Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series

by J. Joseph Wright

  Lea only tilted her head. Her hair had regained its lustrous, healthy glow. Same with her skin, gossamer and radiant. It was her. It was Lea. The real Lea. He wanted to melt into her and forget about the dreadful sounds all around them. The din of the mechanized hunters, buzzing and clanking, rooting for the two fugitives. His only desire was to hold her in his arms, and that’s what he did. Still, something seemed wrong. It was her, but not her. He had to know.

  “L-Lea?” he stumbled with his words. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  She looked at him mournfully, then inhaled and exhaled deeply.

  “It is not Lea,” she announced, and Harvey recognized what she said was true. He stumbled backward, groping for a place to run, but knew only danger awaited him no matter where he went. No place to turn, he stared at Lea, or the thing controlling her, now noticing the deadness in its eyes, yet at the same time an eerie glow of some strange and foreign origin.

  “You’re one of them,” he gasped. “Why? Why did you help me?”

  It produced a prolonged, suffering sigh, holding a hand to its forehead.

  “I can feel her inside me. I hear her spirit,” its eyes met Harvey’s. “She’s strong.”

  The creature manipulating Lea reached out for him slowly. He recoiled, yet somehow, when Lea’s face neared his, he dreamt it was really her. Skin so soft. Eyes so deep and dark.

  “Lea loved you,” the thing shuddered, eyes half closed. “She still loves you. Deeply.”

  With that Lea’s controller leaned back, appearing almost in a state of shock.

  “My kind,” it said. “We don’t experience these emotions. We’ve never experienced this, and it…it’s wonderful.”

  The thing’s last words were nearly drowned out by a sudden thunder of metal footsteps. A probing beam of light pierced the darkness. The hunters were coming.

  “I will hold them off as long as I can, Harvey,” it trembled as it spoke. “My species cannot do this. Lea has taught me this is wrong. And I will help you to stop it…”

  The light got brighter, the sounds of the pursuers louder, coming closer with every passing second.

  “Go, Harvey!” it pointed down the tunnel, into the darkness. “Go and stop this. You’re the caretaker…you know what to do. Go!”

  Harvey locked gazes with Lea’s controller, wondering if maybe she was somewhere inside, watching. He nodded, then made a break for it.

  “Harvey!” he stopped and turned around, just in time to receive an eager embrace. He cringed as a first instinct. This thing, this walking corpse wasn’t Lea. He knew that. Still, somehow, haunted by her memories, it was no longer a monster. Maybe it was more. Maybe Lea had come to the forefront of her own consciousness. Maybe this was really Lea. He wanted to believe that, if only for one more moment. This was his chance. One last chance to hold and caress…and kiss her.

  Their lips joined in an intermingling of souls. He never wanted to let her go, whether this was Lea or not. But, while still engaged in their glorious connection, he opened his eyes and saw her. He recognized her. Despite death and the molestation of her corporeal remains. Despite her spirit being imprisoned inside the walls of her own mind, Lea had found a way to come out. This was his Lea.

  “Oh, Lea,” he kissed her lips, her cheeks, her neck, then her lips again. “Lea, I never want to lose you. I don’t want to go.”

  “You have to,” she was firm. He knew it was her. Not the evil monster. Not the rotten, mucus-excreting maggot that had invaded her skull. “Now be quick, Harvey. Go!”

  “Why don’t you come with me?” he ignored the searchlights warping and distorting on the walls of the long passageway. He only cared about one thing—keeping close to Lea. “We could do this, Lea. We can do it together.”

  “GO!” her eyes flared unlike anything Harvey had seen in a living being. Before he had time to think, searchlights surrounded her. She twisted around and raised her hands, blocking the beams, though Harvey still saw the cyborgs and the parasites in their human host bodies, almost fully redeveloped, surrounding and confronting Lea.

  The last he saw of Lea, she was shielding him from the prying eyes. Sacrificing herself. At that moment, as he dove into the blackness, he wondered if it truly was Lea—the real Lea—he’d just left behind.

  9.

  If ever in his life Harvey could have been described as laser focused, it would have been now, feeling his way along the little-used maintenance conduit beneath the visitor station. He became one of those robots, a cyborg. Single-minded. Programmed for one thing—to bring down the space elevator.

  Winding and twisting through passages he barely knew, he formulated a plan of attack. He knew, from his previous experience with the space elevator, that the power generator had a fatal flaw in design that took a keen eye to identify. Harvey, when he’d made the repair run, had spotted the problem immediately—a misplaced relay. He could arc two couplings and create a critical overload, thereby causing a cataclysmic failure.

  He didn’t have the specs in front of him—ironically one of his hated exposure suits could have told him with its onboard computer link—but, by his estimation, the numbers were staggering. If he was correct, he could create a detonation that would put an old-fashioned nuclear warhead to shame.

  Then it truly hit him, the monumental nature of his task. An explosion that big would take out the entire visitor station, and, if all went well, much if not all of the underground body factory. In essence, it would put an end to the Unspeakable Ones and their terrible schemes forever.

  Only one problem—it would end Harvey’s life too.

  That slowed him down not one bit. The way he looked at it, his life was over anyway. He had no other choice than commit to this course of action, no matter how suicidal.

  He owed it to the ghosts of Cemetery Planet. The millions of souls that called this world their final resting place. He couldn’t let them down. He owed it to Lea. He could never live one second with himself knowing her soul was damned to a fate far worse than Hell. Harvey was a determined man, more determined than he’d ever been in his life. That elevator would come down. The Unspeakable Ones would be stopped.

  Far behind him, in the maze of maintenance tunnels, he heard clamoring, clacking, metal feet crashing, and churlish demands for Harvey to surrender. Nothing, no force of nature would make him give up. He followed the passageway until the voices faded to garbled, incoherent rustling, then to nothing altogether. He knew they’d get lost in the labyrinth. None of them understood this place like Harvey. Only he had the intimate knowledge that allowed him to slip, silently and stealthily, to the one place he wanted to go—the utility bay airlock, the only way outside.

  When he found the conduit leading to the utility bay, he felt like jumping for joy. All he had to do, once in the bay, was put on a suit, hop in a rover, and, after a short trip to the space elevator’s outer bulwark, set the power router into fatal overload. Before dropping to the floor, he made a cursory survey of the large, open bay. He was glad he did.

  A cyborg’s dark gray exoskin shined in the artificial light, sending shivers down his spine. It happened every time he laid eyes on one of those terrifying things. He hated them. Hated their spiny hides, their long, flexible limbs, their calculating stares. Most of all he hated how they filled him with unmitigated dread. A gut-wrenching, almost debilitating horror. And one was obstructing his only way to the outer environment.

  His first instinct was to turn and get out. But with no safe retreat, he had to press forward, had to face his worst fear. He had to disable that cyborg.

  He never dreamed he’d contemplate such a reckless act. Yet there he was, timid Harvey Crane, hiding in the maintenance shaft, searching the utility bay below for anything he could use to help him against his formidable robotic enemy.

  Then a lucky strike. Along the bulkhead, in an emergency case, he spotted a signal flare. And not an ordinary, average signal flare, either, but one designed to be seen from space. Powerful didn’t even begin
to describe those suckers. Harvey remembered being instructed on one and seeing it in action. They were as bright as Betelgeuse, and about as red. His mind raced immediately, formulating the ways he could utilize the flare’s devastating force.

  It only took a moment’s observation of the cyborg design, and Harvey made a reasoned and educated guess. Given the cyborgs were manufactured by DeepSix, Harvey had a slight insight into these machines, their strengths and weaknesses. He knew from experience the power nexus on DeepSix robots were centrally located in the small of the back. This was the principal link for every one of its critical systems. Hit that spot with something as forceful as a space flare, it’s sayonara, cyborg.

  Sounded good in theory. Now he had to put it into practice. Before he had the chance to back down, he inhaled deeply, opened the access panel and jumped. It was a good ten-foot fall, and his knees ached when he landed, but he took the cyborg by surprise. He rushed and snatched the signal flare out of its container. As the cyborg began to take notice of a change in its environment, Harvey already had the flare armed, aimed, and fired.

  Ffffffft! a sizzling fireball the size of a human head rocketed toward the cyborg, sailing just centimeters to the left. Missed! Harvey’s heart sank, knowing the flare gun was a one-shot wonder. That was it. No more flares. No more big plan. The cyborg’s lifelike eyes narrowed and it closed in, step by agonizing step, limbs extended wide and trapping Harvey beneath the service duct. He tried to jump for the duct. It was way out of reach.

  Then another stroke of luck. Behind the cyborg, past its viselike metal talons, over the sinews of its shoulder, Harvey saw another emergency flare. It was on the adjacent wall, seemingly light years away with the robot assassin standing in-between. The monster android plodded toward him. Careful, deliberate steps meant to corner as well as terrify him.

  Flailing its long, articulated arms, emitting a harsh, metallic shriek, stepping at Harvey with adept and agile motor skills, the metal monster reached high with its giant clawed foot, bearing down on him and ready to deliver a crushing blow, Harvey saw his opening.

  Harvey had read accounts of extreme stress or cases of singular traumatic events when time stood still. People describe it like it really happens. Of course, whenever Harvey would come across such depictions and characterizations, he’d dismiss it immediately as whimsy or imaginations run amok. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. Time did indeed stand still. It gave him the sensation of being in an invisible cloud, moving effortlessly and rapidly like a bee, or like the wind itself. And before he knew what he’d done, he dropped to the floor, rolled once, and popped back up to his feet. Then, in a series of rapid motions, he ran, took the flare, armed, and pointed it. Just like that, he fired the immense and devastating ball of flames.

  Direct hit!

  A tiny but significant weak spot in the cyborg had been punctured, and a small surface explosion led to a larger one, deep under the exoskin. The android turned to face Harvey and, for the first time, he saw something other than unrestrained malevolence. He saw fear. These machines were lifelike in almost every detail. Made to resemble some sort of alien reptile with superior cunning, speed and strength—and the unmitigated desire to survive.

  Burning from the inside out, it ripped at its own scaly skin, tearing open and curling back a portion of its chest. The wild actions had no salutary effect. The damage had been done. A series of bursts sent more noxious blackness from its eyes, ears, and every joint in its body. Total and catastrophic breakdown.

  With free reign in the utility bay, Harvey wasted not a single second in securing what he needed for his trip to the space elevator. He’d never been happier to put on an exposure suit. And he even enjoyed the rover’s bumpy suspension as it eased onto the ramp, the airlock hissing and then lifting slowly, letting in the dark stillness.

  The rover plodded on its predetermined course, and once he cleared the walls of the utility bay, he looked up. He balked at what he saw. Earlier, in the food court maintenance core, he’d thought a few ships hovering in orbit were bad enough. Now there were dozens. At least ten gigantic freighters, a large number of combat cruisers, and many, many smaller craft.

  Harvey’s heart pounded in his chest. This was an armada being formed right before his eyes. The horizon was infested with ships of all sizes, and he knew they all had one single purpose, one cruel goal. Harvey had to stop it.

  He punched the thruster lever and the rover jerked hard, kicking up the gritty topsoil. In no time, he rounded the giant concourse and reached the space elevator, ramming the bulkhead as he skidded the rover to a dusty stop. At the power generator, he ripped open the access panel and spotted the fatal flaw immediately. The manufacturing defect he would exploit to blow this place sky-high.

  Ironic. Only a few days earlier he was working on this very generator, repairing these very couplings. Now he was there to do the exact opposite. With the kinetic wrench from the suit’s toolkit, he created a simple arc, a synapse where there shouldn’t have been. This simple method, in theory, would set off a chain of events that would involve every power generator in the visitor station, in essence transforming the entire complex into a bomb. And it was working.

  A rippling torrent of radiance burst through the translucent nano-tubes. Fluctuations. Small at first, then increasing in intensity. An alarm sounded, then another and another. Soon it was red across the control board, and the space elevator itself began shaking. High above, the great tether loosened and the cab, ascending quickly, tilted precipitously to one side, then the other. Then its ascent slowed dramatically, as if it automatically sensed danger below.

  Harvey was transfixed on the meters running to their maximum levels. He knew he was watching his own life slipping away. But he wasn’t paying attention to anything else, and didn’t see when someone, or something came from behind. All he saw was a black glove, reaching quickly and yanking free the kinetic wrench, unjamming the feedback loop. Instantly the nano-tubes began flowing normally. The elevator’s outer structure stabilized. The tether tightened again, and the cab resumed its skyward voyage.

  Stunned at the sudden and dramatic turn of events, Harvey spun on his heels to confront the perpetrator of this galling act, and it set his nerves on edge when he saw, through the rounded and warped glass of an exposure suit helmet visor, the miserable face of Kip Broders, host body for the leader of the Unspeakable Ones.

  10.

  Harvey retreated from his attacker, reaching for the tool belt, desperate for a weapon. The monster controlling Broders had learned to use its host body well. It seemed to possess superhuman speed, and was on top of Harvey before he could think.

  Face up on the ground, Harvey saw ship after ship peppering the horizon, a dazzling fleet of transports and fighters assembled for destruction. Some darting about as if agitated. Others sitting still in stoic prewar repose. The megalithic transports were in line, waiting for their abominable payloads.

  Seeing the alien craft in such numbers dragged Harvey into a bleak state of pure and unfettered melancholy. All he wanted was to just give up, dig his own grave in the ground right there. But he had an even more immediate concern. The beast within Broders was on the attack. From its mouth issued an alien malediction so foul, so excruciating to Harvey’s ears it sent waves of agony through his system.

  The parasitic monster circled Harvey like a predator. As it passed the space elevator, Harvey caught a glimpse of the cab on its lonely descent to the visitor center for another shipment of morbid abominations. Harvey’s detrimental ponderings rambled to the Earth invasion force amassing in front of his very eyes. He couldn’t allow it, and resolved to one more desperate yet tragically necessary suicide mission. Like a modern-day Battle of Bubat, with the odds so great against him, the thought of victory, of mere survival seemed but a fantastical dream.

  Aware of his imminent demise, he shunned all fear and shot to his feet, shoving aside his suddenly startled attacker. He used the turn in momentum in his favor and sprang at the s
pace elevator’s power panel. On the ground he found his kinetic wrench, and put it back into place, sending the generator into another terminal overload. Red lights flashing. Ear-rending alarms. A steady pulse of something menacingly inchoate just below the surface.

  The larval infestation within Broders tackled Harvey to the quaking ground with the speed and accuracy of a prime athlete. These monsters were deadly and clever. It became obvious to Harvey when, after being physically thrown several meters, the Unspeakable Ones had enhanced the human bodies, made them stronger somehow. And faster. Much faster.

  In a flash, the nonhuman thing rushed to the generator and removed the wrench for the second time. Then, with another terrifying display of prowess, the parasite slashed at Harvey’s helmet, yanked on the suit’s power couplings, and, most damaging of all, dislodged the oxygen hoses, ripping them from their housings. With a spark and a fizzle, the visor screen went out. All suit systems down. Backup disabled.