"Warning, prox...ity ...ert!" Judy struggled to be heard clearly over the ship's comms as a severe wave of static muffled her words. She was the Stardust's designated AI software and was in charge of controlling all the ship's subsidiary systems, including it's navigation and atmospheric/mechanical maintenance. But right now, she was finding it difficult to perform any of those functions properly as everything inside the ship was, figuratively, falling apart.
"Judy, status report!" Captain Jardon yelled out to her as he broke into the Stardust's cockpit while trying desperately to get the last of his collar buttons to close. His arms and legs felt jittery and wobbly at the same time what with the adrenaline that was firing through his system at the urgency of the situation. It was especially bad because he had just been woken up from his stasis.
"All the ship's electronic systems," Judy began before another wave of static assaulted the comms, making every electronic thing in the ship to flicker, "Are malf... rapidly. I'm having a hard time ...bilizing them."
"What about the planet?" Jardon asked as beads of sweat formed on his slightly wrinkled forehead, "How much time do we have before—"
He couldn't finish his question as the solar blinds covering his ship's screen suddenly folded haphazardly, revealing the scenery that was beyond them. That is, the millions of tiny twinkling stars that were dotted across the inky, cosmic blackness of space.
The view before Jardon's eyes would have certainly mesmerized him hadn't it been for the huge circular sphere of green, blue, and - mostly - dark brown that stood right in front of his ship, dwarfing everything else.
Proxima b, the word burned in his mind before his face went pale. He made a beeline for his pilot's seat where the chord for his mouthpiece rested on the dashboard in front of it. He pulled on the chord with his shivering hand and brought it closer to his lips.
"This—This is Captain Jardon speaking, " he said shakily and hurriedly after clearing his throat, "All personnel that are currently awake and not in cryo-stasis. Please, find cover and brace yourselves. We're about to make a rough planetary entry."
As Jardon let go of the mouthpiece, letting it drag itself back to the crevice in the dashboard where he pulled it from, he passed a hand over his forehead, wiping the sweat off of it for the second time that day before addressing Judy again.
"Judy!" He called out to her as he watched the planet outside his ship grow in size rapidly.
"Yes Capt..." she responded barely before the static cut her out again.
"Lock down everything in the ship that can be locked down."
She didn't respond. Only static came through the cockpit's speakers but Jardon didn't need a verbal confirmation from her. The task could be done as long as she heard him.
There were seat belts on either side of his seat, he pulled on them as he strapped himself tightly into the chair. He was right after all, it was going to be a rough entry.
Just as the last seat belt locked into place, however, the very unforgiving descent into Proxima b began.
Everything that happened after that was a blur. Especially after the time when the outside of the Stardust erupted in flames as the ship entered Proxima b's atmosphere. The light that suddenly filled the cockpit was so bright that Jardon had to close his eyes shut and then cover them with both his hands just to stop it from blinding him.
After a few moments, Judy said something to him. Something about the Stardust's central coupler disengaging. At least, he hoped that's what it was about. He couldn't hear her properly over the static that constantly interrupted her and the sound of the wind violently rushing past the Stardust as it fell ever closer to the planet's surface.
When it seemed like all his senses would finally overload from all the intense pressure, everything went black.
SOMETIME AFTER
100 heard something hiss just as an immense wave of light penetrated through his closed eyes. He winced from the sheer intensity of it all before he felt a couple of strong arms grab him. They lifted him off of whatever he was lying on and placed him on a sturdier, more solid surface.
"Captain?" a familiar male voice said to him when the hands withdrew, "Captain? Are you with us? Can you hear me?"
100 opened his eyes but everything around him looked ill-defined and bleary, there was a ringing in his ears too. He felt light-headed and weak. The urge to vomit suddenly overcame him and he was left with no choice but to heave out whatever was in his stomach. As a soldier with space travelling experience, this was the first time he felt like this after a landing and, quite frankly, it sucked.
"Give him some room," a much calmer female voice said to the first one, "He needs fresh air."
After almost ten minutes of ragged breathing, 100 started to feel like himself again. When he opened his eyes a second time, he finally saw everything that was around him, clearly. He sat up and saw that he was on a slightly grassy ground in the midst of two other people. One of whom was his second in command, 94, who was also the man who addressed him earlier.
94 approached him, "Will you be able to stand sir?" He asked as he extended his hand to his captain.
As 100 shook his head slowly and carefully, signaling a disapproval to the statement, a cough left his chest, "What... What happened?" He asked hoarsely before letting out another cough.
"We crashed," answered Professor Berezira Mendy. She was the female voice from earlier and was one of the highest ranking scientists on the ship.
"Crashed where?" 100 inquired as a third cough rocked his system.
Mendy shrugged, "Where else? We're on Proxima b."
She gestured to something behind her that wasn't quite too far from the three of them. This 'something' was huge, metallic and colored a dark foggy shade of grey. Their ship, 100 realized — or, better yet, a part of it. Multiple people, who were dressed very similarly to him, moved in and out of its bulking size, bringing to the outside with them either various boxes with unknown contents or cryo-tubes containing even more unconscious people.
"Something happened to our ship," Mendy continued, "I don't know why or how it did — I was still in cryo-stasis at the time — but, well, it did and now we're here."
Of the group of people that were walking in and out of the ship, there was a certain young woman that approached the trio. 100 and 94 didn't know her, Mendy on the other hand did. But that was far from surprising as the two - 100 and 94 - only knew of Mendy because of how famous she was back on Earth.
The young woman who approached brought with her four water bottles which she quickly shared with each of them before whispering something in Mendy's ear. When she finished, Mendy turned to the captain and excused herself. Both she and the other woman walked away.
...
"How are things looking?" Mendy asked the young woman when they reached a certain distance away from the captain, all while uncapping her bottle of water.
The young woman, whose name was Diana Smith, shrugged, "Fifty-fifty really," she said after taking a sip from her bottle, "The backup generators are still in excellent condition. Only problem is, the electronics."
"What about the electronics?"
"Well," Diana began, "Most of them are fried. We must have driven into a really powerful solar storm after the jump. Our radiation shields couldn't keep up. I suspect that did a number on Judy as well. But honestly? Am pretty amazed we even managed to land looking at the damage. Granted there were a few casualties, she really did outdo herself. Despite the insane amount of effort it must have taken, she coordinated the duo-landing procedures better than was expected. Especially considering the conditions she did them under."
"What are the odds?" Mendy remarked before another question left her, "How long do you think the engineers will take to fix everything?"
"I don't know," Diana replied, "But it shouldn't be too long. Less than 10 hours I'd wager."
"Huh, looking at things in the long run," Mendy said, "That is a relatively short time."
...
"Here," 94 said to 100 as he took a seat next to him, handing him his water bottle after noticing that the captain's bottle was already empty, "You need this more than I do."
"I suppose that makes sense," 100 said, receiving the bottle with a hand that was slightly weak and shaky, "Care to give me a briefing on our current situation?"
"Well, to begin with, we're on an alien planet," 94 sarcastically remarked as he gestured to the purplish-blue sky above everything else, where there was a reddish-orange sun shining its light on everything they could see. The strangest thing about this sun was the vastly smaller and whiter sun sitting right next to it.
100 scoffed after downing everything that was in 94's bottle in one go, "As if that wasn't obvious enough."
This caused him to chuckle. The captain was by far not an uptight person, sure he loved to keep to himself most of the time and enjoyed his fair share of sarcasm, but he was still a decent person to have around almost all the time. This was something that 94 could testify to after having worked with him for years following their first meeting in the training barracks back on earth, a time before the military designated either of them with their Soldier Identification Codes. 94 and 100 weren't their actual names.
"Fine," he said as he struggled to contain the smirk that formed on his face. There was something about patronising his long time friend that left him feeling satisfied. His sarcastic retorts entertained him, "Starting from where the professor left off and from what I was able to gather, we've suffered only a few minor set backs and casualties. Of the total three hundred and fifty passengers that were on our side of the ship initially, at least fifteen have been confirmed dead while forty-five others have their fates still yet to be verified." He shrugged, "And of that same forty-five, at least ten may have fallen out the ship following a mechanical fault that delayed the closing of it's coupler doors after the separation."
"Do you reckon we can still track their cryo-pods back to where they may have fallen?" 100 asked, referring to the missing five, as he tossed aside the water bottles.
94 let out a sigh in response, "Yes, but it might take us a while. See that trail?" He pointed at some strange shallow tracks in the ground that began at the base of their ship and continued south, away from it.
"Yes."
"No one knows how long it goes on for. Our best estimates so far say about two or three clicks because of the size of our ship, the thickness of the planet's surface and the speed we must have attained during the drop."
100 raised his brow at that, "What's the problem with that? Three clicks is very walkable."
"Two things," 94 responded, "First, the terrain. It's uneven and inconsistent. You haven't noticed it yet but we're on a hill and two clicks south of us is a forest and about a dozen water bodies. Second, our numbers. Most of our Frontliners are still in their cryo-pods and they will stay like that for a while because the engineers are running priority as the ship needs patching up. The professor wasn't joking about whatever hit the ship. It did it quite some damage."
"So," 100 said, "If am getting you right, we just need to wait for more of the frontliners to be awake then?"
"Yes and hopefully, you'll be able to stand without falling over and puking by then."
"You're having too much of a blast out of this."
94 held back a laugh, "How can I not? I mean, there are literally two suns above us right now. Two suns! I don't know about you but that's not something you come by every day."
"I guess you have a point," 100 closed his eyes and took in a deep breath.
"Tell me something though," he began after a few moments of silence, "How do you manage staying this... optimistic even after what happened on Mars?"
The blissful expression that had formed on 94's face faultered as unpleasant memories from a past that he wished he forgot began replaying in his mind. The horror, the blood, the flesh, the claws and the sight of people that he knew and loved getting ripped apart. It stuck with him, a mental scar.
"What happened on Mars" was a topic that he and the captain usually refrained from talking about. But, since the captain himself brought it up, he wasn't that apprehensive to indulge him.
Just after the Third World War concluded, before the Earth's conditions reached maximum critical levels, the Interstellar Movement - the unification of all the nations that rebelled against the USA and its associates, collectively known as the Global Union - which lacked the majority of earth's remainder of diminishing resources, realized that their best and fastest chances of survival depended upon them moving their numbers to Mars. This came after the rather obvious conclusion that the damage rendered on the Earth via the war could never be fixed - not with humanity's current technological status.
But, while the move to Earth's red neighbour was ideal on paper, it was not without its own problems in reality.
The first, and the most pressing, being Mars' uninhabitable atmosphere. Terraforming a planet, any planet, is always a resource-intensive venture. The fact that the IMT were at a shorthand of raw materials meant they had to be careful with the way they utilised any of them. The second problem, and clearly the most detestable one, was the presence of the Global union. Since the entire world was facing the same exact problem, it would only follow that they would all arrive upon the same exact solution. In this case, Mars. It was the nearest planet that could be made livable in the shortest period of time, so how could the GU also pass its significance by?
Despite both factions being in roughly the same shoes, the GU had more resources at their disposal, which meant the IMT were already a step behind in their race for survival.
But while this was an evident set back, it also provided them with a unique and interesting silver lining on the situation. If the GU were after the same planet as them, they wouldn't have to use up as much resources inorder to change it. In fact, they'd save up quite a lot.
And with this realisation came a new motive. One of cultivating as opposed to activating. The people of the IMT soon realized that sharing a planet with the GU - even if only temporarily and without their awareness - would do no one any good once their status came to light. If both factions could over look their own species' survival for a chance to destroy the other, what were the odds they'd ever reconcile?
They had already destroyed one planet beyond revival, what would stop them from destroying another? The answer was obvious. With that in mind, the IMT decided that, instead of hijacking a part of Mars at the behest of the GU, they'd use the minimum time window under which they could go unnoticed to siphon whatever resources they could get from the reviving planet and use said resources to help them get to - and backwards engineer - another potential planet. When this plan was finalised, they got a select few individuals to be moving to and from Mars harvesting their resources.
The first five siphoning trips were successful, nothing went amiss and all was well. But, when it was time for the sixth and last trip, challenges arose. During this time, the GU had changed enough of the Martian atmosphere that the planet's polar ice caps had started melting. This was a good thing, since natural water was a very good sign of progress. Unfortunately, there was something that both the GU and IMT were unaware of about the ice caps of Mars. They were by far not empty. There were living creatures inside of them, whether or not these creatures were remnants of Mars' past life cycle, no one could tell. All everyone knew was that the melting of the caps successfully released these creatures back into the Martian atmosphere and no sooner had this happened than they began wreaking havoc upon the planet's surface.
100 and 94, who were part of the IMT's sixth undercover siphoning crew, witnessed first hand how dangerous these creatures were as, in a span of two hours, every other member of their 50-man crew was eaten alive by them, including 94's two sisters - one of whom was 100's fiancee - and 100's younger brother. That's why they almost never talked about this topic after they left Mars. Too much was lost a lot on that day.
Going back to the captain's question, 94 found himself unintentionally clenching both his fists before turning away from him. After a moment of silence had passed between them, 94, feeling like the worst of the memories had gone away, finally responded.
"That's how am coping with everything."
"By pretending it doesn't hurt?" 100 asked him, surprisingly in a somber way.
94 clenched his teeth next, the question stung but he understood where it was coming from. Unlike him, the captain wasn't scarred only mentally but physically too. One of the creature's that killed their crew took his left eye with it and left three very evident claw marks on that side of his face as well so that every time he stared at himself through any mirror, he was reminded of Mars and all the things that happened there. But the way he chose to deal with it was still wrong, brooding and dwelling on the sadness was hurting him more than he realized.
"No," 94 said after a deep inhale, finally facing his captain, "But by accepting that it does and by accepting that whatever happened won't change no matter how much I choose to dwell on it."
100 was the one that turned away this time, "You say that as if its easy," he stared at sky, where the two suns stood directly above them .
94 sighed, "It's not. But I don't let that stop me."
Before 100 could respond, a shout erupted from a few of the people that were at the entrance of their ship. As he and 94 watched, a crowd slowly formed.
94 then stood up and extended his hand to him, "Do you feel like you could finally stand up without falling over?"
"Don't get too cocky, subordinate." He said as he reached for it. Surprisingly, there was a smirk on his dark brown face.
"You wish," 94 said with a smirk of his own. When the captain was successfully on his feet, they made their way to the commotion.