Deathstalker War

  And then the barrage stopped, as suddenly as it began, and all was quiet, save for the crackling of the flames. Evangeline quickly snuffed them out as the craft righted itself, and then she stood and listened, braced for more attacks. Finlay studied his panels, then let his breath out in a long slow sigh.

  “They’ve stopped. We must have fallen below their programmed response limits. People, I’d say we just got very lucky.”

  “How bad’s the damage?” said Julian.

  “Could be worse,” said Finlay. “Nothing major’s gone down. We can still land and take off safely. Assuming the ground defenses only fire at craft coming down, and not those leaving. But you should stay in your crash webbing anyway, people. Landing’s liable to be a bit bumpy.”

  “Check for comm traffic,” said Giles. Finlay nodded, and bent over the comm panels. It only took him a few moments to eliminate the comm signals from the departing starcruiser, and concentrate on the planet below. The comm computers ran up and down the frequencies, and found nothing.

  “Not a damned thing,” said Finlay. “No one’s talking to anyone down there. The whole planet’s silent.”

  Giles nodded slowly. “Try the sensors. Check for life-forms.”

  Finlay moved over to the sensor panels, waving away smoke that drifted in front of his face. The sensors were right next to the panels that had blown up, and they’d suffered some smoke and fire damage themselves. He ran a quick diagnostic, and frowned. Forty-three percent efficiency. Not good. Limited range, and even more limited information. He set the sensors for the widest remaining range, and then watched the displays with a deepening scowl.

  “I’m getting . . . something,” he said finally. “But don’t ask me what. I’m getting readings, but they don’t make any sense. I can’t tell whether they’re life-forms or not. The computers can’t find anything in their records to compare them with. Which is supposed to be impossible.”

  “Aliens?” said Giles.

  “Unknown,” said Finlay. “But I don’t think so. Even the most alien life-forms should conform to some established pattern. This is something completely new. Whatever these readings are, they’re swamping the sensors. If there are any humans down there, the sensors aren’t sensitive enough anymore to pull them out of all the noise.”

  “Or there could be no one left,” said Evangeline. “Harker’s been down there for months now. Anything could have happened to him.”

  “Think positively,” said Julian. “What about his ship’s beacon, Finlay?”

  “That’s still there,” said Finlay. “I’m locked on to it, loud and clear. Should be able to put down right next to it.”

  “Well that’s something,” said Toby. “Anyone think to bring any beads or trinkets for the natives?”

  “There aren’t any natives,” said Julian. “Never were. Shannon’s World was a dead rock floating in space before it was terraformed. There are no indigenous life-forms. They would have got in the way of Shannon’s carefully crafted dream. Whatever’s down there now, it isn’t natural.”

  “You’re a real cheerful sort,” said Toby. “You know that?”

  “Shut up, Shreck,” said Giles. “Finlay, put us down. Fast as you can. That starcruiser isn’t going to stay distracted forever.”

  Julian cleared his throat. “I came on this mission at the last moment. Do we have time for a quick briefing on what we can expect to find dirtside? I know the basics, but, well . . . Field of Blood doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.”

  “Think positively,” said Toby.

  “Shut up,” said Giles.

  “There isn’t that much real information,” Finlay said quickly. “Only one man ever got off this planet alive after whatever happened happened. He renamed it Haceldama, before he died. Whatever he saw down there destroyed his mind. He wanted to die, to escape from what he’d seen.”

  “I have a copy of the man’s original statement,” Toby said diffidently. “Just the relevant points. He tended to ramble. I acquired the tape from a colleague, for a purely nominal price, which I’m sure the underground will take care of. Once they find out about it. Shall I run the tape?”

  “Run it,” said Giles. “It might stop some of us from getting cocky.”

  Toby nodded to Flynn, who accessed the ship’s comm channels through his camera, and then had the camera run the tape in its memory banks. The main viewscreen shimmered, and the bright blue planet below was replaced by a man’s face, wild-eyed and sweating, and so painfully thin that the bones of his face seemed to be pushing out against his skin. His mouth trembled and his face twitched. He’d been strapped to his chair, apparently as much to hold him up as anything. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh but even. His eyes snapped back into focus, as though even in the depths of his pain he was still driven by some desperate need to tell what he knew, what he’d seen.

  “My name is Adrian Marriner. Survey scout, twelve years experience. I was the leader of a survey team sent to discover what happened on Shannon’s World. They didn’t tell us about the earlier teams. The ones that didn’t come back. There were ten of us. Good men and women. They’re all dead now. I am the only survivor. There’s a war going on down there. Total war. No quarter asked or given. Forget about the missing people. They’re all dead. They were the first to die, and they died hard and bloody, poor bastards. Forget about the pleasure world, too. It’s a nightmare now. The worst dream you ever had. Terrible. Awful. A grotesque travesty of itself. Every man, woman and child who came here died horribly, but the war goes on. It always will. Don’t send any more teams. What’s down there is too much for any human to stand.”

  He started crying then, great rasping sobs that shook his whole body. Flynn shut off his camera, and the crying face disappeared from the viewscreen, replaced by the enigmatic face of Haceldama, coming up to meet them.

  “That’s pretty much it, I’m afraid,” said Toby. “He just says the same thing, over and over. When he can stop himself crying. Or screaming. It’s as though what he saw horrified him so much that his mind became stuck in a groove, forever repeating itself. He died soon after this tape was made, and it was probably a blessing. He was quite insistent that every human being on the planet is dead, which rather begs the question—who’s fighting this endless war he talked about? People have come up with various answers, none of them conducive to a good night’s sleep. If anyone has any helpful comments, feel free to chip in. I’ve watched this tape till it’s coming out of my ears, and it still scares the crap out of me. I mean, this was an experienced survey scout. Seen everything. And Haceldama reduced him to a sobbing child.”

  “I’ve seen the tape before,” said Finlay. “I knew one of the people involved in his original debriefing. We have no idea why Marriner survived when the rest of his team died, or how he got offplanet. The Quarantine starcruiser was adamant that no ship had got past it. Marriner was discovered wandering the streets of Golgotha’s main starport, crying his eyes out and telling his story to anyone who’d listen. Security picked him up, but they never did find his ship, or how he managed to land it on Golgotha without setting off all kinds of alarms. Which is, of course, supposed to be impossible.”

  “For any number of reasons,” said Evangeline. “How could he have guided a ship all the way from here to Golgotha, all on his own? Computers can only do so much. Someone must have been with him. Someone must have helped him.”

  “If they did, they never surfaced,” said Toby. “Despite an awful lot of people looking for them real hard. The Empress was breathing fire over the lapse in security, and she was not at all happy when the search came up empty-handed. She takes homeworld’s security very seriously. I did hear there were a lot of sudden vacancies in Security’s upper echelons not long after that.”

  Julian bit his lower lip hard. He could feel the familiar debilitating ache building in his head again. He couldn’t give in to it now. He couldn’t be seen to be weak. Not now. He hugged himself tightly and made himself breathe d
eep and slow. It didn’t help much, it never did, but he had to do something . . . To distract himself, he leaned forward and concentrated on the sensor panels. He could feel cold sweat beading on his forehead. He hoped the others hadn’t noticed.

  “I thought Harker had a personal beacon?” he said carefully.

  “He did,” said Finlay. “But not long after he got here, he took it off and left it with the crash-landed ship. We don’t know why. He could be anywhere by now.”

  “He could even be dead,” said Giles.

  “Think positively,” said Toby. “At least we’re getting a clear signal from the beacon. Hopefully his ship will provide clues as to where to look next.”

  “Put us down right next to the ship, Campbell,” said Giles. “And let us all pray that the trail isn’t as cold as seems likely. Or we could be here for a long time.”

  Finlay put the adapted cargo ship down on a great grassy plain, only a few hundred yards away from the remains of the crash-landed escape pod. The pod looked in rough shape, but the beacon came through loud and clear. There was no sign of life anywhere. Giles was first out, of course, gun and sword in hand. He glared suspiciously about him, taking his time, and then nodded for the others to join him. Finlay was quickly out the hatch to stand beside the Deathstalker, with Toby and Flynn hot on his heels. They moved slowly toward the pod, checking all the time for hidden booby traps.

  Evangeline and Julian were left behind to guard the cargo ship and keep things ready for an emergency takeoff, should one prove necessary. Uneasy in each other’s company, they studied their surroundings a little more intently than they really needed to. According to the viewscreen and sensors, the grassy plain stretched away to the horizon in all directions, a vivid green so pure and unwavering it was almost unnatural. There was no sign of any life. No birds, no insects. The scene was completely silent, save for the quiet steps of the new arrivals approaching the pod. The sky was a brilliant blue, sharp and clear, with no trace of any cloud. It was a warm and comforting sky, almost hypnotic, the kind you could lie under for hours and never wonder where the time went. High up in the sky, the fat yellow sun had a big smiley face on it. Julian found that particularly disturbing. It made him feel like he was trapped inside a nursery school party.

  “How the hell did they do that?” he said finally, as much for the comfort of hearing his own voice as anything. The quiet was getting to him.

  “It’s not that difficult,” said Evangeline. “Some form of holographic projection, I expect. The real question is why anyone would want to.”

  “All part of Shannon’s dream, I suppose,” said Julian. The headache was wearing off, and he was feeling human again. “Smell the air coming in through the hatch. Pure and rich and invigorating. Designer air. That’s the kind of attention to detail that pulls in the visitors.”

  Evangeline sniffed at the fresh air. “It’s all right, I suppose, if you like it pastoral, but why is it so quiet? Where is everybody? Is this all there is?”

  Julian smiled slightly for the first time. “I very much doubt it. I can’t see Shannon getting away with charging top prices just for this.”

  “I don’t know,” said Evangeline. “After the pressures and hurly-burly of high Society, I can see some people paying a good price for guaranteed peace and quiet.”

  “I wouldn’t give you a bent penny for this,” said Julian. “It’s too quiet. It’s as though . . . something is waiting to happen. Something bad.”

  “Are you always this cheerful?” said Evangeline.

  “Mostly,” said Julian. “Hang around and I’ll break into a song and dance. You watch the instruments. I’m going to try a psionic scan. See if I can pick up anything.”

  “Is that wise?” said Evangeline, her voice carefully neutral. “The doctors did say you were still supposed to be taking things easy.”

  “I can pull my weight,” snapped Julian. “If I thought otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”

  He concentrated, his mind leaping up and out, searching for life signs and hidden surprises. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this, but he had something to prove, if only to himself. The rest of his team blazed brightly around him, warm and comforting in their humanness. The crash-landed pod was dark and empty, all systems down, though the beacon shrilled endlessly, like a hungry bird in a nest. He stretched out, covering the grassy plains. His range was limited, compared to what it had been before the mind techs got their hands on him, but he pushed those limits as hard as he could. He needed to feel like he was a valued member of the team. He didn’t want anyone to think they were carrying him. He wanted Finlay to be proud of him. So he pushed and strained, defying the ache already building in his brow, and suddenly he made contact. Two of them, just on the other side of the horizon, heading toward him. But he was damned if he could tell what they were. They were quite definitely alive, their minds shining bright and clear, but they were like nothing he’d ever encountered before. Intelligent, focused, but not human. He could sense the minds, but he couldn’t read them. And yet there was a familiarity to them as though he’d known them before somewhere, but couldn’t place them, like the faces you see in dreams. Julian pulled back, alarmed on an almost instinctual level, and his mind suddenly jarred on something else, so close at hand he’d overlooked it before. The shock jolted him back into his body, and his head fell forward into his hands as he groaned aloud. Evangeline moved quickly in beside him.

  “What is it? What did you see?”

  “We’re not alone here,” he said thickly. “There’s another ship, about twenty feet away. Buried under the grass. It’s full of death. Tell the others.”

  In the end, it took all of them working together the best part of an hour to dig down to the buried ship’s airlock. The lock was closed, its power depleted, and they had to crank it open with the exterior manual override. Inside it was dark and gloomy, all systems dead, and they had to wait impatiently while Finlay went back to the cargo ship for flashlights. None of them felt like going in without them. Julian was still muttering about death.

  They moved slowly through the dark interior, the ship gradually giving up its secrets to the bobbing lights. It was an Imperial pinnace, presumably sent down from the orbiting starcruiser. Something had shot the shit out of it, but it had still made a safe landing. The rebels searched the pinnace from stem to stern, but there was no sign of life anywhere. What they did find was blood. Old, dried blood. Dark and heavy and splashed over most of the interior. Given that the inner hull was still intact, despite the battering the pinnace had taken, it seemed clear that whatever happened did so after the landing.

  “These bloodstains are long dry,” said Toby. “Whatever went down here, it’s over. Guess the war must still be going on.”

  Finlay unloaded the memory crystal containing the pinnace’s log, took it back to the cargo ship, and ran the last few entries on the viewscreen. Everyone crowded together before the screen, but the log didn’t have much to tell them. The pinnace had been sent down by the Quarantine starcruiser, the Deliverance. It had carried a crew of twenty, all trained marine elite reconnaissance troops. They’d tracked Marker’s beacon to the escape pod and put down beside it. There were no more log entries after that.

  “They had the same idea we had,” said Toby. “And look what happened to them.”

  “We don’t know what happened to them yet,” said Giles testily. “We don’t know what happened to anyone yet.”

  “None of this makes sense,” said Evangeline. “If the recon team were all killed, where are their bodies? And why bury the ship instead of them?”

  “More mysteries,” said Giles. “I hate mysteries. According to our sensors, there’s some kind of building or structure just over the horizon, due east of here. I say we go and take a look. Maybe we’ll find some answers there. Or at least some clues.”

  “What about the two contacts I made?” said Julian. “They were definitely some kind of life-form, heading this way.”

  “If you see
anything that isn’t us or Harker, you have my permission to shoot first and ask questions afterward, if at all,” said Finlay. “The one thing we can be sure of is that we don’t have any friends here. This particular part of Haceldama may seem quiet and harmless, but that doesn’t mean you can trust it an inch. Stay alert, all of you. This place kills people.”

  And so they set off across the grassy plain. Anywhen or anywhere else, it might have been a pleasant stroll. The gentle slope was just enough to stretch their legs, and the air was full of the smell of freshly cut grass. The day was warm enough to make them feel pleasantly loose, with the occasional cool breeze to make sure they didn’t overheat. The going was firm without being hard, and the grass sprang back up immediately, no matter how hard they trod on it. Perfect weather, in a silent, empty world. Under a sun with a smiley face.

  The horizon slowly flattened out before them, eventually revealing a sudden dip in the land, like a huge grassy crater. In the middle of this was a large building, simple and blocky, constructed in bright primary colors. A high arch stood between the rebels and the building, covered in swirling red and white stripes. A large sign at the top of the arch said WELCOME TO SUMMERLAND! The rebels stopped at the base of the arch to study the sign. The letters were big and blocky, almost cartoonish, like something from a children’s primer, designed to be bright and cheerful and nonthreatening. There were floodlights at the top of the sign, but they’d all been smashed. There were splashes of old, long-dried blood on the arch supports.