Episode 1:
They call us Pandora Squad because our hope lies in a little box, now very far away.
Light years.
I don’t know where we are. They don’t tell us, just point us and shoot. Right now it’s hard to know anything except my head is so filled with noise, I can’t even think.
It’s all noise. Noise I can’t even hear anymore, only feel.
Concussive blasts greeted us. Rocks falling and sand raining down on my helmet. We’d landed in a rockslide. The repetitive hiss of the enemy, almost a chittering sound was lost on me as we slid down to the cliff base and into the necrobot spiders’ advance.
Who the hell thought those were a good idea?
I used to think the only good spider was a dead spider. Now, not so much. Alive, spiders mostly kept to themselves in their webs, eating bugs and, for the larger variety, the occasional small rodent. These dead husks reanimated by the Avispa’s foul machinery were abominations.
I felt sick. We all felt sick. Sick from the pressure waves of the sound we could no longer hear converging on us asynchronously. Sick from the dust of another world sucking into our lungs. Sick from the spin of this too fast planet.
Jenkins acted on it. Or at least tried, his guts likely emptied on the ride over. Poor kid got thrown into this his first day.
I remembered what that was like, the day I’d opened the box…