Out of Thin Air
16 Jan 2018Kodeyne
Clouds of yellow dust billowed up as Devil's Daydream settled into the surface of Pleiades Sector PN-T B3-0 A5."Not the snappiest of names, is it, little world?" mumbled Kodeyne as the engines powered down. She sighed and gazed out of the cockpit. The reason she was in this remote place was right in front of her. Strange grey spikes, stone-like yet living, jutted out of the ground, radiating from ribbed structures. Meta-alloys. Very much in demand, and places like this were the easiest place to get them. She'd been here before; the main difficultly was navigating through the forest of spines...
She dropped into the SRV and listened to the familiar hiss as the hatch sealed. The familiar clunk as the front wheels unfolded and the vehicle dropped to the ground. She swung round and began to head for the maze of barnacles. She had got no further than a few metres from the ship when the sensors picked an almighty thud. A trace flickered in the scanner; displays flickered and went blank. The SRV's engine cut out and it came to a halt.
"What the hell....?" Kodeyne rattled the controls, then gasped as the Remlok's helmet deployed. The sensors were dead but she could feel the vibration through the ground. She looked up. "Oh no....." Her mouth went dry and her chest constricted.
"Oh shit!"
A great, deep red eight-petaled flower was descending with slow grace from above. It manoeuvred until it was over the very centre of the barnacle forest and pitched through one-eighty.
Her hands fell from the controls and she gazed helplessly at the eireely beautiful thing. Tears ran down her face.
"I'm sorry....I'm so sorry...."
Ridiculous thing to say, it wouldn't hear her, much less understand. She'd seen enough reports on GalNet, watched enough footage. Thargoid Interceptor. This was it. This had to be the end. She thought of Ali, whom she had hoped to see again....she thought of dear Mrs Myshkin, her foster mother. Almost without thinking, one hand took the little cat-stone from its pouch and grasped it.
A glowing pulse of energy radiated from the Thargoid. The rear set of petals reconfigured themselves. Kodeyne sat and waited numbly for death. A bright beam suddenly connected the ship and the barnacle; the SRV shook with the reverberations. How long that beam shone for, she would never be able to tell - then it abruptly cut off. The hovering craft changed confirmation again, rising up into the dark sky and vanishing into a spatial distortion.
The SRV's displays came back on; the engine coughed back into life. As the Remlok's helm folded itself away again, Kodeyne simply sat and stared at the distortion as it faded. She couldn't stop shaking. It must have seen her, surely? It couldn't not have! So why....why was she still here? Why had she been spared when thousands had died?
Still badly rattled, she slowly drove into the field of spires. It did not take long to collect a couple of meta-alloy buds. She didn't feel like staying for any more shocks. Drove back to the ship and loaded up. Stumbling into her cabin, opening a drawer and lifting out the flask of Lavian brandy. Popped the lid off. Drained it in one go. As the warmth of the liquor spread through her, the tension slowly dissipated. She made her way back to the cockpit and stared at the alien structure.
"Well, DD....going to think twice before coming here again! Must be somewhere else we can get the goods from. But let's get out of here for starters!" She'd met the Thargoids and lived to tell the tale. Would she be so lucky next time?