The Planet of Doom

“Something is very wrong,” Doctor Bill claims.

“What’s wrong now?” Haticat asks.

“The records indicate that this star should have a hycean planet around it, not a terrestrial one,” Doctor Bill says.

“Could the other explorers have missed one of the planets?” Haticat suggests.

“Perhaps, but there’s only one planet now. The sensors clearly show a rocky world with a nitrogen atmosphere, not a watery one with a hydrogen-helium atmosphere,” Doctor Bill says.

“Are you sure this is the right star?” Haticat asks.

“Yes. I triple-checked,” Doctor Bill answers.

“Maybe it lost its water due to solar flares or something,” Haticat suggests.

“The records are from thirty years in the future. If this is the same planet, it gained water somehow,” Doctor Bill says.

Not able to resist a good mystery, Nathaniel orders a close flyby. The planet is largely grey rocks and sand. There are numerous glass lakes, perfectly smooth and transparent. One active volcano oozes pink, sparkly lava. “Scans show nothing unusual. It’s just a lifeless, volcanically active world with a thin nitrogen atmosphere,” Doctor Bill reports.

“Keep scanning. Maybe the water is underground,” Nathaniel says.

They are still looking for clues when the ship shudders and starts to fall. “Whoa! Magnetic flux just increased by six thousand percent! We’re losing our antigravity field!” Haticat yells.

“Reestablish!” Nathaniel orders.

“Trying,” Haticat says. “Failing.”

“Fire the proton cannons on wide beam setting,” Nathaniel orders.

“Firing,” Fred replies. The protons superheat the air underneath them, providing enough buoyancy to soften their fall. The ship skips across the rocky surface and finally skids to a stop in a sand dune. The force field holds, protecting the hull from damage.

“I still can’t maintain an antigravity field,” Haticat says. “The local magnetism is too volatile.”

“There might be a way to modify the force field to shield us from magnetism, but it will take a long time to set that up. We might as well go exploring,” Nathaniel says.

He puts on a spacesuit and steps out the door into a forest. He looks around in awe. “Where did all these trees come from?” Not one branch is broken. No leaves lie on the ground. There are no animals. The trees are of identical heights. Everything is too clean. He grabs a frond and turns it over in his hand.

“These trees are not real,” Doctor Bill says, looking at his scanner.

“But I can see them,” Haticat says.

“What I mean is that whatever these structures are, they are not trees. They have no DNA, no cellular divisions, and no active metabolism. They are merely inert masses of cellulose, peptides, and water, nothing more,” Doctor Bill explains.

“How did they get here?” Haticat asks.

“I don’t know,” Doctor Bill says.

Nathaniel walks ahead, trying to see how far the new forest extends. It appears to go on forever. He does his own scanning and discovers the roots do not branch, but instead extend all the way down to the bedrock.

Then he sees the puddles. Here and there are slightly flattened globes of water, some as much as a meter in diameter, yet held in shape by extreme surface tension. A scan reveals the ground to be extremely hydrophobic. He sticks his gloved hand into one and lets the water run off back into the globular puddle. His Gruezhlings walk up behind him. “Hey, the magnetic interference has stopped. Maybe we can take off now,” Doctor Bill says.

“I’m not leaving until I understand how this planet can completely change its whole climate in mere seconds,” Nathaniel declares.

“Could it be some sort of atomic hypercomputer?” Haticat asks.

“To operate on a planetary scale would require a lot of power, roughly equivalent to that of a stellar mass black hole,” Doctor Bill states.

“We could scan for a power source back at the ship,” Haticat says.

“It would also guarantee the existence of multiple ogres as a matter of statistical certainty,” Doctor Bill says.

Fred draws his weapon and looks around. “I hate ogres.”

“Okay, back to the ship,” Nathaniel commands.

The explorers have barely taken three steps when the trees and puddles are sucked back into the ground. They stop and look around at the barren desert – and start to sink. The ground is softening. “Quicksand!” Haticat yells. Six seconds later, the land has completely transformed into seawater. They are tossed about by waves in a choppy ocean as far as they can see. The sky is suddenly overcast and lightning flashes in the distance.

The ship is sinking. “Come on!” Nathaniel yells. He swims as fast as he can, slipping into superspeed. He reaches the landing site moments after the ship disappears from view. He swims downward in the dark sea, guided by the ship’s external lights. He makes it to the airlock. He waits impatiently for the airlock cycle to complete. He gets inside and runs to the controls. Reestablishing an antigravity field, he begins to ascend. Suddenly, the ship comes to a jarring stop as if it hit something. The engines are fine, but it will not move. The external sensors are not working. Nathaniel opens the door and stares into a wall of solid rock!

On the surface, Fred finds his lower half encased in stone. Fortunately, his gun is still in his right hand and he uses it to blast himself out. He blows away chunk after chunk until he can climb out of the hole. He looks around. It is still overcast. There are several large cracks in the ground. Sparks discharge across the gap. Each section of land seems to have a different charge. There is no sign of the others. They must be underground. Fred uses his scanner to find them. Haticat is one meter underground. Doctor Bill is two meters underground. He starts shooting.

Nathaniel tries everything to get the scanners working again. The stone must be pressed against them. Without a clear view of the outside, he dares not use the teleporters or guns, not knowing where his crew is. Then he gets the idea to use his radio. If he can lock onto his crew’s radio communicators, he can teleport them inside. “Is everybody alive?”

“I don’t know. Haticat and Doctor Bill are underground. I’m blasting them out,” Fred reports.

“Okay. I’m trapped in the ship. Let me know when you are all safe and I can teleport you on board,” Nathaniel says.

“Okay,” Fred responds.

Nathaniel continues to pace anxiously. Then he hears cracking. The stone is moving. Pressure on the hull is increasing on opposite sides of the ship. He sees the wall buckle. He turns quickly and sees it buckle on the other side. Then a long, thin crack appears. He tries to activate the force field, but it won’t stay on.

“Captain, we’re all ready,” Fred announces.

Nathaniel teleports them inside and returns to fiddling with the force field. “Yikes! We’re being cracked like an egg,” Haticat exclaims.

“Supernovas!” Fred curses.

Then the ship shakes and they are falling. The artificial gravity and inertial dividers hold steady. They only feel the shakes that deform the ship’s frame itself. Now free of the rock walls, the sensors show the ship tumbling into a deep cavern. It bounces off the sides of the crack. The caverns keep going and going, branching deeper and deeper. “We must be at least fifty kilometers deep by now!” Doctor Bill exclaims.

Finally, the ship falls into a vast, open space. The cracks close behind them. Below are massive spines of some kind of shiny metal. “Aha!” Nathaniel shouts as he finally gets the force field generator running. The field repels the spines and the ship settles safely among them. “What a wild ride!”

Haticat and Fred pan the external cameras around them. The ship’s spotlights illuminate many broken ships. There are several spacecraft of Ninosan design, Hammer-Face freighters, Extolon warships, and Vlymon pleasure cruise ships. “What is this place?” Haticat asks.

“Outside temperature and pressure is in excess of what our spacesuits can handle,” Doctor Bill says.

“Those trees were to lure us away from ship controls. This shapeshifting planet is a ship-eater,” Nathaniel states.

“Ships aren’t food; they have no calories,” Fred says.

“No, but they do have antigravity fuel. That’s the one piece of technology all these wrecks have in common, and every one of them has been drained,” Nathaniel says.

“We need to get out of here,” Haticat says.

“Yes, but we can’t fly through solid rock, and the planet can always just magnet-jam us again,” Doctor Bill says.

“I have some ideas about that,” Nathaniel says.

“Whatever we do, this planet is going to keep trying to eat us,” Haticat says.

“I have some ideas about that, too,” Nathaniel says. “I need to make some modifications.” He begins fiddling with the particle accelerators at the heart of the ion gun assembly, running a magnetic tube from there to the filtered fuel tanks, and then playing around with those.

Minutes later, there is a loud noise. New cracks have opened in the roof of the cavern and large drops of white-hot lava has begun to fall. It pools in a low area several hundred meters from the ship. The dripping increases. Then it starts to pour. “It’s filling fast; we have minutes,” Doctor Bill warns.

“Okay, shut off the force field,” Nathaniel orders.

“Captain?” Fred responds.

“Just for a few seconds. I need to dump some fuel,” Nathaniel says.

“We’re giving it what it wants?” Haticat asks.

“I’ve poisoned the fuel. There are only a few ways to derive energy from antigravity, and all of them are inhibited by antimuons. Once it gets a taste, I’m guessing it will lose interest,” Nathaniel says.

Haticat flips off the force field. “Won’t our engines be inoperable?”

“Yes, but I have some ideas about that, too,” Nathaniel says.

The fuel is dumped. The force field is reestablished. The white lava continues to rise. The expanding ripples lap just thirty meters from the ship. “The outside temperature is now over two thousand Kelvin,” Doctor Bill announces. “If we become submerged, the force field can only handle direct contact with lava this hot and dense for maybe an hour – two at most.”

Suddenly, the lava stops pouring. The explorers look up curiously. Then there is a deep grumbling sound. The ground vibrates. Suddenly, the air pressure outside spikes. Alarms blare. Opaque gas fills the cavern, blocking all light from the lava. The ship shakes violently.

Thirty seconds later, the clouds dissipate and turn into a flurry of snowflakes. “Wow,” Haticat says. Soon, the snow clears to reveal starry blackness.

“It blasted us all the way to the night side of the plan…” Fred starts to say, but stops when he sees the planet itself rushing away from them.

Doctor Bill checks the instruments. “It shot us out of a geyser at escape velocity!”

“Okay, mission accomplished. Now we need to take the next seven weeks to filter the antimuons out of our fuel and hope we don’t hit anything before we have working engines again,” Nathaniel says.

“Seven weeks! That’s boring!” Fred complains.

Haticat just sighs. He is glad to be alive and not buried under white-hot lava. He watches the planet recede in the sky from his perspective. Right in front of his eyes, it transforms from a tan and orange, rocky world to a grey, sandy world with scattered seas of red, sugary syrup, making itself appealing to the next explorers to pass this way.

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