Expedition Nereus Read online

  Expedition Nereus

  At Close Range

  Part One

  By Ilya Martynov

  Expedition Nereus: At Close Range, Part One by Ilya Martynov

  Translated by Joshua Schiefelbein

  Edited by Joshua Schiefelbein

  Published by ArcInset OU

  Sepapaja 6, Tallinn, Estonia, 15551

  www.ArcInset.com

  © 2019 ArcInset

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for you, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author and company.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover by Viktoria Volokitina

  Protocol I-844

  1

  "Acknowledge, over. This is Lieutenant Jack Sallenge transmitting from Nereus' surface," he said, running his palm along the dark gray edge of the teleport.

  "Damn machine!" Jack cursed, slamming his fist against the table in annoyance. The abrupt movement caused the device to vibrate and buzz in an unfriendly manner. He wanted to spit at the teleport, but he held back.

  "I say again, this is First Lieutenant Jack Sallenge. Mission F-3476N8."

  He pressed the fingers of his right hand to his temple. His other hand clung so tightly to the teleport frame that it seemed his palm was going to absorb all the warmth being emitted by the device.

  Still no answer. On this alien planet 8.5 light-years away from Earth, the dead silence on the other end of the call made his blood turn to sharp, ice-cold crystals that stung his heart. Jack felt this cold chill spread across his entire body from deep inside.

  The mission to colonize the planet was already on the verge of failure. The teleport couldn't lock in to the necessary frequency. The platform seemed to be warming up, getting ready to function, but Jack's lack of knowledge in physics and technology meant he couldn't tell if it was working properly. Handling devices meant to transport objects through space wasn't part of his duties. In normal circumstances, only the mission captain and his executive officer were allowed to operate the teleport.

  Yet at that moment, Jack regretted that no one from the Academy ever described in detail how teleports functioned. But what the officer did know was that teleports were officially banned by the government. Current legislation only permitted teleport use in extremely urgent situations, and only by qualified personnel. Jack tried not to think about how at that moment he was potentially breaking the law. That line of thinking would've drained the energy from him, allowing the deathly silence to freeze his soul into ice.

  He knew that the teleport didn't actually move anything anywhere. All it did was read data about the state of the smallest particles of the object placed inside before sending that information to a similar device, which would reconstruct all the particles based on the data received. During the flight to Nereus, the spaceship "Avant Light" constructed a tunnel of portals that compressed the space-time continuum. By doing this, the ship could travel faster than lightspeed, leaving in its wake a system of superluminal signal transmissions. This system allowed the built-in teleport sensor to send and receive information with virtually no delay.

  Of course, matter didn't just appear out of thin air. The teleport needed not only a source of energy but also matter that could be used to rebuild received objects. In fact, disposing of the source object was unnecessary, as it was enough to simply process and transmit the information about its state. But creating extra clones of objects was strictly forbidden by the law, so the "teleported" objects were thrown into space along with the rest of the garbage. Jack thought for a moment that perhaps such actions were too wasteful.

  The lieutenant recalled how his dad talked about teleports. His father believed that the laws restricting the use of teleportation, such as the ban on copying organic matter or producing objects without destroying the original, had no connection to the interests and care of people. The government didn't protect the interests of ordinary citizens. It only supported massive corporations who believed the spread of teleports and nano-assemblers capable of constructing any object from sand, pebbles, and dust would ruin business.

  For now, the officer had only a portable teleport at his disposal, but it was a module that was part of a larger device. Jack had to come to terms with the fact that the other two parts had likely been destroyed when the captain's shuttle crashed.

  As he set up the teleport to transmit ultra-fast radio signals, Jack caught himself thinking about how he wanted to hear Gladys' voice more than anything in the world. And it wouldn't have even surprised him. The teleport eagerly accepted Jack's messages and compressed them before transmitting through the high-speed channel.

  This device's potential was restricted though. Jack could transmit and receive signals or receive small objects so long as the item fit within the height and width of the teleport's chamber, which was a little less than a meter. To transport items to other places, a single teleporter module on its own was insufficient. Even if Jack somehow found a way to clamber into the chamber and stand on the teleport pad, he'd never be able to send himself to Earth, no matter how eager he was.

  "Do you read me? This is First Lieutenant Jack Sallenge, research officer speaking. How strong is my signal? Can you see me and hear my voice?" he continued, still firmly holding on to the teleport's front frame.

  "Just wait a bit. They'll answer. It's early morning there," a voice said. Anne, who woke up ten minutes ago, sounded a bit more energetic. Her voice was surprisingly loud, if not a bit commanding.

  Jack flinched. He hadn't expected Anne to speak normally after she had almost been killed by the shuttle's violent crash-landing. Flashbacks of their terrifying fall through the atmosphere rushed in his mind. A massive glass shard pierced through her neck and his attempts to resuscitate her deathly-pale limp body. Jack wasn't a doctor, but his bioengineering education told him that his fellow officer Anne Petrow was in critical condition. He had managed to properly treat Anne's wound with the help of a regenerator, yet even though she was receiving enough nutrition, she wasn't recovering for some reason. Instead, it seemed she was getting worse with each passing day.

  He walked up to her, took her hand, and pressed his lips against the back of her palm, noting that it seemed too cold. Anne had become a person near and dear to him, almost like an older sister. Jack felt that here military hierarchy no longer mattered. She was neither a shuttle commander nor a colonel, and he wasn't a first lieutenant. It was just them, stranded alone together in the solar system. But he decided he needed to get rid himself of such thoughts.

  "Anne, how come I never got to know this side of you?" Jack abruptly said, feeling his eyes tear up. He hugged her gently, feeling the strong odor of the gel left on her neck by the regenerator. The scent of her sweaty hair, splayed out on the snow-white pillow, mixed with the mechanical smell of burnt metal.

  He leaned back and saw tears running down her dry pale cheeks. Jack believed there must be a fragile, fatigued woman hiding behind the stern, uncompromising visage of the high-ranking officer. He could feel how hard it was for Anne to acknowledge her own helplessness. She had never been rendered so weak before. To Jack though, she was the strongest and most tenacious person in the world because, as he recently realized, her real
strength wasn't in her stamina, but in her ability to trust others and be herself.

  He waited until Anne drifted asleep, her breathing becoming deeper and more regular. He needed to disassemble the equipment and place it carefully in their small glass pavilion. Night began to fall, and the window panels gradually darkened. As he was moving a container with a scanning microscope, Jack noticed his reflection in one of the panels.

  It was surprising how thin and gaunt he had become. He had always been athletic and fit, but now it seemed as if he had lent someone at least one-sixth of himself. He had already long forgotten about his appearance and physical state, especially in recent days when Anne's health consumed his every thought.

  “Yeah, buddy, you've lost quite some weight there," he commented to himself as he gazed at his reflection in the panoramic window.

  He lifted his arms and flexed his biceps. To his horror, he realized that they were half the size compared to just six months ago.

  “Damn water conservation! If only we didn't need to make stops in space due to ship malfunctions," he thought. "I'll soon be a twig at this rate. Muscle certainly isn't a luxury here."

  He glanced at Anne as she slept, trying not to imagine the possibility he would have to carry her on his back.

  He analyzed his reflection again, opening his broad jaw and tracing along his hollow cheeks with his fingers. His gaunt face depressed him just as much as the drop in his biceps. It seemed his gray eyes had lost their energetic spark as they had sunk into his eye sockets. Now they looked as dull as a pile of cooling ash.

  Jack pulled up his silver-gray shirt and looked at his abs, which had begun to worry him for quite some time. The square muscles of his solar plexus had merged into an intense, smooth monolith. His attempts at relaxing them were fruitless. Such a thing happened to him in times of extreme worry or stress. Jack hated that feeling when everything in his stomach hardened so much it seemed there was a stone inside. His upper abdominals were squeezing his stomach until it began to ache with a throbbing, dull pain.

  "A corpse with fair hair," he grinned, half-whispering before quickly returning back to business.

  2

  It was already dark by the time First Lieutenant Sallenge stopped at the panoramic wall of the residential pavilion to gaze calmly into the black of night. He could see a couple small hills and a few boulders about a hundred meters away. Jack drank water from a cup reminiscent of those used in the 20th century. He had brought it along on the trip so as not to forget about his planet and hometown. By some miracle, it survived the shuttle crash. As it turned out, the cup was much more durable than many modern items...

  Suddenly, his attention was drawn to something extraordinary. One of the huge boulders moved, rising up slightly before falling and moving sideways across the sand. It was hard to make out all the details from such a distance, but even then, Jack swore he could see something that looked like a tentacle grab the boulder and pull it.

  Goosebumps quickly ran up his spine.

  He noticed some movement on the other side of the hill, recognizing one of the local herbivores, a ball-shaped wartstone, in the twilight. This animal was moving in a way as if it were hobbling, limping to one side. Most likely it was an infant that fell behind the pack on the way back from the watering hole.

  Jack observed the whole scene, worried. He hesitated, pondering whether he should get Anne up from the bed, but in the end, he decided she ought to see it.

  "Anne, something strange is happening next to us," he said, carefully shaking her shoulder before she fell back asleep. "I think you need to watch."

  "Are you sure?" she asked sternly, furrowing her brow.

  "Definitely!" Jack responded firmly.

  His worried look caused her to shudder. She gritted her teeth and nodded silently. After more than two years of flying on the ship, Lieutenant Sallenge had managed to learn that Colonel Petrow wasn't used to showing her weakness.

  Jack helped her hobble to the window.

  They watched the ball-shaped wartstone stop for a moment. Then, as if it sensed something, it suddenly jumped on the hill, but the decision proved to be a fatal mistake. The next second, the owner of the tentacle appeared.

  A huge beast, three or four meters tall, clambered over the hill from the side hidden from Jack's view. Lieutenant Sallenge was unsure if he was looking not at a tentacle, but rather a long limb that had either a sharp beak or a huge claw. Then another limb appeared just before a massive, shining tail came into view. Quick as lightning, the beast struck the wartstone.

  A scuffle ensued, which was impossible to follow in the darkness. The officer never doubted for a second that the beast dragged the carcass of the unlucky wartstone behind the hill to feed on it. Jack's mouth went dry and he recalled the words of senior engineer Alan Forts, which he said on the captain's bridge one day, "...a place inhabited by herbivores has predators too."

  "I wouldn't want to come across that beast," Jack finally spoke after standing still for some time, frozen with fear. "Alan, how right you were. Those damn sequences!"

  "Yeah, Alan was right," Anne responded, no less frightened as she looked into the empty darkness beyond the window. "There are lots of surprises here that we need to learn to live alongside."

  "We need to be more attentive about dangers. I thought..." Jack stopped short for a moment, reviewing the scanner diagrams from the ship. "I thought these herbivorous wartstones were aggressive and dangerous, and somehow the worst is still to come..."

  "We need to check all the security, and we need to fetch an intact weapon from the shuttle."

  "You're right."

  The next day Jack went about everything at a frenetic pace. He quickly reached the shuttle with a robotic helper, grabbed a weapon, loaded it on the robot, and headed back home.

  On the return leg, he stopped near the hill where he and Anne saw the wartstone and the huge beast the previous evening. He quickly ordered the robot trapecrawler to make its way to the pavilion before he ascended the hill. The wind had already partially covered yesterday's battleground with cyan grains of sand. On the alert, Jack had his weapon ready to shoot at a moment's notice.

  A deep imprint left by the body of the herbivorous wartstone descended down the hill before disappearing somewhere near an isolated rocky ridge 300 meters away.

  The hill was covered with triangular tracks along with a few round footprints from the wartstone.

  "This beast must be very powerful," Jack thought. "But where does it live?" He stood there for a while, carefully looking around.

  In his mind's eye, he had a mental image of the planet and how it resembled an olive-green ball in space. On the surface, it looked much different.

  "We've experienced some serious scrapes, guys, but we managed to deal with the malfunctions. We also succeeded in keeping our ship on course," Captain Graham's voice said in Jack's mind. "Nereus is a planet with a perpendicular rotating axis. This means there will be almost no discernible change in seasons for us. Generally speaking, the climate is more stable than ours on Earth. The average planetary temperature doesn't climb higher than 23 degrees Celsius. Nereus is smaller than Earth and about 63 percent of Earth's mass. The days last 22 hours. Aside from two small seas, there are almost no open water surfaces.”

  The map of Nereus unfolded in Jack's mind. He navigated it easily, zooming in on mountain ranges or focusing on the ice caps at the planet's poles. His brain visualized the area of the planet where the two seas were, one of them cyan for some reason, not blue like the second one.

  "It'll be hard to find drinkable water on the planet," the captain's voice continued in Jack's memory. "But the high humidity in the morning will help us make up for the lack of water at our landing zone. The oxygen level is a bit lower than Earth's at 19 percent, but you won't be affected much. You're well-trained and able personnel."

  Jack grinned, recalling the captain's smile with his black mustache.

  “I wonder where the captain and the XO are
now?" Jack pondered. "Did they... Jack, you know perfectly well they didn't survive..."

  He bitterly kicked at the greenish-gray dust with the toe of his boot.

  He glanced at the shining sand, following it like a cat trying to chase down the bright sparkles, when suddenly, as if some higher power told him to do it, he looked up. Something was wrong with the sky. It seemed alive.

  Jack recalled the captain's story about super-dense layers in the atmosphere and unusual gas phenomena. He turned his head, trying to take in as much of the yellow-green sky as he could. The clouds were almost invisible, but the ones he could notice were shaped like elongated semicircular parentheses.

  "They're moving strangely. In the future, I need to check out what's happening to them," Jack thought, spitting on the sand before walking further.

  His saliva hissed before breaking up into several droplets that, in turn, seemed to dissolve on the surface of the sand. On Earth, the moisture from his saliva would have probably evaporated just as quickly, but on Nereus, millions of tiny microorganisms pierced the watery substance, carefully processing each water molecule with tiny cellular pumps.

  Later that day, after he returned to the pavilion, Jack almost didn't leave Anne's side. He thought that if he could entertain her or make her laugh, all the pain and suffering Colonel Petrow was experiencing would magically wash away and she'd recover.

  When she slept, Jack used the teleport to send intermittent messages to the Center on Earth, hoping to eventually hear someone.

  At some point, as he struggled with the teleport, Jack suddenly remembered how a few days ago he had spent a long time collecting the parts to build the device. Anne looked fresher compared to now, but she still slept just as much. He would run to her every now and then to inform her he had inserted this or that part before energetically explaining the main problem was how to properly fix the batteries that powered the entire device. She would give him a weak smile, nod approvingly, and fall back asleep.