Instantly he found it hard to breathe. The air circulation ceased, and with it Harvey’s ability to draw oxygen into his lungs. Panting, wheezing, he collapsed, not willing or able to face his assailant. Didn’t want to see the foreboding future he’d been unable to prevent. But he had no choice.
His body was flipped over with the insensitivity someone would visit on an emaciated carcass. That’s what he felt like. Dead meat. Suddenly he saw swirling lights above, and his dying brain for one brief moment mistook them for stars. But stars didn’t circle like that. They were space ships, the evil armada preparing for an assault on Earth. Swarming like vultures. He was the carrion, and they the scavengers.
Then the sky darkened from the shadow of a bulky and familiar outline—Broders, standing over Harvey for the death blow. Harvey closed his eyes, unable to raise his arms in defense. Energy gone, lungs on fire, dark silhouettes swarming about the night sky, Harvey shut down and waited for the end.
The end didn’t come. Not yet.
“Look, human!” the parasite shouted. “Witness with your last moments the beginning of the end for your kind.”
By some cruel twist of fate, he persisted. Just enough air in his helmet for one last breath, and to watch the elevator cab touch down. Inside, through the view portholes, he saw dozens of moldering host bodies. It made his skin crawl at how many of them were lined in wait. And when the elevator cab’s airlocks opened, the lines began to move. Orderly and calm and slow. Like Earth people going to a show. Only this show was a deadly carnival of destruction. Harvey had no doubt about the murderous ambitions of these evil beasts. What the parasite inside Broders said next only put an exclamation point on the end of a very long, very lurid sentence.
“You see?” it laughed as the elevator cab, now filled to capacity, began its long and speedy ascent up the incredibly thin yet durable nanofilament tether. “You failed, human! You failed just like the rest of your insignificant race will fail. Weak. Stupid. A waste of resources and a polluted stain in the galactic gene pool. This proves it. Your utter failure proves to me your worthlessness. And proves to me you and every one of your kind need to DIE!”
In the thing’s hand, Harvey caught a brief glint of something metal. A kinetic wrench. It swung the tool behind its shoulder, winding up for a broad, swift stroke, straight down onto Harvey’s chest.
Then the parasitical monster paused. Harvey, with clenched eyes, opened them quickly while reacting with a terrified start to a tremendous rupture from up high. The source of the clamor was unmistakable. The tether, with a violent eruption, severed abruptly two thirds of the way up, recoiling like a rubber band. Suddenly, with no support, the cab stopped climbing and hung in space for a moment, weightless. Then the collapsing tether fell in silent slow-motion, bringing the cab and its passengers with it.
Almost simultaneously, the orbital station erupted in a fiery mass of orange and yellow and red. Harvey shielded his face from the blinding explosions, one after the other, until the orbital station was invisible behind a flaming sheet of violence.
The destruction spread to the superfreighter docked to the orbiter, manifesting firstly in flickering hull lights. Small explosions led to larger and larger ones. Soon the ship was engulfed as well, resulting in a brilliant display of omnipotence. Something had done this. A wayward comet? A malfunction in the space elevator? None of those explanations seemed feasible. Then, as he surveyed the night sky once again, he saw the reason.
Beyond the points of light, the shimmering shadows and dancing spacecraft, even larger than the superfreighters, looming like a giant azure planet in the horizon, was a ship unlike anything Harvey had ever dreamed of, let alone seen. No words could describe the size with any sufficiency or certainty. It eclipsed all of the other ships by such wide margin it was laughable to make any comparisons at all.
The change in scenery was unmistakable, and when the monster inside Broders saw the mammoth spacecraft, it lifted both fists to the sky and released a primal scream. Harvey couldn’t understand a word of it. He could guess, though.
The Guardians had heard the emergency beacon after all. True to their word, they had come to ensure those conniving, nasty beings known as the Unspeakable Ones didn’t spread their miserable hatred.
Suddenly another gigantic superfreighter went up in flames, from a power source that, though invisible, originated from the Guardians’ ineffably large vessel. It pulsed with a cerulean glow preceding the explosion, and did again before yet another transport ship ruptured into a roiling mass of flames.
The Broders host body spun quickly, destruction raging above it in a fiery halo. In its vacant and detestable stare, Harvey saw plainly a hatred so complete, so profound, it superseded even the furious and one-sided celestial war overhead. Explosion after explosion, the gigantic ship flashed a deep, rich blue, and, one after the next, the armada dwindled. Smaller ships swirled frantically, engaging in a dogfight with the much, much larger vessel. They parried and dodged, sending rapid and sustained gamma bursts. Heavy weaponry. Some of the most destructive known to mankind. One of those missiles could take out an entire megalopolis on Earth. Here, against the mighty Guardians, they were one hundred percent ineffectual.
And, as this terrible yet magnificent war raged, the monster inside Broders, in a last ditch effort, turned his wrath on Harvey.
“You did this!” it lurched at Harvey, and, in midstride, something caught his feet. Harvey heard a subtle, rippling whistle. It was the tether, recoiling violently. The long, silky band of nanothread was an innocuous and stunning landmark while attached to the orbiter. Now, released from its anchor, it had become a deadly serpent, razor sharp and lightning fast. The parasite controlling Broders dropped to its knees, fog shrouding its visor. Harvey couldn’t see the fear in its eyes, though he heard it scream when, like a whip, the tether snapped in a semicircle, releasing its fury on the host body’s neck.
It happened so fast, Harvey almost didn’t see it. He had to shake his thoughts straight and go over it in his mind in order to even begin processing it. His sight traveled to the ground, where a helmet rolled to a standstill. Such force in that thin ribbon. It had taken Broders’s head off cleanly.
Harvey found himself transfixed on the helmet. He couldn’t look away from the face inside. The menacing grimace, frozen in time, a contorted caricature of a human being. A sad and ugly deception. This wasn’t Broders. He was a good man. This was a monster wearing the costume of the dead, pretending to be something it never could. Harvey watched the last gasps for air, the desperate gesticulations of speech, the final throes of death.
In the night sky, he saw another kind of death throe. A war of gigantic proportions waged between a race of beings in conventional craft and another race, higher beings, with quite unconventional technology. In reality, what Harvey was witnessing couldn’t be classified as a war. He couldn’t classify it as a slaughter, either, since the ones being destroyed, systematically and succinctly, were the ones who deserved to die. It was a righteous culling. A necessary evil.
The indescribably large blue obelisk had full command of the heavens, and was exerting its will effortlessly. For the first time in what seemed an eternity, Harvey sensed something in his gut, a feeling as foreign to him as that hideous language of the Unspeakable Ones. He felt hope.
Then, just like that, his one shred of optimism devolved to desperation when an explosion rocked the ground. Only this detonation didn’t take place hundreds of kilometers in space. This one happened only a few meters away. The space elevator cab had crashed down, and the tether rounded back to its source, following the path of least resistance straight to its anchor. In doing so, its frayed, whipping end slammed into the power coupling, causing an instantaneous and catastrophic flare-up.
The explosion acted upon the thin atmosphere quickly, an abrupt and all-encompassing ball of bright yellowish orange. Gaseous fusion erupting in all directions. An omniscient omnivore, swallowing the very landscape to satisfy its raven
ous carnal cravings. Harvey, standing now, was one of those unfortunate souls on the menu for this flaming, searing sphere of unconstrained energy. He had no time for humanly responses. Just a thought—Lea. He dreamed of her in a better place, and, with his last wish, the only wish he’d ever wished, he asked that her soul be released again.
He wished Lea was free.
11.
Bubbles.
Everywhere bubbles. Soft. Weightless. Caressing and shimmering and soothing. Vitreous bubbles touching and probing and kneading.
Healing bubbles.
He was in a cloud of bubbles, lighter than a feather wafting in a waterless sea, an ancient elixir meant to soothe and restore and enrich. No time. No pain. No worldly senses. On and on the bubbles fed him, sustained him, kept him from drifting off to that cryptic clarion cadence from afar, irresistible in its melodic hypnotic call.
Formless. No body. Only consciousness. He accepted his new state of being, and flowed with the bubbles, deepening the sensation of calm and peace and freedom. So soft. So light. No more heaviness. And no pain. If this was death, he accepted it. He yearned for it. All the religions, all the spiritual sects and cults and belief systems ever devised by man had to be speaking of this when they meant heaven. A warm, weightless place, devoid of hatred or anger or desire or hunger. Only joy and peace and overwhelming benevolence.
Yet nothing to be seen but bubbles. Flirtatious, even mischievous tiny translucent spheres bathing him in an endless stream of compassion. If he had died, he never wanted to leave this puffy, pastel wonderland. He wanted to continue floating in this ethereal stream, no longer afraid, even laughing at himself for being so fearful of death and all the changes brought with it. The unknown. He was fearful of what he couldn’t possibly comprehend. And now that he’d experienced it, the transformation of life to death, he took joy in his previous ignorance.
Such naive creatures, the living. He never wanted to go back there, to the realm of the incarnate with all its hunger, its pain and suffering. He wanted to stay here, in the womb, gestating in his cocoon forever and ever, nurtured by the milk of the cosmic mother, eternally a babe in the luxuriant folds of existence, where neither time nor money nor any sort of material needs or worries existed. Heaven. If that’s what it was called, then he embraced it with all of him. This was it. This was home.
12.
He awoke fighting the shadows, on his back, kicking and clawing. He felt the milky viscous fluid encasing him in malevolent incarceration. He wasn’t in heaven after all. He knew where he was—back in the underground factory of gruesome corpses and withered bones. He was certain of it, certain the Guardians had never come. A hallucination. All in his mind. A well-thought-out, well-meaning dream of what Harvey really wished would happen. The encasement holding him immobile told a different story. He knew this sensation. The exact same feeling he had when trapped in the receptacle, his body paralyzed by the white liquid, his brain awaiting its larval invader.
He beckoned all he had inside, every last milligram of resistance. Now that he’d tasted everlasting peace and freedom, he had a profound and primeval need to survive, if for nothing else than to be the sole human left alive. He fought for his own soul, for his own life, for the human race.
Then he sensed something that siphoned off just a little of his anxiety. Warmth, softness, comfort, and, most of all, affection. Not the cold, rigid, body-forming containers on the conveyer belt. Another moment of clarity, as the fear was supplanted by guarded curiosity, and Harvey began noticing other things, things that assured him he no longer was in the custody of those tyrannical monsters.
His surroundings were the major giveaway. The subdued atmosphere, with its rounded construction and opalescent lighting seemingly from nowhere, signified an environment on the exact opposite end of the comfort scale compared to the dungeon below Cemetery Planet. Pillow soft and serene. Gently pleasing. No real walls, just a soft haze. If this was indeed the afterlife, he couldn’t tell, though a stabbing ache in his chest, pulsating down to his abdomen screamed something other than the hereafter. He winced, holding his ribcage, and as soon as he exhibited his discomfort, a turbulent funnel of bubbles appeared from nowhere, bathing him in soothing analgesics of some ethereal design.
He shuddered at the suddenness of it all. So absolute was the numbness that pervaded when the healing bubbles began caressing his body. He was undressed. He knew that now. And, as his other faculties began returning, he noticed other things.
Angelic beings of the highest magical order. Large, dressed in luminous clothing that seemed to both fit snugly and flow freely at the same time. Three of them, standing or hovering weightlessly—he couldn’t tell which—supervising his ascent back to health. They gazed at him with tremendous compound eyes. Two gigantic orbs consisting of thousands of smaller lenses, cells of visual stimuli all focused on Harvey, all reflecting only caring and kindness.
The only reason he wasn’t fearful beyond recognition was the compassion he perceived. Otherwise, these giant beings with insectoid eyes would have terrified him. He knew they had to be the Guardians, and the moment he thought it, the tallest one of the three nodded its noble head. Harvey had no inkling on the differences between males and females of the species. Seemingly, no differences existed.
Harvey stared at the creatures longer and harder than should have been deemed polite. He had to. Something inside compelled his eyes like magnets. Like a spell of persuasion, a seduction of goodness, he was drawn in spontaneously. He would have gazed upon these magnificent gods forever if not for a large oval opening, its blackness in sharp contrast to the brilliant interior. He studied the view, and was stunned to find the craggy, barren vertical projections of Mount Mausolus.
He sprang to his feet, surprised by the sudden revelation that he hadn’t actually been lying on a bed, but suspended by the whirlwind of strange, transparent little bubbles, or beads. The beads surrounded him as he ran to the view porthole, continuing to administer their healing tinctures, possibly at some atomic level. Harvey didn’t know. He was too busy to conjecture. Busy with questions about what he was seeing outside.
He expected to find a terrible mess, a tangle of twisted tombstones, hummocks of pulverized rock and sediment. And machines. Those terrible machines he’d seen doing the dirtiest of dirty work. The transports and diggers and cyborgs, all working collectively like ants, busily robbing the planet of its deceased inhabitants. The last time he’d laid eyes on the landscape of this world, it was littered with those machines, filthy with the labor of evil industry. Now, though, the change took him by surprise and he had to struggle in order to process it all.
He was inside an alien craft, parked at the base of the great mountain. From that vantage point, Harvey saw the visitor station, glimmering in the distance like a treasure. And, indeed, he witnessed empty grave plots, crooked headstones, and mounds and mounds of soil. He also saw the machines used by the Unspeakable Ones, the DeepSix-built devices that aided and abetted the terrible madness. Now, though, the machines were idle. Those weren’t the surprises fluttering his pulse and speeding up his respiration. It was something else, something so strange and ethereal, he found it difficult to even accept such things existed. Yet, when he examined the tiny, clear and colorful beads surrounding and dancing excitedly about, he saw a similarity between them and the things outside.
Oval shaped craft, hundreds of them, of varying sizes and brilliant shades of cool colors, working diligently and feverishly. One had the task of removing a transport, on its side and dented, from its dusty resting place. Other, smaller ovals hovered nearby and plucked the caskets still attached to the belly of the transport. Corpses that never made it to the conveyer. Coffins were replaced into their graves. Graves were topped off with soil. Headstones were straightened to their original conditions.
In the innermost reaches of his soul, Harvey felt contentment, a glowing and warm beneficence of such purity his only logical reaction came as tears. And more tears. The Unspeak
able Ones had been stopped. The ghosts of Cemetery Planet were free.
If Lea could only see this. He sobbed, and as he lowered his head, felt more than just the soothing beads on his skin. A Guardian, the tallest and stateliest of the three, placed a surprisingly soft palm on Harvey’s shoulder.
“Do not be sad,” the voice had a rapturous tone, like the sweetest of stringed music. “You have done a great thing. Brave. Very brave.”
“So the beacon,” Harvey said. “It worked?”
“We received the alarm. Thanks to your courageousness.”
He didn’t see the being’s lips move when it spoke. They were communicating with him by thought, the same as the emergency beacon’s blue glow.
“We know of all the hardships you have endured,” the being went on. “The Unspeakable Ones were a treacherous species. We never should have let them survive. Thank you, Harvey Crane, for helping rid the galaxy of its most insidious menace.”
“Then you killed them?”
The giant, gentle being folded its arms in a prayer-like fashion. Its two companions, standing on either side, did the same.
Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series Page 18