Chapter One

Plan Of Action

A series by Trent Anderson

Episode 1:

Ghost Town

*** The following contains strong profanity. Reader discretion is advized ***

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“Space is cold; unforgiving. It never lets you rest.” An asteroid shot past the window. Jared looked out of the paneless frame and tried to follow the asteroid as it whizzed past the ship. The flying rock slowly disappeared, hurtling to infinity. It was in motion, and it would stay in motion until something stopped it.

“You always have to be on your guard,” Jared said. “But it’s so beautiful. I just couldn’t resist it… Like I always say: beauty can be found anywhere… you just need to look for it.”

The blue rings around a purple planet seemed to be moving as the ship flew closer to them. “It’d be so much prettier with color,” Jared whispered to himself. The audio recorder in front of him beeped, showing that it had a low battery. It was the only recorder he had. The government had issued one handheld recorder for their trip. Apparently, that was supposed to remain intact the entire way.

The red light blinked on and off. The transition was so smooth and calm. Jared couldn’t take his eyes off it. The red was the only color he’d seen in eight months and he intended to cherish it. It wasn’t often that the battery ran low.

“I’m attracted to beauty,” he told the red light. “That’s just who I am.” His gaze shifted to the window again. Suddenly, everything around him looked so colorless. The planet was grey, the rings were grey. But the red light blinked again. Jared’s eyes found themselves at it a second time.

Jared reached forward, locating the touchscreen in front of him. The blue backlight cast a glow on his face as two fingers pulled down a pair of columns. Slowly, yet suddenly at the same time, the all-too familiar hum on the engines dropped to mere silence.

The silence was the worst part. It was so loud… yet so quiet. He could never hear it… yet he knew he could. It was never there… but it was always there.

Even as the ever-present “silence” faded… there was yet another layer of the same nothingness that took over.

Cherishing the silence just as he cherished the red light on the recorder, Jared delayed it as long as possible. But all things must come to an end, whether good or bad.

His fingers subconsciously pulled the columns below the bar that stood at a virtual ground level. Inertia would continue to carry the ship forward even if the engine was off. Again, the tiresome hum picked up as the engines reversed. Jared kept the bars below the terrainnous line until the ship was completely still in space. And still it would remain, until something moved it.

The same hand that pulled the bars down reached over a few inches on the control pad and pushed a computer generated switch to “idle”. If the engine was shut down for too long, it would turn off altogether and the Mach disk would be ruined. It floated on a BlueRibbon in the middle of the engine. A very delicate piece, but vital to the movement of the ship outside of a planet’s atmosphere.

“This is our home… for now, at least.” Jared leaned back in his chair again. He looked up on the control board again and found the clock. Large white numbers changed every second on the farthest right section. They kept going up and up until finally, when the nine was about to explode, the section to the left of flipped up and the second counter reset.

A beeping sound suddenly burst from the speakers. Jared had heard it many, many times before. It was the clock which informed him that his shift was up and that he could go to sleep in the back room. He rarely ever slept, though. It was their two hundred and forty-eighth day in space; he had heard that beeping sound nearly 500 times: once in the morning to wake him up, once in the evening to wake Eric up.

“We’ve been on the lookout ever since day one,” he continued, “But we haven’t seen anything yet…” He waited a few seconds, expecting his partner to come out and take over. “Uh… I should probably recap our entire purpose here… just for sanity’s sake,” he said. “The government on Earth sent us out to find habitable planets outside of our solar system… and… well, we’re supposed to find some place nice to colonize and head back to tell them.”

The gray doors behind him slid open, sending the sound of pressurized motors through the cabin.

“That’s why I’m doing this now,” he finished.

“What happened while I was out?” Eric asked as he rubbed his face with one hand and sat down in the second chair. The man’s beard was freshly trimmed, but it was apparent he hadn’t had his morning’s coffee. Well… you could hardly call it “coffee”. It was a sad mixture of a dirt-like substance and lukewarm water. It didn’t taste anything like the strong brew of coffeehouses on Earth; hardly fit for a man with Eric’s muscular physic.

“Not much,” Jared said. “That looked interesting… right there.” He pointed out the window as Eric tried to locate whatever it was Jared had stopped for.

“That cluster of planets?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me see if I can pull it up on the viewfinder.” Eric rolled his chair over to what looked like a pair of binoculars attached to the control panel. He looked in, rotated several knobs on the side and finally found the beautiful cluster of planets.

“We’ve been coming up on it since yesterday,” Jared said.

“It’s magnificent,” Eric said in awe. It didn’t matter that the planets didn’t have any color. It was still beautiful. “Here,” Eric touched the base of the viewfinder and pulled it to the more extensive screen in the middle of the control panel.

The picture immediately fit to screen; a much larger image than the one seen looking out the window appeared before them. The automatic color-grading system replaced the numerous grey and white planets with vibrant shades. Suddenly, what was once a white planet became a deep purple; and a black ring became a red swirl. What looked like a dust cloud around the cluster was now evident.

“Interesting,” Eric said. Jared looked up at him, not sure what to think. It was hard to discern what Eric meant when he said things like that. It wasn’t just occasionally when he was that descriptive. It happened all the time. Jared could never tell what Eric was thinking. He figured that the best thing to do was to leave him alone. If Eric wanted to say something he would come right out and say it. “Let’s take her in,” he finished.

Normally, Jared would just ignore it and do as Eric said, but he couldn’t take that chance at the moment. If Eric were the captain, that would be a different story. But at the moment, both of them were the same rank. Jared eyed him silently.

“Take her in,” Eric commanded.

“We don’t even know what’s down there,” Jared pointed out. “We can’t just go in.”

“That’s why we’re here, Jared. That’s why we’re here…”

He gave in and fired the engines up. Eric was in a rare mood, how long he would stay that way remained a mystery. The hum of plasma jets returned to the room as Jared steered the ship into the cluster.

“That one-” Eric highlighted one of the larger, blue planets near the center of the group. “Land us on that one.”

Jared copied the information to his control panel and prepared to land. The ship did have an auto-pilot landing system, but Jared preferred to control the ship on his own. The thought of his life in a computer’s hands didn’t sound too good to him.

“Scanning for habitable environments,” Eric said.

“Got anything?”

“Jared… I’m going to need you to bring us around the edge as we get closer.”

Jared’s hand shot to a black joystick on the right side of the console while his left hand controlled the engines. He locked his elbow in and steered with his upper body, just like the Academy had trained him to do.

The shuttle glided around in a slow circle as Eric scanned it. Finally, the ship’s sensors got a hold of something, allowing Eric to survey the array of planets and their various moons. “Jared, look,” he said after a minute.

“What is it?”

“Planet B. The blue one,” he said.

He touched a few controls in front of him to stabilize the ship, then rolled over to the large screen.

He stood over the view screen and noticed that the computer had labeled all of the planets with letters. Floating annotations were seemingly attached to the balls as the ship passed by them, giving them the appearance of movement. The friendly group of balls in space passed over and around each other in a delicate dance.

“What about it?” Jared asked, a bit confused that Eric would just point out a random planet to him. “It’s blue,” he agreed.

“More than that. Look closer.”

Jared placed two fingers on the planet and pulled them out, magnifying the point selected. He couldn’t see much except clouds over the ocean. Occasionally when the clouds broke or cleared slightly, he would get a glimpse of what was underneath.

“Wait for it,” Eric warned. “Wait… There!”

There was a sudden hole in the white covering, revealing what appeared to be a series of black pipes beneath it. “Is that-?”

“Is it?” Eric asked. They held eye contact for a minute; neither spoke a word.

“We need to get a closer look at this.” Jared rolled his chair back over to his panel and started typing on the touchscreen. He took hold of the joystick again and tuned the engines to atmospheric conditions. “Bringing us in now,” Jared said as he tilted the ship towards the surface of the planet and then level out, directly above the ground.

“Set us in standard orbit,” Eric ordered.

“This is as close as I can get. If we go in any further we’ll be in the atmosphere,” Jared said.

“Then get us in the atmosphere!” Eric snapped.

Jared sighed as he tilted the nose in and let the planet’s gravity take control.

The months of smooth flying across the solar system suddenly came to an end as the ship started shaking violently. “I hope you realize we can't get back out,” Jared explained. “Once we're in we'll have to land.”

“I realize that, now get us down there.”

“Alright,” Jared said shortly. “We’re going down.”

Eric’s eyes remained inside of the viewfinder. “It’s beautiful,” he said again.

“What do you see?” Jared asked, the whole time keeping his eyes on the screen in front of him, which now displayed a projection of the planet in relation to the ship.

“Wh-” he cut himself off. Jared waited for him to finish… “S**t,” Eric said.

“What?” Jared asked. No answer. “Eric! What is it? Eric!”

“Shut up,” he snapped. “Give me a second.”

Jared waited anxiously as the shuttle’s vibrations continued to worsen. After a good amount of time had passed, he couldn’t stand it any longer. “What is it?”

“Jared…” Eric swallowed. He didn’t continue.

Jared reached out with one hand and switched the view screen to magnify what the viewfinder was displaying. His heart jumped at the sight of it. “Eric… there’s more than just something down there. That’s a city.”

Eric pulled away from the viewfinder. “F**k,” he cursed. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“No, this is good,” Jared said.

“How is this good?” Eric yelled.

“This is what we were supposed to do,” Jared said. “This is exactly what’s supposed to happen.” He was already shaking, and considering that his hand was on the joystick it didn’t help much with the turbulence they were taking from the planet.

“No, we were sent to find habitable environments!”

“If there’s life down there it’s obviously habitable.”

“For them at least.” Eric returned to the viewfinder and looked in. He was silent again. Eric turned to the larger screen in the middle of the console.

“We should be breaking through the cloud covering right now,” Jared said. “Tell me what you see.”

Eric maintained a stone cold face as he stared at the view screen. He clearly wasn’t happy with Jared telling him what to do but he didn’t let it go anywhere. The white foam that had obstructed their view of the planet before was now gone. “They look pretty advanced,” Eric said reluctantly as he scanned the surface. “It’s got a lot of structures and buildings. They look like skyscrapers from Earth.”

Finally, Jared couldn’t take it any longer. “Here, take the stick,” he said, standing up and moving over to the screen.

“Fine,” Eric said as Jared crowded his space. He sat down at the console and took the stick. Instantly, the ship leveled out and flew smoothly, tilting side to side slightly as they glided down to the ground.

Jared decreased the size of the image as they moved closer. The shuttle’s camera was located directly on the bottom so they could fly over any planet and have an image to go off of. Jared could see a yellow field not far below them. They should have been touching the ground any second.

“Coming down…” Eric said. “10 kilometers… 5… 3… landing now…” He pulled a lever back. A grinding sound reached their ears as the flap protracted and pushed the air over the small wings.

Suddenly, a large a very loud crashing sound filled Jared’s mind. It was all he could hear for what felt like an eternity.

In an instant, the sound was gone and all Jared could hear was the sound of steam pouring out of a vent. A few drops of fluid here and there, but the steam was abundantly apparent. In a matter of seconds, the temperature of the cabin had risen insurmountably.

Drops of sweat poured off his forehead. Jared needed to get out of there quickly. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but he could tell that it was bad. Now if he could only figure out how to move his arms. Jared lifted his head as best he could and looked at the rest of his body.

A large sheet of metal from the ship had collapsed on him, restricting him to one spot. He struggled to break free, but found it useless. His head fell back and he looked at the ceiling. Smoke was rising from behind him and cluttering the top of the ship.

“Eric,” he croaked. He heard coughing from his right side and tilted his head to get a view of Eric. He was kneeling down, apparently recovering from the crash. He coughed and stood up again. He staggered over to Jared and knelt down beside him, putting his hands under the metal.

“On three,” he said. “One… two… three!”

The moment the last number came out his mouth, Eric put all of his strength into lifting the piece of metal off of Jared. The sheet of metal rose up six inches or so and Jared managed to scramble from beneath it.

Eric let go of the sheet as soon as Jared was clear and then it drop. Jared didn’t have much of an idea of how heavy the sheet was until he heard it slap the floor of the crashed shuttle.

Jared stumbled over to an emergency unit in the side of the ship and opened it, grabbing a backpack. “What was that?” he asked.

“Rough landing,” Eric answered as he grabbed his own backpack. “You’re fine.”

“That was more than a rough landing,” Jared said.

Eric slipped the pack over both arms and moved to the door. Luckily, a quick-release lever was left in clear view. Eric pulled it and the door opened. He pushed it further and stumbled out, reveling in the glory of fresh air.

Fresh air.

The thought that had, for so long, been buried in the back of his mind, was finally real. It was impossible. The planet they had crash landed on was capable of supporting life. That meant the ship’s computer was correct when it had classified the planet as a class D.

“Jared,” Eric said.

“I can breathe…”

“Me too.”

Eric stood up and surveyed the crash site of the shuttle, only feet away from them. It was upside down and looked like it had flipped several times until it finally came to a halt nearly a hundred feet from where it first touched down.

“Come on,” he told Jared. “Let’s get across this field before someone comes to find out who crashed on their planet.”

Jared tried to stand up, but found that it took too many muscles. He reverted to kneeling instead. He looked to the pile of ship metal behind him, then forward. His eyes found a mark on the horizon, just over the hill. It looked like a point of some kind, like a tower. “What’s that?” He asked himself more than Eric, but his partner saw fit to answer him.

“I guess it’s part of the city we saw.” Eric walked up to the smoking crash and moved some pieces with his hands. No doubt they were hot, but he didn’t mind. He was looking for something.

Jared stood up to get a better look of whatever it was over the hill. “We need a P.A. in case we run into something out here.”

“What did you have in mind?” Eric asked him.

“I don’t know,” Jared wondered. “We don’t have any weapons…”

“I doubt we could hold off against a people with plasma rifles,” he scoffed.

“We don’t even know if there are people here,” Jared argued.

“Interesting theory,” Eric stepped back from the crashed ship. “A city with skyscrapers… but no one around to tell us who built them.”

Jared knew he was defeated. He could try to keep on arguing but it wouldn’t get him anywhere. The pack on his shoulders was ill-placed. He re-shifted the straps with his hands and bumped it further up on his neck.

“There’s nothing left in this s**t-pile,” Eric sighed. He looked around. “We should make camp here. There’s a hill over there, and clear plains on the other three sides. If anyone tries to attack we could fight them off and still have some place to run to.”

Jared shook his head in disappointment. “You know what, Eric? You can stay here and prepare for a fight but I’m going into the city and finding out what’s going on here.” He took off in the direction of the hill.

“Jared. Stop. Jared!” Eric yelled.

“What?” he whipped around.

“We stay together,” Eric said. “We don’t separate.”

“I’m going in there whether you’re coming or not, Eric,” Jared said. “Make up your mind.”

Eric sighed. “We need to stay together. If they try to kill us we need to make a stand together. On our own we’re just that much weaker.” Jared could see a bit of reason in Eric’s argument. “There’s no point in splitting up. The ship’s destroyed and we can’t get out of here.”

“That’s what you need to realize,” Jared said. “The ship’s destroyed…”

Eric was still hesitant. His expression maintained the same skeptical look. “Fine…” Eric picked up his pack, which he had set down a minute before, and set it on his shoulders.

The walked on and slowly, but surely, the city came into view below them.