In his most optimistic dreams he survived and even thrived on this strange planet, maybe one day finding a way to make it home. More likely and a death he could accept would be going down in a blaze of plasma fire, in the song and light of a gun battle, shot down by his own people. His own people would hunt him down like an animal, slaughter him. He understood that, didn’t even really blame them.
If they did not, if they tried to take him alive, he would make them fight to the death. He would not be captured, he would fight until they killed him. If they captured him he would die of old age in a prison, or be publicly executed. His people were cruel, in execution doubly so. The death chamber is nothing more than a giant dehydrator, not that different to how he was feeling except in an execution faces would be jeering at him through the glass walls.
Even in his nightmares he could not have imagined it would end this way, alone and lost, dying of the heat and dry. Not long, if help, if his friends did not come, not long and all they would find was a papery-skinned corpse, as dry, brittle and faded as the leaves, fallen bark and twigs he lay in. If they found him at all.
Passing out from exhaustion Johnny dreamed of cool water, of cold swamps, of air so humid it dripped at the slightest provocation and condensed on your skin. He dreamed of home. Home, where your skin was never dry, where the moisture of the air was enough to stay wet. There were forests on this planet where it was like that, never dry, the air dripping. Those places were the most sought by his people, used as luxury estates, for luxury hotels. He had never been there and could never go there now he was outlawed.
He had been miserable as a child, back at home, hated the restriction, the religious strictures, the mentally inflexible people. He had hated the school where they had been educated almost from birth. A disobedient child, he had grown up into a surly, rebellious youth in his third decade, the time many of his people go a bit wild. It was everybody else’s fault; he would not have had troubles if everyone else was not so bloody boring. Boring, controlling, stuck-up, mindless drones, he did not hate his people back home, he pitied them. It seemed inevitable that with his native intelligence and disrespect for the restrictive culture he was born into he would get in trouble with the law.
It had started minor – a habit of trespass, a disbelief that there should be restrictions on where he could walk. Arrests for brawling followed, though he was never responsible for starting fights, always seeming to get caught up in violence. He always, however, ended the fights, and it was hard to profess his innocence when after almost every fight he was the only man left standing.
With almost complete disrespect for the law and a firm understanding of the unfairness of a society with haves and have-nots he had moved on to minor thefts, not to make money from crime but rather because he did not believe he should be denied something he wanted. It really didn’t matter to him who owned something when he wanted it.
More and more brushes with the law and he lost all faith in the laws of his people. No longer caring for the strictures of his society, unable to tolerate the strictness of life in the city he turned vagrant, disappearing into the deep swamp.
He was happiest then, better suited to the life of a wanderer and outcast, hunting and gathering, carrying only the technology that suited his lifestyle. It was a lonely existence – nearly all the people in his advanced culture lived in cities and towns. Only a few tramps, poorly adjusted to modern life, still lived in the swamps in which their people had evolved.
Every society in the galaxy seemed to create people like him: throwbacks who could not tolerate the urban life, who were happier with a more primitive way of life. Most of those people were loners, they would help each other in need, they were friendly when they happened upon others, but otherwise they had no desire to seek others out. Every society in the galaxy drove the people like him out.
Solitude had not bothered him then; he was happiest in his own company. The swamp, the small flopping, wriggling things living around his shack, the wet hanging trees – these were his friends, his family. His communicator was useless out there in the swamp, out of range, but that was okay, he needed nobody, even his family, even his old friends were surplus to requirements. They had been no help when he needed them to get him out of trouble with the police. If he needed them he knew where to find them.
The end to his freedom, to his relatively idyllic existence came suddenly and with no warning. A dead animal in the swamp – a large amphibian, good hunting, good to eat – had alerted him that something was wrong, then he found another and another. In the vast miles upon miles of trackless swamp in which he had made his home the life started dying. Fish, amphibians, even the worms, the small skittering things, died. Soon there was nothing to eat. The swamp was surely not dead, it was the size of one of the big oceans on Earth, but all the food animals within reasonable travelling range were dead or dying.
Johnny had been hungry before; when he first ran from the city it had taken him some time to regain the skills his people had lost, skills that he needed to survive. There were some lean times then, with between little and nothing to eat, but he had lived through it, eventually learning the skills he needed to find food. This was different, there was simply no food, no end in sight to the hunger.
With no other choice possible he swam the many miles to the camp of a family he knew, a family who had walked into the swamp so long ago they had children in their second decade who had been born out there. Surely they would know what to do.
They were not there, not in their camp of ramshackle huts in the swamp, not out hunting in the water nearby, just gone, even the mother and children. There was nothing to eat, no stored food, no hanging meat, no drying fish. Presumably they had wandered off looking for better hunting, though their tracks in the mud led in the direction of the nearest city.
Johnny had been left with only one choice: he too turned towards the nearest city and started walking, following their tracks. His meagre possessions were already in the ancient, mud-stained backpack he had carried into the swamp all those years ago. When the mud ran out he entered the water; tangled with tree roots and reeds it was hard to swim through. Luckily, though it was not a good sign for the health of the swamp, the large predators that might have made it difficult were not in evidence.
A week later, exhausted and half-starved, he came upon a wide, clear, marked canal – a highway through the swamp, where civil engineers had made a deep cutting and kept it clear of mud, plant life and debris. Normally boats carrying goods into the city, and between cities, moved up and down the canals while family transports zigged and zagged, swirling, splashing, dodging between them in a rush to get somewhere else.
The canals were bustling, noisy places.
This canal was impossibly silent. Confused and disconcerted Johnny swam just outside of the markers where he would be safe if a boat came speeding along. It would be another couple of days swim to the edge of the city; he had hoped to hitch a ride but there was simply nobody passing.
His hunger was almost intolerable. There was still nothing to eat, he had nothing left but prayer – prayer to a deity he no longer believed in, to the god of the religion they had hammered, beaten into him at school, prayer he would find food.
A few miles from the city, when you could hear the hum of it but not yet see it through the swamp trees, his personal communicator chirped. So shocked by the unaccustomed sound – the long-silent, forgotten, disregarded device – he inhaled water, choking and spluttering as he took it out of his bag. It was a warning, a warning that the canal he was swimming in was closed to traffic due to an accident. How bad was it?
Johnny stared at the suddenly unfamiliar device; had he forgotten how to use it so quickly? He pushed another control and downloaded a news feed: a couple of freighters had collided in the canal and others had been moving so fast they had added their wreckage to the tangled mess that was already there. One of the trucks had been
carrying an agricultural chemical, deadly to fish and most other swamp life.
There was no use trying to escape it – he had been poisoned already, had been swimming in it for days, weeks even, for as long as it had been leaching into the water. If it was going to cause Johnny harm it was going to anyway, it probably already had. He may as well keep swimming to the city.
A day later he came upon the canal-block, a string of boat-sized floats right across the canal. It was posted with signs in bright purple, ‘NO ENTRY’, ‘TRAFFIC HAZARD’, ‘HEALTH HAZARD’, ‘BIOHAZARD’ and other similarly dire warnings. What was missing was a ‘DETOUR’ sign as there was no other path, no other canal to take.
The swamp forest here was thick, thicker than anything Johnny could remember seeing, almost completely impassable. There was a drift of dead fish floating against the buoys, ranging in size from minnows, the length of a finger joint, right up to a single monstrous beast as large as a canal freighter.
Paranoid, terrified if he could admit it, he returned to the edges of the swamp, as far away from the cleared canal as he could manage. The thickets were genuinely impassable, though at the edge running along the length of the canal was a reed bed with a few scattered shrubs. Keeping in the reeds, there to be virtually invisible, hiding behind small trees and smaller bushes Johnny began to skirt past the disaster.
There, among the wreckage, the sunken ships, the dead fish, were workmen, wearing bright colours, wearing what seemed to be environmental suits if they were in the water. Johnny was no expert, so he had no way to identify the heavy machinery they were using to clear the canal. There were also police, dressed in their yellow, heavily armed, standing on barges and speedboats. There were fast boats parked near the wreckage, plain-clothed police or government inspectors, maybe both. None of them saw Johnny as he swam past in the shadows among tangled trees and hanging vines, his face above the water and that barely.
When he finally reached the outskirts of the city he was weak, barely able to crawl out of the water onto the mud and sludge at the edge of the island. Certainly some of that weakness was hunger and a long swim, but a part of him, the part more aware, less exhausted, was worried that such long exposure to the poison in the swamp had harmed him in some way.
He was pained and tired, barely able to lift his face from the mud at the edge of the water, unable to sweep away leaves that tickled his nose and eyelids. Slipping in and out of consciousness he had no idea how long he lay like that, breathing but only just, not moving, not awake yet not sleeping. The thin mist from the jungle of the city-island, the damp of the mud, the water in which he half lay, that was what kept him alive in the thin watery sun of that season. Waking, if it is waking when you have no memory of sleep, when collapse leads to sudden wakefulness with nothing but a gap between, he crawled under the cover of the trees. Half delirious with starvation, exhaustion and poison, he could not think, his only remaining drive was the hunger that had driven him from the swamp. There were houses on the edge of the trees, larger than most but still built to the open, water-loving plan as the rest of the city – lily pads of ceramic and steel, wet drooping foliage of glass and aluminium, sculpted fronds and dripping moisture.
So hungry, he was barely conscious of the alarm that went off as he raided the refrigerated food stores in the first house he found. Too tired and too sick he was too slow in getting away, unable even to turn a door latch with his hands full of food. All his blood had run to his stomach; he was sluggish, sleepy, ill and he didn’t even resist when the law officers cuffed him and led him to their boat.
Some days later, well fed and rested in the lock-up, treated for the poisoning by the police doctors, it occurred to him how stupid he had been, how unlucky. He didn’t even have someone to contact – he had no numbers for old friends and family, nobody would even know he was alive after so long in the swamp. The numbers in his communicator didn’t work, everybody must have changed them in the years he had been away. There was nobody to get him free, nobody to find him legal representation. Alone by choice in the swamp, he was alone when he needed help.
The judge had taken pity on him, lost and alone, starving and sick as he had been when he was picked up. He was given a choice. Jail or the Colonial Troopers.
There was no way he could have known then that jail would have been the easier fate.
Chapter 13
They are not like us, these arrivals from another planet, these beings who have decided to colonise our world. Evolving, coming to being on a different planet to ours, they have very few direct similarities in physiology to any life on our world. This is despite the fact that the basic building blocks of life – DNA, RNA and protein – are essentially the same. We were surprised when finally able to examine a sample that although the cell structure is completely alien their biology is built of the same sixteen essential amino acids and they have the same four bases in their DNA as we have.
Their biochemistry is in fact similar enough to ours that they can digest the protein and fat that we do, can in fact live on our food. The main difference in digestion and metabolism is that they eat far less carbohydrates than we do. It is not known whether or not there are fewer carbohydrate sources on their planet or their position on the food chain caused them to evolve into almost obligate carnivores. Until we study other species from their world we can never know.
While biochemically they are similar, almost identical, to us, morphologically they are almost entirely alien. As stated before, their cell structure is completely alien with no organelles or structure we would recognise. This has the unintended effect of causing some confusion, as they don’t look as alien as we would expect them to. In fact, they look so similar to life on this planet people without a scientific background would have no idea how alien their biology is.
Superficially they appear to have similarities with the amphibians of our world; essentially they look like great humanoid salamanders. They have the same moist, slimy skin as amphibians and there is evidence they are as tolerant of heat and dryness as most amphibians, which is not at all.
This would explain, for instance, why our base, the last military science base controlled by the US army, has been moved to the middle of the desert in Afghanistan. The invaders that the military have begun to derogatorily refer to as ‘Toads’ are reluctant to move into the deserts, if they are capable of it at all.
There is much we still don’t know. We have absolutely no clue as to the morphology of the other life on their home world, except for assumptions we can make that their animal life will likely be as related to them as ours is to us. Despite their obvious intent to settle here they have not yet unloaded livestock from their ships and are living on rations or from hunting. We also have no idea as to the manner of their reproduction. Do they have two sexes as we do? That seems likely as this is the most expedient manner in which to guarantee genetic diversity and the survival of the species. Are their children born live or from eggs? Do they undergo a metamorphosis as do amphibians from our world?
We may never know, because before we can study them they may very well have completely wiped us out.
– Carly Boyle PhD.
Document recovered from hard drive in the remains of Base Delta, Date Unknown
The people in the Settler town where Perth used to be, on the continent that was once called Australia, did not know how lucky they were that Father Grark of the First Church had been sent to the planet unarmed. For days he had been moving from pathetic colonial office to more pathetic colonial office, attempting to request, then later to requisition a flier. He had been told by the Trooper Office that it was unsafe to travel by land, especially for someone inexperienced and unadapted to the local climate.
He was far too important, they said, to risk himself on a surface journey, by boat, on foot or mounted. Besides, they said, it was too far, would take too many days, maybe even weeks. They were forced by policy, unbreakable polic
y that disallowed exceptions, to deny him the right to travel overland. He would need a flier, they said.
Then they told him they had none available. Even if there was one not currently being used, they said, it would still be unavailable. It did not matter who he was, who he knew, why he was there or who sent him, he was still a civilian and had no right to access their scarce air support. If he had only intended to make a short trip they might have been able to incorporate his travel into existing patrols, as a favour to the Church, but at the distance he wished to travel this was impossible.
There were private taxi services, of course, but all of them said where he wanted to go was too far, too dangerous. One driver, when informed where Grark intended to travel, coughed into his drink, spraying himself and collapsing back into his seat in a fit of choking. He was still choking when Grark walked away, half glad he was unarmed, half wishing he could shoot the idiot. Maybe he was still choking, or dead. Grark’s ability to care about whether he had accidentally killed the idiot was rapidly fading.
He even tried to hire a flier, take himself there. He walked to the flier rental agency, filled in the requisite forms, handed them over to the agent who filed them in the trash. They then showed him the clause in the contract; no fliers would be rented to anyone travelling to the outback, it was still too unsafe. It did not matter that the government said there was no Native problem, the rental company thought different.
The Church owned no fliers; he even resorted to contacting the Department for the Protection of Natives, which apparently had no budget to buy fliers either. Everybody but the Church, who paid no taxes, complained constantly of the extreme height of the tax rate both at home and in the colonies. While trying to get a flier out of department after department, Father Grark wondered where all that money went.
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