The Black Pod

The Black Pod

By Martin Wilsey

This is a work of fiction.
All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious.
Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.

The Black Pod

Copyright © 2015 by Martin
Wilsey

All rights reserved,
including rights to reproduce this book, or portions
thereof
, in any form.

Cover Art by Martin
Wilsey

For more
information:

Blog:
http://wilseymc.blogspot.com/

Web:
http://www.baytirus.com/

Email:
[email protected]

The Solstice 31
Saga:

Still Falling
(2015)

The Broken Cage
(2015)

Blood of the Scarecrow
(2016)

Short Stories:

The Outer Ring
(2015)

Kill Valerie Hume
(2015)

The Black Pod
(2015)

"When it began… I was just a
man."

--
Solstice 31 Incident Investigation Testimony Transcript:
SecTech Chief Anthony Adams, Senior Security Technology Specialist
on the
Ventura
.

<<<>>>

SecTech Chief Anthony
Adams witnessed, more than experienced, the destruction of
the
Ventura
and
the death of the crew. He watched missile after missile detonate
its nuclear payload and never felt so much as a vibration from
inside the Black Pod.

The pod was designed to
survive anything, even a direct strike from a nuclear bomb. It had
to survive. It held the story of the demise of the
Ventura
. That was the
Black Pod’s purpose. The hull was
Polycarbon, and made of a fiber more than a
meter thick. The internal power system was
comprised of dual dark matter reactors, and would last 200 years
without additional fuel.
The internal inertial dampeners were so powerful, Adams never
felt the initial blast.
There was no sense
of the three axis spin that the Black Pod was in, as
its
orbit decayed. It housed the
Ventura’s
main
data store and Central Artificial
Intelligence
SYstem
, CAISY.

The Chief’s eyes welled
with tears
a
s he watched via the external camera
array, as the plasma cannons hammered the life pods and
shuttles.

“
Box, I need a
status,
” Adams said, the
words
catching in his throat. At
his
command,
virtual computer screens opened all around the
dome. He sat in the center, in the single,
massive
command chair.
His fingers flashed across the
huge
curved control
console.

“
The
Ventura
has been struck with a total
of eleven Javelin nuclear missiles,” AI~CAISY said in a cautious
tone. “Automated re-entry systems are fully functional. Grav-plates
will be
activated
when we are 50 kilometers
from the surface.”

“
Caisy, how did this
happen?” There was despair in his voice. AI~CAISY knew Adams was
upset, because he didn’t use the nickname ‘Box’.

“
There was an automated
defense grid. It had stealth satellites with weapons platforms.
There was no warning, no hail, no radio challenge of any
kind.”

“
Did I ever tell you why I
call you ‘Box’?” Adams asked AI~CAISY.

“
No. It’s the primary
user’s privilege to call the AI anything he likes.”

“
Back home,
commercial
craft used to have a recorder called a Black Box.
It was the seed concept for the Black Pod. The same idea, except
for… me…” Adams sat in the command chair staring out at
nothing.

“
You call me Box and I
will call you Tony.” It sounded as if the AI had decided something.
“Tony, we are now in hostile environment survival mode. Passive
sensors only. No beacons. Besides, all the external antennas have
been burned off,” Box said as the dome view changed to external
simulated static positioning. Adams could see the virtual Black Pod
in the center of the virtual screen of the dome, tumbling end over
end. Inside it, however, he felt nothing. He didn’t even have
his
five-point
harness buckled. He never did.

“
What else?”

Box continued, “We are coming in
really steep. We have less than another orbit before we are down.
Entering the atmosphere in seven minutes.”

There was debris all
around them, moving at the same velocity and vector as they were.
“Hold off on the grav-plate and thrusters as long as possible. If
we want any choice at all where we set down, we will need all we’ve
got,” Adams said. The Black Pod was not a spaceship. It was even
less maneuverable than a lifeboat. It was an incredibly
dense
rock that was fitted with a large grav-plate so the builders
could move it. It could hit the planet without the grav-plate
activated and Adams would probably not even feel the impact because
of the powerful dampeners.

As they entered the upper
atmosphere, chunks of the
Ventura
surrounding him began to burn up. At 50
kilometers,
the thrusters halted the spin and oriented the
grav-plate towards the planet surface. As the pod
started
to slow, the rest of the pieces around him appeared to speed
ahead.

Long-range
optical sensors indicated
that they would land in a heavily forested area. Already he could
see the debris impacting the forest in great explosions. In a rapid
series of
decisions,
he navigated the pod toward
an area between two small, elongated lakes. At the final
moment,
he spotted a level clearing and guided the pod to it, landing
it expertly.

The forest was
ablaze
all around the clearing.

Adams stood to examine his new home.
The pod’s Heads Up Display (HUD) provided a view as though he were
standing on a platform ten meters across, his command chair and
console in the center.

“
Box, I want external
audio.”

The sound came in as a low
roar. The fires raged. Animals were fleeing the forest, into the
clearing, to escape the inferno. He could hear the birds crying out
in panic. He saw deer and foxes and bears. There
was
also some type of elk, and smaller animals of various
species.

“
So much like
Earth,
” he said out loud without meaning too.

“
Gravity is .89G and
the
atmosphere
varies from Earth less than one percent,” Box
confirmed. “The
animals
fleeing to the south will run
directly into another fire. This entire area will be engulfed in
less than a day. If they move to the lake in the
west,
they may have a chance.”

The
fire
was jumping rapidly from treetop to
treetop. Adams had thoughts of Hell. He considered cracking the
hatch and just walking out into it. It might be easier.

Then he saw her.

There was a little girl
perhaps ten years old stumbling out of the forest. She was about
200 meters away. She had some kind of animal, like a large dog,
with her that she leaned on for support.
Its shoulders were as high as hers.

“
Box, zoom in.” Before Box
could zoom all the way in, she disappeared in a dense cloud of
smoke that persisted for a full minute. By the time the wind
cleared it
away,
the girl was gone; only the
dog-like creature remained. Adams realized it was standing over
her, protecting her, or trying to nudge her awake.

It was not a dog. It was
a
broad-chested
beast the likes of which he had never seen
before, with a mane
like
a lion’s that wasn’t fur, but
rather feathers. It was a
reptile
. Mostly.

“
Box, open up!” A square
trapdoor opened directly behind the command chair. The ladder was
in fact part of the back-structure of the command chair, and Adams
slid all the way down to the next level without touching a rung. A
locker quickly gave up a survival pack and vest. He already had a
Glock
on
his belt and he grabbed an AR-79 out of a ready
rack. He ran down to the ground before the ramp was completely
deployed.

SecTech Adams had left
running to the younger people long ago. He regretted now the polite
refusals he had made to Worthington, Rand and Barcus to join them
on runs in the 2G outer ring of the
Ventura
. He did keep the gravity at
2Gs in the Black Pod as his one concession to fitness. The gravity
here, however, was light, and he ran
smoothly through the tall grass
.

He should have grabbed a
breather unit though. His lungs burned as the waves of smoke
billowed
over him. Eventually, he stopped running and had to lie down
in the grass to breathe the precious unpolluted air near the
ground.

When the smoke finally
cleared, he found he was just 10 meters away from the girl. The
beast had already seen him.
It’s ruff was up.
The mottled
gray feathers were trembling a warning. He could see that they
were
singed
in places. It was behaving like a giant
cat,
its cruel-looking
tail swishing side to side, revealing the creature’s
agitation.

Adams approached, his
assault rifle targeting the animal. It began to draw back
its
lips,
showing
teeth like steak knives,
serrated on the inside edge.

Just then the girl’s hand
reached up and touched
its
front leg. It was as if she had
switched it off. It completely ignored Adams and began licking the
girl’s sooty face with a large black tongue.

When Adams’ eyes met
hers
,
he didn’t know what to do. So he just let the
rifle swing to his back on the sling and waved for her to come with
him back to the safety of the pod. She started to get up and fell
again, her one
hand
never leaving the
beast.

She reached out to the Chief with her
other hand.

Suddenly, beyond her, he
could see another great cloud of smoke coming their way. Decision
made, he risked a
bite
from the beast. He
lifted her up in his
arms and ran. The
creature
ran alongside. The girl
extended an arm out to it in reassurance.

That’s when Tony saw her burns. Her
clothes had been half burned off. He knew his jostling must be
agony for her. They had covered maybe half the distance back to the
pod when he paused and gently set her down. She immediately cried
out in pain and rolled onto her belly.

He unslung his pack. As the beast
tried to lick her wounds, she screamed and pushed it away. It
whimpered like a pup even though the thing was huge. Adams had
never seen this species.

The
med
spray brought instant relief. The pain
was numbed, and the nanites would have the
second-degree
burns
completely
healed
in just a few hours. She was
able to stand before he was even done treating her.

She patted his shoulder.
Speaking rapidly in a language he didn’t understand, she pointed to
the beast. He realized it was also
severely
burned, even worse
than the girl.
There
was a scorched area on its right flank, and both its front paws
were burned horribly to the first joint.
Its muzzle was also
severely
blistered.