Head into the Jungle

The jungle swallowed our Team twenty meters past our beach camp.

Once we could no longer see the beach, we found ourselves surrounded by dripping leaves, buzzing insects, and vegetation so thick the security team had to slowly chop our way through it.

Lily took point beside me, tablet held in both hands as she followed the distress signal. She was back in her sky-blue uniform, blonde hair tied loosely behind her shoulders, halo casting a faint glow beneath the canopy. Under normal circumstances, I’d be observing my trainee to make sure she was competently navigating the alien jungle.

These were not normal circumstances. Less than an hour ago, I’d bent her over a table and fucked her with no regard for our ranks, working relationship or the mission. Rather than live up to the higher standard of an actual Federation Officer, I completely ignored any reason and gave in to my instincts. Fuck, if I was going to do that I may as well have selected rogue and just stopped by one of the many brothels on the outer reaches of the galaxy.

Lily glanced back. I immediately looked at the jungle. “Lieutenant?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve been very quiet.”

“I’m concentrating.”

“On the mission?”

“Yes.”

A tiny smile appeared. “Good,” she said.

We continued walking.

The red shirts behind us whispered to each other, “Did something happen between those two?”

“Shut up, Harris.”

I pretended to not hear them. Based on their uniform color they weren’t long for this world anyway.

The distress signal was pinging three-point-seven kilometers ahead.

Three-point-six.

Three-point-five.

The jungle grew stranger the farther inland we traveled. Enormous flowers turned slowly as we passed, following us despite the absence of sunlight. Vines recoiled when our boots touched them. Once, I could have sworn a tree sneezed.

I stopped.

“Did that tree just—”

Something screamed behind us.

We spun around. Harris was gone. His rifle lay in the mud.

“Where the hell did he go?” Another of the red shirts shouted. Another officer pointed upward. We followed his finger. Harris was twenty feet above us, wrapped in a thick green vine.

“Oh, come on!”

The vine snapped backward.

Harris vanished into the canopy, screaming.

Gunfire erupted.

“Hold your fire!” I shouted. There was no point, Harris was nowhere to be seen plus Federation pulse rifles are so weak and underpowered we needed to conserve the batteries.

Too late. The vegetation exploded. Not metaphorically. Several enormous flowers opened simultaneously and sprayed clouds of yellow spores across the trail.

“MASKS!”

Lily grabbed my arm and pulled me forward as the security team scattered. Someone fired again. Something roared from inside the foliage. A red shirt disappeared sideways into a bush that immediately folded shut around him.

“Was that plant carnivorous?” Lily shouted.

“No I’m sure it’s just swallowing our officers to keep them nice and safe.” I shouted as I fired my own pulse pistol at the thing.

I grabbed Lily by the arm and we ran. For the next kilometer, the jungle systematically dismantled our security detail. Ensign Palmer stepped onto what appeared to be moss and discovered it was actually the tongue of something underground. Lieutenant Harris—different Harris—was dragged into a pond by a collection of sentient vines.

Petty Officer Alvarez made the mistake of leaning against a tree to catch his breath. The tree swallowed him whole.

By the time we reached a rocky ridge overlooking the interior valley, the jungle had become quiet again. I bent over, hands on my knees, struggling for breath. Lily stood beside me, equally exhausted.

“How many?” she asked.

I looked behind us. Nobody emerged from the trees. “None.”

Her expression changed. No more angelic smile. For the first time since we’d landed, Lily looked less like the impossibly cheerful Angelite trainee who had spent the afternoon tormenting me and more like a young inexperienced officer who had just watched an entire security team die.

I straightened. “We keep moving.”

She swallowed and nodded. The distress signal was less than five hundred meters away. We descended into the valley alone. The vegetation became impossibly dense. Vines as thick as my arm crossed the ground. Trees twisted together overhead, forming a tunnel that forced us toward the source of the beacon.

Then Lily stopped. Her tablet chirped. “Lieutenant.”

I nearly walked into her. “What?”

She pointed through the trees. At first I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. There was something enormous beneath the vegetation. Black metal. I pushed through a curtain of vines. A spacecraft filled the clearing. Or what remained of one.

The starfighter-sized ship had crashed nose-first into the valley and carved a trench hundreds of meters through the jungle before coming to rest against the mountainside. Living vines covered nearly the entire hull, wrapping around the ship’s body and penetrating broken sections of armor as though the jungle were slowly digesting it.

From It’s glossy exterior and sleek silhouette, It was clearly federation designed but had no Federation markings on it. Lily lowered her tablet. “That’s definitely one of ours.”

“Yeah.” Something about its lack of any identifiers but familiar design was bothering me. “Why Are there no markings on its hull?” I continued staring at the silhouette. The swept wings. The recessed engine housings. The black sensor-dampening hull. Recognition hit me like a brick. No, there was absolutely no way. I’d spent months trying to unlock one of these in the original game. “That,” I said slowly, “is a Nightshade-class stealth ship.”

Lily looked at me. “A what?”

Before I could answer, movement flickered near the wreck. We froze. Someone was already there. Lily slowly reached for her pulse pistol.

“Lieutenant…”

“I see them.”