The Call of the Wild

Anardir Base, Ariel, 093/989

A quick search established that this was the crawler that had picked them up in the first place, and that its' sensor logs held the exact location of their own crawler - and therefore their own equipment. After disabling it, they boarded the Nemesis, and Fox took them there to collect their gear.

During the short flight, Jeremiah went down to the automated sickbay aft and climbed painfully in. Vasquez and Victor managed to run through the activation sequence and everything went away for a while for Jeremiah as the robotic surgeon started the task of extracting the bullets with which he was riddled.

An hour later, the Nemesis landed next to the hired crawler, and Hum and Victor cautiously boarded it. Nothing had been disturbed, so they retrieved the equipment and loaded it back aboard the Nemesis.

Jeremiah was out of surgery and asleep by now, so Vasquez clambered in with some relief. There was no way it could save her eye, and it wasn't equipped for regrowth or cybernetic replacements, so the best it could do was seal over and bandage the socket.

Anardir Base, Ariel, 094/989

The first essential - sleep and healing - satisfied, the next step was to tackle the main base. Subterfuge seemed to be an expired strategy, so a more direct approach was gratefully siezed upon - land directly in the base.

The Nemesis did a couple of orbits first, checking the site out. Fox had reported that, overnight, the buildings had all cooled to ambient temperature - very odd - and now, they could see that all was not well on Anardir Base.

The site consisted of one large octaganal single-storey building, and five smaller ones, tentatively identified as living quarters, each also supporting a large parabolic dish. One of these was revolving.

Fox used the ship's laser turret to blast the outer buildings from the air, as well as opening a hole in the vehicle garage door, before hovering briefly to let Jeremiah, Vasquez, Victor and Hum off before returning to a higher hover to cover the area.

Entering the garage, the agents found to their surprise that there was no exit at the back. A blast from Vasquez' fusion gun blasted a hole; peering through, the startled intruders discovered the 10' drop beyond into the comms room on the lower level.

Balked, they went around to the main entrance and explored the lobby, finding the receptionist lying behind her desk. She'd been killed by natural weapons, teeth and claws, and a thumbnail estimation based on known animals indicated a large attacker - seven feet high or so. The Admin office was the same - scattered bodies, torn almost limb from limb by some large and powerful predator.

The desk computer in the office provided a set of floor plans and a telephone list, and Vasquez spent a few minutes ringing the extensions one at a time. None answered, although a few were unobtainable. There was nothing for it but to go and look. Victor was told to start recording everything from this point.

Moving carefully, covering each other as they worked their way along, they emerged from the Admin office and headed to the gantry. As they did, Jeremiah heard the sound of heavy footsteps ringing on the metal mesh, followed a few seconds later by a heavy thud from below. Something had run onto the gantry and vaulted over. Sure enough, when Jeremiah peered over, there were massive shaggy footprints leading into the jumble of experiemental commo gear.

The door of the lab nearest the security station was open; glancing in, the agents saw that the window was smashed inwards, and snow had blown in quite deeply. This presumably was where the infra-masked whatevers had got in. They shut the door and carried on.

The security station was a small nook on the end of the gantry, with racks for three rifles, all missing. It also had the master security computer station, and Victor was set to work on this to see what he could find. With blinding skill, the robot worked the system and accessed the base files, discovering records on the creatures (the Sulamar), the security cameras (including a shot of Torvald Shimuusha sprawled dead in his office!), and the research files on a device called the NeuroComm, a communicator designed by one Keragaan Shugili to utilize the same neural frequency as the mating signal of the Sulamar creatures. Regarding the security camera images of ripped corpses and prowling monsters, it was a fairly safe bet that his experiments had gone disasterously wrong...

The files did hold out some hope though. It seemed the Sulamar were accustomed to hunt their prey by heat signature. This being the case, the agents were probably going to be safe, encased as they were in battledress which (among other things) could match the intrinsic temperature of the surroundings; and Victor being a robot didn't produce anything like a human heat pattern. Their confidence was buoyed by this discovery, and they pressed on.

Returning to the gantry, they concluded that a large heat source might well attract the Sulamar in the base to one location. So Vasquez put a fusion bolt through the hole into the vehicle garage they'd made earlier, firing the parked vehicles there and starting a merry blaze.

Sure enough, all the Sulamar on the lower floor of the base made a beeline for the comms room. Once sure they were all there, Jeremiah, Vasquez and Hum opened fire with fusion bolts, RAM grenades and gauss fire. Within seconds, not only were all the Sulamar dead, but a star system's worth of experimental communications gear had been reduced to smouldering scrap.

Wasting no time, the team moved down the stairs and onto the lower level, heading directly for Shimuusha's office. Leaving Hum on guard outside, Vasquez and Jeremiah entered the office with Victor.

Sparing barely a glance for the slaughtered corpse of their quarry, they turned their attention immediately to the cause of all this trouble, the innocent-looking hand computer sitting on the desk. Victor gingerly connected his datafeed to it, fed in the backdoor codes, and information began to flow into his data banks.

Meanwhile, at the door, Hum tensed. The door opposite had been wrenched open, and a Sulamar, terrifyingly huge at this range, had appeared. The sniper was drawing a bead, preparing to fire, when something odd about its' behaviour stayed his hand.

Instead of advancing on his position, the beast was heading determindly towards the stairs. Reaching them, it climbed rapidly out of sight, and disappeared.

As soon as the download was complete, Victor was unplugged, and the four headed for the exit. Of the last Sulamar there was no sign; evidently the damage they'd inflicted in the comms room had disabled the NeuroComm and cancelled the signal that'd attracted the beasts; the last survivor had left to return to the snows that were its' home.

Stopping at the security station, their last act was to wipe the security records back to an hour before their own arrival. Then they left, boarding the Nemesis and heading back to Shugaul.

Interplanetary, Ariel System, 097/989

Two days later, Jeremiah and Vasquez (who were on watch) were alerted by a call from Victor, who had been set to monitor the passengers 24/7. Reaching the bridge, they found the pictures of the hold almost entirely obscured by a thick mist.

Turning to another screen, Victor brought up the archive footage from a few minutes ago. One of the rebels was seen to casually flick his head backwards, then drop a small object unseen, from which the gas erupted, scattering the other terrorists like ninepins. Turning on the audio, Vasquez challenged him, demanding he surrender. The man tried to bluff it out, claiming there was something wrong with the LS to the hold and demanding to be let out immediately. This cut no ice. With a steely whisper, the newly-replaced iris valves at the forward end of the hold were opened, and the air was vented out to space, along with the gas, and all the Sons of Earth, dead and alive.

There being no reason to go to Shienar, the Nemesis jumped shortly afterwards...