“Okay.  It should be just over this hill.”

Jansen sighed as he watched Ames bound off ahead of him.  The other astronaut might only be a few years younger, but it showed.  The younger man took huge, bounding steps, not worrying about damaging his suit.

Following behind, Jansen insisted on more caution, even though it slowed his pace.  All these young bucks were so eager to explore, to push boundaries, that they never listened to the safety briefings.  Jansen knew very well what even a small rip on the suit could do, this far out from the lander.

“There it is!  I found it – wait…”

Jansen frowned.  His younger partner’s voice had just shifted, dropping from eager to confused.

Had something happened to the rover?  Even as he tried to control himself, the older astronaut felt his heartbeat quicken.  They were planning on using that rover for several critical surveys; any damage to it could set back their mission considerably.

Stay calm.  He forced himself to slow his breathing, to focus on the plodding, bouncy steps.  Crossing the moon was like walking on the surface of a giant marshmallow – each step felt soft, and there was the ever-present fear of his feet slipping out from beneath him.  Conserve oxygen, he repeated in a mantra.

Finally, he reached the top of the hill.  Ames was down below, looking at the rover.

It didn’t appear damaged, Jansen thought as he approached.  It was parked between a couple large boulders, and all the external struts looked intact.  Even the little front shield, designed to protect against any kicked-up scree, was-

Fluttering?

There was something on the front shield, Jansen realized.  Even though there was no breeze on the airless moon, it seemed to be fluttering back and forth.  Ames was staring at it.

“What is it?” Jansen asked as he drew up closer.

You can’t shrug in a space suit.  The shoulders are too stiff and don’t move that way.  But from the way Ames raised his hands, Jansen knew exactly what the younger astronaut was attempting to convey.

“You take a look,” he said, his voice sounding uneasy.  “You’re the lead, after all.”

Jansen fought back a sigh.  Passing the buck.  Weren’t these “best and brightest” supposed to be beyond doing that?

Still, he reached out and tugged the thin, gently waving object free of where it was stuck against the rover’s front shield.  The object seemed to be a thin sheet of plastic, with some sort of markings on one side.

He held it up closer to his helmet, trying to read it.  Fortunately, once he picked up the sheet from the rover, it stopped fluttering and went rigid, like other objects in this airless environment.

The sheet had some sort of writing on it, but he couldn’t read any of the characters… Jansen squinted, as suddenly the letters seemed to swim, rearranging themselves and contorting until they formed block English.

“What?  I don’t understand.”  The comment slipped out of his mouth without thinking as he stared at the sheet of thin plastic and the words on it.

DEAR INFERIOR SPECIES STOP. 

YOUR UNINTELLIGENT APPARATUS IS PARKED WITHOUT PROPER INTERPLANETARY DOCUMENTATION STOP.  EXTRAPOLATION OF BIOLOGICAL CYCLES FROM THE NEAREST PLANET REVEALS THAT IT HAS BEEN UNMOVED FOR MORE THAN TWO STANDARD GENERATIONAL DEVIATIONS STOP.  THIS IS IN VIOLATION OF STARSECTOR ZZ9 PLURAL Z ALPHA TREATISES AGAINST GALACTOCOSMIC LITTER STOP. 

FURTHERMORE THERE IS NO RECORD AT THE INTERBUREAU’S NEAREST OFFICE OF OFFICIAL SANCTIONS FOR OFF-PLANET DEPARTURE STOP.  SUBMIT APPROPRIATE FILINGS AND BIOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALS FOR MOLECULAR PATHOGEN EXAMINATIONS BEFORE DEPARTING FROM YOUR SECTOR STOP. 

FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH REGULATIONS WILL RESULT IN INTERDIMENSIONAL FOLDING AND QUARANTINE STOP. 

HUGS AND KISSES,
SECTOR OFFICIAL VOGONIS 39174 

STOP.

Ames was still looking at him.  Jansen knew from the man’s silence that he was worried.

Maybe the younger man was still trying to think in the framework of their mission.  Jansen could feel his mind attempting to do the same, to put this new discovery into some form that he could swallow, could handle.  He wasn’t having a good time of it.

This was huge.  This would redefine their mission- no, he corrected himself.  This would redefine all life on Earth.

And then, a totally irrational thought crept into his head, and he couldn’t hold back a chuckle.

“What?” Ames asked, sounding scandalized that his partner was laughing.  Had Jansen snapped?

Jansen pointed at the sheet of plastic.  “It’s a parking ticket!” he cried, feeling tears slipping out of the corners of his eyes inside his suit.  “NASA’s next great mission, for the glory of humanity – we have to go pay our parking fines!!”

It took a moment.  But soon, Ames was laughing as well.

Two astronauts, beings from another planet, the furthest from home that any human being had ever traveled, rolled in the lunar dust as they clutched themselves and howled with laughter.

Lying back in the grass, I watched as the star streaked down, a trail of light against the dark sky.

I sat up with a gasp, a rush of adrenaline suddenly flooding through my veins as I clenched down at the stained table beneath me, staring around.

All around me, the bar looked just as it always did – shoddy, uncleaned, and with a smell all its own that slowly crept in and pervaded the nostrils.  I’d seen it a hundred times before, had spent more money here than I liked to think about.  I’d gotten drunk more times than I could count, had stumbled out across the uneven floor towards the sliding front door lock enough times to know every rut and pit in the synthstone that covered the ground underfoot.

I’d woken up here many times.

But none of them had ever felt like this.

I stood up, my legs erupting underneath me so violently that the cheap chair tumbled backwards onto the floor behind me.  My hands flew up to my chest, patting at the surface through my thin black shirt and all-weather Flex jacket, searching for a bullet hole that was no longer there.

No, I corrected myself.  Saying that the bullet hole was no longer there was wrong.

The hole wasn’t there… yet.

With a deep, shuddering breath, I forced myself to stop frantically grabbing at myself.  I was already attracting the curious attention of some of the other patrons – and most of them were the kind of folks that one didn’t want noticing you.  Not if you wanted to live for long, at least.

I stifled a hysterical chuckle at that thought.  Living long, hah!  That wasn’t going to be a worry for me, at least!

I turned and, feeling like my movements were almost robotic, I bent over and picked up the fallen chair.  I set it back up on its legs, but didn’t resume my seat.  Instead, moving like a drunken sailor who hadn’t yet acquired his space-legs, I stumbled over to the bar’s counter, looking up at the bartender behind it as he sneered down at me.

“What time is it?” I gasped out.

The bartender, a six-armed and six-legged Ifrit, rolled his eyes before answering – a movement tough to miss, considering that his eyes were on eight-inch stalks protruding from his lumpy little head.  “Eight past planet-set,” he grunted at me.  His voice sounded annoyed, even through the scratchy little crap-quality translator box around his neck.

“Eight past set,” I repeated, collapsing down onto the closest bar stool.  I closed my eyes and pressed both of my palms against the closed eyelids, trying to think back, to remember.

The sun had just been rising over the curve of the planet out the windows when the man had pulled the trigger, when I had felt a giant’s fist slam into my chest and drive me off my feet and down to the floor.

That meant that I had eleven, maybe twelve hours.

The bartender sidled a little closer to me, moving in a way that can only be performed with two extra sets of legs. “Something wrong, sir?” he asked, probably hoping that whatever I had wasn’t contagious across species.

I lowered my hands and opened my eyes, and the Ifrit took a half-sidle back from my thousand-yard stare.  “Twelve hours,” I said, my voice sounding hollow.  “I’m going to be shot in twelve hours.”

The Ifrit grunted.  “Sucks, man,” he offered.  “Give you a little privacy, then.”

The bartender stepped away, and I tried desperately to remember everything I knew about strange bullets…

Briggs looked up from her holo display as the whole ship shuddered and Kane fought to keep them from losing control.  Kane could see her eyes burning, filled with fear.

“Sir, it’s the cable,” she said, her voice unnaturally steady.  “Sir, it’s snapped.”

Well, that explained it, noted the logical side of Kane’s mind, even as the rest of him focused on grappling with the barely responsive ship’s controls.  Their slow and calculated descent had just turned into a wild, out of control plunge down towards the surface, still far below.

They were still over a mile above the ground.  Plenty of time to brake, regain control of the descent – assuming that Kane remained calm and didn’t panic.

“Aerobrake,” he announced, making sure that there was no tremor of concern in his voice.  He had to keep the rest of his crew calm.  “We’ve got enough atmosphere for it.  We’ll burn off a fair amount of heat shielding, but that can be replenished later.”

Kane glanced around the cabin.  “Strap yourselves in,” he commanded, as his eyes briefly made contact with those of the rest of his crew.  “We’ll slow down, but it’s going to be bumpy.”

The faces gazing back at the captain looked concerned, but the panic hadn’t yet taken over anyone yet.  For now, his crew was still sane.  They met his gaze, nodding to show that they understood his command.

The altimeter was still shrieking its cry of terror as they plunged down towards the surface.  Kane shot a sidelong glance over at Briggs.  “Any chance you can kill that thing?  It’s giving me a hell of a headache,” he commented.

Briggs rolled her eyes back at him.  “Kind of the point of the alarm, isn’t it?” she quipped in wry tones.  But her long, nimble fingers flew over her controls, and the wail of the alarm cut off a moment later.

Taking a deep breath, Kane leaned forward and took the control assembly, slowly easing it back to bring up the rear fins.  The craft shuddered and shook in complaint, but the forward screens showed the nose slowly rising up from their plunge down towards the ground.

The altimeter alarm might be muted, but a whole new series of alarms started sounding their shrill cries as the landing craft shuddered and jerked its way through the atmosphere.  Aerobraking involved using the friction of the atmosphere to slow the craft.  Although effective, all of that downward energy had to go somewhere – and it instead manifested as burning, searing heat, shredding apart the carbon-ceramic tiles that lined the underside of the landing craft.

Even as Kane focused on trying to keep the landing craft from spiraling out of control, a part of his mind was still distracted, still adrift in paralyzing terror.  He fought to keep that emotion contained, but it was spilling over, threatening to shut the rest of his mind down.

The cable had snapped!  That shouldn’t be possible!  The shuttle had been descending down while attached to a Konstantin-Obayashi cable, nearly six inches of interwoven and trans-bonded parallel carbon nanotubes.  The cables were designed to handle the gravitational flux within a gas giant – a simple drop to a rocky planet like this shouldn’t have presented anywhere near the maximum tested level of strain!

In the back of Kane’s mind, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a sign of something bigger, of something truly going wrong.

But right now, the captain couldn’t focus on that issue.  He had to confront the more immediate and pressing problems.

The aerobraking was working, and he could see that their speed was dropping off.  He just had to hope that their damaged heat shielding would be able to endure the rest of the descent.

“Captain, we’re about to clear the lower cloud layer,” Briggs called out, her eyes on her screens.  “Let’s hope we can find someplace soft to set her down – we can’t exactly do too much steering.”

And a second later, the large forward screens were no longer obscured by the dense fog of the upper atmosphere.

A collective hush fell across the cabin.  For a moment, Kane forgot even his own concerns, as he stared out at the landscape in front of the landing craft.

Green and blue, lush and verdant, spread across the entire globe.  They were still high enough to see some of the curvature of the planet, but the beauty covered all.  For a moment, Kane even thought he caught movement down among the green – some sort of flying creature?  An illusion caused by some sort of geological activity?

Back behind Kane, the captain heard Salander scrambling for his comm.  The fiery little scientist usually kept his mouth shut, but he was the first of the crew to speak.

“Celeste, come in,” the short little man whispered into the comm unit, his normally confrontational voice reduced to a reverent whisper.  “Celeste, this is landing unit one.  Do you copy?”

“We copy,” came the terse reply a moment later.  Celeste still had radio contact with the ship, but the orbital dropship had been waiting to know if the crew survived the landing.

“Celeste, we’re coming in for final descent to the surface,” Salander said, his voice sounding a little detached as he stared out the viewscreens.  “And Celeste?”

“There’s life.”

I staggered through the ruined streets, my breath coming hard and fast as I panted.  My legs were alight with fire, my tired muscles protesting, but I forced myself onward.

I didn’t know how much longer the patchy cloud cover would protect me.

Even as I ran, my eyes in constant motion as I scanned for any shelter, I felt the rays of the sun growing stronger as they cut apart the defending clouds.  In mere minutes, I would be exposed – and then, then I wouldn’t have any time left at all.

There!  Up ahead, I saw a building, large and built of heavy concrete.  The windows and doors were long gone, the building little more than a hollow shell, but it was enough to shield the sight of me from eyes above.  I sucked in one last breath, forced my aching lead feet to pick up the pace, and sprinted towards my potential salvation.

Only a hundred feet or so ahead.  I could make it.

But then, as I sprinted through the shin-high weeds that grew up through the cracks in the asphalt, I felt warmth grace my face.

Up ahead of me, the clouds finally gave up the ghost.  Sunlight, pure and unfiltered, streamed down to light patches on the ground.

“Oh no,” I muttered, with breath that I could ill afford to spare.

I couldn’t hear anything, of course, except the puffing of the air in my lungs.  But then again, no one ever heard anything – at least, not until after the dust had cleared and the chunks of unidentifiable material raining down had ceased.

Dead before the poor bastard even knew it was coming.

In my mind’s eye, however, I could see it happening, could hear the click as the titanium rod detached, starting its long plunge down towards oblivion on the surface of the planet below.  Thrown by a divine spear-carrier, that long pole was aimed with inhuman precision, directly towards me.

But the building was just a few more feet ahead of me.  Maybe, just maybe I could make it.  I didn’t know of anyone who had outrun a rod, but it certainly had to be possible.

“Rods from God,” the program had been called.  At least, that was the name that I knew.  Designed to target enemy combatants anywhere on the globe, the whole thing had gone sideways due to some sort of computer error, leaving the system unable to differentiate between friend and foe.

Thank god that the active software was an imperfect version; it didn’t recognize vehicles, and the heat-sensing capabilities hadn’t yet been activated.

If I could just make it back to the Crawler, I would be safe.  I had spent too long searching the abandoned city for treasures, but even the huge, growling engine couldn’t move the vehicle we all called home at much more than a couple miles per hour.  I could easily catch up-

-if I survived the Rods.

The building was just a few more feet in front of me.  I was going to make it!  But as I put on one last burst of speed, forcing bone-tired muscles to put out one last push of energy, I heard the sound behind me.

It turns out that the victim can hear the Rod coming, if only for a tiny fraction of a second.  It’s a high-pitched shriek, inhuman, on the edge of perception.  It’s the kind of scream that makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

And an instant later, a giant’s hand reached out from behind me and shoved me forward, sweeping me off of my feet and sending me flying through the air.

Burning, scorching heat hit me from behind, singing my hair and crisping my skin.  I threw up my hands, but they weren’t enough to break my fall as I came tumbling into the building’s shell ahead of me.  My ears were deafened, and little black flecks blinked in and out of existence at the corners of my vision.

But a minute later, as I laboriously lifted myself up from the dirt-covered floor, I realized that I was still alive.

A glance behind me revealed a smoldering inferno where the Rod had hit.  For a moment, in the heart of the still-burning flames, I thought I saw a thin black line, still standing upright for a moment where it had embedded itself in the earth.  But then, a second later, the sight was lost behind waves of blinking, charred smoke.

I cautiously checked myself over.  I had definitely lost some hair, and the burns would hurt for weeks.  But I was alive, and nothing seemed broken.

And here, shielded from the sky, I was safe.

For the moment.

In the corner of the building, a pile of rubble appeared climbable.  From the top, perhaps I could spot the Crawler.

I’d have to brave the open sky once more to reach it, but I knew that to stay here was to wait for death.

Trapped between a slow, painful death and the sky, what choice did I have?

“There you are!” my roommate shouted out, making me jump halfway out of my chair as he burst into my room.  “Come on, mate, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

Trying to force my heart to calm back down, I spun around to stare at him in confusion and frustration.  “What the hell, Lex?” I burst out, glad at least that there was nothing too offensive displayed on the screen of my computer.

Lex, however, didn’t even spare a glance at the computer as he dashed forward, reaching out to grab my hand.  “Come on, we don’t have time for squabbling!” he practically yelled in my ear as he bodily pulled me up out of the chair.  “We have to go!”

“What are you talking about?” I shouted back, trying to pull free of the man’s grip.  His fingers were like iron, however, and he resolutely tugged me towards the door of my room, even as I tried to sink in my heels.

The man didn’t reply out loud, but he thrust his wrist out at me, as if this would answer all my questions.  I looked down blankly at it.

Lex always wore a large, bulky, rubber-edged digital watch. I assumed that it was one of those fancy models that simultaneously tracked his motion, heart rate, bowel movements, and any other meaningful statistics.  I occasionally found the man sitting in our crappy little living room with the watch plugged into his computer, and I assumed that he was syncing it up or something.

Right now, however, the watch’s face displayed a series of flickering numbers, constantly shifting.  Half of them looked more like alien hieroglyphics than actual numbers, but some sort of activity was definitely happening.

“What?  I don’t know what that means,” I complained, as the man pulled me out into the hallway and down towards the stairs.

“It means that we’re in deep flarg, that’s what it means!” Lex snapped back at me.  He took a moment to look down at the watch himself.  “Now look, do you have your exit kit prepped?”

“Exit kit?  What?”

The man rolled his eyes.  “Yes, you know, the basics!  Toothbrush, seashells, chocolate, bowler hat?”

I just stared back at him.  “There’s, uh, some chocolate in the kitchen?” I suggested weakly.

“Well, go grab that!” Lex yelled at me, shoving me away in the general direction of the kitchen.  “And find a hat!”

Still confused, I stumbled into the kitchen.  Not quite sure why I was doing this, I rummaged through the pantry cupboard until I located a few sad Hershey’s bars that had managed to escape the post-Halloween feasting a couple months previously.  I shoved them into a tote bag, and then, on impulse, also pulled a baseball cap off of the hook by the back door.

As I stuffed the cap into the tote bag, Lex came bounding into the kitchen, triumphantly holding aloft something small and shiny.  “Good – we’re almost out of time!” he called to me, as he ran for the back door.

“Out of time before what?” I asked, still feeling bewildered.

“Before we miss our exit window!  Now come on!”  In front of the back door, the man shoved the small, glinting key in his hand into the knob, turning it as he twisted the door.

I opened my mouth to tell my roommate that the door was unlocked – I could see that from the deadbolt above the knob.  But as my roommate opened the door, the words died, unspoken, in my mouth.

I knew our back yard quite well.  It was fairly small, mostly just dead grass.  Over in the corner was my attempt from last summer to try and start a vegetable plot; I hadn’t managed to grow anything except for a denser patch of weeds than the rest of the yard.  Now, there wasn’t much left except for some plastic stakes and a rusting shovel that I’d borrowed from someone and never returned.

When I opened the back door, I could always see down the couple of steps into that patch of dirt, bordered by the tall wooden fence that separated us from our neighbors next door.

But now, when Lex opened the back door, I did not see our back yard.

Instead, I was staring into a dark and dim expanse that looked like the inside of an industrial storehouse.  Large stacks of mysterious objects formed pillars stretching up towards a high ceiling, their contents shadowed and shrouded.

“Wha?” I choked out, wondering if I was going crazy.

But next to me, Lex looked overjoyed.  “Yes!  Now come on, the bridge will only hold a few seconds!” he shouted – and lunged forward, pulling me with him through the door!

I tried to protest, but I could either make a noise, or resist his pull, but not both.  A sad bleat slipped out of my mouth, but I was half-tugged, half-dragged in through the doorway, into this mysterious and alien scene on the other side.

A second after we had stepped across the doorway, I heard the door slam shut behind us.

Once on the other side, my legs suddenly felt incredibly odd, and I felt my ankles slip out from under me.  I tumbled down onto the floor, landing in a sprawled pile of limbs.

“Lex, what the hell is going-” I began, as I pulled myself up.

As I looked behind me, however, I once again lost my voice.

The door through which we had just passed, the door leading back to my rental house’s kitchen, was no longer there.  Instead, I found myself staring down a seemingly infinite hallway, flanked by hundreds more of these pillar piles of stacked boxes and other items I couldn’t name.

“Oh good, we made it,” Lex commented next to me, sounding relieved.  “Here, let’s get up and find a spot to stow away before one of the crew-“

“Hralgharh?”

The noise sounded like a sadly obese older man attempting to gargle a too-large swig of mouthwash.  I turned towards the direction of the sound, feeling ice-cold horror flood my veins.

From out behind one of the pillars, a massive… something had crawled.  My best description of the thing would be a giant knot of worms, if each of those worms had a single large eyeball and a beard of electric blue hair.  From somewhere inside the wriggling mass, the creature made the gargling noise again.

Next to me, Lex hopped up lightly to his feet.  “Just a moment, good sir!” he called out to the nightmare, pasting a wide smile across his face and reaching down to haul me up to my own feet beside him.

“Lex, I – what – how – who,” I stammered out, my mind desperately trying to cling to the last shreds of sanity.

“No worries, mate, no worries,” Lex whispered to me, the smile still spread wide across his face.  “By the way, did you happen to grab any chocolate?”

Chocolate.  Yes.  This was the first thought I could actually understood.  Mutely, I reached into the tote bag and pulled out one of the candy bars.

“Perfect.  He’ll probably scalp us on the exchange rate, but we’ll kick ourselves for that later,” Lex murmured back to me.  And then, before I could respond, he held the bar out to the giant worm-ball in front of us!

From the mass of tentacles, a smaller, slimmer appendage slid out and wrapped around the candy bar, pulling it from Lex’s hand.  The creature made another noise, this one sounding more like the same sad obese man as he tried to climb into an overly full bathtub.

“Great!  We’ll just head down to the mess hall, shall we?  My buddy here could use a few hits of Karnquatz juice,” Lex called cheerfully up to the worm-ball monstrosity as it turned and trundled away.  “Thanks for having us!”

After I was fairly confident that the worm-ball wasn’t about to lunge back and devour us somehow, I turned to Lex.  “What?” I asked him, doing my best to imbue that single word with all the incomprehension and confusion that filled my head.

“No worries, mate,” he replied, looping his hand through my arm and gently walking me down one of the corridors.  “Get some juice into you, and you’ll feel right as rain!”

“I don’t want to feel right as rain!”  I burst out, even as he walked me away.  “I want to go home!”

For a moment, a cloud passed across my roommate’s features.  “That, um, that might be a little tricky,” he said, a note of somberness in his voice.

“Why??”

“Well, it doesn’t exist,” Lex commented, looking a little uncomfortable.  But then, his expression perked up once again.  “But hey!  We made it off before the wipe, and this ship might have Karnquatz juice.  Things could be worse!”

The ruins and rubble stretched on for miles.  The area, once a vibrant city, had been reduced to nothing but hiding holes for rats and vermin.  Trees, once kept as ornamental symbols of mankind’s conquest over nature, now grew out beyond their enclosures, slowly but surely cracking open their concrete prisons.

The wind drifted through the lifeless ruins, carrying not even the scent of decay.  Even the bodies were long gone, dissolved back to the dust from which they had clawed their way out.

No sound drifted on the wind.

Wait – hold on, do you hear something?

It sounds like whistling…

The whistling, a light and pleasant tune that meandered across the chromatic scale without any clear rhythm, grew louder, until a bushy head of hair popped up from behind the rubble that was once a skyscraper.  The man paused his tune for a moment long enough to, with a grunt, dislodge one of the heavy chunks of concrete.

“Very nice!” he called out aloud, as he watched the concrete slab tumble and slide down the pile of rubble.  “At least a spare, I’d say!”

After the chunk of concrete had come to a stop with a thundering boom at the bottom of the pile, the man began rooting around in the newly uncovered cavity.  His voice drifted up out of the hole.

“Let’s see here… ooh, there’s something!” the man’s voice called out, filled with a burst of excitement.  A few more grunts followed, accompanied by more concrete boulders being heaved out of the hole.

“Yes!” the man cried, as he wrenched out the small, cylindrical object he had dug from the rubble.  He held it aloft, as if showing it off to the rest of the empty city.  “Oh, how lucky am I!”

“I’ll be eating well tonight!” he kept talking, even as he carefully made his way down the pile of rubble.  “Oh, this is the best day ever!  I can’t wait for sundown!”

The man, once back down on the decaying city streets, turned around, surveying the crumbling buildings around him.  “Let’s try that one next – it looks like a triangle!” he decided, setting off towards his next destination.

As he strolled away, he broke out once again into whistling – although now, the whistling was interspersed with little exclamations.  “I can’t believe it!  A whole can of beans, practically as good as new!  I’m going to be eating like a king tonight!”