Unexpected Encounter 19
13 May 2016Rebecca Hail
The two silhouttes stood silently between the strange looking, withered trees and looked up to the black Anaconda circling the island. Its roaring main thrusters could be heard over the whole island, when the ship made it's first, way too fast, approach. Blue flames shot out of its lateral thrusters as the ship slowly floated towards the old shipwreck. Ironically it was the same shipclass.Even from several kilometres they could see how the hangar opened and two smaller points launched from the ship.
One of the silhouttes moved her hand towards her head.
"Drones. Not manned. The ship has not deployed its weapons yet," the brittle voice of an old woman said. Then she cringed in pain.
The other silhoutte did not even react. He just stood there and looked down on her as she rolled in pain over the wet ground, holding her hands to her temples.
"Very good.", his cold voice said. "This is the first chance in fortysix years. And I'm going to use it."
-near the old ship wreck, a few minutes later
The Anaconda descended slowly, ventral thrusters creating scrotch marks into the ground as it neared touchdown. Its landing gear shifted into position, supporting the weight of the massive ship as it settled into position. Almost immediatly, it went into standbye mode, the powerful thrusters making a long, decrecendo whine as the glow from the nacelles faded into black.
The entry ramp slowly lowered, the two women cautiously walking onto the strange planet. Both were in full atmo suits, but only the taller, blonde-haired one was armed. She took her first steps onto the dusty ground, and then gestured for the younger, shorter one to follow.
A large patch of land around the old wreck was barren, but the dense forest wasn't far away. Rebecca lifted her rifle and looked through the thermal scope towards the edge of the woods.
"I really don't like this. I feel ... eyed.", Ria said with a slightly unstable voice through her oxygen mask.
"The drones haven't found significant thermal signatures nearby. I'll enlarge the search area just in case.", Rebecca answered, "I have a bad feeling about this, too. Don't leave the hangar. I'm going to take a look around the wreck."
"At least give me a knife."
"A knife? For you? You would only hurt yourself."
Rebecca stepped off the hangar ramp, carefully testing the rocky ground, then she looked through her scope towards the woods again. Nothing. The strange looking forest showed no sign of any movement.
She put her rifle over hear shoulder and walked to the forward cargo hatch, typing on her PSA. The hatch opened and the cargo cranes and belts inside the hold began working.
A large cuboid container held by four cables descended from the hatch.
"What's that?", Ria asked from the hangar ramp.
Rebecca looked back to her.
"That's my insurance, that I'm the only one recovering the cargo of this thing."
"What do you mean?"
An annoyed look crossed Renecca’s face. "I mean that it's a bomb, Ria. A damn big one."
Another container lowered from the hatch. Rebecca shouldered her rifle, opened it and took two black bags and a medium large silver suitcase out. Then she walked towards the shipwreck.
Before she entered through the crack in the rear section of the Anaconda, she turned towards Ria.
"If anything strange happens, lock the bulkheads behind you and call me. They should keep everything off until I'm there to deal with it."
"And if you can't deal with it?"
"Then we have a problem."
-In the ship wreck, several hours later.
The drill screeched as Rebecca drilled through the last of the twentyeight security bolts holding the cap of the container. She wiped the metallic dust, which flew everywhere through the dim, only by a portable spotlight illuminated cargobay, from her oxygen mask.
It had taken an hour to find and access the bay, and another hour to get the armoured container into a suitable position for breaking it open. The tools she had used were scattered around the container and a little pile of broken drills was right beside the cap. The next step was to dose the soft plastic explosives into reasonable amounts and fill them into the holes in the bolts.
Too much and the cargo would blow up with the container. Too few and the bolts would block the cap and she'd to get a heavy plasmacutter out of the ship. And even with that thing it would take days to get the container open. Mostly because she had to cut through several layers of the shiphull to access this room with such a monster of a tool.
Sure she had worked with explosives before, but not with precision charges and not to recover something. A quarter hour passed then she'd prepared the explosives in the correct amounts, placed the detonator pins in the explosives and cabled them correctly.
Quickly she crouched out of the cargobay into the half buried hallway, then she pressed the button on the remote. Twentyeight small blasts echoed through the old, empty hallways of the ship and the shockwave whirled up a lot of dust. Rebecca had set the explosives to detonate shortly after each other because she feared that one big blast might damage whatever was inside the container.
As the dust settled down again, she risked a look into the cargobay. The cap of the armoured container laid in front of it, twentyeight small columns of smake ascending from where the security bolts had been.
Inside the container was a second smaller container, round, nearly half a meter long, twenty centimetres thick and carefully suspended not make contact with the bigger container. Several, through the blast badly damaged, pieces of paper flew through the cargo bay.
Rebecca grabbed the least damaged piece and turned it around.
'Intergalactic Naval Research Arm' stood there, followed by a big INRA logo, then a bit further down on the page: 'Operation Aftershock - Classification ultrablack - INRA Research Division'. Unfortunately the other pieces of the file were ripped into a few thousand shreds by the blasts and Rebecca had neither the time nor the patience to puzzle it back together.
She opened the silver suitcase and four round pits could be seen. A quick check of her gas mask proofed that it was still airtight, then she pulled the smaller container out of its suspension. It was surprisingly heavy for its size and after unscrewing the lid she knew why. Air fizzed into the container as she took the cap off it and she could see almost five centimetres of metal on every side protecting the content of the container from outside influences.
A worrying thought crossed her mind. What if the heavy armor wasn't protecting what was inside from the outside, but the outside from whatever was inside ...
Sweat ran over her face under the oxygen mask, then she shook her head a few times to drive the distracting thoughts away and focused on her task. Slowly she put her finger through the metal ring inside the container and pulled it out. A slender metal frame with four glass spheres almost as big as a fist, filled with a transparent but slightly cloudy liquid, came out.
One after another she removed the spheres from the frame and put them carefully into the four prepared pits.
As she closed the suitcase she could feel her heart beating like crazy and sat back to calm herself off the adrenaline rush. The spheres were secured, and all she had to do was get back onboard her ship and get off-world.