Planet of Graves

by Marc Everitt

  The file created a mental picture of what Taylor felt had happened and he walked it through his mind to see if it made any sense. Hanley stumbles across the underground bunker, but doesn’t get inside. He doesn’t tell the Major about it, of that Taylor was sure, as the Major would certainly have made a journal entry about it if he had been told, but probably mentioned it to someone else. The knowledge and admission of the same had almost certainly led to his death.

  Taylor read again the entry on the screen, pausing on the sentence where the Major wrote that he expected Hanley to discover little of consequence. The Major could not have been more wrong, if Taylor was right in the line of his thinking then what Hanley had discovered had cost him, Will and the Major their lives. Taylor sat in the Major’s room and peered at the monitors the late commander had secretly installed all over the station. Taylor had digested the information he had found on the computer records a couple of hours earlier, and was satisfied that he had a fairly good mental picture of what had occurred.

  He was now playing a waiting game. Whoever deleted the file on the Major’s personal reports was also the person who didn’t want anyone knowing that Hanley had been outside of the station in the particular area of the bunker. They almost certainly killed him to keep that secret. Whether Hanley had told more than one person about his sortie that day was impossible to know. Possibly Will Shanks had known and had made an innocent reference to that knowledge.

  This would have been enough of a reason for the murderer to strike again. If they would go to such lengths to stop people knowing about Hanley’s trip to the vicinity then they would certainly be desperate to get their hands on any piece of real evidence regarding the work which was going on there. Taylor knew that the rock he had found represented just such an item of evidence. He had openly told the crew about his find and was now waiting to see when the murderer would come to dispose of the fragment.

  “Come on, I know you’re coming,” he breathed as he sat in the dark watching the screen in front of him. On the screen, he could see his own quarters, and in them the fragment lay on a table for all to see. He locked his door, as he knew the murderer would expect it. He didn’t want it to appear to be a trap and so, knowing the villain could get into the room if they really wanted to, had wanted to make the whole scene look as natural as he could. He had hooked the monitor up to a remote recording unit, and was confident that when his room was entered he could use the recording as evidence of the guilt of the individual concerned.

  He yawned and stretched his arms then took a sip from the hot drink he had at his left hand. He had been watching the screen for at least an hour now, but it felt like a year. Eli would be taking over from him in less than an hour from now, he thought, so at least he could get some kind of rest. It had been some day. If he could end it with any kind of proof of the murderer’s identity, then he would consider it a worthwhile day as well as an extraordinary one.

  He drained the remains of the drink in the cup and leaned back in the chair, trying to relax his back muscles. Suddenly he sat bolt upright in the chair, as he watched the door to his room begin to open. The small screen showed the dark room growing lighter as the door edged open, carefully and cautiously, and the light from the hallway crept in. He could not yet see any sign of the individual causing the change and he checked the recording unit was working and activated.

  Slowly, Taylor began to be able to distinguish a shadow and he thought it would only be a matter of seconds before he saw the person enter the room fully and he could get a good look at their face, as well as a recording of it for posterity. The shadow grew longer and Taylor thought of an old proverb about spider’s telling flies to come into their parlour. He couldn’t think how that proverbial tale ended.

  The screen in front of him went blank, silently and without fuss. Taylor frantically checked all the connections he could lay his hands to in the room, and finding nothing amiss, knew he had been beaten. He ran from the room, he had to get to his own room before the intruder could get away with the fragment. He cursed his arrogance for leaving the rock in such an obvious place and with no security. These things, so delicately plotted to allow the thief easy access and get Taylor the proof he required; now conspired against him. Rather than a benefit, they now made it easier for the thief to get away from the scene before he could get back from the Major’s room.

  He approached the hallway that ran past his room and found the door to the room open. He entered cautiously and switched on the light, ready for trouble, but not realistically expecting any. He knew that the thief would be long gone by now. He looked around the empty room, the fragment was gone and he had no sign of the thief. He also had no evidence of their identity. He punched the wall in frustration and immediately regretted it as pain shot up his arm. He shook the wrist concerned, slumped to sit on his bed, and held his head in his hands. How could the thief have sabotaged the viewer so as they couldn’t be seen, he pondered?

  On a whim, he stood up and looked outside the room. In the hallway, he noticed a box attached to the wall just outside the door. He took a closer look. It was a portable com-unit, but he could see straight away that it had been interfered with. There were signs of the unit having been modified and as Taylor plucked it off the wall and opened the casing, he had a good idea of what had been done to it.

  “Must have boosted the mid-range transmitter to try to create interference,” he muttered to himself as he studied the circuitry closely. As he suspected, the unit had been boosted with an energy inefficient relay being created. The life span of the unit had been drastically cut so that a lot of energy could be transmitted. With no signal to transmit, the small unit simply filled the local area with high-density radio waves. Furthermore, the person responsible for the alterations had known what they were doing. The frequency of the interference was exactly that of the camera hidden in Taylor’s room.

  They had known that he was likely to be watching, he realised, and had taken steps to secure the fragment with no risk to them. He threw the unit to the floor in disgust with himself. Now he had little to draw the criminal out with and would have to come up with another strategy. He thought again that his foe obviously knew how to play this particular game and could play it well. “Too well,” he cursed under his breath and went back into the room to work out how he was going to proceed.

  ***

  In another part of the station, a gloved hand brought a large hammer down rapidly over and over again. The fragment splintered into hundreds of pieces while the owner of the hand imagined that they were bringing the hammer down on the head of Taylor West.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” admitted Taylor as Eli asked him the same question for the tenth time. Eli was concerned, it was not often that Taylor was outwitted like he had been. That made Eli feel nervous indeed. “The modified Com-unit. It could have been the handiwork of the same person who made the by-pass unit,” Eli suggested, unwilling to believe Taylor’s pronouncement that Chris Maxwell’s amateur do it yourself activities were not for the purposes Eli thought they were.

  Taylor seemed to be in a trance. He had hardly spoken since Eli had returned and his friend knew that there was a great deal of thinking going on. He shook off the irritation that Eli’s previous statement represented to him and then, quite unexpectedly, seemed to brighten. His smile returned and he thanked Eli. “You have hit the nail on the head, my friend,” he exclaimed gleefully and stood up from his despairing position on the bed and started to make for the door.

  Eli was startled, Taylor had been so adamant that Chris was not the one they were looking for and Eli was surprised that he had changed his mind so quickly and easily. “Where are you going now?” he asked as he followed Taylor out of the room and down the corridor at speed.

  “I’ll need your help,” Taylor replied cryptically.

  “Help with what?” Eli called exasperated, “What are we going to do?”

  This time Taylor was pleased to be able to answer t
he question. “We are going to accuse Chris Maxwell of two counts of murder and several counts of other things I haven’t thought up yet.”

  ***

  The room was silent and tense. Sara couldn’t believe what had just happened, she had been called to the control room by an emergency announcement from this West character and, when they were all waiting and griping about how they had been asleep, he had put on a little performance for them. He had spoken about his investigation of the crimes that had been perpetrated recently and had announced to the five people listening that he knew who was responsible and that it was Chris Maxwell. No one had spoken since then and they had all been too stunned to do much of anything.

  The first one to respond to the accusations of Taylor West was Chris Maxwell himself. “What the hell are you talking about, you fool!?” he snarled disdainfully and Taylor braced himself for a violent onslaught. Chris spoke again, “You get me out of bed to call me a murderer?” He yawned loudly and Lana tugged his sleeve sleepily.

  Taylor smiled and turned to the rest of the team confidently. “Well, he wouldn’t be likely to admit it now would he?” He was careful to keep one eye on Maxwell at all times. This was a delicate situation for him, bearing in mind the big man’s volatile temper. Eli stood to Taylor’s right and thought he must be going mad. He knew Taylor well, and this action was not like him at all.

  Chris looked around at Sara, Alan and Eli. “Ignore this idiot. I pity the fool. If I had the energy I’d batter him for wasting my time. As it is, we’re going back to bed.”

  With that, the Maxwells left the room and Taylor breathed a sigh of relief. That was the difficult part over with, now for the easy bit, he thought. He turned away from the door and shrugged his shoulders to the watching, still amazed, members of the team.

  Eli went as if to speak but Taylor cut him off before he could start. “He’s calm, which is good. But I’ve got to tell you. Keep away from him until I can get us safely away from here. He could snap at any moment.”

  Alan nodded his agreement. “He won’t want to be taken back for trial.”

  “He won’t need to be. He’ll be leaving with the rest of us. He’ll have no choice,” Taylor assured the scientist. He was met with frowns and confusion by the team. He realised there was something he had neglected to tell them all and knew that now was as good a time as any. “Did I forget to mention the world is going to end?” he asked calmly.

  Eli thought they had taken the news fairly well considering. Taylor was brushing his teeth in the bathroom as Eli lay in his bed thinking. Taylor had told Sara and Alan that they all needed to leave the planet as quickly as they could and that he would take them to a ship in the morning. He had told them to pack as much as they could and that they would all be checking out of the Hotel Graves’ World first thing in the morning.

  Alan had merely asked why, while Sara seemed stunned into silence. Taylor responded to Alan’s question with the simple reasoning that the planet was becoming unstable. “Do you think they believe you?” Eli called out to his friend. Taylor poked his head around the bathroom door, toothbrush still in his mouth.

  His reply was intelligible to Eli but only just. “If Dr Shkandia is right, we will have all the proof we need soon enough.”

  He spat the toothpaste from the mouth to the basin in front of him and walked back into the main part of the room. “It doesn’t really matter if they believe me or not. This planet is going to shake itself to death very soon. The next tremor should convince them of the need to be elsewhere,” he remarked and got into bed. If that day had been eventful, he had a suspicion that the following would be even more so.

  ***

  The Warrior paused in its approach to the station, it could sense something happening. It cocked its head to one side and, almost immediately, knew that it should seek cover. It had been over the fence and very close to the building when it had stopped its coming. It judged what it thought was the best place to take cover and sped to it. It knew it would not be long. As it got itself as close to a wall as it could it could feel the beginnings of a distant rumble, and braced itself for what was to come.

  ***

  “What was that?” Eli whispered, afraid to speak any louder for fear of being unable to distinguish the sound he thought he could hear. He needn’t have worried, the rumbling was becoming louder by the second. Taylor had leapt to his feet and was beginning to dress. “Quake. Damn I hate it when I’m right!” he shouted over the rapidly growing noise. He ran to the wall and activated the alarm switch.

  The siren rang out throughout the station and Eli got himself as quickly as he could. “This is going to be a big one,” he remarked as he felt the room begin to shake. Taylor was halfway out of the door, and Eli noticed that he had grabbed as much of his personal belongings as he could carry. He decided it would be wise to do the same. The corridors of the station were beginning to fill with the confused team. They did not need it explained to them what was going on an Eli was glad of that.

  After the performance, Taylor had gone through in the control room with the accusation of Chris, he really didn’t think the team would take kindly to being woken and dragged out of bed again. As it was, the shaking walls and sounds of metal tearing and splitting was enough to convince the team that they needed to rise and get themselves to some sort of cover. Eli met Alan in the hallway, the scientist was still wearing a pair of flannel pyjamas and caught hold of Eli as he and Taylor ran for the exit. “They have never been this big before,” he said referring to the size of the tremor they were all suffering. “Looks like your friend may be right.”

  “How does a small tremor turn into something like this?” Eli asked as they ran, dodging parts of the station that seemed to be falling around their ears. The sound was deafening and Alan had to shout to be heard even though he was right next to Eli.

  “It doesn’t. This world must be very unstable. We need to get out of here.”

  “We are doing that, or couldn’t you tell?” Eli replied.

  Alan looked confused. “There isn’t a ship due here for at least two months. There’s no way we can get help here within a couple of days.”

  “Don’t worry. Just follow Taylor,” assured Eli. Secretly he hoped that his friend knew what he was doing. He himself had not seen any ship parked out in the desert, but if Taylor said there was one then he would have to believe him. Like Alan, he could see no other was they were going to get off the planet. Lana and Chris were waiting by the main door to the compound in various stages of undress and bleary eyes.

  “If this is some kind of joke, West….,” Chris threatened.

  Lana turned her eyes up into her head at the stupidity of her husband. “He can’t make the earth shake. This is a serious tremor.” Eli heard a scream from the direction they had just ran, and it took him about two seconds to realise that Sara must be in trouble.

  “Sara!” he yelled back into the expanding amount of smoke and debris that the crumbling hallway was beginning to resemble. It was clear to all the team that the station was not coping well with the violent shaking of the ground it was being subjected to. They all needed to get out into the open where the falling debris was lessened.

  They could hear no reply from further in the station; Taylor was the first to speak over the bedlam. “I’ll go back for her, you get out with the others.”

  Eli looked adamant. Chris and Lana were already going out of the door and she looked back and shouted. “Well, one of you better go.” Taylor conceded, he didn’t like his friend going into danger but he could see that Eli was in no mood to argue the matter with him.

  He nodded quickly and issued a warning as Eli ran back into the hallway. “Just be careful, Eli.” Then Eli was gone, and Taylor was left with three scientists in half-asleep states and a sense that he had just sent his friend to his death. Outside the station, the team could see a gigantic crack that had appeared in the ground, running from the east as stretching as far as the eye could see. It looked to be steadil
y growing and was already well-over a metre wide. Taylor ran with Alan and the Maxwell’s to try to get away from the devastation that was occurring in the station.

  Pieces of the base were cracking and tearing away from themselves and he could see it wasn’t going to stay standing for long. He hoped that Eli could get to Sara and get himself out in time, before the whole station fell to the ground. They ran until they felt they were a safe distance from falling debris and any further collapse the station may suffer and then turned to look at the disaster in progress. Taylor was horrified to see not only the station but also a rapidly advancing alien being, appendage glowing an ominous red.

  Taylor moved swiftly. Within a second, he was running back to the station. Falling down or not he knew it represented a better chance of survival then staying out in the open with the alien being. When he had met the alien before it had seemed less hostile. It looked very hostile now though, and he had no intention of waiting to see if it would take its opportunity to kill him this time. He was not the only one too see the creature and the cacophony that filled the air already was increased by the shrill screams of Lana.

  “What is that thing!?” shouted Chris as he followed Taylor back towards the main door of the station. Alan was running behind them and Lana was just now getting herself together enough to realise she needed to be moving and quickly. The creature paused in its pursuit and Taylor knew that was not a good thing. Sure enough he heard a loud cracking noise like an electronic discharge in a thunderstorm and the air around him turned a deep red as a bolt of energy fizzed past them.

  He suspected that the creature was using its first blast to gauge its range and was proved correct when the second blast from its tail weapon slammed straight into the back of Chris Maxwell. To his credit, the big man did not fall straight away. Instead, he seemed to sway slightly and topple to the ground like a giant tree that had been felled. One look at the stationary alien warrior was enough to tell Taylor that it was already building upon a bio-chemical charge in its tail.