Castaway Planet

Galactic Calendar 259872/ 2000 [ Sol Year 4387/ Day 154 of 365. Sol standard year]

Days after of Crash landing/ 2

Uninhabited Island / Fallen Corporate Fighter

Galactic Standard Time / 1230

Al smiled as he climbed up the vines, his eyes on his goal. If everything had worked right, then he would be able to pull out the components in one go. If not, it might take a minute or two, and with the sounds around that might be time they didn’t have.

As he climbed he spared a glance at the others on the ground. Jinn was right where he helped Al up the vine, right the fighter, ready to attack anything that might come at them. Sara, Paige, and Racha were all a few feet away, looking out of their little half-circle. He hoped that those other spiders stayed away, but he didn’t know what to expect from this planet.

He grabbed for a vine with his free hand and gave a small pull and smiled at the results. Good, it seemed strong enough for his weight. As he drew nearer to his goal, he heard a strange sound and looked up. Ahead of him, right against the very section he needed to take off was a large green insect. It was a good foot long and had a long stinger mouth. On its back was a set of four clear butterfly-like wings with red patterns on them.

It raised its wings and he grinned at it, both of them not moving or making a sound. After a few seconds, the insect speared a vine to their right and seemed to drain the life from it. As it did so its wings started to glow white and once it was done it flew away, going up and behind the crashed ship.

Al stared at the dead vine, moving his hand towards it and turning it to dust at his touch! As it floated away on the wind, Al looked from where it had been to his vine. He swallowed as he looked up where the insect had gone. He picked up his speed, climbing faster until he reached his goal.

He looked at the latch and with his free hand he opened it, revealing a silver sphere within. Al grinned and looked back down, a smile forming on his face. “Found it! Just give me a minute!”

As everyone turned to look at him, he felt a small spark of joy as he looked down.

“Sure that’s how long you’ll need Al?” Jinn called up and Al laughed before replying, raising his head.

“Yeah! I passed my zero-g repair course and… SPIDERS!” Al cried up as he pointed

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Racha turned and saw three of the smaller red spiders moving towards them. She reacted without a thought, firing her pistol at them. As Jin, Sara, and Paige joined in, the spiders were killed in an instant.

Racha looked at the three spiders and felt a flash of fear. She knew this tactic, they were scouts. And if they were smart enough to send out scouts, then were they smart enough to…!

“Watch the sides! Al finish up fast!” Racha barked out as she started to pan her gun around. She was to find anything that might show a spider coming at them, she didn't think the attack was over.

“GOT IT!” Al called out from above.

Racha tried not to let anything send her down a black hole, she had to keep her attention in the now. But it was harder than she tried not to, the more she thought about it.

If the fighter behind them was that old, that created so many problems for them. The area the Cooperate Rebellion happened in was hundreds of lightyears away. And then there was the age, it had been hundreds of years, and still this planet was unknown! That was impossible as far as she knew! The Federation always looked through each lightyear they colonized hard, that was routine. The directive was to find everything in their new space, all to keep from being attacked from behind! The Service even had watcher stations around possible worm-holes based on local legends. They should have found this planet by now, at least based on where the Spirit had been!

The only explanation was that something was blocking tech from finding it. Then there might be even more ships that crashed here. And if that was true then maybe the crashed ships like this one were the result of something here too. And if it was at least a few hundred years old, it had to be older. And that meant the ‘Unknown War’ was more than a possibility. And that meant Ruins, the strange complexes with science beyond what the Federation thought was possible, science that was like magic.

It made sense if that was part of why they crashed. The public only knew about the ‘safest’ Ruins. Like the one on that vacation planet, no one could get pregnant there so the nightlife was something. Or that one near the core, every plant that fifty miles around it had harvests in weeks instead of months. Places like that were seen as places to try and study the science of extent races, and books were written about them, but never the hidden ones.

The Federation never let the really dangerous ones become public knowledge. There were already cults that worshiped the races that created the Ruins, let them know about all of them? Like the one in the center of the Salor Nebula. It had a laser that could burn a hole through the hull of their strongest ship armor. Or the one on that death world, now that was a nightmare! They still didn't understand how the shield around the planet reflected all laser based weapons! And that wasn’t talking about how the creatures there seemed to track down any range weapons above muscle powered.

To put it simply, the Service called Ruins ‘beyond’ known science.

“Any idea if we should expect more of them?” Sara asked and Racha looked at her.

“Maybe, look. Just keep watching your side, we need to get moving towards the shore as fast as Al comes down,” Racha said and Sara nodded.

“Don’t worry, I won’t let you down!” Sara exclaimed and Racha nodded.

“I know you won’t, I brought you along for a reason,” Racha said and Sara smiled. Racha turned away and let her smile fall, hoping that Paige didn’t pick up her feelings. Racha hadn’t known what to expect from Sara, but then there were reasons she had brought her along. And Racha had to admit that it wasn’t her new abilities.

Sara’s abilities hadn’t been needed, and dragging her along was something Racha wasn’t happy about. Just one monster that knocked her out and it wouldn’t matter if she was here. But that was the same problem if Sara wasn't here. But Racha hadn't brought Sara along to heal, but for more practical reasons. If the survivors got it into their heads to attack her or Nova forbid worship her... that was a problem she should stop before it began. No, the best idea was for her and Jinn to stay where she could see them. At least until the danger they represented was gone.

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Paige kept looking away from Racha, hoping that she didn’t let anything show in her posture. She had overheard Racha’s comments, and she felt a taste of deception from her. Paige was starting to get worried, Racha had brought her power-using leader, herself, and two others out here. It would have been so easy for them to kill the other two and capture her, but then they found this fighter.

She didn’t think that even the Service would have created anything like this as a trap, but the thought was there. But on the other hand, this place was so beyond what anyone could do, the idea was insane.

Suddenly she felt a spark of wonder and looked up. On one branch of a tree ten feet up was a three-foot-tall bird. It had a large red hook-shaped beak, white feathers, and blue eyes staring at her with its head cocked. She just stared at the bird for moments, feeling it look back at her. She just stared, wondering for a second why the spark of its feelings was so loud when she realized why.

Her eyes widened as she felt its feelings change, becoming more joyful as it looked at her and she felt her eyes water. If she was right, then this might change everything they knew about this planet. She looked at it and smiled, trying to gather enough courage to speak up when something attacked the bird from behind!

It fell towards the ground, screeching as eight red limbs grasped around it. It hit the ground Paige saw one of the smaller spiders on its back with its fangs in the bird’s neck. “Help it! Please!”

A second later, Jinn dashed past her and speared the spider from the side with his knife still in its smaller form. Paige ran towards it, she felt tears as she felt the bird’s emotions, and how they started to slow down. She had only felt that once before when that child almost died because of his allergy. It seemed that once again, her need to help people would reveal her abilities to others.

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Above then, Al smiled as he undead the last binding. Putting his tool away, he slowly reached out and grabbed one of the handles of the data core, pulling it free. Holding it gently, he put it into his bag and sighed. He never would have figured that his class on ancient starships would have come in handy. And from what he saw, the data unit was perfectly intact and it looked like he could safely get it to work with some time. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he should do this. But he hardened his eyes, reached into his bag and pulled out a small square piece of tech with a few wires coming from it. Within a few moments, he finished connecting it to the fighter and smiled as it sent him a report that his nanites displayed over his left vision.

The engines were still good, and the battery was at half charge. The sensors were buried in the ground, so the effort was pointless. There was no way to use the sensors to see if anything was around them, but the chance had been there.

But he frowned as he saw that the sensors were very low level, too low for a good fighter craft. Guess the old stories he found in those old data archives were true, the Cooperate Alliance lost because they gave their forces mass-produced junk. He saw the weapons were just as bad, and damaged enough that they would cause a feedback loop that would cause this craft to explode.

For a few moments, he thought of how big that boom would be. And then he wounded what reason he would have to create something that big, but then he thought of the vine-beast. If there had been a fighter like this there, could they have drawn it away long enough for him to turn a fighter into a bomb? And would the creature have even known what he was doing?

He didn’t know exactly what this would tell them, but it was enough, it had to be. He had seen those insect things out there with Jinn and Sara, and something about them had bothered him. There had been something about the way it had hunted them, and the one he had killed with his bomb… and then there was the vine thing. He wanted to think that Jinn had been wrong, that its reaction was wrong.

He didn’t want to think that it could reason, if it could that was very bad. That thought led down a long spiral that ended with the question of just what else was capable of thought on this planet. And the best thing that he thought could think was the larger insectoid, the smaller ones could have been pre-sentient members of its species, that would make sense.

But he couldn’t think about that, he had to pay attention to this right now, and they had to get away from where they killed that spider thing. There was a chance that it might not have been the mother of those things. Or it might have just been an older version of the smaller ones. Hives and nests usually had a guardian if many of the same insects lived there, and spiders sometimes did that. He had to get down and nothing, nothing could keep them from leaving this find.

“What are you doing!?” Racha demanded from below.

Al almost lost his grip on the vine, but he caught himself and held on tighter. He looked down and frowned, before he heard sounds of buzzing wings. It caused him to turn and look up, paling as he caught sight of what made the noise.

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Sara looked on as Paige looked at her while Racha screamed at Paige. When Paige cried out, Sara had turned as Jinn had moved. She had barely turned her head when Jinn had killed the spider that had attacked the bird. She was still trying to figure out what had happened when Racha had reacted.

“I need help, Sara please!” Paige said as tears came to her eyes.

Sara looked at the bird, how it was so weak and she took a step towards it, not even thinking about saying no. She had studied healing to help anyone that needed it or anything. And she had treated pets back on the ship as practice to get used to the feeling of a life being in her hands. She had taken another step before Racha barked at her.

“Stay there! We don’t know what your ability can do or how it’s powered! if it takes strength from you then that’ll hurt us WHEN we run from here!” Racha said and looked at Sara with a scowl on her face.

Paige felt her heart thunder in her chest, trying to find out anything to counter Racha’s thoughts. But before she could say anything, Jinn spoke up.

“I don’t think so. If our abilities are the same I think it's being fueled by something else. I can, I can feel something different about myself, I can feel something deeper within me. And if I’m right, then one bird won’t bother Sara’s condition that much,” Jinn said as he stood with his back to Paige as she cradled the bird.

Sara looked at Jinn, a strange feeling going through her as she felt herself nodding. She hadn’t even felt anything until after healing the tenth deckhand. And a small bird wouldn’t hurt at all.

“We have no reason to help it. It’s just an animal!” Racha said firmly and Paige shook her head.

“No! It can think, reason! I could… I could sense it,” Paige said, looking away.

Sara blinked, looking at Paige in shock. What had she just said?

“HELP!” Al cried out from above, and Sara could tell right away that he was scared.

Sara looked up and felt her mouth drop open in horror at what she saw. Cresting the ‘top’ of the fighter was a swarm of the same red insect Al had seen. There had to be at least twenty of them, maybe more. Each one was hovering above the fighter, and they were looking right at something. And to Sara’s horror, each one had a face like a mosquito, and that meant they drank a liquid, probably blood.

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Jinn pulled out one of his pistols and put his blade away as he looked up. Al was climbing down fast, large red insects flying above the fighter. As he watched he saw one of the insects poke its stinger mouth into one of the vines, and in seconds the vine had withered into dust! Al was at least a quarter of the way down, but some of the bugs looked like they were going for the one he was hanging on.

“VOID! Sara help the bird, Paige get ready to run, and Racha help me blast them!” Jinn barked as he tried to call up the aura again. With nothing happened he tried to find it, then he remembered the words he had ‘heard’ in his mind, and thought them. Aether Comet.

As soon as he thought them, he felt the power course through him. With a single step, he was ten feet away from where he had been. He turned before he jumped up, passing the height of the fighter, seeing beyond it. He saw something that shocked him in the shadows of the fighter, and for a second he was shocked. He swallowed before he drew his other pistol, his hard eyes locked on the swarm and started to fire as he fell. Behind the fighter, in its shadow was a large bee-like hive, the source of the red insects.

Below Racha had started to fire, Sara having made it to Paige and her cargo. As he fell, Jinn’s blasts hit eight of the swarm, but more of them came from the hive!

Jinn realized that they couldn’t stay here, they had to move now! And there was only one way that could happen. As he landed on the ground he moved down, aiming at where Al was, and called out to the others.

“Get ready to move! I’ll get Al,” Jinn called out and then he jumped at Al.

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Paige looked up at Jinn’s words, the bird in her hands after Sara had used her ability on it. It had gotten better, and Sara had looked shocked, muttering something as Paige smiled.

“Thank you, Sara! He… he feels thankful too,” Paige said and Sara blinked and looked at her.

“You can feel its… his emotions!?” Sara asked in awe and Paige nodded, sensing Sara’s awe. She smiled at her friend, actually feeling lighter to let someone else know about her ability. And with Sara able to cleanse people, she was in the same boat as her.

She looked up as she wondered how to bring up the danger Sara was in, when she saw Jinn grab Al and kick off the fighter. As they cleared the tree tops she saw Jinn look ahead and felt a spark of fear from Al. Jinn’s emotion suddenly disappeared as he drew his pistol, firing. Only this time when he fired large blue energy bolts came from the aura around him, speeding towards what he had fired at.

As soon as Jinn landed Paige reacted. “What did you see up there?!”

“A swarm of spiders, at least thirty of them led by one a lot bigger than the one we killed! And there were at least four more the same size as what we killed with it! They’re at best five minutes away from us!” Jinn said as Paige felt the ground shift beneath her as she felt Sara’s horror.