The Moldy Dead

by Sara King

  The Moldy Dead

  by

  Sara King

  A

  Legend of ZERO

  Story

  The Legend of ZERO and The Moldy Dead are copyright © 2013 by Sara King. No part of this work may be copied or reproduced without the express written consent of the author. For inquiries (begging?), please write Sara King at kingnovel@gmail.com.

  (Don’t worry, she’s really cool.)

  Disclaimer:

  The following story isn’t real. Duh.

  But! If you’re still unsure, let’s compare the facts. Fact: This story involves sentient creatures with three legs, sentient creatures with six legs, and sentient creatures with no legs. While I suppose you could MAKE a sentient creature with no legs, it’d be awfully difficult to make, say, one with six. Fact: This story involves interstellar spaceships. Humanity gets really super excited if it gets to the Moon. The thought of going to Mars is like, whoa. The thought of leaving our tiny solar system, which is only one tiny star in a single galaxy made up of at least 200,000,000,000, with billions of other galaxies out there just like it, makes most people laugh or roll their eyes. Unless something drastic happens, we won’t be colonizing other planets for, gee, centuries. That obviously rules out your grandmother being on the spaceship in this story and my devious intent to expose her secret collection of decorative elephants. Fact: In this story, there is no mention of Earth, Humans, McDonalds, or even Wal-Mart.

  Really, people. It’s not real.

  Yet.

  Author’s Note:

  This story features Congress’ discovery of the Geuji, one of the main antagonist/protagonist species in The Legend of ZERO series. It was written to explain why the Geuji’s history has been so heart-wrenchingly tragic from very First Contact. Though it’s a stand-alone 8,000-word story, The Moldy Dead is best read before Zero Recall to get the full scope of what has happened to the Geuji as a species, and to understand Forgotten’s frame of mind in the Legend of ZERO books.

  Unnamed Planet,

  8th Turn, 193rd Age of the Huouyt

  It took eight and a half turns to reach the mold planet. During the envoy’s journey to the Outer Line, seven members of their crew died; three to suicide, two to old age, and two more simply didn’t wake up, their bodies rotting inside substandard Congressional casks.

  Esteei had risen that morning to find that only eight of their original fifteen were left. The Ooreiki were whispering foul play, giving the Huouyt suspicious glances, but Esteei was accustomed to the inter-species angst. He was more worried about the other Jahul, whose frozen corpse now drifted somewhere in their wake.

  The senior Jahul Emissary was one of the three who had simply put on their spacesuits and thrown themselves into the ship’s backwash while everyone else slept. It left Esteei, the only remaining Jahul on the ship, in charge of an ill-fated mission nobody wanted anyway.

  Now, staring out at the clammy, glistening black landscape spread out before him, Esteei wondered if he should have done the same.

  The entire planet was covered with mold.

  The only areas clear of the glistening ebony organism were along the beaches, where their ship now rested. The rolling black waves halted at the highest flood line, leaving about five rods of shoreline where Esteei and his envoy could set up for their turn-long stay.

  It was a pointless gesture. There were no beings here for Esteei to make contact with. Anyone could see the only thing that lived here was mold.

  Endless miles of mold.

  Grimacing, Esteei stepped back onto the ship to fill out the death reports.

  #

  Crown’s peers buzzed with conversation. The ship had descended at an angle perpendicular to the ground, as the Philosophers had thought it might. It meant their visitors were well beyond the aero-based technologies, as they predicted. In fact, everything about their visitors had been theorized long in advance…except for the way they looked.

  Not even the Philosophers could out-guess Nature.

  Nature, it seemed, had produced at least three other sentient species, each vastly different from the next. Most of them were short, squat, brown things with tentacles bearing long metal instruments, probably some form of energy weapons. They had large brown eyes with slit pupils, the surfaces sticky with clear mucous, their simple intentions clearly written in their expressive faces.

  They were the guardians. The brown bipeds spread out in a fan, testing the area, ready to draw enemy fire from their wards, should they encounter hostility.

  Of course, they encountered none.

  The Philosophers had been waiting for this a very long time.

  Soon, they would be free.

  The other two aliens were different. The first was tall, with white cilia coursing over its skin, giving it a downy appearance. It alone had the biological compatibility to leave the ship without wearing a protective suit. It walked on three muscular legs and appeared to have some aquatic ancestry, since it had trouble keeping itself upright in the sand.

  It was the eyes of this one that bothered Crown’s peers. Those who could see them said the tripod’s eyes were unnatural, blue-white and difficult to read. They determined that he was a leader of sorts, as it was he who struck out along the shore, following the waterline.

  The third alien was the one that intrigued them, though. The guardians ringed him, their sticky brown eyes alert and watchful. If he was not the leader, he was very important to their group.

  He walked naturally on six legs, though from the way his splotchy green skin folded in the center of its back, it appeared as if he could shift its weight onto the back four legs and manipulate objects with its two front, three-fingered hands.

  The hexapod was not physically strong. Like the aquatic alien, it appeared to be struggling under the gravity of the Philosopher planet. Its six legs were spindly, almost out of proportion with its long, dome-shaped body. Its eyes were even more of a mystery. Completely black, yet they somehow conveyed more emotion than the other seven combined.

  When Crown learned they were heading in his direction, he grew excited. He knew it was embarrassing for a Philosopher to lack that kind of discipline, but he couldn’t control his curiosity. He was tired of subsisting on thoughts passed through a million others before it reached him. He was tired of listening to second-hand accounts, tired of theorizing, tired of hypothesizing, tired of imagining.

  Crown wanted to see them.

  #

  They began to explore the shoreline first, putting off wading through the endless acres of black mold as long as possible.

  The Ooreiki youngsters, desperate to find some form of life on the planet other than the omnipresent black mold, picked up several odd-shaped stones and suggested they were broken carapaces of aquatic critters, that possibly the dominant species of the planet lived in the oceans and not the land.

  Esteei and Nirle, the only two survivors who had been on a Congressional envoy before, gave them the benefit of the doubt, though it was painfully obvious to both of them that the stones were just that.

  Bha’hoi was not so tactful.

  “Those are rocks, you ignorant Ooreiki furgs. Jreet hells, I’ve had enough of this. I’m going back before their stupidity rubs off.” Frustration flaring off of him, the Huouyt Overseer then turned and stormed back to the ship, leaving the seven of them alone on the beach.

  The young Ooreiki dropped their prizes dejectedly, their expressive faces wrinkled in shame.

  Prime Commander Nirle lifted his rifle and watched Bha’hoi go through the scope, his anger hot against Esteei’s sivvet. Tempers had flared ever since they’d learned their destination, and for a horrible moment, Esteei thought the Ooreiki was going to fire.

  “Two hundred credits says I ca
n kill him in six shots,” Nirle said, still watching the Huouyt’s narrow back through his rifle.

  Esteei was curious, despite himself. “Why six?” He knew a Huouyt was hard to kill, but Nirle had been trained in Planetary Ops, of the Ooreiki Ground Force. They prided themselves in their weapons mastery.

  Still watching the Huouyt with his weapon, Nirle replied, “I’d have to blow his legs and arms off first.”

  The younger Ooreiki hooted.

  Esteei, who had not been trained in the arts of killing Huouyt, was lost. “Why?”

  “Because it would hurt more,” one of the battlemasters answered. “Five for the limbs, then the last one for the brain.”

  Nirle grunted and dropped his rifle again.

  They moved on, dutifully scouting the empty shore for life—an endeavor that was obviously becoming more pointless with every tic that passed. Eventually, the younger Ooreiki became more animated, their shame disappearing with their Prime Commander’s anger. They even began picking up odd-shaped stones again.

  An hour or two later, a sudden, odd rush of anxiety slammed into Esteei’s sivvet, almost knocking him over. He frowned, glancing at his companions. “Is something wrong?”

  Nirle grunted. “Yeah. I didn’t pull the trigger.” The squat brown Ooreiki was looking back towards the ship wistfully.

  Esteei glanced at the younger Ooreiki, all of whom were watching him with curious, sticky brown eyes. Which one of them was anxious? And why?

  His sivvet continued to burn, the acidic-metallic taste right before fear. None of them, though, seemed to be worried. As Esteei scanned the endless expanse of black mold that seemed to be creeping toward them as they stood there, shock hit his sivvet like a cold splash of liquid nitrogen, more powerful than anything he’d ever felt before.

  Nirle noticed his glances and frowned, his stocky body tightening. “Boys, let’s get our Emissary back to base. If there was something here, he would’ve felt it already.”

  “Wait.” Coldness continued to pound at him, icing down his sivvet, making his whole body tremble.

  Nirle paused on the flat, wind-lapped stones. “Wanna give it a few more tics? Don’t blame you. Truly, Jahul, I’d shoot myself if I had to have the Huouyt in my head.”

  Esteei frowned out over the waves of mold, feeling the anxiety growing to something bigger. “There’s something out there.”

  Nirle’s face hardened with seriousness. “Where?”

  Esteei scanned the glistening mass, but saw no break in its rolling perfection. “I don’t know. Maybe underground.”

  “What’d you feel?” Nirle asked, coming to stand beside him.

  “Shock,” Esteei said. “Fear.”

  “So we’ve been sighted.” At his words, every Ooreiki in the group took a fighting position around Esteei, protecting him with their bodies.

  They waited.

  Nothing.

  There was one rock that kept drawing Esteei’s attention. It was shaped like an upside-down teardrop, weather-beaten to near oblivion. The sticky black mold had crested the top, gleaming in the sun like a glossy black raindrop.

  As Esteei watched, the mold moved.

  Like wind over a field of grass, it rolled. The rolling spread outward from the inverted tear-shaped rock, until every glistening black surface was moving.

  “You see that?” Nirle whispered.

  Esteei felt sick. “Take me back to the ship.”

  #

  Never in his life had Crown been so impatient. He heard reports that the tripod aquatic alien had turned back, some sort of dispute, and that one of the guardian aliens had aimed his weapon at the aquatic one’s back.

  Please, Crown thought, Just let me see you.

  As if the universe was answering his prayer, the seven remaining aliens stopped on the beach in front of him.

  When Crown saw the hexapod’s face, he flinched back in shock. It was the same face that had haunted his subconscious for thousands of turns, the face that Crown had always thought to be a construct of his own boredom.

  But here he was, and it boded poorly for the Philosophers.

  Replaying in a tiny corner of his mind for a thousand years, the face had always watched them die.

  They’re going to kill us. Crown sent his message out, and immediately the other Philosophers responded. Their fear was increasing, not because of what Crown had said, but because the aquatic alien had changed form.

  It had changed form. It had placed a tiny piece of material into a receptacle in its head, swallowing it with squirming red appendages, and then its entire body shifted to something else.

  Something that could move unseen under the Philosophers.

  And now it was spying on its fellows.

  #

  It was a young Ooreiki who finally named the mold.

  Wiping it off his boots after another slogging adventure through the glistening black terrain, he wrinkled his meaty Ooreiki face.

  “Man, this stuff’s as nasty as geuji.”

  Geuji.

  Or, in Old Poen, ‘Draak shit.’

  The name stuck. It became so colloquial that Esteei even used it in his reports to Congress by accident.

  Outraged, the Botanical Committee immediately came up with a new name—something in ancient Ueshi meaning ‘great black sleeper’—but to everyone actually living with it, the mold was known as the Geuji. Fondly capitalized, since it was a lot of geuji.

  The Geuji resisted every attempt to control it. With the high tides threatening to invade the ship, Nirle led patrol after patrol out over the glistening landscape, attempting to carve a landing clearing into it with fire and shovels. It was pointless—the Geuji healed in hours, leaving unblemished, glistening terrain behind.

  Esteei caught Nirle on his way back from another failed attempt. Frustration emanated from the Ooreiki in an emotional barrage on Esteei’s sivvet.

  “Still doesn’t work?” Esteei asked, nodding at the slime-covered shovel the Ooreiki carried with him.

  “If you look hard, you can see it growing back,” Nirle growled. He stalked onto the ship. Inside, Esteei heard a shovel clang against the wall, then hit the floor in a clatter.

  Esteei glanced down the beach. The Geuji remained in a perfect line above the high tide mark, never dipping below it, following it with extreme precision.

  If they grow so fast, why haven’t they grown toward the water?

  Suddenly very conscious of being alone outside the ship, Esteei hurried back inside, where Nirle and his grounders were shrugging off their gear in disgust.

  #

  Panic was spreading amongst the Philosophers. Something horrible was going on, something they had no control over. The aliens were fast, horribly fast, yet their minds were slow. The aquatic tripod seemed to be the only one to realize what the Philosophers were, but for some reason it hadn’t told the others.

  Something was wrong.

  #

  Two days later, the patrol came back one short.

  It was an odd day, one where the Geuji erupted in constant motion around the ship, coursing with wave after wave of activity that almost appeared to have a pattern to it. Entranced, Esteei had stepped outside to watch it.

  It reminded him of the rolling oceans of grass on his home planet, yet here there was no wind. The mold had been doing it since early morning, a few hours after Nirle left with his groundteam. The longer Esteei watched it, the more it made his pores itch, yet he could not look away.

  “Esteei,” Nirle called, breaking the spell. He was jogging up the beach to him in a heavy, lumbering Ooreiki gait. With him were four of his five groundmates. All of them emanated fear. “Did Tafet come back?”

  “No,” Esteei said, tearing his eyes from the Geuji. The waves had stopped suddenly. They were now as utterly, glistening calm as if they were the fields of ebony they appeared to be. “There’s nobody here but me.”

  Esteei had been choosing to stay behind lately. He’d quickly learned that the mold was some s
ort of emotional magnifier for the Ooreiki, giving his sivvet the equivalent of an emotional beating when he got too close. He could only handle one or two hours at a time without feeling sick.

  And now the Ooreiki were afraid. It was as palpable as if someone had opened up Esteei’s skull and wrapped his sivvet in wet, putrescent cloth.

  “Where’s Bha’hoi?” Nirle demanded.

  “Down the beach.”

  “Which direction?” the Prime demanded.

  “West,” Esteei said, stunned at the fury emanating from the Ooreiki. “You think Bha’hoi would—”

  “You haven’t been to war with the Huouyt,” Nirle said. “I have. They’re smart and they’re psychotic. If he thought he could kill us all and get away with it, he probably would. Just for the hell of it.”

  Esteei stared.

  “But we went east,” Nirle said, almost reluctant. “Climbed through a rock formation, and that’s where we lost Tafet. Spent all damned afternoon looking for him. He’s not answering his headcom.”

  “He fall asleep?” Esteei asked.

  Nirle gave him a dark look.

  “What about your PPU?” Esteei quickly said.

  Nirle brought it out and showed it to him.

  Five small green dots clustered near the point Nirle had marked ‘Slime Removal Station.’

  “Where’s Tafet’s?” Esteei asked, confused.

  “There’s only two ways the PPU stops picking up the signal,” Nirle said. “Either something fried his tag, or something killed him and removed it.”

  None of them bothered stating the obvious—in a land of rolling waves of mold, there was very little electro-magnetic interference.

  Esteei glanced out at the gleaming black landscape, fearful now. Tafet was the one who had named the Geuji. Aside from Nirle, Tafet had been Esteei’s favorite Ooreiki, the least likely to assault his sivvet with a barrage of harsh emotions.