It was raining. It had rained ever since they’d set down on the planet. Heavy grey rain that splattered down from dark skies. They’d set up lights and a perimeter of vehicles, headlights watching like eyes surrounding a clearing in the dead of night. Fuzzy white beams from flashlights bobbed and circled the enclosure as the marines and the CRCS fought to establish the nature of the danger and the extent of the contamination. Contact with any civilians still inside the recycling plant had been lost hours ago. Danny listened to the to-and-fro of communication across the radio.

It was hard to give a hoot about pending insanity when his knee was cold and throbbing. It was an insistent ache from the damp chill of the planet courtesy of a leaking seal in his armour that he really should have fixed before they shipped out to this godforsaken colony. Small things but they tended to matter when cold and pain were involved. He had the damn replacement seal in his quarters up in the carrier. It would have taken him minutes to strip down the leg joint and change the connection before the mission. But it was just a quick ‘guard and grin’ or so they’d been told. Guard the perimeter while the CRC did their stuff and grin at the media cams while they upped their ratings with another freaky deep space disaster for the viewing public back home. Only this had gone more pear shaped than a giant trophy-winning pear could ever get. They’d already been out here five hours longer than a regular g-n-g should be. Five hours without a hint of a relief, no let up in the persistent rain and not so much as a notion of rotation back to the temporary base that was set up at the drop point. The perimeter had moved back three times already. Rumour was that the CRC had lost two entire teams in there. That was what all the fuss and radio chatter seemed to be about. Those guys were invincible; crazy as the contamination they went in there to fight. No wonder command was getting nervous.

Danny could feel that this was a bad one. He hadn’t been on that many CR missions but the Marines always kept well back, moving with the perimeter as it spread outwards until the threat was gone. They weren’t moving fast enough this time. Just to add to the knee, the thermal regulator inside his armour started to play up. He stamped to get moving, trying to get some warmth back into his leg. His foot splashed in grey sludge; it wasn’t so long ago that they’d been standing on the familiar flexiplas walkways, standard outfitting on all these outer edge research stations. Now it was sludge. He could almost feel the contamination creeping up on them.

He thought of mentioning it when someone ran up, the badge of rank on their very new looking and obviously not-leaking powered armour demanding a salute. It was a captain – things were getting desperate if they were sending the officers out to speak to them. He stopped to speak to the corporal at the other end of the barrier, something private, not on comlink and then moved down the line to Danny. It was Williams – one of the good guys.
“Situation’s normal,” he said, the tone completed the SNAFU acronym without having to say it out loud. “Keep it off general com but we’re heading for a total evacuation. The CRCS have one team left in the vicinity. If they fail, we’re pulling out,” he paused and looked closer at the name stencilled onto the armour, “Danielsen? You on barrier again? How the hell do you get stuck with these assignments, Private?”
“Insubordinate disregard for authority, sir. Again.” It was a record he was becoming quite proud of. And barrier duty wasn’t that bad. Except the times they forgot to tell the barrier guys to move back, when the contamination was spreading too quickly and things were getting weird. There was a sudden increase in background noise as if the rain was beginning to pick up into a full-blown storm.
The Captain had to yell, “Things are getting weird! You noticed it?”
“Yessir.”
Williams was smart. One of the few who knew how to read these things. Too many of the rest stuck to the regs and the book until it squashed them.
“OK, let’s move back then!”

The perimeter lights rippled outwards. They could see sparks inside the dark every now and then, and every so often a few figures would break out of the shadows and stagger across the threshold, to be carried away to the ships still waiting to complete the evacuation. Dust-jets flew crazy patterns overhead; he’d never seen this many in a single zone, red dust streaming behind each pass. The rain streaming down his visor turned red. It was never-ending. Danny looked at the clock on his visor HUD. It was counting backwards. “Dammit sir, we’re getting caught up here!” The ground trembled beneath his feet, strong enough to jerk the reactors in the powered exo-skeleton. There was just white-noise coming over the radio. He reached to grab the markers, looked round to see the perimeter failing, lights winking out and everyone running, yelling and waving their arms in a frantic get back gesture. Captain Williams shoved him violently into a run and they ran, abandoning the barrier. Lightening flashed down behind them, sparking out contacts in armour that should have been resistant.

Eventually the perimeter was re-established, then moved back another K. Most of the news crews ships had taken off and were taping from a distance now, live FTL to Earth and the other colonies and the dozen or so ships flitting round out here. Danny looked around. The Marines were more spread out now the perimeter was wider and they didn’t exactly have a barrier to guard anymore. Williams had waved and gone off to check the rest of the ragged line. One of the braver news crews buzzed closer. Danny struck a pose and did the ‘I’m a Marine, you’re safe now look’ then realised they were taping something behind him and turned around. A CRC guy was running up, black bug armour silhouetted black against the black of the contamination zone. Danny had never actually seen one this close. He shied away as the guy skidded to a stop and grabbed his arm, slapping something onto the armour there.
“Yo soldier, you’re assigned to us,” he yelled, “C’mon we need you. Now!” The now was emphasised. Strongly. It was weird to hear a human voice come out of that thing, not easy to see it as a helmet and visor and not as some mechanoid bughead.
“What about my unit, sir?” Danny yelled back, starting to follow that “now” instinctively.
“It’s been cleared. C’mon!”
They ran. Into the zone. Danny didn’t look back.

It was like fog but it was black – no hint of the red dust. Just swirling black fog, sweeping in an embrace that chilled even through the armour. The knee was leaking badly now. Danny was trying not to limp, trying to keep up and trying not to freak out and run away. He’d shrugged his shoulder round to see what it was on his arm, saw a disk with an amber light winking and flashing into red. He resisted the urge to look again as they got deeper in. As far as he could see, the CRC guy wasn’t wearing one but they had that freaky armour, probably built into it and probably not leaking and cold like his standard military issue. Danny could hear something fizzling somewhere, as if a cable was sparking right next to his ear one minute and miles away the next.
“What’s that noise?” he yelled. “Do you hear it?”
The CRC guy turned around, from Danny’s perspective, all in slow motion and somewhat dramatic as a result. He took hold of Danny’s arm and twisted it to look at the disk. Danny tried to see for himself, cold panic mixing with a detached dread deep inside. It was black. Dull matt black. What did that mean? He was dead? Obviously not. Mad? Maybe. About to disintegrate into a million pieces of Marine Corps private? He looked up, visor to visor with one of the legendary CRU’s, close as he’d ever been to one of those insane heroes of the news crews. He wanted to scream out, something, anything to break the spell. And was snapped out of it by another slap on the arm, “C’mon, you’re fine!”

Three disks later and they ran into a bunker of sorts, black boxes piled behind some kind of bug skin screen. Danny fell as his knee finally gave way and slid in, feeling like he was so far into this that he’d never see daylight again. His head was splitting in the pounding silence. He sat for a moment, realised that another two of the black bug suits were looking down at him and blinked tears out of his eyes to try to focus. His arm was twisted again. “Five disks!” one of them yelled at him. “Five disks?” they yelled at the guy who’d escorted him in.
Danny blinked again, stupidly, glad they couldn’t see his face through the reflective visor or the trembles that were beginning to take control of his arms.
One of them, DeMario from the name etched into the armour, knelt down beside him. The DeMario? Danny stared.
“We need you to watch this,” DeMario said and set up a panel in front of him, right where he was sitting. They weren’t going to make him move anywhere. The trembles eased slightly. He nodded. “Watch the range indicator, here. And let us know if it gets up as far as this.” DeMario pointed out the acceptable limits of whatever it was. Danny nodded again.
The range indicator suddenly shot way up past the danger point. Danny felt his heart leap as time froze for several millennia before the gauge dropped again.
“Don’t worry,” DeMario said, “it does that. And watch these three monitors. Let us know if any go out.”
There were five monitors, two were out already. CRU’s always had five to a team. This one had three meaning that they’d lost two guys. One team left in the vicinity and it was DeMario’s and DeMario had already lost two people. DeMario was one of the best. DeMario was one of the worshipped team leaders of the CRCS. Danny shuddered as reality slipped around him.
DeMario brought him back with a wave of a wand. He tapped the wand against Danny’s visor. “This is a Reality Vector Ward - you activate it like this,” he snapped the wand in two only it didn’t break, straightening straight back up but glowing now incandescent black. DeMario planted it in the ground next to them. “Just make sure you know where real is before you crack open one of these. Ok?” Danny nodded.
DeMario slapped another disk on his arm, reached across and clicked the safety catch secure on Danny’s rifle. “Kid, don’t fire this thing. At anyone. Understand? No matter what you see or think you see. The com here has links direct to us and only us. Use it if you have to. We’ll be right back.” And they left him.

Within a couple of minutes Danny was hallucinating that DeMario returned and told him to go home, that everything was alright here now and there was nothing to worry about anymore. He knew it was a hallucination because the imaginary DeMario blurred out of focus and vanished and Danny was left listening to chatter that proved that DeMario was still out there and that everything was still most definitely not all right. One of the monitors began to flicker. Danny flicked it and it began to fade to grey. He grabbed the com. “DeMario!”
“We know! – we know. Peanut grab that line. Dammit. Ouch! Hymek – if you can hear this, I hope you can sleep tonight you son of a…”
Peanut was the name on one of the other monitors. The one greying out was labelled as Smurf – the guy who’d brought him through the contaminated zone, Danny thought. They were losing him.
“Where? Tell us where! Give us a heading. Ouch!”
In a tribute to Marine Corps training, Danny calmly gave them numbers in a manner that belied the turmoil and panic he could feel welling up inside him, as the range indicator rose and the ground he was sitting on began to turn to liquid, dry ice whisping up to drift over the panel he was watching.

Smurf crashed back into existence with a clatter from the com and static fuzzing up his monitor. “Alright, I’ve got it – looks like we have an opening on the roof of the communications tower. We’re gonna have to climb, DeMario.” There was a hysterical laugh, “DM, you up to this?”
There was no reply from DeMario unless it was on a private link.
Peanut began to give a running commentary. “Climbing to the first balcony – can you smell roses? Can anyone else smell roses? Eugh. ‘K, I’m going on up to the next. The ladder’s getting slippery. Smurf, is your ladder getting …ack, slimy? Whoa! ‘K, I’m on the second.”
“Keep talking to us, Peanut,” that was DeMario, Danny was beginning to recognise the voices and beginning to smell oil. Engine oil? He considered letting them know and decided they were busy enough. Smurf and Peanut were having a tough time climbing. They talked constantly now, prompts whenever anyone slipped into silence. Occasional jokes he couldn’t follow.
He jerked awake, suddenly aware that he had lost concentration somewhere. “…Hey Kid, talk to me. Where’s the range indicator?”
He sat up too quickly, a jab of pain lancing into the knee, and stared in horror at an indicator that was black and smoking.
“It’s melted, DeMario,” he said calmly, “It’s melted – is that a bad thing?”
“Negative, ignore the range indicator. What can you smell? You getting cold?”
“Negative on the cold,” he thought surprised at the realisation and thought he said it out loud too but he wasn’t sure any more. “And I can smell…” The engine oil had turned into coconut. Or was it bubblegum?
“Keep talking. Keep with us here.”
Which was an odd thing to say, Danny thought, seeing as how he wasn’t out there with them in the first place. “Peanut is beginning to fade,” he said focussing on the monitors now there was no indicator to watch. “Peanut, you ok there?”
The monitor came back full strength. Guess so. Talking seemed to help. All three of them were talking at once now, so he joined in.

At some point they got to the roof. Reality was elsewhere. Somewhere different and far, far from this nightmare hollow of warm, drifting breezes. Danny couldn’t remember when it had stopped being cold and became too warm to breathe. The respirator in his helmet didn’t seem to be working, it was getting harder and harder to take a decent breath. He tapped on the intake nozzle, gasping as the seals around his neck suddenly began to constrict and squeeze. It took him a frantic couple of seconds to unlock the catches and throw the helmet to the ground where it wrinkled and folded in on itself. It reminded him of that experiment they’d done in high school where they attached a steel can to a vacuum pump and watched it collapse under nothing more than air pressure. He started to reach towards it, the uncomfortable thought settling that it could have done that while his head was still inside it, realised that he could actually breathe fine and much easier without it and kicked it away.

The inane banter from DeMario’s CRU had eased off – the com line quietly whispering to itself now with nothing that he could make out to be words. There was something he should watch for, he thought vaguely. He looked. As far as the eye could see there was just ragged black rock and a faint swirling mist. It was too warm. He tried to get up, difficult with one knee being so stiff and sore, and wandered forward. And tried to remember when that had happened. Strange he couldn’t remember but it was all too vague. There was something about talking and bubblegum but all he could smell now was sulphur. And it was quiet.
Something plucked at his eyebrow. He swatted it away, backing off from the cloud of tiny winged creatures that was suddenly swarming about his head. He stumbled backwards, remembering something about not real. Not real. “You’re not real,” he yelled at them and flinched as one of them flew up and took a bite out of his ear. He turned and ran, laughter echoing behind him. Engine oil sprang to mind, and wasn’t there a wand or a ward or something? It lit up ahead of him, a glowing black stick stuck in the ground right by his rifle. His next footstep hit muddy ground and the next caught a chill in the knee. He gasped breaths of cold damp air and half ran, half staggered towards the beacon. The laughter turned into a shrill screeching and then a scream that he could hear behind him and all too clearly over the com channel as he slid in behind the barrier.

DeMario crouched low to one side of an open stone doorway. This wasn’t so bad – they’d been in far worse situations where reality had bent around and bit them hard and fast. This was nowhere near. Right now, he had a clear and unwavering grip on exactly where reality was, exactly where the drop ship was parked and exactly how much he was going to drink tonight when they got back to base. He pulled the box around and unclipped the catches, the fingers of the suit clicking against the chitinous surface of the case. Peanut was still screaming, swearing now and yelling obscenities at Hymek, the colonists, the academy for ever letting him graduate into this fiasco and the damned fairies for pulling a wall down on top of him. DeMario paused once the box was unlocked. As soon as he opened it the compiler would be exposed to the contamination. So they’d have about two minutes. He’d been promised that they were working on a bug skin version that would at least have a chance of lasting longer out here but no one he’d spoken to had even seen one never mind field-tested one. So he had two minutes.

He glanced behind him at the ward he could just about make out, glowing black in a black mist. The line was about ten metres ahead of him. Smurf was in there with Peanut - across the line. It had come on them quickly as soon as the rift up on the roof had been sealed; that closure initiating a concentration of stresses at a second weakening across the compound that hadn’t even shown up on the initial survey. And the contamination had spread then far more rapidly, twisting reality and sweeping Smurf and Peanut to an elsewhere before they’d even had a chance to mark out a new line to stay behind. DeMario was in the inbetween; that was why he could hear Peanut ranting and the Marine kid back at the staging point nudging gentle reminders to them that there was still a world back there that they could pull out to if they could just get the source of the contamination sealed. Hell of a task for a first time out recoveryman who probably didn’t even know that he had the job, and was sitting back there in military issue armour like it might protect him from anything out here. DeMario almost laughed, the first time he’d landed in a zone he’d been wearing a flight suit and sunglasses. Weird how things change so quickly. And not just the kit they were issued with.
He knelt by the box, one hand on the lid and waited, listening to Smurf tease directions and readings out of Peanut. Peanut was their numbers guy. And he’d gone quiet. If they lost him, then unless Smurf had actual visual on the source, then they might as well pack up now and drift into the mists of unreality. That was the other aspect of all this that had changed – they used to blunder in and find the problem more by happy chance and pure bluster than any of the reams of calculations and data manipulations they had now. That was one of the reasons why Peanut was so good – he could do both and DeMario still favoured the old bluster in approach at times. Like maybe now was a tempting thought. “Hey Peanut,” DeMario added to the buzz of the com, “I thought the academy kicked you out before you graduated.”
“It was a technicality,” he replied, sounding just a tad strained.
“Technicality that they hadn’t kicked you out sooner,” Smurf said, “C’mon Peanut give me some numbers here, I’m losing the thread.”
There was another pause. DeMario started twitching to go as the pause stretched out into a couple of minutes. Coaxing from Smurf was met with silence. DeMario glanced back, no sign of the ward and no word from the Marine for a while now he thought about it. The ground trembled beneath him. The filters in his suit whined and let in a breath of warm air laced with sulphur. DeMario groaned, grabbed the case and lurched to his feet, swaying to catch his balance. Another tremor, more violent this time, was matched by a deep rumble of thunder overhead. Not lightening, please not lightening. DeMario cursed the entire universe and ran forward into the zone, yelling, “Smurf, meet me in the middle!”
He thought Smurf yelled an acknowledgement and didn’t bother to try for any more conversation. He ran on instinct alone, feeling the contamination and knowing which way to go by the heat that was increasing in leaps with each step. Frog-face would be somewhere, he could feel it And smell the sulphur, engine oil and coconut mixing in whisping trails of mist around him, pulling him towards the fissure he knew would be right up ahead. Damned if he was going there today.
The rain started with a passion at some point, huge splashing drops that teemed down his visor despite the field that was supposed to repel them. He skidded to a stop and dropped to one knee, spilling the case open into a rivulet of tumbling muddy water. The compiler rolled out.
“Smurf! Peanut!” he yelled, “if you guys can hear me, throw open your compilers now wherever you are, we’ll triangulate this freaking rift. Cover the whole damned area.” There was an ok from Peanut, faint but there and a yell from Smurf that sounded like an affirmative but could just as easily have been a “you’re crazy!” DeMario grabbed his compiler with both hands, flicked the switch and threw it as high and far as he could manage with gravity acting against him and time going backwards. Tiny sparks flew up as the compiler hit the ground and tumbled across the rocks to lie there in a puddle, inert and inactive.
“No freaking way,” DeMario murmured. He shoved away the case and ran towards what he thought was the complier, following the sparks more than anything as Hymek’s quarter-million dollar piece of junk sank slowly into a quagmire of dissolving universe. Warning lights flashed on the display inside his visor, the suit starting to scream and resist. He engaged the safety override and continued to run, sliding into the puddle and pulling out the steaming remains of the compiler, flicking at it until it showed a glimmer of life and kicking it roughly into touch.
There was a squeal and the compiler warhead exploded in midair, sending a shock wave of reality that sent DeMario tumbling backwards. All three came on line at once. He rolled and staggered to his feet. It wasn’t a perfect triangle but it lit the zone like fireworks, sparking a haze of now down onto the jagged landscape and resetting the laws of physics in the way that humans understood they should be.
DeMario sat down. “Smurf, Peanut, you guys ok?” He waited for affirmatives from both of them, Peanut sounding relieved and slightly bemused, and then, switched over to general com rather than the secure command channel, partly for the purpose of informing command but mostly because he knew it would annoy the hell out of Hymek as the news crews would be monitoring the unsecured general frequency.
“That’s it, Hymek. Show’s over, folks.”

___________________________________________________________________________

“We almost lost him,” Smurf said as they were packing up. Danny was carrying boxes into the drop ship behind him, still looking as bewildered as when they’d found him once the contamination was dealt with and the rift sealed. The colony was fairly much deserted now. The marines had bugged out at some point, the news crews probably earlier. It must have looked bad for a time, DeMario thought without dwelling on how bad it had actually been. Now the white suited scuz of the clean up teams were beginning to trawl through the area. Judging by the rate they were moving at, scouring the ground and what was left of the plant for residue, it would be a long while before the civilians would be allowed back in.
He shrugged at Smurf. “We almost lost you.” And we did lose our recovery man he thought. Two in two assignments. “C’mon, let’s get out of here. I want to get back to base, feed my parrot, ring Hymek’s neck and get a new hose for the compiler. This one is about shot. And yes, we did almost lose him but we didn’t.
“Hey, let’s keep him” interjected Peanut, “I mean, five disks! When was the last time one of us burnt out five disks in a zone?”
Smurf raised one eyebrow, “He’s not a lost puppy Peanut but I’ll admit it was one hell of a first assignment to land in. And I guess you’re right, D’ he did survive. The kid must have something going for him. Are these things getting worse or am I just getting paranoid?”
“Both. It doesn’t help when we’re tired and our gear’s going to hell without a service.” It didn’t help when they could lose a guy on one job and get sent out to the next assignment without so much as the breathing space of a trip back to base. That just didn’t happen. The CRCS always respected the need to return to The Wall when a team lost someone. As it was, they’d landed here with that tag already swaying there above the doorway, before they’d each taken theirs off to hang up there with it. “Hymek’s jerking us around. He’s a jerk, that’s all. DeMario thumbed the release catch on his neck and shrugged off his helmet. The living, filament feed lines that connected the helmet to his nervous system pulled out of the flesh his neck with a slight squelch and withdrew inside the armour. “Damn, it’s cold out here. OK, we’ll keep him, at least until we’re assigned replacements”

They got the last of the gear into the ship. Danny was loitering near the hatch.
“You did well in there,” DeMario said. “Really well. First time inside a zone?”
Danny nodded. “We usually feel it around the perimeter, but never anything like that. Thanks for pulling me back. I’m not sure what happened. I think I went some place.” He stopped as if he didn’t want to say anything stupid. “I should get back to my unit, sir,” he said eventually and waited, standing to attention. DeMario suddenly realised he was waiting for a dismissal or whatever it was the Marines were used to.
DeMario didn’t give him the chance, “They’ve pretty much cleared out by the looks of it. We can give you a ride back to the carrier. We have space,” and bundled him into the drop ship and although Danny didn’t yet know it, into a commission with the CRCS. DeMario figured they could sort out the paperwork later.

The dossier was surprisingly thin. “So where is he now?”
“True to nature, DeMario just denied an assignment allocation and is flying back to Base. He lost another member of his team at India One.” There was a pause. “Considering the CRC lost two entire teams out there – teams that were fully equipped and fully manned – DeMario has once again proved himself to be a lucky sonovabitch and elusive as hell. We have a doozie planned for him at Andrea though and even if he does show up at Base, Hymek will ensure that he flies out without so much as a new needle for his gauge never mind any replacement personnel. His team is down to three and it was his recovery man that failed to make the grade at India. There’s no way DeMario can survive another assignment.”
“How far do we trust Hymek?”
“We don’t. Hymek is a fool but he’s a fool that follows the regulations and so long as we keep writing them, he will keep the CRU’s exactly where we want them to be.”
“Speaking of Hymek, I’ve had to field a complaint from him regarding the latest psych reports.”
“Again?”
“He suspects that DeMario is writing his own and there are members of DeMario’s team that have yet to report to Dr. Hilliard at all.”
“That’s nothing new. Smurf is too smart to let himself in for that and Peanut probably doesn’t even know he’s supposed to go. I’m sure DeMario would never encourage his team to follow guidelines as to the checks they should go through after time in a zone. He cares about them but he doesn’t give a fig for what we have deemed necessary to keep them sane and relatively intact. I swear, sometimes I think DeMario has seen through the whole charade and is just playing games with us.”
“Maybe he has a better grip on what sane is than the rest of us.”
“Maybe we would be better off without the likes of DeMario and his instincts. That’s what caused this problem in the first place -,” the tone turned darker if that was possible, “we are aware that you have a soft spot for him.”
“I have a soft spot for all the teams that risk their lives out there to protect the civilian colonists from freaky-knows-what is happening as far as they are concerned.”
“Irrelevant. This is happening. We don’t need the colonists or the politicians on Earth or the media darlings to ever get close to what is really happening. You know that – that’s why you are this side of the table and not out there with the scuz that we control. Don’t forget that.”

BACK TO TOP