Arrival: Chapter 27
Sadhika waited restlessly for the madness to descend upon her. She had been in intense situations before, real pressure cookers in fact, but never before in her memory had her life been so directly and overtly under threat. It was an awful kind of restlessness; the kind one only feels when one’s life is on the line with no meaningful control over how it’s all going to turn out. Put more simply she was scared; she was in mortal fear for her life.
She had been monitoring the descent of the landers on her wrist scroll and had been forced to witness all of the same horrors as her fellow simulants. She was still rather in shock at the idea that dozens of people had just died, dozens of her people. Nothing in the memories lent to her by her progenitor had in any way prepared her for such a thing. Commercial and professional stress she was supremely familiar with, and was cool as a cucumber under that kind of pressure, but she just didn’t have the kind of job… the kind of life which meant that anybody under her supervision or direction had ever died on the job. Part of her knew with great certainty that it would all hit her like a brick later on, but at the moment she was only numb to what had just happened.
On some level she also knew far too well that they would not be the only people to die today. A massacre was brewing, and she lamented a thought which she had, that maybe those who burned up on entry were the only lucky ones today. At least they didn’t have to suffer being burned alive, or being shot by their brothers and sisters, or being stuck forever on the ship above or dying of starvation or exposure below after the mission was a complete failure.
At first she’d thought it would be a good idea to stay with Halley and take up a defensive position with his people. She didn’t have any intention of actually fighting, but she’d hoped that being there she might be able to talk some sense into him or his people. Before long though, she realized it was utterly futile. She understood that all of them had stopped listening to her a long time ago. Upon that realization, she’d abandoned them and headed out into the jungle as Wiremu had suggested as an alternative. She knew it wasn’t much safer out there but it was somewhat safer, and in her heart she found that she’d far prefer to be mauled to death by some kind of mutant panda dinosaur than have to suffer being killed by (or worse having to kill) one of her own people. She loaded what gear she’d brought with her into her backpack, picked up her shotgun, and walked off on her own into the jungle.
Many had protested her taking the weapon with her, including Halley himself at first. Being so minimally armed, just that one shotgun would have made a huge difference to their overall defensive capabilities. Sadhika made it clear though, that leaving them her shotgun was totally unacceptable, because her intentions were to remain absolutely neutral. To leave them her personal weapon would be tantamount to supporting their side, and she solemnly swore that if they took it from her by force she would in response commit total and unwavering support to the forces which were coming against them. Although she chose not to mention it because she didn’t think it would penetrate much with them in their situation, she was worried about her safety out in the jungle, and she knew that her odds of surviving that danger went up significantly if she were armed.
The truth in Sadhika’s heart, was that it was an idle threat to suggest that she would ever join the other side against them. She absolutely just didn’t have it in her to raise a weapon against any member of her crew, and she did still think of them collectively as her crew, even if they were factionalized and about to start killing each other. They were all her crew, all her people… all her children in a way, and that’s what hurt her the most, the idea of people she cared so much about killing each other, and her being totally unable to do anything to stop it. Beyond needing the shotgun for her own protection in the jungle, she didn’t want to leave it behind, because she knew that it would be used to kill members of her crew. She found that unacceptable. She brought the weapon in; and she felt it was her duty to make sure that she brought it out with her again.
After leaving Halley’s camp, she found herself very much alone out in the jungle. By now it was early nighttime again, and it was as eerily and disturbingly silent as it had been before, except again for the mysterious shrieking of one particular species. She realized that the night must have been what Asari was waiting for and what took him so long to launch his incursion. They must have been waiting for the darkness. Fortunately for Sadhika though, with her PANEs on she could clearly see in the dark just as well as if it were brightly daytime, with the exception of her vision being reduced to black and white or in this case, black and red. The cameras in her PANEs picked up low light and infra-red signatures to compile as faithful as possible a representation of what was out in front of her, even in pitch black.
The nights were dark on Haven… as dark as nights ever got on Earth, but every night. There were no artificial lights to create light pollution, and there was no large luminous moon. There were only the stars and the grand expanse of the Milky Way. It was usually dark, but on this night off in the distance Sadhika could see a dim dancing glow which she intuited must be the fires from the landers trapped in the jungle canopy some distance off. Not too long after noticing the fires, she began to see the faint signatures of the surviving crew approaching her position. It was either dumb luck, a terrible careless mistake, or a subconsciously deliberate choice, but for whatever reason she had managed to walk away from Halley’s camp in the direction of the area where the landers had come down.
When she realized they were coming her way, she immediately started moving straight to her left to avoid running into them as they advanced towards the landing strip. Once at what she considered to be a respectable distance, she issued a thought command at her scroll to begin broadcasting an identification signal which would show up in their PANE displays. It identified her as Sadhika, and as a neutral non-combatant. It was her hope that by announcing her presence from a respectable distance they would choose to ignore her, or at the very least not shoot her if they did happened to see her and suspect that she might be one of Halley’s people waiting to ambush them. After all they knew she’d been at Halley’s camp, and she hoped that they could intuit exactly what’d happened, that she’d gone out into the jungle because she didn’t want any part of the conflict.
After she began broadcasting the signal, she watched as they seemed to pause to discuss something, and then resume their advance on Halley’s airstrip. She hoped that her plan had worked and that they’d identified her, decided that they didn’t need to worry about her and moved on. Her own personal identification protocol was heavily encrypted, and they must have known how unlikely it was that anybody else could be out there pretending to be her for whatever reason.
She was relieved when they seemed to ignore her and continue on their way towards the airstrip. When they advanced to about the point at which she’d originally detected them in the first place and turned to her left to avoid them, she saw a sudden and panicked eruption of chaotic flailing and thrashing. She zoomed in with her PANEs and to her horror was able to see what was going on. Three of the horned panda dinosaur things had attacked the humans. One large beast was accompanied by two smaller ones, which she figured to be children of the larger one.
Sadhika watched with dread as she saw the first person get gored by the larger of the three beasts. When she saw the first of the landing party shot down by another human trying to hit the animal and missing, she stopped thinking and took off in a flat out run towards them. She watched as a second person, and then a third was gored by the two apparently equally vicious smaller ones, and then as two more were trampled by what she took to be their parent.
If she’d had time to think and back rationalize her actions after the fact, she’d say that it wasn’t a violation of her neutrality to help them because they were facing a planet related threat which wasn’t part of the crew’s conflict. In truth though, she was absolutely intervening in the conflict but just in an unexpected way, and deep down she probably knew it on some level. The animals here were just an inherent hazard of the terrain this battle was to take place on, and the more of the landing party which were taken out by the jungle before even getting to Halley, the greater his chances of ultimately triumphing. Sadhika’s ultimate truth though, was that she just wasn’t the kind of person who had it in her to watch people in trouble without trying to help if she had the power to. She was a helper, a builder, an engineer… a doer. That’s why it was so hard for her to accept that she couldn’t help either side of the conflict in the first place.
There was wild and undisciplined firing of lasers and shotguns all over the area, and the closer she got the lower she had to keep her head until eventually as she arrived she found that she had to lie right down on her stomach to avoid being hit by any stray buckshot or weaponized coherent light beams. Tossing her backpack aside and flipping over on her back, she quickly emptied her shotgun of the buckshot rounds it was currently loaded with and slipped them into the left outer thigh pocket of her coveralls. She then took out the solid slug rounds she had in her right thigh pocket and loaded them one by one into the weapon until it was full. Turning back over on her belly, she waited patiently and as calmly as possible (which was apparently far calmer than any of the landing party), until she had a clear shot at one of the beasts with reasonable assurance of not hitting any of the colonists. When she felt like she had the shot, she fired.
She was deadly accurate, hitting the animal exactly where she’d intended to on its side, above and behind its front shoulder where she figured its heart should be if its physiology was in any way analogous to similar animals back on Earth. Whatever she did hit within the animal, it immediately fell hard to the ground with a heavy thud. Its limbs flailed some in pain and panic, but less and less as it died, until it stopped moving altogether. The two smaller animals, presumably scared off or confused by the sudden loss of their parent providing direction and security, promptly ran off. One appeared to be slightly wounded and limping a little from a previous grazing shot, but the two nevertheless made off with reasonably good speed.
Sadhika stood up, perhaps a little too soon and too quickly given the circumstances, and all fifty remaining colonists turned their guns on her. She put both her hands up and held her gun high above her head in conciliation, and began walking backwards without saying a word. None of the humans said anything either; they’d all seen that it had been her who had just saved them by killing one of their attackers. Given that, none wanted to stop her by force, nor were any of them particularly inclined to have a chat with her at this point either. They kept their aim on her as they watched her retreat back into the thick darkness of the jungle, and then when she had retreated enough for their comfort, they regrouped and continued on towards their enemy’s airstrip.
When they had advanced enough, Sadhika moved in behind their position to follow them to the airstrip. She still had no intention of involving herself, but she was now determined to at least bear witness to the encounter. She thought, still hoped, that at some critical moment she might be able to intervene to stop the madness, to maybe clue them in that one side had already clearly won or that they’d both already lost and that nobody else had to die today. She thought that maybe just by being around there was a chance that she might somehow be able to save a life or two.
She heard the first gunshot, and then a violent eruption of gunfire ensued. The laser rifles made little sound and none whatsoever from a significant distance, but the sound of conventional weapons fire was unmistakable and the sound chilled her to the core. People were dying, more people were dying, her people…
In addition to the heavy booming of the shotgun blasts, she could also hear what sounded more like harsh popping sounds, which she immediately identified as the handguns being fired. It was then that she realized that they’d brought with them all of the small arms Wiremu had ordered them to print for the landed crew to protect themselves against the panda dinosaur things. It made complete sense at the time, but now she found herself decidedly wishing he’d never given such an order. They’d never have had enough time to fabricate them for this incursion if they hadn’t already started making them for more legitimate purposes.
Suddenly she became aware of a rustling behind her. Despite her listening intently to the battle taking place not far away, the sound was close and ominous enough for her attention to be immediately and completely drawn to it. The sound became steadily clearer and louder, and startled Sadhika into turning around to see what was coming her way. To her shock and horror it was a mass of squiddies. There seemed to be a hundred of them at least, and that was only what she could see from where she was crouched down; there could have been many many more. She was afraid for them, they seemed to be walking right into a combat zone and into a slaughter, and what’s worse their presence would only add to the confused fog of war which already existed at the airstrip. Little did she know, she should have been more scared of the squiddies, than for them.
Confused and afflicted with a simulation of rampantly surging adrenaline, Sadhika hunkered to the ground and laid herself down in a nook between a fallen tree and the ground to shelter herself as they passed by, at least she was hoping that they’d just pass her by. She had no idea what could possibly be prompting them to this strange behaviour, but she felt lucky when they didn’t seem to notice her at all and just passed her by. It took several minutes for the entire herd to pass over her, and they seemed to be moving at a pretty good speed too. She figured that she’d been right, there seemed to be at least a hundred of the creatures passing by her as she hid. Once they had passed her though, she was consumed with dread as all doubt was removed from her mind that they were heading directly towards the airstrip and the battle, for some reason she couldn’t even begin to understand or explain.
Not long after they’d passed her by she heard a distinct change in the sounds coming from the battle at the airstrip. The faint vestiges of shouting she’d heard had until this point been simply anger, clearly emblematic of the kind of rage one would expect from those in the throes of a violent bitter struggle. She heard a sharp decline in the number of shots being fired which was then punctuated by shouts which sounded more like those of confusion and panic than what she had been hearing before.
She then heard a sharp uptake in the gunfire, which then began trailing off again until it eventually died off altogether. Several times when she thought she’d heard the last shot fired, she’d find that she was wrong and another would ring out in the night as she listened intently, wondering if this time it would indeed be the last. Now all her ears could detect in the silence of the night was a slight ringing simulation of what humans heard when the loudest sounds in their environment were blood passing through their inner ear and the residual vibrations of hairs in their cochlea. There was an eerie stillness in the air; it was as though the horrific battle had never taken place at all. She was about to begin advancing on the airstrip to investigate what had happened, but as she began to move she was prompted to resume hiding when she saw the squiddies coming back towards her.
As they passed, she realized that it was unlikely that she had just happened to be in the way of one group’s approach to the airstrip, and she came to suspect that many more such groups might have approached the area at the same time but from a variety of directions. If that was the case, there could have been thousands of the creatures on the scene, and she still had no reasonable hypotheses whatsoever about what might have drawn them to the battle in the first place. Unless…
It took several minutes again for the creatures to pass her by, but this time when they’d passed, she didn’t waste any time once she felt safe. She made her way as safely as she could through the jungle and towards the now ominously silent airstrip. When she was just about at the clearing, she tripped over something and nearly fell to the ground. It was a body. When she looked down she could see in clear red and black relief that there were in fact more than half a dozen bodies stretched out in front of her, both human and squiddy. They were all silent, all motionless. She did her best to respectfully step around them.
Once she was out in the open the sight was devastating and it hit her like somebody had kicked her in the gut. Bodies… bodies everywhere… she was sure that there must be even more which she couldn’t see around the inner perimeter of the jungle, but with the aid of her PANEs, she could see the ones out in the open as clearly as if it were daytime.
Out of nowhere she was frightfully startled by the roar of the shuttle’s engines powering up. Her understanding of what the sound meant filled her with dread as she immediately turned and ran towards it. As she arrived all of the craft’s running lights came on, and as she ran around to the front of it she was momentarily blinded by the vessels brilliant headlights.
Ripping her PANEs off and blinking away the sharp pain of such a dramatic and sudden illumination, through her squinting she could just barely resolve Halley sitting in the pilot’s seat looking haggard and intense. She could also see one of his people whose name she didn’t know in the co-pilot’s seat but she hardly noticed this other person. It was Halley she was focused on like a laser beam. Defiantly she put her hands on the front of the shuttle as though she could stop it from moving with her own meager strength. She looked Halley directly in his eyes and slowly shook her head at him. Without words she was ordering, asking, pleading, begging… whatever might possibly make him stop.
“Don’t…” she whispered, knowing that there was no way he could hear, but also knowing that he must be able to read it in her eyes. “Don’t do this Halley!!” she roared as loudly and angrily as she could, while banging her fists hard on the front of the shuttle several times with desperately violent intensity.
But Halley just blinked at her. For a slight moment he seemed to find her behaviour curious, but he soon snapped out of it. His eyes narrowed down with an ominous intensity that chilled her right through to her artificial bones. She could see that he was in the most devastatingly dangerous state a human beings could ever find themselves in, at the intersection of hate and rage.