone with a hot drop into the area if needed. I’ll put the team together. Alan, I would like you to come and assess the damage as you’ll be responsible for coordinating shipments to the area. Raimes and Rick, you too. The rest of you make sure that we are prepared here at home to deal with this in the best way that we can.”

“And what should we tell the civilians?” Alan asked.

Johns laid both hands, palms-down, on the table in front of him and leaned forward. “The truth…but maybe leave out the alien bits. Say that the planet was struck by unidentified space debris. That the Communications Station is down, and we are currently assessing the situation. Let them know that all travel on the trains is shut down too, and they will receive updates as soon as we figure out what the hell is going on.”

The man nodded. “I agree. But we are going to have to tell them eventually.”

“And we will. We’ll tell everyone everything we’ve learned after we get a chance to take a look at the impact site….Anything else?” Johns asked.

“Sir,” an old balding man with red hair said. “The Communications Station was home to our biggest farming operation, by far. They were about to harvest.”

“Oh…shit,” Johns said and he scratched the top of his head. “What are the food stores looking like?”

“Well…it’s tough to be sure without a full inventory. But to be honest, probably not great.”

“Not great, OK,” Rich piped in. “But what does that mean? How, not great? Like, we probably are going to starve, not great? Or we are just going to be below protocol, not great? These are important distinctions, Alan.”

“Well,” Alan Greenspan started, letting out a big sigh before he continued. “I don’t want to say anything official, but probably somewhere in between. We aren’t imminently going to starve or anything, we do have all of that protein meal powder that would last us months. But we probably should see if Osara will send an emergency shipment just to be on the safe side.”

“Alright, I’ll deliver that information in my message to them. Anything else?” No one spoke up. “Dismissed.”

Each hurriedly collected their items and started to make their way through the door back into the Command Center. Sara waited for the men to make their way over to the door and took up a spot at the back of the line.

“Oh,” Johns remembered before anyone managed to leave the room. “And I don’t need to say this, I know. But don’t tell a single god damn person about this until we have a better idea of what we are dealing with. We don’t need a panic. Understood?”

“Understood,” several members of the team said in unison as they made their way out of the conference room’s glass doors.

“Sara,” Johns said as she made her way out. “You’re coming with us to the Communications Station.”

She spun around.

“What? Really? Me?…Why,” she stammered, spinning around so quickly that her hair whipped her face.

“We need a researcher to help us make sense of this. And we will need to collect samples to analyze whatever hit us.” Johns said. “You are the Head of Research, right?”

Sara went rigid.

“Yes sir.”

Chapter 4

In a puddlejumper, Kazi Planet,

Osara System, Ballas Branch

Johns sat with Rick, Raimes, Sara, and a team of eight security personnel in the cramped puddlejumper transport ship when the probes began sending their data back to his terminal. The whole team was clad in their bulky environment suits, which were always worn when venturing out of the stations on Kazi. The suits were once orange but years of baking in the Kazian sun had turned them an dirty rust color.

The air was breathable. Not perfect. A little oxygen-rich for humans. But damn close to Earthlike compared to most planets in the Ring Network. You could take your helmet off and you’d probably survive. For a while, anyway. But Kazi had never had an immunization program. You might survive a half-hour walk through the jungle, but eventually, something would get to you that would make your body go haywire. If someone were to track something truly vicious back into one of the stations, there could have been thousands dead before they knew what happened. The whole planet could be wiped out. It was a lesson that had been hard-earned in the earliest days of the Ring Gate Network.

Unless you were in a station, domed city, or on one of the few planets with a vaccine regimen effective enough to make the open-air livable, environment suits were just a fact of life.

Even though this puddlejumper was as uncomfortable as any that he had ever been on, the truth was that Johns was happy to get out of Kazi Depot. In the hours after the impact, things had been bad. Their medical bays were stretched far too thin. Broken arms and legs were being reset in the hospital hallways. Luckily, they had a strangely healthy stockpile of bone regrowth medication, which would help to regrow bone in a matter of days, not weeks. Seven people had been trampled to death, including a child, and all in the smaller offshoot corridors outside of hte main corridor.

Johns pulled up a video and opened a packet of data that began displaying on the puddlejumper’s dual wall displays, directly in front of the crew. Five video feeds, each from a different probe, displayed in quadrants across the wall. It only took a few seconds for Johns to feel the knot in his stomach cinch down.

The feeds showed various locations around the Communications Station site, or at least where the station had once been. Now, it was nothing more than heaps of smoking rubble. The object’s impact site was clearly visible toward the Northern end of the structure, with what appeared to be a deep crater at the point of impact. The northern side was destroyed. Completely. The southern side seven-story structure had collapsed in on itself but was still standing in some areas, just barely. Fires burned out of control throughout the heap, fueled by the oxygen-rich Kazian environment.

A probe swung down near the landing pad. It was gone, completely unrecognizable, and covered in what appeared to be insulation. The small station that had stood next to the landing pad was eviscerated as well. Another probe that had ventured closer to the impact site showed stacks of rubble taller than two stories, with a weird blue hue emanating from the areas closest to the impact.

“What is that blue color?” Alan asked.

“I have no idea,” Johns said.

They stared in silence, with the whirr of the puddlejumper’s engine as it skirted above the jungle canopy as a backdrop.

Johns knew they all were on the same page — this wasn’t a rescue mission anymore. There would be no survivors. Maybe some poor saps were stuck down there in a bubble underneath the tons of concrete and steel, but they would have no way to get to them. Especially with the landing pad gone. Some of those slabs of concrete would weigh multiple thousand pounds. What a way to go.

The probes hung high. On all sides were lush green forests as far as the eye could see. Where the station had been were giant twisted piles of gray cement and steel. The faint blue color covered about a quarter of the surface area of the rubble as if someone had taken a paintbrush and coated the entire area in a single coat of a glowing translucent blue.

“Any ideas?” Johns asked Sara.

She shook her head.

“No. Maybe a chemical reaction of some kind. Or what the impact left behind.”

A few minutes later the pilot came over the coms channel into their environment suit helmets, letting them know that the landing pad had in fact been destroyed and that they were going to have to hot drop in.

“What’s a hot drop?” Sara had asked. Johns detected a bit of panic in her voice.

“The pilot will take us as close to the ground as he can, and we will take turns sliding down a rope to the surface.”

Sara’s eyes widened.

“No. I can’t do that. I never have—” she said.

“Yes, you can.” Johns cut her off. “It’s not difficult. You’ll go right behind me, latched onto me. You won’t fall.”

Sara nodded faintly and stared down at her lap. Johns could see that she was terrified, the poor thing. He didn’t blame her. She didn’t wake up this morning expecting to have aliens fall out of the sky then to jump out of a puddlejumper.

Johns beat his fist against his chest twice and the team lined up at the back of the ship. Sara awkwardly moved into position behind him. The pilot came over the intercom and informed them that he was going to drop them into a clearing about a mile from the station. It was a small clearing, so he was going to have to hover above the forest canopy. Johns knew that this meant that their hot drop was going to be from quite high, but decided it was best not to tell Sara. A few minutes later, Johns felt the ship come to a stabilized hover over a small patch of grass more than sixty feet below them.

“Hatch opening,” the pilot said into their helmet coms.

The back of the plane began to open, exposing the sky and thick forest below them. It stretched deep into the horizon until the green met the pale grey-blue of the sky. The puddlejumper sat motionless, its solar engine bursting wind from the horizontal and vertical turbines on either side of the plane.

The thick forest canopy didn’t allow for a view of the ground anywhere besides the small patch they had identified just below them. It had been a while since he had an opportunity to see something like this. Usually, he traveled between stations through the train system.

Despite the situation, his view of the forest was a momentary vacation from the metal corridors of Kazi Depot and its connected stations.

Sara made eye contact, her hesitation palpable. Johns used his HUD’s eye-tracking features to switch his environment suit coms to broadcast only to Sara.

“Don’t worry. It’s not as dangerous as it looks. Even if you fall, you’ll be hooked to me.”

Sara nodded, but Johns could tell that he wasn’t helping much. Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned that falling was a possibility. He switched his the group voice channel.

“Alright everyone, remember, we don’t know what is out there. Get to the ground, take cover, be ready. We’ll get our supplies ready, then we have a one-mile hike to the station. Play this like we have an unidentified live threat, even if we have no reason to suspect one now.” Johns said, and he watched as their environment suit helmets nodded.

The man at the front of the line hooked a long, dense rope to a hook at the back of the puddlejumper and dropped it out of the hatch toward the ground below. With no hesitation, he hooked his fastener to it, grabbed the rope, and slid down out of sight. A few seconds later the man behind him followed. Then Raimes and Rick. Then the next. Sara and Johns were the last to go. He switched to a private channel with Sara to speak with her while he latched a secure line between them.

“We only have about 10 feet between us, so we are going to slide down together. Like this.”

Johns demonstrated the correct way to hold onto the rope, wrapping his legs and arms around and gesturing with the rest of his body to stay loose.

“I’ll go first and set the speed. Wrap your legs around the rope, loosen your grip and slide. If you go too fast, tighten up to slow down. Now grab on,” he told Sara as he wrapped himself around the rope and slid down a few feet, giving her enough room to grab a hold with the environment suit’s gloves. “Don’t look down. Keep your eyes on the rope and think about holding on tight. We’ll be down in about five seconds flat.”

Sara nodded reluctantly.

“Now!” Johns yelled.

He pushed off from the puddlejumper and out the open hatch in the back. He began rapidly descending toward the grass field below them. He watched for a split second, waiting for Sara to do the same. But she never did. Johns slid until he reached the end of their connection rope and braced for impact. He felt the tug of the rope reverberate throughout his body and watched as Sara was pulled, face first, out of the hovering ship. She fell right past him.

Johns almost let go as Sara reached the end of their connection line with a thud and hung. She screamed into the coms channel, ringing throughout Johns’ helmet.

“Fuck!”

He felt himself be pulled faster along the rope, gaining momentum with Sara’s added weight pulling quickly toward the ground below. His left hand slipped off as Sara’s weight pulled at his environment suit’s harness. Not far behind it, he could feel his right hand slipping too. As they descended, Sara grabbed onto the main rope below him and pulled herself in, beginning her own slide and reducing the pull against them.

Still, they were falling too fast. Johns squeezed the rope with his gloved hands, trying to apply enough friction to slow them down, but was keenly aware of the fact that they were running out of space.

He squeezed with every bit of strength that he could muster, until it felt like the friction from the rope might tear through his gloves.

Thud.

Johns hit the ground directly beside Sara, his environment suit taking the brunt of the force. Sara moaned through their private channel. He laid on his back, staring up at the tops of the trees that surrounded the clearing. The puddlejumper hovered about one-hundred feet above. That hadn’t gone as planned.

“You alive?” he said without looking away. The rope disappeared as the pilot pulled it from the back of the ship above.

“Yes,” she said meekly.

“Good. Let’s not do that again. Next time I’ll have them bring the basket”

“That would be nice,” Sara said.

When he switched his coms back to the main group channel, Johns was greeted by the entire team laughing hysterically. Rick stood above him, looking him in the face through his visor.

“You still kickin’ in there boss?” he asked.

“Always, shithead,” Johns said, grabbing Rick’s hand and pulling himself to his feet with a groan. The group’s laughter echoed throughout his environment suit’s helmet.

They took a few minutes to get their bearings, and then made their plan. Because the thick Kazi jungle was likely going to be very difficult to walk through, they had brought along several machetes to help them cut through the brush. They would have to chop quickly. Due to the oxygen-rich atmosphere, plants on Kazi had evolved to grow back very quickly, sometimes reaching full capacity growth within a few short hours after being cut back. If they were quick, they might be able to walk back on the trail that they had just cut.

They decided that the leading man would chop away at the dense vegetation, and the others would follow behind keeping a close eye out for any movement in the trees. They didn’t expect any problems, but Kazi’s animal kingdom was filled with predators. They mostly left humans alone, but could always pose a threat if they weren’t on their toes. The conversations they had about those predators had once again made Sara noticeably uncomfortable. It was her first week on the planet. Here she is traipsing through the jungle, on the lookout for reptile-like beasts that run as fast as cheetahs.

From the moment they set out, Johns could see the thick smoke being pumped into the air from the impact site. Had he not been in his environment suit, he was sure that the smell would be just as thick. The closer that they got, the hazier the air around them became. A smoky haze hung visibly in the jungle, most evident where the light cut through the dense forest.

The cut through the jungle went about as smooth as Johns could have hoped. An hour and a half after they had first set out they saw the first views of what was left of the Communications Station through the trees.

They exited the forest on the south side of the station, which was in ruins but had clearly not been as close to the impact point as the Northern side. Various corners, arches, and steel beams were still standing, poking out of the devastation below.

They followed the collapsed walls toward the impact site. The closer that they got, the more the bluish hue enveloped the rubble. From a distance, it appeared to be some form of thick liquid — like liquid metal. A thin fog settled above it, giving the air above the ground a blue mist-like quality.

“When we get to the impact site, don’t touch anything. Especially that blue shit. Even in your environment suit. It doesn’t look like we have any chance of finding anyone alive in this mess, so we’re going to take some pictures, grab some samples, and get to the extraction point as quickly as we can.”

“Yes sir,” Rick replied, the sarcasm in his voice was notable. Johns didn’t mind too much, but at times Rick’s attitude could border on insubordinate. Johns was much more laid back these days, but he did wish that Rick wouldn’t pull his bullshit while something as serious as this was going on.

A few minutes later, as they reached areas of the building that had been completely leveled, they saw their first up-close signs of the mysterious blue liquid. It was a thick, mucous-like material that coated the outside of several plants and concrete chunks at the outskirts of the impact site. It gave off a strange blue hue that glowed slightly.

The closer that they got to the impact site, the thicker and more frequent the blue goo became. It also appeared to be moving. But not in the way that a living creature would move, more as if someone had shaken a bowl of gelatin. Every plant, scrap heap, and giant slab of the building started to become increasingly drenched in the material. In several places, fires were still burning among the broken station shell.

As they approached the northern side of the building, portions of the building were still standing. They peaked their head in, looking inside at the twisted metal of the remaining building. Eerie creaking and groaning emitted from the structure. “Don’t go in. I don’t have a lot of faith that this will keep standing. Let’s send in a drone and keep looking for survivors.”

The farther they walked, the more difficult it became to avoid stepping on the blue goo that dripped from the surfaces around them. As they approached the mound, they had to play a weird game of hopscotch, touching down in areas that the goo didn’t cover. From the forest, Johns heard a loud yelping noise that he identified to be from a Marmak, a cougar-like creature with scales that inhabited Kazi.

Soon, they began to run out of room to step. Johns looked back at the crew to find that several had been stranded as far as 25 yards behind him, having walked into a location where the goo could no longer be avoided. They doubled-back to see if they could find a better route. Ahead of him, he saw some open patches that he thought he might be able to get to. He may even be able to make it to the top of the mound and see what was on the other side.

“Alright, that’s far enough boys,” Johns said to the group. “Everyone fall back to the perimeter where the blue goo isn’t as thick. Half of you keep walking farther down the perimeter and see if you see anything. The other half take up defensive position on the treeline. Sara, you collect any samples that you think might be relevant. I’m going to make my way to the top of the hill here and see what’s what on the other side,” Johns said.

A few of the men nodded and made their way toward the treeline. Sara bent down, unhooked her backpack from her environment suit, and took out several sample kits. With precision, she opened the kit, bent down, and used a spoon-like device to scoop globs of the blue mucous into a collection container. She took her time, scooping small amounts, making sure that she didn’t smear any on the outside of the container, before turning the lid closed and placing it in a sealed bag.

Johns started hopscotching his way up the side of the hill. The farther he went, the fewer goo-less spots there were for him to step. On one leap, he wasn’t completely sure that he was going to make it without landing right in it. He imagined a terrible death where the goo ate through the feet on his environment suit and then started making their way up his legs.

Knowing full well that he couldn’t bring that back on the transport ship, he would have to strip down and leave his environment suit behind, which carried its own risks. The crew would have to remain in their environment suits throughout the flight, and then they would all need to follow hazmat procedures outside of Kazi Depot upon their return. Then, likely, Johns would go into a month-long quarantine, with rigorous antiviral regimens, until he either found that he had caught something and died or was allowed back amongst the public. With the current situation, he couldn’t afford to be locked up for a month.

He continued carefully, hopping his way toward the top of the mound. With each new leap, he could see more smoke rising into the air from the wreckage beyond. With one last leap, he reached a point where he was able to see over the top.

He felt that knot in his stomach cinch down once again. It wasn’t so much that he saw something that he wasn’t expecting. It was the vastness of the devastation before him that took him by surprise. As it turned out, the large mound of dirt had been the outer rim of the crater that had formed around the impact site. It stretched perhaps a half-mile across, with the dirt mound running in a circle around the crash site, cutting through the middle of the building. Inside the crater, the land looked as if the entire area had been lowered by the blast compared to the land outside of the crater ring.

Everything in the crash site was an even worse state than the areas of the building that had been outside of the crater. There, you could still make out support beams and portions of the building that had burned and collapsed onto themselves.

Inside the crater, Johns could barely tell that a structure had been there at all. There were no fires, and every inch of the crater was covered in the thick blue goo. It occurred to Johns that none of the goo itself was on fire, but he could see charred barren pieces of concrete and wondered if those had been spots of goo that had burned away. He captured video through his helmet cam and transferred it back to Command.

The heaviness of the air was apparent within the crater, where the blue mist that rose out of the blue goo was much thicker. The ground was so blue, that Johns thought that it resembled a swamp.

Johns enabled the camera in his helmet and used his eyes to tell the user interface to broadcast the image to his team.

“Holy hell,” one young officer said.

“Wow.”

“Jesus Christ with tits,” Rick exclaimed. “What the hell is that blue shit?”

“I have no damn clue,” Johns said. “Any idea, Sara?”

“Not sure. Could be the remains of the creature that crashed here. Could be some sort of growth.”

“Remains, you mean like this blue shit is its guts and blood?” Rick said.

“Exactly. It could be. We really won’t know much of anything until we get it back to the lab. ”

“Growth? what do you mean by growth?”

“Well…I think we have to entertain the idea that the creature that crashed here was a seed. If it was able to fly through space, certainly it’s instincts would not tell it to crash land into a planet unless there was a purpose for it. It’s entire purpose might have been to spread this…thick mucus-like material,” Sara said.

 

“Great,” Johns said with a sigh. “For now, the working theory is that this shit is its guts strewn all over. Just because that is what I want to believe. Do you have enough samples?”

“Yes, I couldn’t find anything else to bring back aside from samples of the material from a few different locations.”

“Alright, sounds good. I’m heading back down the hill. Let’s get away from this blue goo”

“Is that what we’re calling it now, officially? Blue goo?” Rick interjected.

Johns smiled. “Good of a name as any, I suppose.”

The group that had walked farther ahead was just arriving back at the defensive position when Johns arrived at the treeline. They said had walked about a mile farther but had only seen more of the same.

Johns contacted the pilot, who agreed to pick them up in about an hour’s time at the same spot he had dropped them off at.

When they reached the jungle path that they had cut on their way to the crash site, Johns was disheartened to see that much of the vegetation had already grown back. Not fully, but by the time they reached the end of their trail it would be like they were chopping their way through the forest for the first time. He had expected to have a few more hours. It made for slow going, and eventually, the entire team was forced to help cut through the brush to ensure they were able to get out before sundown.

When they reached the extraction point, Sara was happy to see that the pilot sent down a basket from the hovering ship, picking each member of the team up one by one.

Chapter 5

Outside the Decontamination Station, Kazi Depot, Planet Kazi

Osara System, Ballas Branch

The puddlejumper had dropped them off in front of a large metal room that seemed to have been added to the Kazi Depot station some point after the original construction. Almost as if it had been welded on as an afterthought. A large hatch on the outside of the metal box was opened, and inside was an all-white airlock.

One-by-one, they were asked to enter the airlock that led to the decontamination room. First, in their environment suit. They stood in the middle of the room and were sprayed for about thirty seconds with a thick, foamy substance, before being washed with a high-pressure spray that shot out of nozzles from the walls on either side of Johns.

Once the foam was completely removed from the environment suit, another substance, this one less thick, started spraying from the ceiling, covering the room completely. A woman’s voice came over the speaker. “Please remove your environment suit and set it on the ground next to you.”

Johns complied, twisting and turning knobs at his waistline until the suit was opened and air audibly rushed out into the room. With the environment suit removed and sitting cleanly next to him, the woman spoke again.

“Now take off your clothes. Then, place both your environment suit and your clothes in the large rectangular box to your right, and then close and latch the lid.

Johns did. The rectangular box was about five feet long and three feet wide, nestled up snugly against the walls of the airlock. He hoisted the lid up from one side, propped it up against the wall, and then carefully placed his clothes on the floor of the box, then closed and latched the lid, just as the woman had asked, before returning to his spot at the middle of the room and covering his dick with his hands.

A loud rushing sound came from the box next to him as his environment suit and clothes were sucked at high speed through the piping system to an object decontamination system not far away.

“Now close your eyes and mouth. We are going to spray you down with decontaminant now. It won’t be coming nearly as fast as it had been for cleaning the environment suit.”

Johns did as she asked and soon another rushing sound came from the walls next to him and he began to be covered in the thick foamy substance that he could feel sliding around his skin. Just like before, he was then washed off, then misted from the ceiling sprinklers above. This time they gave him one final hose down before opening the airlock, and the woman greeted him with a standard issue Kazi Depot uniform to change into.

This process wasn’t new to Johns. It was something he went through anytime they had to leave the station on foot.

He didn’t feel much like waiting for the others to come through, but he had made sure that they would decontaminate Sara second. She had samples that she needed to study. And Johns had to gather his thoughts.

***

Later that night, Johns sat alone in Command, staring at the drone video feeds of the crash sites. His com unit dinged and a notification popped up letting him know he had a new message from Sara. “Come to the lab. Studied the samples.”

Johns threw down his things and jogged out of Command. He didn’t have the patience for the walk across the station, so he took a detour to a nearby supply closet where he knew a cart was stored. He hopped in and pulled it out, going all of the ten miles per hour the cart would take him.

He loved the carts. It was about the only time he got to feel the wind in his face inside of a station, aside from the damn air recycler. But breathing that in directly out of the vent was like having a mouthful of plastic.

The corridors of Kazi Depot were eerily quiet at night. Most people on the station worked in research and started their days early. The restaurants, shops, and service providers that had popped up to cater to them in the station had followed suit. Far fewer people worked the off shifts. Kazi mornings started well before the star broke the horizon on the simulated corridor wall screens.

He arrived at the research wing of Kazi Depot about five minutes later and parked his cart just outside of the glass doors. While the Research Lab housed most of the research, there were some facilities in the main building as well. He took the key with him. Avoiding that walk back home was too valuable for him to risk it.

“Morning Sir,” one of the two security guards standing watch outside of the research area said as he walked into the small alcoved entrance area.

He flashed his com unit and bent over to place his eye in front of the retina reader, then placed his right hand on the reader. A puff of air hit his eye and the glass doors to the research lab slid open.

The room was circular, lined around the edges with various countertops and stations for doing whatever it was that scientists did all day. In the middle of the room stood what looked like an enclosed surgical table, with gloved inserts for the surgeon’s hands on either side of the transparent poly-plastic cover. In the middle of the table was a small slide with a small distinctive blue color on it.

“That was quick,” Sara said.

The screen of her com unit showed what appeared to be many cellular like objects, packed tight, washing to one side in unison, like some type of synchronized dance.

“They are very active,” Sara said, zooming out on her screen to reveal the small dab of goo in its actual size.

“I see that. And…What do you make of it?” Johns said, raising his eyebrows.

“Well…it’s a living thing. The Goo is, I mean. It is unlike anything that I’ve ever studied though. Every piece of it is working together toward the common goal of expanding and consuming. Watch this.”

Beside her on the lab table was a petri dish, and inside there were a few small leaves from a plant. She picked one up with tweezers and dropped it onto the center of the Goo. She zoomed in on it using the camera at the top of the see-through box, displayed on her terminal.

As soon as the plant matter hit the Goo, the cellular like objects went into a frenzy. They shook  violently, and attached themselves to the leaf. Piece by piece, they broke it down, almost as if they were tearing it to bits on a cellular level. In real-time, they watched as the leaf disintegrated over the course of several minutes

Outside of the zoomed in image on the screen it was hard to tell what was happening. It looked as if the leaf simply fell into the goo, or was pulled down into it, and then disappeared into nothingness. The leaf became part of the goo.

“The goo is shredding the cells, one-by-one. Then, it grows. It’s hardly noticeable. But look —before and after,” Sara said as she brought up comparisons on the screen in front of them. After ingesting the tiny leaf, the Goo had grown in mass and gained 0.004 ounces. “It breaks it down and the nutrients from the plant to feed itself.”

“So this stuff is corrosive?”

“Yes…well, sometimes,” Sara said, putting her hand on her forehead. “We have more testing to do. But it doesn’t seem to eat through metal, just settle on top of it. It does break down plastic, though, but very slowly. What it does for sure is break down any kind of organic matter. Any kind of plant-based consumable we’ve thrown at it has been gone within minutes. Same with meat. So I’d say…while it might be alright to get this stuff on your environment suit for a while, you wouldn’t want it on your skin.”

Johns nodded. That made sense. And it would allow him to create some very clear rules for the team.

“This is especially a problem here on Kazi. It would be bad enough on a normal world with an average amount of plantlife for it to consume. But Kazi’s is shore-to-shore with lush jungles. And the re-growth rates….this thing may potentially never run out of biofuel to consume and grow.”

“Have you found anything to stop the growth? Or slow it down? Maybe something we could douse it in to keep it from expanding?”

“Fire,” Sara said bluntly. “Fire kills it.”

Without a second thought, she slapped a button on the clear box unit and long pipes of flames started shooting at the slide in the middle of the table. At first there didn’t seem to be a reaction. Then a crust of charred skin started appearing on the Goo. It bubbled, and then began to blacken and shrivel in the middle of the petri dish. Sara held down the button until the goo wasn’t more than ash.

“Say no more,” Johns said, smiling.

Chapter 6

Communications Station Impact Site, Kazi Planet

Osara System, Ballas Branch

Johns watched as Rick struggled to open the crate that had just been air-dropped to the Communications Station impact site, it’s parachute lazily stretched across the charred ground next to the Communications Station wreckage. With each unsuccessful tug at the cover, he let out another round of expletives. After a few tries, he managed to wriggle the crate lid enough to pull it free, giving Johns his first look at its contents — flamethrowers.

Originally, flamethrowers had been used to burn back the encroaching Kazi jungle around the stations. When burned, the plantlife took substantially longer to grow back, although still much quicker than charred plantlife would on other planets.

Later, once a treatment had been discovered that slowed the growth, the flamethrowers were used to clear the land before they treated it. Sara’s discovery that the Goo shriveled when exposed to flame had given those flamethrowers new life. Johns was elated to find that they still had twenty-five of them tucked away in the recesses of the Kazi Depot storage facility. A perfect tool for the times.

Back at the Kazi Depot warehouse, the engineering team was working on putting together more jerry-rigged flamethrowers to help them deal with the Blue Goo at the other impact sites. A rush job. They needed to get as many active flamethrowers as they could before the Goo continued to spread and threaten Kazi Depot and the Research Station.

Johns had talked about it at length with Rick that morning. Their real fear was that it would climb into the forest canopy and become impossible to deal with without burning down large swaths of the forest, which would be difficult for them to control. There was also the worry that once the Goo hit the forest that they wouldn’t be able to get every trace. That and an out-of-control fire might burn for months or years, blackening the skies. Since the vegetation regrew so quickly, a fire would always have ample fuel. They wanted to be quick.

Thirty people had been dropped off in three separate trips from the puddlejumper, this time using a basket to lower groups of three down to the impact site. Each wearing an environment suit, it dawned on Johns that he had never actually been outside of the stations with this many people before. There had never been a reason to.

Those that hadn’t had a chance to see the Blue Goo up close and personal had made their way to the edge of the debris, which was now completely overtaken, slowly oozing its way toward the treeline. The speed at which this thing had spread gave Johns the willies. Now, about 48 hours after impact, the Goo was taking up more ground space than the Communications Station itself had. There was enough now that the blue luminescent light reflected off the dew-drenched trees surrounding the site, giving the entire area an unnatural dim blue glow.

“Alright everyone, gather around,” Johns said through the group channel as he began pulling the first flamethrowers out of the crate and waited. “Pay attention. These things will kill you if you aren’t watching what you are doing.”

The group descended upon the crate in a half-circle, leaving the Goo behind. Johns pulled one of the flamethrowers out and gestured for everyone to get out of the way. He slammed it against his hip harder than he normally would to demonstrate his point.

“Anchor it to your hip. It might just be fire, and there may not be recoil, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to have it secured. There’s still gasses combusting in there. If things go south they will burn you to bits just like they would outside of your environment suit. Then give the trigger a quick pull,” Johns said as he turned around and faced away from the crowd. A long spout of fire came shooting out of the end of the nozzle, traveling at least 20 feet in front of him. Ooohs and Aaahs coming through the coms channel. “Only pull the trigger for a second or two. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand. Point it at the area that you want to knock back, pull the trigger, then sit and watch as it burns away. We can’t afford to catch the forest on fire. Don’t step forward until you are certain that all of the Blue Goo in that area has been burned away. Now, this stuff doesn’t take too kindly to the flame. For the most part, it burns away without any issue, but you have to make sure of it. We can’t be tracking this stuff back to Kazi Depot with us. When we get back, we’ll enter hazmat protocol. There are going to be about thirty of us that have to go through it — it’s going to be awhile. I don’t want anyone complaining. Under no circumstances should you touch the blue mucous in any way, unless you want to risk killing everything you love on the planet. Understood?”

That was Johns’ biggest fear in this whole thing. That they were going to drag some virus back with them that killed everyone in the station.

“Understood,” a portion of the gathered crowd answered back. You could always tell who had spent time in the Osarian Marines. Still, there weren’t enough of them. Johns would feel a lot better with a few more that knew how to handle themselves. At least there were some, though. Marines and former marines had always had a strange sense of loyalty to him that he appreciated. They didn’t judge him for his mistakes like the public had. They weren’t always necessarily on his side, either. But they didn’t hate him. They understood the pressures that came with the job. They saw it for the witch hunt, both on him and on the Osarian Marine Corp (OMC), that it had been.

After taking a few questions and going through the demonstration a second time, Johns was sufficiently convinced that they weren’t going to burn themselves alive with the flamethrowers and started handing them out. As he handed the flamethrower to each person, he directed them toward specific areas of the site, hoping to cover as much as they could. With as quickly as it had spread, he wasn’t sure that they were going to finish before sundown, but they had a good chance if they started now and worked all day.

Sara had joined them at the site to collect more samples. She had, in some ways, taken a liking to the substance. Not many researchers got the chance to discover and research an alien organism like this. To be the first to research an extraterrestrial space-faring creature was clearly a badge of honor for her, and she had jumped in head-first. They had discovered other organisms that had managed to survive the vacuum of space as man had spread out among the more than one-hundred star systems that The Ring Network had given them access to, but never anything that reminded Johns of what they were dealing with here.

They still weren’t exactly sure what the Blue Goo was, and Johns wasn’t sure that they would ever truly know. That fact made his stomach squirrelly. But he couldn’t afford to linger on it. His focus now was on getting rid of the stuff before it infested the whole planet.

Once everyone was set up, Johns grabbed his flamethrower and went to take his own position along the eastern side of the structure next to where Rick was burning the Goo back. He sprayed his flame wildly, pretending as if he was pissing fire and Johns shook his head at him. Rick gave him a nod of acknowledgement, he couldn’t help himself.

He watched as the team in environmental suits took their positions around the outside of the structure. One by one, they began to douse the Blue Goo in flame. It shriveled to the touch. You could hear a slight squeak as it burned like air was escaping as the viscous outer layers of the Blue Goo as it burned to ash. After a moment, admiring the beauty of it all, he anchored the flamethrower to his leg, pointing it at the nearest puddle of Blue Goo, and pulled the trigger.

A tube of flame shot out the end and quickly dissipated into unpredictability the farther it got away from the nozzle. Johns watched as the mist that hung above the mucous was enveloped in smoke and disappeared. After a few seconds of sustained exposure to the flame, the Blue Goo withered into ashes just as it had in the lab. With each pull of the trigger, Johns took pleasure in vanquishing the invasive species back to whatever planet it came from — assuming it came from a planet.

After a few minutes of spraying fire like it came from a hose, Johns began to notice something interesting about the Goo. It started to pull back. The areas closest to the burning areas of Goo started to recede, putting distance between itself and the fire. Just like an animal that pulls away from a threat, the Goo was acting on instinct. Every species took steps to protect itself from damage, and apparently, space-faring squid life was no different.

That was interesting. He had assumed, due to the fact that it could survive out in the cold vacuum and the peculiar way that it had arrived and multiplied, that they would be constantly fascinated by the differences between the Blue Goo and the species that humans had been familiar with. So far it seemed not too different from a fungus.

One thing that humans had discovered as the construction of more ring gates exposed them to new ecosystems and life, was that life in the universe was, generally speaking, fairly similar. Of course, their sample size came from a barely-noticeable corner of the Milky Way galaxy, but for the most part vegetation was vegetation, sea life took on vaguely familiar forms, and land animals evolved to suit their environments all the same. It led to — if not predictable — at least familiar outcomes.

There were exceptions, of course. As a boy, Johns often heard tales of truly alien creatures that man had come across during their feverish colonization periods.

As morning turned into a sweltering mid-afternoon, Johns started to take frequent breaks and chug water from the straw in his environment suit helmet to stay hydrated. They had sent a separate puddlejumper packed with water, but he wondered if it would be enough. The clothes that he wore under his environment suit were drenched with sweat. If he had wrung his shirt, he was positive that the liquid would fill a glass. He walked around the perimeter every so often, instructing others to stay hydrated. It wasn’t going to help them one bit if everyone heat-stroked out. There were still two other impact sites to deal with after this.

***

“So what do you think brought this thing here?” Rick asked as they pulled large gulps of water from their environment suit straws in the afternoon sun, the Goo now burnt back substantially.

“Are you asking if this thing targeted us?” Johns replied.

“Yeah. Was this by pure damn chance? These things were just flying through the black, minding their business in the Osara System, and this tiny little jungle planet just happened to get in their way?”

Johns finished his sip. “Well…seems like these things were built to land, right? Or crash-land, anyway. I mean they keep growing.”

“Right.”

“So maybe it wasn’t by chance. Maybe they did mean to crash land here. But maybe it had nothing to do with us.”

“So…you think they were going to land here regardless? And we just happen to be the unlucky sons of bitches that were there waiting for them?”

“I don’t think anything. I don’t know anything. I’m just saying…Sara said these things eat plants. Or anything organic, really. If a fern was my steak and potatoes I’d probably be pretty happy living on Kazi.”

“Hmm…true enough,” Rick said. “They have been eating the plants, too. Doesn’t seem like the Goo has much interest in us.”

“And it’s not like Godzilla crash-landed here. It’s just some fungus or something. And we seem to be having no problems getting it cleaned up,” Johns replied.

“Have you let Osara know what’s going on yet?”

“Not yet,” Johns said, looking down at the water pack on the back of his environment suit. He looked up to see Rick staring at him with a raised eyebrow.

“I will, I will,” Johns said with a wave of the hand. “I just want the first message to come with some good news too. Let’s make it ‘Hey the aliens showed up and we kicked their ass,” instead of “they showed up and we don’t know anything about what is going on. They can’t help us anyway, right now. But I’ll let them know about it tonight and ask them to send some help along, just in case.”

Rick shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips. He didn’t want to argue. But Johns could see that he didn’t agree with him.

***

By the late afternoon, they had successfully burned the Blue Goo back to only the impact site area. Johns was happy about that because the entire process had become less dangerous. The entire afternoon had been a big worry session for Johns. That last thing he wanted was a giant concrete column coming down on top of some kid. But making sure they burnt every speck of that shit to a crisp was more important.

The closer they got, the less room there was for everyone to safely use their flamethrowers. Rick had yelled at one young man who had absentmindedly shot his flame vaguely in the direction of another security officer, ordering him to go “sit on the sidelines while the adults finished up.” One-by-one, people started to drop out and head back to the staging area near the southern end of the structure. Johns was staying until all of the visible Goo was completely gone.

Once they were done, the plan was to have a small cleanup team continue visiting the area each day for the foreseeable future. The last thing that they wanted was to allow this thing to gain a foothold while they had their backs turned, but Johns was hoping that it would be gone for good once they had burned it all away.

He was already anticipating how difficult the other impact sites were going to be. Since the growth of this thing appeared to be exponential, they had to get the other two burned back quickly before a one day project turned into three days.

While the impact at the Communications Station was particularly awful due to the loss of life, the other impact areas were going to be trickier to deal with. They had landed in forested areas, and almost certainly had started growing up the trunks of nearby trees. The only way they were going to be able to deal with them was to attempt a controlled-burn, which wasn’t exactly easy in a forest that grew back by the next morning. If you start a fire big enough and it will be able to run back through the areas it had already burned.  But they could see from the probe data that the Goo at each site was now inhabiting full acres.

Sometime in the late afternoon, just as they were finishing off the last of the Goo at the Communications Station, Johns received a message on a private communications channel.

“Sir, I need you on the eastern side of the structure, in the crater” Rick said over a private coms channel.

At this point, they weren’t that far away across the remaining goo pond from one another. He looked over and saw an environment suit wave back to him. He stowed his flame thrower and started his march around the outside of the remaining goo and rubble, passing each member of the flamethrower team as they burned different patches of the blue shimmering liquid. The station had been completely destroyed in this area, but not fully obliterated. Large chunks of concrete and metal made walking very difficult. Several times Johns fell and caught himself on another chunk of mangled structure.

As Johns clunkily traversed the wreckage at the edges of the cater and got closer to the area where Rick had waved, he could see that something was off. About forty meters in front of him, down inside the lip of the crater, the ground appeared to be raised. Rick pointed at the mound.

As Johns got close, he could see a faint blue light shining out from underneath the raised sections. The closer he got, the more noticeable the light became. He stopped and stood next to Rick, placed his hands on his hips, and stared at the ground in front of them.

The station debris in that spot was raised about ten feet off the ground. The Goo had spread beneath it, where a larger hole opened up, but that wasn’t what was concerning to Johns. What was concerning was the reason why the debris had been lifted. Below it was a giant bulbous formation of the Blue Goo, but much more solid-looking than any Goo that he had come across as of yet. They looked almost like giant glowing basketball. The ball pulsated at about the rate of a heartbeat and appeared to grow and shrink with each pulse of the light, almost as if they were breathing.

Johns switched his communications to broadcast to a private channel.

“Sara, I’ve got something on the southern side of the building, in the crater, that you’ll want to collect. And bring a big container.”