“You know what really pisses me off?” Gustoff said, momentarily turning his attention from the praying elderman to April who was leaning against the tight thatch walls that the building was made out of. Most of the buildings were made out of that sort of material. They hadn’t quite learned how to form bricks. They were close though. One of the people in the settlement was always working on infrastructure. He wasn’t the type of person to pray to a disaster site. He was the type of guy that would attempt to figure out how to avoid such a thing again. But people like him were few and far between. Only three of them existed in the settlement out of the many thousands of people living there. And two of them were Gustoff and April. So getting anything off the ground was going to be hard.
“You even heard what I said?” Gustoff said, shaking his head.
“Sorry, what?” April asked, finally looking at him. She’d been sucked into the charade in front of her. The silk robes they wore. The big torches they swung. The barely audible whispers they spoke. It was all a little too creepy for her.
“They spend all this time praying to their so called God, even though they believe that it was their God that killed Aston and his family. I mean, has anybody attempted to search for the bodies? Check if they are actually dead? Or have they been far too preoccupied with proving me wrong?” Gustoff asked. He couldn’t bear to look at the elderman in front of him in the distance. Every time he did, it made him feel sick.
“Prove you wrong?” April asked.
“Yeah, don’t you see it? It’s like they’re obsessed with proving that their God exists. So anything that happens, be it an accident or a turn of good fortune, they’ll immediately say it’s down to their deity.”
April shrugged her shoulders.
“What can I say? They’re idiots. They’ve never listened to you. Even when you came to them with solid ideas. Ideas about building a scope to observe the stars above us. That was a good idea. And if they’d listened and let you build the damn thing, then maybe someone would have spotted whatever crash landed onto poor Aston’s house, and would have been able to forewarn the settlement. It’s a shame. Aston was a good man.”
Gustoff nodded and looked at the floor. The dirt below him was slightly scattered. He noticed that his feet were blackened. The make-shift thatch sandals he’d forged a few weeks ago were near their use by date. Whilst talking to April, he’d involuntarily been kicking the dirt beneath him. Digging his heels and soles into the mud. Gustoff had made quite a mess.
“All I’d wanted to do was call a meeting at the hall and put together a search party. That’s all I wanted to do. Instead of praying to the damn scorched rubble, maybe they should be thinking about finding the bodies of the baby girl that lived there. The father. The mother. The young boy. And the bigger boy.”
April nodded.
“What do we do though? I mean, it’s not like we can just make them do as we say, is it?” April asked. She tried to comfort Gustoff with a squeeze of the hand, but before she could clamp down on his hand, he’d started to walk off. She stood there for a few seconds, staring as he approached the elderman praying at the burn site. There were maybe eight or nine of them, all in robes, all bending down, all praying. A knot in her stomach nearly doubled her over. What if Gustoff loses his temper and hits one of the elderman? They’d hang him for sure. So she quickly caught up with him, her breathing heavy, mouth open, trying to get some much needed air into her lungs.
“Randy, don’t do anything stupid here. They’ll kill you!” she said, grabbing onto his hand. It was nice to finally feel his touch. But now was not the place to embellish such a warm feeling that was rushing through her. The equally, yet overpowering feeling of dread had taken over as they approached the burn site. With every step they took, the sounds of the holy men praying became much more prominent. She could hear their tongues clicking and their mouths opening and closing as a flurry of inaudible words left them.
“Please, Randy!” April blubbered, tears rolling down her cheeks. She let go of his hand as he powerwalked toward the men. She stopped dead in her tracks, fearing the worst.
In her mind, she was seeing him violently attacking the elderman as they prayed. But fortunately, that’s not what happened. Randy walked past the praying men without much regard. None of them spotted him at first, but as soon as his right foot crunched onto the rubble of the burn site, they seemed to all notice him at once.
“What are you doing?” one of them shouted as they stood up. His robes were flapping in the moderate breeze. To April, he looked mythical. Like a gatekeeper guarding a hidden treasure or an artifact of great importance.
Another one stood up. This one was bigger. His robe was slicker. The colors were brighter. And he was much angrier.
“You cannot step on the soil. This is a place of worship. A place of God!” he screamed. By now, the others were all on their feet. Gustoff turned around and smiled. It was a defiant smile. A smile with no happiness attached to it. A dead smile. In conjunction with dead eyes, staring nothing but death into the men wearing the fancy robes. Gustoff stood there for a few seconds, flashing his death stare, but then he turned back around, and took three steps onto the scorched soil. The men in the robes gasped in absolute horror.
“Heathen! How can you do such a thing? That soil you’re standing on has been blessed by the elderman of this settlement! You cannot just walk on it. You dare disobey us?” the head elderman said, his fine robes bouncing slightly as he bellowed at Gustoff. But Randy wasn’t phased. If he could have seen April’s expression, he’d have seen that she was very much phased. She was petrified of what they would possibly do to him. But Gustoff didn’t care if he lived or died. Living in the settlement was no life. For there is no life without freedom.
“I dare to do as I please! You are not the leader of me. You don’t get to decide what I do, much like I don’t get to decide what you do!” Gustoff said, taking another two steps onto the soil. He bent down, grabbed some soil in his right hand, and flung it at the gawking elderman. They ducked as if he’d just threw poison at them. Gustoff started to laugh.
“Look at you all! Frightened children. Scared of science. Scared of knowledge. You stand there in your robes, thinking that you’re better than all of us. Better than me, even! I know more about where we come from than anybody on this forsaken planet. I know that we are not alone. I know that there are more people like us. Somewhere far away, but they are there. I have come to you with ideas that would take our settlement into the new ages. Ideas that would stop people getting sick. Stop people wasting their time on nonsense, and you’ve brushed my ideas off like they were trivia,” Gustoff said, taking another two steps forward.
“But they aren’t trivia!” Gustoff continued. “You can attempt to run away from science, but science says we’re not alone. Yet you choose to waste your time praying to a false God, instead of recovering the bodies of the family that live here. That shows me what type of people you are! You think that if there was a God, he’d want you to ignore the dead? Let them rot where they were killed?”
The elderman looked at Gustoff and then at each other. One of them took a step forward, being careful not to step on the “sacred soil”.
“We do care. We care too much. You stand there and tell us that what we are doing is wrong, yet you offer no solutions. You just mock us. Make fun of us. Throw dirt at us. That is not how a civilized person acts,” one of the elderman said.
“There’s nothing here! Can you not see that? You’re praying to nothing. You’re wasting time. Valuable time that could have been used to find the bodies of the Aston family.”
The elderman shook his head.
“You’re wrong. There’s something there. There’s always something there. It’s around us. All of the time. Day and night. It can see us. It can hear us.”
Gustoff balled his fists up. He turned around and started kicking the blackened dirt.
“There’s nothing here! Nothing!” he screamed, kicking the dirt ou
t of the burn site. He kicked and kicked and kicked. Every time he did so, he moved closer to the middle, where all the debris was. And as he did so, the elderman cried out, begging him to stop.
“You’re a mad man!” one of them heckled.
“Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” Gustoff said, taking one final kick.
But his foot stopped half way up. His toe hit something. Something that wasn’t there. A clunk could be heard. Randy hissed in pain, but stood there, stunned for a second or two.
“What was that?” April asked.
Randy turned to face the now silent elderman.
“My foot hit something,” he said, a panicked expression on his face. He turned back, and kicked again. Another clunk could be heard. This time it was louder. All of the elderman gasped in shock. It sounded like metal.
“It’s a miracle,” one of the elderman blurted out.
Gustoff stood there, staring. There was nothing there. But when he kicked, there was. His heart was thumping in his chest. He put his hand out. Closing his eyes, he slowly reached out, palms out, expecting to feel something.
And then he opened his eyes in shock.
“There’s something here!” he shouted.
***
“You hear that?” Timson asked as he lurched back in his seat. The banging was coming from the outside. It was originating right in front of him. Whatever was responsible for the banging was right on top of them. Touching the ship. Like it, whatever it was, knew that they were there. Alarm bells were sounding off in Timson’s head. They had been made. The ship’s stealth cloak was no longer protecting them from whatever lay out there in wait for the crew.
They were still invisible, not that it mattered anyhow. The banging confirmed Timson’s worst nightmares. Whatever was out there was smart. It knew that things didn’t just fall out of the sky and burn at 1000 degrees and not be worth investigating. Smart enough to know that something being invisible didn’t mean that it wasn’t there. That it wasn’t a physical thing. Just because you couldn’t see something, didn’t mean it didn’t exist. Nine times out of ten, it did.
At least that’s what life had taught Timson. That usually, nine times out of ten was about right when summing up the probability of your worst nightmares. The universe had a way of confirming everything you ever dreaded as a kid when it came to the horrors out there. The vacuum of space was a very scary place. The stories of strange occurrences on manned stations orbiting distant stars were only made worse by the fact that through all of humanities efforts, they still hadn’t managed to find alien life.
But now things have changed. Now they were on alien soil. Uncharted ground. A stranded orbiter ship running low on both fuel and battery power. They wouldn’t last much longer than a couple more minutes, then the air would give out. Once that happened, then all three of them would die in there. Suffocating on their own recycled air. It would be a painful death. Their throats would clam up. At first it would feel like a slight irritation running up their gullet. Then the irritation would become an undeniable pain. A pain that would make their jaw’s tingle and their hands grab at their necks. Lightheadedness would settle in. But before they would pass out, they’d feel their hearts begin to pound in their chest so hard that left for any longer, the usually durable muscle would rip and tear open, leaking large amounts of blood into their chests, sending them off to a permanent slumber.
The crew of the pod were in panic mode. But their training had kicked in. Timson was now reaching for the lockbox under his command center. He grabbed the box, entered the pin and opened it. Inside were three pistols. They were old-world caliber. Instead of using energy, they used bullets. It was the safest bet in an emergency like this. There was no point in having high energy weapons on board a ship. Not when in most emergencies, the lack of power would render them useless. Useless in the sense that they were not able to charge them up. Batteries on laser weapons depleted. That was a fact. But caliber bullets didn’t. Plus, you could carry a lot of ammunition on board, making the old-world bullet propelled weapons very effective indeed.
Timson handed a handgun to his two-crew team. The woman operative hesitantly checked the magazine and sighed while the young man smiled.
“At least we’ll go out in a blaze of glory,” the young guy said, still smiling.
“Forgive me for not jumping up for joy, but we don’t know what’s out there. For all we know, there could be space bears or something,” the woman said. Timson remained quiet as he thought long and hard about the plan he was fashioning in his head.
“Space bears?” The young guy said, grabbing some ammunition from the lockbox and putting the rounds on his belt.
“Yeah. They’re a thing you know,” the woman replied, doing the same. There was another bang outside. It startled all three of them.
“Sounds like a stupid thing,” the young guy said.
Timson raised his hand in the air and signaled them to quiet down.
“That’s enough. It doesn’t matter if it’s space bears or twenty-foot-tall snake people out there, what does matter is that we remain cool, calm and collected. We lose our shit here, and we risk dying. We need to remain level headed here. On my say so, the three of us are going to unbuckle ourselves from the seats, get up, holster as many clips as we can to our person, and make way toward the hatch. One of you will slowly undo the latch and then we’ll pop our heads up for air.”
“Air? Are you crazy?” The woman said, clipping some ammo to her utility belt.
“I checked the composition levels before killing the engine. The atmosphere is breathable. We’ll be more than okay out there, providing there’s no damn space bears,” Timson said, winking at his two-person crew. The girl flashed a smile at him, while the younger man shook his head.
“Space bears my ass,” he hissed.
There was a pause. And then another bang. Timson nodded at his crew and counted them down.
“On three,” he said, retracting a digit on his hand every other second. When his open hand had turned into a fist, they were up on their feet and under the hatch. The younger recruit breathed deeply and placed both hands on the hatch.
“Good luck out there,” Timson said.
It was all he could say, really, considering the fact that they were most likely going to die in a few minutes.
***
“Orion Traveler, this is Commander Williams. I’m in command of a vessel that’s on course for the Andromeda Galaxy. We’ve picked up a distress signal from one of your orbiter pods. My crew and I have been sent by Earth to recover the crew members of the pod. Do you read us, Orion?” Williams said into his microphone.
According to the readouts on the LED screen in front of him, the connection between the Orion and his ship was weak. It probably had something to do with the fact that his ship was still in the Milky Way galaxy, a good two-point-five-million-light-years away from the approximate location of the Orion. But technology allowed such communication, thanks to Earth’s placement of various signal booster towers and coms units every million light years or so, helping long distance communications somewhat. The original use of such towers was for any possible first contact with aliens, but unfortunately, the universe hadn’t given them the opportunity to get in contact with any just yet. But Williams had a feeling that that would change soon.
“All I’m getting is static,” one of the crew said as he swiped at some of the screens, attempting to garner an accurate readout from the Orion.
“There must be something blocking our coms with theirs. Probably stellar winds,” Williams said as he diverted his attention to the view outside. They’d slingshotted past the moon and were well on their way to the jump gate, which was located a few hundred thousand miles away. At the speed they were going, they’d reach the gate within the next couple of minutes.
As the medium sized ship approached the gate, the horizon changed from the speckled blackness of space to a purple hue. The hue was a direct result of the jump gate being switched on. The
station that orbited the gate must have been made aware of their arrival and journey through the gate, because they were already firing it up.
“Sweet Jesus, that’s quite a sight!” the recruit muttered under his breath. He’d be delegated with the least interesting job on the trip, and that was watching the radar for any anomalies. So far he’d spent most of his time just staring out of the port window, gawking at the scenery. But the jump gate was something else entirely. It was like nothing he’d seen before. Colorful and intimidating. The thing was rectangular and looked a bit like a teleporter from a computer game. But instead of there being some sort of rippling material in the middle of the gate, there was a solid purple sheet, or what looked like a solid sheet, and they were heading straight for it.
“Is that thing solid?” the recruit found himself asking.
“No, it’ just looks solid. Don’t worry recruit, we’ll be fine,” Williams said.
“I’m not going to lie, I feel a little nervous!” the younger member of the team blurted out, almost immediately realizing that he sounded like a pansy. The others laughed a little, but the laughter soon died down as they got into the radius of the jump gate. The laughter was soon replaced with silent awe as the purple hue shone through the various windows, hitting the five-man team in the face. Their skin shone as they stared directly at the gate. The shadows of the metal frame surrounding the purple nucleus was a sight to behold.
The staring was interrupted by an alarm. At first, it startled the five-man crew, but then they saw that it was just their coms unit informing them that they were being hailed.
“Commander Williams,” he said as he greeted the video caller. A pretty blonde stared back at him. She wore a worker cap and was covered in oil. She looked like a roughneck, a sexy roughneck at that. All she was missing was the oversized wrench.
“Caught you at a bad time?” Williams asked. The lady smiled and shook her head.
“This thing is always in need of maintenance, you just caught me on my break, that’s all. Glad to see that you made it safely to the gate,” she said.
Second Earth: Part One (Second Earth Serial Book 1) Page 4