James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 08

by Hellfire

  Keeler took another drink. “Do we submit him for the Randomer Series?”

  “He’s never shown any indication of precognitive ability,” Alkema protested. “But, za, I think we should. I’d be interested just to see the result.” “What’s Atlantic’s status?”

  Alkema didn’t have to check his datapad. “He’s been judged fit for duty. In fact, he’s on the Bridge, now. The others have been cleared as well, but we should keep them under observation until… just until.” “Right, just until. Promote Specialist Atlantic to lieutenant,” Keeler ordered. “He’s been through a lot, and I like his taste in women.”

  “I’ll make it happen, sir,” Alkema agreed. He checked his chronometer. “It’s almost time, shall we adjourn to the bridge.”

  Keeler agreed, finished his drink, and rose from his seat. He grabbed his walking stick, for once actually needing it for support. “Whoever would have thought space would be so …

  weird,” Keeler mused, leaning heavily on his walking stick as they exited the briefing room.

  End of Part II

  Hellfire Part III: Cake Or Death

  It has been 16 days since Pegasus departed the Hellfire System Fallon Colony: Northern Hemisphere

  “How’s your leg?” David Alkema asked Commander Keeler.

  “It’s broken and it hurts like a kick to the balls, how in perdition’s flames do you think it is?” Keeler shot back.

  Alkema put his hand on the commander’s shoulder to try and draw out the pain. The commander slapped it away. “Hey buddy, that may work on the chicks in Josh-Nation, but I don’t swing that way.”

  “I’m just trying to release some of your endorphins to ease the pain,” Alkema protested.

  But Keeler insisted. “I don’t go in for that medical mind-trick stuff. When I’m in pain, I want to tough it out the old fashioned way… with powerful opiate-based chemicals.”

  “We don’t have any of those,” Alkema argued. He would not have minded some opiates himself, as the bite-wound on his neck throbbed painfully.

  Keeler sucked in a deep breath in the dark of the pit. “When we get back to the ship, I’m going to send a sternly worded letter to whoever provisioned this trip.”

  “That was me,” Alkema replied, knowing the medical kit was with one of the McKenzie brothers.

  Before Keeler could add to his misery again, there was a loud bang outside the barricade Alkema had built over the entrance to their bunker. They had taken shelter in this old stone dome structure to protect themselves from a mob of crazed and angered villagers. In the darkness, they had not realized the interior of the dome was a steep drop from the doorway, or, at least, Keeler hadn’t realized that and tumbled into the pit, giving himself a compound fracture of the right leg.

  Alkema fingered his pulse weapon, and nervously checked the barricade. He had thrown it together out of tables, doors, and other metal plates and objects he had found in the shelter, but he had no idea how long it would hold now that the villagers had caught up with them. “I hope the McKenzie brothers made it back to the ship.”

  “Za, I would also hope that,” Keeler groaned. “Because if they don’t, we’re probably going to die.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “It’s the truth, and we have to face it,” Keeler scolded. “Even if they make it to the ship, there’s only an outside chance of a heavily armed rescue team getting to us before that mob breaks through that barricade and eats us alive.”

  Alkema shuddered. The wound in is neck seconded the notion.

  Keeler persisted. “Let’s trade with the natives for some agricultural supplies, you said.

  Let’s ask permission before we make a cultural survey of their abandoned cities, you said.

  Brilliant shining idea that turned out to be.”

  This would have been the moment to tell his commander to shut up, but Alkema, his face burning red with the shame of it, had to agree. He had been the one to insist on making contact with the colonists before exploring one of Fallon’s large and decaying cities, that stretched along a river plain nearby. It had seemed like the right and proper thing to do. And so, they had landed their ship outside one of the small, primitive villages that had sprouted up away from the decaying urban centers. They had approached the village with peaceful intent, to inquire of the leaders if it might be all right to explore their abandoned cities and, if necessary, offer to trade with them in exchange for the privilege. They had even brought shiny trinkets and medicines to offer for trade.

  But as they crossed the scrubby land outside the village, their landing party… himself, Keeler, and a pair of warfighting brothers named Vaughan and Bon MacKenzie. Both were strongly built men in their early thirties – who happened to pull double-duty in Pegasus’s Cultural Survey – perceived there was something amiss with this planet’s inhabitants, even from a distance. The four of them had hidden in the brush a few hundred meters outside the ramshackle huts of the village, and observed.

  The villagers appeared as thin as scarecrows, and they shambled almost randomly in their movements throughout the village and the plots of haphazardly planted scrawny vegetables that marked its outskirts. Their seemed to be purposeless patterns to the way they shuffled, as though they were moving only out of long habit and retracing the steps of previous, more purposeful lives.

  And they moaned. Their moaning was a guttural, dirge-like sound the Lingotron™

  could not make sense of.

  “Are they sick?” Alkema had wondered out loud.

  “Malnourished, definitely,” Bon Mackenzie had said.

  “The soil in this area is depleted,” Venture MacKenzie had added. “They’ve been planting and harvesting the same crops without fertilizing or rotating. That would explain the starvation.”

  “So, the possibility of getting booze from them is practically nil, I take it,” Keeler had drawled.

  In the distance, Alkema observed two villagers scrapping over what looked like the carcass of an animal. Like a hunting pack, the other villagers converged and soon an ugly melee had developed, in which the carcass was ripped apart and villagers who weren’t fighting each other scrambled for pieces of meat off the dusty ground.

  “We should pull back,” Alkema suggest. “I don’t think…” He didn’t finish because at that moment a sub-human shriek arose from the brush behind them. They swung about to see a wild-eyed villager, dressed in rags, skin brown as mud, teeth rotting, standing and screaming as though they were ghosts. It was so shriveled and leathery, they couldn’t even tell what sex it was.

  Before they could much react, he, she, or it lunged at David Alkema and took a small chunk of skin right out of his neck. Alkema’s self-defense training kicked in and he punched his assailant hard in the sternum. The creature fell backwards, let out a squeak, and then lay still on the ground.

  “Is it dead?” Bon McKenzie asked, he knelt over the villager’s fallen body.

  “I’m not inclined to check,” Alkema replied. He put his fingers to the spot on his neck and then examined them. They were quite a bit bloody. Vaughan McKenzie handed him a sterilizer from the medi-kit, and Alkema attempted to clean his wound with it.

  “I think it’s dead,” Bon observed that the neck had twisted over badly on impact. Just as he began to lean over the body to check for a pulse, the creature sat up and began screaming again.

  “Holy Cruz!” Vaughan ejaculated, and the four of them scrambled backwards. It was Bon who had the presence of mind to silence the thing with a pair of bolts from his pulse gauntlet.

  But the creature’s cries had not gone unheard. The villagers turned in their direction, and began erupting in a series of throaty cries, like prehistoric birds, and upon seeing the newcomers, they came shambling, en masse, in their direction.

  “I think we should get back to the ship,” Commander Keeler said. “And we should get back the ship right gleaming now.”

  Before they had even made it to away from the clearing, , there had s
eemed to appear many more villagers than they had noticed at first, converging from three sides. Their movements were slow, but their purpose was malevolent. And that horrible noise they made…

  half shriek and half groan … it rattled the very bones of the landing party as they skedaddled toward the meadow where they had left the Aves Hector.

  And they ran, firing the occasional warning shot, and the less occasional deadly shot to the chest in hopes of turning back the villagers, but it was to no avail. The crowd was maddened, and the party soon found themselves cut off from the ship. It was decided that the MacKenzie brothers, acting as warfighters, would draw the villagers away so that Keeler and Alkema could reach the Aves. The plan backfired when the villagers pursued Keeler and Alkema instead of the warfighters. Soon after, Keeler and Alkema became hopelessly lost in the hills between the village and the old city, and found that their COM Links weren’t working.

  As the last light of the day drained over the horizon, they had come across a stone dome at the summit of a round-top hill. It seemed a good place to hole up and await rescue.

  But somehow the villagers had found them again.

  “Bang!” another impact against the door he had painstakingly sealed shut brought Alkema out of his flashback. He shined a light on the barricade in the darkness. It was a careful arrangement of metal plates braced by structural supports and the sturdier pieces of furniture he found during their first half hour in the bunker. It had taken him hours to build. How much longer it would hold, he could not guess.

  After inspecting the entire inner wall thoroughly, Alkema was pretty certain there was no back entrance to the dome, which provided the mixed blessing of there being no other way in or out from ground level. There was a kind of hatch in the roof, that he could reach from the inside by means of a ladder that extended into the dome. He did not think the wretched villagers could make it in that way. He began to check the floor to see if there was a lower level they could access.

  The wound on his neck had stopped bleeding, but it itched and burned fiercely, in a way no other injury had hurt him before. He was almost certain the villager had infected him with something; probably something fatal. His head began to hurt sorely, as though whatever contagion the villager had transmitted was beginning to spread to his brain.

  When he failed to find a way below, he inspected the other contents of the dome. The interior of the dome was filled with obsolete equipment and old technology, which seemed to have survived intact the planet’s societal upheaval. Alkema picked at one of the control panels inside the dome. “If we had power, we could use this equipment to get a message to Pegasus.”

  “And if we had booze, I could get drunk,” Keeler answered him.

  Alkema pulled off a side panel and examined the inner wiring of the panel. He began wondering if he could somehow create a beacon on the roof of the dome, something to guide rescuers to their location. That might at least improve their odds of rescue.

  Periodically, there would be a bang at the entrance, as the villagers tried to batter their way inside.

  There was a quick ‘woosh’ of a sound. Something rushed up and slammed against him out of the darkness. His light clattered to the floor and he found himself wrestling with a fierce, wiry humanoid wrapped in a coarse robe that stank of manure and body odor. Alkema’s first thought was that one of the villagers had somehow found his way into the dome. But when he kicked himself free of the tussle, his attacker began screaming, almost coherently, as it scratched at his face.

  “Blasphemers!” he screamed, rotten breath puffing from his lungs. “You have violated the Holy Temple of the Sphere, and you will be made to pay!” And then he charged and bit Alkema in the neck.

  Alkema kneed the attacker hard in the jaw, and then slammed his head against the hard cement floor, hearing a satisfying crack. To his relief, the blow had knocked the attacker out. Alkema retreated back, picked up his light, and checked his barricade. It was still holding.

  Then, he flashed in on his assailant.

  “Why is it always the neck with you people?” Alkema shouted at his unconscious form.

  The man had not gotten in much of a bite, but had managed to re-open the wound and Alkema was bleeding again. He wiped the wound with his fingertips and felt prickly hot pain emanate from the wound upwards into his skull and downwards into his chest, as though the weird infection were spreading through his body.

  Alkema dug around in his pockets for the wound sterilizer, but didn’t find it. He didn’t remember feeling it when they came into the dome, and was almost certain he had lost it outside, probably when he fell into that trench that surrounded the dome, the trench he couldn’t see in the darkness. He really wished he had the sterilizer, or some booze like the commander suggested, but he didn’t, so there was no point dwelling on it.

  Instead, he examined his assailant. His stinky attacker was a small man, not much more than half the height of a typical Sapphirean male. He had a long, tangled beard but was mostly bald otherwise, and he wore a simple black cassock.

  “Bang!” Something hit the outside door very loudly.

  “Tossing him outside is probably out of the question,” Keeler observed dryly. “You might want to tie him up.”

  “Za, I was getting to that.” Alkema ripped some wiring down from ceiling and proceeded to hog-tie the unconscious man. He bound him at the hands and ankles, tightly enough to threaten circulation. He then secured the man to a support pillar, as far away from the commander and himself as he could manage in the cramped space.

  “I don’t know how I missed him,” Alkema said as he tied the man up. “I checked this place thoroughly.”

  “It’s dark, and he probably knows where to hide,” Keeler said back to him. “Frankly, I was sort of expecting it. By my count, on half or more of the worlds we’ve visited, someone has threatened to kill us. What’s with that? Is that any way to treat guests? If galactic explorers from a lost colony came to Sapphire, we wouldn’t kill them, probably. We probably would offer them cake. Isn’t cake better than death?”

  “What is this ‘cake’ of which you speak?” Alkema muttered back, knotting the rope double-tight behind the man’s arms. “Is it a literal cake, or is it a cake of kindness or something like that?”

  “Can’t it be both?” Keeler asked. “Maybe a nice flaming rum cake with Jutland-style caramel topping? And the kindness is baked right in. The point is, I think, you can judge how advanced a civilization is by how they greet outsiders. They see a cake, they’re going to want to get along with you.”

  “What if the visitors were much more powerful than we were?” Alkema argued. “What if they were clearly more advanced than us, and we were unsure of their good intentions?”

  “If that’s the case, we should kill them and eat them,” Keeler stated calmly.

  Alkema wasn’t sure he had heard the commander correctly. “We should what?”

  “Kill them and eat them,” Keeler repeated. “Hey, I mean, it worked on us, we’re getting off this rock as soon as a massive and well-armed rescue party shows up to free us, and we’re not coming back. I can guarantee that.” I know it’s not the civilized thing to do, but it would make them think twice about screwing with us, wouldn’t it?” Alkema checked the ties one last time and then sat down on an old musty office chair, facing Keeler. He realized then that the hardest part about treating his injured commander would be determining the precise moment delirium set in. Complicating the matter was the rise of his own fever, the pain in his head, and the feeling of disorientation that made it ever harder to concentrate. Also, he was beginning to crave red meat; the bloodier the better.

  “Bang! Bang!” Something hit the outside door very loudly twice, which shook Alkema back to lucidity. Alkema rose from his seat and turned his attention back to the insides of the dome, trying to find something he could make, or something he could build, that would get them out of here alive.

  “I don’t think this was a temple,” Alkema said a
few minutes later, as he took apart one of the monitor station consoles. “It may be now, but before their civilization collapsed, I think it was a weather monitoring station.”

  “Blasphemer!” shouted a voice. The raggedy old man had regained consciousness.

  Alkema was gratified that the ties were holding him.

  “You can talk,” Alkema observed. He shined his light toward his captive. The man ducked his head and howled with pain when the light touched his eyes.

  Keeler addressed the mad captive. “I believe introductions are in order. I am Commander William Keeler of the Heavily Armed and Very Dangerous Warship Pegasus. This is my Executive Officer, Lt. Commander David ‘Let’s Nuke Them From Orbit’ Alkema. You would be advised to let us leave here in peace.”

  “I am the Caretaker of the Holy Temple of the Moods of the Sphere!” shouted the man.

  “Violators of the Holy Sphere will be meant with terrible vengeance!” Alkema walked two steps closer to the Caretaker. “We didn’t mean to violate the temple. We sought refuge from the angry mob outside.”

  “You violated the Temple of the Sphere. Now, you will pay with your lives!” the Caretaker screeched.

  “I also left some violation on the outside wall of the Holy Temple of the Sphere while Alkema was diddling with the locks,” Keeler informed the Caretaker. “Just so you know.” Alkema gritted his teeth. The commander was not being helpful, but he had to try.

  “Where did you come from? Why didn’t I see you when I checked the place out.”

  “Blind are they who trespass on the sacred floors of the sphere!” the Caretaker screeched. “But greater still the darkness that befalls those that …” Alkema interrupted his sermon. “Do you know those people outside?” The Caretaker growled wetly. “Vile creatures, fallen from their high ways. The sphere struck them for their arrogance. Now, they eat dust!”