The Hungry God

Session 02 - Terra-ble First Impressions

The C-130 touched down at the Voss Campus as the Arizona sun dipped below the horizon, the stasis chamber humming steadily in the cargo bay behind a team that had already grown accustomed to impossibility. Dr. Jones, the flight physician tasked with monitoring their prisoner’s vitals, had been less than inspiring — Sammy and Ronnie noticed the white powder on his workstation long before Guy confirmed it was cocaine. But the prisoner stayed unconscious, the chamber stayed stable, and the flight stayed uneventful. Some victories are won by doing nothing.

Voss was waiting in the conference room, tired but composed. Guy delivered the debrief at his usual rapid-fire pace — the hike, the sentries, the garbled Arabic radio response, the flying carpets screaming across the desert sky. Ronnie confirmed that their target had shrugged off tranquiliser darts and only went down when the gas hit, with a rifle butt to the back of the skull for insurance. Then Guy produced a small button he had been given — supposedly a device to summon or control Jenkins in some way — and placed it on the table. Ronnie, never one to leave a button unslapped, immediately activated it. Instead of summoning anyone, the device began playing slow, smooth jazz. The room dissolved into laughter. Even Jenkins cracked a grin before dismissing the team to report to R&D after breakfast.

The mess hall that evening was a study in contrasts between men who had been living on field rations and a kitchen that wasn’t ready for them. Guy and Ronnie descended on the bar and food line with the enthusiasm of the recently starved, demanding everything from pizza and fries with gravy to a steak that wasn’t on the menu. Ronnie’s requests for sausage rolls and scotch eggs were met with polite confusion by Pauly, the bartender, who dutifully added them to a growing list of special requests. Terry Muñoz, a nervous young cook with grease burns on his forearms and a habit of calling everyone “Sergeant,” scrambled to keep up. The group settled in with their drinks — Molson for Ronnie, a seven and seven for Guy — and spent the evening in the kind of easy, sharp-tongued camaraderie that only soldiers who had just survived something genuinely dangerous could manage.

Morning came early. Ronnie was up before dawn, running the perimeter and working through his calisthenics with the grim efficiency of a man who treated his body like a weapon that needed constant maintenance. Guy discovered the base’s Obstacle Course and ran it several times before showering and heading to the mess. Sammy, meanwhile, had spotted a woman on the base who caught his eye in a way that made him forget entirely about his scheduled appointment with R&D. Her name was Brittany, and she was fast — impossibly fast. She and Sammy ran the obstacle course together in an impromptu race: log walks, wall climbs, wire crawls, cargo net ascents. Brittany led through most of it with an ease that suggested she had done this kind of thing many times before. She crossed the finish line first and waited for him with a smile and a wink. Sammy was supposed to be somewhere else entirely.

Guy and Ronnie had already made their way through the base’s layered security and down to R&D Level -1, where Voss was waiting alongside the lead scientist and a team of researchers. Four power suits hung on the wall — enormous, seven-foot-tall exoskeletons of plated armour that looked somewhere between a special forces operative and a medieval knight, with one noticeably smaller than the rest. Ronnie immediately found a scientist with a coffee mug and began slowly, deliberately pushing it toward the edge of the desk with one finger, maintaining unbroken eye contact until the man snatched it away. Guy, characteristically, went straight for the technical manual and began reading.

The suits were extraordinary pieces of engineering. Powered by backpack-mounted energy cells good for eighteen hours of use, they offered significant protection and dramatically enhanced the physical capabilities of the wearer. Guy tested the communication link between suits, Sammy brought up the targeting system and painted a scientist in the room, and Ronnie demonstrated the suit’s strength by punching Sammy’s unoccupied suit across the room and ripping an office divider clean in half, sending sticky notes flying in every direction. When Sammy finally arrived — several minutes late and slightly out of breath — Voss greeted him with pointed politeness and directed him to the remaining suit. Ronnie, still in his armour, walked over to Sammy’s suit and gave it a solid kick, sending it skidding a dozen feet across the floor. Sammy caught it by the foot just before it got away entirely.

The Obstacle Course became their proving ground. Ronnie and Guy went first, racing through with the competitive intensity of two men who would never admit they were competing. Ronnie’s suit gave him a slight edge in raw power — he seal-hopped through the wire crawl on his knuckles, climbed the thirty-foot rope, and rang the bell at the top. Then he used the suit’s enhanced strength to rip the bell clean off its mount, dangling one-handed from the rope while holding it out like a trophy. Guy, not to be outdone, reached the top shortly after and simply let go, dropping thirty feet to land in a superhero crouch while the suit’s systems absorbed the impact at the cost of a significant chunk of its power reserves. Sammy ran a second heat against Brittany, who had apparently decided to see how the new hardware performed. She was faster than him through most of the course, but Sammy used the suit’s enhanced jumping to close the gap on the cargo net, and they reached the top of the rope at the same time. She gave the bell a hit with her palm. Ding. Then she slid back down with a grin.

Suit customisation requests followed. Guy had already been sketching in his notebook — small disc-shaped Limpet Mines that could be loaded into the suit’s arm and fired on command, set to detonate on timers or by movement. Sammy requested Rocket Boots and a retractable blade with an electromagnetic charge system in both hands. Ronnie, with the enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting his whole life for this conversation, requested dual-linked storm chain guns mounted on both arms and retractable forearm blades. A Language Translator was added to every suit as an afterthought. Ronnie also requested a Thermo-Optic Chameleon Surface — an electro-optical layer that adapted his suit’s colouration and thermal signature to the surroundings — and the scientists delivered it successfully. He pushed further, asking for advanced targeting software at Tech Level 10, but that proved beyond the R&D team’s current capabilities and the attempt failed. Sammy, meanwhile, went bigger: he asked for full Invisibility Surface on his suit, and the scientists pulled it off — a TL10 system that rendered him effectively invisible to the naked eye, a significant leap beyond mere camouflage. Guy’s attempt to add a microbot surveillance swarm to his own suit fell short — the technology was beyond current resources, though the scientists promised to try again if more fragment material became available.

Dinner brought unexpected business. A scientist named Xander from the R&D department approached Ronnie’s table, sent by Eric — the mess hall cook Ronnie had befriended in Session 01 about a food-selling side hustle. After dinner, the two stepped outside, and Xander produced a foil-wrapped object about the size of a baked potato — a shielded meteorite fragment, drained of its energy but still rare and valuable enough to fund serious research. Ronnie negotiated the price down from ten thousand dollars to a seven percent cut of whatever he could get for it. Meanwhile, Sammy had been making better use of his evening — he struck up a conversation with three nurses at a nearby table, and one of them, Mary Jane, stayed long after her friends left, drawn in by his military stories. She gave him her number.

That night, there was a knock at Sammy’s door. It was Brittany. She said she had seen him talking to the nurse and had felt a little jealous. Sammy let her in and poured her a drink. She took a sip, set it down, stood up, and clapped once. There were two of her. She clapped again. There were four. Four identical women standing in his room, looking at him with the same smile. Sammy stared and said nothing for a long moment. The evening ended there, at least as far as anyone else was concerned, and Brittany was gone before morning.

The next day brought a level of the facility none of them had seen before. Voss led the fully suited team down to R&D Level -2 — a restricted floor accessible only through him — where a circular, wavy arch dominated the centre of the room, its surface shimmering like heat rising off desert asphalt. He explained that the portal had been constructed using the meteor fragments and that it linked, for reasons no one fully understood, to a planet the research team had designated Terra. A previous recon team had gone through a month ago without powered suits and had never come back. Voss wanted to know what was on the other side, and he believed the party’s new equipment gave them a fighting chance.

Guy stepped through briefly to confirm the portal was two-way, took a look at the blasted, dead landscape, and stepped back. The sky was overcast, the ground cracked and dry, two suns of different sizes hanging in the haze above. The atmosphere was breathable but thin on oxygen, which the suits handled without difficulty. The team set a six-hour turnaround, confirmed their suit systems were functioning, and began jogging north in the direction the previous team had gone.

About half an hour in, Guy spotted a three-foot hole in the side of a hill. Sammy activated his suit’s invisibility and crawled inside while Guy attached a concussion limpet mine to the entrance as insurance. The tunnel angled downward for thirty yards before opening into a dome-shaped underground chamber, and in the centre of that chamber was a Terran Insectoid — a chitinous creature the size of a small car, cold-blooded and very much alive, gnawing on what appeared to be a human femur. Sammy scanned it, fed the data back, and the team made the collective decision to retreat and continue the mission rather than engage something that almost certainly had friends nearby.

They found the fatigues about an hour further north — torn, bloodstained, bearing the name Hernandez. The density of the three-foot holes in the ground had been increasing steadily, and the suit sensors were picking up a drained meteorite fragment somewhere ahead. Ronnie pocketed the fatigues without ceremony.

The ruined city appeared after another half hour of travel, a sprawl of crumbling concrete and exposed steel beams stretching across the plain below. The team swept it methodically — building by building, floor by floor — finding three-legged furniture, strange three-wheeled vehicles with yoke controls, plastic bottles, and destroyed circuit boards. Guy’s analysis suggested the city had been attacked by conventional weapons roughly a century ago and then simply left to decay. At the city’s centre stood a statue of a three-eyed, three-armed, three-legged humanoid holding something like a sword above its head, with an inscription at its base in a language none of them recognised. The suit sensors placed a drained fragment somewhere within fifty yards of the statue.

From the top of a twelve-story building near the city centre, the team got their clearest view yet of the surrounding terrain. To the north, hundreds of the three-foot holes dotted the landscape, and moving among them was a swarm of two to three hundred of the giant insectoid creatures, digging with methodical purpose. The team watched them for a moment, then turned south. They took a different route back, avoiding the densest concentrations of holes, and made it to the portal with time to spare.

The debrief was thorough. The team handed over suit footage — the bug in its nest, the femur, the ruined city, the statue, the distant swarm — along with Hernandez’s fatigues and a collection of alien artefacts. Ronnie turned over half of what he had picked up from the ruins. The other half stayed in his pockets. The research team began analysing the data while Voss recommended closing the portal and placing defensive armaments at the threshold. The party was given the following day off, and Ronnie immediately suggested driving an hour to the nearest city, finding a hotel, and hitting the town. He also needed to find a buyer for the potato. The team had walked through a portal to another planet, found the ruins of a dead civilisation, and come back in time for dinner. Tomorrow, they were going to a bar.