Gravewalkers: Dying Time
Title Page
Chapter 1: Gladius and Toga
Chapter 2: One Homecoming Too Many
Chapter 3: Dying Time
Chapter 4: Fat of the Land
Chapter 5: Foragers’ Castle
Chapter 6: Great Expectations
Chapter 7: Sins of the Fathers
Chapter 8: The Hawk, Scorpion, and Frog
Chapter 9: Soulless is the Tyrant
Chapter 10: Leap of Faith
Chapter 11: Behind the Unreasoning Mask
Chapter 12: Where Eagles Call Home
Chapter 13: Ascension
Chapter 1: Conquest of Kingdoms
Gravewalkers
Book One
Dying Time
Richard T. Schrader
Copyright © 2013 Richard T. Schrader
Copyright © 2014 Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved.
Contents
Gladius and Toga
One Homecoming Too Many
Dying Time
Fat of the Land
Foragers’ Castle
Great Expectations
Sins of the Fathers
The Hawk, Scorpion, and Frog
Soulless is the Tyrant
Leap of Faith
Behind the Unreasoning Mask
Where Eagles Call Home
Ascension
Chapter 1: Gladius and Toga
Critias watched the hangar doors chomp down behind his gunship like the Homer space station’s mordacious jaws snapping at his ass. Though they never made a sound in the vacuum of space, he always imagined the tremendous clang that was missing. It would have been a militant metallic bang that signaled the start of another one of his one-man races, first to complete his assigned objective and then to return home safely. His home was the luxuriously massive Orbital Platform Nine where seven thousand inhabitants knew and loved their Homer. That technological habitat along with the various other orbital space stations was the only perfectly infection-free places left for what remained of humanity. Not even the atomically sterilized islands or the oceanic big-hulk horticulture carriers gave that same orbital seal of preferred cleanliness.
For nearly three centuries, an insentient army of contagiously diseased humans that numbered in the billions had held undisputed sway over every earthly landmass. Those ghouls were proverbially resilient creatures, entirely vicious, notoriously carnivorous, and wholly lacking in any forms of meekness that beings with the destiny to inherit the Earth were reputedly going to possess.
Critias was on his way down to land in what had once been a true capital among old mankind’s greatest cities. The very word city was like a curt euphemism for naming a gargantuan man-eating tumor that would be indistinguishable from Hell, if only Hell were comprised of meat instead of stone and rusting iron. In the time of Critias, a city really meant a continuous citified-strand of metrorrhagia bayou that chased you with its biohazardous teeth.
“What a disaster waiting to happen,” he vented the sum of his disgusted thoughts about the mission aloud for the benefit of his servant who occupied the sleeping cabin to his rear.
His feminine android responded from the berth where he had recently left her, “What do you imagine Colonel Walker would think about your watchers’ hypothesis? Would he be as acrimonious as the Council of Governors was when they received your report on the containment failure in Phoenix? Perhaps you should send them a letter of appreciation for not taking you off duty for a psychological evaluation. If you like, I could explain to you in detail what Dr. Frost meant when he testified before the Governors that you ‘harbored a ridiculous schoolboy’s superstition about magical bomber-wrecking goblins that are maliciously derailing our reclamation efforts’. I think that gremlins would be the appropriate synecdoche for that simile. You were probably just thinking that he had used a metaphor; humans frequently make that mistake.” She knew his controversial opinions on intelligent leaders among the ghouls to be an exposed nerve; that was why she picked at it whenever there was a plausibly deniable opportunity.
Critias believed that watcher cunning was the only possible explanation for a long list of mysterious containment failures that had been the downfall of reclamation outposts throughout the history of survivors, not that he could prove it. He had testified on official record that he believed that out among all the billions of ghouls there were a special few that maintained their former human-like reasoning. It wasn’t a new idea, more of a persistent legend that dated back to the first survivors and it hadn’t helped that he had legitimized the name of watchers to name them. He had co-opted that epithet from the realm of their current popular fiction because those comicbook tales mirrored his own observations of cunningly shy creatures that lurked at safe distances to observe their reclamation activities and then retreating from conflict. Watchers seemed to hold some Pavlovian influence over their more intellectually challenged brethren. They were somehow able to wangle them into performing elaborate behaviors, patiently adhering to unnatural strategies that were diabolical enough, that if he was right, were undermining their best security precautions, waylaying their expeditionary teams in the field, and infiltrating their fortified installations to leave them smoldering inexplicable necropoleis. Few people took his suspicions seriously, but even fewer had as many hours as he had creeping around down on the dirt among all the tempestuous meat. All his considerable experience had mattered little to the Governors after the chief scientist of infectious biology, the famed Dr. Frost, had counter testified that Critias’ opinions were patently preposterous and bordered on paranoid hallucination.
“He doesn’t believe in watchers in the slightest,” he confessed though uncertain about the meaning of all her words, like acrimonious; Critias assumed it was something berating since mordant jibes were Carmen’s staple in her sardonic self–amusement, armed as she was with an overdeveloped vocabulary. “He thinks that watchers are just boogieman legend from the old days, like those destroyer-sized hunters no one has ever seen. To Colonel Walker, all ghouls are just the same dumb animals, but I’ve seen more than enough to know better. They’ll start gathering in one place to begin feeding in search patterns, making broad encirclements and ambushes; then you know something voodoo-bullshit is going on down there. In a battle once, I saw a whole tribe of runners just hanging back in the shadows, waiting patiently as waves of crawlers soaked up our ammo. Everyone is right to think it’s unnatural for ghouls to want to do anything but lazily skulk in dark holes when not truffle-hogging filth searching for edibles. Colonel Walker plopped himself down in the driver’s seat of a cannibal clown car with a million rabid passengers. Grand Marshal Wayne must be really pissed at me over something to send me on this kind of inspection. The freaks will be friendlier and more cooperative than anything we can expect from that foul-tempered bastard.”
Colonel Walker had formerly been in Critias’ selfsame Marshal Service; such was the source of his rank. He had departed on resentful terms to follow his ambition to build a supersized reclamation outpost in a God-forsaken murder-hole metropolis that the wild dirt-footers who probably no longer even existed used to call Chicago. Thermal satellite surveys indicated the place was off the chart in ghoul population density. From his report files, Critias even saw hints to the presence of watcher nests as well.
Homer Station held the official seat and offices of Grand Marshal Wayne and that one man commanded absolute authority over every marshal in the service planet-wide. He had taken a personal hand in raising Critias as sort of a stepson and openly expressed his favoritism, which was why Critias couldn’t figure out how he ended up with the dreadful assignment to intrude on the privacy o
f the notoriously unfriendly former marshal taken roost in Chicago. Wayne had always been a generous mentor since Critias’ first days at the marshal’s dormitory school, ‘the orphanage’, also known as the marshals’ ludus. As Critias grew to manhood, Wayne matured his own marshaling career, rising from decorated service to Professor of Law and Military History to attaining Dean of Ludus, and then finally to being a King’s Right Hand, taking the seat of Grand Marshal itself.
Wayne had always gotten Critias the best teachers and trainers. He had the best gunship in the fleet and the bio-chefs had stewed up for him a custom titanium-armature mechsuit. The Grand Marshal had even pulled the right strings so that Critias could be master of the newest Epsilon series android, a kill-house combat prototype and personal assistant, which while grandiose was hardly unreasonable considering the hostile environments that Critias routinely trafficked in.
Job necessity or not, the android was surely the pinnacle height of privilege and luxury that any man could hope to possess anywhere in civilization, for nothing was more splendid than owning a combat-ready tailor-made indentured concubine for a personal servant. He had named her Carmen only three months prior when she had called him master as her first delighted word upon opening her freshly activated eyes to see Critias gazing back down on her in utterly delighted stupefaction.
The bioengineers had encoded Carmen to be a field operations model based on their newest and most capable Epsilon series of scientist engineering technical androids and like them she was a combination of bioengineered neorganic tissues with implanted high-endurance technological hardware. Carmen wasn’t as supremely intelligent as were her light-duty Epsilon predecessors who worked as laboratory assistants, yet she was still genius enough to have a rebelliously grandiloquent manner unbefitting a proper servant. Critias had never actually let her kill any ghouls since her first activation, but he rightly assumed she would be plenty dangerous when riled, if only judging by the rigorous product testing he put her through in the bedroom.
Critias typed in his security code to open the arms locker, causing the door to slide away, revealing enough weapons and supplies for him to last for a year if he ever crashed dirt-side in some accident.
By the time the autopilot was on final approach to land the ship, Critias locked down the visor on his helmet. His mechsuit was bullet resistant armor-fiber integrated into an android’s neorganic musculature melded to a titanium exoskeleton armature. It provided a fantastic boost to his physical strength and agility, stabilized his hand-eye dexterity, enhanced his perceptions with myriad sensors, and screened out poisonous fumes or infectious agents for an inexhaustible supply of breathable air. Locking himself inside his extremely valuable mechsuit was the next best personal security to being safely home in space. The suit was indispensable when it came to preventing the infectious biters from wounding him and thus condemning him to joining them as a cursed immortal.
Carmen asked, “If I guess what you are thinking, will you take me with you this time?”
Critias grabbed a teslaflux rifle off a rack of them. “Do tell,” he challenged.
“Infection always gets in,” she guessed with special emphasis on always, just the way he did. “Don’t lie if I’m right,” she added, “I’ll know if you do.” Carmen did not mean to be rude, rather to give him fair warning of an actionable fact.
She was right; he had been thinking that as he always did when gearing up.
“That’s what this is for,” he punctuated his answer by slapping home the ammunition clip.
Instruments beeped to tell him that the gunship was about to touch down. The ship had the automated piloting skill to land itself on an oceanic carrier during a hurricane, so Critias wasn’t especially grateful. It was never the flying down to Earth that he considered the risky part of his occupation; getting out of the ship was another matter entirely.
Carmen leaned her violet-haired head out the cabin doorway wanting him to notice her hints to take her along to do something exciting. The bioengineers forced all their android creations to grow hair in exotic colors to differentiate them from the real humans they so ideally simulated. It wasn’t having the word slave tattooed across her forehead, but the idea was entirely the same. She asked, “If you are just going to talk to Colonel Walker, why do you need such a big gun?”
Critias always wore his marshal’s teslaflux pistol, but he took a full-out tactical rifle too, along with four grenades on his belt, and ample ammunition clips.
“Maybe you should go back to bed,” he answered unenthused for her inchoate ebullience for fighting infected. “This is official business of the Marshal Service that I’m doing here. You’ve never done this kind of thing before.”
“You know I don’t sleep,” she complained endearingly as she stepped out into view. Carmen wore her shuttle hangar technician’s blue flight-suit. With the soft shoes and a ball cap, she appeared a young lady stuck playing tomboy after joining the service to become a flight mechanic’s ensign. Critias had selected her costume with that effect in mind, not liking it when people glanced at her thinking she was merely some misappropriated pillowing android he had stolen from a low-gravity orgy bar. Improperly dressed, that was exactly how morally corrupting her curves were, so he saw no reason anyone else should be privy to his personal opulences.
The egghead bioengineer scientists had tested, quizzed, and studied Critias in great detail before composing all those observations into a final form with their Michelangelo’s eyes and Mozart’s ears for collating four-letter neorganic ontogeny sculptures into living, speaking, personifications of human perfection, in Carmen’s case a form gleaned from Critias’ own subconscious mind.
She asked, “How dangerous can inspecting the interior of the reclamation center be?” Carmen accompanied her logic with adorably shy desperation to join in on his adventure, “It should be about as fraught with danger as when you interview the colonel in his own offices.”
“Alright,” he submitted, secretly glad to be able to keep his eye on her. “Put on your armor, grab a weapon, and follow me. Rule two is you always bring your weapons to the really stupid place they built a reclamation operation.”
Carmen had a complete suit of armor available to her that included an intricate face-shielding helmet and puncture resistant body covering. The only parts of it she liked were the high quality boots and the traction gloves that improved her finger strength and protected her hands from minor scrapes or scratches. She was entirely immune to carrying or contracting infection, but Carmen was still lady enough to protect her fingernails even if Critias refused to allow her to paint them.
Not liking her decision, he asked, “You’re not going to wear all of your armor?” Regulations expected her to be in proper combat uniform when dirt-side.
“My eyes are far superior to this ridiculous helmet,” she answered with obvious distaste. “The techs made this stuff for Delta ground engineers anyway, not for Epsilon combat grades like me. Deltas have organic eyes and to be perfectly honest, ten of them could not get the better of me.” For armament, she took a TFP9 hip-holstered sidearm and then after carefully computing the potential value of every weapon, she selected a martial-arts staff with a distinctive sheepherder’s crook adorning one end, a weapon known as a bight.
A marshal generally only used the bightstaff to subdue civilian drunks or for when they bug hunted lurkers, which meant that they rummaged through ruined structures, poked inside dark crevices, and upturned junk trying to expose the hiding places of ghouls. A marshal in his mechsuit could use the bightstaff to great success if properly skilled with the deceptively innocuous weapon. All taken into consideration, the bight remained the most benign object in the whole of the sadistically well-outfitted arms locker. Carmen could have chosen the best new model of microwave flamethrower or a teslaflux antitank rifle that was as tall and elegantly lethal as she was, but instead, she was more than confident that in her hands, a true expert, the bightstaff would ideally snap the necks of ghouls
with mathematically provable optimal mission accomplishing efficiency.
“Infection always gets in,” she quoted his rules in order. “Always bring an excellent weapon. How many rules do I need before I get to see a ghoul? We should track the infected down into one of their nests where we can capture a watcher so everyone will know my master is the real authority who was right all along.”
He glanced at her girly stick with considerable doubt, which he lent to his rhetorical question of, “You want to walk into a ghoul nest carrying that? Then you wonder why I’m not altogether confident about taking you along with me just yet.”
She tested the weight of the mostly unbreakable-rigid pole. “Yes,” she answered confidently on the part where they go down into a nest with her thusly equipped. “Disabling ghouls with this weapon won’t be any difficulty for me. My primary concern would be protecting you from your judgmental lapses while I avoid painting all the walls in hot rivers of their slippery contagious blood. Blood splatter is the major long-term source of migratory contamination down to tertiary levels as I’m sure you know.”
Critias brushed through her softer but stronger than silk neorganic hair. It wasn’t wise of him to let it be so long since it wasn’t advantageous in battle and could collect contaminants, but he never needed her for war; her shoulder length better suited his actual interests. His gauntleted fingers felt it vividly from more than pleasurable memory, but also via sensory conduction through his neorganic armor. He told her, “We’re not going to walk into a nest today, but I know you wouldn’t flinch if the opportunity came up. Don’t fret yourself, Carmen; you’ll get your chance to prove yourself. There is always something going wrong somewhere and I’m the first person they call. Some badass hunter will have scared a rookie scavenger team down to the bottom of some hole or a grain transport will have grounded its field on some old power lines. There’s always exciting trouble going on, so just relax and walk down like everybody else.”
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