Planet of Graves

by Marc Everitt

  “Fence is back on line now,” he mumbled solemnly, as if it didn’t matter now. He knew that it did matter a great deal, however, as it would be a tragedy to make Taylor’s sacrifice a worthless one. They were safe now from the creature if it decided to come back. Alan wondered where the creature had come from. The planet was supposed to be uninhabited, and certainly had no hazardous life-form like the one they had all seen.

  Eli interrupted him in his train of thought, “How’s the Major?” The Major had returned to what was left of the medical unit after the creature had left the compound and was receiving treatment for drastic loss of blood. The members of the team were not hopeful that the Major would pull through and every minute that passed seemed to resign the team to the fact that another one of their number was about to be lost.

  “He is in treatment now,” Sara replied as she released hold of Eli and back self-consciously away, “the medi-comp is doing what it can, but….”

  She broke off and her sentence was concluded by Lana who had just entered the room. “He lost too much blood, the medi-comp is just delaying the inevitable.”

  She actually looked sincere, it was as if the recent experiences on the station had made her realise that it was not a game that they were all playing and although she was no big fan of the Major, she knew there was safety in numbers. Eli thought to himself that if the Major died then they were either one murderer less or the list of suspects had shrunk to four. He wondered how Taylor, the pain of even thinking about his friend was almost too much to bear, would have looked at the situation.

  A thought occurred to Eli at that point. “Who is with the Major now?” The remains of the research team looked from one to another and a realisation hit Sara, Alan and Eli at around the same time.

  Lana confirmed their fears without realising it. “It’s all right. Chris is keeping an eye on him.” She had barely finished her sentence when Eli was out of the door and on his way to the shattered medi-lab, certain he would find the Major dead when he got there.

  Sara glared at Lana pointedly. “How could you leave the Major and Chris on their own?”

  “What?”

  “Well, it was not so long ago that your husband tried to kill him. Or had you forgotten?” Sara did not expect a response to her rhetorical question and was surprised to get the one she did.

  “That is all sorted out now, Chris has calmed down about that.”

  Alan snorted his disbelief. “Chris is never calm. I can’t believe you two.” With that, he was out of the door also and on his way after Eli, hoping he wouldn’t have to place himself in the line of fire as he was in the canteen. With the two women left alone in the control room, Sara’s attitude changed totally as her self-assurance drained away.

  Lana seemed to know that her colleague was now uncomfortable and knew the cause straight away. She thought to herself that a little more intimidation wouldn’t go amiss. “Have you changed your mind about what we talked about?” she laughed and adopted an almost comic pose of mock seduction. Sara ran from the room, almost in tears and Lana felt very pleased with the power she had obtained. If she had been a little less preoccupied with herself and her mind games, she would probably have noticed the light flashing on the furthermost console which would have told her of the approach of a spaceship about to enter the planets orbit.

  On entering the Medi-lab, Eli was surprised to find the Major alive, albeit very ill and pale, and no sign of Chris anywhere to be seen. After he checked his vital signs, which were worrying to say the least, he came to the conclusion that the Major could not survive much longer. He had simply lost too much blood, and the plasma that the computer had synthesised was not enough. He wondered whether Lana had purposefully left her husband alone with the Major in order that Chris could finish the job he had started in the canteen. But if that was the case then where was Chris?

  None of this made sense to him and he wished Taylor, another wince as he felt the pain return, was there to shed some light on the bizarre behaviour of the team. He was sure that it was often the case that people stationed on remote colonies tended to be a little strange. It was either a reason for, or a by-product of, them being there. He wondered which of the two was to blame in this case. Then he decided he would try to find out, if he possibly could. Alan jolted his arm as he stood silently behind him.

  Eli thought that this was a good a time as any to start his questioning, “The Major’s weak but still alive, we should stay with him as long as we can.”

  “Definitely,” agreed Alan with a nod. He, too, thought it was likely that Chris would try to kill the Major while he was in this state.

  “Alan, why are you here?” Eli asked as they sat by the bedside of the Major.

  “What do you mean?” frowned Alan, confused.

  “On Graves’ World. Why are you here?”

  “Well, the readings of the tremors which the planet….”

  “No, no, I know about all that and it is interesting. But there are a million places in the colonies where you could study earthquakes. Why here?”

  “I wanted to come here,” offered Alan unconvincingly. Eli pressed on now he had the scent of the truth.

  “What about the others? Are they all big fans of Graves’ World?”

  “No,” Alan warmed as the conversation briefly swerved away from him, unaware that he was talking himself right where Eli wanted him. “Chris was posted here as punishment for an attack on his last station commander.”

  Eli shook his head. “Nothing changes then.”

  Alan continued, “Will was sent here because nowhere else would have him. Lana came as a package with her husband. The Major didn’t fit in anywhere so they sent him out here where it doesn’t matter.”

  “So they were all posted here to get them out of the way,” muttered Eli. It was obvious to him that Hanley would have been sent there for the same reason. But what was Alan’s story?

  “Why are you here, Alan?” he tried again and this time received an answer.

  “I…. I….. was unlucky, I suppose,” started Alan. “In the wrong place at the wrong time.” Alan told Eli the whole story. Alan Johnson had worked on the colony at Ceti-Beta 7 for several years, but had failed to notice the coming of, and therefore warn the colony about, a large earthquake which had left hundreds dead and thousands homeless. He had been otherwise engaged when the readings came in to the post he was supposed to be monitoring. It sounded to Eli as if there had been a woman involved and found it difficult to blame Alan for not having spent his entire time watching a steady stream of numbers spewed out by a computer.

  The Company’s judicial department, in its benevolence, found him not guilty of extreme negligence as there were mitigating circumstances and instead found him guilty of the lesser charge of adversely affecting the reputation of the Company and sent him to a distant colony for a non-specific term of duty.

  As it happened, Alan quite liked where he was posted, until people started to die left, right and centre. He had long held the opinion that he had been sent out of the way to avoid the Company’s embarrassment. They certainly didn’t want it to be common knowledge that on the day in question Alan had been coming to the end of a duty shift which was already ten hours longer than the maximum allowed working hours.

  Eli absorbed all this information, but it still left him none the wiser, he knew why Chris and Lana were here and the answer made sense. The Major and Will; he could also see the reasoning behind the Company getting them out of the way. Hanley too, and at a push Alan. But why Sara, and why himself?

  “Sara wanted to come here,” Alan mused as if reading Eli’s mind. “She’s an expert in the field of alien environments and landscapes. This sort of desolate hellhole is just down her alley.”

  “I wonder why I was sent here. It seems this place is some sort of purgatory. What did I do?” Eli thought out loud, unwilling to mention Taylor’s name in this sentence.

  Alan laughed. “I suppose it does seem like that. We have all got
our reasons. Outer colonies tend to be like that.” A seed had sown itself in Eli’s mind and he cogitated and tried to make it grow. It occurred to him that these outer colonies were easy places for people to hide if they didn’t want their actions to be too closely examined. The inner colonies had more people and stricter protocols in place to stop you doing what you shouldn’t.

  It was no wonder that the crime rate on such worlds was so much lower than the outlying planets. The Company made a show of having security presence in all sectors of the empire, but in reality it was common knowledge that if you were reasonably careful then you could get away with a lot on outer worlds. It was simply too expensive to place a security force on each world, and not practical in manpower terms.

  This, Eli thought, was one factor that had led to the death of his friend. He could remember so many different times he had spent with Taylor, and although he tried to force them from his mind he could not hope to do so. From the time they met, they had been firm friends. Many people had commented to Eli that Taylor was very aloof with him and seemed not to be bothered whether Eli was with him or not.

  At first, Eli had felt the same way but as time passed and they began to be posted to assignments as a team, he started to understand that if Taylor didn’t like someone, he simply had nothing to do with them. Eli knew that his friend had no time for fools and felt the same way about people he didn’t like. The fact that Taylor was content to work with Eli and had spent a good deal of his spare time with him as well was enough to reassure Eli that his friendship towards Taylor was reciprocated.

  Eli could not remember how many times Taylor had saved his life and would never hope to try to count all the times he had relied on his friend to rescue a situation from what seemed to be certain disaster. Eli recalled the time they had performed an emergency shutdown on the reactor at the Martian Colony capital with minutes to spare and saved thousands of lives. Also the time Taylor had assisted the police in apprehending the man responsible for the shooting of the eminent scientist Dr Marco Everitti hours before he was due to deliver a paper on Global Cooling.

  Eli had no idea how Taylor had not been decorated for services to the Company many times over. Now he never would be, Eli thought sadly. It was certainly true that Taylor had always seemed to fall on his feet and had a certain autonomy of action in many circumstances. He had always attributed that to luck and good judgement, but Eli had a suspicion that a lot of Taylor’s lucky escapes and provident placements were the actions of someone looking out for the maverick engineer.

  If there was such a person, or persons, then they had no need to do so any more, Eli pondered, as Taylor had finally run out of luck. It didn’t seem real to Eli, no matter how sad he felt. Taylor couldn’t be dead. He knew, however, that he would just have to resign himself to the fact that he was and the cold truth that he would have to go on without him. There was nothing else he could do, and that impotence galled him greatly. Even if he managed to solve the mystery of who had murdered Shanks and brought the Swamp creature to the planet that killed Hanley and Taylor, the whole sorry tale would leave him with a sour taste in his mouth every time he thought about it.

  No conclusion to this little drama could be grand enough to overshadow the death of Taylor West, and Eli could think of very little that would be able to do that. The foreseeable future appeared to Eli as a dark, badly cobbled sidestreet which led to somewhere bad, and wasn’t a safe or enjoyable trip in any case. Taylor had seemed to stroll through life easily and without too much thought; an impression that belied the immense level of cogitation that was occurring inside his mind.

  The easy nonchalance that he wore around him like a cloak had always stretched to cover Eli as well, and Eli had always felt calmer when Taylor was around. It was as if nothing bad could happen when his good luck charm was in place. Now, though. The lucky charm was lost and Eli couldn’t help but be concerned about how things were going to pan out and whether any of them would live to see any world other than the bleak uninviting plains of Graves’ World.

  This seemed to Eli to be the nadir of his adult life, but he knew he had to push on. If he were to have any chance of getting off the planet alive he would have to stop the murderer before he could be allowed to continue his twisted purpose. Eli wondered what that purpose could be. If it was Chris Maxwell who had killed Hanley, then he supposed it was possible that he did it because of the alleged affair that was going on between Hanley and his wife. That would certainly be motive enough, Eli thought. He tried hard not to believe that Hanley had been killed simply because he was the sort of man to raise murderous thoughts in the best of men.

  Eli followed the train of thought to see where it would lead him. He had a good motive for Chris to have arranged the accident that had killed Hanley but what about Shanks? Had Will known something about Chris? Certainly, the information given to Eli by Alan previously about what Will had told him the night before he died strongly suggested that Chris was up to something he didn’t want the others to know. Eli knew from experience that didn’t necessarily mean the obvious conclusion, but the evidence against Chris seemed so strong.

  Also, Eli found it too much of a coincidence that Chris was outside the building when the fence came down. But why do that and not prepare himself for the coming of the creature that he, if he were the man Eli was looking for, surely would have known was coming? Why come back into the danger area like he did? The whole thing just didn’t seem to make sense. If Chris had brought the creature to the planet and had been hiding it outside the fence he could have used it to dispose of his wife’s lover, that was true. He could have killed Shanks to cover himself for the earlier crime. But the attack on the base by the creature, what purpose would that serve?

  And why do it when he was outside the base, thereby making him an obvious suspect and also a potential victim for the beast’s mindless rage? Eli could tell that no one else on the station was thinking this about Chris or else they would surely have accused him of it, but it was only a matter of time.

  Eli’s thinking was interrupted by the beeping of the medi-comp that stirred him back to the bedside of the Major. He looked at the readings on the tiny screen and his heart sank further. The level of activity in the Major’s brain was being monitored by the computer, and Eli could see that the level was dropping as the blood loss began to affect the motor neurones in the brain. The plasma infusion from the computer seemed to be wearing off as the Major’s body struggled to keep itself alive. It appeared obvious to Eli that the Major would never regain consciousness and he turned sombrely to Alan who stood quietly, knowing what was about to come. “Alan, you’d better let the others know. The Major’s dying.”

  “Can we do anything?” Alan asked with a tone of voice that indicated he already knew the answer. Eli shook his head sadly as he saw the levels of brain activity level out to nothing and the medical computer discontinue its connection to the Major.

  “Nothing at all. He’s gone.”

  As Eli and Alan mourned the passing of Major Hastings at his bedside in the research station on Graves’ World, a spacecraft was settling nicely into orbit around the planet. It slowed its velocity to match the rotation of the planet and hovered a thousand miles above the surface of the world. The vessel appeared sleek and brand new; it had no signs of corrosion or collision from any space debris. It had the look of a ship that was fast and purposeful, and this was echoed by its pilot. Inside the vessel the Warrior stood in front of its vast armoury and tried to decide which of its many weapons it should use when it descended upon the face of the planet.

  The single eye pulsed as the Warrior increased the magnification of its vision and focused in on a deadly looking gun which it seemed to instinctively know was suitable to destroy human beings and similar species. When its creators had ruled the galaxy, the human race was merely a primitive species, bound by ignorance to their homeworld and devoted to petty wars over land ownership. The T’suk had never really bothered too much with the human race
at the time, but had been careful enough to study the forms of life on the planet. From this lengthy ancient research the T’suk had been able to supply their final creation with weapons which would be suitable for use against all possible races, humans included.

  The Warrior picked up the weapon and tested its weight. It felt perfectly balanced for the Warrior to use, and with good reason. It had been specifically designed to be used by the Warrior, aeons after its, and the Warriors’, creation. After thousands of years stored in the small spaceship’s armoury the weapon was as good as new. The appendage rising from the base of the Warrior’s back throbbed with the latent energy that the creature possessed. The Warrior could feel the energy in its appendage and knew it required a release.

  It also knew it would be landing shortly and then would have a chance to use its deadly weaponry to good effect. It felt a burning need to accomplish its mission, the importance of it was paramount. The Warrior’s whole being was devoted to the protection of the project its creators had set into motion so long ago. The Warrior knew all about the solution its creators had found for their genetic inheritance and had no feelings about it one way or another. It concerned the Warrior not a bit what would happen if the project came to fruition.

  No, the Warrior corrected its own thought, when the project came to fruition. It would see to it that nothing would disturb these vital stages, and that it’s creators’ purpose in developing it would not be allowed to be rendered irrelevant. The ship’s control computer spoke to the Warrior in the same bleak monotonous voice as it always did. “In position for your descent to the surface.” The Warrior signalled its approval and marched over to the main viewer to see how the planet looked. It betrayed no clue as to the secret it hid, nor did the Warrior expect it to.

  The computer droned, “The ship will enter landing co-ordinates at your discretion.” The Warrior entered in the landing data, despite the fact that the ship knew exactly where it was going. As the Warrior did so, it confused the ship with the exact location of their proposed landing site.