by Marc Everitt
Three short, sharp blasts of the ‘Cavalry’s pulse weapon and the small drone exploded, the remaining pieces falling to the ground below. The other two drones hovered warily, unwilling to go any closer and fired at the ‘Cavalry from a distance. The distance that the drones were compelled to fire from, however, meant the ‘Cavalry’ had plenty of time to avoid the pulses and fire back with its far more powerful weapons. It reasoned that the drones were deadly to a ship when pursuing it or in very close contact with it, but less effective when in a straight face to face shoot out.
Without being able to close in on the ‘Cavalry’ and finish it off the drones could only fire ineffectively at it. It was only a matter of time before one of the powerful blasts from the ‘Cavalry’ hit a drone. One after the other the drones fell to the firepower of the larger ship and, as they did, it limped back to the drop point to reactivate its repair droids to work on the damaged thruster while it waited for the crew. The ship tried not to think too much about its crew overwhelmed by the hordes of monks it detected in the monastery. It had a horrible suspicion they were being overwhelmed as it repaired itself.
“One minute there are hundreds of them and the next, they are gone,” pondered Kyle as he gazed around the deserted monastery. The floor of the room was littered with stunned monks who would not come around for several hours and some dead ones who would not come around at all. Halfway across the main hall of the monastery Kyle and Fenchurch had been laying down covering fire while Pope and Cameron recharged their jackets, when all of a sudden, the monks seemed to leave their heavily fortified positions and flee the hall altogether.
This was something that worried Kyle greatly. The monks were obviously prepared to defend their ground with courage and it was not in keeping with the way of the assault so far that they should disappear out of the room as if giving up. “Perhaps it was time to pray,” offered Cameron only to be met with a disapproving glare from Pope.
Kyle peered around the pillar he stood behind at the empty hall and had a sudden thought. “If you had an easily defensible position, why would you leave it?”
Pope thought for a moment and then his face turned grave. “Only if I were going to try and flush the attackers out of hiding.” Just then gas began to pour out of the vents in the walls which had just opened. The crew looked wildly for somewhere to run and hammered on the vast locked doors at either end. With no chance of escape and no way to avoid the fumes, Kyle saw his men fall one by one until, finally, he fell himself and could see no more.
***
The first thing that he saw when he, surprisingly, opened his eyes was a striking looking portrait of a young lady, dressed in similar robes to the monks they had been fighting. He hadn’t recalled seeing any women in the building. The painting seemed to be very old, but the woman’s simple beauty shone through the years. On closer inspection, he saw the picture was dated 2243 and felt sorry that he would never meet the lady in question. Then he surveyed the rest of his surroundings.
He was surprised when he awoke for two reasons. One was that he was waking up at all and the other was that he did not recognise the calm, tranquil surroundings he could see all around him. Kyle found himself in a plushly decorated room, which did not seem to be in keeping with the rest of the monastery he had seen, if he was even in the monastery at all. The walls were covered in delicate silks and materials he couldn’t place but they looked to him as if they were worth a few credits. There were cushions all over the floor and a rather nice chaise-longue sat invitingly to his right-hand side.
‘Where am I?’ he thought. The situation did not make any sense to him, first they were fighting tooth and nail with the monks and then he was here. He looked around. The rest of the team were sprawled on the floor in various groggy stages of returning to consciousness. He could see that all their weapons had been taken from them. He reached to his shin. ‘Damn’, he thought as he realised his emergency gun and knife had also been taken from him. Strangely, the hover-paks were still on the crews’ backs. He could see Cameron moaned as he held his head to try and stop the immense throbbing that Kyle knew he must have also been feeling. He tried to get to his feet and slowly, in stumbling steps, he made it to the chaise-longue. It seemed that on these occasions it was always Pope who voiced the crew’s feelings and this time was no exception.
“Why aren’t we dead?” he asked. The only reply he received was a shaking of heads.
Kyle ventured, “There must be something they want from us.”
“They have taken our weapons already. Not that they’re short on those.”
“Yeah,” mused Kyle, “but they didn’t take our paks.”
“Well, they couldn’t, could they? They are thermally sealed to our backs and need to be released with the code sequence,” answered Pope brightly. This seemed to Kyle to be the sensible answer. The Hover-paks needed to be secure to their backs so as to reduce the accidental dislodgement of them whilst in flight. In order for the crew to remove them, they needed to have a code entered into them. If the monks had tried to remove them without the code they would certainly have been disappointed.
As his head began to clear, Kyle tried to formulate a plan of escape. “We need to get out of here?” he stated bluntly.
“Yep, God damn this Hell hole,” joked Cameron looking around the plush, luxurious room they found themselves in.
“Why put us here? If they wanted our paks they could have left one of us alive and put that person in a dungeon,” queried Pope. His tone was beginning to get concerned, but the answers he sought were soon to be revealed.
The door to the room swung open and Father Cassius entered with two burly, well-armed monks as escorts. He smiled benevolently and approached the crew. The two escorts snarled under their cowls and fingered their guns menacingly. “I see you are awake. I trust you feel well,” smiled the old man kindly.
“We are delighted with your hospitality,” said Kyle diplomatically before Fenchurch had a chance to say what he knew he was thinking.
“Why are we alive?” asked Cameron with all the tact of youth. The old man smiled as if talking to a simpleton and sat himself down on the floor as if about to tell them a story. Kyle hoped it was a good one.
“There are two things we need from you,” started Cassius.
“Here it comes,” winced Cameron before he shrank back from a look from his cousin. Kyle apologised for his cousin and asked the old man to continue. He did so cheerfully.
“We need your floating devices. They seem to be stuck to your bodies. We also need you to tell us why you came here at this time?”
The crew looked from one to another with frowns and worried glances. Kyle decided the best approach would be honesty. “We were sent here to steal relics from your monastery.”
“We know this, what we don’t know is who sent you.”
This was not a question the crew actually knew the answer to themselves. Kyle explained to them that he had just received an anonymous communication that he should do the job, deliver the goods to Earth and leave them in a designated area then wait for his money to be transferred by guaranteed exchange. This was not likely to be an answer that would please to old monk and Father Cassius could see that he was not getting any response.
He spoke again, this time more quietly. “Do you know who we are?”
The crew shook their heads. Fenchurch muttered that he thought they were a bunch of ‘funky monk lunatics’ and received a blow to his head from the butt of one of the monk’s rifles for his trouble. He didn’t speak again during the conversation that followed.
The old man continued, “We are disciples of the mighty T’suk. We await the return of our Gods and have done for hundreds of thousands of years. The time is near now and we are preparing ourselves for our salvation and enlightenment. Then you come. I am concerned that you have been sent here by one who knows what is about to happen and thinks he can stop it. So you can see I need to know who sent you.” Kyle shrugged and pointed out they didn’t know who had se
nt them and showed the old monk the communication that he had kept in his pocket.
The old man smiled as he inspected the communication. “Ah, I see this is as I suspected. The Company and its shadowy cohorts in Social Control have sent you here. We were concerned that you may have been Social Control yourselves but I do not believe that you are. I think you have been duped and used to do others dirty work. I think you have had a lucky escape, my friends.”
Kyle found this conversation to be amazing. “How can you call us your friends? We are here to steal your relics and have killed dozens on your brothers.”
“Don’t remind him,” urged Cameron, as if he felt the monks may have forgotten the events of the past hours.
Kyle continued, “How can you say we have had a lucky escape?”
“Firstly, you have killed none of our brothers. We have suffered no fatalities here for over two centuries. Secondly, you must know that you would have been killed the second you delivered the relics to Earth. The Company has sent people here before to do this job, none have succeeded and they would never have been paid if they did,” said Father Cassius.
Cameron chose this time to air his confusion. “What is going on? Are we going to be killed or not?” Pope shook his head sadly, did this boy have no dignity.
“We will not kill you, but you can never leave here. It has been decided that it is too near to the enlightenment to allow for bloodletting to occur.”
“What about the men we killed?” Kyle persisted.
“My son, you have killed no one. I have told you that,” answered the old monk patiently. “Let me explain.” The explanation they heard made them all sit wide-eyed in disbelief. When the monk was finished, he politely asked the crew to remove their hover-paks and took them with him as he left the room. Kyle heard a distinctive click as a large locking mechanism slid into place inside the heavy door, then sat for a while and tried to digest what the old monk had just told them.
Apparently, the Disciples of T’suk had come into being when they had stumbled upon the remains of a vast archaeological find which dated back thousands of years to the dynasty of the T’suk empire. These beings were the founders of the biggest empire the galaxy had ever seen and were technologically advanced. From what the monk had been saying, they had died out thousands of years ago, but the monks believed they would return. They thought that the time was very near, and when the T’suk did return, they would come back and finish the empire building job they started all that time ago.
The old man had pointed out that one of the escort monks who stood in the room was one of the men who had been ‘killed’ in the battle in the main hall. Fenchurch had shouted that he could remember shooting the man and was sure he had been dead. Apparently, these monks had amazing recuperative powers and could not die. The monks who had fallen in the hall had merely been taken away and treated with what the old man had called the Nectar of T’suk, and their wounds had healed.
The crew found this difficult to believe but could not argue with the fact that they could see monks they had thought they had killed walking around with no injuries at all. The old man had even given them a demonstration by pouring a little of a gold liquid he had secreted in a small vial in his robes onto the large swelling on the head which Fenchurch had received from the butt of the gun. Miraculously, the swelling receded before their eyes. The old man had just smiled, he was used to such wonders. After that, the crew had been more inclined to believe the monk. Apparently, no one had died in the monastery for over two hundred years. This, they claimed, was because of the liquid in the vial which was a gift from their Gods.
When Kyle had jokingly asked where it had come from he had been told that it was from a world nearby but the monk could not tell him where that was as it was a world holy to the monks. The crew had been told that they would be spending the rest of their natural lives in the room they were now locked in. They would receive food and drink but could never leave. Kyle chewed the whole unbelievable situation over in his head.
The one factor of which he was sure was that the liquid in the old man’s vial was an incredible find. If the crew could find the source of it, it would be worth a fortune to the highest bidder. But first they needed to escape. Pope interrupted his thoughts, “No wonder they fought so bravely. They knew they couldn’t be killed.”
“How do we get out of here?” asked Cameron, frustrated but tired. Fenchurch piped up from the back of the room.
“Well, I have an idea,” Kyle said. The crew gave him their full attention and a smile returned to their faces as he explained what he had in mind.
When the monks next came to bring the crew their food they found the room empty and ran to the Father of the monastery to tell him the men had escaped. As they fled the room a couple of seconds passed then the crew of the ‘Cavalry’ appeared out of thin air in the room. The door had been left open and they quickly moved through it and out into the monastery to search for the way out.
“We should get our kit before we go,” Cameron suggested as they ran through the corridors of the monastery, ducking behind pillars to avoid monks coming the other way. It had taken over an hour to build up enough concentrated charge in the deflector jackets that the crew were wearing to achieve the task in hand. A short burst from the jackets had allowed them to deflect not only laser but also all other forms of light.
Of course, this could not last for long, as it required an enormous amount of power, but it had bent the light around them and rendered them invisible. The brilliant scheme had one drawback, however, as it had burnt out the power cells in the jackets and they now had no defence against hostile fire. But they were free and if they could get back to the ‘Cavalry’ they had plenty more weapons and jackets there.
The only thing that they didn’t have a spare set of was the Hover-paks. Kyle hated to lose them but it was more important to get out of the place as soon as they could. He thought that if they could escape and find the source of the restorative liquid then he could buy as many Hover-paks as he wanted. “There is no time for that, besides we have no idea where they are being kept,” answered Pope as they ran.
A couple of times it seemed as if they were bound to be caught but their luck held all the way to the main gate. They ran into two monks there but had the advantage of surprise and the knowledge that however much they hurt the monks they would be restored good as new within the hour. Fenchurch had moaned that this had made the idea of violence cheap and meaningless but hadn’t minded dealing with the monks all the same. He saw it as good practice for when he really did kill again.
Then they were out of the gate and into the jungle, struggling their way through ten kilometres of harsh, uncompromising terrain to get back to the ship. Kyle only wished he knew whether he had a ship to get back to, or whether the ‘Cavalry’ was lying in a hundred pieces on the ground. It would certainly take them several hours to get back to the ship but at least the jungle gave them good cover and stopped the monks from following them.
When they finally arrived, tired and weary, at the landing site, Kyle was overjoyed to see his ship safe and sound. He pressed the switch on the implanted com-unit, which he had pointed out to Pope on the trek back would have been taken from him if it were not implanted. The sight of the lowering loading lift was one to bring joy to the crew and, as they boarded the ‘Cavalry’ again, Kyle was in good spirits once more. Two things stayed with him from his visit to the monastery - one was the amazing sight of the restorative liquid working its magic, the other was the haunting quality of the picture on the wall.
Only one of these, however, was likely to lead to money. As the crew disbanded to get on with their business and deal with the incredible day they had encountered in their own way, Kyle was left in the cockpit of the ‘Cavalry’ on his own. He thought to himself that there was obviously a source of the liquid and he didn’t believe for one moment that it came for any God. The old monk had said that it came from a nearby world that was sacred to them.
; He began to look at his star charts to study the nearby systems. It was at this point that the ‘Cavalry’ chose to give its captain the information it had picked up on its way into the system. Studying the data on a nearby world, Kyle smiled with the look of a man who has a plan developing. “Graves’ World. Looks like the ‘Cavalry’ has come to the rescue once more.” He adjusted their flight path and, as they left the orbit of Alpha Prime, told himself that surely Graves’ World couldn’t be as strange as the world they had just left.
***
The small medical centre looked as if a bomb had hit it. More accurately it looked as if an angry monster with large teeth and claws had hit it. When Taylor peered into the room his heart sank. He saw the lights flickering as the fitting dangled by its power flex from the ceiling. The room was in total disarray, tables and medical equipment strewn across the room. He could see no sign of either the Major or the creature, but the devastation in the room was testament to the fact that they had been there.
The room smelt of desperation. It looked to Taylor, as he entered the room cautiously followed by Eli and Chris Maxwell (both sporting large pieces of metal to use as clubs), as if the Major had put up one hell of a fight. There was blood on the floor but not enough to lead Taylor to think the Major had suffered the kind of fatal blow that West knew the creature was capable of inflicting.
Taylor motioned for the team to be quiet and cocked his head to one side straining to hear a sound; any sound. He heard the faint sound of banging and thumping from further down the main corridor. They headed in that direction, with Sara and Alan looking as if they could die of nerves at any time. Taylor thought to himself that he wished that was all they were in danger of dying from. They neared the engineering section of the base and, as they turned into the room, could finally see the creature. The Major had managed to hide himself inside a storage locker that had so far been able to keep the creature out.
The creature paced up and down in front of the metal locker, occasionally aiming a blow at the door that made a resounding noise echo around the room. Taylor could only guess what kind of state the Major was inside the locker. The creature stopped its pacing and Taylor froze in his tracks. The beast seemed to be sniffing the air and it suddenly whirled to face them, its primitive face a blur of teeth and fury. It charged towards the six terrified team members, and only Taylor had the presence of mind to move quickly. As the creature approached at high speed he dropped to his haunches and ducked under the swipe of the creature’s claws.
