Preparation

Lee searched the Excelsior for materials with which to construct a makeshift stretcher. None of the quarters revealed anything of use, the bunks having been integrated into the bulkheads, and she was reluctant to pull anything from the cryochamber. Likewise, the cockpit and airlocks were off limits. Amazingly the cargo hold was empty of anything of use as well. None of the bindings or gratings Lee would have expected were in evidence. The only containers she found were solid metal and welded to the deck. When she unmatched their lids Lee found, boxes stuffed with ration packets. At least they wouldn't starve right away. For the cargo space to be so sparse, Hawthorne's business had to be doing exceptionally well or abysmally poor. Janice suspected the later. Eventually her quest led her to the hatch leading into the engine room. A steady rumbling emanating from the room vibrated the hatch and waves of heat radiated from the door's edges. Lee did not believe in Hell, but if it existed she felt the engine room hatch might just be a portal leading into the inferno.

Knowing she would have to become well acquainted with the area Lee was nonetheless daunted by what lie behind that portal. Their lives teetered on her ability to identify the systems Johnson told her to activate or secure therein. Taking a deep breath, she cycled the hatch and entered the tight confines of a tunnel latticed by piping leading into the heart of the ship. The engine compartment comprised much of the ship's mass, the currently empty cargo hold being the next largest portion and the quarters taking up the least space. It was a warren of patina colored pipes, sweating plastic tubing, and coils of silver snake skinned wiring. Undoubtedly Hawthorne knew its workings like the back of his hand, but to the uninitiated it was a labyrinthine furnace of metal and glass. Lee quickly found herself lost amid the unmarked passages with no sign of the parts she required.

The heat hit her in waves of ever increasing intensity. In less than a minute she was sweating to the point that she had to unzip her jumpsuit. Lee found quickly that she had to watch where she placed her hands because much of the piping was scolding to the touch. Fans in the ceiling, most of which were stationed above junctions where panels, gauges, and piping extended from shallow alcoves offered momentary points of respite.

The noise was nearly as unbearable as the temperature. Even asleep the inner workings of the Excelsior were a monotonous earsplitting tone sure to drive the unprotected insane. She found a headset in one of the equipment niches, which pretty much eliminated the cacophony. The longer Lee travelled through the metallic maze the greater her impression of being digested in the guts of a leviathan became.

After a half-an-hour of wandering she ended up in a metal cavity that expanded into the room housing two enormous machines into which many wires and pipes ran. The astrobiologist assumed these were the actual engines. One she knew would contain the nuclear thermal reactor used for launching and landing the spacecraft. The other was a ram fusion generator, employed to propel the Excelsior at 98% the speed of light between the stars. That was the extent of her knowledge concerning intergalactic propulsion systems. Seeing nothing of use in the actual engine room Lee continued down a corridor across from the one she'd entered.

Toward the rear of the passage she found an equipment room. In one cabinet, she discovered some tools she recognized. Spanners, drivers, sockets, and ratchets, but nothing with which she could use to transport the crippled Johnson. Further scrutiny of the caged room uncovered a pile of aluminum struts beneath a tangle of cables. The struts were too short, so she pulled an electric drill she found hanging from a peg in the bulwark along with other manual tools. Lee punched holes through the ends of each strut and connected them with some loose bolts she found in another cabinet filled to the brim with a mismatch of nuts, bolts, and a sundry of connectors she had no idea how to use or what they could possibly have been for. She wondered how the pilot ever found anything among the disordered mess. Lee dragged her creation through the passage, the struts occasionally catching the grating that covered the floor. It seemed to take forever to reach the hatch. She felt like a draft horse pulling garbage though the brimstone gates of hell. How did anyone work in that oppressive heat?

Finally, Lee stepped into the cool confines of the general quarters. For a second she felt faint, the cold air coming as a shock after the inferno of the engine compartment. With a grunt she dropped the improvised stretcher and closed the heavy hatch door. She heaved a sigh of exhaustion, leaning against the bulkhead for a couple seconds to catch her breath before retrieving the stretcher and heading to the crew quarter. For the first time since their retreat into the ship, Lee felt as though she was doing something to help get them off the dread planet. Midway toward the crew quarter she found her second wind, energized by the improved probability of their escape. Janice Lee raced around the doorway to show Bradley Johnson her invention.

"It's done Bradley," she called before seeing the youth's downcast eyes. The smile her elation had sprouted withered and died. She looked over to the bunk on which Hawthorne laid unmoving.

"I think he's gone, Doc," Johnson said.

"No," Lee gasped in denial.

Tentatively she approached the pilot's still form. His chest did not rise; his brown skin was ashen and his eyes stared vacantly at the bottom of the bunk above him. Gone was a good enough way of saying it. Dead would have been more precise. Lee collapsed to the edge of the bed.

"How long?" she asked.

"I don't know. I woke up and he was that way."

"We knew it was likely to happen. I was just hoping…"

"Yeah, me too," Johnson said mournfully. "And he never got to hear your story."

"What," Lee said, lifting her face from her hands to look at Johnson.

"Your story. You said you were going to tell him about your family history. Sorry, I was awake during your talk with Carl."

"Oh, I remember now," Lee admitted.

"Why don't you tell me then? "asked Johnson.

"No," Lee said. "Not now." She was unable to go into such a sorrowful tale while sitting beside the corpse.

"Don't wait too long," Johnson said, looking at Hawthorne's body.

Lee moved Hawthorne's body into the outer lock and laid it with that of Borlov's. The blanket she had covered the commandant with was saturated with blood at the point where his head should have been, so she went back to the quarters to retrieve another. When both bodies were shrouded, Lee paused to consider saying a prayer. She was not a religious woman by any means so no well-rehearsed platitudes came to mind. The astrobiologist bowed her head and simply said, "Goodbye." Then turned about to continue the task of saving herself and Bradley Johnson.

It took some doing but she managed to make the stretcher somewhat presentable by wrapping bed sheets around the frame and tying the four corners to the struts. Whether it would work or not was still to be seen. Johnson looked skeptical about the prospect of climbing aboard the contraption.

"Ready?" Lee asked enthusiastically. Seeing Johnson's dubious attitude, she was affronted. "It will work! I made it myself," she assured him.

\

"If you say so, Doc."

And it did. Fortunately, Bradley Johnson was not a large man and Janice Lee was something of an athlete. The causeway leading to the cockpit was her hardest trial. At one point, she nearly dropped the stretcher when her footing slipped on the stairwell. Johnson's yelp of 'YaHoo' was less energetic than usual. Eventually Lee got Johnson into the cockpit and seated in the command chair.

"There you go," she said. "What's next?"

"Wait a second, Doc. Let me catch my breath."

"Let you catch your breath?" Incredulous, Lee asked, "I did all the work…" But then she saw the kid wasn't kidding. A slick of sweat gleamed his pale skin. Lee could not help but think of Hawthorne in his last living hours. Apparently, Johnson had the same idea.

"What is it, Doc? Some kind of bug?" he wheezed.

"Maybe," Lee answered, although she was now more certain than ever that an alien pathogen had piggy backed on the attacks of the Plethorian animals. Of all the hazards they had faced, here was one they could not see and potentially the most dangerous.

"Bugs and weeds. That will teach me for disrespecting the little guys, ha?"

"Could be a good old human anaphylactic reaction. I can't tell just by observing your symptoms. I'd have to do a detailed blood analysis and a biopsy to know for sure. I don't think we have time for that though. We have to launch as soon as possible."

"Don't worry, Doc. I'll get this rust bucket into the space before the trolls bash its doors down. It may be a bit cliché, but just like the heroines of ole, the innocent head strong female will survive this mess with her tight ass intact," Johnson said wryly.

"That's not what I meant," Lee answered, denying the current of self-preservation pulsing through her brain. "I was just saying that we have to be space bound before some new menace rises it ugly head. Besides, even if it is a microbial attack of some sort we can contain it once you're in the cryochamber. You will just have to wait until we get to New Haven so qualified physicians can look you over."

"I never thought of that," Johnson said, slipping into abashed child mode once more. "But we don't even know how to operate the sleep cells yet. What if…"

"If we can't figure them out then we're as good as dead anyway. Besides, I have been thinking about that subject and if the cryogenic chambers are anything like the live specimen containers I use on a regular basis then I should have no problem running them."

"Got an answer for everything, don't you Professor Lee?"

"Not everything. I'm going to need your help launching this ship. Are you ready to do that?"

"Hell yeah! Let's blow this joint."

"I haven't the foggiest notion of what that means. But I gather it involves leaving PM. In that case let's get to work."

Johnson twirled around in captain's chair where Lee had deposited him. He took a great breath of air as if hyperventilating before a deep dive and said, "Righty then. Let's do this!"

It turned out that there was no check list available, but Johnson recognized all the gauges and switches on the command console. He was pretty sure he knew the sequence of operation as well. When Lee voiced her skepticism, Johnson said, "Don't get your panties in an uproar. I've got this."

Minutes later Lee found herself once again at the engine room entrance. This time she had come prepared for perdition by donning an EVA. It was a tight fit in some of the narrow corridors with the bulky suit and helmet on, but at least she wouldn't roast this time.

"You there yet?" Johnson asked over the helm com.

"Keep your knickers on," Lee replied.

She heard Johnson chuckle loudly over the hat speaker and dialed the volume down.

"I must be rubbing off on you," Johnson said after his mirth had died a bit.

"Heaven forbid," Lee grunted as she actuated the hatch and opened the heavy door.

"Admit it Doc, you're a cougar in disguise. Hey, there's a video feed coupling on the console here. There should be an activation button on the top of the helmet. If I can see where you are I'll be able to guide you much better."

"Got it. How is the feed?"

"Crystal clear. See that pipe with the blue stripes painted every two meters or so? That's the coolant tubing. Follow it."

"I've got it. The one that looks like a coral snake. Where does this lead?"

"Well we are going to need the fusion drive to lift off. It's basically a nuclear engine and as such it would be prudent to make sure the containment rods won't overheat when I press the go button. The gauge up here says everything is good, but I'd rather double check."

"If the containment was broken wouldn't we know. I mean I came down here unprotected the first time. Wouldn't I have been exposed to any radiation leakage then?"

"Well no one told you to go down there without an EVA."

"No one told me not to either!" Lee gasped, "Anything else I should have known about?"

"Well there's the flux capacitor. It could be out of alignment resulting in a temporal misalignment."

"What!"

"Just kidding Doc. That's just something from one of those old vids I like to watch. But seriously, there are a thousand things that could go wrong on a spaceship. Ninety percent of them would have made their presence known by now. We check'em anyhow and double check the other ten percent. We could have taken off by just checking the command console here in the cockpit, but instruments sometimes lie. Especially on an old model like this. That's why I need you down there."

"Alright then. No more funny business. Let's get to it."

"Okay Doc, your right. To work it is."

They began a detailed system check of the ship. With Johnson's guidance Lee found herself tracing pipes, climbing gangways to reach valves and slipping between metal framed alcoves to read gauges. Even with the EVA suit on she began to perspire due to the exertion.

"Is all of this entirely necessary?" She asked after a half an hour of sweat inspiring work.

"Starting a starship is not like starting a hover car. You don't just flip a switch and Zoom! off you go. You throw a gasket mid take off and Boom! Pow. Game over. Ever heard of the Columbia or the PRP Manila? Those guys did half-assed flight checks. Look what happened to them."

Lee had never heard of the Colombia, but everyone knew of the Peoples Republic of the Philippines Manila incident in which three thousand colonists were drowned because of a faulty O-ring when the ship landed on the ocean world of Godwana. A few of the passengers had been recording messages to loved ones across the galaxy to be transmitted via deep space radio when it happened. One second excited accounts of their arrival were being taped and the next there was nothing save the roar rushing water. Divers found those last messages and the flight recorder that had diagnosed the Manila's system failure seconds before she sank. The wreckage still lay in a thousand meters of water, testament to the danger of space travel and the fragility of man's technological supremacy.

"You've convinced me. Where to next?"

"There should be a fluid meter somewhere down the passage you're in. If so it's will be for the reserve fuel. I'm only guessing from the size of the pipe your resting on, but if I'm right then it will be a good thing to check out."

"Let's just hope there's no need to use it. If it came down to it could you..."

"Holy shit! "

Lee paused in the corridor that Johnson had directed her down, half afraid to question his outburst. "What is it Bradley?"

"Oh, sorry Doc. It's just that we have new company. Nothing that can harm the ship. At least I don't think they can. That blood grass didn't appear to be dangerous either."

Somewhat relieved Lee continued along the passage looking for the meter Johnson thought might be there. She tried to keep her mind on the task at hand knowing that her current objective was paramount when compared to her scientific interest, but her curiosity could not be contained.

"What do they look like?" She asked.

"Hell if I know."

"Try Bradley. Please."

The kid laughed at her insistence, his amusement cut short by a bout of phlegmy coughs; a subtle reminder that Johnson's health was still in jeopardy. "Boy, do you have a thing for creepy critters."

"I'm starting to like you."

"Ouch, touché. I'll try if it will make you happy." There was a pause over the com while Johnson chose how to describe the additional Plethorian animals that had joined the assault on the Excelsior during which time Lee squeezed through a particularly narrow stretch of passage. She was grunting her way through the pipe laden defile when the kid spoke again.

"Know those Old Earth bugs they cloned and planted on New Haven during the Reconstitution effort? The ones that curl up into a ball when you touch them?"

"Pill bugs?" Lee asked as she finally located a box through which the piping she had been following flowed. A single glass meter filled to the top indicated the reserve tank was full, assuming she had followed the correct line.

"I guess that's what you call them. Can't for the life of me think of why anyone would bring those things back."

"Fertilization. They brought thousands of insect and annelids to fertilize the soil of New Haven because it was unsuitable for Terra flora when the colonists first arrived. By the way, the gauge here says the tank is full."

"Great. Anyway, these things are about waist high. And I don't think these are as shy as the OE versions. Their rolling right through the blood grass."

"Their carapace must be immune to the enzyme. It will be useful to study this species when we return. Whatever protective properties they have could be developed into a counter to the blood grass secretion for future explorers."

"Future explorers! Lady, if you haven't noticed this world is kicking our ass. It must have done the same thing to the precols, and they had an armed escort of military guards. The only way this place is getting explored is with thermal charges. With this high Oxygen atmosphere, I bet you could ignite the whole planet given enough fuel. I don't know, but I'd like to see how well Sanguis Herba burns. If I didn't think it would take us with it, I'd set our engines right over the whole lot of monsters out there on our way up and blow this planet to hell myself on launch."

Lee heard pain, anger, and conviction in this short tirade. She had to talk reason to the kid. If gone unchecked, his wrathful emotions could result in the annihilation of an entirely unique biosphere. Hesitantly she began, her words picking up speed as new defenses came to mind.

"We can't do that. This is a world full of one of a kind lifeforms. You've seen for yourself that they resemble nothing discovered thus far. And their behavior. Have you noticed there seems to be no flight mechanism? Everything on this planet is predatory. How any one species manages to survive this constant warfare is beyond me. It goes against everything we thought we knew about evolutionary mechanisms. Not to mention the concerted attack on the ship is unprecedented. There may be a hive mind involved, or even some never speculated bio-behavioral condition. There is no telling what we could learn from them. Have you stopped to consider how they communicate across species? They may hold the secret to a new form of communication, perhaps even the age-old dream of telepathy." Lee was out of breath by this time she finished her argument for Plethora Minor's preservation.

She hadn't actually considered half the notions she had presented, but in her attempt to rise Johnson from his condemnation of the planet she'd entertained any ideas that might sway him from reckless action. Even as these theories spilled from her, Lee began to wonder how close to the truth they might be. If only half of what she guessed turned out to be true, then Plethora Minor had to be saved for scientific research alone, never mind the sovereignty of a planet that was of negligible use for humanity.

There was silence over the com. Lee hoped that Johnson was taking a moment to consider her arguments. When he finally spoke, she knew her words had fallen on deaf ears.

"They killed them, Doc. Carl and Andy are gone! The cap and I might not have seen eye to eye, but I truly liked him. I knew how hard it must have been to be a freelance spacer and I egged him on because secretly I was envious. I've been given everything I ever wanted since birth, and here was a man who was fighting to make something out of nothing. He was free, free to succeed or fail on his own merit. Something I will never have to face. I wanted to tell him how much I respected that as he lay dying on the bunk beside me, but I never did. Now I never will".

Lee heard the soft sobs over the com and was moved to try to comfort the kid, but also knew to give in now would be to sentence Plethora Minor to doom. Although she wasn't sure if the Excelsior thrusters could ignite the planet's atmosphere, but Bradley Johnson's family held sway over decisions made New Haven's government and even more pull with NASA inc. If bombing a planet full of hostile lifeforms didn't bite into their potential profit margin, then they wouldn't blink before laying it to waste.

"Bradley, they're animals. This wasn't personal. It was a defense mechanism, that's all."

He wasn't hearing any of it. "They killed Andy! That crazy Russian was a good guy. Did you know his whole family went into cryo when he left for this trip just so they would all be the same standard age when he came back? That's the kind if man he was, the kind of man I wish my father was."

Lee thought Johnson was finished, but the kid practically screamed his next words.

"He save our assess back there. Doesn't that mean anything to you? Are you really that heartless?"

Lee felt as though she was back in her dream, rooting for sleet mites and elephants while humanity beckoned her to rejoin society and embrace all if its myriad needs no matter how senseless they might be. She choked back a sob she felt building in her throat. Not because she mourned for their fallen companions with the degree that Bradley did, but because she could not. The fate of Plethora's life was mire close to her heart than the deaths of Hawthorne and Borlov. Nonetheless she tried to sympathize with Johnson.

"I understand how you feel," she began only to be cutoff by the kid.

"You don't understand shit!" Johnson yelled over the com. Lee waited for him to vent his frustration with her, finding it harder to remain unemotional.

"Shit!" The kid screamed again. This time there was fear as well as anxiety in Bradley Johnston's voice. Lee felt her stomach turn as she realized that this explication was not aimed at her seemingly impartiality toward their losses, but at some new threat.

"Doc, get up here now. The mountains are moving."

Launch

Lee was panting heavily by the time she spied the engine room exit. She had run full tilt through the metal warren after Johnson's cryptic message about moving mountains and his fervent command to exit the engine compartment. What set her heart to hammering and her legs to churning was the sounds of dormant systems coming to life as she ran. The leviathan was waking. Lee had thought the machinery festooning the cavernous engine compartment was unbearably loud before, but now the vibrations from whirling turbines and pounding pistons was a physical force that jarred her every step, reverberating through her EVA, setting her teeth to rattle. Even muting the helm did nothing to deter the racket. Visible waves of heat began to shimmer from piping, immediately fogging her helm visor. She felt sure she would be broiled alive in her survival suit, despite knowing that the EVA suit would protect her from anything save a full blow fire.

As she hurried toward the general quarters Lee thought she heard Johnson speaking to her through the hat com, but nothing he said was discernible beneath the omnipresent noise. She burst from the engine room, slamming the hatch open so that it added its own weak clamor to the ruckus behind her. She closed the hatch and removed her helmet for fear that she would over breath the survival suits life support in her haste to reach the cockpit. Lee fancied that it would have been quite ironic to die of suffocation inside the spacecraft when there were demons without anxious to do the job for her.

It crossed her mind that she had never in life been prone to associating every experience with life and death until arriving on PM. While her paranoia disturbed her, Lee believed it might be justified under their current situation.

On that note she ran as fast as the EVA allowed her toward the cockpit and the revelation of whatever the new threat was. The last tangible thing Johnson had said was that 'The mountains are moving'. She had no idea of what that meant, but on a planet where the grass and tree analogues were mobile then it wouldn't have been a far stretch of the imagination that the mountains could go on walkabouts as well. For that matter, if the ground on which the Excelsior perched were to sprout fangs and swallow the ship whole Lee would not have been too surprised. More paranoia, she knew. Perhaps her heightened sense of cautious wasn't so advantageous after all.

The pounding on the hull by the Plethorian aggressors was louder than when she'd entered the engine compartment. It was as if the enraged animals sensed their attempt to depart and were sent into a frenzy by the impending escape of their prey.

Lee witnessed poof of the escalated attack when she rose from the winding causeway and into the cockpit. Over Johnson's shoulder four monitors showed a menagerie of lifeforms either headed for, or already assaulting the ship. It was an astrobiologist's dream come true. It was a nightmare of Lovecraftian dimension. Tall semi-transparent things like jellyfish on stilts speared their way toward the Excelsior on a multiplicity of spindly appendages. A troupe of tripoidal creatures with headless torsos that terminated in flurries of whipping tentacles raced toward the ship with the grace and speed of hunting cheetahs. Johnson's pill bug analogies rolled alongside these alien sprinters, springing at the Excelsior, unfurling mid leap to reveal anterior filled not with legs, but row upon row of hooked teeth.

There were more distinct species on the screen. At least twenty that Lee could spot in the brief time since entering the cockpit. Throngs of predatory lifeforms all wantonly rushing toward the ship with the intent to kill them.

On the third screen over she saw a monolith that has not been there previously. As she watched, the black tower rose then fell, as if it were a Titan striding up from the distant horizon, its head, if it had one, was literally lost in the clouds. Here was Bradley Johnson's moving mountain. An appropriate description if she'd ever heard one. Farther on still other indistinct forms were rising from the horizon. An entire herd of mountains trampling their way toward the Excelsior. Unfortunately, the closest creature, whatever it was, was too far away to discern any of its details aside from its impossible height and girth.

"Are we recording this?" Lee asked awestruck.

"No time for that. Take a seat. We have to get out of here now!"

"But what about the pre-flight tests? You said they were crucial."

implored while scanning the command console for anything that would record the profusion of lifeforms. Just as before she could not make heads or tails of the numerous buttons, switches and levers that littered the console. In frustration, she struck the dash.

Johnson, mistaking her outburst as a panicky reaction to the added menace, said, "Don't worry Doc, we should be in the air momentarily. We are just going to have to take our chances that everything is working on this ship. Those monsters out there may look slow, but not a minute before you arrived they were barely noticeable. It was just by blind luck that I looked up at the screen and saw them coming at all."

"We have to get a record of this Bradley. It's important! "Lee implored while sitting in the long unused copilot seat.

Incredulous, Johnson stopped in the act of toggling a switch. "You still want to save these demons?"

"They're not demons. They are just animals that have somehow evolved to treat any new species as a threat. They are like antibodies fighting off an infection. We are the disease."

"No, Doc. We're the cure" Johnson said. Then he turned back to the command console. Leaning back into the captain's chair he flipped the final switch before Lee could reply. The thunderous roar of igniting engines shook the Excelsior as though it were at the epicenter of an earthquake and volcanic plumes of exhaust smoke filled the monitors, obscuring further view of Plethora Minor and its deadly denizens.

"You might want to buckle up!" Johnson yelled with a feral grin as the ship slowly began to rise. Lee strapped in, all thoughts of argument forgotten in the sudden violence of the launch. Through tear streaming eyes she saw Bradley's grin fade into a grimace. She wasn't sure but he seemed to be focused on a gauge she speculated to be an altimeter. The Excelsior wasn't lifting fast enough.

"Damned gravity!" He screamed and toggled another switch. The Excelsior gave a heightened roar of defiance and strained towards the heavens. On the monitors Lee saw that they were breaking out of the exhaust cloud. Through the billowing fumes came a sight that both awed and terrified her. The mountain had arrived.

Evidently Johnson had seen the behemoth too. He grabbed the steering column, pulled the ship hard to starboard, and grunted in an effort to guide the ship away from the fast-approaching doom. Out of the sooty veil Lee glimpsed a coarse ebony wall that filled all the forward-facing monitors. Colonies of blood grass dotted the immensity like barnacles on the skin of a cetacean, while nameless monstrosities sheltered in shallow pores honeycombing its chitinous bulk. Pulsing polyps festooned its skin while larger membranes surrounded by long pale tendrils dappled the beast at irregular intervals, the tentacles undulating with queasy rhythm or lashing out at anything within their vicinity. Off what purpose these queer organs served Lee could not tell during the brief view she was granted for the Excelsior chose then to plunge into the omnipresent ceiling of clouds.

There was no relief in the cover of clouds. No way of knowing whether Johnson had steered them clear of the creature's path. For ten tense seconds Lee held her breath, certain that at any moment the ship would plow bow first into the titan's flank. Then they were through. And still the mountain loomed before them.

Johnson struggled to turn the Excelsior further starboard. The ship and he groaned in unison as the kid attempted to force the Excelsior to perform maneuvers it had not been designed for.

On a forward monitor one of the strange tendril adorned membranes was swiftly approached. The mucous covered tissue split open as the Excelsior's port side neared it and Lee was enlightened as to the nature of the numerous organs. They were mouths.

The Excelsior had almost completed its turn when a phalanx of tendrils shot out from the jaw nearest it, the tentacles stretching like the tongue of a chameleon. Two of the ropy appendages struck the spacecraft's aft and adhered there. On a screen monitoring that section of the ship the mouth which was already large enough to swallow the Excelsior whole, widened. Teeth reminiscent of an OE lamprey poked through the black tissue of the cavernous gullet beyond. Only these were ten-meter-long serrated incisors.

Lee screamed in absolute terror as the maggoty lasso started drawing the Excelsior in. For five agonizing seconds the creature managed to hold the Excelsior despite the thousands of tons' pressure exerted by the ship's thrusters. Then Johnson gave the ship even more juice, breaking free of the mountain's grasp and rocketing the Excelsior into the upper atmosphere of Plethora Minor.

Lee watched bug eyed at the fast retreating bulk of the Plethorian Titan poking through the clouds below them. It was headless. Just a mass of tissue with mouths. A devourer. It would be easy for anyone viewing the enormous beast to imagine it a prince of Hades and the things scrambling along its pillared torso its minions. Even though she, believed, no, knew, that the Plethorian lifeforms were biological in nature, there were aspects about them that defied all known evolutionary principles. Their size and speed went against any previously theorized determinations for life on a planet with PM's atmosphere and gravity. They should have been squat and slow animals considering those parameters, given that they were carbon based creatures. Their behavior and ability to communicate across species was equally inexplicable. Most of all, the mountain was a mystery of mythical dimension. No animal could be that large or fast. Constraints of bone, musculature, and electrical impulses between synapses should have prevented anything from attaining the properties of the behemoth. Even if the thing had multiple brains as the dinosaurs of OE were thought to have had, it was a being of impossible proportions. There were questions there on Plethora Minor that would occupy the minds of scientists for untold decades.

But as her terror subsided, and Lee began to think more clearly, she came to the reluctant realization that those questions would never be answered. Plethora Minor was a doomed planet. It was a place that evoked primal fears, a place that would remind men of their meek and humble beginnings. And what humanity feared, what it could not control, humanity destroyed.

"We're. Not. Out. Of. The. Frying. Pan. Yet!" Johnson yelled, his voice distorted by the vibrations rattling the ship and its occupants.

Lee could hardly hear him over the rumbling of the Excelsior's engines. His worrisome glance between what appeared to be a fuel gauge and the altimeter told her everything she needed to know.

"Are. we .going. to .make. it?"

Johnson, one hand pulling back tight on the steering column while the other pushed the throttle to its upper limits, spared her a glance.

"Don't. know," he said, before returning to his effort to maintain the spacecraft's trajectory.

Upward they flew, lancing the primrose sky with blazing blue white flames trailing from the Excelsior's four thrusters.

On the monitors clouds concealed any sign of the horrors below. The only evidence of the monstrosities prowling the surface of Plethora Minor was a squadron of Plethorian avian still doggedly pursuing the ship.

Now that they had escaped the clutches of Plethora, their current danger announced itself with a hiccup. The Excelsior's engines shut down.

"Shit," Lee and Johnson said together.

The G force that had been pinning them into their seats reversed as the Excelsior began to lose altitude, its nose dipping gradually ground ward while their stomachs wrenched upward. Then a spurt of reserve fuel must have kicked in. The survivors were rammed back into their chairs as the engines ignited once more. On those screens showing the view of cameras mounted on the dorsal spine of the Excelsior the sky was darkening to a midnight blue, punctuated by wisps of ephemeral cloud.

Lee and Johnson waited with bated breath for the engines to stutter again. Waited, and waited some more. There was no way they were going to make it out alive. Why should they? No one else had. The engines would die, or better yet, explode. Something thing would reach out from the hellish planet and pluck them back to the embrace of its horrors. With a fatality born from experience, they waited.

Now those cameras pointed toward the heavens shown the blackness of space, as inviting as mother's womb. Still the engines propelled the ship upward, their throaty roar subsiding as the Excelsior plunged from the chaos of PM's atmosphere and into the welcoming sterility of vacuum.

Quiet. Blessed silence. For a time, Lee and Johnson basked in it. They had been hounded by the incessant pounding, scrapes, and screeches of the Plethorian animals' assault for days, during there hadn't been a second of reprieve. Now, with the deafening roar of the Excelsior's thrusters extinguished it was a pure pleasure to hear absolutely nothing whatsoever.

The quietude was interrupted by a bleeping from the console. It was a reminder that although they had escaped the terrors of PM, their problems were far from over.

"Fuel indicator," Johnson said. He flipped a switch, ceasing any further use of their precious hydrogen. "We almost used up the reserve trying to avoid that thing."

"Does that matter?"

"If we want to point the ship in the right direction it does. Launching blindly as we did violated the first rule of space flight; Fuel conservation. The ram scoop will pick particles of hydrogen from the vacuum, but the ship needs to be moving for it to work. So we don't want to make too many navigational corrections. Get pointed in the wrong direction without acquiring enough hydrogen and we could be headed on a one-way trip into an asteroid or something."

"Can you get us pointed in a direction that doesn't involve crashing into an asteroid or something?"

"Well, like I said before we took off, I'm no navigator. I fell asleep during that course. Hawthorne must have plotted away out of here. Hopefully the console computer here will have something I can work with. Assuming Carl didn't encrypt every file on the damned thing. Besides that, I can start searching the long-range radar. Maybe I'll find our exit route on my own."

"Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. Is there anything I can get for you? I mean anything not, ah, in the cockpit?"

"Nope, don't think so." Johnson said with a wide, yet obviously forced grin while patting his useless legs. "Hawthorne was used to flying this ship solo so nearly everything I'll need is right here. That's why the console is such a cluster fuck. Normally a ship's instrumentation is spread out between the pilot and copilot stations. Crafty old Carl must have customized this command console himself for everything to be so conveniently at hand for one person. Kind of impressive. So, no. I won't need to be able to waltz in order to solve our navigational problem."

"In that case I'll be down in the cryochamber trying to program the sleepers," Lee said. She paused before turning to descend the stairwell, wanting to talk further, to explain her feelings concerning the death of their companions and the plight of Plethora Minor. But Johnson had already turned back to the console. Either he had not sensed her need for further discussion, or he had sensed it and was not yet ready to talk about anything that didn't concern their own survival.

Crestfallen that the easy camaraderie that had been growing between them seemed to be waxing, Lee started down the causeway. Janice Lee wasn't a person who attracted friends casually, and though she was aware that their shared experiences on Plethora Minor was the catalyst that had driven Johnson and her together, Lee had felt herself becoming attached to the kid nonetheless. She hoped that solving the cryochamber issue would take her mind off PM and its future should she and Johnson survive.