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Chapter 618 Red Rover, Red Rover...
Chapter 618 Red Rover, Red Rover...
Chapter 618 Red Rover, Red Rover...
(Ed note: Red Rover is a playground game that Gen X kids used to play. It isn’t played now, because, like most Gen X games, it was incredibly violent and kids would sometimes get serious injuries (like concussions, teeth being knocked out, the occasional broken bone, and bloody abrasions) and nowadays people prefer their children to come home from school uninjured. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rover )
An hour ago.
A team of seismologists had taken a rover filled with measuring equipment to install on what they believed was a fault line just off the coast of New Australia. It was considered research-worthy, as they had never seen a fault line run perpendicular from ocean to land before. Parallel, sure; there were plenty of fault lines on Earth that came within proverbial spitting distance of coastlines. The San Andreas fault in California, the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the American Pacific Northwest and Canada, and the Alpide Belt in the Mediterranean region, among others, sometimes reached within a kilometer of various coastlines.
But this new discovery had them as excited as, well... as seismologists ever got, really. They were a dour, stone-faced lot in general and tended to be on the serious end of the scale. It wasn’t surprising, considering the gravity of their area of study and how oh so very deadly earthquakes could be, and generally were.
Just as they were about to reach their destination, the order calling them back to home base had come in. So they dutifully packed up the crates they had just been about to unload, got back in their rover, and started the engine. Or tried to, at least, as it simply refused to start.
Dr. Paul Hodgins, the lead researcher, fancied himself something of a mechanic, so he and one of the two marines attached to the mission as escorts got out of the rover, despite the pouring rain and constant lightning strikes, and opened the engine compartment.
“Jim, you’re never gonna believe this,” he radioed to his friend and coworker in the rover.
“Never gonna believe what, Paul?”
“There’s some kind of... it looks like roots, maybe? Anyway, it’s all tangled up in the engine. Gonna take a while to get it sorted out and I don’t think we have enough time before the storm hits.”
“Have you called it in?” Jim asked.
“I might just have to. Why don’t you take a look and let me know what you think?” Dr. Hodgins threw a short video file to him.
Jim watched all fifteen seconds of the clip and noticed something that didn’t bode well for their research team. “Paul, I... I can see it growing. I don’t think that’s just something we accidentally picked up on the way out here. I think it grew up into the engine compartment while we were unloading the rover. You’d better get back in here and call it in.”
“Agreed, I’m on my waaaaAAAAAYYYYAAAARRGH!”
“Paul? PAUL!?” Jim shouted over the open communicator, but was only met with silence. “Corporal Klinger? Anyone?” The ominous silence continued for what felt like an eternity before the marine that had gone out with Dr. Hodgins broke into the channel amidst the crackling, hissing, and popping of a damaged communicator or bad connection.
“IT’S GOT MY LE—AAAAAARRRGH! OH GOD!! HELP! GET IT—” The marine’s screaming broke down into incoherency and continued for a few seconds, then he, too, went ominously silent.
The four scientists in the rover looked at each other, then Paul ventured, “I’m calling it in to base. Any of you volunteer to go check on Jim?”
The other three scientists shook their heads and cast wary gazes at the cab of the rover, as if they expected whatever had “gotten” the head of their team to leap into the vehicle and come after them.
Paul turned to the remaining marine that had been assigned to escort them. “How about you?”
“Let’s see what the external pickups have for us first. I can’t leave you completely unescorted, it’s against SOP,” the corporal replied.
The five remaining members of the mission turned to the monitor on the divider that separated the drivers’ compartment from the cargo compartment and it flickered to life. The flickering was a bad sign; imperial technology did NOT flicker. At least, not under normal circumstances anyway.
A grainy image appeared on the screen as the camera mounted to the roof of the driver’s compartment panned back and forth. Everything appeared normal, though the image was distorted and blurry.
“Is there something wrong with the camera pickup?” one of the scientists asked. “It almost seems like the ground is... moving. Computer, run diagnostics on camera three.”
{Acknowledged. Diagnostic program in progress...} the VI installed in the rover replied. {Diagnostic scan complete. No errors reported.}
“So is the ground actually moving? Perhaps it’s an artifact caused by the ionization in the atmosphere because of the thunderstorm.”
{Unknown.}
“Let’s try another camera and see,” the second scientist suggested.
The view switched to a camera pickup located over the side of the cargo compartment, but it was the same grainy, blurry image and the ground still appeared to be moving.
“Maybe the thunderstorm caused some symbiotic organism to come up to the surface? That patch of ground almost looks like the top of the tubs of earthworms I buy when I go fishing,” the third scientist said. “Let’s see what’s on the other side.”
The view changed to the camera on the opposite side of the rover, and off in the distance, it looked like a solid wall of black had risen up from the ocean that was just a couple hundred meters away from where they were.
“Uh... I don’t think that’s the sky,” someone murmured, almost whimpering.
“It isn’t a tidal wave, either,” the marine interjected.
“So what is it?”
Lightning struck the ground only a few hundred meters from the rover and the echoing boom of thunder was loud enough to rattle the three-ton vehicle like a paint can in a mixer as what appeared to be a solid wall of giant roots crashed down on the doomed rover and buried it beneath them.