www.thevalentinechronicles.com presents:
Flesh
by
Paul L. Mathews
Intruder
Like all Theocracy ships, the Tower’s bridge
was big enough to be considered a hall. Once, the vaulted ceiling would have
been decorated with bright flags, the brass columns that dominated the walls
would have gleamed, and the array of monitor stations and computer banks
circling the captain’s chair would have chattered and flashed.
Now, however, the bridge bore dull, disintegrating
witness to the ship’s slow death. Now its ornate ceiling was lost in the
darkness, the flags tattered and torn. Now the columns were dull and dirty. Now
the outdated computers were largely silent, the few that worked offering the
only illumination in the dim bridge. The air was stale,the atmosphere silent and oppressive. Once it would
have been alive with officers, guards and nobles resplendent in purple uniforms
and suits of brass Stak Ta armour. Now only a handful of
emaciated crew, their faces lost in the darkness, watched as a naked prisoner was
dragged onto the bridge by four guards dressed in shabby fatigues, and a
stooped old man in a cook’s chequered regalia. The prisoner and his escorts
were Moreaus—bipedal human/animal splices created by
humans to fight interstellar wars. The prisoner had the head of a rabbit; the
guards mongrel dogs.
The prisoner was forced to his knees before their
leader. Sat upon the captain’s chair like a satanic apparition, Stanztrigger was seven foot of Moreau with a rams head,
goat legs and long, clawed fingers. A faded set of black fatigues hanging from
his limbs, he was tall and thin to the point of being skeletal. His long face
was framed by a pair of curved horns, and scars—camouflaged by his black
fur—criss-crossed his nose and forehead. His eyes were alert and bright, and
they bore into the Moreaus before him.
“What is this, Cook?” he said, staring at the
trembling prisoner. Despite his physique, Stanztrigger’s
voice was still strong and gruff.
“I caught him in the Pantry, sir,” Cook said. The
only human on the ship, he was a haggard man with no chin, big ears, a pointed
nose dominated by flared nostrils, and an overbite. He had the kind of furtive
eyes reserved for rats and killers. “He was stealing food.”
Stanztrigger stood.
Reaching to the flak-vest behind him, he produced a tiny pair of golden
pince-nez from one of the vest’s pockets. Fixing them across his elongated
nose, he moved to stand beside the prisoner, metal shoes nailed into the base
of his hooves ringing as he walked. The Prisoner flinched, his trembling
intensifying. Stanztrigger knelt and grabbed the
prisoner firmly by the furry chin, lifting his head to look him in the face.
“Is this true, Seb?”
Seb tried to look away, but
Stanztrigger’s grip was too strong. Cook and the four
guard-dogs surrounding him exchanged glances. Cook licked his cracked lips with
a long, dirty tongue, and continued to watch with narrowed eyes.
“Is this true?” Stanztrigger
said again, his tone increasing in gravitas. He was peering hard into the
prisoner’s eyes.
Seb began to cry and
whimper. “Yes, yes, it’s true. I’m sorry! Please! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
“And you ate what, exactly?”
Seb began to answer, but
choked on the words, managing only an inarticulate gargle.
“Seb, please, don’t be
afraid.” Stanztrigger’s voice had lowered to a soft
murmur. “I only wish to ensure our survival on this planet, you know that.”
“I… I ate a leg from one of the humans in the
Pantry.”
Stanztrigger nodded. The
nod had a weary quality. He cupped Seb’s face in his
hands. “Why?”
Seb looked at his leader
with wide eyes, as if searching for some sign, some mercy. The tension in his
body drained visibly, lost to the intimacy of Stanztriggger’s
gentle questioning. About them, the assembled Moreaus
were transfixed, watching the unfolding drama with sunken eyes that drowned in
black sockets
“Why did you do it?” Stanztrigger
said. “Say it.”
“I’m just so hungry, sir. I didn’t want much. Just a
mouth fu—”
“We’re all hungry!” Stanztrigger
roared, standing to glare at the cowering Moreau. “Look! Look at us!” The
expansive sweep of his arms took in the entire bridge and it malnourished crew.
“All of us, starving. Desperate. Every
last one of us. We have been for years. Ever since the
Tower crashed here on this damned
planet. But you?” He grabbed Seb by his long, trembling ears and hauled him to his feet.
The prisoner cried out, and what little waste lay in his shrunken bowel slid
down his inner thigh like rolling glue. “But you think you’ve got some right to
steal what little food we have?”
“I’m sorry. Please, I promise. I won’t do it agai—”
“Take him to the Pantry, and prepare him for our next
meal.” Stanztrigger said, turning away. “But forego
the bolt-gun. I want him alive when you skin him. Such is the fate of thieves
on my ship.”
“Yes sir,” Cook said, bowing and wringing his grubby
hands. He then turned and snapped his fingers at the four guard-dogs. By now
the prisoner had collapsed to the deck, sobbing. As the guards dragged him
away, they gave Stanztrigger hunted, fearful glances.
“Excuse me, sir?” It was a tiny, hollow voice, and Stanztrigger turned to look down on its owner. A diminutive
girl with the head of a sparrow and whose hands shook violently, she was
looking up at Stanztrigger and presenting him with a
small comms unit. “I have an incoming signal from
Chaff. He says something’s crashed on the eastern beach. He says he watched it
fall from the sky.”
“What? What’s ‘crashed’?”
“A ship.”
#
A pair of weak, distant suns hovered over a filthy
sea, peering through drizzling rain. As the squalid sea—choked with dust and
chemical foam—lapped against a stony shore, a six wheeled armoured vehicle
emerged from the glut of dead trees that haunted the island’s beach. A worn
Dogfish class amphibious vehicle, its camouflaged armour was rusty and scarred.
The grumble from its petrol driven engine was lumpy and uneven, and acrid smoke
belched out of its exhausts, gathering around the rear of the vehicle in a
grimy haze. The front of the vehicle was enclosed, but the back was open with
an old mounted machine gun. Like the vehicle, its Moreau passengers were
protected by light and dirty Theocracy armour, worn over old Theocracy fatigues
and heavy parkas. Hoods concealed the crew’s heads.
The vehicle came to stop just beyond the tree line,
and a hatch on top of the cabin was thrown open. One of the Moreaus
in the cabin stood, thrusting his head and shoulders into the open air. His
scarred head was that of an old wolf, the grey fur so thin and sparse the skin
beneath was plainly visible. A badge stencilled on his chest identified him as
Chaff.
“We’ve found it,” Chaff said into a tiny head-held
communicator. “We’ve found the ship.”
Partially submerged in the approaching tide, the ship
sat with its nose tipped into the sea and its backside in the air. The waters
about it were undulant and frothy. Red and grey, the ship’s
battered, scorched hide revealed a violent past. Its hull was holed, and it was
taking in water.
“Do you see anything else?” Stanztrigger
asked over the communicator.
Chaff paused to assess the surroundings, sniffing the
air. The air was damp and tasted of brine, and the accompanying breeze made the
dead trees behind sway and whisper like the restless dead. “No. Nothing. Just the ship.”
“How big?”
“It’s small. A cutter.”
“Repairable?”
Chaff hesitated. “I’m… not sure.”
The reply was curt and impatient: “Then find out.”
With a swift trio of thumps on the vehicle’s roof,
Chaff bade his driver forward. The vehicle set off, gears grinding as it
approached the downed spaceship. As the Dogfish approached ,
Chaff could see the vessel in greater detail. “Wait!” he said into his
communicator, his voice dropping an octave. “I see a name! There’s a name on
the hull! The… Trioka?”
“Troika? Never heard of it. Now get on board and see if we can use it
to get off this damned planet.”
“What about the survivors?”
“You bring them to me. Dead or
alive. I don’t really care. As long as they’re edible…”
#
The six scouts squeezed into the darkness of the Troika
through a breach in the cutter’s hull. The squall of spray outside was getting worse, and—forced to drive their amphibious vehicle through
the rain and into the shallows to reach the ship—they were wet through.
As the six Moreaus clung to
whatever they could to avoid sliding down the skewed vessel’s titled corridor,
Chaff looked around. The ship was a mess, with live cables, access panels and
ruptured conduits strewn everywhere. The light was limited to baleful emergency
strips that barely impacted upon the gloom. The heady smell of the salt water
outside was fighting against the smell of burning. With the deck at an awkward
camber and the ship’s guts strewn about the deck, it was going to be difficult
to move freely. He eyed a nearby power-cable warily as it hissed and lunged in
the darkness, spitting sparks. The sooner they could get to engineering and
shut down the reactors the better.
Reaching into the depths of his parka Chaff produced
a hand-held scanner and activated it. Old and wet, the small machine spluttered
and faltered before it finally surrendered its information to Chaff.
“Five life signs,” he told his men, “in three areas:
flight-deck, med-bay and engineering.” He turned to his men and gestured at the
nearest two. “You take engineering and shut the ship down. You two take the
med-bay, and you come with me to the flight-deck. Now, move out.”
The nearest scout’s stomach growled loudly. “What do
we do with the survivors?” A dog, his eyes twinkled as the fur about his mouth
twitched.
It was a loaded question, and Chaff could feel the
eyes of the five Moreaus burning him. “We take them
back to the ship for Cook.”
“All of them?”
They were every bit as hungry as he was, and the
brief fantasy of fresh meat rotating over a fire made him salivate. “Well,”
Chaff said with a dark smile, “Maybe not all of them.”
“We can have one to ourselves?”
“Call it a ‘finder’s fee’,” Chaff said, nodding.
“Aye, sir,” they said in unison, their voices
invigorated, before making their first ginger steps into the vessel.
#
Boyd groaned as he came around, hand going to his
forehead.
He hurt. Everywhere. He
ached in muscles he’d forgotten he had. He was also hungry. Very,
very hungry, with his stomach in painful knots.
He took a moment to try and assess his situation. He
was still in his vac-suit. His torn vac-suit.
The fractured recollection of the fight against the Calci
flirted with his memory. But, where was he now? He sat up. The
Troika. Engineering.
The emergency lights had failed, but there was a small nest of split cables
near the door, and their sparks illuminated the ruination about him. The generator
in the centre of the room was in pieces cast about the deck, the hydrogen
conduits were smashed, and none of the engineering read-outs were active. There
was no sound other than the insistent hiss of the power cables and the dripping
of water.
At least the Troika was in one piece,
relatively. And at least he was still alive. Thank Christ…
You don’t need Christ, Boyd. You’ve
got me.
He froze, eyes switching from side to side. A voice. A voice in his head. Plain and devoid of accent or inflection, yet definitely feminine.
Who the Hell was it?
That’s not important right now, Boyd. There
are intruders on the ship. You need to see them off.
“Intruders?” His voice was
thick and slow. He sat up. “Where?”
Near. You need to get ready.
He put his hands to his head, trying to remember how
he got here. The last thing he remembered was trying to get the graviton drives
back online so Tatiana could make the jump to lightspeed…
Lightspeed. Tatiana. The black hole.
“Jesus, she must have tried to activate the graviton
drives too close to the black hole. No wonder the Troika’s a mess. I
surprised it’s even in one piece…”
Not now, Boyd—
“Shut up!” he said, bloody teeth gritted. “I’m trying
to think.”
He’d been down here trying to get the drives back
online. He’d been down here with… “Dolly!” he said, trying to stand suddenly,
but faltering as he became light-headed and short of breath. “Where’s Dolly?”
#
The two scouts—the dog and a muscular bull—approached
Engineering. They each held old pistols in one hand whilst the other clung to a
procession of holes, monkey bars and conduits as they made their way along the
precariously angled deck. Reaching engineering’s threshold, they stopped, and
turned to each other. The dog nodded, taking a small torch from one of his pockets and,
turning it on, put it between his teeth and ventured forward.
He stood in the doorway, taking in the wreckage with
a sweep of his torch. The first sweep revealed nothing but wreckage and a
damaged generator in the centre of the room. The second promised to be just as
fruitless until, after a small pause, the scout tracked back, the beam of light
scything through the engineering bay until it fell back on a small cranny.
Wedged between a tool cabinet and a spares locker lay
a figure. Lost in darkness, the scout could see very little other then the
damaged vac-suit. From the Moreaus’ vantage point it
was impossible to tell if the wearer was alive.
The dog turned to his comrade, who nodded as he too
put a torch between his teeth. With that they began to pick their way toward
the figure. Hunched low so as to be able to reach beneath them and cling to the
deck, they advanced across the room. Their movements were hurried and sloppy,
desperate to know if they’d be eating well tonight.
Making a wary berth around a nest of hissing cables
that hung from the ceiling, they ignored the sparks that showered their dirty
parkas. Focused squarely on the figure in the torchlight, their attention was a
million miles away from the dark recesses in the ceiling. Moving on, they were
oblivious as Boyd lowered himself from one of those
recesses. By the time the Moreaus realised he even
there, it was too late. With a swift, fluid motion, Boyd grabbed one of the
twisting cables by its insulated casing and thrust its sheered end squarely
into the dog’s back. Simultaneously Boyd seized the dog’s hand and aimed the
pistol therein at the other scout. As the material of the parka ignited and the
cable bit through into the flesh beneath, the dog convulsed, firing his pistol
involuntarily whilst screaming in abject agony.
As the staccato of the gun tore across the bay, the
bull twisted and danced a haphazard, ungainly jig as the bullets thudded into
him, his death illuminated in the strobe of the pistol’s muzzle-flash.
#
Chaff cursed under his breath. He couldn’t raise
them, try as he might.
He paused, hunkered into a door. Beside him a further
scout—a rat-headed youngster known as Moz—clung to a hole in the wall. The two of them were
staring at bodies slumped across the narrow corridor. Rotten and bent, they
stank, and their lifeless, bloodshot eyes stared into a baleful eternity.
Chaff activated his comm,
this time paging his leader.
“What do you want?” Stanztrigger
asked over the comm. “Have you taken the ship?”
“We’re… um…” Chaff faltered. “There’s something wrong
here.”
“Wrong? What do you mean ‘wrong’? Explain.”
“The ship. It’s full of
bodies.”
“It just crashed. What did you expect?”
“No. It’s full of rotten bodies. They’ve been dead
for years, at least.”
“And?”
He paused before continuing. Something in darkened
recesses of his mind groped at stories he’d heard as a child. Of a man in the
sky who commanded an army of the dead. “They all have the same faces. They’re
all the same person. Just different versions. Different deaths.”
“Enough. I don’t care. You secure that ship and bring
back what edible crew you can. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“And Chaff?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t get lost on the way back.”
The signal dropped out, and Chaff stared a little
longer. One of the cadavers’ heads flopped to one side suddenly, startling him.
“Let’s go,” he said, skin crawling.
#
The ploy had worked, and the discarded vac-suit had
distracted the intruders. Now, however, Boyd had other concerns: Tatiana and
the rest of the crew.
With one of the scout’s torches in his hand, he had
managed to locate Doll Two—or bits of it. Its limbs and torso had been thrown
about the bay, but he had managed to find its head. Sat with his back to a
wall, leaking water pissing down over his head and shoulders, he held the
android’s head in both hands. He fiddled under its jaw-line until he found a
switch and pressed it.
What are you
doing? the voice in Boyd’s head said.
“You’ll see…”
“This unit is booting up,” Doll Two’s head said.
“Please state user name and password.” Boyd could feel the head vibrate gently.
“Boyd. Password: Urizen.”
“User recognised. This unit is now online. How may I
be of service, Master Boyd?”
“Tatiana and the others.
Where are they?”
“Scanning now, Master Boyd.”
#
The air in the med-bay smelt of brine mixed with cleaning
fluids. Such was the angle of the ship that one end of the darkened bay was
partially submerged and lost in water, dressings, plastic trays and syringes
floated on the surface. Presently two of the Moreaus,
pistols drawn, eyed the stygian depths warily, but it was too dark to allow the
scouts to see what lay beneath. One Moreau— an aging chimp with grey hair—hung
back while the other— a brutish boar with a misshapen head —waded further in to
the waist-deep water.
The Chimp produced a small comm
from his parka, and held it to his lips. “We’re in the ship’s medical bay,
Chaff,” he said. “We can’t see anybody here. Over.”
“My scan showed one contact in there. Alive. Find it.”
With a splash but no warning, the boar was dragged
under, vanishing so quickly his cry of surprise was subsumed and deadened as
water flooded his open mouth. A dwindling patch of bubbles were his only
epitaph. The chimp—eyes wide and limbs shaking—began to fire into the water
where his comrade had once stood. The reflected flash of his muzzle danced on
the surface of the water. The report of the gunshots echoed about the place
“What? What’s happening? Who’s firing?” Chaff
demanded over the comm.
The chimp didn’t have time to answer. A red, muscled
arm burst from the water, thrusting a surgical scalpel into the scout’s groin
and piercing the femoral artery. Crying out, the chimp clutched at the wound,
both hands closing about the protruding scalpel. Unable to stem the flow of
blood, he stumbled, fell, and was lost beneath the reddening water.
#
“Vast is currently in med-bay,” Doll Two said. “She
appears to have killed two intruders.”
Boyd grunted. That made sense. If there was anybody
he could trust on the Troika to make
short work of these Moreaus, it was Vast. “What about
Tatiana? And Ivan and Katarina?”
“They are still on the flight-deck, Master Boyd.”
#
Chaff and Moz now stood at
the threshold of the flight-deck. As Moz squeezed
into a doorway, Chaff pressed the button on his comm
even harder, as if the increased pressure would illicit some reply. “What’s
happening?” His voice was now every bit as frayed as his clothing. “What’s that
gunfire? Have you encountered resistance? Is there anybody there? Why won’t you
answer?”
Finally giving up, he lowered the comm
and his head, eyes closed.
His lowered head twitched slightly, hearing
something. His eyes snapped open and he looked up, glaring at
Moz froze in mid-chew, an
almost comedic look of guilt on his face before he quickly moved his hand
behind his back and swallowed. “Nothing.”
“Show me.” Chaff’s voice had regained its authority,
and he held out his hand to receive whatever Moz was
hiding. The rat shook his head vehemently. “Show. Me!”
With the truculence of a chastened child, Moz—head lowered so as to avoid Chaff’s glare—placed the
object in the Chaff’s hand.
“What the..?” Chaff stared at the chunk of rotten
flesh that now festered in his hand. “Where did you...? Tell me you didn’t…”
“I’m so hungry,” Moz cried
out. “I cut it from one of those corpses.”
“Cut it...?” Chaff gasped in exasperation before
flinging the piece of rotten meat down the corridor. “Have you any idea how
diseased that meat could be? We don’t even know what those damn corpses are.”
#
Boyd, still barefoot, made swift progress through the
Troika. Turning a corner, he paused, confronted by a clutch of dead Calci. Limbs bent at odd angles, they littered the
corridor. Boyd’s eyes narrowed as his body tensed still further, tightening his
grip on the old pistol he’d taken from his victims in engineering. Skin
crawling, he saw they were the all too familiar doppelgangers of the Troika’s crew, ghastly extrapolations on
their fates. Frozen, he saw Tatianas. He saw Ivans. He saw Katarinas. Some
even looked like him. All were immobile, but were they really dead?
“Master Boyd?” Doll Two—voice relayed over the comm set in Boyd’s ear—interrupted his wary appraisal. “You
must hurry, sir. The flight-deck has been accessed by these intruders. I
believe Master Ivan and the Princesses are now in danger.”
#
With the nose of the Troika partially
submerged, so too was the flight-deck. The canopy had been smashed on impact,
and the rain was pouring in, tainting the air with the taste of salt. As Chaff
and his comrade waded into the water, pistols drawn, they looked about them
warily. Little of the expansive instrumentation on display was functional, and
even they stuttered intermittently, giving brief tactical displays, diagnostic
read-outs and engineering reports. A klaxon tried to wail, but managed little
more than a protracted gargle. A speaker set into the ceiling spat static
which, for the briefest moments, seemed to recede and allow and brief snatches
of spoken word—harsh, snide syllables that hinted at vitriol and obsession. The
biggest TAC display on the flight-deck alternated
between streams of green binary code that cascaded down the screen, and a brief
readout that illustrated this small, remote planet on which the Troika
had crashed, and—beyond the planet’s small system—a large vessel limping toward
it.
None of that mattered to Chaff. Bringing Moz to a halt with a swift gesture, he stopped, up to his
waist in water. Three crew, all strapped into their seats,
could be seen, submerged to the chest. Heads slumped forward, they were
immobile. A man and two blue girls. The man was old
and tough looking, but the girls were young and tender. Succulent.
Chaff’s mouth began to water.
“I’ve found three survivors,” he said, lifting the comm to his lips, “but the ship is not secure. Some of its
crew are still alive. I’ve lost four men.”
“Four? For God’s sake, Chaff…” Stanztrigger’s
voice tailed off briefly before continuing, “Okay, get back here.”
“Shall I bring one of these survivors with me now?”
“Bring what you can carry—no more. Just get back
here. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yes, sir.”
#
Boyd paused by the door to the flight-deck, pistol
raised against his shoulder. He wasn’t even out of breath, and the wound he’d
suffered to his shoulder back on the Jaroth Pha dreadnought didn’t even throb.
His feet had been cut to ribbons by the debris as he’d sprinted across the
ship, but he didn’t feel any pain. It just didn’t make any sense.
He pushed his confusion to one side. “Dolly?”
“What little information I can elicit from the
flight-deck’s surveillance system would suggest the intruders have fled, Master
Boyd. You may be too late.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Stabbing at the door’s pressure pad with his elbow,
he stepped into the doorway as the door slid aside. Pistol at the ready, eyes
narrowed and jaw set, he took the briefest moment to assess the situation. He
could see Ivan. He could see Katarina…
… But he couldn’t see Tatiana.
His focus shifted, looking beyond the smashed canopy.
Out in the shallows, out in the rain, he could see an amphibious vehicle
pulling away and heading for the shoreline, the garrulous rattle of its engine
uneven and strained as the driver bullied the throttle. Even from here he could
make out Tatiana, her still body curled around the stand of a machine gun that
brooded in the rear of the vehicle.
“Shit!” He sprinted forward, plunging into the water
that flooded the flight-deck as he pushed onward. Strong strides made short
work of the distance, and he soon burst out of the water as he clambered onto
the flight console with every intention of jumping straight through the damaged
canopy and pursuing the vehicle. He stopped in his tracks, however, as the machine
gun opened up. Only then, as heavy calibre rounds pounded against the hull, did
he see a Moreau standing at the machine gun. Obscured behind the weapon’s big
metal shield, all Boyd could make out was the Moreau’s legs.
Dropping to one knee, Boyd took a firm hold of his
pistol with both hands and began to aim. Still the machine gun roared.
Boyd fired, and the Moreau behind the machine gun
went down, a miasma of blood bursting from his thigh. The vehicle pushed on,
however, and Boyd could see he had mere seconds until it reached the trees that
lined the beach. He began to take aim again.
“Shit!” It was no use. He couldn’t even see the
driver.
She’s gone. Leave her. You
need to get this ship repaired. Crepitus
could still be out there.
“Fuck off.” From his crouching position he moved like
a sprinter in the blocks. Through the canopy and down the scared nose of the Troika
he ran. Within seconds he was in the water, pushing through the swell as he
ignored the cold, the wind, and the rain.
What are you doing?
“Dolly? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, Master Boyd.”
“Tell Vast to keep the Troika safe until I get
back.”
“Get back? From where, sir?”
“They’ve got Tatiana.” Blood swelled about his legs
as rocks on the seabed cut his feet, and salt stung his wounds. He didn’t care.
“They’ve got Tatiana… and I want her back.”
To be continued...
© 2008 Mathew David
Spaull. All rights reserved.