Nowhere Man 1 (Patreon)

Now, I don't expect to continue this story anytime soon; I'd just had an itch to write some things for the tryonn species, and wanted to make sure I'd claimed my stake ahead of time. Since this was the story I wanted to write with a tryonn in it, well, I might as well write this one! Comments appreciated!

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RAM BAM BAM BAM BAM. That was not the noise the Blue Wake should have been making as Tac Sunus dumped his payload over the upper deck of the krakun Dreadnought. He immediately pulled to crest off the Dreadnought’s port side, but the turret on the aft got a lucky shot in, and his number three engine exploded.

In their arrogance, the krakun had sent only one Dreadnought into orbit over Blue, but Tac wasn’t confident he would live to gloat about their mistake.

“’Join the Orbital Defense Corps’, they said,” Tac barked as he turned the overhead lever for manual fire extinguishing. “’See the stars and meet interesting people’, they said. Luna witness me, if I survive this I am going back to that recruiting station and biting the officer’s throat out.”

The suppressant foam flooded the quickly burning engine compartment behind him. What air remained in the cabin, the foam and fire quickly absorbed, which was why the corps always emphasized putting the breathing helmet on before an emergency. Tac had to scramble to make sure the neck wrap covered his gills, lest his body assume his lungs were struggling and tried to find water instead.

“Krakun ship firing off the starboard quarter,” AMET announced. “EMP missiles locking in on your location.”

Given that it was very difficult to tell which way was up in space, while they were inside a stellar system, the guidance assumed that the the solar plane dictated right-way-up. Tac could not actually tell his real orientation at the moment, or even the position of Blue given one of the four engines decided to misfire and send him into a spinning tumble. But his species was used to getting lost in three-dimensional space, so despite the lack of direction, he didn’t feel panic. He just wanted the tumbling to stop.

“Don’t tell me you’re still online,” Tac moaned at the ship-governing AI. “Let me die in peace!”

“You just expressed a wish to survive this encounter,” AMET said.

“Yeah, and given there’s an EMP on my tail, that’s rather unlikely.”

The EMP missiles weren’t especially dangerous on their own, since they were only meant to disrupt a cubic kilometer of space. But that was enough to disable small ships so they could stay still for a moment and be picked off with more conventional arms. If he was entirely crippled by that point, he was either going to plummet straight into Blue or get a nastier missile on his tail without the chance of avoiding it.

“I believe we can get safely out of combat range if you let me assume the controls.”

AMET cut the number two engine, adjusting the Blue Wake back into balance, and the fighter craft bowed into a wide curve as the AI straightened it out and bent its trajectory, skimming over the upper atmosphere of Blue as it did. “Recommend docking with carrier.”

“What, and let the EMP strike me in the staging area?” Tac exclaimed, righting his paws onto the controls. “Absolutely not! If I drag an EMP back to the carrier they’ll blame me for it!”

“Your orders are to stay in orbit or return to the carrier.”

“You don’t get it, AMET! No, screw that, I’m falling back on my own terms. Give me back the controls.”

AMET did as he was ordered, and once the steering column was back in his control, Tac flipped open the box covering the regulator switch, and smashed it with his fist. He laughed, and in the dim reflection on the cockpit window, several rows of sharp teeth behind a breathing mask laughed back at him. Tac lined up the flight curve with the opening of the gate to Ergest six thousand kilometers away, and punched the throttle.

“You’re risking a court martial,” AMET warned him.

Tac switched off the speaker, and barked out on of his favorite songs at the top of his air-lungs.

I'm gonna fly to paradise!

I'm gonna swim warm seas

I'm gonna feast and grow

And fill the shoals

And never ever leave!

It didn’t sound nearly as good being shouted into a breathing mask as it did underwater, but that hardly mattered in the moment. The single stanza covered the time it took to cross the gap to the gate, the round, glowing opening to another stellar system quickly ballooning in size. The gate guard, still holding the line against the krakun, made an attempt to contact him, but since it only took one second for him to blast through the ring, they hardly got a single word out.

However: on only two engines, despite the terrific speed, Tac’s fighter was still, relatively, hobbling away from the fight. The EMP missile that followed his ship took the short way across Tac’s curved trajectory, and caught up to him just as he crossed the threshold. When it detonated, for a full second, the thin blue light that normally rimmed the gates shimmered into a wave.

—

Tac coughed as he swallowed lungfuls of air. He’d never gotten used to waking up in the dry, as he always felt like he was suffocating. He had a headache, and his tail was sore, and he realized it was from too much light glaring in through the cockpit. Smoke floated around him, but his mask was still functioning. Even so, he struggled weakly against his harness keeping him in the pilot seat. He tried hitting the ejection pod switch, but after a long hiss, the system blared a warning over the canopy that the ejection system was jammed.

Oh… crash landing, he realized as he spotted the dirt piled up all around the canopy. Thankfully, the gravity stop worked, as slamming into a planet at twenty thousand kilometers an hour should have rightfully separated his flesh from his cartilage.

“AMET?” Tac asked, before he remembered he shut off the box’s annoying whining, and he turned the switch back on. “AMET, are you there?”

“Part of me is,” AMET said. “You have been out cold for thirteen hours, and I have administered two injections of saline and izigate to keep your heart going while you regenerated.”

“That explains the headache…” And the roaring hunger, but Tac was used to feeling hungry since he joined the military.

“We have been cut off from the ODC central network. I’ve sequestered a portion of myself for emergency and survival procedures.”

“Where are we? Did we make it to Ergest?”

“Unlikely,” AMET said. “From our last known position just before the Ergest Gate, the likelihood of striking the land on Ergest would have been very small.”

“But where else could we have possibly landed?”

“Unknown.”

Tac blinked. Was he mistaken? AMET just said that it was the Ergest Gate, but maybe AMET was mistaken, unlikely though it was. Maybe they skipped out of Ergest and flew into another gate… but that was even less likely than crash landing on Ergest itself.

“I don’t think we’re gonna find out just sitting here,” Tac said, this time carefully unbuckling himself from the seat. He didn’t have any room to stand in the tilted cockpit, but he could at least pull his quite large tail out of the seat sleeve and give it a rub down. “How much air do we have?”

“Unknown.”

“You don’t know how much air we have?”

“It is hard to estimate the total amount of air on this planet.”

Tac paused. “…the planet’s atmosphere is breathable?”

“Yes. Similar proportions and quantities of atmospheric mixture to Blue.”

Tac started to pull his mask off, though considered the smoke that’d built up in the cockpit. He stood, awkward as standing was, and after pulling several safety pins around its corners, he popped open the overhead escape hatch, and Tac shoved his way out of the cockpit and into chill wind and dry land.

Once Tac removed his dirty mask entirely, he was struck by the vast, thick and rolling hills of blue-green vegetation. He’d ended up on a long, stony plain along a mountainside—he’d never actually seen dry-land mountains before as Blue had none, but he was clearly at the base of one. The stony efface far into the sky, though how high it went he couldn’t tell.

But he blinked at the violet skies beyond, because widening his sight, he realized he was looking at the edges of a gas giant that took up the larger portion of the sky. The haze of the atmosphere cloaked it and dimmed the color greatly, but it was impossible to miss. That planet had to have been absurdly close.

Tac must have landed on one of its moons. It was a somewhat comforting thought, as he’d worshiped the moon of Blue all his life. Even knowing it was a barren rock wasn’t terribly upsetting or concerning, the moon just radiated some feeling of correctness and life into the galaxy. And a lush moon, too! It was like he’d fallen into the garden of Luna.

But still, the cynical, analyzing part of his brain took hold. An atmospheric moon around a gas giant had always been theorized as possible, but a chlorine atmosphere on a moon? Precisely like Blue? With a somewhat light, but still similar gravity to Blue? In a temperature range that, while cold, was clearly bearable?

Something wasn’t adding up.

“AMET?” Tac asked.

“I recommend you grab the emergency defense and supply kit,” AMET said from the hatch. “I have already loaded myself into the offboard computer.”

“Is anyone coming for us?”

“Unknown.”

Of course. In any case, Tac could spot the line of the sea some miles off, and if he was going to survive here for an unknown period of time he’d rather do it in the saltwater. Maybe this was the luck of Luna. Maybe he’d just claimed a new planet for the tryonn people, and he had it all to himself.

He doubted it, but he would have very much liked to believe.

Tac cracked open a size panel on the back of the ship and pulled out the emergency supply case. Opening it up, he at once pulled out the survival vest and slipped it around his chest, as well as the field gloves. Then, skipping the boots for the moment, he grabbed a can of rations, and popping open the lid, he dumped the kilo of cooked fish guts into his mouth all in one go.

“Mmm,” he mumbled, chewing. Not the best meal he’d ever had, as he never got used to the rubbery taste of cooked food. And that kilo was all he was normally afforded in one day, and as much as he considered just popping open the remainder of the cans right there and eating his fill… he couldn’t afford to.

The computer AMET mentioned strapped to his arm; it was of military design, and so the OS on its screen was of minimal design. A small speaker talked to him.

“Recommend wearing the headset,” AMET said. “I can see what you’re looking at with the viewfinder, and I can talk to you privately through the earpieces.”

Tac removed the headset and trying it over his head. “What, do you think that someone’s going to eavesdrop on us?” Tac grinned. “Come on, there’s no way that this planet’s inhabited.”

Something rumbled in the distance. Tac’s heart missed a beat, as he looked over the treetops to spot birds leaving their nests—he’d never seen birds before, either, except through science textbooks, but he could interpret their movements much like schools of fish—if they were fleeing, it was because something much larger was near.

“Uh…” Tac said, eyes fixed as the trees swayed. “You said something about defense?”

“LX6000 Light Rail Autogun,” AMET said, “with flechette molder. The LX6000 can use any magnetic metal to—”

“Wait, what?!” Tac turned his eyes to the case, he realized that the gun was the long metallic green shape on the end. He pulled the massive rifle out of the foam lining—it was surprisingly lightweight, at least for a weapon nearly as tall as he was, but boxy. Tac had never actually fired an LX6000 before, but he was pretty certain that it wasn’t really a defense weapon.

The trees shook again, and with a loud, pervasive roar, something that stood upright like a tryonnoid, but with limbs made of metal, suddenly tore through the canopy. Save for distinct joints and edges, the robot looked like it rose in whole out of a junkyard, slapped together out of scrap vehicle parts. Its face, of which it had very little, comprised just a single ocular lens, which turned its attention in Tac’s direction.

“AMET, what is that?!” Tac exclaimed.

“Unknown,” AMET said.

“Yeah, thanks.” Tac said, his throat feeling extra dry. When the robot didn’t move, he looked up with a awkward, hopeful grin. “Hey…are you… search and rescue?”

“╥≡◦╨│║╗₶ⱻﬕ▬⁞‖,” it said.

The ground shook as it took another step forward, casting a shadow over Tac. It arms reached out, fingers extending.

Tac scrambled for the gun’s handles, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. “AMET!”

“Safety switch is on the bottom.”

Before AMET even finished speaking, Tac found the twitch and threw it. Again, nothing happened, except this time the gun emitted a rising pitch. It didn’t seem like it would help if the gun were so slow to fire, and the robot’s massive hand, almost as large as the Blue Wake, bore down on Tac’s head. He squeezed his eyes shut as the gun’s electrical hum grew louder and louder, and then…

FTT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT TT. The noise was more like a thrum than distinct gunfire, and ended as abruptly as it began, a ghost of the noise echoing off the valley floor. Despite the thrashing, Tac did not let go of the trigger until the device sounded an alert in his ear. Ammunition depleted. It’d taken less than three seconds.

Tac opened his eyes. Smoke poured from the barrel of the boxy weapon. The robot laid fallen on the floor of the clearing, its entire body split in two. Though the robot had torn its way through the canopy of trees to get here, it was only now after Tac had fired the weapon that the trees themselves had been shredded to pieces, creating a distinct ‘V’ shape where once there had been forest.

“AMET…” Tac asked, slowly, “…why was I given a ‘defensive’ weapon that can kill a krakun?”

“In case you needed to defend yourself against a krakun,” AMET said simply.