Elsa spat out some blood from where she’d bitten her lip. Mouth free, she croaked out the command to open the capsule. The forceful ejection sent it flying straight out and into the wall of the furrow a few feet away. So much for the instructors promise that the pods landed right side up every time.
With the top portion gone, a fine mist covered her. Elsa fought to hold her breath but the smell of rancid peaches still assaulted her. The foam holding her in place dissolved rapidly, letting her slide out within seconds. She scrambled around the pod, keeping contact with it to retain some semblance of up and down until her body could compensate for the trauma she’d gone through. She triggered the release on the cargo bay and pulled the door off so it served as protection to her back. A few more twists and pressed buttons released first her X109 energy rifle then the large container of supplies that she slipped on her back.
Elsa spun around, rifle held at the ready, and surveyed her situation for the first time. The ditch dug by the screamer was roughly three feet deep. Giant trees and vegetation rose around her, enclosing her within the tropical jungle her pod had landed in. She frowned, the insertion point was supposed to be near the destroyed research outpost, humanity’s only real settlements on Vitalis. Whatever had hit her pod had redirected her.
Roughly sixty seconds at over a thousand miles an hour meant she could be up to twenty miles away from her target. She adjusted her pack before subvocalizing the command to call up a map in her helmet’s display. The map displayed, albeit at an orbital overview size.
“ FIST team three, Dark Angel reporting in,” Elsa spoke after activating her radio, naming off her First Insertion Special Tactics unit then her individual code name. She waited several seconds for a response that never came. “Interference,” she muttered, followed by a curse fit for a Marine Special Operator. Previous reports from the Explorer logs had indicated intermittent problems with radio contact on Vitalis. Without connection to the orbital fleet her GPS was useless too.
She adjusted her pack one more time, anxious for a chance to find a secure position to break it apart and redistribute the contents to the various mounting points on her armor. She picked herself up enough to look over the wrecked capsule and survey the jungle. Her helmet’s light amplification made the scene almost as bright as a Vitalian day, while the superimposed thermographic indicators showed nothing large enough to be a threat to her, only some smaller mammals.
Elsa climbed out of the trench and turned around a few times to take in the scenery. She figured if she followed the trench the screamer had dug she’d be headed in the right direction. Both her internal compass and the one built into her helmet were failing her. “Guess that’s why they don’t let Marines with cybernetics on the FIST teams,” she mused aloud.
Elsa’s specialty was terrestrial insertions, but Vitalis at night was a different world from anything she’d been prepared for. Even a training stint in the rare protected jungle plots in Africa couldn’t have prepared her for the raw menace of the jungle around her. The trees had trunks often wider than she was tall. Even though she was only 5’6”, they seemed huge. She saw plants that looked both succulent and dangerous, though the flowers were closed at night. Some even seemed to recoil as she neared them, as though they could sense her. She smirked at the prospect, but moved on quickly after suppressing a shiver that she was alone in an alien place.
Elsa felt the same soreness in her back that had plagued her for the last three screamer trips. She owed that to a rough landing followed by catching the tail end of a blown up aeroskimmer. Her armor had been compromised and her spine broken, but there was virtually nothing technology couldn’t overcome. Modern medicine could fix the damage, but the pains stayed longer as she got older.
She emerged into a small clearing. A river, easily two dozen feet across, crossed her path diagonally. The trench from the capsule had disappeared several minutes ago. She stayed hidden amongst some massive roots that created a small shelter under one of the mega-oaks. She smirked, wondering at the size of the acorns they might drop in the fall. If Vitalis had a fall, she couldn’t remember reading about the seasons of the planet.
The water moved smooth and swift but didn’t seem violent. She frowned and wished her vision extended beneath it. It would be easy enough to look under the surface, but she doubted the water was crystal clear — it was running too quickly for that. Instead she looked up, hoping for some sign of air support or a sign of what it was that had knocked her off course in the first place.
Dark shapes flitted across the nighttime sky, obscuring the stars in patches. She frowned and subvocalized commands to zoom in so she might get a better look at them. A gasp escaped her lips as she realized they were birds of some sort. Her rangefinder and their relative size combined to form an icy lump in the pit of her stomach — many were larger than her screamer!
“ Indigenous life forms,” she whispered, sinking back behind the tree. They were nocturnal hunters. She racked her memory for more details of the native life of Vitalis. She’d been focusing on the human need to explore Vitalis for potential medicinal and rejuvenative purposes. Her job had always involved people fighting people, exogenous life forms seldom, if ever, came into the picture. The simple fact was that humanity hadn’t run across much in the way of alien life. What had been encountered was fungus, bacteria, barely developed plant life, or a few species of very aquatic invertebrates. Vitalis had offered the first fully developed ecosystem not originating from Earth.
And the life, she now began to recall, was massive. Vitalis had been likened to a pristine Earth from millions of years ago, complete with enormous creatures not so dissimilar from Earth’s dinosaurs.
Elsa turned to stare at the winged beasts flying through the sky again. “Aw fuck,” she muttered, noticing for the first time the dark line that stretched across the sky below the birds. A quick check of her suits limited sensors confirmed that it was a cliff and it was nearly three hundred yards high. Her capsule had missed it, but that meant she was even further off course than she’d first estimated.