Chapter One
The twin suns of Orthese lay upon the horizon. They shimmered like split yolks in the heat haze that already baked the planet’s surface. The bruised sky, reluctant to release the night, fought to hold them down as they took their sluggish, inevitable journey to their zenith.
Lieutenant Remi Orthesian watched from the pavilion that his mother had built. The smell of citrus was carried to him on a warm, light breeze. In the fields that stretched for miles in all directions, the workers, no more than dark illusions in the half-light, moved with purpose and pride towards the strips of land that they worked from sun up to sun down.
Remi sat on the ancient stone bench that he had shared with his mother for the final time on the day that he had joined the Wounded Sons. It overlooked the fields of golden corn and the orchards that lay between him and the distant palace; her bequest, her legacy, her gift. He sipped at a glass of freshly squeezed fruit juice from a table by his side.
It was hard to believe that, less than two years ago, all he surveyed was wasteland, a wilderness caused by virus bombs and treachery. It was testament to the human will to survive, to the ingenuity of humankind. From dry, roasted soil had sprung the harvests of regeneration and hope. All those people, all those strangers, had come together as one and begun to live again. He was sure his mother would have been proud.
It had been an eventful couple of years. His clan of Wounded Sons had regained its honour and been formally brought back into the Supremacy fold. The recruitment was going well; many young men had passed the primary trials of becoming an Enhanced and were being taught the art of war by his fellow brothers from the Palm of Earth clan.
Thanks to the insightful Inquisitor Mercurse, the planet had been reseeded and not only had they had growth, they had flourished (as his drink, a product of the sweet orchards below, could testify). Trade negotiations had gone well between Orthese and House Waite; agriculture was paving the way for a lucrative trade between them. Munitions had been brought down to the planet, again thanks to Mercurse. Remi’s clan was being rebuilt and rearmed; they had even brought in settlers to help the process. Since the treachery, a lot of houses and farms had been left abandoned, but were now slowly and surely being utilised.
Beyond the fields and the farm workers, beyond the glistening streams and irrigation channels and fruit-heavy trees, a silhouette stood against the slowly lightening sky. Its dome, now starting to soak in the myriad colours above, strove for the skies. The four proud turrets looked like childish space ships about to leave Orthese. Soon, when the day finally broke, they would look as they really were, like the remnants of medieval Aquitaine, elegant towers that spoke of troubadours and unrequited love and chivalry.
The palace, that for so few years had been his home, was now the headquarters of the Wounded Sons.
Remi picked up his juice and drained the glass. He loved the citrus of Orthese. It was the taste of success.
Chapter Two
The monitoring tower withstood the tempest as it always did. High winds and lashing rain were a constant in the mountainous area. Electrical storms, brewed in the northeast, climbed the mountains like titans until they were forced by weight alone to shed their load and their anger upon the earth and unleash havoc upon the ground. Avalanches were common and deadly and one could never tell from one season to the next how the terrain would look once it had been overturned and flung back down by the wrath of the storm.
A lone Pritli stood safe and warm in the observation lounge at the top of the tower. He had long ceased to be daunted by what went on outside and was more overwhelmed by the tedium within. He yawned, put his hands behind his head and feet up on the console and looked with tired disgust out of the window, nothing to see but miles upon miles of mountains. And rain. He would have bets with himself as to where the next bolt of lightning would land, what devastation it would wreak upon the ground so far below.
The black and yellow clouds rolled across the mountaintops, swallowed them like giant spectres. As far back as he could remember things had always been the same; the bubbling, phlegmy clouds, the harsh, biting rain, the scything winds that were said to have peeled the skin from a man as he hurried hopelessly to find shelter.
He took another swig of ale, belched and looked through his binoculars. Remnants of food and dried rivulets of drink had caught in his expansive beard, but he didn’t care. He didn’t even notice. It provided an almost unlimited reserve of food at which he could absently pick in the more tedious moments of the very long days.
His kind were all the same; ruddy complexions, stocky build with arms like boulders and beards that were, so the myth went, born of the forest and transplanted to the face in the womb.
Despite the comfort of the tower, he wished he was back in the mines or even the hydroponics bays. There was a different kind of comfort in the backbreaking work of the mines, in the dust and the darkness illuminated by weak light, where shadows were companions and filth was not just the residue on your skin, but the words that fell from the mouths of your workmates as you boasted and lied your way through a shift, warm laughter sweeping through the tunnels like a sirocco wind across a warm plain.
But, no. He had to break the nose of the loud mouth who had insulted his family. The insult was probably true, but he wasn’t going to let the idiot he head-butted know that. So here he was above the mountains in the observation tower as punishment. Six months of this; six months of semi-standard food and slurry for ale.
He scanned the horizon again; nothing had changed; same old rain, same old storms, same old clouds, same old comet falling...
He adjusted his binoculars. He saw it correctly; a comet, an actual comet. He had heard the legends, of course, from his grandparents, of how comets would rip the fabric of the skies, maybe open portals to other worlds, and how doom would befall those who saw it. They were harbingers of disaster, of death, of famine, of misfortune, of floods and earthquakes, but he knew this was not so. Comets had fallen before and the world had not ended.
He watched its descent, the binoculars in one hand, while with his other hand, on a scrap of stained paper, he calculated its impact point.
‘No,’ he said quietly, as if afraid to let anyone know of his fears. ‘No!’
He dropped the binoculars and lurched to the transmitter. ‘This is Gast Elkinsson. Observation tower forty-seven. Repeat. Gast Elkinsson. Observation tower forty-seven. Can anyone hear me?’
There was nothing but static and crackle, then a faint voice came over the speakers. ‘We hear you forty-seven. What is it now, Gast? Want some warm blankets to keep you warm, you poor baby? Need more cheese?’
‘No. Get me the foreman of gallery one. Repeat. Get me the foreman of gallery one.’
‘Why?’
‘No time to explain. Just get him now!’
‘OK, OK, keep your beard on. You young pups...’ the voice trailed off as the speaker dropped out of audio range.
The wait seemed interminable. What were they doing?
‘Foreman Bergsson here. What is it?’
‘Falling object heading towards gallery one. Impact in approximately thirty cycles.’
‘What? You been drinking the slurry again, Elkinsson?’
‘I’m serious. Start evacuating the gallery now. Repeat. Falling object heading towards gallery one. Evacuate now’
‘Let me check obs tower forty-six and forty-eight.’
‘Now is not the time to check the handbo...’
The hiss of static and the crackle of failing diodes filled the air for a few tense minutes.
A thin, broken voice came across the radio. ‘Message received and understood. Evacuating now. Well spotted, young Gast. Bergsson out.’
Gast slid to the observation tower floor and started to pray.
*
Silas creaked. Well, his old hardened leather did, but sometimes it was difficult to tell. The lamp on his helmet gave off a dim glow. On the walls, it picked out trails of condensation and the scars of pick work. His auto trailer leaked oil and hissed, its old tracks cracked and worn.
Silas, he thought to himself, they thought you senile for even coming down into these old workings. Too dangerous they said. Pockets of gas, rodents the size of houses, slugs the size of horses; don’t be a fool old man, they said. What they didn’t know was that there was a lot of old abandoned equipment in these tunnels, abandoned due to cave in or land fill, to gas explosion or sheer laziness. Most of his kind thought it unlucky to use a dead man’s tools. Not he. He shined it up and sold it on the market to the young 'uns. He patted their heads and gave praise to their beards and grinned at their backs as they trotted off into the mines to make their fortunes. Gullible fools, he laughed. Not him. Not good old Silas. He made the money, he made the groats. He made the groats to drink the ale; it was all he wanted in life. Groats for his ale and little work. What he did wasn’t work in his eyes anyway. It was a collection service of old tools. He was a service provider (he thought that phrase up himself and damn proud he was of it too). He didn’t believe in old superstitions, there was no time for that spooky trash. He just wanted to make groats; groats he could use to buy the ale and then swim in its groggy embrace.
He heard a dull whump in the distance and a breeze of warm air passed over his face like a hand. He noticed all the small cave worms hurriedly crawling down the tunnel, their faint luminescence giving them away in the dark. Odd, he thought. Must’ve been a gas explosion up ahead. Maybe it cleared an old tunnel or three, he thought. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Still, it was odd how the worms crawled away from it. Normally they would go where the heat was. He continued down the tunnel, the worms dying under his feet in their anxiety to flee.
*
‘Damage report!’ shouted Foreman Bergsson. A young Pritli ran over to him holding a sheaf of papers. Bergsson looked at the oghams on the paper. ‘Any lives lost?’ he asked.
‘None sir. As you can see, the object broke through the upper tiers and carried on down to the disused tunnels approximately a mile down.’
‘Damnation! I wish I had that power to drill down that quickly.’ He smiled grimly. ‘OK, get an exploration team together. Full gas resistance. And make sure they’re armed.’
‘Yes, sir,’ responded the young 'un and hurried away barking orders.
*
The deeper Silas went into the tunnel, the more intense the heat became. The worms had stopped crawling away, to be replaced by what looked like maggots. With the heat came a smell of rotten meat, intense, unavoidable in the confines of the tunnel. He could understand sulphur smells this deep down, but rotten meat?
The floor became slippery as the maggot infestation grew. They were now at least an inch thick. He could hear them burst as he stood on them or as his faithful auto trailer drove over them and lost its grip in their pulp and skidded upon their bodies. Above the sound of the ground maggots, Silas could hear a faint, distant buzzing.
Walking became more difficult. It was as if he had to drag his feet through treacle. He had to hold on to the wall with one hand to stop slipping over. His trailer slid to one side, its tracks gummed up with dead maggots and the ichor from their broken bodies.
The source of the buzzing soon became apparent. There were only a few at first; black, corpulent, red-eyed flies, unfeasibly large. How they flew he had no idea, with their bloated bodies and small wings. With them came the stench of putrefaction, of autolysis, as if they had been dipped in death and it seeped from their pores.
They buzzed him, only a few at first, then many, then hundreds. Soon he saw that they covered the walls and the ceiling. Their feet sucked at whatever they landed upon, whether it was him or the walls or the auto trailer, and left a glutinous glob behind that held the disgusting odour in place like pustules that had burst upon the skin.
The noise, the high-pitched tinnitus buzz, almost as if a thousand voices were whispering at him, began to hurt his ears. He stopped and put his neckerchief over his nose and mouth, pulled down his infra-red goggles and tried to put the straps over his ears, partly to cut out the noise, partly because he realised that there was a distinct possibility of something crawling into an orifice and laying eggs or making a meal of him from the inside out.
The heat signature given off by the mass of flies blinded him with a sea of red. He flicked the infrared filter off and waited for his eyes to readjust. He could see through the writhing, flying mass that the tunnel opened up into a cavern, a cavern strewn with debris from the tunnels and galleries above.
In the centre of the cavern was a glowing rock, easily the size of a workman’s hut. It steamed and made the cavern feel like a sauna. The heat was almost unbearable.
Silas took a nervous, curious step towards it, half his mind filled with warning, the other half filled with the value of this extra-terrestrial boulder.
It had cracked upon landing, straight across the middle, as if a giant knife had been taken to a giant egg. From this crack came the maggots and flies. It reeked. Whatever was in this rock must have died, it must have died and fed the maggots, which in turn became flies. But how had they survived? One could understand that they could survive, perhaps, when the rock was intact, but surely, they too should have died upon impact.
Yet, as he pondered upon it, the crack became bigger. The rock spewed a viscous black jelly onto the maggots that slimed around in it. The thick crust started to undulate and gradually became more transparent.
Silas could see a recognisable shape within with it, a prone form, a bloated prone form, humanoid, easily six feet in length. It seemed to have rags, or perhaps torn ribbons of skin, floating in the slime around it, and parts of what looked like leather armour on it. It was hairless and sexless, its body mapped in thin, black, pulsating veins, its skin a pale green. Long talon-like nails protruded from its hands.
Its eyes opened and looked at Silas.
*
Magnusson checked his squad again. He knew it annoyed the hell out of them, but to check and triple check was the only way, as far as he was concerned, to stop you checking out. He didn’t care if it annoyed anyone. He wanted to sleep at night.
He made sure that all their armour was carapace from the giant cave beetles and that no hint of metal was hidden among them. He’d seen what a single spark could do in a cloud of gas. He checked all his squad’s rebreathers, sounded off all their names and waited for their nods of acknowledgement.
The whole routine took around thirty minutes. He kept telling them it was the most valuable thirty minutes of their lives, but they just bitched and moaned.
When all the checks were done, he uncovered a cage and tethered a small dog-like lizard to a leash, then set off down the tunnels. The going was slow as they had to constantly check the lizard for discolouration; if it changed hue it meant gas and it was the hue that indicated what type of gas was involved. The colour they didn’t want was one which caused the lizard to turn purple; this meant that corrosive gas was about and if that was the case not even their armour could save them.
After four hours of weaving through tunnels and wading through water, they came upon a Pritli, an old one. He wore ragged leather armour and had in tow a very old auto trailer. He was upright, dragging his legs mechanically, but his eyes were vacant and there was a sheen of sweat upon his pale, dirty face.
Magnusson leaned in and looked for signs of life. ‘Silas? You in there old feller?’
What was the old fool doing down here? He seemed to be muttering to himself, jabbering nonsense.
‘Hold it there, old timer,’ said Magnusson. He pressed a hand against Silas’s chest to stop him, but the old miner just pushed against it as if his destination was set and there was nothing anyone could do about it. As far as Silas was concerned, they just weren’t there.
He put his ear close to Silas’s mouth in an attempt to pick up anything recognisable that may fall out among the rubbish.
‘IamthebringerofcorruptionWearetheywhoelicitthegloryofthetransformationofpestilenceanddiseasePreparethyselfforthegiftthatwebestowupontheeYouwillbecomeourvesseltospreadourpestilentgloryacrossyourworldYourbodyandyoursoulnowbelongtousWearethegiversandtakersoflifeyetthroughdeathliferemainsWearethegatekeepersoftheascedanceintothenextlife,’ recited Silas.
Magnusson grabbed Silas’s shoulder and shook him. ‘Old man? Do you hear me? Are you okay? Silas?’
As if hearing some distant call, Silas turned his eyes towards Magnusson. ‘What? Magnusson, is it?’ Magnusson nodded. ‘I was just doing a bit of salvage work, my boy.’
‘There’s been a hit on the mines and caverns, Silas. Head up top where it’s safe.’
‘A hit, you say? Okay, my boy, will do, but what do I do about that?’ he jabbed a thumb behind him.
Magnusson lifted his torch and followed the thumb. On the auto trailer was a body of some sort, but not the kind of body that Magnusson had ever seen.
‘What the hell is that? Just what kind of salvage are you doing down here, Silas?’
Silas smiled thinly. ‘Kind of surprising, eh?’
Magnusson called three of his men over. ‘Escort Silas to the Seers. They may be able to tell us something.’ He turned to Silas. ‘My boys are going to get you out of here, Silas. You understand? You’re safe now.’
But Silas had gone again, slipped into Sunday school recitation.
‘IamthebringerofcorruptionWearetheywhoelicitthegloryofthetransformationofpestilenceanddiseasePreparethyselfforthegiftthatwebestowupontheeYouwillbecomeourvesseltospreadourpestilentgloryacrossyourworld...’
He shook Silas again and the old Pritli’s eyes came back into focus. ‘Oh, hello. Young Magnusson, isn’t it? Didn't see you there. I was just doing a bit of salvage work...’
‘Yes, Silas, it’s me.’ He shook his head. ‘Time to go, Silas. Go with my boys now. They’ll take care of you.’
‘Of course. We must do what we must do.’
Magnusson watched his men and Silas disappear back the way they came, Silas’s muttering dissipating with distance.
‘PreparethyselfforthegiftthatwebestowupontheeYouwillbecomeourvesseltospreadourpestilentgloryacrossyourworldYourbodyandyoursouldnowbelongtousWearethegiversandtakersoflifeyetthroughdeathliferemains...’
‘Right,’ said Magnusson. ‘The rest of you, with me. Close formation. Let’s find us a comet.’
*
6 Months Later
Valeria Mordeen was achingly bored. Her tedium, her ennui, seeped through her and dripped from her every extremity.
She looked out of the toughened glass window and was not surprised to see it was raining. It seemed to rain for weeks on end, then be tropically hot for a week, then return to the deluge. She could smell the damp everywhere and when it was hot, she could smell the mustiness of drying fabrics and papers and could feel the rot in her soul.
She guessed the extreme weather was because of the continual aether storms above them. The sky boiled incessantly and puked weather out as if it was exorcising a demon. Add to that the gravity of the planet, which would crush her if she took but one sniff of air, and she was surely in some kind of Supremacy-forgotten hellhole. She couldn’t even explore the planet without a protective suit, unlike the native Pritli, who were descended from mankind, but due to the extreme conditions on planet, had mutated into the race they were now; small in stature, around four feet tall and broad, tenacious of spirit and as surly as death. How she loathed their tiny frames and filthy beards.
It had been almost two years since she had arrived on E5150. The demon amalgam of XIIBD had teleported them here. She had wanted to go back to the Belili but, as the thing she now called Twelve had pointed out, no destination had been given, so it brought her here, to the edge of existence, where she would be safe. Oh, she was safe alright, stuck on an old human colony, lost and forgotten and shielded by aether storms, which prevented not only interstellar communication but interstellar flight.
Twelve had brought her to the lowlands of this planet, stone walls and stone houses under the protection of a stone keep and the local Low King. Luckily, Twelve’s demon form had abated when they appeared. The Pritli were curious about them and initially took them prisoner and brought them before the Low King. They were going to be held captive until she started regaling His Royal Highness with tales of the Supremacy, which piqued the Low King’s interest. After that, he became most helpful; he had allowed her to stay in this manse and equipped her with a crude body suit to protect her from the gravity when she went outside.
She had, of course, promised to bring him and his kin back into the Supremacy’s fold. What he didn’t know was that mutants would be killed.
Twelve found out that he had access to all of his previous incarnation’s database and informed Mordeen of this. She gave it (Twelve was an ‘it’; the ‘he’ had been lost in the transformation) the task of manufacturing crude ballistic weaponry. This she brought to the king who was mightily impressed.
She promised more if he could promise more ore and maybe a small staff of Pritli to help her.
So far, it had taken nearly two long years. These creatures were so slow, with the tech level of vegetables. Was this a penance? After all she had done, for the good of the Supremacy? After all the self-sacrifice? She hoped it was, because this was most definitely more than she could endure.
Yet her boredom would not subside. It stormed through her like a cancer, carried in her bloodstream to reach every part of her. She knew that, if she waited, something would eventually happen. This was the way of things. Let one domino fall and then see where the others tumbled. It was the waiting for that first domino that was sapping her energy.
Outside her door, she heard footsteps. She turned to them, watched the shadow beneath the gap in the door, narrow at first, then wider and darker as whoever it was came closer. The footsteps stopped and Mordeen suddenly realised that she had been holding her breath.
The soft knock at the door actually made her jump.
She hesitated. How long had it been since someone had knocked at her door. It was as if the world was suddenly acknowledging her existence, an existence that she had seriously began to doubt.
She cleared her throat. ‘Come in,’ she said.
The door opened and Mordeen saw a young girl, vaguely familiar, human, with long dark hair and a pale complexion. She was thin. More than thin. Undernourished. The girl’s dark eyes stared at Mordeen as if waiting for permission to speak.
‘Well? What do you want? Can I help you?’
The girl didn’t reply. Her mouth was open, as if she was about to speak, but there were no words. Then her body began to shimmer as if made only of smoke and a Pritli passed through her. With that, she dissolved.
‘Yes, Mistress Mordeen. I am Jere Doxey. I am the king’s aide. You can indeed help. The Low King asks for your attention and has sent me to escort you to him. You will need your pressure suit.’
Mordeen stood and bowed her head.
The first domino had fallen.