Incarnations ~ Part 1 of 3

Incarnations ~ Part 1 of 3

 

By Len Morgan

Engage power.  

 It was Harley’s voice in his mind, calm and reassuring.   Power, he thought.   He heard a faint click and a sharp crackling sound.   His eyes opened, to a torrent of rain.   He gazed out at the dank forbidding storm-scape.  Without infrared sensors, the darkness would have been complete.   He could see a faint afterglow, defining the regular shape of a wall stretching from horizon to horizon.   Even as he took it in, a ball of blue flame materialized twenty feet above the wall and to his left.   It was projecting a stark beam of white light down into the void, midway between him and the wall.  Alert and predatory, it moved as if on rails, traversing the intervening ground, illuminating and defining every square inch, adding stark contrast to the flat desolation before him.

The killing fields, Harley volunteered.   Don’t move, he warned.   The light approached quickly now, bathing him in its cool ethereal glow.   He lay still and the light moved on.  Wait!   Wait – wait – it reversed direction, rapidly retracing its path, to where it first appeared.   Wait – wait – wait– then it returned to the farthest point it had reached, and continued its steady progress, combing the barren mudflats constantly searching.   

Now!   He scurried forward ten, twenty, thirty yards, skirting the remains of a dismembered mechanical spider, partially digested by the acid rain.   He passed the remnants of eight other similar constructs, in his frenzied dash for the wall.

Stop!   He froze as the light spun back in his direction once more, illuminating him briefly, before moving on.  

Wait, wait, wait-   It turned again to resume its journey mapping and memorizing every hillock and puddle of the killing fields.   Looking around he realized he had progressed beyond the last of the dismembered spiders; he was now in virgin territory.   At ninety yards he paused anticipating yet another light cycle.   He waited but the light did not return.   Several minutes passed before he cautiously moved on, covering a further ten yards.   Then, to his left, the ball appeared once more.   A second appeared to his right; he heard a faint hum, a crackle accompanied by the smell of ozone.   The ball changed, flickering - blue - green – yellow, then red.  A ruby laser licked towards him dissecting his left side appendages, with surgical precision, throwing him high into the night sky.  He turned pirouettes in mid-air as the second laser quartered his arachnid body.  Mangled shards of red hot metal ploughed deep furrows in the soft mud porridge, raising steam as they cooled.   He felt no pain before returning to oblivion.

.-…-.

   “That one lasted nineteen minutes Stig, but any movement within a hundred yards of that wall clearly triggers a laser strike.”

Stig slapped the instrument panel in frustration.  “Our sensors are detecting no signs of life out there; it must be some kind of automatic sentinel.”

Harley shook his head, “It’s ignoring our attempts to communicate; it doesn’t seem programmed to respond.”

“If it can’t be neutralized the colonization will have to be abandoned.”   

 “The alternative is to move on to Perligolli.”   Harley paused as the implications sank in.   He went to the galley and prepared two mugs of stim-café.  “Another thirty-six parsecs?   It took the Orbitar ten thousand years to get here from Earth.”

“It’s so unfair!  Carb-oxy life forms were never intended to last that long, even in stasis, I doubt we could survive another fifteen thousand years,” said Stig his face revealed his frustration.

“The CM crystals will survive the journey but I’ll wager ninety-nine per cent of the minds they contain will have gone insane before Orbitar gets there; that’s assuming there is an E-type planet in the Perligolli system.”

“We’re here now Harley we’ve got to find a way.   Hope, or New Earth, whatever they decide to call it is our new home!”   We don’t really have a choice, he thought. 

“We still have eleven Rak-nid units, but we only have two CM crystals to man them.   We could try returning to the Orbitar for more crystals?”

“I doubt we‘d make it Harley.   We haven’t had contact with the ship since we left; for all we know it no longer exists.”

“All we’ve got since hitting the atmosphere is static, and according to the con-panel we don’t even have enough fuel to reach escape velocity.”

“That doesn’t surprise me; I’m beginning to think this whole scenario was a set-up to lure us here.   We lost three Lander’s and ten remotes, then this two-man scout makes landfall without a scratch?   I don’t believe in coincidence, but at this moment I feel like a rat in a maze.  Question is whose maze is it, theirs or ours.”

“What’s the difference?” said Harley.

“We were told it’s an uninhabited, E-type planet.   Yet, it was inhabited recently, possibly within the last ten thousand years, yet mission control knew nothing about it?   We find it abandoned but guarded by advanced alien technology?”  Stig’s face clouded, “My instinct tells me we’ve been set-up.”

“My gut feeling says you’re right.   I think it’s a listening post to give early warning to the rest of the Universe; lookout, the humans are coming.”   They finished their stim in silence.

.-…-.

Stig harboured fond memories of their childhood.  He and Harley had been inseparable pals, growing up in the burbs of New Birmingham; they went through high school, University, and Space Academy, always together.

They graduated as pilot and navigator respectively and spent years prospecting in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter.   They worked for all the major mining conglomerates discovering and developing viable mineral deposits.

  When the market became crowded, Harley became bored with the routine so they switched from space jockeying to prospecting on Mars.   In the beginning, there was a lucrative market for the rare ore deutridium, found only on the red planet.   Ironically it was a key component in the production of synthetic flesh used initially in plastic surgery; without it, the mass production of synthetics would never have been possible.   They made a fortune, cashing in on the experience they’d gained working in the asteroid belt.

  When deutridium was synthesized and mining it became a thing of the past they cut their losses and returned home to earth.

.-…-.

“I think we’ll try two Rak-nid units this time Harley.”

“We only have two CM crystals left Stig, when they’re gone we’ll be done, for sure.”

“Damn!  I know that."  Stig shook his head, "sorry".

“No offence taken.  There’s a lot at stake.”

“If I’ve guessed correctly we only need a crystal in one of the Rak-nids.   Can you rig some kind of remote control for the other?”

“They all have rudimentary remote drives; they can either be programmed or guided with a J-Stik.”  

  

   Stig awoke the Rak-nid and viewed the planet through its eyes.   They followed the pattern laid down on previous approaches, avoiding the globes, as the earlier units had done.   They pushed forward, carefully narrowing the distance between themselves and the wall.   Ninety, seventy, forty yards, they were way past the wreckage of the previous units.   At thirty yards, Stig instructed the CM to keep moving and stop for nothing until it reached the wall.   Harley’s manually operated unit was programmed to stop every ten yards.   As it paused for the second time it was spectacularly incinerated, a flash of fire a plume of steam and it was gone.   The CM Rak-nid reached the wall and stopped without warning, as if its batteries which had been fully charged before starting off, had been drained.

 “Well that’s it, we have one more stab then we’re out of ideas, and time,” said Stig.   “What do you suppose it's doing?”

“The Internet knows, we’ve been orbiting this world for two and a half years, but know nothing more than we did when we first arrived.”  Harley winced and looked away.

 “I don’t understand.  I was awakened two days ago, if we’ve been here for two years why wasn’t I roused earlier?   Why wasn’t I fully briefed before we left Harley?”

“It wasn’t my idea; they said they needed to protect you.”  

“Protect me?   From who, from what, why?”

 “We arrived and everything was going smoothly.   The policy adopted was to wake people only when their skills were required; to conserve our resources.  Nothing could be taken for granted.  We were setting up a new colony, ten parsecs beyond our solar system, fer crysake!   Then we received a message from the planet, it was their one and only communication.”

”Didn’t you think I should know this before we left?”

“I did, but they said no!”

“What was the message?” Stig asked.

’Only a true born human can set foot on this world,’ said Harley.

“That was it?”

“We waited but there was nothing else, so we ignored it and sent down the landing parties.”

“Such arrogance,” Stig seethed.

“Three manned Landers, with a hundred and twenty crewmen were lost before we switched to unmanned probes – that didn’t change our luck.   Each flight began routinely then, as soon as they entered the atmosphere, we lost contact and the craft just seemed to disappear.” 

“What did they mean by ‘true-born’ humans?”  Stig asked.

“Humans born and bred on Earth.”

“So where’s the problem?   There are hundreds of ‘true-born’ humans aboard that ship.   I saw them, before we left on the Orbitar, a good few of those in the Lander’s must have been ‘true-born’ humans.”

Harley shook his head.   “All Synth’s.”

”But, we were banished because we refused to give up our natural bodies for synthetics.   It was these bodies, warts and all, they found so offensive.   There were thousands of us forced into a deep sleep, in orbit around Mars.   You know that Harley, you were with me.”

 Harley shook his head. “My original body barely survived two thousand years, I’m a clone of the original Harley; I was created from his genetic material and I have his memories because they were stored in a CM crystal but that means I’m no longer ‘true-born’.”  

“But, we both agreed, we would die rather than inhabit synthetic bodies, we…”

“Of all those who left Earth in the Orbitar only one ‘true-born’ survived.   We were in stasis for ten thousand years, our bodies, our minds, were unable to cope with it,” tears formed on Harley's cheeks.

“You let them turn me into a synth?   Knowing how I feel about it?”

 “You self righteous asshole Stig!   You are the only remaining ‘true-born’ human!  Most didn’t last as long as me, after five thousand years you were the only one left, but being the hard-assed obstinate bastard you are, you survived to defy the odds.”

“All gone.   Everyone?   No survivors?”   Suddenly the last human felt so alone.

Copyright Len Morgan