(Personal Story/Planet Galan, Advent Colony)
Part Ten of Teir -
-Teal
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Teir-
News –
She screamed!
<Reverse>
The hallways were dark, the sun was still yet hours away, Gelle ran, her eyes wide, she was crying. Her slippered feet swished across the floor tiles. In the dark she could see no colors at all. She ran, tears streaming down her face.
May the Creator protect us! May the Creator protect us! May the Creator protect us!!!
She ran, tears streaming down her face.
“God protect us…” she whispered under her breath as she ran.
<Reverse>
The room was white. The dome of the room stark, a console ran about the circumference of it. White crystals embedded into the console. In the center of the domed ceiling a single large white crystal pulsed slowly, the light dim.
Then it flared.
The light circling inside the stationary crystal then branched out in twelve threads of light that angled as lightening might, in irregular jagged lines to each of the twelve drones sitting at the benches that surrounded the console/walls.
Each sat perfectly still.
Their faces expressionless under their masks.
Each dressed in a white slim overall from neck to wrists to ankles.
Each was barefoot.
Their hands played over the crystals in front of them.
Lights flared in the console as the transmission was confirmed, reconfirmed and the back sources checked and then re-checked. Each of the women in the room then dropped their hands to their sides and sat perfectly still.
In the center Sere stood absorbing the relayed transmissions from each of the other 11 at the consoles. When the re-confirmation stopped she moved. Crossing to the edge of the room and down through the access plate that led out through a series of psi locks to the Convent proper. The access tunnel opened a dialating portal that appeared at the Mother Superiors inner chamber wall. Sere stepped through into the dark and moved to the Mother. The lights came up dim as she moved across the room. The Mother stirred sleepily and opened her eyes even before Sere was halfway across the room. Her face lay on the bare sheet of the bed. She was tired. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. Sere moved silently to the edge of the bed.
The Mother turned her face from the sheet, from the press of the thin mattress underneath in the unadorned room and sat up slowly, wrinkles of the sheet pressed into the skin of her cheek.
She was getting old.
She could feel it.
The weight of rousing, the time it took to collect herself.
A hundred years ago, she would have been completely awake as the drone entered the room, now she was still collecting herself. She raised herself on stiff arms and turned her face to the drone. Sere stood there expressionless underneath her mask. Her hair was cropped short and was completely hidden by the mask. The uniform was standard and it would have been impossible to know she was a woman at all if not for her anatomical build.
“Mother?” Sere asked.
The Mother tried to turn herself out of the bed, moving her legs under the covers and pulling the over-gown from the edge of the bed around herself. She tried to speak, but her throat was still dry and only a weak sound came out. She shook her head. Soon enough she would be completely useless! Already the drone should have delivered her message and the Mother her instructions.
What was going on?
It was the middle of the night!
A stab of fear went through her.
It was never good when these kinds of things happened. Waking’s in the middle of the night. For a single stark and horrid moment she was frozen with fear.
She had felt that perhaps only a dozen times in the course of her Tenure over the last one hundred and fifty years.
The Mother nodded as quickly as she could then, her mind still partially clouded, but there was nothing for it. Sere linked.
The image in the Mother Superior’s mind blossomed into a visual image of stars.
<Reverse>
The ships moved out of the nebulae slowly, almost as if standing still against the background of surrounding red gas and blinking stars.
Slowly, out of the red and into the black of open space.
Their shapes were exotic.
Their markings unknown.
The language of the crews incomprehensible, yet the thoughts behind them clear enough, though the pattern was unrecognizable, their thoughts jumped from one idea to another, the level of synaptic traffic was low. There were images of blood and destruction in their minds.
And joy in it.
More ships came out of the cloud, shadowed shapes that formed themselves against the red background.
They moved with a slow and deadly intent in the silence.
<Reverse>
Smoke lay over the green world.
Smoke and debris.
A’brim huddled in the lee side of a ditch that had once carried water to the fields. J’acom leaned against the dirt side of the ditch with him, pushing a twig of reed grass between his teeth as they listened to the sounds of spiked legs of crawlers in the distance.
“How long ye figger?” J’acom frowned through black teeth, pulled the reed from his mouth and spat beside him into the dirt.
A’brim cocked his head, listening and tried to gauge the sound of spikes in the distance.
“Think they’re in Gr’evers now. “ He said and shifted the gun in his hands beside him in the dirt, making sure to keep the barrel balanced upright.
“Ten kil den I figger.” J’acom said. The other men in the long line down the length of the ditch shifted and some murmured, but nothing that was recognizable.
“Tell ‘em we wait until they’re by us before we move.” A’brim said to the air, not looking at the other man beside him, he peered above the edge of the ditch for a moment, but saw only green sky and smoke in the distance.
J’acom nodded, “Yep.”
Then leaned across to the next man down, Silas still wearing coveralls, the man still carried his field scythe. It would prove useless against the metal crawlers, but if he could get close enough in to whatever was running it, he expected it would work on their flesh as well as it did on seep grass. Silas nodded at J’acom’s words and scuttled down twenty hand spans to the next man.
There were thirty of them in the ditch. Every man in the surrounding farms out from Bascombs village, including 15 year old Tick Mauldsen who had taken over the farm after his father had died in a N’hel stampede 3 years before in a cattle run. The women and most of the children had all been sent away.
Three months ago.
When the Trawler in orbit had first appeared and the crawlers had first started dropping. Three months to take a world. It seemed little enough time to cover an entire planet. But the crawlers were efficient and moved even at their slow pace across the surface in unrelenting sweeps that left behind nothing but burned ground and destroyed buildings.
They had moved into Sel Port a month ago, there were stories that had come out that a crawler had been stopped there. And another story out of New Portage to the north that a crawler had been ambushed as it was coming across the St. Tallen river, but no news had come out of New Portage since. The radios went silent and the only news of movement was smoke on the horizon and the flood of refugees that came across the hills with packs of ragged clothes on their backs.
Gil Teesen had come out from New Portage, down across Sel Port and then inland. He had walked for weeks until his boots had holes in them and his toes stuck out the front. He had a beard and a red gash over the top of his eyes that had healed to a long brown scar. He said he’d been in a house when a crawler had come up on the abandoned farm he was staying the night in. The crawler had simply ripped the house to shreds and a gas main had exploded as Teesen had scrambled out of the basement. It had taken out the crawler which had spilled a thick red mucus over the ground as it had been torn open in the blast. The metal spiked legs had jerked like something alive as the fluid poured out of it and then it had finally stilled. He had slept the night in the field beyond the house and in the morning had gone into a rip in the side of the crawler and found dead things that he said looked like nothing human.
Then he had left, traveling overland at night, sleeping in the day as best he could, trying to find cover and bush to hide himself.
The crawlers moved in the daylight mostly. Some few still moved at night, searchlights atop the long metal machines glaring like half a dozen brilliant eyes in the dark. But mostly they moved in the daylight. He pushed hard and tried to put as much distance between himself and the crawlers as possible. They moved slowly, ponderously, like heavy fat insects gorging themselves on whatever structures they could find as they moved.
People fled, animals fled and the crawlers seemed to ignore them. Only when heavy groups of people came upon them did they react at all, but then their beams would lance out, red and brilliant gleaming for long frozen seconds in the still air. The air smoked with the heat of those beams and the air steamed around the crawlers like some innate mist that helped to shroud them. They decimated the crowds. Slicing across the ground and through people as easily as a hot knife through sweet yeet butter, the ground burned and smoked and only the charred remains of people and animals remained behind after they started to move again.
It had taken him three weeks to cross the distance from Sel Port to Gr’evers, and then to Bascombs. He was a thin man, the clothes hung from him in long folds of oversize cloth and he was barefoot by then. He had a scraggly brown grayish beard and red rimmed eyes and a slackness in his face as if he had seen too much.
He knew the machines better than any of them.
He didn’t say it was hopeless.
But he didn’t say it wasn’t.
In the half light, as they had gone into the ditch and waited, straggling men running stooped over out from the tall fields and the thin walls of barns and the houses which stood in the early light A’brim had asked him what the chances were, some people had gotten one down in Sel Port hadn’t they? And in New Portage? It was possible.
The men ran, Teesen ran easily, his long legs loping at a steady even gait. A’brim was not weak, but he was also not a runner. He quickly was out of breath and pulling long drafts of air in as he ran.
“Don’t breathe so fast.” Teesen had said as the men ran together, the long line of the others spread out in a long arc across the ground.
“It’s possible?” A’brim had asked again, huffing as he ran, trying to slow his breathing while his mind wanted to pull as much air into his aching lungs as he could.
Teesen had looked off in the sky then, chewing on his lower lip and creasing his lips into a tight line as he ran. The two of them had come up on the ditch then and threw themselves into it, landing hard against the packed side of the ditch and groaned as they landed.
“Maybe… “ Teesen had wheezed out in short breaths as the men twisted around and leaned back against the packed dirt, “…depends on how many …” He wheezed again, trying to regain some breath “… on how many come.”
“How …many… usually?” A’brim had pulled long deep breaths into his body and looked at the man and watched his face, looked at the scar that was burned into the man’s forehead and watched his eyes. They were blue now, relaxed and clear, though tired. Dark rings scored the man’s cheek bones under his eyes.
“They usually travel in small groups of three to five, sometimes though half a kil will separate them from one another. If we get one alone, not to close to the other’s we might have a chance at hurting it. It will be last minute, but we will have to get a man back into the house as they come up maybe a quarter of a kil from the house. But it’s possible.”
A’brim had nodded because he was out of breath and couldn’t answer. Both the men settled themselves back against the side of the ditch and wheezed heavy breathes into the still silence.
The other men had come into the long cut in the ground, throwing themselves in and settling into groups. J’acom had come across the field at an easy lope, pulling on a grass reed in his mouth. He had grinned as he jumped down into the ditch and nodded to the other men. He was old, easily twice A’brim’s age, but he was a wiry and hard bodied man used to a hard life on the farms. He hired out as a hand, even at his age because he had no farm of his own. He worked other’s fields and was paid, and he slept in the hollows of the trees down off the ridge line in the summers and often slept in barn’s for the winters. He carried a stenner, it was an old army rifle from the Tech factions war, some twenty years past, but hadn’t said exactly how he had ever come across it.
He was a T’Lani, like most of the men here, though some were outlanders come to start over and forget whatever it was that they had left behind them. But no one knew if Old J’acom had ever been off world or not. He had always been old and had always had the stenner. But his youth and exploits were as unknown as rumors in a small town on any planet you could name.
He dropped into the ditch and leaned next to A’brim and smiled through black teeth, then cocked his head and listened to the sound coming up over the horizon of metal spikes of crawlers.
“How long ye figger?” he asked A’brim, pulling the reed from his mouth and spitting into the dirt beside him.
A’brim cocked his head, listening and tried to gauge the sound of spikes in the distance.
“Think they’re in Gr’evers now. “ He said and shifted the gun in his hands beside him in the dirt, making sure to keep the barrel balanced upright.
“Ten kil den I figger.” J’acom said. The other men in the long line down the length of the ditch shifted and some murmured, but nothing that was recognizable.
A’brim nodded.
“Maybe five or six hours, you think?” He’d looked over at Teesen then, the man laying back against the side of the ditch with his eyes closed.
Teesen nodded his head slow.
“Yeah, about that.”
“Tell ‘em we wait until they’re by us before we move.” A’brim said to the air, not looking at J’acom beside him, he peered above the edge of the ditch for a moment, but saw only green sky and smoke in the distance.
J’acom nodded, “Yep.”
“Pass it down,” A’brim had inclined his chin in a gesture to J’acom and the man had nodded back, “Try to get some sleep before they’re on us. When they get close, we’ll have to have someone get back over to the house.”
J’acom nodded again and then leaned over against Silas, huddled in the dirt in his coveralls with his legs drawn up and the scythe in the dirt between his legs.
The sun was hot overhead, the green light thick and heavy on the tall yellow grass, the twisted trunks of Bettel trees, the black soil of the ground that was smeared on every man’s clothes and hands and feet. And some faces.
Tick Mauldsen grinned as if he would never sleep.
A’brim watched the boy and wondered if that were true. If they didn’t make it here, the boy never would sleep again. He thought of Selene then, and Teir, and the Advent ship that had pulled into orbit, in a running spiral to keep ahead of the alien Trawler that had parked itself first over the equator and worked its way toward the pole.
He hoped they were ok.
He prayed they were ok.
It was all he had, sitting in the dirt worlds away that he could hope for. Then he settled down and tried to get some sleep. He sun fell heavy on him and it felt odd, trying to sleep in the middle of the day. But he closed his eyes anyway and tried to calm his breathing.
*
*
*
The sound woke him, and he raised up, peering over the top of the rise and saw a crawler on the far side of a hill, perhaps two klicks out. Then a metal shape rose up over the nearest hill, some five hundred hand spans distant, a spike of one of its legs pinned a Bettel tree and splintered it as it came down and through the tree and into the ground.
The house was 300 hand spans from the ditch. He turned then to look to J’acom beside him, but the man was gone. Teesen as well.
The closest man to him was Silas, eyes drawn down into a hating stare that looked out from the ditch and didn’t even see A’brim.
Others stirred down the long line and the boy Tick, held onto his hayfork with white knuckles.
The crawler pulled itself up over the rise and turned immediately for the house, its metal legs rising and falling like sledgehammers against an anvil on a hot day. The ground shook as it moved, the stalks of the things eyes weaving in half a dozen circles as it trudged toward the house and barn.
It closed the distance at an even pace, long spike legs twisting around like an insect repositioning itself, the spikes driving in with a reverberating thud each time one hit the ground in a staccato irregular rhythm.
“How long they been gone?” A’brim asked.
Silas still peered over the top of the rise, his eyes barely over the edge. He didn’t turn but said in a calm voice.
“Two hours ago.” He glanced back over at A’brim, his eyes still twisted and wide with hate, but his voice remained steady. “When the first of the crawlers came over that far hill.”
“How many?” A’brim felt his chest squeeze down then, a heaviness that he hadn’t felt in many many years. He was afraid.
Silas turned away and looked back over the top of the ditch, he brought his hand up holding the scythe and rested it against the edge.
“Eight.” His voice still calm; still detached, his mind and voice and eyes all worlds apart from one another.
“My God… !” the sound wheezed out of A’brim and he leaned back. He hadn’t really thought they could do anything at all, but he had hoped. The hope turned to dust in his mouth.
Eight!
The crawler came up on the barn then, its spiked legs leveraging up almost like arms as it closed on the barn. J’acom came running out of the barn then hollering at the top of his lungs.
“YEAH!! YEAH!! YEAH!!!” he screamed in long winded yells into the heavy green air.
The crawler half turned, its spiked legs skittering around under it.
“COME ON YOU BIG SILVER BAST-“
The barn exploded then, the crawler shivered and then several of its spike legs on the side nearest the barn collapsed, the front of its face blossomed in sudden black smoke and a ripping of metal that opened up like a seed pod opening and a gush of red mucus poured out in a long thick stream, splattering the ground as the machine continued to shake, then fell face first into the dirt in front of where the barn had been, but now only a smoking burning tower of flame arose.
J’acom scrambled to pick himself up off the ground, his legs working to get a purchase in the wet dirt, and then his foot caught under him and he pushed up, his arms swinging in long arcs at his sides and ran away from the house toward the open field.
A second crawler came up over the rise then, from the backside of the house and where the furnace of flame that had been the barn now stood, its eye stalks swirling in circular arcs as it pulled itself up and over the rise, spike legs rising and falling methodically.
As it moved toward the other crawler the house exploded in a jet of flame and debris that shook the other machine, the roof lifted off and came down over the head of the second crawler crushing the eyestalks, the machine shook its length like a wet dog and half turned toward the open field when a second explosion tore open the side of the house slamming mortar and stone into the side of the machine as it turned away with gaping holes in its side as it attempted to move out away from the fountain of flame that had been the house. It wheeled around, a high pitch whine keening from its metal frame, the spike legs rising and falling slower, it pivoted and then its legs buckled underneath it and it crashed into the ground, red mucus fluid pouring from inside, out onto the ground in a widening pool.
What had once been the house and barn, ruined searing hulks now burned, and the machines burned.
J’acom scrambled up from the edge of the yard where he had been thrown when the house blew and sprinted for the fields, two crawlers came over the edge of the rise then, almost side by side, the stalks sweeping in long arcs in front of the machines. He reached the edge of the tall grass and dived. The crawlers beams lanced out then searing into the tall grass as the machines moved forward. From the edge of the ditch A’brim saw the figure of J’acom rise up then, burning and stumble out into the yard as the machine shifted itself, moving around the burning house, its spike legs pounding into the ground.
J’acom raised his stenner and fired, several rounds going off and striking the side of the machine, scorching the side of the metal, but nothing else. The burning man lowered the gun and kept firing, crippling and then shattering one of the legs, but the machine shifted its weight, bringing the other legs forward and re-balanced. It sagged for a moment and then regained itself, moving across the ground in quick steps it raised its head with the stalks swirling above it and a beam suddenly lanced out and caught J’acom. The beam glowed for long seconds before winking out, but then it was gone, and J’acom with it.
A’brim clenched his teeth and reached for the gun beside him, his hands were shaking. He forced it down and pushed up off his back from the side of the ditch and stood up. He turned to shout something to Silas, but the old man was already over the top of the rise and moving toward the machines. The man moved two steps, his scythe still at his side when the beam hit him, glowed bright and brilliant for long seconds and then he was gone.
A’brim looked down the line of straggled men still in the ditch and shouted, “Run!” He went up over the front of the ridge, running as hard as he could toward the machines, pulling heavy lungful’s’ of air into his mouth. The ground was uneven and he stumbled as he ran.
He ran across the uneven ground, pulling at lungful’s’ of air, sweat pouring down off his forehead into his eyes, his chest heaving, his legs stumbling, trying to gain purchase in the ridged dirt. He didn’t feel it when the beam enveloped him.
Two more crawlers came over the rise on the side of the first, as their noses broke the edge of the ridge their beams flashed out. Men rose up from the ditch then, shadow figures in the small distance, some running toward the machines, others away.
The beams swept out in scorching precision, and the figures burned in the heavy thick green light of the sunlight that fell down through the trees in soft light, in the red beams that struck out in rapid and quick succession, the ground burned and smoked where they fell and did not move.
*
*
*
Long after the machines had moved on, the boy Tick still sat in the bottom of the ditch and cried, his arms huddled around his legs. The day had gone down into twilight and twilight into night, the air getting colder. Stars winked above the broken trees, above the smoke that still drifted in heavy wafts across the ridge. The boy sat in the bottom of the ditch and shook, partly from fear and relief, partly from the cold.
When the night was far down the other side he managed to get himself to stand, still shaking and to clamber out of the ditch.
He stood on the edge and looked out at the night, the shroud of half-light that fell out of the sky and the still smoking ruins of the house and barn and two of the crawlers. The others were gone.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, thinking about the other men, about Teesen and J’acom going back to the house and barn to blow them, of A’brim running toward the machines stumbling and silent. Of the other’s that had gone over the top then, some screaming and waving their handguns, their farm implements, their bare fists with their mouths open and screaming at the top of their lungs.
The boy turned then, back toward Bascomb and Gr’evers. He didn’t know if anything still stood back that way, more than likely not. But the machines were gone, and it made more sense to go back where they had already passed than to go where they were headed. He moved through the tall grass, stumbling, trying to get his balance under him, stiff and still shaking, crying, over the edge of the still smoking ruin and down the far slope into the burnt grass and scorched ground into the dark.
*
*
*
The ships moved out of the deep black toward the green world. Already the level of internal chatter had risen, the Trawler in orbit over the green planet shifted its orbit and came to a complete stop, all the engines cut, it drifted for a moment in a gravity breeze as the ships stabilizers shifted, compensating. Then it didn’t move at all.
It beamed orders down to the surface crawlers as the alien fleet slid into silent orbit.
For a moment on the surface the crawlers stopped, their stalks frozen as the transmission completed its run. And then they settled down onto their legs, pulling them back into the bodies of the crawlers and jets fired.
Slowly they rose from the surface toward orbit.
The Trawler waited silently.
The chatter between the fleet ships and the Trawler continued for several long minutes before it stopped. And then the Fleet pulled away from the planet.
A single large ill shaped Capital ship remained in orbit with the Trawler.
The rest move out of orbit, as silently as they had come, shifting direction as they turned toward one of the inner planets.
The sunlight of the green star fell out of the deep dark and bathed the planet and the alien ships in a soft green haze as they moved.
Stars winked in the far heavens.
Ignorant and unknowing.
*
*
*
The Mother Superior began to sob, pressing her hands into her face and rough shakes raked her. “Oh… ooohhh my God…” she sobbed and tried to stand, but could not, she sat back heavily on the bed still holding her face in her hands.
“F… fff…. Find… Gelle….” She sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Oh God … oh god, oh god oh god oh god…in Heaven… find Gelle and …” She stopped and sobbed, her voice failing, she cried and coughed trying to clear her throat, “tell her…” she cried, and finally pushed herself to her feet, she stumbled toward Sere and gripped the woman’s arms, she coughed again to clear her throat, “tell her to go to Teir.”
Sere steadied the Mother in her arms and gently helped her to sit again on the edge of the bed, she nodded once and left the room through the thin dark door into the hallway, closing it behind her. In her mind, she was already searching for the girl Gelle, in mid stride halfway down the hall she turned toward the ramp as she raised her head and looked up in the dark hallway to a room three floors up that she couldn’t see.
There.
*
*
*
Gelle ran.
Tears streaming down her face. “Oh Creator help us! Oh Creator help us! Oh Creator help us!”
She sobbed as she ran, holding her stomach and crying, down the dark hallway in the middle of the night.
She stumbled as she ran up against the door and shoved it open.
The door banged back and struck the washbasin with a heavy thud, the pitcher on the washbasin teetered and fell to the floor with a crash, shattering porcelain and water across the wooden floor.
The shadowed form of the girl bolted upright in the small bed and turned toward the door.
“T’Lan has fallen!! Oh my God help us! God help us!”
*
*
*
Teir screamed.
And thought that she would never stop.
***
