Here There Be Monsters
Posted on 03 Dec 2020 @ 7:47pm by Commander Calliope Zahn
Mission:
M1 - Emergence
Location: Obsidian, mountains
Timeline: MD 05 1615
1116 words - 2.2 OF Standard Post Measure
Driving was therapeutic. Sitting high off the ground in the driver's seat of Chief Debrov's custom rover, Calliope appreciated the thrumming and the intuition of shifting through the gear sets while leaning into the curves and bracing over the rough terrain. It wasn't long before the Science Outpost was long gone from her rear view mirror, obscured by the rock outcroppings and craggy volcanic formed mountain features. The "road" she was following had to be some kind of ancient lava flow, hardened over eons ago. She tried not to let an over active imagination consider outrunning an actual flow. Things had long since quieted down in the crust of Obsidian, after all, and the science station kept a close eye on seismic activity, just in case...
Calliope loved driving. She took every chance she could on away teams to assume the driver's seat. She tried not to resent it when she climbed the ranks and then had to allow the junior officers and pilots the pleasure. To make up for it, she had a few favorite racing holodeck programs that she thought would be worth revisiting. Too bad she hadn't brought a data chip with her music library along, she thought with disappointment as she veered back and forth on the path, avoiding obstructions that appeared to be loose mountain stone. The road needed some maintenance, perhaps. She looked nervously up hill, worried there might be more errant stone yet to join these ones on the ground.
The oversized specialized tires and reinforced shocks were able to take the beating of the ruthless terrain. Calliope admired Chief Debrov's custom work on the Rover. It certainly outclassed Admiral Indri's buggy by kelipates. "I wonder what he'd quote for a build of my own," she muttered as she switched gears again, flying along a rare straight-away and appreciating the view of the desert below. Calliope remembered to mind the nav computer as it sounded an alert of the upcoming terrain's hard turn and down shifted to gain some traction and control.
As she did she heard a different kind of roar. A new one. One she hadn't heard from the Rover's engine. In fact, it wasn't coming from the rover at all. She glanced out the window and spied a group of something like overgrown centipedes pouring down the mountainside. If her judgement of size and distance was accurate, they averaged twice the length of the rover, each one equipped with mandibles that looked not unlike a klingon weapons master had designed a can opener. She couldn't count their legs at a glance going at speed, but there had to be 10 or 12 each. The body segments were each armored in some sort of thick plating or shell material.
Small stones the hoard of hell-caterpillars had loosed from the mountain side above pelted the rover— a hail of warning.
Leading into the turn ahead, Calliope reached up and felt for the rifle to reassure herself. It was still there. Whatever good a pulse rifle shot or three would do her when an angry mutant caterpillar was ripping it's jaws through the rover's body... Maybe they weren't angry or after her. Maybe they were out for a family stroll. Maybe they'd just pass her by. Or not. The jist of Admiral Indri's warning about the deadly nature of Obsidian's surviving fauna replayed in her memory.
"Just keep going," she repeated Debrov's stern advice. Closing the distance while she slowed for the turn, the creatures were in her mirrors— every mirror. Every display, except directly ahead. The nearest one appeared to have four feelers on it's head like a feathered crown , and multiple compound eyes. Restraining herself from reacting reflexively, she tried not to gas it too soon for fear of spilling off the unconstrained mountain road and down the open bluff.
Hold. Hold... Easy... Calliope clenched her teeth in a snarl. She felt the drift of the rover on the obsidian glass road edging the cliffside.
Her nostrils flared as she timed out the accelerator at the earliest possible moment and put the terrors behind her, until they were completely out of view and she had to wonder if they'd been a desert nightmare, or a trick of the desert sun on her mind. What the hell were those, anyway? From above, Obsidian had looked so desolate. She wouldn't have thought it full of creatures. "Here there be monsters..." Calliope muttered to herself as she watched them diminish in the rear view.
Calliope parked the rover by a medical prefab that looked like it had been more permanent than the temporary shelter was intended to be. There was a sand dune covering one side of the wall and a dug out to get to the entrance. The desert had clearly shifted around the structure. She left her duty jacket with her hat and tried to air her uniform shirt by pinching it in the front and pealing it away from her skin. It was plastered almost entirely by sweat from the heat and the tension of the drive down the mountain. She was tempted to peal it off over her head and go on in her undershirt, but for fear of it giving someone the wrong impression of her.
As she approached the entrance she took note of the setting sun's light cutting around the mountains and then looked away again. "Right. Stop looking at Loki, Calliope." She reminded herself. She walked passed a line of vehicles... one of them looked suspiciously familiar and she noticed the basket still in the back. Feeling more than a little defiant, she checked around for any other souls and then reached in to the back seat, tilting the basket to see inside.
"Huh."
There was nothing substantial in it. Just a loose flaxen cloth and a small toy made of printed cloth scraps that looked comically not unlike one of the murder-centipedes she'd just outrun. It had bone carved buttons for eyes and they appeared amusingly crossed. "You're not so scary," Calliope told it while she was still trying to get her heart rate back in order. She returned the toy back to the basket and shook her head wondering why the Admiral had been so abrasively defensive about it. No doubt it had just been to make some kind of point with her.
Calliope steeled herself for the possibility she'd bump into the bitchy Admiral once again. The camp didn't look that expansive, after all. There was a double entrance, which was a smart way to manage climate control when you had limited generator capacity. Calliope let herself in and waited for her eyes adjust to the light inside...
