.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls...troopers all:
I'd like to take this oppotunity to thank you all for reading my science fiction adventure tale.
I hope you all had as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
That's all it was, a bit of fun.
Just good old fashioned pulp action and adventure with a sci-fi setting.
Sergeant Ryker and I are about to embark on a 3 month long motorcycle journey across a large chunk of Old Earth: Europe, Morocco and Eastern Europe down to Turkey and maybe across to Eygpt to see Cairo and the Pyramids.
So the adventures of Rye and Jessa and the rest of the crew are on hold until we return.
Sergeant Ryker can still be contacted at the email address at the top of the page.
So feel free to send comments or thoughts to him if you wish.
(Just realise it might take a while to get an answer, as it's the first holiday Rye's had for a while and he'll be busy immersing himself in local cultures. And doubtless having plenty of new adventures along the way!)
So...see you all again in 3 months.
Thanks again for reading.
Take care, be safe.
Cheers: Kevin 'Jaqhama' Lumley
Sydney
Australia
.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The Amon and the Others
Journal entry: 54
Jessa and I are cautious. We flick the safeties off our rifles and quietly make our way back to the main hall.
“It’s trying to jaunt away,” Billy informs us. “But no luck. The AM shield has trapped it here.”
We stop at a corner and I carefully stick my head around, checking out the area in front of me.
I draw in a sharp breath.
Jessa drops to her knees and peers around the corner from next to my leg. “Christos. It looks just like the stories.”
She’s right. The space vampires of legend are often described as tall, skinny creatures, with pale skin, demonic visages and leathery wings. The thing we’re looking at has all those attributes and more. The face is almost human…except for the black eyes and the pointed chin. The large, pointed ears. The slit of a mouth (which I just know is filled with sharp fangs) Long, clawed digits. It’s covered in a sheen of soft white fur. Some sort of bright material is wrapped around its waist and groin area. Looks like red silk to me.
“It’s seen me,” Billy Wilddog says calmly.
I look up at Billy’s position, high overhead. He’s nestled in an aperture in the rock wall.
A snap makes me look back at our new arrival. The leathery wings spread out and it launches itself into the air. Making unerringly for Billy.
Before it’s even halfway to him Billy raises a cumbersome looking rifle and fires off a shot. Instead of bullets a finely woven net of steel mesh erupts from the thick barrel of his weapon and envelops the flying creature as it nears the other’s position. Entangled in the steel net, the thing, unable to fly now, plummets back down and crashes heavily onto the unforgiving ground.
I slip around my corner and jog over to the fallen creature. Jessa shadows me, her Multi .75 never wavering from the downed myth in front of us.
Just as we reach it the creature regains its clawed feet. Still entangled in the capture net it looks in our direction and hisses at us. And then, in the blink of an eye it rips the finely woven steel netting apart as though it was made of cobwebs.
“Shit!” I hear Billy exclaim over my wrist comp.
* * *
My bracelet is tingling like crazy, as I’ve discovered it always does when it perceives I’m in a dangerous situation. The creature in front of us starts to move closer. Suddenly my weird alien bracelet sends a jolt right through me. I gasp and my back arches. My hands open and my Gatlin .50 drops to the floor. Black spots swim in front of my eyes. Then, as suddenly as it happened, the savage jolt that screamed all along my nerve endings stops.
And I feel different.
I feel powerful, real powerful.
Without really being aware of what I’m doing I reach behind my back and unsnap the Ru’a battle-axe from its harness.
My right hand brings it around in front and I hold it up so that the alien creature can see it.
Jessa looks concerned at my moment of agony, and at my dropping my weapon. “Rye?” She has her Multi .75 aimed at the thing before us and I’m aware that her finger is tightening on the trigger.
I reach out with my left hand and push the barrel of her rifle down. “No,” I say.
She blinks in surprise.
The creature has stopped a short distance from us. Its black eyes widen as though in shock. Then the mouth opens and it speaks.
“Ta sark jai dei!” This cannot be!
And without knowing how, or why, I reply in the same guttural language. “Ra kesh nai mara?” We have not forgotten you!
“Aiee!” It throws itself at me, claws outstretched, seeking my throat.
* * *
I open my eyes.
WTF?
“He’s awake,” I hear Billy Wilddog say.
“Iron?” Jessa’s voice. I look at her as she kneels down beside me, a concerned look on her face. I feel her soft hand on my brow.
I’m confused. The last thing I remember is the ALF leaping at me.
“What happened?” I croak. My mouth feels dry.
“Was hoping you could tell us?” Billy suggests.
I close my eyes and open them again. All I can think of is that Jessa called me by my first name. And nobody ever does that.
I see that I’m lying on my back, on a medi-blanket. Ziggy is hovering around, above me, scanning me with his wrist comp.
“He’s ok, looks like.”
We’re outside. The sun is shining. How many hours have I been unconscious?
“What the hell happened?” I demand.
* * *
Billy Wilddog tells me the story. It’s so way out I can hardly believe it, but the others throw in the occasional agreement or nod now and again. So I cannot but doubt Billy is telling me the truth.
“You threw away your rifle and pulled out that axe of yours. The creature said something to you. You replied in the same language. Whatever you said really pissed it off, because the next second it threw itself at you. You took a swing at it with your axe. The creature was quick, lightning quick. It swerved aside and cut at you with a clawed hand. Caught you on your right shoulder. Tore right through your jacket. Blood spurted out. You whirled away, almost as fast on your feet as the creature. Then out of nowhere, I mean like out of thin air, the creature produced a sword. Grayish, like it was made of lead or something. The pair of you started hacking and slashing at each other like nobodies business. Jessa and I wanted to shoot the ALF, but you was both moving so fast it was impossible to fire off a shot without taking a chance on hitting you by mistake. When I say you and that thing were moving fast…I mean like a blur, Rye. I’ve never seen a human move that quick. The bracelet on your wrist was glowing black, same as the axe. It was like a pulse of black light. Your shoulder stopped bleeding. Your axe struck the creature, it was wounded, blood was pouring out of a huge slash in its side. But it healed up. Stopped bleeding. You two carried on fighting. Your axe and that thing’s sword sparked like fire every time you blocked each others weapon. You were both yelling stuff at each other. Not that any of us could understand what you was saying.
“Then you knocked the creature off its feet. Before it could get back up you cut down at it with your axe…and sheared its head right off!
“You kinda stood over the corpse, all exultant like, waving your axe around and yelling shit we didn’t understand. Jessa called out to you and you looked at her like you’d never seen her before. With the creature dead I called Ziggy and told him to turn the AM shield off. That was a mistake. As soon as he cut the power…there was a bright flash of light from where the body of the creature was lying…and it disappeared. The head, the body, the sword. Everything. Gone. Vanished. Just out and out disappeared.
Billy stops talking and takes a good, hard look at me. “Then you disappeared too,” he tells me.
My jaw drops. “What?”
He nods and Jessa with him. “It’s true, Iron. I looked at you standing there, shouting in a language that I’ve never heard before, that none of us have ever heard, and there was another flash of light and you just vanished. We think you jaunted. The dead ALF as well.”
I’m half sitting up now. Completely stunned. I notice that the black, alien bracelet is still on my wrist. I look around for the axe that has a bond with it. Jessa notices this. “It’s over there,” she points. “It came back when you did.”
Came back? Came back from where? I ask this aloud. My crew mumble and mutter and shake their heads.
“We don’t know,” Billy admits. “Got a few wild ideas though.”
“Tell me.”
He shrugs. “I figure that when the AM shield was lifted the creature, even though it was dead, at least we have to suppose it was dead, I mean you cut its damned head off, the creature’s body somehow returned to wherever it had originated from to begin with. Like some kind of automatic reflex. I told you I thought it was jaunting. That the AM shield we put up would interrupt that. I reckon I was right in that regard. While the shield was in place over these ruins it was trapped here. When Ziggy turned the shield off…well…somehow the body of the thing was jaunted back to wherever it came from…only trouble was you jaunted right off after it!”
* * *
“I remember,” I tell the others later. When we’re all packed up and just about ready to leave the Ruins. “Bits and pieces. I was standing on a plain somewhere. A mountain range in the background. There was a building in front of me. Similar in appearance to the Ruins, except the building I was looking at wasn’t a ruin. It didn’t look old at all.”
I look around my present location. “It was here. I’m sure of it. Those are the mountains I saw in the distance.” I point at them. “I was standing right about here.” I walk away and stamp my foot down on the soft soil, leaving an imprint. “I started off inside the building; the body of the dead ALF was at my feet. I turned and walked outside. I…” I put a hand up to my head. There was a flash of pain.
Jessa is at my side in an instant. “Iron?”
I smile down at her concerned face. “I’m ok. Really.”
With Jessa holding me by the elbow I turn and stare at the others. “Christos!”
“What?” asks Billy.
“There was someone else there. There was someone else standing there with me. We were talking. He was telling me something.”
Jessa is wide eyed. Billy is rubbing his chin thoughtfully and the others are giving me weird looks. “It was a man. Long blonde hair, sharp features, clean shaven, well tanned skin. Dressed in a red shirt and dark pants. He had a sword slung over his shoulder in a baldric.” I draw in a sharp breath. “It was a black sword…and he had the same kind of black bracelet on his wrist that I’m wearing!”
Billy Wilddog is nodding to himself. He catches me staring at him. He shrugs. “I think you jaunted back in time, Rye. I think you met one of the Amon.”
Now everyone else is as confused as me.
“The Amon?” I ask. I shake my head. “Never heard of them?”
“No,” he agrees, “you wouldn’t have. The Others wiped them out, at least as far as I know.”
I gape at him. “I thought no one knows who the Others were? Billy, how do you know this stuff?”
Another shrug. “The ones you all call the Others…that white furred ALF was an Other. Recognised it as soon as I saw it. Although I suspected it was one of the Others before that.”
The rest of my crew are incredulous. “Hey, come on now, Billy. How do you know that?” Slug is wide eyed.
“You said these Ruins were more than just old, disused buildings, before,” Jessa reminds the ex-bounty hunter. “You said it like you know what they were used for. Do you? I mean do you really?”
The older man smiles at her. “I suspect darlin’. I suspect much. Can’t say for sure how much of what I suspect is true and how much ain’t.” he waves a hand around. “You all seen how there ain’t no roofs on these Ruins, yeah? You notice that it don’t matter what planet you find them on, there ain’t never no roofs or any sort of covering on them. Why is that, do you think?”
“Because the Others could fly,” I say flatly. Like it’s a fact.
Billy nods. “Yeah. That’s what I figured out, a long time ago. Not just that they could fly, but that they harnesses some kind of power, latent in these buildings, a power source that we’ve never even been aware of, never discovered. They can jaunt between one of these places and another. On and off planet I’m guessing.”
“Like a transportation beam?” asks Ziggy in shock.
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Mofuk!” exclaims Dax. “Humankind has been trying to develop a matter transportation beam ever since we fist went into space, before that even.”
“Unsuccessfully,” Ziggy points out.
The older man in front of us nods again. “Yep. That’s one nut we haven’t managed to crack. The Others did though. Probably a few thousand years before we got off of Old Earth and started colonising the Universe. Hell, even before the Ru’a and the Geckos and the Zrene were out and about, I reckon.”
“Who was the man talking to me do you think?” I ask Billy.
He shrugs. “Can’t be sure. I figure you somehow jaunted back in time. Long before we colonised this planet. Back when the Amon and the Others were at war.”
“At war?” Jessa’s mouth is open. “Where do you get all this information from? How come none of us have ever heard anything like this?” She plainly thinks Billy is crazy.
He shrugs yet again. “I been all over the universe. Picked up a few clues here and there. Maybe looked at old stories and legends with a slightly different slant. I figured the Amon and the Others could jaunt from world to world, or at least from world to spaceship. Never gave much thought to them being able to jaunt through time as well as space. Now I factor that into my equations it kinda makes sense.”
I raise a hand. “Billy. Hold on there a second. These Amon. How come none of us have ever heard of them?”
“The Others wiped them out. A few thousand years ago, near as I can figure.”
“Who were they then? The guy talking to me looked human.”
“Guy talking to you was human, Rye. Where do you think we came from?”
“We? You mean humans? Terrans? Earthmen?”
“Yeah. Us. Where did us come from?”
We all look at each other. No one speaks.
“We’re the last descendants of the Amons who survived the war against the Others,” Billy says matter of factly. “They lost the war. Exhausted, defeated, almost wiped out, their technology in tatters, they fled as far from the Others territory as they could. Maybe even warped or jaunted through the space time continuum. Found themselves a nice, safe planet. Started over from scratch. End of the story right there, or the beginning, if you look at it that way.”
“What happened to the Others then?” I ask. “How come we’ve never come across them either. And more to the point how come they pop up here and there, in our time, now, and people think they’re space vampires?”
“They are space vampires, always have been. They feed off the life forces of other living creatures. The higher up the evolutionary scale, the more power they gain when sucking the life force out of something.”
“You didn’t answer Iron’s question?” Jessa points out.
Billy Wilddog smiles. “The Amon, almost defeated, played one last hand. They somehow infected the Others with a virus. Damn near wiped the entire species out. So the Amon and the Others both disappeared from the universe. Now they only exist in our legends. Except for the odd survivor, that pops up now and again. Like our space vampire here.”
I’m stunned. I have an idea. It’s so crazy I have to voice it aloud. “You’re one of the Amon!” I exclaim.
“Yeah,” admits Billy with a sly grin. “I am.”
My crew gapes at him.
He winks at me. “See you around, Rye.”
Then he pulls back a leather wristband on his left arm, exposing the same kind of black alien bracelet that I’m wearing.
Touches it.
And disappears.
"I'm glad I don't have to make out the incident report on this one," Ziggy says.
* * *
Jessa is lying in my arms.
We’re in my private quarters, so no one is going to disturb us.
I’m idly tracing patterns across her naked back.
“You don’t remember anymore about your conversation with the Amon?” she asks.
“No. Nothing. I can see his lips moving. I know he’s telling me something. But what it was I don’t know.”
“When you disappeared I thought I’d lost you,” she tells me.
“I think the Amon guy sent me back. I don’t know how yet, but this black bracelet gives the wearer the ability to jaunt, I’m sure of it. Maybe it only works inside one of the Ruins though.”
She shivers. “I wish you’d take it off, Iron. I don’t want to lose you again.”
"You won't," I assure her.
"That thing channeled someone else through your body," she says. "One of the Amon."
"Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe it just gave me the Amon's memories, stored in the bracelet."
"You should get rid of it," she insists. "And the axe."
"Every time I've faced a dangerous situation, since I first put it on, the bracelet and the axe have helped me," I tell her. "I don't think wearing it is a problem."
I can see we're not going to agree on this, so I change the subject.
“Just when did you decide that you wanted me?” I ask, curious.
She smiles. “I warmed to you as time went by. Especially after you saved my life on that Zrene ship. I wasn’t really sure how much I liked you…until you vanished in front of my eyes. I was scared I’d never see you again.”
I nod to myself. “I see.”
She rolls over and looks up at me. “Iron Ryker. The Iron Sergeant. You’re not so tough.”
“Actually you’re wrong about that,” I inform her.
An arched eyebrow. “Oh, really?”
It’s my turn to smile. “Yeah. Really. My names not Iron, it’s Ion. Ion Ryker.”
She blinks in surprise. “But everyone thinks it’s Iron. Don’t they?”
I brush my palm over her short hair. “Yes they do. People hear what they want to hear. I always say Ion. They always repeat it as Iron. It’s why I normally stick to Rye.”
Jessa snuggles into my arms. “Ion it is then.”
I look over her shoulder at the black alien axe, resting in its harness against the wall opposite. I glance down at my black bracelet. The axe and the bracelet are joined, somehow.
“Do you think we’ll ever see Billy again?” Jessa asks.
“Yes,” I say with certainty. “I’m sure we will. I don’t think the universe has seen the last of Billy Wilddog.”
“And what about us?” she asks me. “Where do we go from here, Ion?”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what other adventures the Gabrielle Drake will take us to,” I reply.
The End...for now...but Ion Ryker will return in future adventures.
.
Jessa and I are cautious. We flick the safeties off our rifles and quietly make our way back to the main hall.
“It’s trying to jaunt away,” Billy informs us. “But no luck. The AM shield has trapped it here.”
We stop at a corner and I carefully stick my head around, checking out the area in front of me.
I draw in a sharp breath.
Jessa drops to her knees and peers around the corner from next to my leg. “Christos. It looks just like the stories.”
She’s right. The space vampires of legend are often described as tall, skinny creatures, with pale skin, demonic visages and leathery wings. The thing we’re looking at has all those attributes and more. The face is almost human…except for the black eyes and the pointed chin. The large, pointed ears. The slit of a mouth (which I just know is filled with sharp fangs) Long, clawed digits. It’s covered in a sheen of soft white fur. Some sort of bright material is wrapped around its waist and groin area. Looks like red silk to me.
“It’s seen me,” Billy Wilddog says calmly.
I look up at Billy’s position, high overhead. He’s nestled in an aperture in the rock wall.
A snap makes me look back at our new arrival. The leathery wings spread out and it launches itself into the air. Making unerringly for Billy.
Before it’s even halfway to him Billy raises a cumbersome looking rifle and fires off a shot. Instead of bullets a finely woven net of steel mesh erupts from the thick barrel of his weapon and envelops the flying creature as it nears the other’s position. Entangled in the steel net, the thing, unable to fly now, plummets back down and crashes heavily onto the unforgiving ground.
I slip around my corner and jog over to the fallen creature. Jessa shadows me, her Multi .75 never wavering from the downed myth in front of us.
Just as we reach it the creature regains its clawed feet. Still entangled in the capture net it looks in our direction and hisses at us. And then, in the blink of an eye it rips the finely woven steel netting apart as though it was made of cobwebs.
“Shit!” I hear Billy exclaim over my wrist comp.
* * *
My bracelet is tingling like crazy, as I’ve discovered it always does when it perceives I’m in a dangerous situation. The creature in front of us starts to move closer. Suddenly my weird alien bracelet sends a jolt right through me. I gasp and my back arches. My hands open and my Gatlin .50 drops to the floor. Black spots swim in front of my eyes. Then, as suddenly as it happened, the savage jolt that screamed all along my nerve endings stops.
And I feel different.
I feel powerful, real powerful.
Without really being aware of what I’m doing I reach behind my back and unsnap the Ru’a battle-axe from its harness.
My right hand brings it around in front and I hold it up so that the alien creature can see it.
Jessa looks concerned at my moment of agony, and at my dropping my weapon. “Rye?” She has her Multi .75 aimed at the thing before us and I’m aware that her finger is tightening on the trigger.
I reach out with my left hand and push the barrel of her rifle down. “No,” I say.
She blinks in surprise.
The creature has stopped a short distance from us. Its black eyes widen as though in shock. Then the mouth opens and it speaks.
“Ta sark jai dei!” This cannot be!
And without knowing how, or why, I reply in the same guttural language. “Ra kesh nai mara?” We have not forgotten you!
“Aiee!” It throws itself at me, claws outstretched, seeking my throat.
* * *
I open my eyes.
WTF?
“He’s awake,” I hear Billy Wilddog say.
“Iron?” Jessa’s voice. I look at her as she kneels down beside me, a concerned look on her face. I feel her soft hand on my brow.
I’m confused. The last thing I remember is the ALF leaping at me.
“What happened?” I croak. My mouth feels dry.
“Was hoping you could tell us?” Billy suggests.
I close my eyes and open them again. All I can think of is that Jessa called me by my first name. And nobody ever does that.
I see that I’m lying on my back, on a medi-blanket. Ziggy is hovering around, above me, scanning me with his wrist comp.
“He’s ok, looks like.”
We’re outside. The sun is shining. How many hours have I been unconscious?
“What the hell happened?” I demand.
* * *
Billy Wilddog tells me the story. It’s so way out I can hardly believe it, but the others throw in the occasional agreement or nod now and again. So I cannot but doubt Billy is telling me the truth.
“You threw away your rifle and pulled out that axe of yours. The creature said something to you. You replied in the same language. Whatever you said really pissed it off, because the next second it threw itself at you. You took a swing at it with your axe. The creature was quick, lightning quick. It swerved aside and cut at you with a clawed hand. Caught you on your right shoulder. Tore right through your jacket. Blood spurted out. You whirled away, almost as fast on your feet as the creature. Then out of nowhere, I mean like out of thin air, the creature produced a sword. Grayish, like it was made of lead or something. The pair of you started hacking and slashing at each other like nobodies business. Jessa and I wanted to shoot the ALF, but you was both moving so fast it was impossible to fire off a shot without taking a chance on hitting you by mistake. When I say you and that thing were moving fast…I mean like a blur, Rye. I’ve never seen a human move that quick. The bracelet on your wrist was glowing black, same as the axe. It was like a pulse of black light. Your shoulder stopped bleeding. Your axe struck the creature, it was wounded, blood was pouring out of a huge slash in its side. But it healed up. Stopped bleeding. You two carried on fighting. Your axe and that thing’s sword sparked like fire every time you blocked each others weapon. You were both yelling stuff at each other. Not that any of us could understand what you was saying.
“Then you knocked the creature off its feet. Before it could get back up you cut down at it with your axe…and sheared its head right off!
“You kinda stood over the corpse, all exultant like, waving your axe around and yelling shit we didn’t understand. Jessa called out to you and you looked at her like you’d never seen her before. With the creature dead I called Ziggy and told him to turn the AM shield off. That was a mistake. As soon as he cut the power…there was a bright flash of light from where the body of the creature was lying…and it disappeared. The head, the body, the sword. Everything. Gone. Vanished. Just out and out disappeared.
Billy stops talking and takes a good, hard look at me. “Then you disappeared too,” he tells me.
My jaw drops. “What?”
He nods and Jessa with him. “It’s true, Iron. I looked at you standing there, shouting in a language that I’ve never heard before, that none of us have ever heard, and there was another flash of light and you just vanished. We think you jaunted. The dead ALF as well.”
I’m half sitting up now. Completely stunned. I notice that the black, alien bracelet is still on my wrist. I look around for the axe that has a bond with it. Jessa notices this. “It’s over there,” she points. “It came back when you did.”
Came back? Came back from where? I ask this aloud. My crew mumble and mutter and shake their heads.
“We don’t know,” Billy admits. “Got a few wild ideas though.”
“Tell me.”
He shrugs. “I figure that when the AM shield was lifted the creature, even though it was dead, at least we have to suppose it was dead, I mean you cut its damned head off, the creature’s body somehow returned to wherever it had originated from to begin with. Like some kind of automatic reflex. I told you I thought it was jaunting. That the AM shield we put up would interrupt that. I reckon I was right in that regard. While the shield was in place over these ruins it was trapped here. When Ziggy turned the shield off…well…somehow the body of the thing was jaunted back to wherever it came from…only trouble was you jaunted right off after it!”
* * *
“I remember,” I tell the others later. When we’re all packed up and just about ready to leave the Ruins. “Bits and pieces. I was standing on a plain somewhere. A mountain range in the background. There was a building in front of me. Similar in appearance to the Ruins, except the building I was looking at wasn’t a ruin. It didn’t look old at all.”
I look around my present location. “It was here. I’m sure of it. Those are the mountains I saw in the distance.” I point at them. “I was standing right about here.” I walk away and stamp my foot down on the soft soil, leaving an imprint. “I started off inside the building; the body of the dead ALF was at my feet. I turned and walked outside. I…” I put a hand up to my head. There was a flash of pain.
Jessa is at my side in an instant. “Iron?”
I smile down at her concerned face. “I’m ok. Really.”
With Jessa holding me by the elbow I turn and stare at the others. “Christos!”
“What?” asks Billy.
“There was someone else there. There was someone else standing there with me. We were talking. He was telling me something.”
Jessa is wide eyed. Billy is rubbing his chin thoughtfully and the others are giving me weird looks. “It was a man. Long blonde hair, sharp features, clean shaven, well tanned skin. Dressed in a red shirt and dark pants. He had a sword slung over his shoulder in a baldric.” I draw in a sharp breath. “It was a black sword…and he had the same kind of black bracelet on his wrist that I’m wearing!”
Billy Wilddog is nodding to himself. He catches me staring at him. He shrugs. “I think you jaunted back in time, Rye. I think you met one of the Amon.”
Now everyone else is as confused as me.
“The Amon?” I ask. I shake my head. “Never heard of them?”
“No,” he agrees, “you wouldn’t have. The Others wiped them out, at least as far as I know.”
I gape at him. “I thought no one knows who the Others were? Billy, how do you know this stuff?”
Another shrug. “The ones you all call the Others…that white furred ALF was an Other. Recognised it as soon as I saw it. Although I suspected it was one of the Others before that.”
The rest of my crew are incredulous. “Hey, come on now, Billy. How do you know that?” Slug is wide eyed.
“You said these Ruins were more than just old, disused buildings, before,” Jessa reminds the ex-bounty hunter. “You said it like you know what they were used for. Do you? I mean do you really?”
The older man smiles at her. “I suspect darlin’. I suspect much. Can’t say for sure how much of what I suspect is true and how much ain’t.” he waves a hand around. “You all seen how there ain’t no roofs on these Ruins, yeah? You notice that it don’t matter what planet you find them on, there ain’t never no roofs or any sort of covering on them. Why is that, do you think?”
“Because the Others could fly,” I say flatly. Like it’s a fact.
Billy nods. “Yeah. That’s what I figured out, a long time ago. Not just that they could fly, but that they harnesses some kind of power, latent in these buildings, a power source that we’ve never even been aware of, never discovered. They can jaunt between one of these places and another. On and off planet I’m guessing.”
“Like a transportation beam?” asks Ziggy in shock.
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Mofuk!” exclaims Dax. “Humankind has been trying to develop a matter transportation beam ever since we fist went into space, before that even.”
“Unsuccessfully,” Ziggy points out.
The older man in front of us nods again. “Yep. That’s one nut we haven’t managed to crack. The Others did though. Probably a few thousand years before we got off of Old Earth and started colonising the Universe. Hell, even before the Ru’a and the Geckos and the Zrene were out and about, I reckon.”
“Who was the man talking to me do you think?” I ask Billy.
He shrugs. “Can’t be sure. I figure you somehow jaunted back in time. Long before we colonised this planet. Back when the Amon and the Others were at war.”
“At war?” Jessa’s mouth is open. “Where do you get all this information from? How come none of us have ever heard anything like this?” She plainly thinks Billy is crazy.
He shrugs yet again. “I been all over the universe. Picked up a few clues here and there. Maybe looked at old stories and legends with a slightly different slant. I figured the Amon and the Others could jaunt from world to world, or at least from world to spaceship. Never gave much thought to them being able to jaunt through time as well as space. Now I factor that into my equations it kinda makes sense.”
I raise a hand. “Billy. Hold on there a second. These Amon. How come none of us have ever heard of them?”
“The Others wiped them out. A few thousand years ago, near as I can figure.”
“Who were they then? The guy talking to me looked human.”
“Guy talking to you was human, Rye. Where do you think we came from?”
“We? You mean humans? Terrans? Earthmen?”
“Yeah. Us. Where did us come from?”
We all look at each other. No one speaks.
“We’re the last descendants of the Amons who survived the war against the Others,” Billy says matter of factly. “They lost the war. Exhausted, defeated, almost wiped out, their technology in tatters, they fled as far from the Others territory as they could. Maybe even warped or jaunted through the space time continuum. Found themselves a nice, safe planet. Started over from scratch. End of the story right there, or the beginning, if you look at it that way.”
“What happened to the Others then?” I ask. “How come we’ve never come across them either. And more to the point how come they pop up here and there, in our time, now, and people think they’re space vampires?”
“They are space vampires, always have been. They feed off the life forces of other living creatures. The higher up the evolutionary scale, the more power they gain when sucking the life force out of something.”
“You didn’t answer Iron’s question?” Jessa points out.
Billy Wilddog smiles. “The Amon, almost defeated, played one last hand. They somehow infected the Others with a virus. Damn near wiped the entire species out. So the Amon and the Others both disappeared from the universe. Now they only exist in our legends. Except for the odd survivor, that pops up now and again. Like our space vampire here.”
I’m stunned. I have an idea. It’s so crazy I have to voice it aloud. “You’re one of the Amon!” I exclaim.
“Yeah,” admits Billy with a sly grin. “I am.”
My crew gapes at him.
He winks at me. “See you around, Rye.”
Then he pulls back a leather wristband on his left arm, exposing the same kind of black alien bracelet that I’m wearing.
Touches it.
And disappears.
"I'm glad I don't have to make out the incident report on this one," Ziggy says.
* * *
Jessa is lying in my arms.
We’re in my private quarters, so no one is going to disturb us.
I’m idly tracing patterns across her naked back.
“You don’t remember anymore about your conversation with the Amon?” she asks.
“No. Nothing. I can see his lips moving. I know he’s telling me something. But what it was I don’t know.”
“When you disappeared I thought I’d lost you,” she tells me.
“I think the Amon guy sent me back. I don’t know how yet, but this black bracelet gives the wearer the ability to jaunt, I’m sure of it. Maybe it only works inside one of the Ruins though.”
She shivers. “I wish you’d take it off, Iron. I don’t want to lose you again.”
"You won't," I assure her.
"That thing channeled someone else through your body," she says. "One of the Amon."
"Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe it just gave me the Amon's memories, stored in the bracelet."
"You should get rid of it," she insists. "And the axe."
"Every time I've faced a dangerous situation, since I first put it on, the bracelet and the axe have helped me," I tell her. "I don't think wearing it is a problem."
I can see we're not going to agree on this, so I change the subject.
“Just when did you decide that you wanted me?” I ask, curious.
She smiles. “I warmed to you as time went by. Especially after you saved my life on that Zrene ship. I wasn’t really sure how much I liked you…until you vanished in front of my eyes. I was scared I’d never see you again.”
I nod to myself. “I see.”
She rolls over and looks up at me. “Iron Ryker. The Iron Sergeant. You’re not so tough.”
“Actually you’re wrong about that,” I inform her.
An arched eyebrow. “Oh, really?”
It’s my turn to smile. “Yeah. Really. My names not Iron, it’s Ion. Ion Ryker.”
She blinks in surprise. “But everyone thinks it’s Iron. Don’t they?”
I brush my palm over her short hair. “Yes they do. People hear what they want to hear. I always say Ion. They always repeat it as Iron. It’s why I normally stick to Rye.”
Jessa snuggles into my arms. “Ion it is then.”
I look over her shoulder at the black alien axe, resting in its harness against the wall opposite. I glance down at my black bracelet. The axe and the bracelet are joined, somehow.
“Do you think we’ll ever see Billy again?” Jessa asks.
“Yes,” I say with certainty. “I’m sure we will. I don’t think the universe has seen the last of Billy Wilddog.”
“And what about us?” she asks me. “Where do we go from here, Ion?”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what other adventures the Gabrielle Drake will take us to,” I reply.
The End...for now...but Ion Ryker will return in future adventures.
.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Waiting in the Ruins
Journal Entry: 53
“I didn’t think Finbow would let us have one,” I admit to the others.
“Not surprised,” Jessa agrees. “I mean detaching one of the anti-matter pods from a scout ship and letting us use it to set up a virtual force field. That’s chancy stuff. If anything goes wrong we’ll just be an imploded hole in the ground.”
“Relax,” Billy Wilddog tells us. “This ain’t the first time I’ve done this.”
Ziggy and Dax are helping him coordinate the AM pod settings.
“You’ve done this before then?” Ziggy asks him.
“Well, not on this scale, I admit.”
“How big a scale then?” inquires Dax.
“Just used the AM pod on my ship to create a secure shield around the thing when it was parked up in hostile territory.”
I nod to myself. Great. Big difference between placing an AM shield over a small spaceship and over a set of buildings as big as the Ruins here. I mention this.
“You want to catch the killer or not?” Billy says with a look.
“We’re not even sure it’s going to work,” I reply.
“Should do,” says Jessa. “The creature appears on our scanners, inside the Ruins, we activate the AM shield a second later, the thing should be sealed in. Won’t be able to jaunt through anti-matter.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” suggests Slug. “You’re just guessing.”
“I’m guessing we three can finish this a lot faster if the rest of you don’t keep jawing and distracting us,” Billy mutters.
I hold up my hands. “Ok. We’ll be over there. If you don’t vaporise yourselves we’ll see you shortly.” Signalling to Jessa and Slug I walk away. Behind us the other three continue to manipulate the sensitive controls on the anti-matter pod.
* * *
Five days and five nights we’ve been camped inside and outside the Ruins. And not another sign of whatever it was that created the original blip on our scanners, or made the strange footprint that Billy showed us.
We’re living on freeze dried rations and are down to the last of our tea and coffee. Tomorrow someone’s going to have to take the skimmer back into town for supplies.
Once more I watch the sun set.
I’m half convinced we’re on a wild goose chase. I’m about to say this aloud when Jessa straightens up from her slouched position over by the wall. The two of us are inside the Ruin’s. Billy is nestled up near the open roof. The other three are camoed up outside. The idea being that if we activate the AM field we’ll have people inside and out. Jessa and I are in one of the small rooms, just off from the main hall. The whole structure is built of massive stone blocks. Who built it, or why, remains a mystery to this day. All we know for sure is that another star-faring race was the dominant species in the Universe before human-kind ventured into space. What happened to the Others is unknown. It’s like they just vanished, leaving only a few odd artefacts and their ruins behind them.
Billy Wilddog is convinced that the ruins are more than they appear, as he said to Jessa a few days ago.
“Ever noticed that none of the Ruins, on any of the worlds, ever have a roof? Ever wondered why that might be?”
“I thought the general theory was that the roofs had all collapsed?” Slug asked
Billy spat to one side. “Then how come there ain’t never no fallen stones and rocks inside the buildings? Nah. That’s space dust. Damned obvious that there never was any roofs on the Others buildings. Any fool could work that out.”
Apparently not, as Jessa told him.
The ex bounty hunter snorted. “If the fallen roofs crumbled to dust as the centuries went by, darlin’, how come the rest of the structures didn’t do that also?”
“Different kind of material huh? I don’t know about you but I never seen any of the ruins made of anything but big stone blocks.”
The debate about the lack of overhead coverings on the Others buildings had been raging long before I was born.
“I suppose you have a theory about that too, Billy?” I asked him.
I got a sly grin in reply. “Maybe.”
So here we are. Five days later. Waiting for something that might never appear here again.
“I’ll take first watch,” Jessa tells me. “You get some sleep, Rye.”
“I’m ok. Not even close to tired yet. Getting bored though. Only so many stories we can tell each other.”
She’s about to say something else when her tracker pings.
I jerk my left wrist up close to my mouth. “Hit the AM shield, now!”
Outside I can imagine Ziggy pressing down on the pod control. Pre-set as it is the anti-matter shield will envelope the entire structure in a second. I have no idea what set the tracker off. Twice now we’ve done this and twice it was set off by a small rat-like animal, a local creature that lives here. Strangely we discovered that the Ruins don’t seem to be inhabited by any living thing. It’s almost like the local animals and birds shun the place. Only the little dark furred rat seems to venture inside, and then only when the sun has gone down.
The hair on the back on my arms tingles. A blue light shimmers overhead and also at the openings in the structure. This the visible sign that the anti-matter field generated by the stripped pod is working.
I look at Jessa, watching her checking for more movement blips. She doesn’t take her eyes off the scanner.
“I got nothing,” Ziggy says from outside. His voice carries clearly over my wrist comp. “Us either, seems like,” I reply.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Jessa tells me. “I’ve got a fixed blip. It’s standing in the centre of the hall, out there, not moving.”
“Son-of a-bitch!” exclaims Billy Wilddog over our comps. “I can see it!”
* * *
“I didn’t think Finbow would let us have one,” I admit to the others.
“Not surprised,” Jessa agrees. “I mean detaching one of the anti-matter pods from a scout ship and letting us use it to set up a virtual force field. That’s chancy stuff. If anything goes wrong we’ll just be an imploded hole in the ground.”
“Relax,” Billy Wilddog tells us. “This ain’t the first time I’ve done this.”
Ziggy and Dax are helping him coordinate the AM pod settings.
“You’ve done this before then?” Ziggy asks him.
“Well, not on this scale, I admit.”
“How big a scale then?” inquires Dax.
“Just used the AM pod on my ship to create a secure shield around the thing when it was parked up in hostile territory.”
I nod to myself. Great. Big difference between placing an AM shield over a small spaceship and over a set of buildings as big as the Ruins here. I mention this.
“You want to catch the killer or not?” Billy says with a look.
“We’re not even sure it’s going to work,” I reply.
“Should do,” says Jessa. “The creature appears on our scanners, inside the Ruins, we activate the AM shield a second later, the thing should be sealed in. Won’t be able to jaunt through anti-matter.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” suggests Slug. “You’re just guessing.”
“I’m guessing we three can finish this a lot faster if the rest of you don’t keep jawing and distracting us,” Billy mutters.
I hold up my hands. “Ok. We’ll be over there. If you don’t vaporise yourselves we’ll see you shortly.” Signalling to Jessa and Slug I walk away. Behind us the other three continue to manipulate the sensitive controls on the anti-matter pod.
* * *
Five days and five nights we’ve been camped inside and outside the Ruins. And not another sign of whatever it was that created the original blip on our scanners, or made the strange footprint that Billy showed us.
We’re living on freeze dried rations and are down to the last of our tea and coffee. Tomorrow someone’s going to have to take the skimmer back into town for supplies.
Once more I watch the sun set.
I’m half convinced we’re on a wild goose chase. I’m about to say this aloud when Jessa straightens up from her slouched position over by the wall. The two of us are inside the Ruin’s. Billy is nestled up near the open roof. The other three are camoed up outside. The idea being that if we activate the AM field we’ll have people inside and out. Jessa and I are in one of the small rooms, just off from the main hall. The whole structure is built of massive stone blocks. Who built it, or why, remains a mystery to this day. All we know for sure is that another star-faring race was the dominant species in the Universe before human-kind ventured into space. What happened to the Others is unknown. It’s like they just vanished, leaving only a few odd artefacts and their ruins behind them.
Billy Wilddog is convinced that the ruins are more than they appear, as he said to Jessa a few days ago.
“Ever noticed that none of the Ruins, on any of the worlds, ever have a roof? Ever wondered why that might be?”
“I thought the general theory was that the roofs had all collapsed?” Slug asked
Billy spat to one side. “Then how come there ain’t never no fallen stones and rocks inside the buildings? Nah. That’s space dust. Damned obvious that there never was any roofs on the Others buildings. Any fool could work that out.”
Apparently not, as Jessa told him.
The ex bounty hunter snorted. “If the fallen roofs crumbled to dust as the centuries went by, darlin’, how come the rest of the structures didn’t do that also?”
“Different kind of material huh? I don’t know about you but I never seen any of the ruins made of anything but big stone blocks.”
The debate about the lack of overhead coverings on the Others buildings had been raging long before I was born.
“I suppose you have a theory about that too, Billy?” I asked him.
I got a sly grin in reply. “Maybe.”
So here we are. Five days later. Waiting for something that might never appear here again.
“I’ll take first watch,” Jessa tells me. “You get some sleep, Rye.”
“I’m ok. Not even close to tired yet. Getting bored though. Only so many stories we can tell each other.”
She’s about to say something else when her tracker pings.
I jerk my left wrist up close to my mouth. “Hit the AM shield, now!”
Outside I can imagine Ziggy pressing down on the pod control. Pre-set as it is the anti-matter shield will envelope the entire structure in a second. I have no idea what set the tracker off. Twice now we’ve done this and twice it was set off by a small rat-like animal, a local creature that lives here. Strangely we discovered that the Ruins don’t seem to be inhabited by any living thing. It’s almost like the local animals and birds shun the place. Only the little dark furred rat seems to venture inside, and then only when the sun has gone down.
The hair on the back on my arms tingles. A blue light shimmers overhead and also at the openings in the structure. This the visible sign that the anti-matter field generated by the stripped pod is working.
I look at Jessa, watching her checking for more movement blips. She doesn’t take her eyes off the scanner.
“I got nothing,” Ziggy says from outside. His voice carries clearly over my wrist comp. “Us either, seems like,” I reply.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Jessa tells me. “I’ve got a fixed blip. It’s standing in the centre of the hall, out there, not moving.”
“Son-of a-bitch!” exclaims Billy Wilddog over our comps. “I can see it!”
* * *
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Out of space and time
Journal entry: 52
I peer closely at a mark in the earth. That’s all it is to me. Just a mark, nothing more. “You sure that’s a track?” I ask Billy.
He snorts. “Three toes. There and there and there. Heel of the foot, there. Ground’s hard here. Doesn’t show much.”
“Let me see,” says Ziggy. He crouches down next to us and holds a small disc over the mark. He glances from the apparent track to his wrist comp. “Hmm. Look at that. I’ve patched it through all our comps.”
I stare down at the rectangular screen that is part of the computer clamped around my left wrist. The holo-screen projection that rises from it makes images larger and easier to see. Under a dark red light I can plainly make out the three toed track that Billy has pointed out. I grunt in surprise.
“Told you so,” Wilddog says smugly. “Don’t need no fancy gadgets to track with.”
“How do you know the track wasn’t there before?” Jessa asks.
“Cause I been all over this area with a fine toothed comb, darlin’. It wasn’t here yesterday, trust me on that.”
“How come there’s only one track?” Dax asks. She’s been walking in ever widening circles, staring intently at the ground, looking for more of the mysterious marks.
Billy Wilddog shrugs and stands up. “Don’t rightly know. Got me some ideas. Might keep them to myself. Less you folks think I’m just a crazy old man. Fact is my suspicions are so far out there I can hardly believe I’m giving the idea any thought at all. But like I said, once you’ve eliminated all of the possibles, all you got left is the impossibles.”
I nod. “That’s what I need, Billy. Solid information. Thanks a lot.”
The older man smiles at me. “You’ll think I’m nuts, Sergeant Ryker.”
“Rye will do,” I assure him. “Go ahead. Convince me you’re crazy.”
He shrugs again. “Ok. How come there’s a track at all?” He looks around, at all of us. “Why only one track?”
We glance at one another. Slug spits to one side. “Fuked if I know, Billy.”
Fuked if any of us know, apparently.
Billy Wilddog nods. “Wasn’t a trick question. The critter was here, for a moment, then it was gone. Why?” He holds up a hand. “I’ll just answer my own self, be quicker then.”
He continues. “It entered our world, realised we were waiting for it, so it disappeared itself again. I’m guessing it can jaunt, just like the legends say the Others are capable of. One second it was here, the next it was gone. Whether back to wherever it came from or someplace not far from here, I don’t know.”
Jaunting. The Others. Space dust stories told to children.
“Bullshit,” I say aloud. Slug echoes me.
Billy cocks his head and gives me a look. Not a pleasant one. “You think so, huh?” He points at me. “Told you you’d think I was crazy. Ok. You want it all? Hell, I’ll give it to you. I think the thing, the creature, the space vampire, whatever you want to call it, comes from a different dimension, or different space time continuum. That’s why we can’t see it, most of the time. It exists out of our time/space sphere. I think it can jaunt between its own world and ours, I think that once here, it can jaunt between places. Like these Ruins and the town. My guess is it jaunts into town, but not quite in our dimension, stays invisible, then finds a victim, grabs him, or her, as the case may be…and jaunts them back out into the boonies outside of town…where it sucks the life force from them. Now how’s that for crazy?”
I blink. Crazy’s not the word. I’d be more tempted to lean toward insane. I notice the rest of my crew are raising eyebrows or exchanging glances. No one speaks.
Except Ziggy. “Ok. Let’s say you’re right, Billy. How do we find the thing? Track it, capture it or kill it? And how can we be sure there’s only one of them? Hey, you don’t think the creature is one of the Others, do you?”
“No, I don’t. But I reckon that maybe the things are using some of the tech that the Others left behind.”
“The Others didn’t leave any tech behind,” Jessa points out. “At least none that we’ve ever been able to understand or use.”
Wilddog smiles at her. Points to his right. “The Others left their tech on just about every planet that we’ve colonised, darlin’.”
Jessa gapes at him. “The Ruins? You’re saying the Ruins are tech, not just centuries old buildings?”
“Of course they’re tech,” he tells her. “I’ve always known that. Beats me why the rest of you haven’t worked that out by now?”
By the ‘rest’ of you, he means everyone else in colonised space.
Jessa is silent. She’s looking between Billy and the Ruins. Her brain is computing this new data so fast I can almost hear it buzzing.
Everyone else is looking at me. I take a deep breath. “Alright. I’ll go with this for a bit. Got nothing else to do. But let’s stop building our unknown visitor a bigger myth than he’s already got. One of the Others, a space vampire, a monster out of time, whatever. It’s an ALF. An Alien Life Form. That’s all. Nothing we haven’t all come across before, fought before. The Geckos. The Creepies. The Zrene. This thing. An ALF. That’s all it is.”
I want to get right away from the spooky aspects here. Get some reality going. I can’t afford to have my crew thinking we’re facing some sort of mythical creature that has supernatural powers or abilities.
Surprisingly enough Billy Wilddog agrees with me. “Rye’s right,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my travels around the Universe, but everything has an explanation. Course some of those explanations are a tad thin, but only ‘cause we don’t know enough yet. Hell, we probably never will know enough. And that’s a good thing. Be a boring old Universe otherwise.”
He rubs his hands together. Grins that roughish grin, the same one I used to see featured on the front cover of magazines and sat-vid shows. “Ok,” he says. “This is what we do…”
* * *
I peer closely at a mark in the earth. That’s all it is to me. Just a mark, nothing more. “You sure that’s a track?” I ask Billy.
He snorts. “Three toes. There and there and there. Heel of the foot, there. Ground’s hard here. Doesn’t show much.”
“Let me see,” says Ziggy. He crouches down next to us and holds a small disc over the mark. He glances from the apparent track to his wrist comp. “Hmm. Look at that. I’ve patched it through all our comps.”
I stare down at the rectangular screen that is part of the computer clamped around my left wrist. The holo-screen projection that rises from it makes images larger and easier to see. Under a dark red light I can plainly make out the three toed track that Billy has pointed out. I grunt in surprise.
“Told you so,” Wilddog says smugly. “Don’t need no fancy gadgets to track with.”
“How do you know the track wasn’t there before?” Jessa asks.
“Cause I been all over this area with a fine toothed comb, darlin’. It wasn’t here yesterday, trust me on that.”
“How come there’s only one track?” Dax asks. She’s been walking in ever widening circles, staring intently at the ground, looking for more of the mysterious marks.
Billy Wilddog shrugs and stands up. “Don’t rightly know. Got me some ideas. Might keep them to myself. Less you folks think I’m just a crazy old man. Fact is my suspicions are so far out there I can hardly believe I’m giving the idea any thought at all. But like I said, once you’ve eliminated all of the possibles, all you got left is the impossibles.”
I nod. “That’s what I need, Billy. Solid information. Thanks a lot.”
The older man smiles at me. “You’ll think I’m nuts, Sergeant Ryker.”
“Rye will do,” I assure him. “Go ahead. Convince me you’re crazy.”
He shrugs again. “Ok. How come there’s a track at all?” He looks around, at all of us. “Why only one track?”
We glance at one another. Slug spits to one side. “Fuked if I know, Billy.”
Fuked if any of us know, apparently.
Billy Wilddog nods. “Wasn’t a trick question. The critter was here, for a moment, then it was gone. Why?” He holds up a hand. “I’ll just answer my own self, be quicker then.”
He continues. “It entered our world, realised we were waiting for it, so it disappeared itself again. I’m guessing it can jaunt, just like the legends say the Others are capable of. One second it was here, the next it was gone. Whether back to wherever it came from or someplace not far from here, I don’t know.”
Jaunting. The Others. Space dust stories told to children.
“Bullshit,” I say aloud. Slug echoes me.
Billy cocks his head and gives me a look. Not a pleasant one. “You think so, huh?” He points at me. “Told you you’d think I was crazy. Ok. You want it all? Hell, I’ll give it to you. I think the thing, the creature, the space vampire, whatever you want to call it, comes from a different dimension, or different space time continuum. That’s why we can’t see it, most of the time. It exists out of our time/space sphere. I think it can jaunt between its own world and ours, I think that once here, it can jaunt between places. Like these Ruins and the town. My guess is it jaunts into town, but not quite in our dimension, stays invisible, then finds a victim, grabs him, or her, as the case may be…and jaunts them back out into the boonies outside of town…where it sucks the life force from them. Now how’s that for crazy?”
I blink. Crazy’s not the word. I’d be more tempted to lean toward insane. I notice the rest of my crew are raising eyebrows or exchanging glances. No one speaks.
Except Ziggy. “Ok. Let’s say you’re right, Billy. How do we find the thing? Track it, capture it or kill it? And how can we be sure there’s only one of them? Hey, you don’t think the creature is one of the Others, do you?”
“No, I don’t. But I reckon that maybe the things are using some of the tech that the Others left behind.”
“The Others didn’t leave any tech behind,” Jessa points out. “At least none that we’ve ever been able to understand or use.”
Wilddog smiles at her. Points to his right. “The Others left their tech on just about every planet that we’ve colonised, darlin’.”
Jessa gapes at him. “The Ruins? You’re saying the Ruins are tech, not just centuries old buildings?”
“Of course they’re tech,” he tells her. “I’ve always known that. Beats me why the rest of you haven’t worked that out by now?”
By the ‘rest’ of you, he means everyone else in colonised space.
Jessa is silent. She’s looking between Billy and the Ruins. Her brain is computing this new data so fast I can almost hear it buzzing.
Everyone else is looking at me. I take a deep breath. “Alright. I’ll go with this for a bit. Got nothing else to do. But let’s stop building our unknown visitor a bigger myth than he’s already got. One of the Others, a space vampire, a monster out of time, whatever. It’s an ALF. An Alien Life Form. That’s all. Nothing we haven’t all come across before, fought before. The Geckos. The Creepies. The Zrene. This thing. An ALF. That’s all it is.”
I want to get right away from the spooky aspects here. Get some reality going. I can’t afford to have my crew thinking we’re facing some sort of mythical creature that has supernatural powers or abilities.
Surprisingly enough Billy Wilddog agrees with me. “Rye’s right,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my travels around the Universe, but everything has an explanation. Course some of those explanations are a tad thin, but only ‘cause we don’t know enough yet. Hell, we probably never will know enough. And that’s a good thing. Be a boring old Universe otherwise.”
He rubs his hands together. Grins that roughish grin, the same one I used to see featured on the front cover of magazines and sat-vid shows. “Ok,” he says. “This is what we do…”
* * *
Thursday, April 2, 2009
The Bounty Hunter
Journal Entry: 51
“I figure you’re here for the same reason I am,” the new arrival says. “You folks have the look of a military unit about you.”
So much for the covert look then.
“Let’s say we are,” I acknowledge. “Where does that put us?”
“Well I ain’t much for company on a hunt. Best you all keep out of my way. No offence, but I been doing this kinda stuff for a number of years now, and I’m pretty darn good at it, if I do say so myself.”
“Holy shit,” exclaims Ziggy. He slips his pistol back into its holster and points at the silver haired man. “You’re Billy Wilddog! The bounty hunter.”
The man smiles modestly. “Used to be. Retired now.”
Wow. Not often you meet a living legend. Billy Wilddog. The most famous bounty hunter in the Seven Systems. Half man and half myth. I grew up hearing stories about this guy. Gunfighter. Tracker. Bounty Hunter. They used to say that if the Wilddog was on your trail you might as well just put a bullet in your head or turn yourself in, because it would only be a matter of time until he caught up with you.
“You’re the guy who killed Kannibal Kane, the serial killer who had his own death cult on Deckard’s Moon?” Slug asks, wide eyed.
A slight inclination of the head. “Yeah. That was me.” He turns his head and spits to one side. “Freaking nut that guy was. Had to waste a few of his followers too. Crazy sons of bitches they all were.”
It’s time to bring this impromptu meeting to a close. “Mr. Olddog, sun’s going to be down in a bit. We need to get ourselves set up. I have nothing against you joining us, but make no mistake, this is my party, you’re just a gatecrasher. I give the orders here, everyone follows them. If you’re straight with that then we’re cool. If you’re not…”
He grins at me. “Well now. Ain’t you the bravo.” In the blink of an eye he spins his pistol around and re-holsters it. Walks right up to me and sticks out his hand. We shake. “You all can call me Billy,” he says. “Seeing as how we’re on the same side like.”
“Fair enough.” I turn to the others. “Ziggy, Dax. You set up a hide over there. Full camo holo field. I don’t want anyone or anything to see us, after the sun’s gone down. Slug, you and Jessa do the same over there, on the opposite side of the Ruins. But where we can still see you. Billy, how about you and I get comfortable right here, next to these rocks, I’ll put a holo field around us.”
He shrugs. “Sure. Good as place as any.”
“You really think we’re going to come across a vampire, Billy?” Dax asks as she sets up her holo field. “And why are you hunting it anyway, if you’re retired I mean?”
“Am retired. Was visiting an old friend here on Morgana. He lives in Bream. Had himself a daughter. Cute kid. Teenager. They found what was left of her body a couple of weeks ago. My buddy was grieved. His wife had passed on some years before. Daughter was all he had. Killed himself a few days a'fore I arrived. Blew his brains out.” Billy took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I ain’t got so many real friends that I can afford to lose them. I found out the local law here, and your military boys, hadn’t been able to catch this killer. They was all whispering about freaking space vampires and scared to wander around at night. The killer made a mistake when he took my friend’s daughter. Be the last mistake he makes.”
I shiver. The older man’s voice had gotten cold as he spoke. There was a power in this man, that I hadn’t come across before. The alien bracelet on my wrist tingled for a few moments. Like it was worried also.
“No need for you to be a’feared, young feller. I ain’t after you.”
I wasn’t aware that I’d given any indication that I was unsettled there for a moment. “How did you know?” I ask him.
He smiles quietly. “I’m Billy Wilddog, son. I know lots of things.” Suddenly he grins and looks years younger. “And I can read a person’s body language like most can read a book.”
The rest of my crew have set up their holo fields. From where Billy and I stand all we can see is the natural terrain around them. The holo fields copy the surroundings perfectly, deleting the people who are inside the radius of the projection.
I busy myself with our own field. I lay the projector flat on the ground, press a couple of buttons. Check the viewing screen. Although nothing had changed for Billy and I the view in the screen shows the boulders beside us, the scrub and small trees around us, the Ruins to one side…and nothing else. To all intents and purposes we are now invisible. Cloaked we call it in the military. The field deadens sound also, so if we keep our voices down we’ll still be able to talk. I can communicate with the others using our wrist comps.
“How did you end up out here?” I ask the other. “I mean here at the Ruins?”
“Every time there’s a killing like this, on any planet, there’s always some Ruins close by. This ain’t the first time I’ve hunted the so called vampires.”
I’m surprised and my face must show it. “You mean you’ve seen the things? Killed them?”
“Nope. Mean I’ve hunted them before. Never said I’d caught up with them. Never seen one myself. Got some ideas about that.”
He has a small backpack with him. He rests his rifle against a rock and slips the pack from his shoulders. Reaches inside and pulls out a hand held motion sensor. He picks up his rifle and snaps the motion tracker onto it. “I figure whatever these things are, they’re invisible,” he informs me.
“The fuk?” I hear over my wrist comp. I’d left it on an open channel, so the others could hear us. That was Slug’s voice.
“You serious, Billy?” asks Ziggy.
Realising that he can be heard by the rest of my crew he replies to them. “Yeah. Gotta be. No other answer for it. They seem to be able to sneak right up on people, snatch them away and make off with them. All without anyone else noticing or hearing a thing. No one ever seems to scream, and a couple of times the victims have been quite close to other people. My buddy’s daughter was taken just a few metres away from a crowd of her friends. She’d walked to the corner of a street, just ahead of them, she turned the corner, out of her friends’ sight for a few seconds at the most…but when they walked around the corner…she was gone…just like that, vanished. No struggle, no screams, no nothing.”
“That’s a pretty scary story, Billy,” I hear Jessa say. “Could she have been dragged into an alley, down a sewer opening or something, pulled through a doorway?”
“Nope. Long street. Concrete walls on both sides. First side street or doorway was too far away for anyone to have dragged her off so far.”
“We’re kind of working undercover with the local CAF forces,” I tell him. “We’ve read the Intel reports of the people who’ve gone missing here in Bream; I don’t remember reading anything like that?”
He shrugs. “I did my own investigating. Went up and down that street a number of times, in the daylight and in the dark, at night. Clear line of sight up and down that street, for some distance. Her friends were telling the truth, and I got no reason to suspect they wasn’t…means whatever took her grabbed her, silenced her and made off with her so quickly that it’s almost impossible to believe it could be done.”
“Christos,” I hear Dax mutter.
“You have any theories’?” I inquire.
“Sure,” he says. “It’s obvious.”
I look at him. “It is?”
Another slight smile. “Whatever took the girl must have either been able to climb up the side of a sheer wall, or was able to fly away, or was able to jaunt itself somewhere else.”
Jaunting. The claimed ability to vanish from one place and appear instantaneously in another. Alienologists claim the Others might have had the ability to jaunt. That even, with the help of some technology we haven’t discovered yet, been able to jaunt themselves between planets. I’ve always thought that’s just so much space dust myself. I say as much to Billy.
He shrugs again. “I eliminated all the other possibilities. So then I had to work with the possibilities I had left. Even if they did seem to be plumb crazy.”
“Heads up,” Jessa whispers urgently over my wrist comp. “Movement over on the west side. Something’s moving over there, coming this way.”
Billy and I crouch down, safely invisible behind our projected holo field. I look at the motion tracker attached to his rifle. Sure enough it shows something coming toward us. The sun has gone now. I peer through the darkness. I don’t see anything. I reach into my top jacket pocket and remove a pair of basic infra red glasses. I slip them on. Now I can everything very well. Everything’s eerily green. I am looking west. I don’t see anything.
I half pull the glasses off and glance at the tracker again. The single red blip is getting closer to us. It’s almost on top of Jessa and Slug’s position. “You see anything?” I whisper over the wrist comp.
“No,” comes the hushed reply.
I slide the glasses back down.
I see nothing.
Maybe Billy is right?
I hear him grunt in surprise from behind me.
“How about that,” he says.
“What?” I ask quietly.
He stands up and walks past me, out of the projection field. Rifle cradled across his chest. He stops at about the spot where the motion blip was.
“It’s gone,” he tells us all with conviction.
Then he bends down, takes a small flashlight out of a pocket and shines it down at the sandy ground. “Well, well.”
I walk over and crouch down next to him.
He points. “See that.”
“Yeah,” I answer. “What is it?”
“A track,” he replies. “A damned footprint is what it is!”
* * *
“I figure you’re here for the same reason I am,” the new arrival says. “You folks have the look of a military unit about you.”
So much for the covert look then.
“Let’s say we are,” I acknowledge. “Where does that put us?”
“Well I ain’t much for company on a hunt. Best you all keep out of my way. No offence, but I been doing this kinda stuff for a number of years now, and I’m pretty darn good at it, if I do say so myself.”
“Holy shit,” exclaims Ziggy. He slips his pistol back into its holster and points at the silver haired man. “You’re Billy Wilddog! The bounty hunter.”
The man smiles modestly. “Used to be. Retired now.”
Wow. Not often you meet a living legend. Billy Wilddog. The most famous bounty hunter in the Seven Systems. Half man and half myth. I grew up hearing stories about this guy. Gunfighter. Tracker. Bounty Hunter. They used to say that if the Wilddog was on your trail you might as well just put a bullet in your head or turn yourself in, because it would only be a matter of time until he caught up with you.
“You’re the guy who killed Kannibal Kane, the serial killer who had his own death cult on Deckard’s Moon?” Slug asks, wide eyed.
A slight inclination of the head. “Yeah. That was me.” He turns his head and spits to one side. “Freaking nut that guy was. Had to waste a few of his followers too. Crazy sons of bitches they all were.”
It’s time to bring this impromptu meeting to a close. “Mr. Olddog, sun’s going to be down in a bit. We need to get ourselves set up. I have nothing against you joining us, but make no mistake, this is my party, you’re just a gatecrasher. I give the orders here, everyone follows them. If you’re straight with that then we’re cool. If you’re not…”
He grins at me. “Well now. Ain’t you the bravo.” In the blink of an eye he spins his pistol around and re-holsters it. Walks right up to me and sticks out his hand. We shake. “You all can call me Billy,” he says. “Seeing as how we’re on the same side like.”
“Fair enough.” I turn to the others. “Ziggy, Dax. You set up a hide over there. Full camo holo field. I don’t want anyone or anything to see us, after the sun’s gone down. Slug, you and Jessa do the same over there, on the opposite side of the Ruins. But where we can still see you. Billy, how about you and I get comfortable right here, next to these rocks, I’ll put a holo field around us.”
He shrugs. “Sure. Good as place as any.”
“You really think we’re going to come across a vampire, Billy?” Dax asks as she sets up her holo field. “And why are you hunting it anyway, if you’re retired I mean?”
“Am retired. Was visiting an old friend here on Morgana. He lives in Bream. Had himself a daughter. Cute kid. Teenager. They found what was left of her body a couple of weeks ago. My buddy was grieved. His wife had passed on some years before. Daughter was all he had. Killed himself a few days a'fore I arrived. Blew his brains out.” Billy took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I ain’t got so many real friends that I can afford to lose them. I found out the local law here, and your military boys, hadn’t been able to catch this killer. They was all whispering about freaking space vampires and scared to wander around at night. The killer made a mistake when he took my friend’s daughter. Be the last mistake he makes.”
I shiver. The older man’s voice had gotten cold as he spoke. There was a power in this man, that I hadn’t come across before. The alien bracelet on my wrist tingled for a few moments. Like it was worried also.
“No need for you to be a’feared, young feller. I ain’t after you.”
I wasn’t aware that I’d given any indication that I was unsettled there for a moment. “How did you know?” I ask him.
He smiles quietly. “I’m Billy Wilddog, son. I know lots of things.” Suddenly he grins and looks years younger. “And I can read a person’s body language like most can read a book.”
The rest of my crew have set up their holo fields. From where Billy and I stand all we can see is the natural terrain around them. The holo fields copy the surroundings perfectly, deleting the people who are inside the radius of the projection.
I busy myself with our own field. I lay the projector flat on the ground, press a couple of buttons. Check the viewing screen. Although nothing had changed for Billy and I the view in the screen shows the boulders beside us, the scrub and small trees around us, the Ruins to one side…and nothing else. To all intents and purposes we are now invisible. Cloaked we call it in the military. The field deadens sound also, so if we keep our voices down we’ll still be able to talk. I can communicate with the others using our wrist comps.
“How did you end up out here?” I ask the other. “I mean here at the Ruins?”
“Every time there’s a killing like this, on any planet, there’s always some Ruins close by. This ain’t the first time I’ve hunted the so called vampires.”
I’m surprised and my face must show it. “You mean you’ve seen the things? Killed them?”
“Nope. Mean I’ve hunted them before. Never said I’d caught up with them. Never seen one myself. Got some ideas about that.”
He has a small backpack with him. He rests his rifle against a rock and slips the pack from his shoulders. Reaches inside and pulls out a hand held motion sensor. He picks up his rifle and snaps the motion tracker onto it. “I figure whatever these things are, they’re invisible,” he informs me.
“The fuk?” I hear over my wrist comp. I’d left it on an open channel, so the others could hear us. That was Slug’s voice.
“You serious, Billy?” asks Ziggy.
Realising that he can be heard by the rest of my crew he replies to them. “Yeah. Gotta be. No other answer for it. They seem to be able to sneak right up on people, snatch them away and make off with them. All without anyone else noticing or hearing a thing. No one ever seems to scream, and a couple of times the victims have been quite close to other people. My buddy’s daughter was taken just a few metres away from a crowd of her friends. She’d walked to the corner of a street, just ahead of them, she turned the corner, out of her friends’ sight for a few seconds at the most…but when they walked around the corner…she was gone…just like that, vanished. No struggle, no screams, no nothing.”
“That’s a pretty scary story, Billy,” I hear Jessa say. “Could she have been dragged into an alley, down a sewer opening or something, pulled through a doorway?”
“Nope. Long street. Concrete walls on both sides. First side street or doorway was too far away for anyone to have dragged her off so far.”
“We’re kind of working undercover with the local CAF forces,” I tell him. “We’ve read the Intel reports of the people who’ve gone missing here in Bream; I don’t remember reading anything like that?”
He shrugs. “I did my own investigating. Went up and down that street a number of times, in the daylight and in the dark, at night. Clear line of sight up and down that street, for some distance. Her friends were telling the truth, and I got no reason to suspect they wasn’t…means whatever took her grabbed her, silenced her and made off with her so quickly that it’s almost impossible to believe it could be done.”
“Christos,” I hear Dax mutter.
“You have any theories’?” I inquire.
“Sure,” he says. “It’s obvious.”
I look at him. “It is?”
Another slight smile. “Whatever took the girl must have either been able to climb up the side of a sheer wall, or was able to fly away, or was able to jaunt itself somewhere else.”
Jaunting. The claimed ability to vanish from one place and appear instantaneously in another. Alienologists claim the Others might have had the ability to jaunt. That even, with the help of some technology we haven’t discovered yet, been able to jaunt themselves between planets. I’ve always thought that’s just so much space dust myself. I say as much to Billy.
He shrugs again. “I eliminated all the other possibilities. So then I had to work with the possibilities I had left. Even if they did seem to be plumb crazy.”
“Heads up,” Jessa whispers urgently over my wrist comp. “Movement over on the west side. Something’s moving over there, coming this way.”
Billy and I crouch down, safely invisible behind our projected holo field. I look at the motion tracker attached to his rifle. Sure enough it shows something coming toward us. The sun has gone now. I peer through the darkness. I don’t see anything. I reach into my top jacket pocket and remove a pair of basic infra red glasses. I slip them on. Now I can everything very well. Everything’s eerily green. I am looking west. I don’t see anything.
I half pull the glasses off and glance at the tracker again. The single red blip is getting closer to us. It’s almost on top of Jessa and Slug’s position. “You see anything?” I whisper over the wrist comp.
“No,” comes the hushed reply.
I slide the glasses back down.
I see nothing.
Maybe Billy is right?
I hear him grunt in surprise from behind me.
“How about that,” he says.
“What?” I ask quietly.
He stands up and walks past me, out of the projection field. Rifle cradled across his chest. He stops at about the spot where the motion blip was.
“It’s gone,” he tells us all with conviction.
Then he bends down, takes a small flashlight out of a pocket and shines it down at the sandy ground. “Well, well.”
I walk over and crouch down next to him.
He points. “See that.”
“Yeah,” I answer. “What is it?”
“A track,” he replies. “A damned footprint is what it is!”
* * *
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
William Olddog
Journal Entry: 50
We’ve hired a skimmer from the cabin park and after buying some supplies have driven out to the local Ruins.
The sun is just beginning to go down. We park up and de-bus and make sure to take our packs with us. Now we’re all dressed in long pants and jackets, as the nights are supposed to be quite cool here. I sling my pack over my left shoulder. It isn’t that heavy. It wouldn’t be, all I’ve got inside it is my alien weapon, the Ru’a axe that I won in my battle against the bejewelled Creepy. I left the rest of my kit, except my knife and pistol, back in the cabin. The others have done the same. All their packs contain are broken down Multi .75’s and Gatlin .50’s.
Slug takes some self inflating sleeping mats from the skimmer. “Might as well get comfortable. I’ll park the skimmer over behind that ridge.”
The Ruins loom before us. A long rectangular mass of old stone blocks, worn by age and the weather. Strangely shaped doorways, never made for a human to walk through. In all these centuries no one knows what the Others look like. No trace of them has ever been found. The few artefacts that have been discovered are incomprehensible in their design and purpose. I walk about inside the crumbled structure. The roof has long ago fallen down, if it ever had a roof. Unlike the Ruins that Quake, Judd and I explored back on Sharna, there’s no stone chair sitting in the middle of this place. Probably removed by some enterprising colonist, long ago. I walk down a ramp that leads beneath the building. Jessa, seeing this, jogs over. “We should stick together,” she tells me.
“You getting spooked by all those vamp stories,” I tease her.
“You’re a fine one to make jokes, Rye,” she answers. “You’re the one walking around with an alien axe. I saw that sat-vid of you fighting the Creepy warrior. I saw the other one, the Chief I guess, hand you the axe as a token of your victory. That wasn’t made by any Creepy you know?”
“It wasn’t?” I’m surprised. “How do you know?”
She looks puzzled. “You really don’t know anything about it, do you?”
“Nothing,” I assure her. “Except the bracelet I’m wearing is made of the same metal as the axe, and it…well it kind of tells me stuff.”
She blinks. “How does it tell you stuff, Rye?”
I’m about to answer her when Ziggy calls out. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, rube?” He slips a hand under his jacket and pulls out a pistol. Points it in the direction that Slug parked the skimmer in. Jessa, Dax and I all turn to see what he’s waving his weapon at. Slug is walking back over to us, hands on top of his head. Behind him is a guy who looks to be in his fifties, shoulder length silver hair. Face burnt dark by desert suns. He’s lean with a lantern jawed face. A silver goatee. Bright, piercing eyes, they shine out from under the brim of a battered canvas hat. He’s got a pistol in his right hand and a rifle in his left. Equally battered leather jacket and canvas pants, worn, dusty boots. He might be considered old in some circles but this guy looks like someone most folks wouldn’t mess with.
“You point a gun at a man, you’d better be prepared to use it,” the new arrival informs Ziggy. “I got your buddy between you and me. While you’re busy shooting him I’ll have killed you. Might be best if you lower that thing. I wanted to shoot anyone; it'd all be over by now.”
“Ziggy,” I say loudly. “Lower your weapon.”
Reluctantly he does so.
The silver haired fellow nods. “You can put your hands down and go join your friends,” he tells Slug. Then he looks at me, the pistol still in his fist, not exactly pointing at me. “You in charge here, rube?”
“Yes I am.”
“What you folks doing here, carrying all this hardware around with you?”
“Hardware?”
He sighs, the pistol raises a little. “I ain’t stupid, son. Ran a scanner over you all. Caught sight of them rifles in your packs, the knives and pistols under your jackets. I’ll ask you again, before I start to lose my patience. Who are you and what are you doing out here?”
“Maybe you should tell us who you are first,” says Jessa defiantly.
The older man shrugs. “Sure. I’m William Olddog.”
“And what are you doing out here, William?” she continues.
“Me? Oh, I’ve come to kill the vampire that’s been murdering people back in Bream.”
* * *
We’ve hired a skimmer from the cabin park and after buying some supplies have driven out to the local Ruins.
The sun is just beginning to go down. We park up and de-bus and make sure to take our packs with us. Now we’re all dressed in long pants and jackets, as the nights are supposed to be quite cool here. I sling my pack over my left shoulder. It isn’t that heavy. It wouldn’t be, all I’ve got inside it is my alien weapon, the Ru’a axe that I won in my battle against the bejewelled Creepy. I left the rest of my kit, except my knife and pistol, back in the cabin. The others have done the same. All their packs contain are broken down Multi .75’s and Gatlin .50’s.
Slug takes some self inflating sleeping mats from the skimmer. “Might as well get comfortable. I’ll park the skimmer over behind that ridge.”
The Ruins loom before us. A long rectangular mass of old stone blocks, worn by age and the weather. Strangely shaped doorways, never made for a human to walk through. In all these centuries no one knows what the Others look like. No trace of them has ever been found. The few artefacts that have been discovered are incomprehensible in their design and purpose. I walk about inside the crumbled structure. The roof has long ago fallen down, if it ever had a roof. Unlike the Ruins that Quake, Judd and I explored back on Sharna, there’s no stone chair sitting in the middle of this place. Probably removed by some enterprising colonist, long ago. I walk down a ramp that leads beneath the building. Jessa, seeing this, jogs over. “We should stick together,” she tells me.
“You getting spooked by all those vamp stories,” I tease her.
“You’re a fine one to make jokes, Rye,” she answers. “You’re the one walking around with an alien axe. I saw that sat-vid of you fighting the Creepy warrior. I saw the other one, the Chief I guess, hand you the axe as a token of your victory. That wasn’t made by any Creepy you know?”
“It wasn’t?” I’m surprised. “How do you know?”
She looks puzzled. “You really don’t know anything about it, do you?”
“Nothing,” I assure her. “Except the bracelet I’m wearing is made of the same metal as the axe, and it…well it kind of tells me stuff.”
She blinks. “How does it tell you stuff, Rye?”
I’m about to answer her when Ziggy calls out. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, rube?” He slips a hand under his jacket and pulls out a pistol. Points it in the direction that Slug parked the skimmer in. Jessa, Dax and I all turn to see what he’s waving his weapon at. Slug is walking back over to us, hands on top of his head. Behind him is a guy who looks to be in his fifties, shoulder length silver hair. Face burnt dark by desert suns. He’s lean with a lantern jawed face. A silver goatee. Bright, piercing eyes, they shine out from under the brim of a battered canvas hat. He’s got a pistol in his right hand and a rifle in his left. Equally battered leather jacket and canvas pants, worn, dusty boots. He might be considered old in some circles but this guy looks like someone most folks wouldn’t mess with.
“You point a gun at a man, you’d better be prepared to use it,” the new arrival informs Ziggy. “I got your buddy between you and me. While you’re busy shooting him I’ll have killed you. Might be best if you lower that thing. I wanted to shoot anyone; it'd all be over by now.”
“Ziggy,” I say loudly. “Lower your weapon.”
Reluctantly he does so.
The silver haired fellow nods. “You can put your hands down and go join your friends,” he tells Slug. Then he looks at me, the pistol still in his fist, not exactly pointing at me. “You in charge here, rube?”
“Yes I am.”
“What you folks doing here, carrying all this hardware around with you?”
“Hardware?”
He sighs, the pistol raises a little. “I ain’t stupid, son. Ran a scanner over you all. Caught sight of them rifles in your packs, the knives and pistols under your jackets. I’ll ask you again, before I start to lose my patience. Who are you and what are you doing out here?”
“Maybe you should tell us who you are first,” says Jessa defiantly.
The older man shrugs. “Sure. I’m William Olddog.”
“And what are you doing out here, William?” she continues.
“Me? Oh, I’ve come to kill the vampire that’s been murdering people back in Bream.”
* * *
Alienology
Journal Entry: 49
We walk into Bream in our hiking clothes, backpacks slung over our shoulders, looking like any other tourists that have been camping out for a week.
It’s not really a city. More like a large town. Made of concrete and steel and plastic and glass.
We pass a mobile patrol of local CAF troopers, four man team, flitting slowly past us in a hover jeep. They wave or nod and we respond the same way.
“How come we’re covert, Rye?” Dax asks me. “They suspect some of the CAF guys are vampires?”
“Will you stop using that expression please,” I plead. “I think there’s no chance the killer, or killers as the case may be, are fuking vampires, anymore than you are. And yes…we’re covert because people are getting edgy and no one has any idea who’s behind the murders. CAF troopers are on patrol 24/7. All over Bream. Could be someone’s using a CAF uniform and a vehicle that looks like a CAF machine to blend in.”
“So what’s the plan, Rye?” Slug wonders aloud.
Ah. Good question. Don’t have one myself. Captain Finbow and I had discussed this. He suggested we should just nose around, preferably after dark, which is when all the people disappeared, and see what we could see. As plans go, it’s not that great. I mention all this to my crew as we start along a sidewalk. I glance at the shops on either side of the street. Shops are shops, all over the Universe.
“I have some ideas,” Jessa announces unexpectedly.
I stop and turn around and look at her, one eyebrow raised. “Don’t keep it a secret.”
She casts covert glances around us, as though she’s afraid that someone might be listening. “Not out here. Let’s find a hotel or a cabin or bar someplace and I’ll tell you some interesting facts.”
Now I’m intrigued. “Ok.” I use my wrist computer to locate a nearby cabin park. It caters to transient workers as well as tourists. I point. “GPS has it down there. Let’s march along, get settled into some accommodation and then we can sit around and listen to Jessa’s ideas.”
* * *
We get a bunkhouse cabin. Sleeps eight. Plenty big enough for the five of us. Toilets and showers are next door. Kitchen and cooking facilities just opposite. Great. Feels like I really am on holiday. Reminds me of that camping trip I took with Quake and Judd, up in the mountains back on Sharna. I’ll have to get on the uninet and see what those two are up too. In the meantime we dump our kit and get ourselves some tea or coffee from the free vending machine outside our front door.
There’s a wide porch out the front, chairs, a lounge, a table. We decide to sit around in the sunshine while we listen to Jessa’s ideas. I lean back into my padded chair, sun on my face, cup of tea in one hand, vigar in the other, blowing orange flavoured smoke into the air, getting a small rush from the vitamins and minerals the vigar contains. “Ok,” I tell her. “No one around but us, that I can see. What your thoughts, Jessa?”
She looks about herself. Takes a drag on her own, mint flavoured vigar. “I’m a bit of an alienologist,” she says. “Kind of been my hobby for most of my life. I like nothing better than wandering around the ruins that the Others left behind. Just looking at stuff, poking around, even finding an odd object, now and again.”
“Sure,” I agree. “Like doing the same thing myself. But what do the ruins have to with the vamp…the unknown killers?”
Jessa taps away at her wrist comp. “I’ll patch you into my comp. Then we can all look at the same stuff. I’ll hologram some info on the floor here, to give you all a better idea of what I’m talking about.”
She begins. “We’ve all heard the space vampire stories, yeah? Of course we have. I’m sure none of us really believe them either? Except maybe Slug here, because he’s looking a little crestfallen right now? Hey, I’m just pulling your leg, rube. But I’m going to point something real interesting out to you guys right now…did you know that just about every space vamp story takes place on a planet, a planet, that has the Others ruins on them?” She pauses, blows some more mint flavoured smoke.
I fiddle with my vigar, take a sip of my tea. “You have the evidence to back that statement up?”
“Yes I do. As soon as I knew what the mission was I checked to see if there are any Ruins on this planet…and sure enough, over here,” she points to a hologram she’s just made on the floor between us, “there is the remains of one of the Others structures, just here. East of our position. The disappearances took place all over Bream. Twelve in all that we know about. Only seven bodies were recovered. Those seven were all found to the east. Just outside the town, in the forest or just dumped on the plains, almost like who ever did the killings wasn’t fussed about the bodies being found.”
I look at her. The elfin face. The short, tousled dark hair. She’s dressed in a sleeveless T and a pair of short, stretch black gym pants. White socks and hiking boots. Her sleek muscles flex and writhe beneath her tanned skin. Be still my heart.
“You’ve been busy,” I say. “I’m impressed. But you can’t be the only person who’s ever thought that the Ruins and the vamps go together?”
She shakes her head, blowing out some more smoke. “Of course not. But it’s just a theory. No ones ever seen or caught a space vamp, so there’s no proof. That’s why it’s just a theory.”
“You actually believe in these things, Jessa?” asks Ziggy with raised eyebrows.
“Let’s just say I don’t disbelieve in them. They never used to interest me at all, until I kept finding references to them in regards to the Ruins, on different planets, all over the Universe.”
I’ve been looking at the data that Jessa has had flowing across my comp screen. Numbers, tallies, recordings, events, locations, likelihoods, statistics.
“Have there ever been any recorded vamp killings that weren’t on a planet that had Ruins?” I ask her.
“Apparently not. Or at least none that can be confirmed.”
“What about those empty spaceships, found drifting, no one on board?” inquires Slug.
Jessa shrugs. “No idea. Could have been vamps, could have been Creepies, could have been deep space fever, for all I know. I think people just go around making up space vamp stories because they can’t find any other explanation.”
“Surely the Federation must be aware that the vamps and the Ruins seem to be mixed together?” asks Dax. Like me she’s been paying careful attention to the information flickering across her wrist comp.
“The Fed is well aware of the connection,” Jessa says. “They just don’t publicise it.”
“Why not?” Slug is wide eyed.
“Imagine if the Fed started admitting that space vampires sometimes emerge from out of the Ruins, on different worlds, and start killing or making off with citizens. There’d be a mad panic. There’s Ruins from Those Who Went Before on just about every colonised world in the Universe. Even on Zrene and Gecko and Creepy planets.”
“Well,” I say, extinguishing my vigar in the water ashtray on the table. Watching the remains of the butt begin to dissolve. “I sure didn’t know about any of this before.”
“It’s all over the uninet if you want to check it out,” Jessa tells me. “Like I say, the Ruins have always interested me, not the vamp stories. But I have to admit, that once I started researching, there does seem to be some connection between the two.”
“So let me get this straight,” exclaims Ziggy. “You think that the vamps emerge from the Ruins, go hunting a human victim, to drain of their life force, and then sneak back to the Ruins and hide out again. Christos, Jessa, that’s sat-vid movie stuff. Come on.”
The young woman shrugs. “I’m just giving you factual evidence. I’m not trying to say that the vamps come out of or do anything. But anywhere you find a verifiable story of a drained body…you’ll find that planet has Ruins. And often the Ruins are close by where the killing took place.”
“You have any ideas about what the killers are?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “No. But like you I don’t believe in space vampires. I think there will be a much more reasonable explanation.”
“Like what?” asks Dax.
Jessa shrugs. “Haven’t worked that out yet.”
Slug sniffs. “So what we going to do, now that we’re here?”
I glance around my assembled crew. “Let’s forget about doing covert recons around the streets at night. Let’s set ourselves up a watch post near the Ruins, to the east of here. What the hell, can’t hurt.”
* * *
We walk into Bream in our hiking clothes, backpacks slung over our shoulders, looking like any other tourists that have been camping out for a week.
It’s not really a city. More like a large town. Made of concrete and steel and plastic and glass.
We pass a mobile patrol of local CAF troopers, four man team, flitting slowly past us in a hover jeep. They wave or nod and we respond the same way.
“How come we’re covert, Rye?” Dax asks me. “They suspect some of the CAF guys are vampires?”
“Will you stop using that expression please,” I plead. “I think there’s no chance the killer, or killers as the case may be, are fuking vampires, anymore than you are. And yes…we’re covert because people are getting edgy and no one has any idea who’s behind the murders. CAF troopers are on patrol 24/7. All over Bream. Could be someone’s using a CAF uniform and a vehicle that looks like a CAF machine to blend in.”
“So what’s the plan, Rye?” Slug wonders aloud.
Ah. Good question. Don’t have one myself. Captain Finbow and I had discussed this. He suggested we should just nose around, preferably after dark, which is when all the people disappeared, and see what we could see. As plans go, it’s not that great. I mention all this to my crew as we start along a sidewalk. I glance at the shops on either side of the street. Shops are shops, all over the Universe.
“I have some ideas,” Jessa announces unexpectedly.
I stop and turn around and look at her, one eyebrow raised. “Don’t keep it a secret.”
She casts covert glances around us, as though she’s afraid that someone might be listening. “Not out here. Let’s find a hotel or a cabin or bar someplace and I’ll tell you some interesting facts.”
Now I’m intrigued. “Ok.” I use my wrist computer to locate a nearby cabin park. It caters to transient workers as well as tourists. I point. “GPS has it down there. Let’s march along, get settled into some accommodation and then we can sit around and listen to Jessa’s ideas.”
* * *
We get a bunkhouse cabin. Sleeps eight. Plenty big enough for the five of us. Toilets and showers are next door. Kitchen and cooking facilities just opposite. Great. Feels like I really am on holiday. Reminds me of that camping trip I took with Quake and Judd, up in the mountains back on Sharna. I’ll have to get on the uninet and see what those two are up too. In the meantime we dump our kit and get ourselves some tea or coffee from the free vending machine outside our front door.
There’s a wide porch out the front, chairs, a lounge, a table. We decide to sit around in the sunshine while we listen to Jessa’s ideas. I lean back into my padded chair, sun on my face, cup of tea in one hand, vigar in the other, blowing orange flavoured smoke into the air, getting a small rush from the vitamins and minerals the vigar contains. “Ok,” I tell her. “No one around but us, that I can see. What your thoughts, Jessa?”
She looks about herself. Takes a drag on her own, mint flavoured vigar. “I’m a bit of an alienologist,” she says. “Kind of been my hobby for most of my life. I like nothing better than wandering around the ruins that the Others left behind. Just looking at stuff, poking around, even finding an odd object, now and again.”
“Sure,” I agree. “Like doing the same thing myself. But what do the ruins have to with the vamp…the unknown killers?”
Jessa taps away at her wrist comp. “I’ll patch you into my comp. Then we can all look at the same stuff. I’ll hologram some info on the floor here, to give you all a better idea of what I’m talking about.”
She begins. “We’ve all heard the space vampire stories, yeah? Of course we have. I’m sure none of us really believe them either? Except maybe Slug here, because he’s looking a little crestfallen right now? Hey, I’m just pulling your leg, rube. But I’m going to point something real interesting out to you guys right now…did you know that just about every space vamp story takes place on a planet, a planet, that has the Others ruins on them?” She pauses, blows some more mint flavoured smoke.
I fiddle with my vigar, take a sip of my tea. “You have the evidence to back that statement up?”
“Yes I do. As soon as I knew what the mission was I checked to see if there are any Ruins on this planet…and sure enough, over here,” she points to a hologram she’s just made on the floor between us, “there is the remains of one of the Others structures, just here. East of our position. The disappearances took place all over Bream. Twelve in all that we know about. Only seven bodies were recovered. Those seven were all found to the east. Just outside the town, in the forest or just dumped on the plains, almost like who ever did the killings wasn’t fussed about the bodies being found.”
I look at her. The elfin face. The short, tousled dark hair. She’s dressed in a sleeveless T and a pair of short, stretch black gym pants. White socks and hiking boots. Her sleek muscles flex and writhe beneath her tanned skin. Be still my heart.
“You’ve been busy,” I say. “I’m impressed. But you can’t be the only person who’s ever thought that the Ruins and the vamps go together?”
She shakes her head, blowing out some more smoke. “Of course not. But it’s just a theory. No ones ever seen or caught a space vamp, so there’s no proof. That’s why it’s just a theory.”
“You actually believe in these things, Jessa?” asks Ziggy with raised eyebrows.
“Let’s just say I don’t disbelieve in them. They never used to interest me at all, until I kept finding references to them in regards to the Ruins, on different planets, all over the Universe.”
I’ve been looking at the data that Jessa has had flowing across my comp screen. Numbers, tallies, recordings, events, locations, likelihoods, statistics.
“Have there ever been any recorded vamp killings that weren’t on a planet that had Ruins?” I ask her.
“Apparently not. Or at least none that can be confirmed.”
“What about those empty spaceships, found drifting, no one on board?” inquires Slug.
Jessa shrugs. “No idea. Could have been vamps, could have been Creepies, could have been deep space fever, for all I know. I think people just go around making up space vamp stories because they can’t find any other explanation.”
“Surely the Federation must be aware that the vamps and the Ruins seem to be mixed together?” asks Dax. Like me she’s been paying careful attention to the information flickering across her wrist comp.
“The Fed is well aware of the connection,” Jessa says. “They just don’t publicise it.”
“Why not?” Slug is wide eyed.
“Imagine if the Fed started admitting that space vampires sometimes emerge from out of the Ruins, on different worlds, and start killing or making off with citizens. There’d be a mad panic. There’s Ruins from Those Who Went Before on just about every colonised world in the Universe. Even on Zrene and Gecko and Creepy planets.”
“Well,” I say, extinguishing my vigar in the water ashtray on the table. Watching the remains of the butt begin to dissolve. “I sure didn’t know about any of this before.”
“It’s all over the uninet if you want to check it out,” Jessa tells me. “Like I say, the Ruins have always interested me, not the vamp stories. But I have to admit, that once I started researching, there does seem to be some connection between the two.”
“So let me get this straight,” exclaims Ziggy. “You think that the vamps emerge from the Ruins, go hunting a human victim, to drain of their life force, and then sneak back to the Ruins and hide out again. Christos, Jessa, that’s sat-vid movie stuff. Come on.”
The young woman shrugs. “I’m just giving you factual evidence. I’m not trying to say that the vamps come out of or do anything. But anywhere you find a verifiable story of a drained body…you’ll find that planet has Ruins. And often the Ruins are close by where the killing took place.”
“You have any ideas about what the killers are?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “No. But like you I don’t believe in space vampires. I think there will be a much more reasonable explanation.”
“Like what?” asks Dax.
Jessa shrugs. “Haven’t worked that out yet.”
Slug sniffs. “So what we going to do, now that we’re here?”
I glance around my assembled crew. “Let’s forget about doing covert recons around the streets at night. Let’s set ourselves up a watch post near the Ruins, to the east of here. What the hell, can’t hurt.”
* * *
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
