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DOMINSKI PILOTED ONE OF THE facility’s rovers toward the western bio-dome. Most of the bubble enclosure had been shredded, and pieces of it were scattered all around by the breeze. The center support tower had snapped in its middle— its top half had fallen into the dead forest of the failed terraformation and its bottom half was still standing, though at an angle.
“The destruction is catastrophic,” said Dr. Fukumura. “However, it is remarkable that the plant life managed to spread beyond the enclosed domes. Dr. Carter and his team did a fantastic job sculpting the lifeforms to fit Thuun’s unique composition. I can’t help but wonder how it all went wrong. Not only are the domes destroyed, but everything is dead. The terraformation seems as if it was going better than could have been expected, then there was chaos, destruction...we need to find an explanation.”
Another rover was already parked outside of the dome’s observatory entrance. Dominski pulled up next to it.
“The dome’s been obliterated,” said Silhouette, “but the research office is almost completely unharmed.”
“Wind storm?” suggested Dominski.
“Couldn’t be,” said Fukumura. “The domes were designed to withstand even the most severe environmental effects. No storm or quake should have been able to bring it down.”
“Then what?” asked Dominski as he followed Fukumura toward the office door. “Was it sabotage? I don’t see any signs of battle. Not even a plasma burn or discarded charge. Nothing.”
Fukumura went to open the office door. “Let’s find out.”
It was jammed. The doctor shoved her shoulder into the door and it budged about an inch.
“Barricade,” said Dominski. “Someone is...or was, in there. Let me handle it.”
Dominski positioned himself a few feet back from the doorway and then ran forward, ramming himself into the door. He bashed it open wide enough for a person to squeeze through, but it wasn’t going to open any farther. He stepped inside and then shouted back to the others, “All clear!”
Silhouette and Dr. Fukumura followed him into the building. A couple of file cabinets had been knocked over by Dominski’s charge and pushed against the nearest wall. The small enclosure was dominated by the large window that looked out into the dome’s former forest. A single ceiling light was on over a computer desk in the far corner of the room where a frail form was curled into a fetal position on the floor.
“We’ve got a dead body,” said Dominski.
“Oh no,” said Fukumura.
“Let me see,” said Silhouette. As she walked over to the body, an electric buzz filled the room and a digital layout loaded onto the large window.
“The office is coming back online.” Fukumura walked up to the window and interacted with the digital display.
Silhouette kneeled next to the deceased woman and pulled back her hair. Her body had withered and was covered in a thin layer of sticky moisture, much like everything else had been. There was no mold, no maggots. She had been dead for at least several days in the hot, humid conditions of planet Thuun and showed no signs of decomposition. Weird.
There was a gash across her neck, its dried blood and the thin layer of Thuun slime on top of it glistened in the room’s light. A boxcutter was on the floor a few feet away from her body— also covered in blood.
“Self-inflicted?” asked Dominski as he looked over Silhouette’s shoulder.
“Looks like it.” Silhouette dug into the woman’s pockets, finding a broken pen in one. The shriveled body shifted with ease as she felt around for more clues. Underneath the corpse was an object, one that the woman had wrapped her dying body around. It was a notebook.
“Don’t see handwritten stuff everyday,” said Dominski.
“Looks like she was keeping a journal. Not much else for her to do in here without power.”
“Hmm.” Dominski had moved away from Silhouette and was staring at the digital display that had formed on the window. “Fukumura’s wandered off outside. I can see her. There! See?” He traced his finger along the Doctor’s on-screen path until she walked beyond the edge of the display. “This camera feed is still working.”
Silhouette turned to look. “Yeah, that one’s a live feed. The others are recorded, though. They’re looping. What are they showing?”
“I don’t know. It just looks like plants to me. I’m going to catch up with the doctor.”
“I’ll be out there in a minute.” Silhouette watched the videos as Dominski went outside to meet Fukumura.
On screen, three videos repeated in ten-second loops, each a steady-shot of vibrant plant life in the dome’s enclosure. But something was moving in the recordings. It was green and difficult to differentiate from the abundant underbrush, but Silhouette could catch glimpses of it as it moved through the thickets. “There weren’t any large animal lifeforms brought to Thuun,” she said to herself. “Not yet.”
Changing her focus, Silhouette could see beyond the digital display and through the window to where Dominski chased after Fukumura. The Jeden disappeared into the brush as he headed in the direction of the fallen tower.
Silhouette returned her attention to the notebook in her hands.
The journal was unsettling. Amnah Hussan had written her name on the first page and followed it with dozens of a brief entries, all undated and unorganized. She mentioned a ‘beast’ in her writings, but did not describe what it was. As Silhouette deciphered the notes, it became clear to her that Amnah had purposefully barricaded herself inside of this observatory office after the destruction of the dome, wanting to run away from the others who were still inside of the facility. “They’re losing their minds,” she had written. “They’re afraid. They’ve gone nuts. I’m afraid, too. I had to get out of there.”
Sketches filled many of the pages. It looked like she was drawing her memories of home, of her city, her school, family. “I want to go home, but they won’t let me. Rawlings took the ship himself and went who knows where. Katey cut the comms. We’re stranded. Why? WHY?!”
The later pages became scratchings. She had started carving into the paper with her pen, soaking the sheets with ink.
“So scared. Thuun. Don’t find me.”
Those were the last legible words.
Silhouette placed the notebook and pen next to the deceased Amnah, then turned back to the windowed display. The interactive screen was intuitive enough for Silhouette to understand its workings. Her finger flipped through the video files and selected one of the most recent recordings where the thumbnail displayed footage from high above the forest with a clear view of the dome’s central tower. She maximized the video and hit play.
The window went opaque with the video footage and blocked out the exterior sunlight, allowing the screen to display with vibrant clarity. The video started with a clear view of the lush fauna that had dominated the floor of the dome, and it was possible to see through the clear walls of the dome where the greenery had spread outside of its climate-controlled confines.
A group of vines had taken over the central tower. It was swaying back and forth, gently at first, and then increasing its swing a little more with each pass. It initially appeared to be the result of exterior winds or a quake, but the tower suddenly jerked as if something had hit it, and then the tower bent in the middle, sharply, causing some debris to fall off of it.
The swaying escalated in intensity, becoming harsh, violent. The dome remained attached to the top of the tower as the structure bent downward, eventually snapping and falling to the ground. The dome collapsed and the camera’s feed continued to record a while longer, offering only a view of the dirt that it had plummeted into.
“Eeeeyaah!”
A distant scream erupted from outside. Not from the video, but from within the dead forest outside of the observatory office. Silhouette ran out of the building and toward the sound.
* * *
She had recorded the biological signature of each member of the Krajova crew while they were in transit to Thuun, scanning their biophoton emissions, vital rhythms, thermo prints, and more, to create unique bio-tracking identities in her Ocu’s datadrive.
Silhouette turned on her ocular bio-tracking and searched for Dominski’s presence. She spotted his signature not more than a hundred yards into the dead forest, then she ran to him, his image becoming more clear to her Ocu’s sight as she closed the distance between them. He had collapsed and was lying motionless on the ground.
Following the same trail that Dominski and Fukumura had blazed through the brush, Silhouette moved as quick and silent as a wild cat. She was but a shadow in the woods, a breeze through the trees.
All of the sterile forest’s expired plant-life was covered in the yellow fluff that continued to fall from the sky. Everything Silhouette saw was dead, until she spotted Dominski. He was unconscious and had fallen into the shallow edge of a murky pool of water, but he was still breathing. Silhouette detected no other signs of movement nearby. Fukumura was nowhere to be seen.
She hauled Dominski out of the pool and placed him on his back near the water’s edge. There was a small boulder within the shallows of the muck that was splattered with blood, and Dominski had a gash across his forehead.
Silhouette slapped his cheek. “Hey, Dominski!” She slapped again. “Hey, hey, wake up. Where’s the doctor?”
There was no response.
Silhouette reached into Dominski’s pack and pulled out the medical kit he had stored in there. She cleaned his wound as best as she could, then wrapped his head with a bandage. There was a comm attached to the collar of his coat. Silhouette pressed her hand to its activator and spoke into it.
“Team Krajova, respond.”
“Who is this?” asked a voice over the comm. It was Kapral Kapoor.
“This is Enforcer Silhouette. Jeden Dominski has been hurt. Dr. Fukumura is missing.”
“Fuck,” said Kapoor. “I’m on my way.”
“Jeden contacted us just a minute ago,” said Kapral Yost. “Said he was chasing after the doctor and saw some slimy alien thing moving in the brush. I hate aliens.”
“And where the fuck were you, Enforcer?” demanded Kapoor. “You’re supposed to be with them. Why did you let the Jeden get hurt? What did you do to him?”
Silhouette inhaled a deep breath and repressed her instinctive responses, subduing her defensive rage. “Dominski is stable, but unconscious. He sustained head trauma. Do you have his location?”
“Yes,” responded Yost. “The comm is sending a tracking signal. Kapoor and I will be there in thirty on the rover.”
“Good,” said Silhouette. “Tend to your Jeden. I will find Fukumura.”
“You don’t command us,” said Kapoor. “Fukumura is our responsibility.”
“The Jeden is our primary responsibility, Kapoor,” said Yost. “We will take care of him first, then we can worry about the Doctor.”
“I will return once I’ve found Fukumura.” As Silhouette stepped away from the comm she noticed that Dominski’s knife was missing from its sheath. She looked in the immediate area for the Doctor, then scanned the surrounding forest for Fukumura’s bio-signature, but there was nothing. Dead or gone.
If Fukumura was dead, it was possible that her body was at the bottom of the swampy pool of water where Silhouette had found Dominski. She walked into the muck to investigate, the water reaching her hips at its deepest point, and crouched low so that she could feel around for anything unusual.
Silhouette stepped on something stiff that stuck to the pad of her foot. She lifted her leg, then yanked Dominski’s blade free from her suit. It was coated in a sap-like substance, a thicker variant of the slick moisture that had thinly covered most of the facility and that Amnah woman’s corpse.
Something else stirred in the water as a result of her movements. An object, green and plump, floated just under the surface and was moving in Silhouette’s direction.
She gripped Dominski’s combat knife and stabbed down into the fleshy object. Nothing happened. She lifted the knife out of the water with a hunk of plant meat skewered on its blade.
The flesh was plump like a steak, but gooey and green like an aloe leaf with thin, woody skin. The dripping sap emitted a sweet fragrance that reminded Silhouette of the mulberry body lotion she often used, which was an oddity in this otherwise foul-smelling world. A brief moment of bliss crossed Silhouette’s mind as the aroma tickled her nose. She wanted to take off her mask and taste the plant. Just a little bite.
A loud cough startled Silhouette, her sudden, jolted movements shaking the plant chunk free from the knife. Dominski had rolled to his side and vomited a portion of the murky pool back to where it belonged.
Silhouette walked back over to Dominski and tried again to communicate with the man, but there was still no response. She pulled him a little farther away from the water and slid the combat knife back into its sheath at his side.
All right then, she thought. Where is Fukumura?