The Pod Chaser

by T.R. Naus

Art by Francine Lee

Olyvia carefully landed her craft near the dig site. She had turned the engines off, and he watched her glide the one-person vehicle into a perfect landing. He didn’t want to be impressed by her skill, but he was. He always had been. When she opened the door, she jumped out with a giant smile and bowed deeply. 

“I told you not to land here,” Elgin said. He tried to sound angry but couldn’t maintain the facade as she ran over to hug him. 

“I didn’t make a noise,” she replied. She kissed him quickly before he disengaged. 

“They heard you,” he said. He turned around and started walking back to the laboratory while talking to her over his shoulder. “Why did you risk landing so close?” 

“I need an answer today,” she said while following him. “The company said that your report is due, and if you don’t provide it, they will proceed with normal excavation operations.”

“What’s the rush? The planet has been uninhabited for hundreds of years. All the minerals, metals, and….” He searched for the right word. He stopped and looked at her.

“Time is money,” she answered. Olyvia led the operation and was responsible for getting production back online. No matter how much she wanted to stay here with him. “The whale bones threw off our schedule. We have another job to get to.”

“Schwaleens,” he said.

“What?”

“They aren’t just space whales,” he answered. “Schwaleens are the biggest and most majestic of the species. So few Schwaleen pods have been reported that we don’t have enough information to track them. This dig should…”

His voice trailed off as he looked past her at the massive bone structures in the distance. It was a rib cage larger than any building the planet had standing. 

“You found actual remains,” he said. “This is one of the biggest biological discoveries. I told you that your company can get rich by claiming first rights to this planet. ”

She put her hands on his cheek and smiled, her eyes sad. She was very aware that these were Schwaleens, and she had spent a lot of time over the last few months staring at the remains with him.

“I did tell them,” she said, “and they looked into it. The profits from this haul will be much bigger than any academic payout.”

The inhabitants called their home Earth, and it was clear that they didn’t think much about their natural resources. They excavated so much of it for so many trinkets. The company didn’t have to dig as much as on other projects. They could use a standard vacuum to sort the resources from the junk—and there was a lot of junk. 

When Olyvia’s crew reached Earth, they quickly discovered two sets of space whale bones. They could not resume work until a cosmic biologist cleared the site. Since space whales were not uncommon, that process was typically quick. The Academy reacted to the transmitted vid with a rare stop-work injunction. They dispatched the Schwaleen expert, Dr. Elgin, “The Pod Chaser,” to investigate.

Something behind him caught her attention, and she reacted swiftly. She pushed him down while she pulled her pistol from its holster. She pointed it and fired before Elgin could respond. The energy hit a crustacious creature racing to them on six legs. With two large pincers, it was thin, bony, white, and nearly the size of her craft. It fell immediately, only to reveal two more right behind it. 

“I told you not to land here,” Elgin said. 

“Not the time,” she replied. Her next two shots dropped the attacking creatures. Four more of them surfaced. 

“Follow me,” he said. He raced to the laboratory. She was behind him, shooting at the growing number of attacking monsters. 

He disappeared into the door of the tent. She wasn’t sure what he was up to, but she had no intention of dying in the closed space of a laboratory. She was going to go down blasting anything that moved.

She heard a resounding thump from inside the tent. She turned and screamed his name, but before she reached the door, she was hit by an invisible wave of energy that pushed her back from the entrance. She landed on her back and slid to a halt after crashing into a rock.

This is it, she thought. She waited to be eaten by whatever those hideous species were. Her vision was blurry, but she saw Dr. Elgin come into view over her.

“I told you to follow me,” he said.

She passed out before she could find a witty retort.

#

Olyvia sat up quickly, reaching for her holster, ready to fend off another attack. She relaxed and laid back down when she realized she was in Elgin’s bunk. She felt comfortable in the mess that was his living space. A desk and two cabinets were littered with paper, specimens, and equipment. She was sure the bed would look just as messy had she not been back in his life over the last several months. He loved his work, and she loved his passion.

She had been unsure how she would feel about seeing him after their separation years ago, but being with him again was like wearing a familiar sweater that made her feel safe and comfortable.

She got up and stretched. She didn’t feel like she had been knocked out. She felt like she had the best night of sleep in her life. 

She also smelled fresh coffee. She found two empty mugs next to the machine and poured them both a cup. She added two spoons of sweetener to his. Some things never changed. 

On her way out, she passed the desk and noticed a folder with the Agency’s seal. It was his report. He was done, which meant they would soon return to their separate lives. She thought she would be ready for this moment but was not. 

Elgin was sitting on a camping chair, drawing something in his notebook. She looked over his shoulder before handing him a coffee and sitting beside him. She was no longer surprised at how talented he was. She spent many nights lying with him in bed, looking at his drawings, tracing her fingers over the lines in his book. 

“What were they?” she asked. He had perfectly captured the likeness of the creature that had attacked them. 

“Lice,” he said. He stopped and looked at the image one last time before closing the book.

“Those were not lice,” she said as she sipped her coffee. 

“It is a subspecies of whale lice,” he said. “They consume everything, making a great parasitic companion to space whales.”

“I’ve heard of them, but they are not as big as the things that attacked us.”

“You’ve never seen the size of a Scwhaleen,” he said. “Bigger whales host bigger lice. These creatures are more scientifically relevant on this trip than the bones.”

“Are you ok?” she joked. “You usually only want to talk about the whales.”

“That is normally true,” he said. “But everybody will assume that the whales did all this damage.”

“They didn’t?”

“I want to show you something,” he said. 

He got up from his seat and grabbed her hand. They walked into a lab tent with a surgical table in the middle. One of the giant creatures was on its back, with its legs curled inwards as if to protect its underbelly. 

Olyvia dropped her coffee to stifle a scream with her hand. 

Elgin laughed and put an arm around her. 

“I am sorry,” he said. “I should have warned you. Don’t worry. It is dead. I wanted to show you the true destroyer of this planet.”

“Whale lice?”

“Yes, whale lice,” he said. “The whales were shot down, and because they were within the gravity of the planet, they beached. This was an oxygen-rich planet full of resources. These lice breed fast; I can only imagine how bad it got. The planet must’ve been crawling with them at their peak. It looks like they overwhelmed the population and destroyed everything that lived.”

“How sad,” she said. She tried not to think about the civilizations or beings who lived on the planets she mined. They were gone. She was not. It was a job.

“These people were going to drive themselves to extinction anyway,” he said. “Some of the readings I pulled suggested that they were amid an ecological disaster, so their paranoid military response to this new, probably unknown force of nature only sped things along.

“This is the first time we’ve seen this subspecies,” he added. He let go of her and walked to it as he talked. “We assumed they existed, but we used common whale lice as a template.” He wrapped his knuckles on its thick exterior. “We were wrong.”

“Is that your conclusion?” she asked. She stayed near the tent door, unwilling to get close to it. 

He looked at her with a sad smile.

“I saw your report on your desk,” she said. 

“I've been done with it for a couple of months,” he said. “These lice gave me a reason to stay a little longer. Disgusting creatures, but I wasn't quite ready to go. The Academy agreed.”

She blushed.

“How did we not see them before?” she asked.

“The population dwindled after they ate everything,” he said. “My drones found a colony approaching, so I spent a few days setting up a perimeter of vibration rods to keep them guessing. I was worried that your engines would help them pinpoint this site.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he said. She never saw him get flustered. “It was a matter of time.”

He left the tent and returned to his seat. She glanced at the creature one more time, shuddered, and ran after him. 

She grabbed his coffee mug and took a drink.

“You broke mine,” she said before he could protest.

They sat for a while without saying anything. He stared at the bones, and she stared at him. 

“I don’t want to lose you again,” she finally said. “I found jobs near whale migration paths. We can make this work.”

He didn’t say anything. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. She needed to break the silence. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I told myself I would enjoy our time together and let it go when this moment came.”

“Did I ever tell you why I started chasing pods?” he asked after another long pause. 

“No,” she said, looking down at his mug in her hands.

“When I was a child on the Altar…” he started.

“I thought you said everybody died on that colony?” She interrupted.

“No. That might have been better,” he said. His voice carried him into a memory. “My parents used to fight. If it wasn’t about money, it was about their life choices. Altar was a hard place to live, and neither of them was prepared for the sacrifices they would need to make to live that far from civilization.

“I remember hearing the reports of a space whale pod approaching the colony, and I was so excited to see them that I sat outside for nights waiting in anticipation. My parents didn’t care. I don’t think anybody cared because work continued as if this were normal.”

She chuckled. Space whales were more frequent on the fringe.

He smiled.

“I was a child,” he said. “I had never seen a pod. I needed something, anything, to help me escape their constant yelling.

“On the night they finally arrived, the sky lit up with small pinpoints of light.”

“Krill?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “We called them Cherry Bombs. It was so beautiful that even the adults stopped working and looked up at the sky. I thought it was to admire the view, but I heard somebody yell that there were too many. There was a growing fear of what might be chasing a school that large.”

“I’ve heard stories about large pods causing havoc on an atmosphere,” she said.

“I think that was what they were worried about,” he said. “Along the sides of the cherry bomb school were larger lights that seem to be herding them into a tighter ball.”

“Whale size lights?” she asked.

“About the size of small whales, yes,” he answered. “There was a sigh of relief, but I remember being so sad. They were too high for me to see anything but the light of them entering the upper atmosphere.”

“So close,” she said.

“I heard them before I saw them,” he continued. “It was a series of booms that seemed to cause the entire colony to duck. And then I saw them.”

“You saw Schwaleens?”

“They were magnificent,” he said. His smile grew as he stared into the distance. “They were bigger than anything I had ever seen or heard about, but they were graceful. They glided through the atmosphere with glowing underbellies, but I could see each one.”

“How many of them?”

“Initially one,” he said. “It opened its mouth and sucked in so many of the krill before it swam out of the atmosphere. A second one appeared to take its place.

“The other lights were dancing around the krill. They were eating from the edges and the bottom of the school, staying clear of the whales. In effect, however, they kept the krill in a compact area to make it easier for the Scwhaleens to eat.”

“Incredible,” she said. “How did I not know that you…”

Her thoughts trailed as she began to put the pieces together.

“What happened to the colony,” she asked. “What happened to your family?”

“After the whales fed, they swam away as effortlessly as they had surfaced. What cherry bombs were left were eaten by the void wrasses. They disappeared, too.”

“Void wrasses?” she asked.

“The fish that swim with the whales,” he answered. “They love the krill too. These were bigger than the normal ones found in zoos or seen by space vessels.”

“And when they disappeared,” she asked. “What happened to the colony? Did it become a wasteland like this planet?”

“No,” he answered. It was a quick response with no follow-up as he looked around.

“Then what happened here?” She was trying not to get frustrated, but he seemed to be closing down. Whatever happened in the colony impacted him. 

“Cherry bombs swim from planet to planet,” he started. “When space whales get close, the krill race for the nearest gravitational object and attempt to swim into the atmosphere to avoid the whales. The sky lights up as millions of these little buggers desperately look for safety.”

He pointed to the sky, sweeping his hand to show the size of the krill school.

“Normal, smaller space whales simply chase them into the atmosphere until either the krill are gone or so far into the atmosphere that the whales can’t reach them due to their size.”

“I’ve seen the bones,” she said. “Schwaleens are too big to get so far into the atmosphere.”

“Very good,” he said. He looked a little happier as he talked about his findings. “Void wrasses manage to keep the cherry bombs in a tight school by eating from the edges and bottom, preventing the krill from going too deep into the atmosphere. The whales can feed.”

“With no damage to the planet?” she asked.

“There are a few storms in their wake,” he said, “but if the planet is strong enough, and most of them are, they easily survive. Otherwise, we could track Schwaleen pod movements much more easily by following the trail of destruction.”

“OK, fair,” she said. She liked it when he explained things. She didn’t feel stupid for asking like she did in school. It was one of the primary reasons she had gone into industry rather than academics, but he made it seem easy.

“I think this planet was unprepared for nature,” he said. 

“I don’t understand what you mean,” she asked. 

“Some cultures think they are the only ones in the universe,” he said. “They may hope for other life but don’t plan for it. Instead, they create mythologies of first contact.”

“Still lost,” she said. 

“Civilizations like ours, and theirs, take a billion different factors to form,” he said. “The odds of two coexisting at the same time are astronomical. It just doesn’t happen. Nature, however, is constant, so most aliens that a civilization encounters are not advanced.”

“These guys discovered that they were not the only ones in the universe,” she said. “How did that contribute to all of this?”

“Based on the charred bones, these people shot down several void wrasses. The krill scattered, making it harder for the Schwaleens to feast. The whales dove deeper into the atmosphere, likely creating storms that were probably larger than the ones we saw in the colony. The juveniles are smaller and can dive even deeper. One was gunned down.”

“But space whales are mostly harmless,” she said.

“Fear does strange things to people,” he replied. “Nature is large and wild, and if you are not expecting it, you may act out.

“The Schwaleen adults are likely very protective of their young,” he continued. “I suspect more than one dove into the atmosphere. I don’t know how many were in the pod, but one was shot down. Those two whales carried whale lice. 

“I get it. This planet initiated their destruction,” she said, “but if Altar didn’t suffer the same fate, what happened to it? What happened to your family?”

He had a faraway look for a couple of minutes. She waited patiently.

“They were screaming at each other again,” he finally said. “It rarely came to blows, but the name-calling and verbal attacks were brutal.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” she said. She rested her hand on his arm.

“The storms were stronger than anybody anticipated,” he continued. “People panicked as if it were the end of time, but the real damage came after the whales left. Store shelves were emptied as people tried to stock up. Riots broke out when we lost power. My parents took the opportunity to steal the things that they always wanted. Things they felt were owed to them for being in the colony. Looting was so widespread that the authorities called in the military.”

“Why did things deteriorate so quickly?”

“It was a powder keg, I think,” he said. “The settlers thought they would have it better than on their homeworlds, but it was a hard life. Harder than they expected. The situation turned people into animals, and the military eventually resorted to fatal measures to quell the uprising. My parents refused to give up what they stole, so they were killed.”

“Then why do you follow the pods,” she asked. “You lost everything because of them.”

“They saved me,” he said. “I was freed from a bad home and adopted by a good family. My new parents were supportive until they died in an accident when I was in university. They gave me a future. The whales gave me a purpose. I dedicated my life to learning about them. To see them again.”

He went silent again. 

“Are you chasing pods,” she asked, “Or running away?”

He didn’t say anything. 

“Is that why you left the last time?” she asked. “Were you afraid that we might become them?”

He got up and walked into the lab. He emerged with the report. 

“Here you go.” He handed it to her and then kissed her forehead. 

A tear raced down her cheek. 

“I want us,” she said. She kept her voice calm and placed a hand on her chest and the other on his. “I think this is our last chance to try.”

“You are the best thing to ever happen to me,” he said. “But there was a Schwaleen sighting. This one might be real.”

“I understand,” she said softly. “I love you, Elgin, and I hope you find what you are looking for.”

She returned to her vehicle and remembered to set the vertical take-off to anti-gravity. It lifted her slowly but would not attract lice.

He turned around and disappeared into the tent to start packing. 

#

Olyvia returned to the dig site with her team. They needed to strike the camp before they could resume operations. The delegation of scientists and archeologists arrived within days of Elgin’s report and cleared the discovery within weeks. They were already on site this morning packing up their equipment.

She looked over to where the bones once towered. It was another reminder that Elgin was gone.

She went to the lab tent and was relieved to see that the monster was gone. She looked around to see it empty except for a stack of papers with a picture on top. She picked it up and immediately felt a tear roll down her cheek. She covered her mouth with her free hand. The image showed a boy staring into the sky. He was outlined in black ink, as were the roof he sat on and the cityscape behind him. Orange dots covered the sky, and a whale was swimming among the clouds. The boy appeared so small and alone.

“You should probably look at the second page,” she heard from the tent’s door. 

She turned quickly to see Elgin standing with a smile. She didn’t know what to say. She stared at him wide-eyed before finally looking down at the papers in her hand. It was an Academy order for Dr. Elgin to join her company for twelve months.

“I told them that you were taking jobs near whale migration paths,” he said as he walked up behind her. “I suggested you needed an expert. They agreed.”

He turned her around and looked into her eyes. 

“I am not done chasing the pods,” he said, “but I don’t have to do it alone.”

END