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
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
