Excelsior (23 page)

“Tsunamis are usually caused by earthquakes,” Stone said. “I guess we might have to call them something else here… Wonderquakes?”

“Sounds like a breakfast cereal,” Alexander replied.

“Let’s just call them tremors. Anyway, if there’s seismic activity, that means plate tectonics, which in turn means volcanic activity, island formation, mountains, sea floor trenches, and so on. We might find a lot of the same geological features as Earth.”

“Sounds like you have some theories to work on already,” Alexander said as he took a cautious bite of a protein stick. Thankfully it tasted better than it smelled.

“If there’s water damage on the trees, I think it’s safe to say we need to find a new camp site,” Korbin said. “We don’t want a tsunami or a flood to come crashing over us while we’re sleeping.”

“Good point,” Alexander said. “We’ll tell the other shuttle captains as soon as we’re done eating.” He took another bite of his rations. A veggie stick this time. It tasted like spinach-flavored cardboard.

His comm crackled, and Alexander heard Seth Ryder’s voice. He was the pilot of Shuttle Two. “Captain… there’s something happening out here.”

“Out where? You’re supposed to be in your shuttle eating.”

“We finished already, sir.”

“Where are you?”

“On the beach. Listen, sir…”

All he heard was static. “I don’t hear anything, Ryder.”

“Exactly, no waves, because the water isn’t here anymore.”

“The tide’s probably going out. Vasquez was just talking about how two moons could mean stronger tides.”

“Maybe,” Ryder said. “But this ain’t like any tide I’ve ever seen. The water’s runnin’ away from us faster than we can chase it.”

Alexander saw Vasquez suddenly sit up straight. “How long has it been doing that?” she asked over the same comm channel.

“About ten, twenty seconds,” Ryder replied.

“You need to get out of there now!”

“What?”

“Run! Get back to your shuttle and take off ASAP.”

“Yes, ma’am… Ryder out.”

“What’s going on Vasquez?”

She bounced to her feet and ran toward the cockpit. “Tell the other shuttles to take off!”

Stone hurried after her, already on the comms telling the other shuttles to lift off. They all crowded into the cockpit and took their seats. Alexander’s mind raced, trying to come up with an explanation for the way Vasquez and Stone were behaving.

“What’s going on?” McAdams asked.

Lieutenant Stone was too busy cold-starting the shuttle’s engines to reply.

“There’s a tsunami coming,” Vasquez replied, her brown eyes wide.

 

Chapter 20

“A tsunami?” Alexander asked, frowning. “How do you know?”

“Sometimes the water runs out before a tsunami hits. That’s what Ryder was seeing.”

“You sure it’s not just the tide?” Alexander asked.

“No tide is that fast, not even with two moons. We’ve got a minute or two before that wave hits. Stone, you need to hurry.”

“I’m going as fast as I can!” he snapped.

Alexander looked out the side window and saw Seth Ryder and Max Carter come racing up the beach. They piled into Shuttle Two’s airlock, and the doors slid shut behind them.

“They’re not going to make it…” Vasquez warned, her voice a whisper.

“Oh, shit…” Stone said.

Alexander saw what had made him swear. A black wall of water was racing toward them, shimmering in the moonlight, and already curling at the top.

“Come on, Stone! Take off!” Vasquez screamed.

He was too busy to reply.

“We’re not going to make it either,” Korbin said.

Alexander blinked, and in that time the water had all but reached them. Tsunami’s were fast.

Suddenly the shuttle lurched and hovered straight up. Spray sprinkled the canopy and windows. Two of the other three shuttles rose beside them.

“Hang on!” Stone said. He pulled up and ignited the thrusters at full burn. The acceleration pinned them to their chairs. Then the wave crashed and went surging up the beach. Water splashed over them, washing the windows clean. Alexander imagined the water weighing them down and sucking them under, but a split second later they were through and racing toward the stars. Stone leveled out and looped back around to look for Shuttle Two, but it was nowhere in sight.

Stone keyed the comms. “Report in,” he said.

Shuttles Three through Six checked in, but Two was dead silent. No one said anything. Stone and the other shuttles swept their landing lights over the surging black water, but nothing came bobbing up to the surface. Shuttle Two was gone. By now the water was rolling them along the ground, slamming them into tree trunks and cracking them open on rocks.

Alexander watched the trees bending. The smaller ones got sucked under, while the tallest ones weathered the assault just as they probably had a thousand times before. More water damage to add to their trunks.

“Fuck!” Stone said. “Why didn’t he stay in his shuttle?”

“What are the odds…” Korbin whispered. “We were just talking about earthquakes and tsunamis, and then one hits us.”

“If they had time to strap in, they might still survive, even if they’re trapped under the water,” Alexander said. “Shuttles are armored and airtight.”

“I don’t know,” Stone replied. “They’re going to take one hell of a beating.”

“We can’t leave until we know for sure,” Alexander said.

“How long can we hover before we run out of fuel?” Vasquez asked.

“A long time, but we should rather save our fuel.”

“We’re not going to be able to effect a rescue until the water subsides anyway,” Vasquez added.

Alexander rounded on her. “You want to leave them here?”

“For now. Tsunamis aren’t just one wave. They’re a series of waves, and it could be hours, even days, before the water subsides. We can’t do anything for them right now.”

“She’s right,” Stone said. “We need to find higher ground and start setting up camp. We’ll come back and look for them as soon as we can.”

Alexander sighed. “All right. Let’s go.”

*

“Over there,” Stone pointed to the elevation map on the shuttle’s main holo display. The map was compiled from orbital imagery taken by the Lincoln. It showed a line of cliffs running along the coast.

“Elevation?” Alexander asked.

“Around a hundred meters.”

“How big was that tsunami?”

“About twenty. It would take one hell of a wave to reach us up there,” Stone replied.

“All right. Set us down.”

The landing was smooth. Nothing much to see out the viewports until the shuttle hovered down close enough to the ground that its landing lights peeled away the shadows. Alexander saw they were setting down in a field of red grass. A field of blood. It was a painful reminder of the crewmates they’d left behind. For all anyone knew Max and Ryder were already dead, but they could also be using debris as a life raft while the receding floodwaters took them out to sea.

Alexander frowned and listened as Stone checked in with the other three shuttle pilots. A minute later the other shuttles landed around theirs. As the noisy roar of the engines faded to silence, everyone unbuckled and made their way to the cargo hold. No one said a word.

Stone sealed the door to the cockpit and opened the inner doors of the rear airlock so they could begin loading it with cargo crates. It was hard, sweaty work. Once the airlock was full they all piled in with the cargo and shut the inner doors. Then Stone cycled the outer doors open. After a few moments, a green light went on above the outer doors and they swished open. Then Cardinal and Stone climbed down while Alexander, McAdams, and Korbin passed crates to them.

They had to repeat the process three times to completely unload the shuttle. Then came the job of unpacking the hab modules and inflating them. The shuttles had landed in a semi-circular formation with the open end facing the cliffs and the closed end toward the jungle. Just in case.

He eyed the jungle, imagining the plants in there moving restlessly, their branches writhing like tentacles—or snakes. Alexander shivered.

He hated snakes.

Commander Korbin walked up to him. “They’ll be okay, sir.”

Alexander frowned. She’d noticed him gazing distractedly into the jungle and assumed he was wrestling with some kind of survivor’s guilt. Now he felt doubly guilty for worrying about more trivial things instead.

“I hope so,” he said, watching as McAdams tried to move a fuel cell generator five times her size. It was on wheels, but in the knee-high grass those wheels were digging in.

There came a heavy clanking and thudding sound and Alexander turned to see a jungle-colored Cheetah assault mech come stomping up to them. The cockpit was lit up with the predominantly blue glow of holoscreens. Lieutenant Stone grinned down on them. The mechanized biped reached out and under the generator with the wide flat fingers of its hands held straight like the tongs of a forklift.

“Where do you want it?” Stone asked over the Cheetah’s external speakers as he picked up the generator.

“Over there,” McAdams replied. She pointed to a half-assembled hab module and Stone stomped up to it, making the ground shake with every step.

Alexander turned to Korbin. “Come on, we better make ourselves useful,” he said. “The sooner we get everything set up, the sooner we can go back and look for Ryder and Max.” He hurried over to a stack of cargo crates where Vasquez was struggling to unpack another hab module all by herself. Korbin followed him there.

It took almost four hours of hard, sweaty work to get all the hab modules assembled. When they were done, what they had was a cluster of white, dome-shaped tents, otherwise known as habitation modules, illuminated from within and puffed up with air. The air regulators and electrical generators were hooked up and running. All of the remaining supplies were stacked high inside the habs, still packed inside their crates.

Sweat trickled in an icy line down Alexander’s back, causing a maddening itch. He longed to peel out of his suit and breathe air that wasn’t perfumed with his own BO, but first they had to sterilize the habs to make sure that no alien organisms would survive to infect them when they finally did get a chance to take off their pressure suits. Doctor Crespin stood with McAdams beside one of the air regulators, discussing what conditions alien microbes and hitchhiking insects were least likely to survive.

“We’re on an alien planet,” Crespin said, “so speculating about what may or may not kill alien organisms, whose conditions for survival are still unknown to us, is a waste of effort. All we can do is limit the risk.”

“Agreed,” McAdams replied.

Alexander left them to it. He noticed the rest of the crew was at a loose end, standing around waiting, so he ordered them back to the shuttles to get some sleep. He didn’t see Lieutenant Stone anywhere, but after asking a few crew members about his whereabouts, Vasquez told him where to look.

“He’s out in a Cheetah watching the perimeter.”

“Thanks. Go get some sleep, Vasquez.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander walked past the shuttles, grimacing as he left the comforting glow of their landing lights. The red grass turned black with the night. He spent a moment looking for Stone with his suit’s sensors. His HUD highlighted a large shadow standing halfway between the shuttles and the trees.

“Lieutenant Stone,” Alexander said, making comms contact as he approached.

“Hey there, Captain.”

“You see anything interesting out there?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I thought I saw something moving on infrared, but it was only there for a second.”

“Well, apparently the trees move, so I wouldn’t get too worried.”

“I don’t think it was a tree.”

“Why not?”

“The air is down to four degrees. Ground is close to that—black and purple on infrared. The jungle traps heat, so it’s one big wall of blue at around ten degrees. Any warm-blooded animal would run a lot hotter than that, making it stand out in green, yellow, or red. Whatever I saw was in that spectrum, and it was big.”