Planet of Graves

by Marc Everitt

  Still, Pope had a fondness for the gun that was not merely sentimental. The weapon had saved his life on several occasions. As he cleaned the barrel of the gun, he muttered a low prayer to his God to see them all safely through the coming hours. His mind clear and his body relaxed, Pope felt ready for the mission.

  The ‘Cavalry’ slowed as it entered the orbit of Alpha Prime and settled into a geo-synchronous pattern ever the area of the monastery. It lay on the central continent surrounded by vast quantities of jungle terrain. There was no way the ship, though it was a relatively small craft, could land in such dense vegetation and tree cover.

  The ‘Cavalry’s sensors picked out a small clearing in the jungle about eight kilometres from the monastery and set its downward trajectory to aim for that spot. Alerting the crew through its internal landing lights, the ship plunged down towards the planet. Kyle looked at the viewer as the vast expanses of green grew larger and filled the screen. He reduced the magnification steadily as the ship neared the surface, until the view he had was one with no magnification at all.

  At this point, he strapped himself into his small, lightweight hover-pak and slotted his Plasma Rifle and Guided Missile Launcher, or GML as the crew called them, into the storage slots provided on the back of the pak. He had a large knife stored and hidden in the leg holster that also housed his tiny laser pistol, for emergency use. He had a large pocket in his laser deflector jacket that he used to carry Snare & Stun nets and concussion grenades.

  As he was attempting a day mission, he did not wear the Night Helmet he often used, but other than that he felt he was fully loaded and ready to go. The rest of the crew tended to kit themselves out with the same gear, with the exception of Pope’s using his Machine Gun and Fenchurch using various guns of questionable origin in addition to what Kyle used. Cameron, of course, always took exactly what his cousin took on a mission.

  This, Kyle felt was a good thing as he knew at any one time what kind of back up he had from his crew in terms of firepower. If there was one thing he had learned over the years and the countless altercations on countless worlds it was that you could never have too many guns and too much firepower. While there was a lot to be said for guile and tactical awareness, he was a big believer in the maxim that ‘might is right’.

  As the ‘Cavalry’ touched down on Alpha Prime with barely a shudder it switched off its artificial gravity and let the planet’s Coriolanus force supply the necessary pull to keep them all from floating away. The landing lights went out in Kyle’s cabin and he left the room for the loading lift. He was met en-route by a silent Pope and a beaming Cameron who couldn’t stop himself from talking though he knew it annoyed his crewmates.

  “Are we all ready to get some then?” he smiled. No answer came from his colleagues except a small smile from his cousin and a sigh of weariness from Pope.

  “I mean, we are going to walk through this job,” he continued as they neared the loading lift.

  They could see Fenchurch was already at the lift waiting silently. Kyle spoke up. “Cameron, I have told you many times not to say that, It will come back to haunt us one day.” They entered the loading lift and it descended to the lush floor of vegetation below. The loading lift was a cylinder roughly large enough for ten people to stand comfortably, and it acted as a means of leaving the ship without compromising the integrity of the ships airlocks and seals.

  The cylinder slid down under the centre of the ‘Cavalry’ and rested once touching the solid floor below. The crew looked out of the clear walls of the lift to ensure there were no dangers close by and then opened the lift locks and exited the cylinder. Once the door closed and clicked itself locked, it slid back up into the belly of the ship as if it were never there. Kyle fingered the ‘lift recall’ button on his com-unit that he had implanted in the flesh of his forearm. This unit allowed him to contact the other members of his crew as well as the ‘Cavalry’ and was a vital part of his equipment.

  Only Pope refused to have the com-unit implanted into his arm and so carried a chain around his neck which, as well as featuring the religious signs and symbols of his God, had a com-unit dangling at the end of it. Kyle had long argued that this could be lost or taken from him and would therefore put Pope in danger if he were captured or got lost. Pope usually replied that the implanted unit could also be taken from him, only this would cause him more pain in the process.

  This was something that Kyle couldn’t deny and so the two had agreed to differ. Kyle always felt a second of panic when he saw the loading lift slide seamlessly into the ‘Cavalry’ and needed to reassure himself of his route back into his ship by fingering his lift recall button. Pope and Cameron scouted ahead to make sure the landing area was clear, then all four powered up their Hover-paks and were soon gliding two metres over the canopy of trees at speed towards the monastery.

  Kyle’s Hover-pak showed their speed to be just over sixty kilometres an hour and from this, he calculated they would be needing to drop to the forest floor and approach on foot in about five minutes time. ‘But,’ he thought, ‘we may as well enjoy not walking for as long as we can and save our energy for later.’

  With this in mind, he allowed he allowed himself the luxury of relaxing and savouring the feeling of air rushing against his face. The Hover-paks had been one of the best things he had ever acquired. He had stolen them from a Company laboratory on the Martian Colony a couple of years prior when he had been employed to test them. Obviously, he had given fraudulent details to secure the job in the first place. He had put one on his back and swooped over the testing range, picking up as many as he could from the pile he was supposed to be testing his way through and disappeared into the sunset.

  As it transpired, only six of the twenty-two he had been able to carry away actually worked, but that was six more than he owned before the ‘acquisition’ so he was pleased with that. The crew of the ‘Cavalry’ powered their way over the treetops until the monastery began to be in sight and then dropped down to the ground and switched off their Hover-paks.

  “Aw,” moaned Cameron playfully, “I hate it when I have to walk.” No one paid any attention to the young man and they all set off through the trees in the direction of the monastery. Keeping their eyes open for signs of people at all times, they wove their way with difficulty through the thick undergrowth.

  ***

  “Father Cassius,” blurted the young novice as he entered the main chamber of the monastery. All the monks in the room looked round, unused to such disturbances. The young novice walked closer to an old monk with almost perfectly white hair and a serene look of calm. The old man had seen the approach of the novice but had chosen to ignore the younger man until he was beside him.

  Only then did the old man speak. “Brother Aylett, what is it that troubles you?”

  The young man, grateful to be acknowledged but nervous at speaking to the father of the monastery, spoke quickly and in a panicked tone. “Father, forgive me for intruding on your contemplation, but strangers approach; and they fly like the birds!!!”

  Father Cassius thought deeply about this and then spoke to the young man in a perfectly calm voice. “Brother Aylett, these strangers mean us no good. Of that, you can be sure. It may be provident for us to break open the armoury and man the guard posts.”

  With this the old man returned to his contemplation, but this was not enough for the young novice. Aylett shuffled his feet with nervous energy and spoke again in faltering tones. “Forgive me, Father, but who are these men and why do they come here now of all times? Do they mean to stop the….”

  “Brother Aylett, who the men are is of no consequence. They come to take what is holy to us. They come to do what dozens of others have tried to do. To take from us the relics of T’suk that we hold dear. But they will meet the same fate as the others who have come here and tried. All will die.”

  Seeing that the young man was still troubled the old monk spoke kindly and quietly once more. “Do not be fearful, Brother. Th
ey cannot stop that which must be. Our God’s time will come again; so it is written, so will it be. These men can do nothing to prevent that.” A few moments later the walls of the monastery were lined with monks armed with laser pistols, all waiting for the oncoming strangers; and with orders to kill them all.

  From the edge of the jungle, the crew of the ‘Cavalry’ looked out furtively, trying to see if any monks were walking in the grounds. The monastery had been greatly altered, Kyle observed to his dismay. The courtyard had been left clear and open and the turrets around the walls were ideal lookout posts. The open ground the team would need to traverse to get to the main gate was several hundred metres, and it would be difficult to cross without being seen.

  “Things look fairly quiet,” said Cameron cheerfully. “Let’s go.”

  He went to take a step and was restrained by his cousin. “No, there’s something wrong here. It’s too quiet.”

  “Monasteries tend to be quiet,” Pope reasoned, but Kyle was not having it.

  “This is too quiet. I can’t see anyone about at all. That can’t be normal. Switch your deflector jackets on,” he ordered. The jackets protected the wearer from laser fire for a total sustained period of about two minutes before they would need to be switched off to recharge. Kyle hoped that they would not be needed and could think of no reason why he should be concerned about a bunch of monks. Perhaps his long association with Pope had led him to the realisation that holy men could be warlike as well.

  He just had a feeling they were walking into something a little unusual this time. He didn’t like the look of the courtyard one bit, it looked to have been designed to be easy to defend. It could just be a natural clearing, and certainly that was what it looked like, but if so then the coincidence was extraordinary.

  “Can’t see anything,” mused Pope. However, he too was beginning to feel that something was wrong. Fenchurch, on the other hand felt nothing. He was getting tired of waiting around and took a step into the clearing. He had taken only a couple of steps into the clearing when he was hit with several laser blasts and he fell to the ground immediately.

  Kyle sighed. “I hope he had his deflector on, or he’s a goner.”

  “What the hell is going on? Who’s shooting at us?” snapped Cameron.

  Pope assessed the situation concisely. “It appears the monks knew we were coming and are ready to defend themselves.”

  “Hmmm,” Kyle thought out loud, “this is going to be more difficult than I thought.”

  “What do we do?” asked Cameron.

  Fenchurch had started to crawl back to the shelter of the jungle, obviously knocked to the ground by the force of the blasts but otherwise unhurt. Kyle was pleased to see that the Deflector jackets were working at least. He became aware that everyone was looking at him, and decided on the only course of action he could think of. Charging his plasma rifle and unclipping a couple of concussion grenades, he said, “Looks like a charge across hostile terrain with no cover. Your jackets run out in two minutes. The blasts will knock you down and slow you up. Try to weave and avoid being hit. If you’re still out in that courtyard when your jackets run out, you’re dead. This ought to be fun.”

  He grinned like he was quite mad and ran headlong into a wall of laser fire that had once again erupted from various points on the monastery walls. The others ran after him, trying their hardest to avoid running in a straight line but painfully aware that the protection of their jackets was running out. Pope was knocked to the floor by a deflected blast from the turret to the teams left, but picked himself up quickly and was on his way again.

  Kyle threw a concussion grenade at the offending turret and the laser fire from that direction stopped momentarily then re-started as the dead monk’s weapon as taken up by another. Fenchurch seemed to have the luck of the devil as he charged across the courtyard, spraying plasma fire across his path. He had made up the most ground and had covered nearly half of the distance when he was finally hit and knocked to the ground once more.

  ‘Damn’, thought Kyle, ‘it would be easy to cover this much terrain in two minutes if we didn’t have to keep getting up from the floor every ten seconds’. His jacket beeped at him to advise he had a minute to go before power shut down and he thought they were not going to make it.

  The monks seemed to realise they could knock the ‘Cavalry’ crew down even if they couldn’t keep them down, Kyle had a feeling that they also knew about deflector jackets He saw that Cameron was constantly knocked down and hadn’t even covered a quarter of the distance. Kyle had a horrible feeling that he was going to lose some of his crew here, and was about to go back to help Cameron when he noticed the laser fire was not so intense anymore.

  He looked up to the sky where he could see a ship flying in at low altitude with guns blazing. It was his ship! Pope had also noticed the arrival of the ship and thanked his God for the invention of sentient ship computers. This was not the first time the ship had come to their aid, that was the reason for Kyle naming her the ‘Cavalry’, but this was easily the most dramatic.

  As the monks aimed their fire at the ship, which had armour to easily withstand such an attack, the crew scrambled to the main gate. This brought them safety from the laser fire as it was directly below the monks’ vantage points. Being so close to the walls of the monastery the crew could not be seen by the monks looking out over them, and Kyle and Pope took the opportunity to hurl grenades into the small gaps in the walls which the monks had been firing out of.

  The crew had all switched their jackets off to recharge while they were out of the line of fire. Kyle had a feeling he would need his jacket once inside the building and needed them fully charged. He could hear the sounds of screams as the grenades he had thrown exploded and his heart sank. He had not wanted the job to be like this, but could not afford to lay down his life for that sentiment.

  The ‘Cavalry’ flew away into the distance, having done what it had intended to do, and Kyle was dismayed to see three small craft fly out of the monastery and give chase to his ship. “What are they?” he said as he watched them track his craft. They had seemed to be no bigger than a large bird of prey, but were spherical and mechanical.

  “Look like some sort of tracker-killer drones,” ventured Pope in a tone which was as amazed as Kyle felt. “Who are these monks?” Tracker-killers were often used in developed colonies as a form of aerial protection. They were robotic devices that tracked a given target and unleashed a barrage of firepower at it once it was caught. Kyle had no idea what a backwater planet like this was doing with these devices.

  Despite its impressive sounding name, Alpha Prime was no more than a stop off on the way to nowhere. The crew knew then, even if they didn’t know already, that they had bitten off a whole load of trouble on this job. Kyle could not be more worried about the ‘Cavalry’. He detested tracker-killer drones. “Damn ship killers, I hope the ‘Cavalry’ blows them all out of the sky,” he spat.

  “So do I,” agreed a dazed Cameron who was recovering from his battering in the courtyard, “It’s a long walk home.”

  “Come on,” said Kyle returning his mind to their immediate priority, “let’s move in. Gamma formation.” In twenty seconds, they were walking through a large smoking hole in the main gate and into the middle of a deadly firefight with monks who seemed to be everywhere.

  The ‘Cavalry’ sensors picked up the drones that were following it and tried to shake them off with few evasive maneuveurs. It too had recognised them as Tracker-killer drones and was rapidly going through its databanks to try to find tactical analysis on how to defeat such a threat. The main problem with fighting Tracker-killer drones was that they were too small and nimble to be able to aim at. They could hit you, but you couldn’t hit them.

  They were closing on it fast and it knew it only had seconds before they were in firing range. A blast off the starboard side told the ‘Cavalry’ that the drones were quicker than it had calculated, and it flew wildly from side to side to try and
avoid their fire. Three drones whizzed after it, getting closer all the time, and they were getting closer with their fire also as the small drones compensated for the ‘Cavalry’s evasive flying.

  The ‘Cavalry’ had been hit with mild blasts twice when it came up with a strategy it thought could work, or at least even the odds up a little. Firing blasts from its rear guns the ‘Cavalry’ cut all thrusters and tried to get the drones to fly by, but they also cut their thrusters expecting the scenario. The ‘Cavalry’ had not believed such a common tactic would fool them but wanted their tiny minds to be occupied while it flew closer to its destination. It had detected that it was only a couple of hundred kilometres from the planet’s magnetic pole and had reasoned that it could withstand the effects of the magnetic maelstrom at the pole better than the smaller, less armoured drones could. It seemed to be the only hope as it could not outrun the drones and could not avoid their fire forever. Only another fifty kilometres to go and the ‘Cavalry’ continued to try and keep the drones occupied with evasive flying.

  Spinning and whirling through the air, the deadly dogfight was a sight to behold, but the ‘Cavalry’ knew it couldn’t last much longer. It had already been hit on the port side and had lost a thruster. As it happened, this made its flight path more erratic and made it harder for the drones to get a lock on the fleeing ship. It flew over the planet at enormous speeds and was over the pole in seconds; it slowed and hovered there, waiting for the drones to follow.

  The small pursuing craft also slowed as they neared. The lead craft crossed the pole and the magnetic field played havoc with the computer brain in the drone. It slowed to almost a complete stop as it fought to clear its circuits of the interference it was suffering from. This made it an easy target for the ‘Cavalry’ which, being a larger and more heavily shielded ship, could repel the forces it hovered inside.