DEATH COLONY: SURVIVORS
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6
The two survivors were quite amazed to see they
had landed on a planet that differed little from their Earth home.
They were on what looked like a sandy beach next to a lake, rather
than an ocean. Surrounding the vicinity, trees of all kinds and
colours flowed as far as the eye could see. In a word, the planet was:
‘…Beautiful.’ Said Mia. ‘It’s
beautiful.’
Hal agreed. He looked around. He was a city boy
from Lincolnshire and had never seen such a remote place. He took a
deep breath and welcomed the fresh scent of the air into his nostrils.
‘Where do you think we are?’ he asked. Mia shrugged.
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘I know we can’t be
back on Earth again, because there are two moons in the sky, but this
can’t be the penal colony they were taking us to, what’s it
called?’
‘Natin,’ Hal said. ‘It’s a mining planet
full of mass murderers, rapists… and those are the “nice” ones.
It’s nothing like this, believe me – I’ve read reports of other
soldiers that’ve worked there.’
‘Well wherever we are I’m glad it’s here
and not Natin.’ Said Mia, not sure how much sense that sentence
made, but not caring. She soon found herself strolling casually toward
the lake, for the moment paying no care to the creature that slaughter
everyone on the ship. ‘I wonder if any of the survivors are out
here?’
‘Maybe,’ said Hal. ‘But I doubt it. I
don’t think anyone would’ve survived that. I think we we’re the
lucky ones.’ His expression dropped as he thought of his lost
comrades and of Kyle.
Kyle had been Hal’s only friend growing up.
Sure, Hal had made what he called “acquaintances” with other
people, some were Kyle’s friends, but Hal had always been a loner
and preferred small company to large groups. But Hal had lost his only
true friend.
‘You okay?’ Mia asked, breaking his train of
thought.
‘Peachy.’ Hal replied, nodding.
At length they decided to take a look around the
large clearing where they had landed. As they discovered more of their
environment, they noticed that the lake was at the bottom of a
majestic waterfall that fell from about one hundred feet up and that
they were in (pretty much) the centre of a giant rainforest of some
kind.
‘I could have lived here my whole life.’
Sighed Mia, plucking a few leaves from some branches and sniffing
them. Everything here smelt and looked so divine. It was like an
unknown paradise, untouched by beings anywhere.
‘Fool’s paradise,’ Hal said. ‘You just
know there’s something wrong with it.’ He laughed. ‘You’ll
probably find what’s his name… Tony Blair hiding in the bushes
waiting to bore us to death with “why he’s better than us” and
stuff.’
Mia thought for a moment. ‘Tony Blair? The
Prime Minister?’
‘Yeah, he was PM about thirty years ago,
and--‘
Hal stopped, listened. Mia started blankly at
Hal.
‘And what?’ she asked.
‘Ssh.’ Said Hal, pressing a finger to his
lips. He listened again. Mia listened as intently as she could, but
could hear no more than the wind in the trees and the gentle gushing
of the waterfall.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ she said.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I heard something, like something running
through undergrowth.’ Hal replied, listening some more. He appeared
to hear it again as he jumped and pointed about one hundred yards away
to a patch of bushes.
Sure enough, they were rustling – and it
wasn’t the wind. Mia took a few steps forward to try and get a look
at what was in the bushes. They could be paranoid. Any planet with the
ability to grow such beautiful plant-life had to have indigenous
wildlife somewhere.
‘Could be an animal.’ Said Mia, though she
didn’t take her eyes off it. She barely even blinked. ‘Just an
animal.’ She said to herself.
After a while, the rustling stopped and whatever
was in the bushes bounded off back into the colourful forest. Both Hal
and Mia let out a sigh of relief. Mia giggled, slightly embarrassed.
The two sat down by the lakeside and soaked up
the warm (possibly) afternoon suns. There were two of them, one to the
east, one to the west, which at this point, caused no shadow.
‘So tell me something,’ Hal said. ‘If you
didn’t murder anybody, which it’s clear you didn’t, why are you
here? How did you convicted of murder?’
Mia sighed and shrugged, looking at the ground.
She kicked some sand and fiddled with her socks, realising only now
she had not put her shoes back on.
‘I was framed.’ She said, looking up.
‘Someone who hated me killed all these people who I happened to not
like and without looking into it properly they arrested me and goaded
me into a confession.
‘How?’ Hal asked, curiously.
‘They did the whole “good cop, bad cop” act
and got it out of me. Plus the one who actually did it was good.
She’d done this kind of thing before with armed robbery and
things… She wanted me to suffer I suppose.’
‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mia. ‘I think she
was jealous or something. I think I was getting a little more
attention that her so she wanted to get rid of me.’
‘Who framed you?’ Hal asked, Mia having his
full attention. She paused and again looked down, opting to fiddle
with her socks.
‘My sister.’
*
Over an hour went by without a word from neither
Hal nor Mia. The two sat in silence staring at the crystal clear
waters and clear blue sky. The suns had moved and so a cross-shadow
had now formed underneath the nearby trees, giving them somewhere cool
to sit.
So calm had the atmosphere become after a time
that Mia barely reacted at first to the familiar four legged creature
than ran under her nose and away into the forest. After a moment of
dumb realisation, she grabbed Hal and stood up in a panic.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, not having noticed
the creature himself.
‘It’s that thing,’ she said. ‘That four
legged thing, it ran past us, right by us in fact, and ran off into
the trees again. I think it’s been watching us the whole time.’
Hal looked around, but saw nothing and blinked at Mia a little
confused.
‘Are you sure you saw something?’ he asked.
‘If something ran that closer to us, why didn’t I see it?’
‘I don’t know, maybe you just weren’t
paying attention – it was pretty quiet.’
A scurrying came from their left, where the
creature had just run from. Out from the bushes, a curious face popped
into view and out crawled a creature the same as the one on the Alpha
Turret, only smaller. Perhaps a baby. Hal jumped back.
‘It’s a… little version. Wait, how’s that
possible?’ he asked in disbelief. To their right, the larger one –
the one the two of them had seen on the ship – scurried out and
trotted casually over to its young, picking it up, turning about and
taking it into the trees. Several other youngsters followed along with
a larger creature.
‘A family?’ Mia gaped. ‘How can there be a
family? There was only one on the ship, right?’
‘That’s all that showed up on the radar.’
Nodded Hal, equally perplexed. ‘Wait a second… Kyle said these
things were from Talnis. They’re indigenous to that place.’
‘That’s where we must be… But this
doesn’t look like a penal colony.’ Said Mia, glancing around.
‘It’s not, it’s where they take the
prison-ships to be refuelled. Replied Hal, pausing for thought. He
nodded. ‘We’ve got to be on Talnis. I mean, I’ve never been
here, but it’s my best guess.’
With this new found information, Mia felt a
little more at rest. Talnis
was just a refuelling planet, which was good to hear, so as far as she
was concerned there was no risk of death or mutilation, except for
perhaps from the wildlife, which could easily be avoided.
‘So what do we do about those weird monkey
things?’ she thought out loud.
‘They don’t look too harmful out here. Maybe
it got stuck and panicked.’ Hal said quite matter-of-factly as one
trotted up to him and gently sniffed his boot, giving it a quick lick
for good measure. Hal carefully crouched down and scratched it behind
the ears. ‘Seems harmless as a kitten to me.’
Mia nodded. ‘You’re probably right,’ she
said. ‘I think if I was stuck on the Alpha Turret I’d kill
everyone on board to get back here.’
Mia was confused. So many people had died so
savagely on the Alpha Turret, yet the animal they thought to blame was
clearly as docile as a puppy and equally as harmless. She saw that
they had only small mouths and were omnivores, as it scuttled around
rummaging for plant-life, perhaps a small insect here or there. It had
claws, which she noted were for climbing trees, they were not talons,
but were sharp.
A day passed and they heard nothing more unusual,
nor did they see any signs of life. They ate the luscious fruit from
the trees and sipped at the water from the lake, feeling more revived
as they did so. It was as though the longer they remained in this
paradise, the longer they wanted to.
‘I could stay here forever,’ said Hal, almost
asleep as he leant up a warm sun-soaked rock and closed his eyes. Mia,
who was sitting on a fallen log with her feet dangling in the water
agreed.
‘I can only imagine what this place would be
like if humans started living on it in masses,’ said Mia, cringing
at the thought. ‘All this would be gone in a few years, making way
for ugly buildings and vehicles.’
Hal sat up and laughed. ‘Ah, so she’s a
modernist?’
‘A what?’ Mia looked almost offended.
‘A modernist. You prefer the “simplicities”
of life. You’ve got no use for modern gizmo’s.’
‘Oh,’ she said monotonously. ‘Guess so.
Would explain a lot.’
Hal never found out what she meant by that.
*
The two sleeping survivors didn’t hear the
booming of the distant drums growing closer with every beat, nor did
they have time to see the tribe of men who knocked them unconscious,
but Hal and Mia awoke inside what looked like a shabby hut constructed
cleverly of large, blue coloured leaves and grey branches. Both of
them were tied up to a log pillar on opposite sides of the room.
‘Where are we?’ whispered Mia, trying to
wriggle free from her restraints in vain.
‘No clue.’ Said Hal, staying perfectly still.
‘My guess is we’ve pissed off the locals.’
‘Did you see them?’ said Mia. ‘I’m sure
they had horns coming out of their heads, and I think one them had…
had wings!’ Hal scoffed and shook his head.
‘Wings?’ he said.
‘Wings.’ Nodded Mia. Don’t forget,
they’re not human.’
‘True,’ said Hal. ‘But they looked it.’
Their conversation was interrupted when a large
looking man – possibly a man – entered with a scowl on his face
enough to cause a storm. Sure enough, as Mia had said, he had two
great wings as red as fire, tucked carefully behind him. Protruding
from his forehead were two great red horns, much like those of an
Earth Ram.
‘You come here now too often.’ Bellowed the
man, his expression never changing. ‘Your people do no good for us.
We give you our gifts yet get none in return.’
Hal and Mia exchanged a baffled look.
‘Gifts?’ Mia volunteered.
‘You come here and take gifts and make demon
fly,’ he said pointing toward the forest. ‘Demon leave and return
many times.’
‘He must be talking about the Alpha Turret,’
said Hal, turning to the winged-man. ‘It’s a ship. It’s what we
use to travel around in.’ said Hal.
‘Demon returns many times,’ the man went on.
‘No gifts of thanks, many deaths to my kin.’
‘How did your… kin die?’ asked Mia
carefully.
‘Demon come and crush them and then leave. Many
times, many times.’ He said, shaking his head, though as before, his
expression remained stone. A look of morbid realisation swept across
Hal’s face.
‘Mia,’ said Hal. ‘He’s talking about the
refuelling. The Alpha Turret came here every month to refuel. I guess
the pilot wasn’t all to careful about what happened.’
‘Well that’s just great,’ scoffed Mia,
rolling her eyes. ‘Your people screw up royally and the nobodies get
to pay for it.’ She shuffled round the best she could so she was
looking at the winged-man.
‘I’m very sorry that your kin died because of
the people flying that… demon,’ she sighed. ‘But it really
wasn’t our fault. We didn’t know that there was any life on this
planet.
‘Your people come and see us from the sky.’
Said the man, his voice swimming in grief. ‘Gods are angry.’ He
motioned up to the sky. ‘Gods wanted demon dead, I slay the
demon.’
‘You put that four-legged thing on the ship?’
gaped Hal, things suddenly beginning to make sense to him. ‘It
killed everyone! It ripped them apart!’
‘It did as Gods asked.’ Said the man.
‘Four-legged thing as you say is Flock. Gentle creature until
possessed by Gods.’
Hal sat silently for a minute, shaking with
anger, his eyes brimming with tears. At length he spoke: ‘Your
“flock” murdered my best friend. Most of the people on that damn
ship were innocent bystanders!’
‘Hal, calm down, this isn’t helping.’ Said
Mia. She looked at the winged-man. ‘What’s going to happen to
us?’
‘You stay here until Gods choose your fate.’
Said the man. ‘Until then my name is Mashan.’
*
Mashan kept his prisoners tied up for the rest of
the day without food or water. Both were beginning to get hungry and
thirsty, for the last time either of them had eaten was the previous
day.
‘Do you think he’s toying with us?’ asked
Mia.
‘I don’t think he even knows what the word
“toying” means,’ said Hal. ‘But I don’t know. He knows
something we don’t. He’s definitely planning something otherwise
we’d probably be dead already.’
‘True.’ Said Mia, shifting about to get
comfortable. ‘There’s still something that I don’t understand,
though,’ she went on. ‘They sent their Flock onto the Alpha Turret
to bring it down—‘
‘—Which would explain it chewing up the
engine.’ Interrupted Hal.
‘Yes,’ said Mia. ‘But it took its time
didn’t it? I mean, don’t prison-ships refuel a week before
shipping prisoners off? Why didn’t it just chew the engine up and
stop it taking off?’
‘Who knows,’ said Hal, quite past the point
of concentration. ‘I guess they wanted to make sure that when they
“brought the demon down”, no one survived.’ Hal gulped, having
possibly described their own fate.
‘I guess.’ Sighed Mia, and trailed off into
silence.
