The Darkness of Space (QueenChaos & JuniorWizard)

Tessa awoke slowly, clinging desperately to the last few moments of her dream. Slowly the feisty redhead from three weeks ago faded away an Tessa rolled over to the empty bed. She groaned in frustration and rolled onto her back, opening her eyes. The sensors in her spacious captains cabin recognised that she was awake and the lights turned on, dim to start with and growing stronger. Throwing the duvet off of her, Tessa swung her legs over the side of the bed, her feet touching down on the plush carpet. She wiggled her toes in it, thinking about how wonderful life was when you're a highly successful mercenary.
"Right, let's do this." She muttered, pushing herself to her feet. Padding barefoot and naked from the bed to the living room section of her quarters, she grabbed the glass of whiskey from last night(well, technically earlier that morning) and downed what little remained. She caught site of her naked, toned body in the mirror, with her perky breasts and mess of raven black hair. The redhead from three weeks ago didn't know what she was missing. Tessa closed her eyes for a few moments and the images came back, of her and the redheaded woman, of how they writhed in the bed together, their hands exploring each other in the heat of passion. Stop it! Tessa thought. She was just another fuck, that's all. And indeed she was, before her there was the guys on Mars, she sure showed them a good time. Then there was the purple haired girl covered in tattoos, the blonde who turned out to be a hooker. All just meaningless fucks between missions, except the redhead had lasted for a month. An entire month docked at Cerberus space station. An entire month of exploring each other, understanding one another. With a sigh, Tessa opened her eyes and went through into the shower. She stood under the hot water, letting it soak her body, drench her hair and wash away the memories.

After the shower Tessa dried off, her black hair still damp as it cascaded down her shoulders. Heading back into the bedroom section of her quarters, should pulled a pair of tight trousers and a sleeveless crop top out of her wardrobe. She slipped on a set of simple yet sexy black underwear, before pulling the trousers and crop top on, leaving her flat stomach and toned arms bare. Following that was a pair black combat boots and her pistol belt, with a holster on each hip that contained her pistols, styled like old Earth revolves but capable of firing laser rounds. Dressed as she was she pulled her hair into a simple ponytail and left her quarters. She ran her ship with a fairly minimal crew, partly cause of her trust issues and partly cause the weaker members of the crew usually didn't survive. As such, she didn't encounter anyone on her way to the elevator. Nor was there anyone as she stepped out. Most of her crew would either be either be going about repairs, or relaxing. They'd just eliminated their latest target and until repairs were completed on the ship and they could travel, the crew would be relaxing yet on alert for if needed.

Entering the cockpit of the Blood Raven, Tessa looked out the windows to see the destroyed wreckage of a space ship slowly drifting and tearing apart with the occasional flash of fire as pieces got caught up in the atmosphere of the planet below, the only evidence of their latest target. Inside the cockpit were Tessa's two pilots, Aliza, her long time friend and pilot for years and Ella, their latest recruit. She was currently being trained by Aliza to fly both the ship and their landing shuttles so that the two of them could fly the ship in shifts and, in a worst case scenario, if anything happened to one of them there would be another pilot. Ella noticed her enter first and turned to greet her.
"Captain Hawkin, sorry I mean Tessa." She blurted, blushing slightly.
"That's better." Tessa said with a friendly grin, her eyes roaming over the busty blonde in her tight jumpsuit.
"Hey Tess." Aliza said, glancing up at her and then back at the monitors.
"How're the repairs going?" Tessa asked.
"All good up here, just waitin' on the engines I'm told we'll be ready to go tonight." Aliza paused for a moment, thinking, before speaking. "there is... something else.
"Good or bad" Tessa asked.
"Neither I suppose. It's a strange signal coming from the planet. one that we can't decipher."
"Oh, okay." Tessa said, thinking for a few moments before a smile slowly spread over her face. "Well I guess we should go have a look, right?" Aliza sighed.
"Remember the trouble we got into last time you wanted to explore?" Aliza asked.
"It'll be fine, this is an abandoned planet." Tessa said and before Aliza could argue the captain pressed the button for the intercom. "Primary ground team, assemble in the docking bay in fifteen minutes." She said before releasing the intercom button. "You stay Al, I'll take Ella to pilot the shuttle, get her some hands on experience."
"O-okay." Ella said, smiling with growing excitement.

Fifteen minutes later and Tessa entered the docking bay followed by Ella to find the ground team assembled.
What's the mission boss?" asked Jade, the field engineer.
"And more importantly what's the treasure?" Asked Lara, one of the soldiers.
"I don't know yet." Tessa Admitted."But we've got a strange signal coming from the planet we're orbiting and I thought we could explore while we wait.
"Great." Lucy, a sniper. said with a sigh. "Another one of your wild gossechases."
"I don't know what you're talking about!" Said Tessa with a grin as everyone slowly started boarding the shuttle.
"Quit complaining, I need to stretch my legs and breathe some real air." Said Svetla, another soldier.
"Well if you guys don't want to come along I'm always happy for some alone time with the captain." Said Maya. The assassin flashed Tessa a cheeky grin before climbing aboard the shuttle.
"You know you're always welcome Maya." Said Tessa as she found her seat.

"Captain, we've passed through the planet's atmosphere and we're half an hour from the colony." Ella's voice came over the intercom speaker linked to the pilots cabin.
"That's great Ella, keep me informed," Tessa replied, while the rest of the women chatted among themselves.
"will do. Also, there's some strange-" Ella's voice was cut off from the rest of the group as everything went black in the windowless cabin.
"Ella, what's happening?!" The captain called out. "ELLA!" There was no reply over the intercom as the ship begin to freefall and spiral. "Everyone hold on!" There was a great roar as the ship smashed into something and light flooded into the shuttle as it was torn in half with the screeching of metal. The world spun and the woman scream as the shuttle seemed to collide with everything it could before finally thudding to the ground.

Tessa stood before her injured group and did a quick assessment. Luckily no one was badly injured. Ella was the worst off, covered in scratches and bruises, with what could be a fractured arm. But what was truly injured was her pride and no matter how much Tessa explained that it was most likely an Electromagnetic field that caused the crash, the young girl still felt guilty. The two halves of the shuttle had landed fairly close together, however Jade and Lara were both missing, presumably pulled from the ship.
"Alright listen up." Tessa said, looking at the slowly setting sun. "We're going to stay here tonight. We'll start a fire and hopefully Jade and Lara will see it and come the morning if they haven't we'll go looking for them. For now, everyone set up whatever defenses we have." And so the women went about securing their location with everything from landmines and caltrops, to mini auto-turrets that could bring down a lightly armored human to several landmines. Finally the girls gathered around the fire to rest, chatting and joking about the captains curiosity being a curse, all while eyeing the jungle around the suspiciously. Finally they all went to sleep apart from Lucy, who offered to take the first watch.

The long out of use colony planet, designated LRT-03 for being the third planet in the LRT system had long been considered just another one of those backwater rocks. Settlers had been sent to it, maybe they died on the way there, maybe they died when they settled and found out they didn't have enough resources to sustain an economy, maybe a million different things. Though Tessa and her crew were freelancers they knew well of the governments of various alliances, always looking to take as much land as they could, looking to send their own citizens out in small groups to seed the universe. Always something or other about seeding the universe with humans, a brand new frontier and some other shit to convince the poor bastards to take a meal ticket in exchange for a one way trip to some backwater, at best they spend the rest of their lives moister farming or surface stripping a planet for a government trade ship that comes by once every ten years. At worst, they didn't live the first ten. The universe was certainly full of wonders, just as much so as it was full of horrors, Tessa and her crew knew that, but most people growing up in a cushy sowed planet didn't know so much as the thought of a struggle. Still, a signal meant at the very least they had made it safely to the planet and gotten their communications relay up and running, even if every one of the poor bastards were dead it would still be worth it to get the scrap from their station and arrival ship if nothing else.

Or, it would have been worth it if the sky didn't crack apart, the rushing sounds of wind ripping the young women from the safety of their descending pod and sending them scattering to the wind. The loss of a shuttle was no small deal, but the fact that no one was impaled or ripped apart in the crash was a miracle in and of itself, although Alize had remained behind with the rest of the skeleton crew, no help would be coming for them until they made help for themselves or had been gone long enough for the crew in the air above to begin to take issue with it, a situation they would hopefully avoid finding themselves in, considering their lack of ground bound supplies. At this point the mission was mostly a wash, there was no way a backwards colony planet such as this one was going to have enough for them to sell or scrape to make up for a lost shuttle, let alone the amount of time they were going to waste on this rock, god forbid anyone on the ground crew suffer and injury and need time to recover. Tessa was a good and fair captain, but you would have to be insane to work for her, the body count on her ship was ridiculously high, even for a freelancer who loves to throw themselves into danger it was near unprecedented. Tessa operated at a pace that most simply couldn't, the skeleton crew she considered her core were probably some of the few women in the universe who were actually willing to put up with her wild, forward plans. Even then her allies often met her unstoppable attitude with sarcasm and mockery, knowing full well that they were probably the only people who could do so without getting a knife between the ribs from her. Still, it was hard to argue with results, Tessa's company was never short of funds, and she was more willing to go into high risk situations knowing full well she had the credits banked to repair the ship dozens of times over before they ran dry.

The downed pod had been damaged too much to restore anything, even lighting or communications, the ground team was doomed to have to settle for natural fire for their warmth and their light. They would certainly need to, as night grew closer on the planet the green light of the sun tinged the entire surface a dull, murky green, descending into complete darkness at night, more pitch black than the women had ever known due to the lack of a natural satellite. Lucy had to maintain the fire with a fervor that almost made the watch meaningless in and of itself, the light only reached a few feet in either direction and more than likely served as little more than a beacon to the women in the otherwise pitch black landscape. Not only that, but as the sun dipped on the horizon they women were faced with the terrifying reality that they were now in sub-zero conditions and it was rapidly growing colder, considering how hot the planet registered during the day, it seemed almost unbelievable that it would get this cold at night, the fire providing the smallest amount of warmth, the cold of the night attempting to close in around it and smother it out like an assassin in the night. One can only wonder for Jade and Lara, being alone with no one to share body heat and possibly without the necessary tools to create a fire could spell a deadly end on a planet like this, and a frankly ungrateful one, to die cold and alone with the only allies never even knowing what happened to you; such were the risks of Tessa's bold plans.

Far away from the initial crash site, to the east and closer to the colony station the signal was coming from than anyone was Jade, she had been thrown out right as the ship ripped apart, tossing her in nearly the opposite direction of her friends, leaving her nothing to soften the blow of her crash aside from the fact that the seat of her pod had been ripped from the ship with her still in it, slamming into the ground in the chair threatened to snap her tail bone and shatter her teeth as they clamped together, but luckily she managed to avoid the fate - perhaps through skill but more than likely through sheer luck. It took her nearly an hour to manage to get out of the chair that had saved her life, the belt had become stuck and the manual release was crushed in the landing, finally managing to snap it open it was only then that Jade was able to properly examine her surroundings. To her west she could see the start of a thick, choking jungle. The 'trees' if you could call the black, twisting things with long 'leafs' of strange spinning red matter made the entire jungle idea seem like a concept only thought up in a madman's dream, the jungle itself looked almost as horrifying as any brutish monster she had ever faced. Unlike her allies, she found herself in a rather open area, a small field dipped between the edge of the jungle and sheer cliffs to her east. The colony station was almost due east of her position, not that she would be able to scale these cliffs without the right equipment, she would certainly have to go around them. Still, she couldn't see the edge of the cliffs in the distance, and night was rapidly closing in, to her east she can see some small, whistling caves situated under the cliffs. While they might look scary, they would definitely shelter her from the elements and hopefully keep her warm.

Lara however had it the worst of any of them, her landing involved hanging onto a sheer piece of metal she'd managed to grab mid-air as she was yanked from the ship. The size of the metal had done something to slow her descent, and that might have been the only thing that prevented her from pancaking onto the ground after the fall. However that might have been for the best as instead the young soldier found herself slamming face first into a murky swamp, her grip on the metal sheet effectively acting as a boogie board that carried her across the dank waters, kicking up more and more debris, water and mud into her face. It was only when Lara finally let go that the metal shot from under her and she began to roll through the murky mud, face slapping against the thick blackness several times before she was finally left gasping for air, chilled to the bone due to the coldness of the water, probably already riff with strange alien diseases from all of the swamp water she had just swallowed. Despite all the commotion, even as she lay there in silence all Lara could hear was the soft shuffling of plants, branches and leaves in the wind. Not a mosquito, not a frog or alien frog or whatever else would be out here. None of that, instead all she could find was the occasional twitching vine in the periphery of her vision. Despite her absolutely beaten up body, laying cold and getting colder as the sun set, Lara was lucky to have even survived the fall, even more lucky to not be covered in leeches and mosquitoes. Still, night was closing rapidly and the young soldier didn't have many options for warmth out here in this stagnant, wet swamp. She would have to work something out, and fast.

Jade just sat in the chair for several long moments, shaking and gasping for breath, breathing deep. What the hell? She thought as she looked around, trying to out what had just happened. It had all been a blur; one minute she was sat in the shuttle, the next the lights were off and before she knew it she was free falling, screaming. As she struggled to get out of the chair her throat felt raw from screaming on the way down, the slightest cough seeming to set it on fire. She grunted, clamping her teeth together as she struggled with the belt keeping her strapped into the seat. Finally it came free and she staggered from the seat, falling to her knees. After climbing to her feet she looked around with an overwhelming sense unease. She shivered as the wind brushed over her exposed, flat stomach, while the sinister black tree-like spires towered over her. Jade was a field engineer and as such she was used to having lots of tech at her disposal. Lots of tech that remained with the crashed ship, of which there was no sign.
"Guys!" She shouted. "Tessa!" She wandered around in a small radius, shouting for her team mates, with no reply. The wrist mounted multi-tool she always wore was of little help, flickering on and off, but the old fashioned compass she had mounted to it still worked fine, giving her an indication of which way she had to go to get to the outpost. East, through the cliffs. Jade quickly assessed her options in the diminishing day light, the feeling of unease forming a pit in her stomach. "Well shit!" She swore loudly.

Lara looked around in despair at the seemingly desolate swamp as dirty, murky water dripped her every bit of her. He clothes were soaked, her hair drenched. At least her rifle still worked, being water proof and fairly resistant to damage. She held it in both hands as she shivered, trying not to think about all the diseases that no doubt thrived in the dirty water. The sky was already growing dark and there seemed to be something sinister about the silence of the swamp, the only noise being the rustling of branches and leaves in the wind. Having grown up around similar habitats on Earth, she was used to the sounds of animals or creatures that lived there. As the sky began to darken she checked her compass, which was cracked during her landing but still worked. She tried her flashlight and swore when it didn't work, before limping off in an eastwards direction, her body bruised and battered as she looked for somewhere to take shelter.

It was dark by the time Jade had finally managed to get a fire going in the entrance to one of the caves. After scanning her environment they seemed to be her best option and she had made directly for them, picking up dry leaves and scattered wood for a fire. It had been difficult work at first, trying to light it. She wasn't at all prepared or trained for surviving n the wild, so it was a miracle that she managed to light it at all. The crackling fire was of little comfort however, as she watched the flickering, dancing shadows fearfully, her mind racing with the horror stories she'd heard about wild frontier planets. The young field engineer had been born and raised as a spacer, living on various ships with her family. The only time she'd been on planets was when they were restocking in the huge, crime ridden metropolises of Earth and similar worlds. Leaning against the wall and shivering as she tried to get as much heat from the fire, her handgun was always within reach as she looked from the sinister trees outside, to the deep shadows of the cave that she feared to explore. Slowly her eyes started to droop and her head nodded several times as sleep began to sneak up on her.

Meanwhile Tessa lay on her back in the middle of her camp, listening to Lucy's footsteps as she patrolled. Her crew were fairly spread out, sleeping either alone or in pairs, huddled together. Some did so for simple heat preservation. while other did so out of companionship. Tessa was a pretty relaxed captain and allowed fraternisation in her company, so it was no surprise that she could her the rustling of clothes, the unzipping of zippers and the quiet gasps and kisses as certain members of her team tried to make love as quietly as possible. Trying to shut out the sounds as they fueled her own arousal, she rolled onto her side to find Ella sleeping nearby with her back to the captain, so Tessa wrapped her arm around the voluptuous blonde and huddled closer to her, while telling herself it was all for the body heat.

The planet seemed almost unnaturally quiet, for Lara in the swamp it was much more obvious, but for Jade in her temporary home against the cliffs, hidden from the twisting, blackened trees it was much less noticeable. The lack of any sort of rustling about the trees should have told her something, should have made her more aware of her situation, yet it was futile in the end, the girl was too far panicked and annoyed to have been able to properly assess the situation. It wasn't long before the darkness had overtaken the planet, the stark cold a powerful contrast to the almost muggy warmness of the few hours they'd spent on the planet after they landed. Despite that mugginess the few pieces of scattered wood and leaves she had managed to cobble together burned in a small pit in front of her. They were from the black trees, and as they burned they seemed to twist, distend and contort themselves into all kinds of odd and strange angles. As she was nodding off to sleep, Jade could swear she managed to catch sight of the branches twisting around the flame, embracing it before a dark, deep goo dripped down from it. A snap of her head and the quick blinking of her eyes however and the visions were gone.
How long had she been asleep? It must have been awhile now. Jade could barely think to herself as she awoke, the cave now in pitch black darkness due to the dead fire in front of her. She'd never seen the true darkness of a world, living on ships meant that there was artificial light no matter the time of day. With the tiny satellites of this planet, even the light reflected to the planet was minimal during the evening, and Jade was unable to even make out the hand in front of her face.
Still, even as she struggled to adapt her vision to the darkness, she heard the rustling of black tree branches against the ground outside. Had they been long enough to reach the ground? Jade was fairly sure they hadn't. Still, more unnerving was the soft chittering that seemed to be emanating from deeper in the cave, slowly bringing itself close.

Lara on the other hand didn't even have the comfort of the caverns, instead she was subjected to the freezing, battering wind that flowed through the more Earth like trees of the swamp. They hung and swayed in much the same was as the swamp trees of Earth, but unlike those they all seemed to be half buried in the swamp itself, their trunk usually sprouting from the pools of water, leaving the canopy only just a little ways above her head. Despite the fact that the suit would normally keep her warmer, the fact that it was half filled with muddy, stagnant, freezing water meant that the young girl actually felt more cold from the suit than if she'd discarded it completely. Still, walking around buck naked on a freezing alien planet was hardly a good idea, either. Despite this, she still trucked on it an attempt to look for something that might help her, effectively stumbling through the swamp in the dim twilight.
As her feet tripped and tangled with the various foliage of the floor of the swamp, thick roots choking out her path, something more sinister brewed. Slipped through the thick roots and the twisting paths was a few small yet durable purple tendrils. They came from a large, bulbous flower just a few feet away that had sensed prey, and as they lunged forward, they attempted to wrap around Lara's ankles and throw her to the ground. (Roll: 8)

As soon as Tessa had touched her she felt Ella's pulse increase, her breathing grow more sharp. Ella was a rookie in many things more than just as a soldier on her crew, and the fact that it was the captain making a move on her after such a stressful day must have been all the more nerve fraying. Yet still, she doesn't object, doesn't remove Tessa's hand and even slowly pushes herself back against the captain, sandwiching her chest against Ella's back. Luckily for the both of them this was just for warmth, even though the way her generous ass pushed back against Tessa made the rubber of the captain's suit twist slowly against her clit. The only unfortunate effect to the side of free love in camp was that even the normally hard willed Lucy was getting distracted. Try as she might the only thing she could make out in the camp was the bodies of her four team mates mashing slowly together, the darkness of the world around them like a brick wall. If she was the only one left out, she was definitely going to at least watch, just a bit.