Communications Station Impact Site

Johns watched as Rick struggled to open the crate that had just been air-dropped to the Communications Station impact site, it’s parachute lazily stretched across the charred ground next to the Communications Station wreckage. With each unsuccessful tug at the cover, he let out another round of expletives. After a few tries, he managed to wriggle the crate lid enough to pull it free, giving Johns his first look at its contents — flamethrowers.

Originally, flamethrowers had been used to burn back the encroaching Kazi jungle around the stations. Later, once a treatment had been discovered that slowed the growth, they were used to clear the land before they treated it. Sara’s discovery that the Goo shriveled when exposed to flame had given those flamethrowers new life. Johns was elated to find that they still had twenty-five of them tucked away in the recesses of the Kazi Depot storage facility. A perfect tool for the times.

Back at the Kazi Depot warehouse, the engineering team was working on putting together more jerry-rigged flamethrowers to help them deal with the Blue Goo at the other impact sites. A rush job. They needed to get as many active flamethrowers as they could before the Goo continued to spread and threaten Kazi Depot and the Research Station.

Johns had talked about it at length with Rick that morning. Their real fear was that it would climb into the forest canopy and become impossible to deal with without burning down large swaths of the forest, which would be difficult for them to control. There was also the worry that once the Goo hit the forest that they wouldn’t be able to get every trace. That and an out-of-control fire might burn for months or years, blackening the skies. Since the vegetation regrew so quickly, a fire would always have ample fuel. They wanted to be quick.

Thirty people had been dropped off in three separate trips from the puddlejumper, this time using a basket to lower groups of three down to the impact site. Each wearing an environment suit, it dawned on Johns that he had never actually been outside of the stations with this many people before. There had never been a reason to.

Those that hadn’t had a chance to see the Blue Goo up close and personal had made their way to the edge of the debris, which was now completely overtaken, slowly oozing its way toward the treeline. The speed at which this thing had spread gave Johns the willies. Now, about 48 hours after impact, the Goo was taking up more ground space than the Communications Station itself had. There was enough now that the blue luminescent light reflected off the dew-drenched trees surrounding the site, giving the entire area an unnatural dim blue glow.

“Alright everyone, gather around,” Johns said through the group channel as he began pulling the first flamethrowers out of the crate and waited. “Pay attention. These things will kill you if you aren’t watching what you are doing.”

The group descended upon the crate in a half-circle, leaving the Goo behind. Johns pulled one of the flamethrowers out and gestured for everyone to get out of the way. He slammed it against his hip harder than he normally would to demonstrate his point.

“Anchor it to your hip. It might just be fire, and there may not be recoil, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to have it secured. There’s still gasses combusting in there. If things go south they will burn you to bits just like they would outside of your environment suit. Then give the trigger a quick pull,” Johns said as he turned around and faced away from the crowd. A long spout of fire came shooting out of the end of the nozzle, traveling at least 20 feet in front of him. Ooohs and Aaahs coming through the coms channel. “Only pull the trigger for a second or two. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand. Point it at the area that you want to knock back, pull the trigger, then sit and watch as it burns away. We can’t afford to catch the forest on fire. Don’t step forward until you are certain that all of the Blue Goo in that area has been burned away. Now, this stuff doesn’t take too kindly to the flame. For the most part, it burns away without any issue, but you have to make sure of it. We can’t be tracking this stuff back to Kazi Depot with us. When we get back, we’ll enter hazmat protocol. There are going to be about thirty of us that have to go through it — it’s going to be awhile. I don’t want anyone complaining. Under no circumstances should you touch the blue mucous in any way, unless you want to risk killing everything you love on the planet. Understood?”

That was Johns’ biggest fear in this whole thing. That they were going to drag some virus back with them that killed everyone in the station.

“Understood,” a portion of the gathered crowd answered back. You could always tell who had spent time in the Osarian Marines. Still, there weren't enough of them. Johns would feel a lot better with a few more that knew how to handle themselves. At least there were some, though. Marines and former marines had always had a strange sense of loyalty to him that he appreciated. They didn’t judge him for his mistakes like the public had. They weren’t always necessarily on his side, either. But they didn’t hate him. They understood the pressures that came with the job. They saw it for the witch hunt, both on him and on the Osarian Marine Corp (OMC), that it had been.

After taking a few questions and going through the demonstration a second time, Johns was sufficiently convinced that they weren’t going to burn themselves alive with the flamethrowers and started handing them out. As he handed the flamethrower to each person, he directed them toward specific areas of the site, hoping to cover as much as they could. With as quickly as it had spread, he wasn’t sure that they were going to finish before sundown, but they had a good chance if they started now and worked all day.

Sara had joined them at the site to collect more samples. She had, in some ways, taken a liking to the substance. Not many researchers got the chance to discover and research an alien organism like this. To be the first to research an extraterrestrial space-faring creature was clearly a badge of honor for her, and she had jumped in head-first. They had discovered other organisms that had managed to survive the vacuum of space as man had spread out among the more than one-hundred star systems that The Ring Network had given them access to.

They still weren’t exactly sure what the Blue Goo was, and Johns wasn’t sure that they would ever truly know. That fact made his stomach squirrelly. But he couldn’t afford to linger on it. His focus now was on getting rid of the stuff before it infested the whole planet.

Once everyone was set up, Johns grabbed his flamethrower and went to take his own position along the eastern side of the structure next to where Rick was burning the Goo back. He sprayed his flame wildly, pretending as if he was pissing fire and Johns shook his head at him. Rick gave him a nod of acknowledgement, he couldn’t help himself.

He watched as the team in environmental suits took their positions around the outside of the structure. One by one, they began to douse the Blue Goo in flame. It shriveled to the touch. You could hear a slight squeak as it burned like air was escaping as the viscous outer layers of the Blue Goo as it burned to ash. After a moment, admiring the beauty of it all, he anchored the flamethrower to his leg, pointing it at the nearest puddle of Blue Goo, and pulled the trigger.

A tube of flame shot out the end and quickly dissipated into unpredictability the farther it got away from the nozzle. Johns watched as the mist that hung above the mucous was enveloped in smoke and disappeared. After a few seconds of sustained exposure to the flame, the Blue Goo withered into ashes just as it had in the lab. With each pull of the trigger, Johns took pleasure in vanquishing the invasive species back to whatever planet it came from — assuming it came from a planet.

After a few minutes of spraying fire like it came from a hose, Johns began to notice something interesting about the Goo. It started to pull back. The areas closest to the burning areas of Goo started to recede, putting distance between itself and the fire. Just like an animal that pulls away from a threat, the Goo was acting on instinct. Every species took steps to protect itself from damage, and apparently, space-faring life was no different.

That was interesting. He had assumed, due to the fact that it could survive out in the cold vacuum and the peculiar way that it had arrived and multiplied, that they would be constantly fascinated by the differences between the Blue Goo and the species that humans had been familiar with. So far it seemed not too different from a fungus.

One thing that humans had discovered as the construction of more gates exposed them to new ecosystems and life, was that life in the universe was, generally speaking, fairly similar. Of course, their sample size came from a barely-noticeable corner of the Milky Way galaxy, but for the most part vegetation was vegetation, sea life took on vaguely familiar forms, and land animals evolved to suit their environments all the same. It led to — if not predictable — at least familiar outcomes.

There were exceptions, of course. As a boy, Johns often heard tales of truly alien creatures that man had come across during their feverish colonization periods.

As morning turned into a sweltering mid-afternoon, Johns started to take frequent breaks and chug water from the straw in his environment suit helmet to stay hydrated. They had sent a separate puddlejumper packed with water, but he wondered if it would be enough. The clothes that he wore under his environment suit were drenched with sweat. If he had wrung his shirt, he was positive that the liquid would fill a glass. He walked around the perimeter every so often, instructing others to stay hydrated. It wasn’t going to help them one bit if everyone heat-stroked out. There were still two other impact sites to deal with after this.

***

“So what do you think brought this thing here?” Rick asked as they pulled large gulps of water from their environment suit straws in the afternoon sun, the Goo now burnt back substantially.

“Are you asking if this thing targeted us?” Johns replied.

“Yeah. Was this by pure damn chance? These things were just flying through the black, minding their business in the Osara System, and this tiny little jungle planet just happened to get in their way?”

Johns finished his sip. “Well...seems like these things were built to land, right? Or crash-land, anyway. I mean they keep growing.”

“Right.”

“So maybe it wasn’t by chance. Maybe they did mean to crash land here. But maybe it had nothing to do with us.”

“So...you think they were going to land here regardless? And we just happen to be the unlucky sons of bitches that were there waiting for them?”

“I don’t think anything. I don’t know anything. I’m just saying...Sara said these things eat plants. Or anything organic, really. If a fern was my steak and potatoes I’d probably be pretty happy living on Kazi.”

“Hmm...true enough,” Rick said. “They have been eating the plants, too. Doesn’t seem like the Goo has much interest in us.”

“And it’s not like Godzilla crash-landed here. It’s just some fungus or something. And we seem to be having no problems getting it cleaned up,” Johns replied.

“Have you let Osara know what’s going on yet?”

“Not yet,” Johns said, looking down at the water pack on the back of his environment suit. He looked up to see Rick staring at him with a raised eyebrow.

“I will, I will,” Johns said with a wave of the hand. “I just want the first message to come with some good news too. Let’s make it ‘Hey the aliens showed up and we kicked their ass,” instead of “they showed up and we don’t know anything about what is going on. They can’t help us anyway, right now. But I’ll let them know about it tonight and ask them to send some help along, just in case.”

Rick shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips. He didn’t want to argue. But Johns could see that he didn’t agree with him.

***

By the late afternoon, they had successfully burned the Blue Goo back to only the impact site area. Johns was happy about that because the entire process had become less dangerous. At least near the impact site, they wouldn’t have two-story broken pillars towering over them that could fall or drip the Goo down onto an unsuspecting victim that then brought it back into Kazi Depot. The entire afternoon had been a big worry session. That last thing he wanted was a giant concrete column coming down on top of some kid. But making sure they burnt every speck of that shit to a crisp was more important.

The closer they got, the less room there was for everyone to safely use their flamethrowers. Rick had yelled at one young man who had absentmindedly shot his flame vaguely in the direction of another security officer, ordering him to go “sit on the sidelines while the adults finished up.” One-by-one, people started to drop out and head back to the staging area near the southern end of the structure. Johns was staying until all of the visible Goo was completely gone.

Once they were done, the plan was to have a small cleanup team continue visiting the area each day for the foreseeable future. The last thing that they wanted was to allow this thing to gain a foothold while they had their backs turned, but Johns was hoping that it would be gone for good once they had burned it all away.

He was already anticipating how difficult the other impact sites were going to be. Since the growth of this thing appeared to be exponential, they had to get the other two burned back quickly before a one day project turned into three days.

While the impact at the Communications Station was particularly awful due to the loss of life, the other impact areas were going to be trickier to deal with. They had landed in forested areas, and almost certainly had started growing up the trunks of nearby trees. The only way they were going to be able to deal with them was to attempt a controlled-burn, which wasn’t exactly easy in a forest that grew back by the next morning. If you start a fire big enough and it will be able to run back through the areas it had already burned. But they could see from the probe data that the Goo at each site was now inhabiting full acres.

Sometime in the late afternoon, just as they were finishing off the last of the Goo at the Communications Station, Johns received a message on a private communications channel.

“Sir, I need you on the eastern side of the structure,” Rick said over a private coms channel.

At this point, they weren’t that far away across the remaining goo pond from one another. He looked over and saw an environment suit wave back to him. He stowed his flame thrower and started his march around the outside of the remaining goo and rubble, passing each member of the flamethrower team as they burned different patches of the blue shimmering liquid. The station had been completely destroyed in this area, but not fully obliterated. Large chunks of concrete and metal made walking very difficult. Several times Johns fell and caught himself on another chunk of mangled structure.

As Johns clunkily traversed the wreckage and got closer to the area where Rick had waved, he could see that something was off. About forty meters in front of him, the ground appeared to be raised. Rick pointed at the mound.

As Johns got close, he could see a faint blue light shining out from underneath the raised sections. The closer he got, the more noticeable the light became. He stopped and stood next to Rick, placed his hands on his hips, and stared at the ground in front of them.

The station debris in that spot was raised a few feet off the ground. The Goo had spread beneath it, where a larger hole opened up, but that wasn’t what was concerning to Johns. What was concerning was the reason why the debris had been lifted. Below it was several bulbous formations of the Blue Goo, but much more solid-looking than any Goo that he had come across as of yet. They looked almost like giant glowing basketballs. The balls pulsated at about the rate of a heartbeat and appeared to grow and shrink with each pulse of the light, almost as if they were breathing.

Johns switched his communications to broadcast to a private channel.

“Sara, I’ve got something on the southern side of the building that you’ll want to collect. Bring a big container.”