by Marc Everitt
Table of Contents
Start
Cover
Copyright 2017 Marc Everitt.
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Appendix One
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Planet of Graves
by
Marc Everitt
Copyright 2017 Marc Everitt.
All rights reserved.
The right of Marc Everitt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and dialogues are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Where locations are used all characters described therein are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Prologue
Case Open
Graves’ World, 31st March 2501
He was an arrogant man. He knew there was no one like him on the planet and revelled in the knowledge. It was a pity, in his mind, that he had been given such mundane tasks to perform.
Jeff Hanley checked the thermo-locks on the perimeter fence for what seemed to him to be the thousandth time. He was an unhappy man, worried that life was passing him by. He was an engineer, and as everyone was told at every possible opportunity, a damned good one. He qualified, top of his class, from the engineering institute back on old Earth and was already tipped for great things by the time he was twenty-two. From the institute, he was given a post on a star freighter as second engineer: the youngest officer ever to achieve the position in the colonial fleet’s four century history. He rose to the position of chief engineer in 2494 at the age of only twenty-four and proceeded to break all records for competence, performance and (as some of the people who had been forced to endure his company noted) unbearable arrogance. Jeff Hanley was a man who was going straight to the top and knew it.
However, the fact that he felt it necessary to broadcast this knowledge to everyone within a radius of several miles led to his downfall. Another engineer, not as brilliant as Hanley but a little more cunning, who was sick of the attitude of the arrogant chief engineer, supplied the Company with details as to when Hanley was going to throw another of his wild parties. These parties (where copious amounts of alcohol always led to rather large amounts of other substances) were frowned upon by the Company and caused him to receive a discharge from his post and a swift transfer to the small frontier world Hanley now found himself on.
“Bloody ridiculous. Here I am, no-one like me on this whole god-forsaken world, and I have to check the perimeter fence so the Major doesn’t have to leave the building,” he mumbled to himself as he started towards the final checkpoint on his nightly check routine. Although he was assigned to the base as a Nuclear Engineer, with responsibilities pertaining to the running of the station’s reactor, the small number of inhabitants on the base forced him to have to perform routine, and in his view menial, tasks. His mind snapped back to the present, wrenched from its reverie, and he approached checkpoint twelve, on the west side of the base. The dull sand of the desert world swirled around his feet as he moved nearer.
“Damned fool job for a genius, this one is,” he snarled in contempt and stopped dead in his tracks. The lock on the final checkpoint was not secure and the casing was scratched badly around the console panel. All the locks were supposed to be secure at all times. Hanley decided that it was probably a mistake on the part of the person who had last checked the fence at the end of the last shift. He thought maybe they had accidentally triggered the fence release code, but he knew that only the Major could do that. He was so busy pondering and moaning to himself about the incompetence of his colleagues, and generally everyone other then himself: that he failed to notice the approaching figure that was nearing him from inside the perimeter fence.
A figure that had, until recently, lived outside the perimeter fence and never entered the strange world of metal and lead-lined concrete that was the scientific research station. The grumbling, arrogant engineer sealed the checkpoint release mechanism and mumbled to himself, “I don’t know why I bother, go around locking thermo-locks because the Major is an imbecile.”
The figure was very close to him now and would soon be upon him, but he still remained engrossed in his singularity and unique nature.
“Come to think of it, there’s no one like me in this whole sector,” he continued, turning to head to the compound and half mile in the distance, “and most definitely no one like me here on…..” He broke off, as he finally saw the figure that was fast approaching him. He drew in a breath he would never exhale, his eyes bulged and his jaw dropped. The figure was on him before he had time to complete his self-gratifying sentence. Suddenly, with a swift lunge of a clawed hand, Jeff Hanley was proved correct. There was no one on the station like him. However, this was not due to any great intellectual capacity on his part, merely due to the fact that no one else was dead.
Chapter One
As One Door Closes…
Earth, 2nd April 2501
Try as he might, sleep would not come to him. He had tried exercise to tire himself out, but that had not worked. He had tried counting sheep, no success there. He had even watched the daytime television he had recorded on his disc unit for the specific task of curing insomnia, but even this extreme measure had proven fruitless. Or, more accurately, sleepless. For if it were fruit he needed he knew it was more likely that he would be better off visiting the kitchen, and the fruit bowl in particular.
These and many other thoughts rattled around his mind, unsympathetic to his need for sleep, and many questions (the like of which all insomniacs were well-aware of) flitted through his thoughts. He pushed them aside and tried to force his mind to relax and accept a small period of unconsciousness, but he was fighting a losing battle. It was not that he was a man who particularly liked sleeping, rather one who acknowledges that it is necessary to get some at some point. The thing that really annoyed the man was that he didn’t know why he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the fact that it was broad daylight outside and the world was steadily going about its business because he was in a job which required shift work, and his body clock had long since given up the ghost. Since getting in from the reactor at four o’clock that morning he had not slept a wink and it was now fast approaching noon.
The man gave up his pretence of sleep and sat up in his bed, his eyes shining brightly in a face that had not yet seen thirty years. He was an average man to the untrained eye: average build, average height, averagely brown hair parted in the middle and flopping down over his average ears, averagely pleasant face and so on.
However, to the eye which belonged to a more observant individual there were aspects of this man which were clearly not average. His eyes were very bright and shone with an intensity that seemed to bore into you as easily as a drill wielded by a madman could, and these were the first indication to an observer that the man was possessed of a more intelligent mind than most. These very eyes were at that moment settled upon the man’s slippers and he thrust his feet into them, wrapped a robe around himself and padded down the stairs to try and nudge his body into realising that he wasn’t asleep and try and do something about it. That part of his body’s running system was obviously otherwise engaged, because he felt no urge to stretch, no compulsion to yawn and definitely no desire to drift into sleep.
As he approached the bottom of the stairs he saw the postman had b
een hard at work and had left him several letters on his doormat, and two of these were even for the address they were delivered to. The man opened the most dull looking letter first, for he knew that the more interesting looking ones were always a disappointment once opened and had learned to avoid them like the plague), and he frowned as he read the headed paper and the official stamp at the top of the communication concealed therein. The frown deepened as the content of the letter revealed itself to him and slowly a smile crept over his face as he realised he would soon be changing job locations and that the new base for his work would be a place he had been very curious about since the first survey teams landed there. The man checked the other letter to see how interesting it looked and realised it was another demand for him to pay the annual subscription to a book club for a Mr John McArthur.
He had no intention of paying any such bill, and as his name was not John McArthur and he had never met anyone of that name or had ever joined a book club, he thought his refusal was justified. He had written to the book club on several occasions to inform them of his identity but they had replied, rather stubbornly he thought, that their records clearly indicated that a man called John McArthur resided at the address to which the bills were directed. He had often telephoned them in order to point out that, unless this McArthur fellow was a master of disguise and has managed to remain hidden in the house for the past five years, he felt there was likely to be an error in their records. To which the book club telephonist invariably requested that, in that case, could he tell Mr McArthur when he returned home that he had a rather large bill to settle.
When confronted with this the man had reassured them that, were Mr McArthur ever to arrive at the house to which the bills were addressed, he would not only be supplied with the bills but also a rather swift blow to the jaw for his blatant disregard of the fact that people do not like receiving bills for books they never received and didn’t order in the first place. Furthermore, the man often informed the book club that he had run a check through the international telephone directory and had found no John McArthur listed for the entire population of the planet, and as such he felt sure that the mystery man was unlikely to return home to settle his bill.
The man thought about this as he debated whether to open the letter from the book club, decided he couldn’t face it, wondered how a book club could make a profit sending hardback copies of ‘The Mysteries of twenty second century Brazil’ to people who didn’t exist, and made his way back up to his bed.
He started to think about the planet he knew he was being transferred to and the strange circumstances surrounding the death of the last engineer to be posted there. He had known the deceased engineer from the institute and had always found him to be an arrogant sort and so was not particularly sad that he had been found dead three days ago. He lay on his bed, delighted to finally have something to occupy his mind. Taylor West was, therefore, infuriated when, two minutes later, he was unable to prevent himself falling fast asleep.
Deep Space
At the same instant that Taylor West found himself unable to stay awake, another creature gained consciousness for the very first time. It looked at the world with wide eyes, but not because of its surprise at being suddenly sentient. This was no normal creature, and its method of entering the maelstrom of life was no ordinary birth. Its eyes were wide, that was true, but this was due to no expression of wonder: rather a biological construct designed to allow for total peripheral vision.
The creature stretched a sinewy limb for the first time and clenched the appendage on the end of it. The appendage throbbed a dull red and pulsed faster until the glow it gave off had changed from a deep red to a vivid scarlet colour which seemed to spread to the surrounding air. Suddenly, the appendage’s colour rushed to the forefront of the limb and shot out into the air as a blast of plasma energy, destructive and violent. The blast struck the wall of the small incubation unit in which the creature had floated since its artificial conception over ten millennia ago. The fluid flooded from the gash in the metallic shell and drained out of the incubation unit, leaving the creature dripping inside. It forced its limb into the hole and enlarged it sufficiently for the creature to escape into the ante-room.
Had it been a human birth, then now would have been a good time to slap the baby to induce breathing, however it was not human by any stretch of the imagination and had no need of a respiratory system in any case. Besides, this creature was not likely to ever get slapped by anyone in the whole of its powerful, enslaved life. Powerful – due to the fact that it was a state of the art combat organism created by scientists of the ancient T’suk empire, which collapsed into ruin over nine thousand years ago, who were at the cutting edge of biological and genetic research, and it was aggressive into the bargain. It was enslaved due to the primary reason of its being, the core of its existence or prime directive, if you will. The creature was biologically programmed with a task of which it was aware the second it awoke.
Moving to the far side of the room it entered the flight deck. It instinctively knew the location of this area and as it entered, left the shadows and stepped into the light for the first time. It reached out with its arm and pressed a lever on the control deck. The computer was online and a low hum filled the ship as it activated circuits that had lay dormant for thousands of years. Slowly, the hum resolved into a deep voice, which address itself to the creature.
“You are functionally optimal?” The creature nodded its head. “You are aware of your purpose?” continued the computer in a monotonous tone. The creature nodded its head a second time. The computer spoke for the third time, as it was programmed to do, “The ship is now on course for your destination and we will arrive in approximately twenty cyclic divisions. Please proceed with the physical examination in the bio-scanner beam.” The creature looked to its left and saw a beam of light appear from floor to ceiling. The beam pulsed slightly with a green hue. The creature stepped into it as it knew it should and the pulse beam washed over it and a digital representation of the creature appeared on the computer screen. The beam slowly rose from its humanoid feet up its thick, powerful legs. The computer monitored body functions as the scanner beam covered the hips and swept up over the torso and engulfed the creature’s head. The creature stepped from the beam once the computer had confirmed all its functions were optimal, and it walked to the control desk and began to regard the desk layout as it familiarised itself with a ship it had been in for so long but had never seen.
If a human had been able to see the creature they would probably had commented that it was roughly humanoid with six major differences. The first was that the creature had bony protrusions coming from its knee and elbow joints, sharp, curved and about six inches long. They would also have noticed it had an unusual colouring; a constantly shifting shade of gold, one minute dazzling in its brilliance the next as dull as bronze. Then they would no doubt say that it had fins sprouting out of the back of its head which gave it a reptilian appearance. This combined with its facial features to produce an undeniably alien visage. It had one eye with no pupil or cornea, stretching across the whole front of its head which glowed an intense red. It had no mouth, nose or genitalia as it was sexless, and it wore no form of clothing. It was covered with a tough armoured skin. The biggest difference between the warrior creature and a human would have been the easiest to spot. It had a tail. An appendage was affixed to the small of its back and rose, ranging from a width of around twenty centimetres at the base to five centimetres at its end, around a metre and a half so that it ended up over the warriors head.
At the end of the scorpion-like tail it had an adaptable point which could act as an energy discharger, and this was the way in which it had blasted its way out of its incubation chamber, or a cutting point to slice its way through most objects. However, no one had ever seen the creature to make the comparisons about it. Many had seen its kind before, but they were mostly killed by them. Its makers had made three of its kind before it. The first of t
hese had fought for the T’suk empire against their bitter enemies the Karak. That Warrior had succeeded in total genocide as it ploughed its unstoppable way through the alien race.
The T’suk had realised what an awesome species they had engineered and watched in awe and satisfaction as the creature had mercilessly hunted Karak wherever it found them until, after a couple of centuries or so, there were no longer a Karak people for it to hunt. The T’suk called that warrior back by means of a code sequence they had built into its neural pathways and deactivated it the same way. When they took it apart to analyse its injuries they were delighted to find that it had none and would have lived its seven century lifespan with no threat to their safety.
They realised they had created an invincible warrior and in their infamous and brutal twenty five thousand year reign of supremacy in the galaxy they constructed two more creatures on separate occasions to eradicate their enemies. Eventually, the T’suk realised that their race was slowly dying of a genetic disorder which evolution had cursed them with and in the last frantic few decades the creature itself had been created. Finally the time had come for its purpose to be fulfilled. The Warrior’s ship ploughed its way through space, its lethal occupant preparing itself for a task it was anticipated it would have to perform, by its creators a very long time ago. The ship accelerated to its top speed, left the asteroid belt which had shielded it for so long and sped out into the void of interstellar space.
Earth
Elijah Robert Jackson was not a man who slept often, he sometimes went months existing on only four or five hours a night and was a constant source of amazement to all the roommates he had ever had. At this time he did not have a roommate and so he could stay active until as late as he liked with no feelings of guilt. He picked up a small book, which lay on his bedside table and looked at it. It was a tacky book, he knew, but he had no illusions that he was any great literary critic and so always felt better sticking to what he thought most simple to understand. He settled himself down for a solid, relaxing read of his mind numbing book, stretched out his large frame and began to read. The hero of the book, a seven-legged man from the Martian colonies called Zeke Lightstar, was about to confront a shopkeeper about the extortionate price of shoes. Eli sighed contentedly, he loved Zeke Lightstar.
