The boy looked at them for a moment, wide-eyed in fear, then jumped up very quickly and charged back into the crop rows.
“What the hell was that?” Gatlin explained.
“First contact,” Tango responded. He then called out. “We don’t want to hurt you.
Come on out and let’s talk.”
They got nothing in response so they pushed on through the field. Gatlin reported detecting a structure a few hundred meters ahead surrounded by a cleared area. They made for that, crossing the yard between the fields and the house slowly, walking backward to keep their scanners and weapons trained on the field.
In the clearing were a large ramshackle farm house and a large storage barn surrounded by a grass yard, long gone to seed, and falling-down sheds of various sizes, A windmill rotated in the breeze, making a screeching noise like old rusty metal scratching on old rusty metal.
“That sound,” Gatling groaned, adjusting his aural filters to screen it out. When the windmill sound was subtracted, he picked up the first strains of another sound, children’s voices singing a hymn, languid and sickly sweet.
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves; Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Then, they began coming out from the green crops, in twos and threes at first, and then en masse. Boys, girls… the smallest were not more than five or six years old, and they all were singing in a creepy sing-song…
Going forth with weeping, sowing for the Master, Though the loss sustained our spirit often grieves; When our weeping’s over, He will bid us welcome, We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
And as they sang and shuffled, all the children stared at the warfighters, with deadened gazes from eyes that were glazed over.
“O.K., that’s creepy,” said Gatlin.
Warfighter Quatrain raised the pulse setting on her gauntlets.
Suddenly, the singing stopped.
A shrill, prepubescent voice cut through the air: “And I saw in heaven another great and marvelous sign: seven angels with the seven last plagues—last, because with them God’s wrath is completed.”
The warfighters turned around to see a young boy standing on the porch of the house.
He wore a flat round hat and spectacles, clutching a book in a black binder. He railed at them, waving the book.
“Behold, a dream did come to me, and the Lord did show all this to me. A time of
tribulation has come. A test is at hand. The Final Test. And He Who Walks Behind The
Rows did say, “I will send outlanders amongst you. Three men and a woman. And these
outlanders will be unbelievers and profaners of the holy, but the man will sorely test you,
for he has great power.”
He held the book open over his head. It was open to a two-page picture of a red-eyed, reptilian beast.
All the children answered him. “Praise God, praise the Lord!” The three warfighters exchanged looks and a common thought. You’ve got to be shitting me.
“Little man,” said Lieutenant Tango, stepping forward and facing him. “Are you in charge here? I need to speak to whoever is in charge here.” The boy fixed Tango with a harsh glare. “And just as he was offered up unto him, so shall be the unbelievers! Make sacrifice unto Him! Bring Him the blood of the outlanders!”
“You’re not getting my blood,” Gatlin answered, leveling his gauntlets at the children nearest him.
“Steady, hold your fire,” Tango ordered, trying to match the hardened gaze of the boy on the porch. “You don’t want to fight with us. And you don’t have to. We have food in our ships, enough for all of you. Just give us a chance to talk.” The boy called out: “I am the giver of his laws! Disobedience to me is disobedience to him! Seize them! Do it now or your punishment shall be a thousand times a thousand deaths! Each more horrible than the last! I am the word and the giver of …” The boy fell over on the porch, smacked down by a bolt from Warfighter Quatrain’s gauntlet. She leveled her guns at another group of children. “Who’s next?” The children, deprived of the leader but still on the verge of acting on his last order, wavered uncertainly. Behind them, a pair of Aves came in low over the fields.
Tango commanded the ships to hover and hold their position.
“All right, you children listen up. We’ve come to take you off this planet. You can walk onto those ships, or you can be carried on,” explained Tango. “It’s up to you.” A group of older boys broke off from the pack, yelling war cries, and charging toward the warfighters. Gatlin and Quatrain took them down easily with chest shots. Most of the other children panicked at the display and ran off into the fields, disappearing into the rows and leaving behind only a few who were too scared to move.
Tango tapped his COM Link. “Quentin and Leo, it didn’t work out. Plan Beta.” The two ships made a sweeping arc over the fields. Weapons emerged from their undersides. There was what can only be described as a thunderous Woosh as shockwaves cut through the rows of grain, knocking the children down sprawling into the muddy ground.
Tango shook his head. “I guess they’d rather be carried. Gatlin, Quatrain, arm up and prepare to stun any more who don’t want to cooperate. Get the MedTechs to sedate the others. This is going to take a while.”
Mission Report - Nevalah
Warfighter Copperhead had visited two of the Megaplex Cities on Aurora, had patrolled the Archology of Meridian after its bombing, had been through the underwater survival bunker on Dominia, and had even explored the weird, giant pre-fab space-skyscrapers of Ecco 1. They were all stranger than the city of Nevalah but none of them had been as creepy.
Nevalah had been built on the clifftops overlooking coastal plain of one Gethsemane’s southern continents, just few ticks south of the planet’s equator. The city consisted of high narrow stone buildings, tightly packed and arranged with the precision of dominos in a pattern that left only narrow alleys between them. Some had even toppled into each other during the groundquakes that had become common in the final days of the planet, as though the planet were shuddering at the thought of its own death.
The emptiness and silence of the abandoned city and its empty, windy streets gave her the creeps… as bad as any Night of the Living Dead Horror Show back on Sapphire; Worse for being a real place where a real apocalypse was in the offing. The bright star of the rogue planet rose in the northern sky and hung there like an angry red eye in the twilight sun.
If the probes were correct, children had taken shelter in some of the buildings, and it was a real challenge to locate and root them out. They were in no mood to be found, much less by strangers from another planet.
Copperhead led a squad of four down the broadest avenue in Nevalah, which was barely wide enough for four men to walk abreast in. The buildings crowding around her made her feel like she was some kind of rodent navigating a maze. There were no apparent signs of life here. The Spex told them that children were in the buildings on either side, but moving too quickly to maintain a position fix on.
“Up there,” hissed Warfighter Helaman, zooming in on the second-from the top-level of a nearby structure. “Two… distinct. On that floor. Moving… southwest vector.”
“Let’s check it out,” Copperhead said. They moved toward the old building, a tall, narrow rectangle that jutted up from the street. The entrance was blocked with stones and debris, knitted together with stripped electrical wire. Warfighter Neominides suggested blasting through, but Copperhead didn’t want to panic the children. They searched for another way in, and found an opening on the second floor. They rappelled up the side and gained entry.
It was dark inside, but their Spex helped them pick their way through the musty rooms and corridors. What had this been? Copperhead wondered. A hotel, she guessed. The rooms seemed too small for a prolonged stay. But the furnishings, the draperies, even the fittings in the euphemisms had been torn out long ago.
“Something ahead,” said Warfighter Biehn. “Wait, it’s gone.”
“Those kids are fast,” said Warfighter Motyka.
“Or, we’re chasing sensor ghosts,” Copperhead muttered.
They worked their way through the building and found nothing. They soon figured out why. The structure’s interior walls, ceilings, and floors had been punched through in strategic locations. The kids had worked out their own internal networks, and could move from room to room independent of the hallways. The children had also set up booby-traps, as they discovered when Biehn fell through a lightly camouflaged hole in the floor.
Using ropes from their packs, they pulled Biehn back up to their level, then continued their fruitless search for more children.
“It’s getting dark,” said Warfighter Motyka some hours later, stripping off his tactical helmet, his face moistened with sweat in the sultry tropical air. “Let’s get back to the ship, make a plan for tomorrow.”
Copperhead reluctantly agreed. “Fall back to the ship,” she ordered, and led her men away from the city, the two at the rear keeping their weapons ready for another assault from behind.
“If they weren’t in the buildings, we could use stun blasts,” Motyka said to her as they made their way back to the ship.
“If we can just capture a few, maybe we can talk to them, reason with them, get them to lead the others out to us.” Copperhead knew even as she said it, it was wishful thinking.
Copperhead stripped off her tactical helmet as they approached the landing field where they had left the Aves. Nevalah had no aeroport in its day, and the ship had parked on the only decent strip of flat ground nearby. As she and the team approached, she noticed fresh footprints laid in the dust. They led to the ship’s open hatch.
She signaled for the team to halt and scanned the ship, but detected no life signs.
Nonetheless, she led them forward cautiously, and up the landing ramp.
The Main Deck was empty, but several of the storage compartments had been pried open and stripped bare. And there wasn’t single loose object… not a datapad, not a kava mug, not a retro-digestion bag left in the main cabin. Every loose object had been stripped.
Also, the pilot was missing.
The Nevalah children had led them into the city and kept them busy while some of their compatriots had looted the ship.
A determined look came to Copperhead’s eyes as she said, “This is going to be a lot harder than we thought.”
Gethsemane – Abbanaki – “Follow the sound of this voice to the escape ships. You will be fed
and well-treated. We will take you away from this planet to a better place.”
The voice was transmitted through the groves of olive and fig trees that lined the shores of Lake Abbanaki. Alkema had suggested that the food and water available here would draw children, and his thought was confirmed when the first low-altitude sensor flights detected a number of groups of them living here.
PonyBoy James stood in front of his eponymous Aves, grilling Borealan tube-meat over a fire pit, the savory scent of the cooking meat wafting into the trees. He figured anyone living on olives and figs for the last few years would appreciate a good tube-meat. He had told his warfighter teams to hold off shooting until the brats had been given a chance to work.
And he sensed more than one pair of eyes were watching him from the undergrowth between the old olive trees.
He took a tube of the grill and slid it into a bun, than slathered it with relish and onions.
He took a bodacious bite off the end.
“Damn, that is good eatin’” he exclaimed. And it was very good. Since marrying Rocky Collins, he had rarely partaken of good tube meat. Her tastes were a bit more sophisticated than that.
Finally, someone emerged from the bushes, a young boy of maybe, maybe 13. The boy was tall and thin, but not as bad off as the first group of children from Port Gethsemane had been. He approached the fire warily, like a stray cat approaching a saucer of milkbeast juice.
“Hoy,” Ponyboy James called to him. “Are you hungry? Would you like a seared tube-meat?” He sensed the boy would run if he approached, so he simply put a roasted tube-meat on a bun, sprayed it with yellow mustard and drakh sauce and capped it with onions and a sprinkle of pickled fungus. He set it on a plate with some grain-chips and placed it far enough away that the boy could get to it without getting too close.
The boy was cautious at first, but hunger overcame fear. The boy grabbed the plate and tore into the food.
“Let me get you another one of those,” Ponyboy offered, picking up another tube-meat from the flame-pit. “My name’s Pony, by the way, what’s yours?”
“Trig,” the boy introduced himself.
“If you like the tube-meat, I’ve got plenty more for your friends, if you want to bring them back here.”
“Why?” the boy asked. He had finished the meat in seconds and making the chips disappear alarmingly fast. James prepared a second plate.
“Do you know what’s going to happen to this planet?” James asked.
“One day… Boom!” they boy said, then stuffed more food in his mouth.
James nodded and handed him the plate. “Za, well, that day is getting close. That’s why we’ve come here. We thought you might, you know, not want to be on the planet when it goes ‘Boom!’”
“We can’t go through the gate,” the boy protested.
“We’re not going to take you to the Gateway, but we have a great big ship up there somewhere,” he pointed toward the sky. “There’s room for all of you.” The boy interrupted. “They tried to take me, but I wouldn’t let them. My brother is here.”
The boy did look old enough to make it through the Gateway. If James recalled correctly, Anaconda Taurus Rook had said that the cut-off age was about thirteen.
“Is your brother hungry?” James asked. “Maybe you could take him some food. Now that you know it’s safe.”
“I won’t leave my brother,” Trig said.
“You won’t have to,” Ponyboy James assured him. “We have enough room for everybody. And food.”
It took some time, and a lot of tube-meat, but PonyBoy James and his crew eventually recovered 196 survivors from the olive groves of Lake Abbanaki.
Mission Report – Mariah Beach –
Team Victor Alpha had deployed to a beach in a subtropical region of Gethsemane’s southern hemisphere. Waves lapped against the shoreline, hills rose off into the distance and palm-like trees swayed gently in the gentle wind.
“It could be worse,” said Warfighter Lieutenant Diamondback, as a stray ocean breeze blew through his rust-brown hair.
They were in warm weather tactical gear… shorts and short-sleeve shirts, light tactical vests. Fly-bys from probes had located several dozen survivors, mostly older children, who had made up a crude encampment of tree-huts not far inland.
Diamondback took his team forward, following a freshwater creek that led out of the jungle. He had three other warfighters, one medical technician, and a general technical specialist named Sony to assist the Medical Technician, make spot repairs to equipment, and maintain COM links with Pegasus.
As they proceeded into the jungle, Diamondback mind was sizzling with questions.
Why would the Allbeing destroy a world? Why would the Gateway exclude children? How did Pegasus manage to be here at just the last moment to save them? How did the complicated path of his own life lead him to be here, at this time?
To put these thoughts aside, he turned to the Warfighter next to him and asked,
“Herrald, is this what you imagined when you signed up for the Odyssey Project.” Warfighter Herrald, a tall, sinewy hunk of a man with curly, honey-blond locks answered, “Honestly, sir, I expected I’d be captured by a race of beautiful, three-titted, blue-skinned alien nymphomaniacs and forced to breed in their love mines.”
“Why blue?” Diamondback asked.
Herrald shrugged. The team moved in into the woo
ds at the other side of the beach from the water.
They located the children living in groves of trees that lined either side of the creek. They had built crude inhabitations in the branches of the trees.
“They’re in the trees,” Herrald reported.
Diamondback examined the tree-houses with his Spex, and ascertained multiple life-sign readings behind their bamboo(-like) walls. “Sony, send out the friendship message.”
Sony activated the acoustic device. “Children of Gethsemane, we mean you no harm.
You are in danger, and we have come to rescue you. Please come with us. You’ll be given
food and taken to safety.”
Silence answered them. Sony repeated the message three times, but the children remained in hiding.
“O.K,” said Diamondback. “What else we got?”
Anaconda Taurus Rook had defined the mission plan broadly, leaving room for commanders in the field to determine how best to proceed. If attempts to draw out survivors failed, the next step was to attempt non-hostile direct contact. Diamondback sent Herrald and another Warfighter, Riddle, into the trees to assess the situation close up.
A few minutes later, Herrald and Riddle came running back out of the jungle amid a hail of rocks and sharpened sticks.
Herrald reported. “They seem somewhat resistant to being rescued, sir.” Diamondback couldn’t help but chuckle. Here were his warfighters, decked out in the finest armor and advanced tactical weaponry, sent into retreat by kids with sticks and stones. He cocked his gauntlets. “So much for the peaceful approach. Now, we go in shooting, weapons on heavy stun.”
Herrald raised an objection. “Those kids are pretty well dug into the trees. It will be hard to get clean shots unless we draw them out.”
“What do you suggest?” Diamondback asked.
“Crazy Purple Knock-Out gas?” Riddle suggested, naming a powerful airborne crowd control weapon they had developed after determining at Yronwode that large, non-violent means of crowd control would be helpful in some situations. It was still experimental, though. And they would have to get a specially equipped Aves to disperse it.
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