I staggered through the high wind over acid-smooth rock to the closest parachutist. It was Pagan. I was glad to see he was on his feet. He signalled towards the container. Both of us made our way there. The other three visible parachutists were doing likewise. Everyone was struggling against the wind.
Morag had disarmed the explosives on the container. Cat was there, her Bofors railgun at the ready. Mudge as well. Merle was missing. Brilliant, our native guide. The problem was we couldn’t use GPS because it would give away our position and allow Demiurge a way into our systems. We had detailed maps stored in our internal systems memories but they didn’t tell us where we were initially and all of Nightside looked the same. There didn’t seem to be any particularly geographical features.
The parachute signal flare was a welcome if brief sight as the wind pulled it away almost immediately. I guessed that Merle had determined that there was nobody on the surface nearby before firing it. Unless it was a trap. We picked up the container and headed for where the flare had been fired.
I have to admit I hadn’t wanted to help with the container. In fact I would have been quite pleased to blow it up. Already all my muscles ached, but we didn’t know when we were going to get a chance to resupply. We also didn’t know if Merle’s caches had been compromised since he’d last been in-country. Pagan, Cat and Mudge had the other corners. This meant that Morag was on point. I would have preferred someone with more experience but she just simply didn’t have the enhancements to help with the cylinder. I was pretty impressed she was still moving, albeit with difficulty, carrying all the gear she was. Fucking Merle.
I’ve done some miserable fucking tabs in my life. The Brecon Beacons had been a piece of piss after growing up in the Highlands. Wading in full load through the mud and the constant driving rain of Sirius had been pretty shit. However this tab was just a long streak of misery. Merle had said that given time we’d acclimatise; Cat had said that acclimatisation was not the same as getting used to it. That security job that Calum had mentioned was starting to look very attractive now.
It was Pagan who folded first. To his credit I was at the point where everything was screaming in agony and I was taking life one deeply, fucking painful step at a time. Still I’d thought it would be Mudge. More and more I was respecting his better-living-through-chemistry ethos. Pagan stumbled and fell and nearly took us all down with him. We put the container down. I didn’t have the energy to help him up. I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to pick the container up again. Inside the environmental suit I was soaked through to my inertial armour with sweat.
Morag slung her laser carbine and managed to help Pagan up. She signalled for him to take point. Then she moved to his position on the container. I signalled negative. She ignored me. I was for leaving the container there but we picked it up again.
So far I wasn’t enjoying this planet. I was even starting to miss Dog 4’s mud.
Merle lit up a hand-held signalling flare to guide us in. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been walking. It had seemed like a very long, painful time. We were getting closer to the Twilight Strip, the habitable zone between the burn of Dayside and the cold of Nightside.
We were starting to see scrubby worm-like tubular plants, their roots burrowing into the corrosion-smoothed rock canyons. There they were sheltered from the worst effects of the wind. Merle had briefed us that these plants were a symbiotic species that lived on infrared radiation from the small red sun and bacteria that fed on the hydrogen sulphide present in the atmosphere.
We got to Merle as he was tucking the used flare back into his webbing. He pointed down into a small cave opening and then relieved Mudge on the container. Pagan took point with Mudge bringing up our rear as we headed into the cave mouth. Just before we left the surface I caught a glimpse of Lalande over the horizon. It looked red, huge and close, somehow hellish.
I wasn’t sure whether it was a natural tunnel that we followed down into the rock, but it was smooth, somehow organic. It looked like blackened bone in the light from our helmet-mounted lamps and the torches clipped to Mudge and Pagan’s weapons.
We seemed to be heading towards black light, an ultraviolet light source. We stopped and waited while Pagan scouted ahead. After what seemed like a very long time he came back and gestured us forward. Even through the anonymity of an environment suit I could see that he was ready to drop from fatigue. We needed to rest soon but the surface hadn’t been the place to do it.
I was working on automatic now as I picked up that fucking container again and we headed down.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but despite the briefings and vizzes I still wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of the cavern. We were huddled in a tunnel mouth in the ceiling of a chamber looking down at a two-mile drop. The cavern floor was a dense carpet of genetically modified fern and what looked like giant spider plants. There were also ghostwood trees — wide but low and stunted, radiating out like ancient wagon wheels — genetically modified versions of the kauri tree indigenous to New Zealand. In the high-G environment they produced dense wood that was incredibly strong but difficult to cut and work. They were grown from seeds imported from Earth and had been designed to help with the terraforming process. The huge UV strip lights that ran across the cavern ceiling provided the plants with energy and bathed the whole chamber in the visible violet light from that part of the spectrum.
Acidic salt-ice glaciers had crawled through the belly of this planet like worms aeons ago. As they receded back into Nightside, subject to the vagaries of the planet’s unpredictable geothermal activity, they had left in their wake smooth caverns like this that went on as far as the eye could see.
The walls of the cavern were smooth and again reminded me of weather-eroded bone, but down here the clearly defined different rock strata were multihued and showed in stripes. However, the walls and much of the visible floor of the cavern showed extensive damage. The rock had been scored, burned and heavily cratered. Large areas of the genetically modified plant life had been trampled and ripped up — I assumed by fighting and the movement of large bodies of human and presumably Their troops. Parts of the rock were deformed where plasma strikes had made it run like lava before it had cooled and solidified.
Despite the war damage and the artificial violet light giving it an unreal feeling, like a London art club, the cavern was strangely beautiful. Or at least that was what I thought until I took my helmet off. The environment suit’s sensors had advised me that it was okay to try the air. They fucking lied. I could breathe, if you could call it that, but the atmosphere was greasy, acrid. It smelled of rotten eggs and every breath tasted like licking a battery.
I was covered in sweat from head to foot and steamed in the frigid but manageably cold air. The others were removing their helmets as well. All of us were gasping for breath, which, filter or no filter, was making our lungs burn.
We all looked different now. Just before the drop we’d injected our faces with a morphing compound that allowed us to change the look of our features to a degree. We were heading into what we expected to be a near-total-surveillance environment and needed to avoid being identified by the sophisticated facial feature recognition software that Demiurge was bound to be using.
The others all looked like themselves only slightly skewed. We’d also made other cosmetic changes. Changed hair colours, changed hairstyles where possible. Mudge didn’t look right with brown hair and he was going to have to wear glasses all the time to cover his camera lens eyes. I’d thought Pagan was going to cry when he’d cut off his ginger dreadlocks.