Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 5.8 (Part 1)

Our amphibious vehicle climbed up the river. We passed river banks so smooth, they might have been sanded by the wind for hundreds of millions of years.

Behind me, Crick looked out of the windows. Vast stretches of trees towered left and right, leaving no openings for us to enter. In the distance, a huge piece of granite loomed over the woods like a wicked castle.

Dark forests didn't scare me. I spent enough time in them when I was young.

What did scare me was time. Pursuing Kira had cost us at least a day and we still had no idea what Starsnatcher did around that space station.

Speaking of Kira, she worried me, too. If she returned to her dropship and we found her, could we defeat her? She told me she supported the Starsnatchers. Would she be willing to kill if she knew we opposed them?

The vehicle dropped its anchors, stopping at a bank. I went out.

The smooth sand was even prettier from near. It looked as if it wasn't sand at all, but rather obsidian or a similarly polished rock type. When I stepped on it, my boots broke into it, leaving footprints like on the moon's surface.

"Why did you step out?" Crick asked from inside the car.

"Our car can't drive in the forest, or can it?"

"Oh, trust me," Helix transmitted. "This time, we made sure it can."

As before, our robots had followed us on a dinghy dragged by our amphibious vehicle. This time, though, they looked different. Especially the bushbot had changed. Setting foot on the riverbank, it carried an enormous, horizontal blade. The metal sheet lay perpendicular to the robot's extended arm that wielded it. Toothlets raced over its surface, mowing down plants while nanobots dissolved those who resisted mechanical shearing.

That way, it carved a path into the forest wide enough for our vehicle to follow. I returned to the car.

That was foolish of me. After my blunder, Crick gave the car a telepathic order not to open the doors at anyone's but their command.

I was glad not to hear through the doors. Otherwise, the sounds of ferns dancing in the wind might have driven me nuts. Occasionally, I caught glances of glowing eyes stalking me from between dark tree stumps. It was as if the windows weren't even there, How would it have felt to walk on that path?

Eventually, our roadway led us to the clearing.

Starving tree trunks surrounded the area like necromancers performing a twisted ritual. If we extended the metaphor, the nearby granite perch oversaw them. The whole glade was barely larger than the one we encountered Kira in first.

At its center waited the dropship. Silver paint glimmered in the moonlight over its featureless, spheroid surface. Much like Kira's armor, its unblemished glamour contrasted with the rotten soil it lay on. Blades of grass littered the dropship's surroundings like dead maggots.

None of us three felt suicidal enough to set foot in this deathtrap. Hence, our combat robots took the first steps.

"Can we be one-hundred percent sure that no enemies are nearby?" I asked.

"Absolute certainties only exist in mathematics," Crick replied.

"Seriously though," Helix replied, "our heat sensors indicate plenty of dead animals in the forest, but not many living ones. And even if there are enemies, our car is the safest place on this whole planet."

Our robots had reached the dropship. Now, the task was to crack this egg open and look inside.

The bushbot's shearing blade and nanobots showed no effect. Since we weren't stupid enough to shoot cannons at it, our robots resorted to computer tomography. Unfortunately, finding the right wavelength to penetrate the dropship's complex carbon nanotube-steel alloys proved difficult. They somehow scanned my singularity stone, but scanning the dropship was far harder. Since the outside and inside consisted of the same materials, wavelengths that penetrated the hull penetrated everything.