Planet of Graves

by Marc Everitt

  “This data appears to be incorrect. The site of the disturbance is twenty miles to the east of these co-ordinates,” the computer informed the Warrior. The Warrior shook its heavily armoured head in what is a universal sign of disagreement and used the interface panel to enter its reasoning for entering another landing site. It had detected a second area of foreign activity on the planet, this one a smaller installation on the surface which appeared to be unhidden and poorly defended. The Warrior felt it made sense to take care of this problem before it approached the real disturbance to the T’suk project. Focusing the ship’s sensors on the smaller site it zoomed in to get a closer look at what appeared to be a small building, circular in design with an area of land around it and a fence at its circumference.

  It detected the life signals of beings in the area, unshielded or disguised as the other site was. It could detect six strong life signs in the area and two very weak signals. The Warrior deduced that there were two of the beings who had either just died or were about to. One of the strong life signs was different to the others and the Warrior noted with some surprise that there must be a non-human life form on the surface as well as the humans.

  The non-human life sign was very close to one of the faint and getting fainter life signs and it seemed to the Warrior as if the non-human was either killing the human or had already done so. As the organic body of a life form cooled and slowed its metabolic processes the signs which the sensors could pick up became fainter and fainter. The human near to the non-human had life signs so faint that the ship could barely register them. The same went for the other faint life signs that were located in with the other human signs.

  So, the Warrior thought, this smaller disturbance had five human targets and one non-human target. Probably wise to eliminate the non-human target first, it thought. With this in mind, it had set the landing co-ordinates for an area close to the non-human life sign. The ship ploughed its way smoothly through the thin atmosphere of the planet towards the surface. The Warrior prepared itself for the slaughter. It was what it was born for, and it was looking forward to it immensely

  ***

  Pain was all he knew. All it seemed he could ever know. The only form of consolation was that he knew the pain wouldn’t last much longer. He felt himself fading and his life ebbing away. He couldn’t open his eyes, but he could hear that his killer was nearby. He couldn’t feel anything below his waist, but could feel the steady flow of blood from his wound. He knew he would be dead within minutes. His breathing was almost non-existent and his heart had slowed.

  Many things ran through his mind, as if they all wanted to be the last thing to go through. The result was a melange of different images and memories, including people and places he knew he had seen in his dreams but only now realised who and what they represented. He thought it somehow fitting that only now, at the end, did he really know who he was and where he came from.

  Now, he could faintly hear the approach of his killer, and he tried to prepare himself for the final event in his life. He felt strangely calm and serene. His killer passed his twitching, dying body and he felt that it had left for now. Perhaps it preferred its food to be a little matured before it dined, he joked with the remains of his mind. His eyes appeared to be working again as his dying mind shifted his focus from one area to another and some parts of his body switched on while others switched off.

  He could see around his tomb. It was the lair he had seen earlier, when his killer had been sleeping. It would be the last thing he would ever see, he was sure of that. His observant nature seemed to be persisting to the end, and he noticed the tray he had seen last time and in the far corner of the crudely fashioned hollow he saw…. He didn’t know what it was. Maybe his dying mind was starting to see things, he waited to see a tunnel of light. But it didn’t come. All he saw was a small pool of thick gelatinous liquid oozing though the ground two metres from his body. It glowed with a kind of iridescence that made him believe it was a hallucination conjured up by his dying synapses.

  He suddenly felt he needed to touch the liquid before he died. That was suddenly very important to him as he lay dying on the ground. It took a mammoth effort for him to even move his arms, he was so weak but his will and determination drove him on. In the ten minutes it took for him to drag his half dead body across the floor he wondered why he was doing it several times. He would not let go of the idea that he needed to get to the liquid before his killer returned or before it receded back into the ground from which it came.

  The task of reaching the liquid had become his life’s work, all his goals were now symbolised by the simple, yet immensely difficult crossing of the short distance to the other side of the hollow. As he came within touching distance of the liquid he felt he must be near the end, he could no longer see and his strength was almost gone. He wondered if the advent of death was ever represented by the arrival of a spacecraft because as he dipped his pale, twitching hand in the liquid he was sure he could feel a ship land very close to his killer’s lair. His hand began to tingle as the liquid seeped into his flesh and he felt some strength return to that part of his body.

  It occurred to him that the liquid might possibly contain some sort of pain killing element and so used the last reserves of energy to apply a large quantity of the liquid to his open, fatal wound. He was certain he would still die, but it seemed so important to spread the liquid over the wound and he didn’t have any more will power left to disagree with his instinct. He had the curious sensation of leaving his body and he looked down upon himself, lying dead on the ground. So, he thought, this is what it is like to die.

  Bizarrely, his vicious wound seemed to be getting smaller before his spectral eyes and he felt his spirit being dragged back into his body. Suddenly he was looking up at the roof of the lair with his own eyes and could think of nothing except spreading more of the miraculous liquid on his wound. Despite the horrendous blood loss, he started to feel his strength returning and, one by one, his brain’s synapses resumed their normal functions. The supply of the liquid seemed to be running out but it didn’t seem to matter.

  He raised his arm, amazed to be able to do so, and touched his stomach. There was no longer any sign of a wound at all. He felt strong enough to sit up and did so, he had no idea what had happened to him but he had no intention of hanging around and waiting for the creature to come back and kill him again. ‘Kill me once, shame on you. Kill me twice, shame on me,’ he thought and it made him smile.

  He crawled out of the lair and rose to his feet, feeling woozy but getting better all the time. He felt as if he merely had a bad case of flu or a strong head cold now, and that had to be better than he had felt two minutes before. He looked around him and saw the ship he had thought he had imagined landing, it was of an alien design. He had not seen anything like it and his instincts told him he needed to get away from it and quickly. After all, he needed time to digest the fact that he was still alive and try to work out how that miracle had happened. He was sure that when he had looked down on his body he had been dead, but his body’s recovery had pulled him back at the last minute.

  The liquid obviously had some incredible restorative powers; he had never heard of anything like it, and he had heard of many strange things. He decided that he needed to get a sample of the liquid but when he looked into the lair again the ground seemed to have healed itself much the way the liquid had healed him and he could find no trace of it. He heard the sound of weapons firing coming from the ship and poked his head back out of the lair.

  A blast or energy was coming from the open hatchway in the underside of the ship and seemed to be aimed at an empty section of ground. He should have known better, he had seen the way his erstwhile killer had blended into the landscape before. The weapons fire was aimed at the creature, and it ran back to its lair; hit but not killed. He panicked, he had no time to get out of the lair and hide before the beast got to him. He needn’t have worried as a second burst of energy, the like of which he had
never come across, hit the Rodlean Swamp Creature in the mid-section.

  As it fell, scalded and burning, to the ground he tried to see the originator of the blast. A being was walking down the ramp from the unusual ship and it took his breath away. It walked on two legs a man and had two arms like a man. Both of these, however, had bony horns growing out of the knees and elbow joints. It looked reptilian and seemed to be covered with a dense layer of armoured scales. It had what looked to him to be a tail coming out of its back which glowed at the end with the same energy he had seen kill the Swamp Creature so easily.

  Its face had a single eye that stretched across the width of its visage. He could see no mouth at all, but as the being got closer he knew that if it had one it wouldn’t be smiling in a friendly manner at him. He realised he had no chance of getting away from the being and waited, watching in awe, as the magnificent creature came closer to him. He obviously didn’t merit the energy blast, scorpion like, which had disposed of the Swamp Creature. The being was very near now and he could sense the power from the creature, but he could also feel a sense of its nobility emanating from it.

  The being seemed to be looking at his stomach, where his wound had been, and appeared to be uncertain as to what to do. He braced himself for what could be to come, when the being turned around and walked back to its ship, leaving him confused and amazed for the second time in the last five minutes. He watched as the ramp closed and the ship was sealed once more before deciding that he needed to get back to the station and see if his friend was all right.

  He tore his eyes away from the strange ship that just seemed to sitting there and doing nothing. He looked around trying to find his bearings and a landmark to guide him back to the station. He was still a bit unsteady on his feet and had rarely been as far as this from the station. Dusting down his battered jacket and then thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of it, Taylor West began walking.

  Taylor had now been walking for much longer then he should have been in order to get to the station. He was sure he should have been able to see the station by now. He was starting to think that he had headed in the wrong direction, and after having walked for more than half an hour he stopped. He sighed and turned his head. There were many things he didn’t understand and he didn’t like that. For one, he had no idea what the lifesaving liquid that had seeped out of the ground had been and why it had appeared at that time.

  It seemed to him from his earlier inspection of the lair that the creature had been trying to dig a deeper lair and the liquid had seeped out because of this. But he had no idea how such an occurrence could be geologically explained. There couldn’t be a layer of liquid so near beneath the ground. He also had no idea how the ground had managed to heal itself like he had observed it do. Furthermore, he had no idea where the being he had seen had come from. It didn’t fit the patchy descriptions of Clancix that he had heard. He had no clue as to why it hadn’t killed him while it had the chance.

  It seemed very interested in the area of his body where his wound had been healed and had let him live. This he didn’t understand either. Now, to top it all, he didn’t understand where the hell he was, or where he was going. Part of his mind screamed at him to turn back the way he had come, but he could see no distinguishing features that way either. He thought he would press on and see what he could find, but was sure that would be nothing. So he was very surprised when he started to see something in the distance.

  As he neared the object, he could see it was an antennae protruding from the ground. He calculated that he must have walked five miles by the time he was stood next to it. It gleamed with all the reassurance of a man made object in the depressing plains. He was wary, this shouldn’t be here, he thought. He looked around to see if he were being observed at all; and then scouted the area to see what else was around.

  “Executive. We have an intruder on our sensors!” spluttered the young man, all spots and badly fitting uniform. In the three months he had been manning the remote sensor monitors he had never had to report anything of interest.

  His superior came over, her face a mask of disbelief. “An intruder! Let me see.” She pushed her way in front of the young man who shuffled away to what he thought was a safe distance. The female executive frowned at the sensor, she could see a man; plain looking and dressed in a scruffy brown jacket, walking around on the surface. He seemed to be looking for something. She hazarded a guess that he was looking for some signs that there was more than just an aerial out in the desert. ‘No matter’, she thought, ‘he’d have to be hyper observant to find the hatchway. No need to do anything or to panic’. She decided to try to calm the people in the room. “He’s probably one of the research team who had got lost. We knew this could happen one day. He’ll probably look around, see nothing and walk away none the wiser.”

  “Shall I alert the guard?” asked a man at the back of the room. He was nervous; the research team on the surface were meant to have no idea that they were there, what was this fellow doing wandering around.

  “No, not yet,” replied the Executive, “no reason this fellow has to die.”

  Taylor found what he was looking for, signs of life. He was kneeling on the ground, and studying the marks by his feet. They seemed to be too linear and too straight to be natural. Besides which it was clear they were made to look like the result of natural processes of erosion, and he knew that Graves’ World had none of these things. Someone had hidden a doorway to an underground installation here, he hypothesized.

  The best way, he felt, to find out who was inside such an installation was probably to wait. Someone able to construct such a development underground when he hadn’t been able to scratch the surface, and the Swamp Creature had no success at digging either, was almost certainly sufficiently technologically advanced enough to have sensors. They could probably see him at that very moment and as he had no other way of getting to the installation, he decided to ask to be let in. He didn’t know which direction to aim his voice at but decided to just say it anyway. “Hello in there,” he said simply.

  Inside the installation, the female executive was apocalyptic, the man seemed to be talking to them and kneeling just over the entrance. She turned to her junior employees. “Send the guard. He knows we’re here. He mustn’t get back to the research station.” Taylor had been talking to whoever was listening for a couple of moments when he saw the ground move under his feet and a doorway opening.

  ‘Ah, good,’ he thought, ‘now we’re getting somewhere’. A large burly man ran out of the doorway with a weapon in his hand, towards Taylor. The look on the man’s face led Taylor to the conclusion that he was not a welcoming party. Taylor leapt at the man before he had a chance to raise his weapon and within seconds Taylor had wrestled the man to the floor and was using his knee in the man’s throat to hold him still while he spoke again to whoever was listening, “Now that wasn’t very friendly, was it?”

  Once again the female executive shook with rage; who was this damned man. She was about to order that the man be killed before he could get away and spread word of their location when one of the men in the dimly lit security office spoke up, “Executive Carlton, I think you had better have a look at this.”

  “I am a little busy with this stranger at the moment,” she retorted. “It’s about him,” the officer persisted. The Company Executive sighed in mild annoyance and walked reluctantly over to the officer. “What is it?” she toned.

  “The man outside. Look at the readings which the bio-scanner has picked up for him.” The man showed her the readings he was referring to. Executive Carlton blinked in amazement as she looked at the screen.

  “His stomach is covered in the stuff,” she whispered to herself quietly. She rose to her full height and changed her standing orders to the security crew around her. “This man must not be harmed. Bring him inside. I want to see him now.” And that was how Taylor West got inside the secret Company development.

  “So, Mr West, would you like to te
ll me what you are doing here?”

  Carlton was stood over Taylor as he sat in a rather uncomfortable chair. He suspected it was meant to be uncomfortable and decided to raise the issue. “Is this your interrogation chair?” he smiled brightly.

  The woman in front of him drew a deep breath and tried to continue. “Mr West….”

  “Taylor,” he interrupted.

  “Mr West, I would appreciate it if you would tell me a little bit about how you came to be all the way out here.”

  “I got lost when the alien spaceship arrived,” he replied helpfully.

  The look on the woman’s face changed from one of impatience to one of confusion. “Spaceship? What on Earth are you talking about?”

  “Well, it happened like this. I was trying to protect the research station from the Swamp Creature when I got killed, but then I came back to life due to some magic liquid I found….” he got no further before the woman’s eyes widened and she leant in close to his face.

  “Where did you find it?” she breathed in his face. This, to say the least, surprised Taylor. He had expected to be laughed out of the room by such a story, and that was the main reason why he was telling it, but the woman didn’t seem sceptical at all.

  “Aren’t you going to say that I’m mad?”

  “No, Mr West. Our scanner picked up that you have the fluid all over the front of your torso. I just want to know how you came by it.”

  “It was coming out of a hole in the ground,” he replied, sure that the answer sounded insane. The woman again took him at his word. “This hole. Did it appear near to the surface?” She wore the expression of a scientist rather than an Executive.

  Taylor described the hole as best as he could remember but told the lady to bear in mind that he was dying at the time. She nodded as he told her and then activated a com-unit in her pocket. “Dr Skandia. I think you should join us in my room. There’s a man here you will want to speak to.” Taylor felt pleased that he was so popular, but knew it had little to do with his sparkling wit and personality.