And in the long distance sometimes we'd hear other abandoned creatures howl their despair to the stars.
Now I just read to myself, in silence.
*
The line of the dawn slit like a wound, opening the fleshy tones of the day. We packed up and gilded ourselves with the tint of our weapons, gear, and the rising sun. A quick recce by Harky and his telelens told us our short trail had not been encroached upon yet by the hunting party but they were about a day away.
No more talk of death from Fenrys, just the nascent march across a terrain bleached by centuries before any being had set foot on this planet. The greying flats in the distance could've been some residue of creation. We walked five and a half, the little girl once again attached to my person like the parasites essential to all living creatures in one way or another. Only I wasn't quite living and not truly dead, but rather some mass fulfilment of a need more mercantile than mercurial. The flashing sun didn't bother me as it pasted high in the sky like the foreboding gaze of some giant AI; the lenses of which my eyes had been constructed only flipped to an automatic shade and polarized my view.
Fenrys dragged behind, some attitude of reluctance no amount of cajoling and outright threats from Harky could flay to disintegration. Why did he care when he seemed to care so little for anything else, including the boy's sister? A mastermind question for beings bent on their own agendas.
Eventually Harky gave up and jogged to the flank. The Keef kept full ahead like the prow of an icebreaker, deterred by nothing and no one. This mission was his sole purpose for breath and should we have found ourselves recalcitrant in the march, he only had to bend his stare to us to bully our going. Mama Rain gaited alongside me, every once in a while setting a burnished hand along her daughter's head as if to reassure the little thing of its own existence. Here, if you can feel this, you're alive. The girl herself said nothing, but had not uttered a word for some days regardless. Once in a while I dipped my chin to nuzzle her wild hair. She smelled like sea salt, the detritus of the desert. Her grip on my body reminded me that I was more than just a pack mule. To her, I was the life she clung to, the wall separating her from death.
"Hold up," said Harky, hand to his eyes, staring toward the east, some narrow degrees right of our trajectory. We all looked. Vaguely against the shimmer of the long blinding flats and the undulation of the Rach's white edges, there bled a curious line of dark figures, narrow and tall like some alien sprouting of monoliths spontaneously aroused by the day. They seemed to be heading in our direction but it was difficult to discern when they moved and we did not. "Walk around 'em?" Harky said.
The Keef considered it. Giving the roamers a wide berth would be wise, considering how such encounters often ended bloodily. But these didn't look like another hunting party; they moved too slow. "They might be coming from the launch," the Keef said. "Let's go." He set off ahead once more, but at a shallow angle from the black figures. If they changed course to meet us we would see it.
Half a mile and it became evident that they did not change course, but the horizontal line across the landscape kept the kind of pace of a funeral procession. Like it or not, we were drawn in as paid criers. The Keef, bent on news of the launch, angled us toward the figures at the last minute. He and Harky went ahead, with weapons, while I stayed behind with the family and the spider drone—all of our supplies. Broom slid down and stood behind her mother's leg, her thumb in her mouth.
After some time of what seemed like wary regard, the Keef beckoned us forward and so I led the family to intersect with the oncoming line of black figures. They did not stop, though the Keef and Harky stood to the side and watched, their weapons levelled. An acrid scent I'd grown to know over the months wafted ahead of the procession—decayed flesh, burnt hair. These apparent mourners upon closer approach were covered head to toe in drapes of gossamer black material barely lifting from the rack of their bodies as they shuffled forward, drawn by some primal urge lacking completely in reason.
Behind them walked another line of three, similarly shrouded, and amongst their six hands they carried a long steel pole and upon the pole was tied a body of what seemed to be a man. What had been a man. Flesh was gouged from the fatty places and the sockets of his eyes glared black and empty. Through the string of his skin showed the stretched arc of old muscle, cured from the beat of the sun and smoked from what hellfires our gazes had not been present to witness. He was meat, plain and simple, carried from place to place as some macabre nourishment, the only saving grace being that he was already dead.
The eyes of the procession stared ahead and behind me Mama Rain made a sound like a choke. When I turned to her she held her hands over Broom's eyes but Fenrys stared up at the solemn cannibals as if some wonder gripped him.
"If they's comin' from the launch, we're screwed," Harky stated, once the only thing left in our immediate vicinity were the footprints of the drifting abomination.
The Keef, for his part, showed nothing about the sight that had passed us. To him, perhaps, it was just some single fate in a world guaranteed tragedy and where no restriction bound the planet's residents to any reflection of sanity. What was the point anymore of morals and order when the Maelstrom grew on the horizon? The universe was devouring itself so we should just devour one another.
*
Five days of relentless march across the Rach and the fatigue had embedded into their limbs to the point that I was truly alone in my upright stance. Those around me had cycled back into some antediluvian existence, barely managing fire and some sharing of grunts that passed for conversation. We could not stop. The threat from less than a day away was incentive enough, regardless of what promise may have laid ahead. Harky's consistent recces revealed the hunters' steady advance.
The heat struck like some anvil of light from an angry sky deity, followed by the bitter cold of a desert at night, leeching all semblance of calm and dullness that might have had the opportunity to settle in through our driven walk. We encountered no other life, not even a critter, and for the last couple days Fenrys wondered aloud if perhaps we were the only ones left alive.
"We ain't," Harky snapped. "We passed them others. And there's the hunters."
"They weren't no alive," said Fenrys. "Alive like that and you're better off dead. The hunters're no different."
Their voices fell into the air and disappeared almost immediately, as into a void. The Keef said nothing.
"Are we lost?" Mama Rain asked. Even if there was no getting lost. My internal workings consisted of dead reckoning and an unfailing geometry to the curves of the planet. But perhaps she didn't mean in the physical.
The first touch of another nightfall showed more than stars on the reddened horizon. Some sparkling dots grew too regular to be sprung from the edges of the universe.
"There," the Keef said, stopping his stride. His first word for hours.
Broom stirred against my chest. In the distance stood the tower of the launch.
*
The reality of those lights beckoned us forward once morning rose again, even through spectral gusts of wind that blew sand grit into our faces. My eyes coated over with a protective sheen, casting the world into a sepia fantasy. Broom clung to my body, her face buried in the front of my jacket, unmoving except for the fanning expanse of her lungs that pushed breath against my reinforced heart. We were telling each other that we were alive.
Both of my hands weighed heavy by bundles of guns, my back overladen by ammunition and cans of food for the others. The spider drone grated and hummed beside us, beneath the load of the rest of our supplies. After months our only possessions maintained some thin veneer of survival and desperate civilization.
The corpses began as a trickle, as though disgorged from some rolling tide of ocean onto our shores. As if the desert itself upended them when we all knew this was no act of nature. Our walking died to a reluctant shuffle forward. Too much bloodstains, even beheadings. It must have been retaliation or some dissolution of
order. Some of the bodies wore uniforms, many held weapons—guns, blades, bats, ad hoc shovels perhaps meant for digging, not defense. But in the end they became scythes.
On the outskirts, half a dozen piles spread out by metres, tattered clothes lifting disconsolately in the hot breeze. So dried out even the smell that surely must've been cooked over days had dissipated or calcified into nothing. This, the fate of the tent town? All of these hopefuls waiting to be safe? We tried to understand the story but all I gleaned was chaos. An end.
Fenrys ran up close behind Harky, feet kicking sand and small blasted rocks in his wake. He seized the back of the older man's longcoat where a tear had created a ragged hole in the cured fabric. His saviour. The soldier did not shake him off as I thought he might. Instead, we all stepped carefully as through a minefield, too absorbed by the sea of carrion around us, stretching well beyond our capacity to survey with naked eyes. The lacklustre dead, some half-hidden beneath canvas and pole, increased the closer we drew to the blinking tower, the launch site's girders and lights some force of defiance against all of the organic disarray at its heels. Some of the bodies lay in piles of seven or eight, whole families, angled limbs and contorted visages making the desert floor into an ossuary.
I approached one pile. And another. A few individuals cast off from the rest. All looked to be violent deaths, combative, cranial distress and twisted limbs, some mass insanity at the edge of salvation.
Mama Rain spoke: "We have to turn back." And more desperate. "Keef, we have to—"
"There ain't no goin' back," he said, without looking around. He'd stopped amidst a mandala of bodies, each more desiccated than the last, his face forward toward the launch tower and the still life ship attached to the extending arms and steel clamps. Closest to the base of the tower, the bodies were thicker than trees, as if the horde had attempted to climb the ship itself, to latch onto its smooth sides and reinforced plating, to be carried over the curvature of the planet into space.
"The ship might still go," Harky said. More of a question. A weakened hope.
"What happened here?" Fenrys, his voice an uptick of panic. "Why did all these people…"
The Keef turned and stared at the boy. The question died. The Keef beckoned me forward and I dislodged Broom to her mother and strode ahead.
"See if you can find a way in."
To the launch tower. Digging through those bodies. I was built to work in the mines, after all.
I unloaded the weight from my back, rearranged extra ammunition across my chest and hefted the rifle. My way forward consisted of picking around piles, avoiding outflung skeletal limbs and the coil and drape of vomited entrails, likely the result of animal attention that no longer lingered. Eye sockets followed my progression like the blank stares of the blind. This had not been massacre, but suicide in some form. An headlong pitch into desperation. There had been no lottery here, or perhaps the concept of a curated passenger list had driven them to rebellion. Not one would be left behind, therefore none of them could go. If there was any mercy in the universe, perhaps the Karists were right and we should all embrace the Maelstrom rather than descend into this. That way at least we would transition into a resting place.
I didn't need to find the entrance to the tower. Close to it, at the launch pad, the reality became clear.
The ship had attempted launch at some point. And something had brought it down. Maybe faulty construction, maybe the wrong mix of fuel. Maybe some argument on the bridge. Though the docking clamps locked the spire of the craft in place so it didn't keel over across miles and crash into the earth, the rear rockets accordioned deep into the ground, deluges of sand blown up against the gigantic corrugated steel plating as though the whole vessel had just been somehow excavated. Black explosive marks tattooed up the fuselage.
I peered up along the reach of the ship, the single finger and its short wings piercing the russet sky. If any were alive within, they gave no sign.
I found the others gathered some distance from a pocket of bodies that appeared to be scavenged by both people and beasts. Harky's eyes darted. Fenrys still hung off his sleeve and Mama Rain sat in the sand holding Broom against her shoulder, slowly rocking back and forth and humming beneath her breath.
The Keef looked at me and I said, "It won't fly. It's destroyed."
The woman's keen erupted into the motionless air, a solo undertone to Fenrys' "Now what? What did I tell you? There's no point!"
"What're we gonna do?" Harky put in, without the panic, but a dead calm that somehow rang louder.
The Keef, for once, had no answer. Only the dead gave some stifled reply until Fenrys stepped away from Harky, a pistol in his hand that he must have drawn from the soldier's holster at the small of his back, where younger hands had been hovering. Wild eyes rounded on all of us as the boy backed away, the gun aloft, his breaking voice carrying over the dull air.
"There's nowhere to go! They're all dead and others are eating people and everybody knows we're gonna die!"
"Boy—" the Keef started but Fenrys fired off a shot, so sudden the Keef barely had time to clamp down on his rock rod before he was falling to the ground, blood bubbling on his destroyed face.
Mama Rain screamed. Her body curled over Broom's and I moved to stand by the females even as Harky lunged at Fenrys.
There was no control, only a lightning inevitably as muscles moved and voices rose. The shot plunged through me but I barely felt it in my synthetic flesh. Harky propelled Fenrys to the ground where the gun thud out of the boy's grip and skid over the hard-packed earth. The muffled sounds of struggle and grunts played beneath Mama Rain's ascendant keening until another crack whipped between us as like an echo back and forth from our bodies to theirs. Where Harky stumbled to his feet and Fenrys lay face down with his back blown open from the close quarter bullet.
"No…" the soldier said. "No no no no…" And he fell back upon the boy as if to heal the fatal wound with the layer of his own body.
The ruckus must have roused the ghosts. From the edges of my sight, five hungry strangers approached, bleeding out from the base of the tower. They held rude weapons created for close quarter dealings.
I straightened from my crouch in front of the females and shot the launch survivors with my rifle. Dead accurate as I was made. Harky remained oblivious or uncaring, mourning the boy. Nothing remained for him. Mama Rain grasped the back of my jacket but I tugged from her grasp and walked over to Harky and shot him through the skull.
Mama Rain screamed but I levelled the weapon at her and fired. She slumped to the side, her arms gone limp. Broom, sitting on the ground, looked up at me with flat, dusted eyes.
It wasn't survival, it was mercy. I was built to be the thing that excavated the earth, to go where it was unsafe and bring back the jewels of this world.
It was all for naught. The hunting party was on the horizon.
It was time to kill the child, here at the feet of destitution, and I was the last one left alive to do it.
So I did.
*
I wait. They say the Maelstrom's dark energy will eventually consume the entire galaxy. Maybe that's myth as living beings are fond of spinning myth, but I wait for it, here among the dead. The dark energy has already touched this planet, Ada Mas, the thoughts and fears and promises of every creature that used to move across this unfinished landscape, consumed by the concerns of their own limited lives. The dark energy has been here and the wave that will follow is surely more of a cleansing.
The sky will break and the ground will shudder and rend apart. And they will all disintegrate into the stars where first they'd birthed and been scattered.
They created me, Flesh from their blood. And here I am at the zenith of their destruction.
The wave comes and I greet it with open eyes.
A KEEPER'S DUTY
★
by STEPHEN GASKELL
From the youngest age, Edin had always been a sickly child. Any dreams of overcoming his frai
lities and becoming a Karist Trooper died in his eleventh year when a bout of illness ravaged his body. Now, as an apprentice Keeper on his first mission to a dying system, he has a chance of proving himself a valued member of the Enclave. Will he decorate himself in glory or shame?
AS IF PICKING A PATH through the aftermath of a bloody battle, the Karist stalker-class scout vessel slipped through the ravaged Destria system.
From the tidal flats of the first planet to the icy halls of the gas-giant's largest moon, from glittering cities to far-flung factory stations, a thousand conflagrations spilled spacewards. Gutted ships pinwheeled through the cold darkness, and the star's main cybel gate, once a shining iris of hope, circled the A-class star in blackened ruin.
"We should have come sooner," whispered the Karist commander, surveying the still and terrible tableau.
Millions must've perished in the exodus.
Millions more must've been eking out pitiful lives in the detritus, fighting over the few scraps that remained.
Too late to be saved.
Salvation couldn't be achieved in a matter of days. Even furnished with the truth behind the pulsing light of the Maelstrom, they couldn't be saved. The truth was only the beginning. The path to enlightenment needed time, devotion, acceptance.
These poor souls would perish in terror.
Outside, a battle-scarred station drifted past, dark save for a handful of flickering lights. Its hull was marked with both energy weapon scars and conventional munition impacts, while cybel containment breaches and a plasma fire raged unchecked near the core reactors.
Tales from the Edge: Escalation: A Maelstrom's Edge Collection Page 18