They Reign - 5
#5 of They Reign (TF Themes)
THEY REIGN - 5
*
Welcome to chapter 5! This fun scifi story has been sponsored by Aaron Blackpaw , who definitely found this to be an intriguing idea, for sure! I shall look forward to your feedback!
Have fun!
*
BIRNBAUMER 2 SYSTEM
BIRNBAUMER/UoM BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH OUTPOST
FEBRUARY, 2280
*
"..Chandler, check your signal conditioner," Lester said into his headset at the bridge of the search and rescue ship Anders Lexell.
"Comms trouble?" Captain Hodge asked.
"...try cycling it! Someone tell Chandler to cycle his comm pack signal conditioner, alright?" the badger muttered. "Franklin? Hello?"
The badger tapped on his controls.
"Just wait for the second steerable to come into position," Chief Engineer Burnett told him from the other side of the bridge, "We've got a drop in carrier wave strength because the antenna hasn't locked in yet."
"Chief Franklin, yes, this is Lester, please, can you tell Chandler to cycle the signal conditioner off and on again, I'm not getting his biometrics and now his voice isn't coming through either. Yes, thank you, Chief. Got you now."
"Should we be worried about this?" Captain Hodge reiterated.
"No," Burnett said. "We just need to get the antenna into position to receive all their channels."
"It all has to work once they disembark," Hodge noted. "I want everyone's data on our screens at all times."
"We're getting there, sir," Lester said. "It appears that Mister Chandler's suit was not transmitting everything as it should be, but the recycling worked."
"Basically he wants to say that the switch was in the wrong position and he only got static," Rina Morrow murmured.
The badger shrugged.
"Well that completes the comm check," Lester said. "Rescue team, all your signals are coming through clear. Communications security is a GO."
Hodge decided to enter into the conversation.
"Rescue team, this is the Captain speaking," he noted into his comm piece, "proceed at your own discretion."
"Franklin here, roger that. We've suited up and are checking up last pieces of our gear. I estimate five minutes to go."
"Roger that," Hodge said, "we'll be ready to support you in any way we can from up here, too."
"Good to know you've got our backs," came Franklin's reply. "Do you have any updates on the mission parameters?"
"Negative at this moment," Hodge said,"weather looks stable for now, with no incoming storm fronts or the like, we've got about four hours of daylight left...four hours and..."
"Fifteen minutes!" Morrow chimed in.
"...that's a fifteen minutes from Miss Morrow," the Captain repeated the information into the comm channel,"which ought to be enough for your initial survey."
"It should be."
_"_We will also continue scanning the surrounding area for any signs of activity," Hodge said.
"Keep us updated on that too, please."
"You got it," said the Captain.
"We've got the downlink lock to the dropship now," Lester said. "We should have maximum signal strength for the time being."
"Good news," Hodge said. "Keep the channels open for the outpost channels, too. Maybe someone finally notices them and decided to give us a call."
"Wouldn't that be something," the Chief muttered. "Franklin knocking on their door and it's us they call first..."
The Captain managed a snuffle at that.
"It has happened before," he said.
*
The crew compartment of the drop ship was not particularly spacious. The rows of seats on the middle faced towards stacked emergency stretchers that covered the outer walls and were used for transporting patients to the ship. Between them, the crew prepared for their mission. They'd donned the helmets and gloves of their Eddleston Mk 18 lightweight pressure suits, life support packs and their equipment. Every time someone turned, there was a bulkhead or a crewmate to elbow.
"...remember to make sure your lifebelts are secure!" Lynch nickered into her helmet microphone.
"Now you're telling us?" Wong, her fellow equine, replied. "Chandler just poked my hydrostat."
"No poking at hydrostats!" Franklin barked out. "Plug your holes!"
"Do you seriously think it's wet enough that the air could trigger the lifebelts?" Pitman asked.
"No," Lynch said. "I'm afraid your swagger will."
"It's hard to swagger without my tail," Pitman replied with a feline hiss at such a state of affairs.
Her colleague, Larsen, snickered.
"You think yours feels trapped?" the fox proposed. "Yours fits in the back pouch just fine. Think of us with the big ones! The Chief's even bigger and he's not complaining!"
"It's not all about size," the lynx said. "It's about how it feels."
She wriggled her rear, as if trying to magically make more space for her tail in the special compartment of the suit that housed it. Even Banks looked at the motion with lapine curiosity.
Franklin cut the fun down.
"Everyone crosscheck once more!" the lion commanded.
A daisy chain of suit checks followed, after which everyone was deemed to be ready to go out into the unknown.
"Wong, equalize!"
It was down to the engineer stallion to operate the controls that matched the air pressure between the dropship cabin and the planetary surface.
"Down to .2," he said once the whirring of the pumps receded.
"Alright. Lexell, we are opening the doors and egressing now," Franklin announced.
"Roger that, Chief," the Captain replied curtly.
They all stood in readiness, clutching their gear. Some carried crowbars, others engineering tools. Chandler the medic was a walking first aid kit with quick-use bandages strapped to a vest he wore over his suit. Larsen and Pitman carried short carbines, cocked against their knees but ready to be swung up at any moment. They looked more tense than anyone else in the confines space.
"Open the hatch," Franklin gave the word.
The aft facing hatch slid open and with that the ramp extended as well. The noise of wind and the gentle thrum of rain entered their ears through the audio pickups on their helmets. The closed can-like interior of the dropship was replaced by the vast jungle outside.
"Move it, move it!" it was Banks, however, who ordered them to file out of the spacecraft.
Boots stomped onto hard ground. They moved away from the dropship and spread out into a fan, with one armed guard on each end of their line. With guns ready, and helped by their 360-degree visor views, they scanned the perimeter for any signs of immediate danger, or life, for that matter.
"No contacts," Larsen said.
"Nothing here either," the lynx added, "Nothing moving except trees, but we knew that already."
"Confirm egress and deployment, Lexell," Franklin told to their shipmates over the radio. "Nothing here so far."
"After a grand total of ten seconds..." Lynch nickered to herself. She stomped the ground with her booted hoof.
"We can see you on visual and infrared," came the Captain's crisp reply on the airwaves.
"Roger that," Franklin said.
"Heya!" Lynch waved her gloved hand up in the air.
Wong chortled.
"Isn't that a bit much?" the horse told to his fellow equine.
"Just testing the visual acuity," she said. "Chief Burnett was complaining about the sensors the other day."
"Yeah, right," Wong nickered.
"Everyone, let's head for the Command Module!" Franklin rumbled into their shared comm channel so that he would not have to yell. "We'll check there first!"
Pitman took the lead, along with Franklin, for she was needed for the covering of their movement across the landing pad. Larsen, with his gun poised, held the rear of their little convoy. The hard-packed soil was wet under their paws, after weeks of daily rain. Long grasses and other plants grew around its periphery. It looked like the jungle was already trying to retake the outpost.
Beyond the grasses and reefs, there was the fence, with the gaping hole.
"Do you think their car did it?" Lynch looked at the hole.
"It's torn from inside out...it seems like the only reasonable explanation," Wong said.
Franklin looked over at the garage. It was a tall, green, inflatable structure that stood by the Command Module. It was anchored to the ground with heavy wires. Its doors were closed.
"Lexell, have you seen any of their cars in the orbital images?" the lion spoke.
"That's a negative, Lexell," came the Captain's voice, "the computer is still looking and extending the search, including the non-visual wavelengths. We might be able to see indentations and the like through the foliage."
"Roger that," Franklin rumbled.
"All the windows are closed..." Pitman spoke, mostly to herself, perhaps, thinking aloud, but her audio picked it up.
"What do you think?" Franklin asked. He was walking only a step behind her.
The lynx looked thoughtfully towards the Command Module, with its uniform walls and the clearly visual window shutters that were panels of slightly darker grey than the normal color of the building.
"I'm not sure," she said. "Depends if they always kept them closed for the night, or something, or if they wanted to keep something out."
"Shouldn't the local wildlife be stopped by the fence?" Chandler mused, from the rear.
"It should..." Franklin mused.
"Well there isn't anything moving here, at least," Larsen said, "Infrared and bio scan are clean. There's nothing bigger than a mole here...and we're scaring them off with our walking. We're stomping on their tunnels."
Some of them glanced down to their feet, as if they could see the critters in distress. They knew that Larsen's enhanced visor sensors could probe the very ground with ultrasound to search for faults in the soil that might get them in trouble by collapsing underneath them. Pitman walking on the front held the same purpose.
"Still nothing on the environmental sensors," Banks looked at the display on his suit sleeve. "Air is clean of contaminants or radiation. If there was anything noxious here, it must have dissipated by now."
"Unsurprising," Franklin said.
"The reactor is probably cold," Lynch said. "Nothing is coming off the power module."
"What's that?"
Something silver-colored laid flat on the ground. Wong was the first to reach it. He unattached a crowbar from the side of his backpack which he used to carefully turn the flat object over.
"...Birnbaumer 2...University of Mars Biological Research Outpost..." he read out from what had been revealed to be a sign,"Part of the Interplanetary Year of Xenobiology 2275 agenda."
"Doesn't seem damaged," Lynch said. "Must've come loose in the wind."
Wong gave the sign another look.
"Probably."
"It's like nobody has been here for weeks," Pitman said. "The fence, the shutters..."
"Either they've left or...never left," Banks noted.
They reached the Command Module. There was no visible damage, but that they had determined already from the video feed of the probe, remotely.
"Let's open the garage," Franklin ordered.
The doors were operated by a pulley and were entirely manual, despite the high tech construction of the doors themselves, of a high-durability monoplastic honeycomb filled with nitrogen. The door mechanism might have seemed archaic in their high tech environment, but they had been designed to last.
It was dark enough inside that some of them turned on their helmet lights to shine them into the garage. They could hear the rain thrumming against the plastic roof high above them. The garage was relatively cavernous, especially after the small, cramped spaces of the Lexell and the dropship. Two cars about the size of what used to be called a sedan were parked there, side by side.
"There's two cars here..." Franklin mused, "Lexell, do we know how many they are supposed to have?"
"That's a negative," said the Captain. "We know they have a 'complement' of them but we are unsure just how many. The file does not specify their number."
"Okay, maybe we'll figure it out," Franklin replied.
"Four," Larsen said.
Franklin looked at the fox.
"Why four?" he demanded.
"Because there's two here," he waved his gun barrel at the two parked buggies," and room for two more, and their wheel marks on the ground, there."
He did a bit more gesturing, to which the Commander nodded.
"Alright," he said, "did you hear that, Captain?"
"Roger that. It sounds reasonable. We shall be searching for them and their tracks from the images."
_"_They're empty," Pitman said after she'd shone her light into the cabins of each of the cars,"nobody or nothing inside them, and they look clean."
"They might have tracking transponders," Wong said. "We should check in Control. We might be able to find them using the outpost's own systems."
"If they have active transponders, the ship should pick them up," Banks said. "Right?"
He looked at the engineers, whom were eyeing the buggies nearby.
"If they're short range units, even the Lexell might be too far away in orbit to pick them up," Lynch said. "These look pretty standard to me. They're not high end craft."
"Or they might work on a system with a low power carrier wave that must be triggered by an external signal from the main unit here," Wong said.
"We can figure it out at Operations," Franklin said, "Let's get out of here."
They filed out of the garage that had offered few clues to them. Franklin made sure to close to doors afterwards. It would have felt wrong to leave them open, being the uninvited guests that they were.
The crew walked through the wet, happily growing grass, over to the main entrance. The door was closed, and there was a packing crate placed in front of it to act as a step.
"No signs of breaking and entering," was Franklin's initial assessment.
The lion opened a transparent panel and pressed the large button contained below. This caused nothing to happen.
"And no juice to it, either," he said.
"Shall we bypass?" Lynch asked. "I've got the power back on me, we'll just need to jump start it."
Franklin studied the door again.
"Any ideas, Lexell?"
"Burnett here," the Chief Engineer's voice came through to their ears.
"Hello, Chief," Franklin said.
"It's a pretty standard magnetic locking system used by Bass-Welch. If the power goes out on the circuit, the automatics close the door and drop the bars to seal the door. It's a security measure" the Chief mused. "You can see the override access panels on either side of the door. There's a lever there you pull to release the locking bars. Then you can pry it open."
"We'll be on it," Wong said. He and Lynch took position by the door, as the engineers on the team.
"You stand at ready," Franklin pointed his paw at the guards.
"Aye, aye."
With the engineers by the door, the security personnel in front of them, the rest of them stood nearby, expectant and tense while the operation continued.
"No problems here..." Wong said, "just a couple cranks and it should be ready."
"Same here!" Lynch agreed.
"Everyone ready," Franklin ordered.
"Ready," Banks said. The hare had procured a crowbar from his own backpack and held it in his paws in a posture that was relatively aggressive.
The door mechanisms clicked and rustled. Soon both equines stepped aside.
"Banks," Franklin said.
The hare took it to himself to pry the door open. Its dull-colored halves slid quietly into their spaces within the walls of the modular building. His helmet light illuminated a small room within that the hare observed.
"Looks like an airlock," he said,"it's closed. It's empty. No power here either. No signs of damage. I'll check the air."
"How about the inner doors?" Franklin asked. "Do they have the same mechanism for operating them without power?"
"We'll check. Can someone keep looking at them so that we can confirm?" came the Chief's reply.
"I'm on it," Banks said, from inside the airlock.
"Thank you."
"...but I think I already found it," the hare continued, "there's an access panel here on the top."
He pointed at the red-lined little hatch, above the doors on the wall.
"That's it," the Chief engineer mused.
"Permission to proceed, boss?" the hare spoke to Franklin.
"Do it," the lion said. "Everyone ready."
"...again," Pitman said.
"I'm opening the inner door," Banks said.
The hare turned the emergency door lever and then pried the sliding doors open with his crowbar. At first he only made enough room so that he could poke his head carefully in between the doors, to look inside.
"I'm looking into the hallway...it's empty..." he said, "left...nothing. Right...empty. Nothing here."
"Open the doors and we'll proceed in," Franklin sounded impatient.
The hare used his paws to push the doors rest of the way into their slots. He stepped inside the module and was rapidly followed by the rest of the crew in quick succession.
"Checking comms, Lexell," Franklin said once he was inside.
"All your signals are coming in clear," was the Captain's reply.
"Roger."
Their helmet lights bounced off the pale white and gray walls. Doors opened into all directions, leading into other sections.
"Nothing on the scanner," Banks said," the air is the same as outside. Temperature is almost the same, too. Stagnant air."
"Can't imagine it smells too good," Chandler said.
"You wanna try?" Pitman teased.
"Nobody is trying the air until the biological series runs through," Chandler retorted. He glanced at his own wrist monitor before he added,"another twenty-five minutes to go."
"The management offices are to the left," Wong said, "Control room is to the right. Where to?"
"We'll secure Control first," Franklin said,"might be the key to solving this whole thing."
"Might get some backup power on, too," Lynch said. "Harder to search in the dark."
"Let's head down this way, then," Franklin pointed the door marked 'OPERATIONS', "we'll check every room on the way."
Pitman already moved to the door.
"Let's make a move!" she waved her paw. "Go, go!"
*
Thank you for reading my story! Remember that all votes, faves and watches will help others to find these stories to enjoy as well!
Enjoy my writing and want to support my work? Considering checking out my Patreon here https://www.patreon.com/Gruffy for exclusive stories and sneak peeks :)
Cheerio!