James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 08

by Hellfire

  “So, you’re not with them?” Keeler put in.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Alkema demanded. “Are they sick? Do they have a disease?”

  “Nothing unclean may pass the walls of the Temple!” the Caretaker shouted.

  “Then, you shouldn’t make it so inviting,” Keeler purred.

  Alkema raised his voice. “Do you know those people? If we agree to leave, will you tell them to disperse? Will you give us safe passage?”

  “Violators of the Holy Sphere will pay with their lives!”

  “Enough is enough. Just shut him the hell up,” Keeler ordered.

  “I’m giving you one last chance,” Alkema kept his tone patient, but raised his pulse weapon. “If you don’t agree to help us, I’m going to shoot you.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Keeler shouted.

  “Blasphemer!!” the Caretaker shouted.

  Alkema shot him.

  “Blaphmeeemer!” the Caretaker grunted groggily.

  So, Alkema shot him again, and this time he stayed quiet.

  “Bang! Bang!” Something hit the outside door very loudly

  “Well, that passed a few minutes,” Keeler said. “What shall we play now?” As the night wore on, Alkema continued tearing apart the consoles looking for useful parts, taking a break every few minutes to shoot the Caretaker when he awoke and denounced them as “blasphemers!” He had managed to assemble most of the parts necessary to build a crude carrier-wave transmitter. Powered by his pulse weapon, it might have been strong enough to create and electronic signal for Pegasus to detect.

  The banging at the barricade had diminished for a time, but then it had returned. At one point in the lull Alkema had climbed up the ladder onto the roof to see if there were any wires or cables atop the building to affix his makeshift beacon to. While he was up there, he had observed that the crowd had grown larger… to thousands of villagers moaning and shambling in the dark.

  “Where did they come from?” He had wondered, as he began the climb back into the hole. “Why won’t they go away?”

  When he reached the bottom of the ladder, he stumbled getting off of it and tumbled to the floor.

  “Oopsie,” Keeler had said. “Are you all right?”

  “I didn’t break anything,” Alkema lifted himself off the floor, but had to steady himself against the ladder. “I’m finding it harder to concentrate, and it feels very cold in here. I think that bite might have… infected me with something.”

  Keeler shrugged it off. “You’re hungry and fatigued. Ignore it. You’ll have plenty of time to feel sick later when the natives are eating your brains.”

  “I’m serious,” Alkema hissed at him. “You saw how those villagers were acting. They’ve been reduced to savagery. What if… what if the cause of this civilization’s collapse was a mind virus, a pathogen that led to dementia? What if the pathogen was spread orally? Is it possible I got infected when that villager bit me?”

  Keeler’s response was typically irritating. “It’s possible, but I don’t see the point in getting worked up about it.”

  Alkema challenged Keeler. “There were colonies wiped out by local diseases that caused dementia, weren’t there?”

  “Some,” Keeler admitted. “But those were small colonies in the early period of development. This planet had at least a 3,000 year old civilization. If there was such a pathogen native to this world, it should have been detected in the early colonial period.”

  “What if was something benign that mutated, or maybe it was a biogenic weapon.” Alkema had begun to spit when he talked. “Something they developed here, or that was left over from the Crusades, or that the Kariad used on them…”

  “Speculating about it is pointless,” Keeler barked. “If we get out of this alive, they can check you out once we’re back on Pegasus.”

  “If I’m infected, it may be too dangerous to bring me back to Pegasus,” Alkema argued.

  “You might have to leave me behind.”

  “Bang!!” Something hit the outside door very loudly. This time, the force was enough to rattle the barricade. The natives were making progress.

  Alkema whispered. “I can hear them. I can hear them. Outside. In my head. They’re so hungry. So very, very hungry.”

  Keeler was too creeped out by this to provide one of his customary witticisms, and settled for. “O.K…. um…”

  Alkema rose, shook his head, and crossed to where he had tied up the caretaker and slapped him hard across the face to rouse him. “Wake up!” The caretaker was already awake, he had just been keeping quiet. “Blasphemer!”

  “He has a name, you know,” Keeler prompted the Caretaker. “It’s Dave.”

  “Blasphemer!” the Caretaker repeated.

  “All right, we’re blasphemers, we accept that,” Alkema conceded to the madman. “But why are the people who live in the village so savage?”

  “They did not listen!” the Caretaker shouted. “They did not attend the mother sphere.

  They continued in their arrogant ways, and they were punished.”

  “Are they sick?” Alkema continued. “Did the sphere unleash a disease that poisoned their minds.”

  “There is no vengeance in the Holy Mother Sphere!” the Caretaker called. “The Sphere mothers us! The sphere holds us to her! The sphere sustains us! We must sustain it! There is only one sphere!”

  “Look, we don’t give a damn about your mother sphere,” Keeler told the Caretaker.

  “Just let us leave, and you can go back to naked goat dancing or whatever it is you do for fun around here.”

  The Caretaker strained and lashed out against his bonds, all the while denouncing them. “Blasphemers! You shall be consumed in the hot gases. And burned in the sulfur rain.

  You shall starve in the barren fields, and reap the dry winds of death!”

  “Did you say ‘hot gases’ and ‘winds of death?’” Keeler grimaced and shook his head.

  “Neg, too easy!”

  “Blasphemer devils!” the Caretaker screeched.

  Alkema powered up his gauntlet and raised it in front of the man’s eyes. “You know this hurts. Close up, it hurts a lot worse. Tell me, for the love of the Allbeing, do the people of your planet have a disease?”

  “You are from outside the Sphere,” the Caretaker railed at them. “You are contagion. As the body kills the virus, so must you be killed! We must preserve the sanctity of the Holy Sphere!”

  “You really do have an inflated sense of self, don’t you,” Keeler asked. “You know, this planet… this ‘sphere’… was here for billions and billions of years before it was colonized, and if you all dropped dead … which seems to be what you’re working on… it would go on like nothing had happened. In ten thousand years … a tick of the geological clock… no one would know humans had even been here.”

  “Bang!!” The spaces between hits were longer than before, but the hits themselves were doing damage. Each BANG was accompanied by a punch, or a groan, of metal door succumbing a little bit to the onslaught… and a scrape and rattle as the barricade began to weaken.

  The caretaker continued his half-insane babbling. “The sphere gives life to us. The balance must be sustained. What is taken must be given back.”

  “Are they sick?” Alkema demanded.

  “You’re all sick and you’re going to die!” The caretaker yelled. And then he began cackling. “You’re going to die! You’re going to die!”

  Alkema paused for a moment, then smacked the Caretaker on the side of his temple with his gauntlet hand.

  “What was that about?” Keeler asked. “You could have just shot him again.”

  “I want to see my wife and kids again,” Alkema answered. “That means I have to live through the night. He wasn’t going to help.”

  Alkema turned away from the Caretaker and studied the barricade. “I think I can stall them. If I use the power cell from my pulse weapon to charge the electrical capacitor I pulled from the monitor station, I may
be able to discharge enough electromagnetic energy to…”

  “Don’t bore me with the details, just fry some villagers!” Keeler grunted through gritted teeth. Alkema was relieved at that. It meant he didn’t have to explain that he probably wouldn’t be able to use the emergency battery to power the beacon. The discharge would probably destroy the capacitor.

  “Bang!!” Another assault on the barricade underlined the urgency of his task. Alkema quickly moved the emergency battery to the top of the barricade as the pounding from the outside became stronger and more determined. The tables and plates shook as the villagers pressed in against the doorway. He rigged a couple of power cables from the capacitor to the plates closest to the door.

  He snapped open the power chamber on his pulse weapon. There were two oblong power cells inside that glowed with orange light. He carefully extracted one. He realized there would be no way to attach it directly to the capacitor without killing himself, which he did not want to do.

  He positioned himself a couple of meters from the barricade tossed the power cell carefully onto the capacitor and jumped away as hard as he could. The capacitor began to load with energy. Alkema picked up the two ends of a cable and waited.

  The next time there was a ‘Bang!’ at the barricade, he touched the two ends of the cable together. A light show of released electromagnetic energy exploded around the barricade as Alkema tucked and rolled himself back into the pit.

  The snap, crackle, and pop of the discharge was so intense Alkema was momentarily struck deaf, and a powerful ringing would persist in his ears for the next two hours. However, within a few seconds, he made out the sound of clapping and Commander Keeler chanting,

  “Do it again! Do it again!”

  Alkema picked himself up off the floor, and crawled to a place where he could rest with his back against the wall. He lay there with his eyes closed.

  The pounding on the door had stopped. He could not have heard it over the ringing anyway, but some other sense was coming to him, telling him that the natives had pulled back from the structure in fear. It was like a pressure in his mind had diminished, and become dispersed.

  “Are you all right?” Keeler was suddenly full of concern.

  “I am a very long way from all right,” Alkema answered. “I’m starving. I can feel my body temperature rising. We’re trapped in here. The natives will probably come back soon. I don’t have the time or the parts now to make the beacon work. I’m out of ideas. My head hurts. And I don’t see any way out of this.”

  Keeler sighed. “There is one way.”

  “What?”

  “How long until sunrise?” Keeler asked.

  “The sun will be up in the next 80 or 90 minutes, by my reckoning.”

  “Then you have 80 or 90 minutes of darkness to get away from here,” Keeler told him.

  “Quickly, while the natives are gone.”

  “I won’t leave you, Commander,” Alkema replied.

  “Don’t be ri-ding-diddly-iculous,” Keeler admonished. “My leg’s messed up. I’m not getting out of here. You still have a chance. Think of Pieta and your kids. Scratch that, just think of your kids. You have something to live for.”

  “You do, too, sir,” Alkema insisted.

  “Well, true, I do have plenty to live for, but unlike me, you actually have a chance of living for it. I’m just being practical. You know me, Dave, if there was even a chance of saving my own ass, don’t you think I’d make you stay here to save it?” Alkema gritted his teeth. “I’m staying.”

  Keeler shouted at him. “Give me one reason besides your misguided sense of loyalty to stay here.”

  “Who’s to say I would make it out of here anyway?” Alkema countered.

  “Now, you’re just being obstinate,” Keeler countered back. “By the time those natives have finished eating my brains, you could be kilometers away from here. You’re smart. You probably stayed awake through survival training. You can survive out there. But, in here, you’re dead meat. Dead meat, I say!”

  Alkema held out his hand. “Stop!”

  “Pegasus has had plenty of time to dispatch a rescue team,” Keeler went on. “They obviously haven’t found us. And with the bio-signs of 3,000 villagers outside, you’d think they’d have a clue where we are.”

  “Please be quiet, sir,” Alkema said. “I am trying to think.”

  “So, you should save your own ass. And when you think of me, try to remember the good times.” He paused. “If I could think of any, I’d bring them up.” Alkema looked up, there was a faint glow in his eyes. “I can do it. I can get out.” Keeler sounded horrified. “You’re really going to do it? I was kind of hoping my gesture of nobility would prove futile. I thought we’d die together screaming in a horror of brain-eating frenzy.”

  Alkema stripped off his jacket. “I might even be able to save you.”

  “Okay, that’s better, then.” Keeler continued.

  Alkema explained his plan. “First, I’m gonna reinforce the barricade. That should buy you another… maybe an hour. I’m gonna take the priest, put him in my clothes, take his, and roll him off the roof into the crowd. That should distract them long enough for me to run. If I can draw them away, it’ll buy you time. If Pegasus has a rescue party out there, maybe I can

  …”

  Then, there was a loud noise, a thunderous bang that shook the temple to its foundations.

  “What the hell?” Keeler shouted.

  “I better get to reinforcing that barricade,” Alkema said. He moved toward the barricade when another powerful blast hit. The second was so close that the ground shook him off his feet.

  “What are they doing?” Keeler shouted.

  Alkema didn’t know, but it was working. The barricade was beginning to crumble. One of the metal plates he had braced against the upper part of the entrance groaned and gave way.

  “Neg!” Alkema screamed, as another blast collapsed half of his barricade.

  It also woke the caretaker. “Madness!” he screamed. “Your foul and sinful ways have driven us to madness.”

  Keeler seemed resigned to it. “Well, I guess this is about it for us, then. My only regret is… coming on this stupid mission.”

  There was another fireburst outside, followed some seconds later by another. Then came several more distant explosions, as though villagers were missing the target.

  Then, the wall exploded with a mighty crash. The barricade blasted inward, showering the inside with dust and debris.

  Alkema pointed his pulse weapon at the gaping hole opened in the temple wall, although he knew if the villagers swarmed in en masse, it would be a futile gesture. He contemplated whether he ought to turn the weapon on himself. It might be better, he thought, not to die screaming.

  Then, he thought better of it and shot the Caretaker instead.

  Through the thick dust that hung in the air, he saw figures entering the temple.

  “Commander Keeler,” called a familiar voice. “Are you all right?”

  “Is that you Kitaen?” Keeler yelled.

  A huge bald man, clad in tactical gear and wearing fierce warpaint came forth from the hole in the wall. “It is indeed, commander,” General Kitaen reported. “How can we be of assistance?”

  “I need drugs!” Keeler shouted. “Lots and lots of drugs. In fact, if your MedTech doesn’t have something that could put a Borealan Musk Ox into a coma, go back to the ship and bring a MedTech who does.”

  “Of course,” Kitaen said. “Medical Technician And, see to the commander.” Kitaen strolled toward Alkema. “Apologies for not coming to the rescue sooner. We reasoned that you would take refuge in this structure, but he could not figure out how to get to you. We tried non-lethal methods of getting the natives away, but they failed.” He offered Alkema his arm.

  Alkema took it and stood up unsteadily from the floor, suppressing the urge to bite the tactical commander. “How did you finally get in?” He asked.

  Kitaen shrugged. “A dozen Warf
ighters with pulse rifles, air cover, and the favor of the Allbeing can solve most of life’s little problems.”

  Alkema nodded and leaned on Kitaen’s shoulder. “If it’s all right with you, I’m going to pass out now.”

  Kitaen agreed. “Good, why don’t you do that.”

  Alkema gratefully allowed himself to pass out.

  Hospital 4: Two Days Later

  “I was so worried that you weren’t going to make it off that planet alive,” Pieta whispered.

  Alkema took his wife in his arms. “So was I.” He pulled her close and sank his fangs into her neck.

  Alkema woke up with a gasp.

  He found himself lying naked in Hospital 4, surrounded by layers of clear plastic, which he recognized as a quarantine cocoon.

  After he had laid there, alone and frightened, for some minutes, the cocoon folded into itself, opening him up to the room. Medical Technician Skinner was there, looking over him with a dispassionate medical gaze that nevertheless made him cover his crotch with his hands.

  “Welcome back, Lt. Commander Alkema,” Skinner said in his clipped, cultured tones.

  “I trust you’re not in too much distress.”

  “Could I have some water?” Alkema asked. His throat was parched. Skinner handed him a bottle. After he had slaked his thirst, his next question was “Where is Pieta?”

  “She wanted to be notified as soon as you regained consciousness,” Skinner tapped his fingers on the side of his medical datapad. “Shall I notify her?” Alkema nodded to that, and drank more from the bottle. Then, he asked, “Why am I in a quarantine cocoon?”

  “Primarily out of an abundance of caution,” Skinner explained. “When you came aboard, you were delirious and muttering about an alien brain infection. You insisted on being put in isolation.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Alkema said.

  “That was almost two days ago,” Skinner informed him. “The good news is that our blood-scans haven’t found a single alien pathogen in your bloodstream.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “We found six,” Skinner grinned. He promptly displayed in hologram form each of the six virulent pathogens, color-enhanced in sickly green to heighten their menace.