They Answered The Call

Kepler-186f system

2nd planet, Insectoid Builder World, 2174 A.D.

We had spent the last eight hours evading the ever-increasing aerial and ground patrols as we slowly headed towards the stealth pods. There were now millions of worker drones scouring the ground twenty kilometers behind them as the aerial patrols sprayed some kind of mist that the suit AIs had analyzed and determined was a caustic organic fluid.

We watched the capture of Diego and the rest of the team from the overwatch drone telemetry, and Sergeant Ito went into immediate action to follow his last orders. He ordered us to pack our shit as quickly as possible, and within five minutes, we left our base camp and were jogging towards the stealth pods. His haste was vindicated an hour later, when we had gotten seven kilometers from the base camp, and he received an alert from one of the shrouded drones he left there.

He had us stop and take a knee, and he strongly suggested we drink water and eat an energy bar while he pulled up the telemetry from the drone. It had detected an incoming cargo ship that was spraying a fine mist in an obvious patrol pattern that extended outward from the shipyard, one of dozens of others that could be seen in the distance doing the same thing. The overwatch drone had moved away from the oncoming ship, increased its altitude to two thousand meters, and continued monitoring the situation. The mist it was spraying reminded Emily of the hovering autonomous farm drones that sprayed the crops with the fine mist of pesticides on her dad’s farm when she was a child growing up on Proxima Centauri b.

It was coming out of an opening at the bottom of the cargo ship, and she gasped as the drone recorded the results of the mist interacting with the outer edge of the shroud field that was cloaking the base camp. The shrouding field started flickering, and parts of their base camp would appear and disappear as the shroud generator AI tried to compensate for the anomalous mist. The hovering cargo ship had seen the flickering and circled back to a position slightly closer to the center of the camp, increasing the amount of mist it sprayed. Ito had activated one of the sentry drones on the perimeter of the now-exposed camp to go directly into the mist and take samples.

It did so, appearing on the video feed as it got covered in the mist. It forwarded the scanning results to Ito’s suit AI before worker drones that were in one of the large open hatches on the sides of the ship pointed a hand held apparatus at it, and it was destroyed. I couldn’t see the invisible beam that hit it, but there was a distinct pathway of ionized air that marked its passage from the cargo ship to the sentry drone. The shrouding generator suddenly failed, and the entire camp came into existence.

The cargo ship drifted sideways to a relatively flat area beside the camp and landed, and worker drones scurried out of the openings and streamed into the camp. They tore through it, probably looking for us, and then started picking up items and equipment and bringing them towards the waiting cargo ship. Ito muttered, “I don’t think so, fuckers!” before he entered a command into his wristpad that activated the demo bots that had dug into the ground when they set up in the area. The entire camp disappeared in massive explosions that wiped out everything for a hundred meters around the camp, including the cargo ship. He took a knee again and sent a series of commands to the overwatch drone that was still above the camp, and then he reached into his battle pack that was on the ground in front of him and pulled out a box. Inside of it were half a dozen two-inch mini drones, and as he activated them, they all flew up and in different directions, disappearing as their shrouds turned on. He continued pulling items out of his pack, and soon he had a few pieces of equipment on the ground, arrayed into three separate sets.

He stood back up and addressed us. “I hope you both paid attention during your SERE training before this mission. We can no longer rely on the shrouds to hide us anymore, it seems. I will install the camo gear and holo generators on your suits, and we will continue heading towards the stealth pods. We will not be able to move as quickly as we could with the shrouds, so it will take us longer. Once we move out, you will both observe silent protocols and only use text, hand signals, and throat mics. You will both also have to use the waste reclamation unit, so no more bathroom breaks either. We cannot leave any trace that we are here, understood?" We both nodded, and I started dreading the concept of having to use the suit as my bathroom as he proceeded to install the camo gear and the small holo generator on the back of my suit, pushing them into their respective ports.

I tried to remember the important aspects of my SERE training as he started installing the gear on Owen’s back, and I had my suit AI pull up a refresher on my helmet HUD to quickly scan it. I used my eyes to move the HUD cursor around until I saw the relevant link to the camo and holo protocols and winked my right eye, clicking the link with the cursor. A wall of text and info graphs appeared, and I quickly read it as Owen and Ito started testing out the evasion equipment. Ito got on the ground face down and quickly disappeared as the camouflage system perfectly blended him against the surface like an octopus blending into their surroundings, while Owen used the miniaturized holo generator and turned into a grove of native weeds where he was just standing.

“Hey sergeant, how is the shroud different from the holo or camo?” The grove of weeds asked, forcing Emily to stifle a laugh at the ridiculousness going on in front of her as the rock that used to be Ito answered the question. “The shroud manipulates the molecules around us in a process that I really don’t understand, to be honest with you. The holo utilizes light wave lengths, and the suit we are wearing has an outer nano layer that has the same ability that octopi have by employing pigments and papillae for camouflage. The mist should not interfere with the holo generator since the light particles will pass through undisturbed, and we should be perfectly fine if we maintain our distance, as the effects might be noticeable within three or less meters. The camo is a physical system, and whatever crap they are spraying will just land on the suit, which will behave just like anything the stuff is landing on instead of glitching from field interference.”

“Cool. Thanks, sergeant!” Owen replied as he shimmered back into human form. Emily had finished refreshing her memory on the important SERE training protocols at this point, and she used a combination of her eyes and finger movements to order her holo generator and camo system to turn her into several natural features and native animals in quick succession, making sure that both systems worked. Sergeant Ito had started putting items back in his battle pack and checking the immediate area to make sure that no trace of their presence remained before he quickly double-checked our suits. When he was finished, his voice took on a serious note as he started speaking. “I will do my best to protect you and get you off this planet. Follow my orders and movements without delay, so if I suddenly drop to the floor or stop, do the same immediately. Any questions?” I nodded no, and Owen did the same. His voice sounded in my ears. “Can you guys hear me?” We both nodded, affirming that we could hear him.

“Good, silent protocols from here on out. There is a river half a klick from here that will get us about halfway to the pods. When we get there, we will camouflage ourselves as one of the large native aquatic rodents that inhabit these waterways and float along with the current until we hit the bend that turns the river to the east away from the pods. We will exit the river at the bend and assess the best way to proceed from there."

"The suits are watertight and have flotation abilities. Your suit AIs are slaved to mine, so just let them do the work and make the proper visual adjustments and course changes; there is no need for any arm or hand movements to swim. We will have to crawl to the river along the grassy areas to blend in while we move. Your suits will assist you in the movements, so it shouldn’t be taxing. Let’s do this.”

He turned around and laid on his belly, flattening out. His suit immediately blended into the short red grass, and we followed his lead, laying down. A small PIP screen appeared in the upper right corner of my HUD, showing a birds-eye view from the overwatch drone above us. I zoomed in on the picture, and I would not have been able to spot us in the grass if it wasn’t for the faint outline overlay of our forms being defined by the drone above. Ito’s form in front of me had the same faint outline on my HUD screen when I looked ahead, and he started belly crawling. I followed his lead, and on the PIP screen, I saw that Owen was following behind me as I started moving forward. The suit did all the work, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. All I had to do was move my arms and legs, and I felt like the suit took care of 95% of the actual effort.

We crawled for twenty-two minutes before we reached the riverbank, and the red grass started to thin out. Ito continued crawling and seamlessly blended into the brown, muddy soil as he reached it, the bottom half of his body still mimicking the red grass it was in. He reached the rapidly flowing water of the river and slipped right in, emerging a second later as a bright yellow, 1.5-meter-tall aquatic rodent. Emily wondered if the Insectoids ate them or if they ate meat at all as she slipped into the water, following Ito’s lead. She came to the surface and verified on the PIP screen that she looked like an aquatic rodent, and another second later she saw Owen emerge the same way. Her suit AI was already following Ito, and she could feel the changes it made to stay behind him.

They drifted along with the current for forty-two minutes, passing several small rodent families that fled from them and headed to the riverbanks as they approached, not fooled by the camouflage in the slightest. At one point, Ito was attacked by a smaller-than-usual solitary male who charged him. It was probably a juvenile going through puberty, and he sadly had to break its neck to end the relentless assaults. As the corpse floated by her, she looked at the other rodents watching their passage from the riverbanks, and she could have sworn she saw judgment in their eyes as they drifted past. A few minutes later, Ito’s voice sounded in her ears, telling them to get ready to exit at the rapidly approaching bend.

She saw the bend appear a few moments later and let her suit follow Ito out of the water and onto the riverbank, where she took over and started to crawl. The landscape was different in this area, as it was just reddish soil that was sparsely vegetated. Ito issued a hold command, and they all stopped as he conferred with his suit AI and the telemetry from the overwatch drone. His voice came into her ears again after a short wait: “The landscape conditions here are not as favorable as before. We will have to slowly crawl for the next five klicks to blend in on the surface. Once there, we will enter an open savannah with tall grasses that border the same forest we initially came through when we landed. We just need to get through the next five kilometers, and I think we will be okay from there. You guys are doing okay?”

We both signaled yes, and he nodded and dropped back down onto his stomach and started slowly crawling, allowing his camouflage systems to adapt to the terrain. We followed his movements and speed, maintaining a 1.5-meter distance from each other to avoid camouflage overlapping. We had been crawling for almost two and a half hours and were just a kilometer shy of reaching the border of the savannah when Ito suddenly froze, and I heard a whisper coming over my ear buds. “Do not move a muscle. We have movement ahead.” I froze, my heart rate accelerating to a thousand beats per second, as a new PIP screen replaced the one that was showing the outline of Owen behind me with a birds-eye view from the overwatch drone above us.

Less than two hundred meters in front of us were several openings in the ground that appeared out of nowhere, and out of them were streaming many worker drones, with an occasional soldier drone emerging among them. I had stopped mid-crawl, and now I could feel the hamstring of my left leg threatening to cramp up in protest of the unusual position I was holding it in. I tried to relax my muscles without moving, and my hamstring was not having it. It cramped up, and I fought against the impulse to try to straighten out my leg to relieve it while I clenched my teeth to restrain the outcry that wanted to give a voice to the pain I was feeling.

It cramped up even more, and the surrounding muscles did so as well, succumbing to the loss of the hamstring bearing their tension. I panicked and whispered for my auto-doc to inject me with a muscle relaxer, which it did immediately, but it was too late. My left leg instinctively straightened out of its own volition to relieve the multiple painful cramps forming in the back of my left thigh before the injection managed to reach it. My suit leg scraped against the small rocks that were under it, and my suit microphone made it seem like it was the loudest sound in the world. Several of the nearby drones and soldiers must have detected the sound or movement because they spun around and faced our direction, their antennae searching in the air for the source of the disturbance. They started moving towards our position, and in less than twenty seconds, they were now a hundred meters from our position.

Ito had been furiously issuing orders to his suit AI and the multiple drones above us as this was happening, and once the Insectoids had reached the hundred-meter mark, his voice calmly came over the ear buds: “Arm yourselves; I have a diversion attempt inbound. You both are to head west, to your right, and continue to evade and head to the pods. I will engage them and draw them away from you.” As soon as he finished speaking, there were explosions among the main body of the worker and soldier drones that were still surrounding the openings they had come out of. The two-inch mini drones that he had released several hours ago were now dropping from the sky and self-destructing themselves in kamikaze runs as they hit large groups of worker drones, setting off powerful explosions that didn’t seem possible for their small sizes.

The group that was heading towards them stopped, and most of the worker drones turned towards the area of the attack while the remaining thirty-four soldier drones, after a moment of stillness, resumed heading towards their location. Emily reached her hand down and pulled off the needle pistol that was mag-locked to her right thigh, and her HUD showed that it had a full magazine of five hundred explosive-tipped needles, plus the four other magazines she had on her suit webbing. She slowly moved her hand up and sighted the pistol towards the approaching soldiers, using the ground to steady her aim. The last mini drone impacted among the ranks of the approaching soldier drones, and they momentarily disappeared in the explosion as Insectoid body parts and debris flew out in all directions. Ito was yelling now, seeing no point in silent protocols. “Move! Move! Move! Start crawling west; I will draw them away. Go!” And he leapt up, firing his gauss rifle and running to the east and slightly towards the decimated soldier drones, dropping a few of the remaining drones that had survived the explosion.

Emily felt Owen’s hand tugging on her arm as he started pulling her towards the west, and she followed him, staying as low to the ground as possible. Her HUD PIP showed Ito running at full tilt away from them and the soldier drones, his camo and holo gear turned off, and his jet-black combat suit sticking out like a sore thumb against the reddish terrain around him. He was being followed by a large party of soldier drones as he would periodically spin around and spray his gauss rifle towards them, injuring and dropping more drones. She continued to follow Owen, silently wishing him to move faster as she heard her heavy, panicked breathing in the confines of her helmet. They had gotten almost thirty meters from their starting point when the PIP showed a nearby airship that had arrived on the scene and was now chasing Ito, with more drones joining in the ground chase.

She continued to crawl while she kept glancing at the PIP to keep tabs on Ito. The airship was now directly over him, about eight meters above his head. He pulled a small item off his webbing and stopped running, throwing the item at the airship. It hit the ship and remained there, and he threw himself onto the ground right before it exploded. A huge chunk of the bottom of the airship tore out from the impact point, and it started listing as it tried to skid sideways away from the attack, trailing smoke and debris before it finally lost control and smashed into the ground a hundred meters away in an impact that shook the ground under Emily’s body.

They were now a good distance away, and she kept crawling behind Owen, resisting the temptation to lift her head and look back to where Ito was. She glanced at the PIP again and saw that Ito had gotten up and resumed leading the drones away, but they were rapidly gaining on him, and he was in danger of being cut off as other drones emerged from openings in the ground ahead of him and on the sides. His voice came into her ears again. "Keep moving; do not stop. Go!" and she felt tears coming to her eyes as the realization that he was sacrificing himself to save them hit her hard. He had reached the edge of the forest and entered among the tall orange trunks of the alien trees, his black suit turning the same color as the tree trunks as he finally disappeared.

The overwatch drone switched to a different scanner to see through the dense canopy, and Ito’s form reappeared, his form outlined against the ground as he continued to evade the hundreds of drones that were following behind him and flanking him from the sides as they drew closer. His speed was severely diminished by having to constantly move around the tree trunks, and the drones were now less than twenty meters from him.

There was a small clearing ahead of him, and he headed towards it, probably hoping that the open space would allow him to gain some distance on his pursuers. Just as he reached the edge of the clearing, two new openings appeared on the surface, and soldier drones streamed out of them, cutting him off. He slowed down slightly and charged at the group of soldier drones in front of him as two blades snapped out of their scabbards along the bottom of his forearms.

He reached them, and for the first time in her life, Emily saw the true capabilities of a combat suit with a trained operator inside of it. He was a blur of motion as the suit and his AI augmented his movement and abilities, and the nanomolecular-edged blades sliced through the soldier drones with ease. In less than two seconds, he had dismembered and killed over a dozen soldier drones as he weaved through them at a speed that Emily did not think was possible. The remaining drones seemed shocked at the ferociousness of his attack and gave way before him, creating an opening that he surged through.

He started running towards the other end of the clearing when another soldier drone emerged from one of the openings with a handheld apparatus and aimed it at him. The scanner showed the path of the energy weapon as it impacted the back of his suit, and he was knocked off balance, dropping his gauss rifle as he stumbled onto his knees.

The drones took advantage of his momentary collapse and swarmed him, looking like they were trying to capture him rather than kill him. Once again, he fought back in a blur of action as he sliced through them with one blade while shooting others with the needle gun that he had pulled from his thigh. He managed to get out from under the swarming drones and was now walking backwards, dropping them with the needle gun and using one of the blades for any that managed to get close to him. He was limping, and the overwatch drone had highlighted the damage of the particle beam hit on the back of his suit that had managed to penetrate and damage his kidneys and spine.

He was now obviously suffering from the effects of the hit, and his movements became slower as his auto-doc system pumped him full of drugs and tried to repair the damage with medical nanobots. The soldier drones swarmed him again from all sides, and two of them grabbed his blade arm and immobilized it, while a third was trying to sever the arm with its mandibles at the shoulder joint of the suit. He continued firing the needle gun that was in his left hand into the mass of drones until the magazine ran dry, and he unsuccessfully tried to deploy the left-handed blade that was damaged from the hit.

He turned his left gauntleted hand into a fist and started punching, penetrating their exoskeletons and tearing out chunks of internal organs from the drones that were unlucky enough to fall into range. The drones immobilizing his right arm finally chewed through the shoulder joint and dismembered his right arm, and Emily heard Ito’s scream of pain in her ears as hot tears streamed down her face.

She forced herself to look away from the PIP as the drones started working on his left arm, and she looked straight ahead, focusing on the bottom of Owen’s feet as they continued crawling away, leaving Ito behind. A few seconds later, there was a massive explosion behind them, followed by a blast of air that buffeted them a few moments later. The PIP now showed a large crater where Ito was before, and the surrounding forest had been knocked down and flattened by the pressure wave, catching fire from the devastating explosion of the suit’s self-destruct mechanism.

She heard Owen quietly whispering a prayer for Ito’s soul, and she did the same, thanking him for his sacrifice. They were now almost three hundred meters from their original position, and Owen veered left, pointing them towards the forest edge, almost a hundred meters away from their current location. She thought she felt a slight tremor in the ground beneath her and was just about to mention it to Owen when drones started popping out of the ground ahead of them.

Owen’s scream hurt her ears as he yelled. “Emily, run! Get to the pods!” and she froze for a second as he leapt up off the ground and ran towards the drones in front of them, firing his needle gun. She snapped out of it and got off the ground, running to the right a few meters before veering towards the edge of the forest, which now seemed like an impossible distance from her.

Her suit augmented her speed, and she reached the forest edge, turning around to see if Owen was behind her. She cried out in dismay at what she saw. Owen was surrounded as he rapidly fired the needle gun, their explosive tips tearing apart the drones as they continued to tighten the noose around him, undeterred by the losses he was inflicting on them. He looked in her direction, and his voice came over the ear buds, strangely calm while he maintained his fire. “Emily, I love you. Please keep going; I need you to make it out of here. Keep running and don’t stop until you reach the pods!”

She was sobbing loudly and responded to him, feeling the love she had for him in the words as she said them for the first time. “Owen, I love you. I love you; please try to get away. Just run, please.” She saw out of the corner of her eyes that there were worker drones heading towards her position, and she looked at Owen one more time, wishing she had the courage to tell him how much she loved him that night in the tent, not when he was just about to die on this godforsaken planet.

He yelled for her to run one more time before they finally swarmed him, and she started to turn around to run away and leave him behind when she ran face first into a group of soldier drones that had come up behind her. All the terror and emotional turmoil she was suffering from their long flight, the sacrifice of Ito, and the loss of her love slammed into her, and her legs gave way as she fell to the ground and gave in to the despair that overwhelmed her. She offered no resistance, and she closed her eyes and smiled wistfully as she thought back to the night she and Owen made love for the first time. She went limp and prayed for Owen’s soul as the soldier drones roughly grabbed her limbs and hoisted her into the air, like pallbearers carrying her to her grave.