Über Jason: The feat

A sound behind made him turn. The fuselage seemed to be emitting blue smoke. He was no engineer and rather than checking it out, he determined that he should get as far away as possible.

With his remaining good arm Baradox clutched the small chamber to his chest and made his way across the floor of the dust filled crater. Once he had traveled what must have been a mile or so, he both heard and felt an enormous explosion. The ground quaked and he nearly lost his balance. He turned to see the fuel source erupting into the sky with a spinning silver flame that might have reached as high as the space station, for he could see it shoot up and pierce the atmosphere of the planet and ascend further out into space. Somewhere in the middle of the silver light he thought he saw a face reflected, one full of hatred, disguised by a metallic mask that glowed even brighter than the flame.

	Jason X: Planet of the Beast page 173, chapter 7

As Felicity entered the planet's outer atmosphere, the turbulence seemed far greater than the last time she'd flown here. She held the helm firmly with both hands, manually navigating through the invisible pockets of dense air and vacuums that buffeted the shuttle until she was finally clear and well into the inner atmosphere.

She'd been way too busy to focus on it, but now she could more easily examine the strange swirling beam of silver that had shot past her in the outer atmosphere. It went all the way down to the floor of Planet #666. Whatever it was, it did not indicate anything good, and she figured it had to have something to do with the damaged shuttle, although what, she couldn't imagine. That shuttle's fuel source, like this one's, and even the backup nuclear reserves would not create such a disturbance. Still, she recorded what she saw into the shuttle's logs, so there would be a record.

Below was the dismal planet's surface. Bring here again reminded her of Stanislav. How could it not? Maybe this time she would find his body, but she knew she was deluding herself.

She had attached the ring to a chain and wore it around her neck, normally hanging between her breasts. But today, when she suited up, she had pulled the chain into the helmet with her, positioned so she could look down and see it: a concrete reminder of her lost lover. She opened her visor and reached down to pull the chain up so she could kiss the ring.

"I just want you near me," she said, her lips curved into a sad smile.

She checked the coordinates and had to recheck them because the shuttle was no longer in the position it had been recorded at from the station.

"Felicity to G7. I've got a change in shuttle one's position. Do you read that?"

"Roger," Akako's voice crackled over the system, "we see that too. The shuttle has moved. We're tracking the path. It looks as if it may have been falling into a crater."

The image monitor created a computer-generated scan of the planet's surface. "I see that from here."

"Here are the new coordinates," Akako said, and Felicity read them on the screen. She glanced out the pinhole window. "And that shaft of roiling silver light? Are you getting that too? It seems to originate from the crater, about where the shuttle is located. The light is shooting straight up, penetrating the atmosphere of this planet. Hold on..." She programmed the image monitor to check out the rear of the shuttle. "It's heading your way."

"We see it, and it's stopped short of the station," Akako said. In the background Felicity heard London say, "Thank God."

"Okay, we have a reading on the material," Akako told Felicity. "That's the fuel rod reacting with the atmosphere on the planet. The alloy has turned into... something else. Bill's not sure what. I don't think it will harm us, it's stopped a good ways from us, but it doesn't seem to be letting up just yet."

"Roger," Felicity said, still looking through the pinhole at the surface of the crater she was flying over. "I think I can pinpoint the shuttle wreckage, which is all around the fuselage leak. I'll have to put down as near as I dare and hope to find Emery and Bardox. It would be great if I could communicate with them."

"No kidding," Akako said. "What I can tell you is that we get two heat sources that are probably human near the explosion. One close to it, almost in the center of it—but that can't be possible. The other is further away, at these coordinates."

The coordinates appeared on the shuttle's computer screen and Felicity locked them in. For safety's sake, she decided to get to the human heat source farthest from the blast first, and then go retrieve the other. With fuel reacting to unknown planetary conditions, it was best to keep a measure of safety between her and the explosion.

The second figure seemed to be about a quarter of the distance across that deep crater on the planet's surface. Intense winds buffeted the shuttle and Felicity knew she had to land soon before the gale blew her off course. As it was, landing would be a challenge. Taking off was an even greater one, but she'd worry about that later.

She set a course for a mile ahead of the figure, or at least the direction in which he was heading, since he appeared to be moving, howbeit slowly. The shuttle flipped from side to side and she struggled to hang onto the navigational stick, totally unable to leave the landing to the autopilot. No matter how good a computer was, with winds like this, no machine could adjust as intuitively as a human being.

She brought the shuttle down onto the rocky surface with a thud and much skidding. Finally, though, it stopped pretty much in the neighborhood of where she wanted it to be. Something told her that this was not going to be easy—intuition again—and she decided she would not shut off the shuttle's power but keep it alive on low. The winds were worse by the second and they might need to find a calm pocket and escape while they still could.

"Everything okay down there?" It was her brother's voice.

"Yes, Bill, I've landed, all is well."

"We're picking up bad conditions."

"The wind is pretty fierce. I'm leaving the shuttle running, just in case."

"Good idea, sis. Get those two idiots on board and get outta there."

"My thinking exactly."

"Felicity," Akako said, "I've got weird readings on one of the life forms. It keeps fading in and out. Don't know what to make of that."

	Jason X: Planet of the Beast pages 175-178, chapter 7

"There's a storm down there, a bad one and we can't even pick up heat forms and can barely hole in on the shuttle Felicity drove."

Andre, who had listened in, added what everyone else though. "We don't know that anything awful has happened. Felicity landed alright, we know that, and she found Bardox and went off in search of Emery."

	Jason X: Planet of the Beast page 191, chapter 7

Only when she was there, holding him, feeling the form of the man in her embrace, did it occur to her that he wasn't embracing her back. She looked up, expecting to see the rueful smile and the gentle, sexy eyes she loved but instead saw something unexpected: a mask made of silver metal, with an opening. She saw pale eyes and a set mouth, features that she did not recognize.

The giant lifted one arm and she watched the metal-covered fingers reach around as if to hug her. Instead, she felt a hard and fast pressure against her back, and the shock of sudden pain that coursed through her body. Something inside her broken, Something was being ripped out of her, from deep within her.

As whatever it was left her, the pressurized suit fave way, replaced by a hollow feeling. She felt depleted in some essential manner that spelled doom. The elements of Planet #666 entered her though the cavity where something vital had been removed. The planet sucked out the rest: her lungs, ribs, diaphragm, stomach, and liver, everything encased in the torso part of the suit. Before her eye it all crumbled to black dust and blew away.

It was in the last second of her life, as her head fell forward, that she the ring of her lover at the base of her helmet. Now she understood what this one who was not Stanislav had stolen from her- her heart. At least her ghost would remain on the Planet of the Beast forever, with the spirit of her Stanislav. And that final, sudden awareness allowed her die in peace.

	Jason X: Planet of the Beast page 197-198, chapter 7