Fred pushed his foot down harder, even though the acceleration pedal couldn’t go any farther unless he kicked it through the floor-plate.
A few minutes later, Fred’s rail crested a dune. Instead of seeing another dark sand wave ahead, the surface before him sloped down, down and down. He was driving into a massive pit. Far ahead, at the bottom, he saw huge, dark shapes rising up out of the sand.
“High One,” he said. “What are those towers?”
“Ships,” the old-timer said. “They buried some of those there as well.”
There were a few wonderful seconds of nothing but darkness behind them, then their pursuers crested the rim and rolled down after them. Those same lights in his rearview mirror, only closer.
And then, a new light flashed.
Instincts born in training and forged in dogfights kicked in. Fred cut hard left as he worked the breaks, bleeding speed and angling away from their straight path.
A flash of light appeared in their original path, molten orange followed by a cascade of liquid purple glass.
“Hot damn!” the old man said. “They’s shooting at us!”
Fred turned the ‘rail right, again pointing to the towering, buried ships. He demanded the machine give him all the speed it had — the pursuers had not only recovered, they were firing a shucking plasma cannon. He had to get them off the dunes. The closer the pursuers got, the less time he’d have to dodge the fire, and one did not survive a direct hit from a weapon like that.
Whoever wanted the information Fred was chasing down wanted it badly. Firing off an energy weapon like that on a colony that was armed solely with nail guns was going to raise hell, even draw the attention of the Creterakian overlords who really ran the place. Whoever his pursuers were, they were willing to risk drawing a patrol of bats and their entropic rifles to bring Fred down.
The dead ships rose up high in front of them. He’d served in the corps, he knew that these ships weren’t all that big. Maybe a couple of corvettes, the big one in the middle a frigate at best. But “small” up in orbit, in comparison to the destroyers and cruisers, was a completely different thing down on the ground.
Not far now. The ‘rail’s headlights played off a distant, battered wall.
The old-timer pointed. “There! Aim for that crack in the fence!”
Fred did. So close now, so close, if he could just dodge the next round.
Another flash, bright against the early night sky far behind. Fred cut hard-left and dropped speed, hoping the gunner was new enough to fall for the same trick twice.
The gunner was not.
A blast of energy erupted close behind and to the right. The sandrail’s rear flipped high into the air. Up they went, flipping end over end, rising to the sky for a moment before gravity won that brief battle as it always did. The seat restraints slammed him into his chair even as crash-gel poured out of hidden nozzles, coating him in already hardening goo.
Beside him, the old grave digger let loose a cry of elation that was downright giddy.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl for Fred. He certainly didn’t feel giddy, but neither did he feel afraid or angry or even concerned.
No, he simply experienced one of those moments in which you question how your choices have led you to wherever you’ve found yourself.
Somewhere beneath them, the de-com ground’s outer wall passed by. An eternal handful of instant seconds later, the spinning rail crashed into the de-com ground.
Chapter 13: The Elephant’s Graveyard
Someone slapped Fred in the face.
“Wake up, kid.”
The old-timer’s voice, but whispering, not the shrill screech it had been during the sandrail chase.
Fred’s eyes blinked open. He was upside-down, half hanging from seat restraints, half held into place by hardened crash-fiber. The old man was pulling away chunks of the thick fiber, trying to free Fred enough to move.
It was dark, too dark to see much of anything.
“We’re not dead,” Fred said.
“Can’t put one past you,” the old-timer said. “I’ll give credit where credit is due, son — you’re the best driver I ever saw, but we just got plain lucky.”
The old man hit the release button on Fred’s restraints. Fred dropped in a heap on his head, then awkwardly rolled to his side. He looked up, looked around. The upside-down ‘rail had slammed nose-first into some kind of container, punching through the thin metal and crunching to a stop. Fred saw the vehicle’s entry hole and, beyond it, Micovi’s three purple moons.
“I can hear them shuckers out there looking for us,” the old man said. “Hopefully things just kind of take care of themselves.”
“And how would that happen?”
“This is a dumping ground for illegal weapons. Sometimes things have a tendency to go boom.”
The digger made a mushroom cloud with his hands and the sound of a massive explosion with his mouth that ended up sounding more like a raspberry.
Fred heard the sound of an engine echoing through the site. Their pursuers were close. He carefully got to his feet, his body throbbing complaint. The container was full of some kind of artillery shells. He had to step carefully to find purchase on the curved surfaces and hoped that these rounds, at least, had been fully defused.
He reached the edge of the hole made by the ‘rail and looked out. Wrecks and husks stretched out at least a kilometer before him, a graveyard of the Purist Nation’s once-aggressive ways. Ill-formed roads snaked between the machines of death, some mostly blocked by windswept dunes.
So much hardware, and none of it had mattered when millions of Creterakian soldiers swept across the deserts and plains like a plague of ten-pound locusts, each carrying a deadly entropic rifle. But all of that was long before Fred’s time — he felt no loss at the Nation’s lost glory.
Behind him, he heard the clang of a foot rolling off a shell. The old man caught up to him, looked out. The lights of their pursuers’ sandrail played against the hull of an old shuttle, then the machine turned the corner and came into view.
Fred saw the plasma-cannon gunner, his pedipalp hands gripping the controls of the powerful weapon.
The old-timer elbowed Fred and whispered: “Hey, that’s a Quyth.”
“Can’t put one past you,” Fred whispered back.
“But that’s an alien! Aliens aren’t allowed on Micovi!”
“You don’t say.”
“I don’t know what you did,” the old-timer said, “but you must have pissed off the wrong guy if someone sent a Quyth here.”
Fred nodded. He had pissed off the wrong guy. He just didn’t know who that guy was.
Then a bony hand wrapped tight around his mouth. He started to react, automatically bringing his elbow up to drive it into the old-timer’s throat, but stopped himself a split-second before killing the man.
“Shhhh,” the old-timer hissed, so quiet it was almost inaudible. “Don’t move a muscle.”
Fred’s body tensed. He wasn’t used to letting anyone touch him, ever, but then he heard it — he heard the flapping and fluttering of wings.
Bats.
A stream of the horrific little creatures flew across Fred’s field of vision, from left to right, heading for the crawler down below. They came so close he felt the air from their wings. In that moment, Fred felt the instinctive fear he shared with two generations of Nationalites born since the Takeover — when the bats are close, you don’t move, you don’t give them any reason to think you’re a threat.
The last one passed by. The old man’s hand slid away. Fred looked down, more with his eyes than his whole head.
There was a flash of amber light as a splatter of fluid splashed against the crawler’s side. Creterakians didn’t always tell you to stay still, they led with a warning shot. Anyone in the Purist Nation knew that — the Quyth Warrior was not from the Purist Nation.
The big Warrior pivoted the plasma cannon, turning to face the threat. He didn’t even complet
e that turn before three more blasts of glowing amber splashed against him. The first hit his right pedipalp arm, the second his center chest and the third his right leg. The Warrior let out the Quyth equivalent of a scream, a barking, grinding sound that Fred would not soon forget. The pedipalp arm dissolved, and the hand fell away to the ‘rail’s rear deck, still fizzing and disintegrating as the entropic effect crawled down the forearm. Maybe it would run out of steam before it reached the fingers, or maybe the whole hand would just vanish in a puff of atoms.
The shot in the chest, of course, was what killed him. The expanding hole first cut off that scream, then ended his life. His body slumped to the deck, what was left of his chest evaporating away just like the severed hand.
The ‘rail shot forward but didn’t get far. Fred watched, knowing what was coming — once the bats started firing, they didn’t stop until everyone in front of them was dead. He didn’t see the shot that killed the driver, but he heard the scream.
Fred and the old-timer sat very, very still. They breathed slowly; they focused on making no noise at all.
The echoes of the screams faded, then died away. Fred could hear his own heartbeat and the faint hiss of the desert wind sliding across fine sand.
Then, a few minutes later, they heard the flapping of wings fading away into the distance.
The old-timer let out a slow hiss of air. He spoke, no longer in a whisper, but not very loud, either. “I wish I could say I feel bad about those spawns of Satan getting vaped, but I don’t.”
“Spawns of Satan? I thought you said just because something is in the scripture doesn’t mean it’s right.”
“Not all things are right,” the old man said. “Some are. Or at least in the case of aliens chasing me down and trying to kill me, the scriptures are dead-on.”
Fred nodded. “Can’t argue with that. So, how far to the graveyard?”
“We’re in the graveyard.”
“The one for people,” Fred said. “The one that you run.”
“Ah,” the old man said. “Well, if we walk, we might make it before daybreak. I know you’re not from here, young gun, but I’ll say you don’t want to be on foot on the purple sand when the sun comes up.”
“How far of a drive?”
The old man tilted his head back toward the sandrail embedded in the container wall. “I ain’t much of a mechanic, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You don’t have to be a mechanic,” Fred said. He pointed down to the larger sandrail below. “You just have to be good with a mop and a bucket.”
The old man stared down, then nodded. “Ayup. I guess if we wait an hour, the bats will be truly gone. They won’t come back if no one fires off that plasma cannon.”
“I’ll do my best to not pull the trigger,” Fred said.
The old-timer sighed. “Well, this is gonna be messy. But then again, cleaning up dead bodies is what I do for a living. Let’s get it done. And while we’re at it, do watch your step. I’m pretty sure the shells we’re standing on are live.”
They carefully started down.
Chapter 14: Stacks, Skulls & Stones
Aside from the general stickiness and bits of flesh they hadn’t cleaned up, the borrowed sandrail was quite a nice machine. Fred enjoyed the ride. He just tried not to think too much about why the seat was a little damp. He wished he could sell it — the thing was brand new and would fetch a great price — but to show up anywhere civilized with this thing was the same as saying I killed the original owners.
Fortunately, if there was any civilization around, it was out of range of sight.
The sun was just coming up over the purple sand as Fred and the old-timer reached the graveyard. “I hope this was worth it,” Fred said. “I know those Warriors would have put a hurting on us, but a lot of people want to hurt me — I get by just fine by avoiding them as opposed to seeing sentients die.”
“I can give ya what ya need,” the digger assured him solemnly. “Don’t you worry about that. See that big rock over there? The one on top of that high dune? Pull up to the right of that, but go slow, and don’t drive past the rock.”
Fred did as he was told. Like the sand, most rocks in this area were purple. This one was lined with crystals of quartz that reflected the morning sun.
The sandrail slowed to a stop, kicking up a few whirling dervishes of purple dust. Fred killed the engine and waited for the desert wind to take the dust away.
A valley stretched in every direction below them. Fred saw dark cracks in the soil, huge black veins everywhere he looked. Once, centuries or even eons ago, this might have been a lake, or even an ocean.
Now it was equal parts super cemetery and Human landfill.
“Welcome to Micovi’s second biggest industry, son,” the digger said. “This is Grim Tyrant Valley.”
The graves numbered in the tens of thousands. Most were cheap wooden crosses slapped together with nails and glue. Those were broken up here and there by modest headstones, small crescents of hand-carved rock made by the families of the deceased. Fred estimated they were outnumbered by the discount crosses twenty-to-one.
As many graves as might have been dug and marked down there, however, they were nothing compared to the number of bodies that were piled stories high at regular intervals across the valley. Fred couldn’t smell them; dampening filters erected on tall poles surrounded the perimeter of the valley. But he could see the deep levels of decomposition in most of them, as if they’d been lying there for a year or more.
Then he spotted the piles that were nothing but broken skeletons.
He didn’t have to say anything. The old man could read it plainly on his face.
“Budget cuts,” the digger explained. “About a decade ago, I had a staff of twenty-three. Now, I got a staff of five. The backlist of bodies is a mile long. We get to ‘em as we’re able. But I promise ya, whatever state they’re in, every single departed soul you see down there will get their day. I put ‘em all in the ground eventually.”
At the far end of the valley, Fred saw a hoverbarge approaching. Rusted and well-used, it was the kind of vehicle that hauled all sorts of things. On it he saw two logos: the twin green crescents of Rhingold Incorporated and a symbol that had been universally known across Human space since even before the days of space flight — the biohazard symbol.
The barge closed in on the sprawling graveyard. Down on a concrete slab strewn with curls of purple sand, a man waved two handheld orange cones at the barge. The battered machine closed in and stopped above the slab. The man ran out of the way, then the barge’s bottom doors opened.
Bodies spilled out.
Fred guessed there were thirty, maybe forty, all landing in a pile of lifeless humanity.
He felt numb.
“Mine workers?” he asked, as if it mattered.
“Probably eighty percent,” the digger confirmed. “Mebbe more.”
Fred was ghost-pale, and his voice came in a rasp. He gestured to the whole valley, to the sprawl of crosses and monuments, to the piles of skeletons and rotted bodies, to the freshly dropped miners. “How the hell could you possibly find anyone down there in all of that?”
“It’s m’life’s work, boy,” the old-timer said, unfazed. “Now, you wanted this. Should we get on with it or not?”
Fred realized the old man was right. This was his choice, and what could be the last piece of the puzzle might be down there somewhere.
“Which way?” he asked the old-timer. The man pointed out a path that led down the valley to the operation below.
Fred put the ‘rail in drive, and they started down.
Chapter 15: Family
Frederico understood the concept of death. He understood it far more than most. He had killed. He had watched friends die in battle, seen sentients executed for no reason at all. Much of his life, in fact, had revolved around death: dealing with it or dealing it out.
Now, however, he understood he’d been dealing with a lower-case-D death.
In Grim Tyrant Valley, he saw what Capital-D Death was all about.
Fred and the grave digger had spent hours walking through dirt paths that wound through the stacks and piles of corpses that made up Grim Tyrant Valley. All of Micovi’s dead wound up here. So many, in all stages of decomposition, and — worst of all — the smell.
The grave digger gave Fred a soiled cloth to hold over his nose and mouth. The smell didn’t seem to bother the old-timer at all. Fred felt choked by it, and not just his lungs. His entire body and brain felt oppressed by this place, as if the death was constantly closing in around him, threatening to crush him, make him part of the landscape.
The whole place was a giant, blaring message that death is coming for you, too, and there is nothing you can do about it. Fred might have been overwhelmed by it, but the calm of the grave digger kept him tethered. He focused on the old man, who might’ve been strolling through a garden in which he took great pride.
Still, the number of plots and people was staggering. Fred couldn’t imagine ever finding a single one in this place. After fifteen minutes of walking, the stacks of unprocessed bodies gave way to an endless vista of cheap gravestones. Not granite, oh, no, these were made from Micovi’s version of limestone. If you were poor, they wouldn’t even waste good rock on you.
Fred tried to estimate the number of graves but gave up almost immediately. They were uncountable. The old man didn’t seem phased by the vista of death, however — he seemed to know exactly where he was going. More than that, as they walked past each grave, whether they were marked with an epitaph or not, the digger recited names, droning them like the refrain of some dour Church song.
“Porson, Malachai... Harrell, Barbara... Migliorelli, Paul... Yurich, Phillip...
“How do you do that?” Fred asked after the first twenty or thirty names.
The old man seemed annoyed by the interruption. “I told you. This here is m’life’s work. Not just seein’ ‘em put by, but seein’ that at least one body remembers who they was.”