Chapter 2
Subject: Security Sergeant Madison “Maddy” Turner, Oasis III. New Carthage.
The first thing Maddy noticed about the planet was the heat. Walking out of the New Carthage Spaceport and towards the taxi area, Maddy glanced at her smartlink. Not even 0900 and it’s already absolutely sweltering. Her device sounded a wet-bulb warning; something that would normally cause fleet marines and normal colonists a great deal of concern, but, she wasn’t really a fleet marine anymore, and no one around here could be considered ‘normal’ either.
The second thing was the smell. The whole system was apparently named ‘Oasis’ without a single helmet-off survey of it’s single habitable planet. The entire equator of the planet was one uninterrupted landmass filled with an incredibly diverse and virulent cacophony of bizarre creatures, their endless cycle of death, decay, and rebirth filled the air with a bizarre stench. Like someone had microwaved a giant bowl of rotten pear soup.
The landscape around New Carthage was was a patchy mishmash of rock strewn savannah intermixed with pockets of extremely dense and lush tropical growth. A mishmash of plant analogues that apparently thrived in the insane heat and humidity grew up to the sides of the city. The plants here were entirely unlike the Terran variety that was ubiquitous in Dominion space; Maddy lost her self staring at the horizon of red, blue, and purple forests.
“Hey!” A young security officer shouted at her from aside a parked pickup truck. “You must be the new sergeant, yeah? Turner right?”
“Yup, that’s me”, Maddy replied, tearing herself away from the alien world and back to her assignment. She turned to walk towards him, dragging two massive duffel bags just behind her. “You’re with the science group security team?”
The young man smiled a toothy grin. His uniform was the gray, black, and olive green of the Scientific Advancement Section Security Force, but worn down and faded. Despite being in the center of town, he wore light body armor and carried a sidearm. His smile made him look amiable and genuinely happy.
“Yeauuhp, I’m with them! And your taxi driver and bag carrier too,” he grabbed one of the huge bags and threw it into the back of the pickup with a grunt. Maddy leveraged the other one off the back of the pickup’s bed and slid it in.
“You normally drive town in full kit?” Maddy asked, surprised that he was geared up like so around town. Her briefing on the planet had been relatively short and primarily focused on the big native fauna her new team was supposed to keep away from the scientists, not local issues.
“Yeah its those fuckin’ animals you know. Anyway, name’s Felix!” Felix stuck his hand out for a shake, Maddy reciprocated.
“The uh, fauna gets inside the city?” Maddy asked, shaking his hand.
“No the fuckin’ uh, zoo animals. They gave you the run down right? Told you about the goddamn zombies? The animals?” Felix closed the tailgate on the truck and turned to walk towards the driver’s side, but stopped and gave Maddy a sidelong glance.
“Nobody mentioned anything about a zoo. I have a huge packet of stuff on the hazardous fauna on the smartlink they gave me on the station. I’ve been reading through it on the shuttle ride but I didn’t get to whatever you’re talking about yet.”
Felix smiled and started walking towards the front of the truck, ah yeah they act like everything is a big goddamn secret, even when it’s your job to know. Get in and I’ll tell you what’s up on the drive.”
Maddy complied and climbed into the passenger seat of the truck. It was a spartan, military model with an extremely sparse interior and horribly uncomfortable seats. Felix gave it a bit too much gas and the truck rocketed onto the main street. There was no traffic, which was apparently common given the carelessness of Felix’s driving.
Maddy looked around, the calm striking her as unusual. All around were brutalist, concrete structures and simple two-lane roads. There weren’t any cars on the roads or people on the sidewalks. Even the spaceport had been slow; Maddy was the only passenger on the trip, the rest of the shuttle down from the orbital station had been loaded with cargo. Light shuttles were parked at the spaceport, but apparently in storage, or out of service.
“Anyway so here’s the lowdown on the animals. So about uh, right after the ISD decided to bail on the colony here. You know maybe like nine-ten years ago or so, a bunch of scientists and lab-coat guys from the hospital got together out past the barrier and started cooking up a bunch of weird drugs, right? Wild shit! Right?” Felix smiled conspiratorially, apparently relishing the opportunity to tell someone new about the local lore. “The story is they used like venom and poison and everything from the local wildlife to make the drugs, okay? Right?”
“Okay.” Maddy agreed, looking out the window. The brutalist structures apparently only consisted of a few blocks around the spaceport. The town now looked like it was almost entirely made up of those single story modular habitation units they use for setting up the first wave of a new colony. Temporary structures, meant to be used for a few years while the first few batches of colonists built something a more permanent. Colonists moved between makeshift shops, bazars, and sidewalk restaurants. Their clothes worn and faded.
“Yeah so the shit they were making is wild, everyone gets hooked on it. Whole new economy, BAM! Like that!” Felix kept looking over at Maddy while he drove, it made her nervous. “And the thing is it almost fucking kills you, but since the colonists all have those medical nanobots in order to be here, they can’t actually die from it. But it ruins your mind, you know? So there’s all these fucking animals wandering around like zombies stealing everything so they can buy more zoo. Oh, they call it- the drugs from he venom and shit, they call it zoo, because it’s made out of the fauna here, right? And the users are animals. Zoo animals, you get it?” Felix chuckled.
“Okay, so there’s local crime to worry about too then?” Maddy asked, switching into data gathering mode.
“Nah, they’re nothing to worry about just so long as you don’t look like a victim. They’ll steal shit but they ain’t gonna do much more than that. You’ll see, they’re all worn out anyway. God don’t make strong zoo animals.” Felix’s grin never wavered. The truck smashed through a pothole, sending both of them bouncing around inside the truck.
A moment of silence passed between the two, and Maddy used the opportunity to take a closer look at the passing buildings. All temporary structures outside of the handful of concrete buildings in the city core. All clearly used well past their intended lifespans. Most of them had layers of ad-hoc repair work keeping them together. It looked like a shanty town. No surprise that there’d be a drug problem here.
“What a shithole”, Maddy muttered.
“Yeah you call it like you see it!” Felix laughed out in reply. The truck pulled up in front of a remarkably permanent looking structure, shitty though it is. It looked like an old style fire station, with a handful bays in front for land vehicles and an office off to one side. All of the windows were covered in armored steel shutters, and mismatched and weathered paint covered the outside like a mosaic of a decade’s worth of graffiti and hastily done coverup. One of the bays opened and Felix drove the truck inside.
“Come on!” Felix turned off the truck and jumped out. “I’ll take to meet the team! Almost everyone should be here. I’ll help with your stuff.”
Felix and Maddy walked to the back of the truck. The building, apparently the security headquarters, had four bays. Two of them had some type of open cab all-terrain buggies parked in them, the third had the truck they’d rode on, and the fourth held a massive, jet-black infantry fighting vehicle that bristled with barrels and armaments. Maddy recognized the logo on the side armor playing as the security unit logo that adorned the patches on her new uniforms. A cartoon snake was painted on the side of the front armored plate, coiled and lunging. The words ‘Black Mamba’ in cartoon script sat next to the snake. Huge white block letters spelled out RESEARCH down the side of the thing. Armored Personnel Science Mobile; Maddy thought, absolutely absurd.
Felix grabbed one bag and Maddy slid the other out of the truck bed and followed Felix through the bay. It was noticeably cooler inside, and didn’t stink like rotten fruit. They walked into a room that looked a like a common space. A huge kitchen sat next to an open living room of sorts filled with couches and recliners. Some type of huge gun sat partially disassembled on the coffee table in front of a wall display. About a dozen people milled about the space, each wearing some variation of the security uniform pants and jackets she’d been issued, but apparently as casual wear. This is a lot of new folks to meet at once, Maddy thought as a sudden wave of shy, nervous energy washed over her.
Felix cut through the awkwardness and announced her introduction to the whole group. “This is the new sergeant from the fleet marines! Sergeant Turner!”
A mass of people turned to look and a choir of voices offered greetings. An extremely clean cut older man with a huge, wild mustache and skeletal, gaunt face strode over, a snake-like grin on his face. “Sergeant Turner! I’m Chief. Welcome to our domain.” He took Maddy’s hand and shook, just a bit too hard to be totally polite. His smile changed slightly, rising from his mouth to include his eyes. “I’m happy you’re finally here. You and I have a lot of work to do.”
