by Marc Everitt
At the same time, he used his left leg as a support and whirled his right leg around in a broad circular motion to sweep the monster of its taloned feet. The contact he made was good and as he leapt up to his feet, backing away all the time he yelled to the others, “Eli, get the Major out of there. The rest of you stay out of its way. Chris, look after the women. Alan, you’re with me.” Not one of the team thought to question the orders Taylor had given; Sara and Lana backed away to a position behind Chris who stood holding his metal rod like it was a sword. Eli ran to the locker and tried to force open the battered door as quickly as he could. Alan followed Taylor as he tried to keep the creature busy and away from the other’s for long enough to free the Major and for them all to escape.
Chris thought it was strange that he was trying to kill the Major not long ago and was now helping to save the old pervert. But he knew there were too many people in the room to do what he really wanted to, and so he played his part, swinging the rod in front of him to make sure the creature had second thoughts about coming any closer. Taylor circled the beast, keeping his distance but still making sure the beast had its mind occupied long enough for Eli to help the Major. He could see that Eli was having difficulty with the badly damaged door and told Alan to go and help. The creature moved to attack Alan as the timid scientist edged towards the locker but Taylor put himself in between the two.
The creature was wary; it was not used to facing this sort of resistance from a prey. Taylor was quick enough to avoid the swiping arms of the beast and used his roundhouse kicks to keep the creature at bay. This sort of action could not hope to keep the beast away for long, but it didn’t need to. He noted with relief that Eli and Alan had succeeded in opening the locker and a badly bleeding Major had practically fallen out at their feet. They picked him up and heading for the door staying as far as they could from the creature. The swamp creature was confused, it never hunted packs of prey and was only used to dealing with one adversary.
The bar-wielding Chris and the nimble Taylor were distraction enough for Eli and Alan to be able to carry the Major over their shoulders to the door. The team began to fall back, with Taylor bringing up the rear as the creature followed, full of hate. Sara, Lana and Chris ran ahead to try to get to some form of safety. Eli, Alan and the Major diverted into a side door that led to the Major’s quarters and Taylor led the beast towards the far side of the station. Sara sighed as they entered the relative safety of the control room, which had a solid, lockable door. Chris fastened the door behind them and slid his back down the door until he was sitting on the floor with his back against the only door to the room. “We should keep an eye out, in case the others need to get in here,” Lana pointed out.
Chris laughed. “No way. This door stays shut.”
Lana was shaking badly as shock to give way to real fear. “But that creature will tear them apart,” Lana pleaded, walking towards Chris. Sara watched as the two Maxwell’s shoved each other and argued. She could see she was going to have to hope the others could manage to fend for themselves against the creature. There was little she could do for them now.
In Alan’s room, the Major was bleeding profusely from a deep wound on his left leg. Eli tied a tourniquet from a piece of bed linen and tried to staunch the blood flow, but was not having a lot of success. Alan, meanwhile, had found the monitor that was connected to the various cameras the Major had set up in secret and was trying to find out what was going on. He flicked from one camera feed to another, and didn’t stop until he saw the monitor that covered the shattered remains of the westerly facing view port. That was obviously where the creature had smashed its way in. No one had thought it necessary to apply the strengthened layer of plasti–steel to the window and the creature would have had no problem in tearing through the weak material in place.
He could find no sign, however, of the creature, or Taylor for that matter. The Major moaned in pain as Eli pulled the tourniquet as tight as he could, and that was quite tight. Alan turned back to the screen and nearly missed what he was looking for, he stopped the camera selector and realised he was looking into the courtyard. The Major must have used his system to tap into the main sensor set up. He could see Taylor trying to lead the creature away from the base and being a little too successful. Eli joined Alan at the monitor; who had done all he could for the Major for the moment.
“God, Taylor, Keep away from that thing. You’ve done enough now,” he whispered knowing full well that Taylor would carry on leading the creature away from them as long as he could. Time after time he watched Taylor miss the opportunity to double back and get into the base, instead he got further and further away from safety. He was managing to avoid the blows for now, but Eli could see that Taylor was tiring.
As Eli watched anxiously, someone else was also watching the action outside through a monitor, only they were less concerned with Taylor’s health then he was. They could also see that the constant avoidance of the creature, coupled with defensive kicks of his own, was wearing the maverick engineer down. A lapse in concentration would be fatal to him now. At that point, they smashed a button on the console in front of them, careful not to be seen by anyone else in the room, and duly provided one.
Outside the building, Taylor was breathing heavily; he had led the furious creature more than two hundred metres away from the base and felt he could manage a burst of speed to get himself inside the base before the creature. ‘This time’, he thought, ‘I’ll make sure all defensive barriers are switched on’. Suddenly, an alarm rang out, loud and piercing. It only distracted Taylor West for half a second, but that was enough.
“God, no!” shouted Eli as he watched his friend on the screen, powerless to help in time. He saw the creature swipe a vicious set of claws at Taylor’s abdomen and was horrified to see large quantities of blood spray out. He saw Taylor’s hand fall to his stomach as if trying to keep the blood in, but he could not hope to do so. The cuts inflicted by the creature were deep, and Alan had to turn away from the screen as Taylor fell to the floor, weakened by the sudden and dramatic loss of blood he had suffered. The creature did not tear him to pieces as Eli thought it surely would. It must have known instinctively that its prey was fatally wounded and decided to carry this particular meal away for later consumption once it had stopped its feeble movement. Eli felt he was going to be sick as he saw his oldest friend dragged off camera to his death.
Appendix 2
Extract taken from “The search for Companionship,” by E. J. Kinshner. Published 2458
The chances of us finding an intelligent species in our travels through the stars would seem, at first, to be fairly good. The incredible amount of planets with the necessary amount of warmth and moisture to allow the chemical reactions that are believed to encourage the initial spark of life would lead us to the conclusion that life should be springing up all over the galaxy. And it is. Except that the life is of a lower level to our own. Man has discovered many forms of life as he has wandered the galaxy and expanded his domain. These creatures have ranged from the simple, such as the Arcanan Water Beetle, to the complex, an example of which would be the vicious Rodlean Swamp Creature, but all had been animals for want of a better word.
Man arranges himself in complicated social structures, has language and is capable of travelling to other worlds. Our species has yet to find a world on which he can observe social interaction above a basic level, can communicate with the inhabitants or has been passed by a flying saucer. The feeling that we are not alone which was so prevalent in the late twentieth century has finally given way to a realisation that we may well be. With the exception of the rumours and unsubstantiated reports of advanced craft approaching our vessels only to streak away at vast incomprehensible speeds, we are left to merely catalogue inferior species as if the galaxy were a menagerie set up for our perusal.
Extract taken from an article published in the New York Times January 17th 2462
It seems fairly clear now that we have expanded our
borders to such an extent that we are finally coming into the most marginal of contact with an alien species of intelligence and advanced technology. The tabloid press has dubbed these ‘monsters from another world’ as malevolent and evil, concerned only with invading our world and stripping it of its riches. The fact that the riches of the Earth have long since been stripped does not seem to occur to the writers.
It seems obvious to this editor that should these beings wish to strip a world of its minerals it would be far easier to do so to a planet that had no way of defending itself rather than a technologically advanced world such as our own. The brief skirmishes with these creatures whom the scientists seem to have termed the Clancix have only allowed us the smallest of glimpses into their nature. We have no recorded images of how they look, or the propulsion systems of their craft. No idea as to how they organise the society on their world or even where that home world would be.
It is rumoured, and certainly the evidence, such as it is, leads towards the conclusion that their home-world or collection thereof is situated somewhere in a region of space currently uncharted and lying approximately one thousand light years distant from Earth colonies. This, while undoubtedly being a great distance, it is not one which could not be traversed by one of the Company’s new S-class starships in a little over a month. There seems to be little doubt that the Clancix, as we shall continue to call them in reference to the almost fanatical support this naming of their species has received, have developed the means to cross this divide in a much shorter time.
All this would lead us to the inevitable conclusion that our world is not as far from its galactic cousins as we used to feel. Whether or not they are well disposed to or even aware of us remains to be seen. Extract taken from the testimony of Edward R. Tenchord, convicted mass murderer, shortly before he was executed by barium injection on July 17th 2498.
No evidence was ever found to substantiate the claims and it is generally felt this is one of dozens of cases of ‘xenophobic dementia’. “Are you even listening to me? They will come again. I promise you that. You may think you are solving the problem when I am gone, but I am telling you again I never touched those people. But I did see it. I saw it all. The ship, the creatures - God, help us, they hate us all, the things they did to those poor people. I didn’t understand why they didn’t kill me as well. But, hell yeah, now I get it. They felt better if I took the fall for it. Made things easier for them, I guess. Well, sir, yes, I’m ready to die. The question is, are all of you? Because I know they’ll be back. There ain’t a thing I the world we can do to stop them.”
Chapter Eight
Field Trip
Earth
Benny 4 ran out from under the bed as quickly as his little legs could possibly carry him. Wang shouted out to Rodriguez that he had found the cat and Benny 4 could hear the taller man’s steps coming swiftly closer. Benny 4 knew it would be destroyed if it were caught and decided that it had done all it could to protect its home and buy time until the police could arrive. It checked its internal chronometer, ignoring the fact that it seemed to be saying it was time for robo-fish, as it ran out of the broken front door and into the hallway. It calculated that the two men would be able to get away with a tenth of the goods in the home in the three minutes it would take the police to arrive. There was, it knew, nothing more it could do and it headed for safety. At least its memory chip would be downloaded and the crooks would be the subjects of a manhunt in the very near future. This did not seem enough though and it put its mind to how it could gain some measure of revenge.
Back inside the apartment, Rodriguez realised the cat had eluded them and, as he had already committed a felony in breaking and entering, he decided to carry on with his robbery. He should be able to get a good haul in the small amount of time remaining, even if he couldn’t get the whole lot. He ordered Wang to help him start the removal of the most valuable goods they could carry easily. The fact that they hadn’t been able to catch and destroy the cat was a huge worry but there was nothing he could do at that moment about that. He would have to try and track the cat down later before the police found it and its memory was used as evidence against them. Picking up a rather expensive piece of electrical hardware from the lounge he smiled; he loved to shop.
The cat ran swiftly, it knew a place where it would not be found. Ducking through alleyways and narrow passages it was suddenly halted by the arrival of a priority message in its small yet sophisticated robotic mind. It was a message coming in on a channel that was only used by one sender. The cat stopped in its tracks and waited to download the message from its creators and secret masters. Benny 4 digested the information from the message and marvelled at what a busy day it was becoming. It had only planned to eat its dinner and have a bit of a sleep, with maybe a bit of time spent scratching at furniture and causing mechanical mischief, but now it had been the victim of a burglary and had a mission to get on with. There was a particularly dangerous man who was making the wrong kind of noises and it needed dealing with.
As a deep cover Company operative, Benny 4 occasionally had adventures almost as exciting as the ones its apparent master told it about. Placed in the area in order to act as one of thousands of mechanical operatives giving worldwide coverage between them, Benny 4 only covered the local area and, if it were honest, there were rarely things going on which merited its attention. The man it had just received a dossier on, however, was entirely a different matter. A terrorist and assassin for many years the man’s name was Rostock. The Company had hired him for a number of jobs in order to make them appear accidents. Rostock felt he was underpaid for one of these jobs and the Company had just got word from one of their other operatives, a robot dog in this case called Mickey 12, that Rostock was in Benny 4’s area.
Apparently, he was tracking down the Company executive who had hired and failed to pay him. It was very rare that Benny 4 did anything other than sleep, eat and play with little pieces of string. However, it was the operative placed in the area and would have to get on with it. It felt a little distracted by the annoyance of its failure to prevent the burglary of its friend and master’s apartment by two such clods as the men it had just been forced to run from. It knew it would have to concentrate on keeping this Rostock fellow away from the terrified executive who had holed up in a safe house until the man/assassin could be apprehended.
A mischievous thought occurred to Benny 4 as it padded its way through the alleyway, perhaps there was a way it could catch the thieves and achieve its mission at the same time. Killing two birds with one stone. Benny 4 would much rather have killed two birds by wounding them and making it impossible for them to fly then chasing and teasing them before tearing out their guts and eating them and finally leaving their remains on its master’s floor as a gift.
Still, the metaphor made more sense with the use of a stone. As Benny 4 planned what it was going to do to keep the assassin away from the Executive and also to catch the crooks it purred happily and its tail rose up and waved lazily and it strutted its way along the alley. All it needed was to find a nice rotten fish and its good mood would be complete.
Its master’s mood, however, was one of intense sadness and grief. Eli had known Taylor West for such a long time and they had grown to be so close that he couldn’t believe his friend was gone. They had faced a large number of life threatening situations on many worlds together and it was hard for Eli to cope with the knowledge that he was not going to see his friend again. It seemed unbelievable that Taylor had managed to avoid his demise at the hands of professional assassins, evil geniuses and psychopaths, but had eventually lost his life to a mindless beast on a backwater world lightyears from anywhere. Eli sobbed softly as he sat on his bunk in the room that he and Taylor had shared.
He knew he should be with the others trying to repair the damage that the creature had wreaked before Taylor had selflessly drawn it away, but he simply couldn’t bear to see anyone. He hadn’t realised how much he had leant on Taylor for su
pport until he no longer had Taylor there to lean on anymore. He rose to his feet, eyes still moist and face streaked with his tears. He walked to the bathroom and tried to find a tissue with which he could blow his nose and another to dry his eyes. His grief would have to wait. However hard it was, he knew he would have to get back out there and try to help the others. Could he have helped Taylor? He knew deep down that he would never have been able to get out into the courtyard before the creature had dealt the fatal blow, but still the thought kept whirling around his tortured head like a dervish trying to find the way out. He took a deep breath and walked out of the room, looking a little more composed but feeling no different, and headed back to the others.
He found Sara and Alan in the control room applying the final codes to the security system that controlled the fence around the compound. It had been a sombre task to get the fence back up and running but a necessary one. Sara looked at the forlorn figure of Eli as he drifted into the room. “Oh God, you poor thing,” she said and took him in her arms and comforted him. Alan looked on, but could think of no words that would help.
He wished he had never thought to switch on the Major’s outside monitors. Taylor West would still have met the same fate, but at least his best friend would not have had to suffer the agony of having to watch helpless. Alan cursed himself as a fool, and reapplied the final sections of information that the computer needed to power up the fence.
