Chapter 618 Red Rover, Red Rover...

Chapter 618 Red Rover, Red Rover...

(Ed note: Red Rover is a playground game that Gen X kids used to play. It isn’t played now, because, like most Gen X games, it was incredibly violent and kids would sometimes get serious injuries (like concussions, teeth being knocked out, the occasional broken bone, and bloody abrasions) and nowadays people prefer their children to come home from school uninjured. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rover )

An hour ago.

A team of seismologists had taken a rover filled with measuring equipment to install on what they believed was a fault line just off the coast of New Australia. It was considered research-worthy, as they had never seen a fault line run perpendicular from ocean to land before. Parallel, sure; there were plenty of fault lines on Earth that came within proverbial spitting distance of coastlines. The San Andreas fault in California, the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the American Pacific Northwest and Canada, and the Alpide Belt in the Mediterranean region, among others, sometimes reached within a kilometer of various coastlines.

But this new discovery had them as excited as, well... as seismologists ever got, really. They were a dour, stone-faced lot in general and tended to be on the serious end of the scale. It wasn’t surprising, considering the gravity of their area of study and how oh so very deadly earthquakes could be, and generally were. Upstodatee from n(0)/ve/lbIn/.(co/m

Just as they were about to reach their destination, the order calling them back to home base had come in. So they dutifully packed up the crates they had just been about to unload, got back in their rover, and started the engine. Or tried to, at least, as it simply refused to start.

Dr. Paul Hodgins, the lead researcher, fancied himself something of a mechanic, so he and one of the two marines attached to the mission as escorts got out of the rover, despite the pouring rain and constant lightning strikes, and opened the engine compartment.

“Jim, you’re never gonna believe this,” he radioed to his friend and coworker in the rover.

“Never gonna believe what, Paul?”

“There’s some kind of... it looks like roots, maybe? Anyway, it’s all tangled up in the engine. Gonna take a while to get it sorted out and I don’t think we have enough time before the storm hits.”

“Have you called it in?” Jim asked.

{Acknowledged. Diagnostic program in progress...} the VI installed in the rover replied. {Diagnostic scan complete. No errors reported.}

“So is the ground actually moving? Perhaps it’s an artifact caused by the ionization in the atmosphere because of the thunderstorm.”

{Unknown.}

“Let’s try another camera and see,” the second scientist suggested.

The view switched to a camera pickup located over the side of the cargo compartment, but it was the same grainy, blurry image and the ground still appeared to be moving.

“Maybe the thunderstorm caused some symbiotic organism to come up to the surface? That patch of ground almost looks like the top of the tubs of earthworms I buy when I go fishing,” the third scientist said. “Let’s see what’s on the other side.”

The view changed to the camera on the opposite side of the rover, and off in the distance, it looked like a solid wall of black had risen up from the ocean that was just a couple hundred meters away from where they were.

“Uh... I don’t think that’s the sky,” someone murmured, almost whimpering.

“It isn’t a tidal wave, either,” the marine interjected.

“So what is it?”

Lightning struck the ground only a few hundred meters from the rover and the echoing boom of thunder was loud enough to rattle the three-ton vehicle like a paint can in a mixer as what appeared to be a solid wall of giant roots crashed down on the doomed rover and buried it beneath them.