Star Side

Chapter 8

Stellar date (Earth Time): 01-20-2914

I might have jinxed the mission with that thought.

He got to the surface alright. Despite Naomi being in the biggest bitch mode ever, I caught her breathing a sigh of relief when Joshua chimed in that he'd safely landed.

Then it was a solid two hours of Joshua jabbering none stop about the surface of the planet. The plants there didn't vary too much from Earth's other then they had broader leaves and were taller to try and get out of reach of the argon as much as possible. The younger plants, which had to start through the argon, were the ones that produced the carrot puke compound that helped them process the argon in place of carbon dioxide, but the process wasn't nearly as energy efficient as old fashion ATP. But, apparently, these umbrella forests had flowers and all sorts of things.

All of us had seen his plant samples in the lab, pictures of the surface, and heard his lectures, but we couldn't run away this time. The monitors had to be watched for emergency sake and someone had to be on guard constantly to dissuade Joshua from taking off his helmet. The atmosphere may have adequate amounts of oxygen in higher levels, but all one needed was to go just a little too close to sea level or trip and you'd asphyxiate in argon. Even if you got up in time to not suffocate, the heavy gas would sink to the bottom of your lungs and stick around until you hung upside down for a bit, which, if you're outside, would most likely just get more argon stuck in you.

The threat of death didn't stop Joshua from desperately wanting to smell the air, though. Didn't realize he had such a thing for smells. I bet fifty bucks with Levi that he was one of those guys who farted in a bottle and trapped it for later.

Naomi finally had it and had us plug in earbuds to our ears. We took turns being on com with Joshua while the others nursed coffee and did our best not to drool on the controls. I was beginning to wonder if we'd missed something direly important, because babysitting someone on a planet couldn't need this many people.

"What if he brings back some weird disease the injections can't protect us from?" I asked Levi sometime around four in the morning. Naomi was on coms now and the gentle buzz of the system was fast putting me to sleep.

"Then we die," he said. He had a sock over his face and had leaned back as far as the bridge's swivel chair would go.

"What if it turned us into mutants? Like, with superpowers?"

"Cool."

"It'd turn your toenails to claws. Like upside-down Wolverine."

"Eh?"

"Superhero. Has these metal claw things that pop out of his knuckles. Cuts things."

"Huh. Pity. Cut them already."

"All by yourself? Wow."

"Shut up."

"No. Gotta stay. Awake."

"Noami's on the coms."

"Noami's divorcing him."

"Can't die. He's the only thing she can get some from."

"I can hear you, you nasty perverted wart," growled Naomi.

"Hmm."

Another quiet fell between us. It couldn't have been long, but it was long enough for my exhaustion to win out over the caffeine. One of the key's to my brawny constitution was my impeccable biological clock. I never had insomnia. Never had any sort of sleeping troubles. My head hit the pillow at the same time every night and I was out. The downside was caffeine could only do so much for me. I probably was one of those unlucky sorts that metabolized it too quickly.

Because next thing I knew, I was waking up to Naomi yelling.

"Josh—JOSH! Damnit, you better not be kidding with me, JOSH!"

I sat up like lightning. Levi had sat up too, the sock down in his lap, eyes to the screen.

"Vitals are still strong," he said. "He's still alive, but he's panicked."

I looked to my screens. I'd switched jobs with Naomi when she'd taken a turn at coms, so now I had all the navigational readings.

"He's moving west, towards some hills."

"Is he at above argon elevation?" asked Naomi. She had stood up and her fingers were frantically moving readings about, though they stayed the same.

"Not yet."

Levi said nothing, his dark eyes on the jagged line of Joshua's frantic heartbeat.

"What happened?" I asked.

"He'd just found the burial ground. Something came at him, I didn't get any details." She jammed the com alert button, which would give an annoying beep to the person on the other line to alert them of an incoming message. "Joshua! Has something got you? I know you're still conscious, asshat!"

"Conscious does nothing if he lost his helmet," said Levi.

"But I'm still reading normal oxygen levels, it says his helmet is still—"

A crackle came over the speakers. Naomi had unplugged the earbud at some point.

"Demon—it looks l-l-like a god damn—had some kind of—"

Another loud crack came across the intercom, then nothing more.

"He's knocked out," said Levi, glancing at his sister.

"Elevation?" she asked.

"Still not high enough," I said, then paused as the blinker on the elevation chart got weird. I glanced at the numbers with a frown. "He's...going down? I think he's going underground."

"Wouldn't argon gather there the most?" Naomi asked.

I don't know why she was asking me. She knew just as much as I did the properties of heavy gas. We'd all become experts on it since Joshua would never shut up.

I quickly scraped my mind for anything in this planet's fauna encyclopedia, as bare bones as it was, that could look like a demon, let alone be big enough to drag a man as big as Joshua away.

"Could that donkey thing qualify as a demon?" I asked.

"If demons had alien donkeys," said Levi.

"It's got to be something new." Naomi pulled out a drawer and tugged out a plastic container I knew contained a set of magnetic keys for emergencies. "We should send a probe with a camera to his location."

"And what?" asked Levi.

Her hands jerked but didn't stop moving to set the magnetic keys into their slots. The probe they released was a high-tech thing for emergencies, quicker, agile things that were practically supercomputers themselves and the same A.I. as the robots. However, there were only two, and we weren't technically allowed to use them since they were the most expensive thing on the station.

Levi didn't move to stop her, though his expression betrayed none of the panic we all felt.

"Naomi."

She pulled up the probes command screen.

"Naomi."

"What?" she snapped.

"Those probes can't save him. If anything they could startle whatever got him into attacking."

Naomi paused on the entry bar for the coordinate program, most likely because she had no clue what numbers to put in rather than because she was actually listening to her little brother.

This seemed more and more likely the longer she sat there, fingers hovering over the keypad.

I bit my lip and looked back down at Joshua's mark on the graph going deeper and deeper beneath the hills. I quickly pulled up the memory and had the computer recall his path as a line. I didn't have the means to get a read for whatever his surroundings were, but--

"If he can get away, I can lead him out," I said into the silence.

But nobody answered back.