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  Dekker’s Dozen:

  The Last Watchmen

  © 2016 by Christopher D. Schmitz

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  PUBLISHED BY TREE SHAKER BOOKS

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  Dekker’s Dozen: The Last Watchmen

  by

  Christopher D. Schmitz

  Copyright 2016 Christopher D. Schmitz

  Published by Tree Shaker Books

  SERIES TIMELINE

  0 Dawn of time. Only the Great Engine Exists

  Dekker's Dozen #000B Prologue (Wheel of Anathoth)

  Dekker's Dozen #001 The Mechnar Revival

  Dekker's Dozen #002 Flammable Kittens and Conspiracy

  Theories

  Dekker's Dozen #003 Catch Me If You Can

  Dekker's Dozen #004 Ezekiel

  Dekker's Dozen #005 Unicorn Zombie Spores

  Dekker's Dozen #006 Salvaged Salvation

  Dekker's Dozen #007 Red Tree Blooming

  Dekker's Dozen #008 The Verdant Seven

  Dekker's Dozen #009 DNIET Disaster

  Dekker's Dozen #010 Return to Osix

  Dekker's Dozen #011 The Finger of God

  Dekker's Dozen #012 Dead Planet

  Dekker's Dozen #00X Epilogue

  Dekker’s Dozen #000B

  Prologue:

  Wheel of Anathoth

  569 B.C.E.…

  Ezekiel reeled and staggered as the ground shook below his feet.

  Booming explosions cracked the nearby planetary crust, spewing vents of hot, sulfuric air. The swirling portal of light ripped open behind him, bleeding celestial light into the earth realm as its rippling edges swirled and spun like ghostly gears and Ezekiel’s vision clouded, white eyes shivered back and forth with REM movement. He screamed as pain blossomed in his mind, just as it did whenever he experienced divine visions; blood trickled down his chin, leaking from his right nostril.

  “I see it, Yahweh! I see it all!” The vision consumed his brain and threatened to melt his mind; his heart raced at unsafe speeds even as he realized his lips spoke the ineffable name—the penalty for which was death.

  It didn’t matter, he understood, as his teary eyes unclouded and he beheld the boiling environment. The sky had broken and the horizon burned. Chunks of the distant mountains splintered, erupting skyward. The nearby hills melted like wax and trees detonated in flame. Ezekiel stood and looked over the valley near his home in Anathoth. Steam leaked from the vineyards, rising heavenward as the vines curled and blackened.

  Terror gripped the prophet’s heart which silently cried out to his God. “This was not foretold! This is not that ordained, terrible Day of the Lord!” He shouted his disbelief even as creation began disintegrating around him. This must be another vision!

  As if in response to his incredulous doubt, the pergola which shaded him burst into flames; waves of intense, dry heat wafted towards him. Ezekiel panicked and toppled to the hard-packed dirt just outside; the ground rumbled with evil vibrations.

  Fear radiated from his heart and Ezekiel shielded his eyes from the churning wheel of light. The portal was unbearable to look at and so he bowed before it, face to the ground, and tore his clothes.

  A dread noise split the sky and reverberated across the atmosphere. It echoed from the singular point ahead: the dimensional gate seemed to cry with pain.

  With a metallic, belching groan, the air nearby burst into a puff of smog which smelled of ozone and evaporating water. Ezekiel reeled backwards; the tainted air had produced a human form: lying on the dirt was… himself?

  Ezekiel stared. The man was truly him! He wore the same bedraggled beard and hair. He recognized the sandals, made by an artisan who lived down this very road; he even wore the same clothing—although this man’s garments were tattered and soiled with soot and blood. A series of buckled, leather straps held a burnished cylindrical contraption to his back. The belts were much thicker than the hide thong which hung a familiar religious medallion around his neck.

  Stepping forward, Ezekiel spotted viscous gore leaking from the man’s torso; it stained the ground and bubbled up to his lips. A large section of his chest had been blasted away, exposing torn skin and bone—an entire lung even burned away by some nefarious means! Only partly cauterized, the ichorous flow pulsed with each slowing heartbeat, spilling blood onto the dry soil.

  The man who had appeared out of nowhere, a bleeding copy of Ezekiel, locked eyes with Israel’s Prophet of Anathoth. His eyes beckoned to him and he vainly reached for his duplicate. His arms trembled with the onset of death throes.

  He waved him closer, calling for the prophet. Ezekiel sank to his knees at the injured one’s side. His dying copy groaned one word. “Nehushtan.”

  With a trembling hand, the dying one removed Moses’s brazen serpent from around his neck where it had been slung as a necklace. He stuffed it into Ezekiel’s hand and coughed a death rattle.

  As Ezekiel touched the body of his doppelganger, the revelation he’d just experienced reclaimed the prophet in full force. His vision isolated the rogue line of reality which had corrupted the whole. The future broke: the divine machine seized in some forthcoming existence. Feedback reverberations of the ruptured line washed backwards, flowing into every other dimension, cracking the elemental lines and peeling back the boundaries of reality, unmaking all of creation with a grinding, shrieking song of torment.

  In the span of one heartbeat he saw the course of human history through spiritual eyes: the wars and conflicts of mankind and all his terrible instruments of combat and destruction. His eldritch pupils dilated, taking in the far-off Intergalactic Singularity War, the Mechnar Contra, and the failure of mankind to stop a creeping enemy that stalked him since the spawn of sin. The surge of destruction washed backward through time, eroding the engines of reality and stopped with this very moment: Ezekiel making contact with himself.

  He gasped and withdrew the hand from his shallowly-breathing duplicate. “The weed of Eden,” he whispered, looking into the fading eyes of his dead self.

  The version of himself who wore the contraption pointed to the spinning portal even as he shuddered and gurgled. He wheezed as his remaining lung filled with blood; his eyes dimmed and then he shuddered spasmodically before finally falling still.

  Ezekiel quickly unfettered his counterpart from the harness. The pained cry from the rent sky called his heart to action. He had to find the hero! He had seen everything from the birth of time through its ultimate demise—but there was a man who could stand in the way of the demon that had caused this thing—and it was not Ezekiel. Ezekiel was merely the herald.

  The prophet strapped the device onto his body. He did not know exactly how to operate it, but instead moved with pure instinct. He dangled the bronze serpent in front of his eyes. Nehushtan it had been named.

  He knew that the serpent had no special power. It symbolized his peoples’ faith in a grand, cosmic plan and the divine planner.

  Hanging the artifact around his neck, he knew that he needed all the faith he could muster for this mission. Ezekiel kissed the serpent, and then sprin
ted into the blazing, spinning portal just as his plane of reality erupted—disintegrating into ethereal void, becoming one with the vast nothingness.

  Dekker’s Dozen #001

  The Mechnar Revival

  The amber warning light blipped on Margo’s instrument panel. There hadn’t been any contact with the Osix Station for many hours past the mandatory check-in. Only silence came from the moon base.

  Margo bit her lip. Only an intern with Halabella Mining Company, her superiors always seemed to hold her personally accountable for bad news. The moon had long proven to be rich in resources. Her mind wildly speculated on what might have happened as her finger hovered over the internal communications device.

  Maybe it was the krenzin, she thought. After all, the theocratic krenzin had once petitioned the MEA government for its use as a religious commune, before the company began its mining. Halabella, barely managed to retain its rights. Now, the entire moon had fallen mute, save the crackle of an open com signal.

  That the krenzin might somehow seize the property and evict its occupants seemed a crazy notion. The felinoid race rarely used aggression and favored diplomacy above all else; passivity interweaved their central, theological tenants. Following the time when the heinous criminal Prognon Austicon ravaged their planet, the krenzin populated Earth, and invaded human politics. Margo shook her head; this just wasn’t the krenzin’s style.

  Besides, a query from the nearby krenzin outpost opened on her data screen. They’d expressed their own concerns regarding their suddenly quiet neighbors—in fact they’d sent a crew for a safety check. Margo activated the com unit and dialed her boss. They would have to call in a licensed Investigator.

  ***

  Formerly a battleship, the interstellar, colony-jumping galleon Requiem brought relief efforts, free traders, sightseers, religious pilgrims, and every other type of tourists imaginable to popular ports of call. Luckily for Dekker, Requiem’s route brought it past Alpha Centauri.

  It proved more financially sound for him to transport his crew, ship, and equipment on the Requiem than it was to pilot it from Earth, especially in light of the investigators’ current fiscal woes. With all the clearances and the tariff needed to make a jump from Earth, it could be cheaper to shuttle out-system on a commercial liner and jump from there. It depended on what the job paid and the state of his credit accounts.

  The crew itched for a good score like the one Halabella offered, but the jump drives were in dire need of repairs and their ship desperately needed parts. Dekker had even been on his way to Earth’s moon to see Doc Johnson about repairing his ship’s engines when the urgent notice about the job came over the wires. Dekker and his partner Vivian “Vesuvius” Briggs, rounded up their team of licensed Investigators: one part mercenary, one part detective.

  Licensed Investigators became necessary for certain jobs “neo civilization” found too distasteful following a Krenzin renaissance. The crippling legal system as well as growing public distaste for conflict paved the way with gold for those with skill enough for the hot-zones, and then the government did their best to tariff those profits back into nonexistence.

  Dekker paced around the exterior of his ship and muttered about his missed rendezvous with Doc Johnson. He paid no attention to the crowd of spectators that stared at his crew and drew his battered duster close about his body, making sure any personal armaments stayed concealed; their legality depended on the current jurisdiction, but they were all illegal somewhere. He scowled at a male oggler whose eyes lingered too long at his partner.

  Vesuvius’ tight, leather pants and flak jacket certainly hugged her form, practically teasing the male eye. She earned her nickname by her tendency to violently explode. Dekker’s warning scowl might just save this man’s life. Turning to inspect an old hull crack, she threw her red hair back as if it were a lava plume.

  Vesuvius shouted above the jostling crowd in the docking bay. “Listen up! This is the final briefing before we make contact!”

  Many of the travelers who milled about cast disapproving glances at her, Dekker noted. Their disdain might have been born less from their love of Krenzin philosophy and more because the Investigators had inconvenienced the pilgrims with a stop so near to home. Vesuvius stared them down and gave Dekker the floor.

  “Exterior check looks good,” he hollered. “Doc Johnson said she’d hold for another mission or two before we were risking any significant danger.”

  Vesuvius shrugged playfully. She’d been at that meeting—and knew that Dekker and Doc had different opinions on where the threshold to “significant danger” lay.

  Dekker checked his timepiece and then ushered his crew into the Rickshaw Crusader for the debriefing. The battered, but powerful Class B cruiser was their mobile base of operations, and so far, their schedule held intact. “Matty, you’re on the stick,” he barked.

  The stoic, square-jawed man nodded and left the room as Dekker slid a headset over one ear and positioned his microphone. A chime signaled in his earpiece alerting him of the connection. Matty wouldn’t miss the mission details while he disembarked the ship during the Requiem’s brief layover.

  “Osix Station Beta is completely cold.” He played with a mini projector and a three-dimensional holograph of the Alpha Centauri system formed. “We’ve been hired to check it out and have absolutely zero intel on what it might be. Halabella has a lot of enemies—you’ll remember some of the past litigation and ethics violations—but none of them really have the means or desire to strike at the company like this: eradicate the local population.” Dekker manipulated the zoom function, panning through the primary twin stars, and displayed the proper coordinates.

  “Unless we’ve got an Austicon copycat,” Guy piped in, under his breath. Vesuvius elbowed him; they’d long put the subject of that mass-murderer to rest and it was a sore topic for Dekker.

  “We’re here,” Dekker pointed at the holo map. “The Osix moon orbits Rico, the first planet at Alpha Centauri A. Osix is composed of mostly rocky terrain; it’s rich in minerals and new heavy metals that are still being discovered.”

  He zoomed the map in to focus on the planetary satellite. “Osix Station Alpha, Beta, and Gamma are at these points nearby. Alpha is the mine network; Beta and Gamma are the residential and commercial sectors. Communications with Beta and Gamma have been rendered impossible, and Alpha does not respond to hails; the channel is open, but has been completely silent.” Dekker was silent for a moment. “An entire colony of miners doesn’t simply disappear without a trace, and with no emergency beacons. The Krenzin orbital station near Osix sent down a relief team just in case… they disappeared as well.” None of his crew had any love for the Krenzin—but their effort initiated a brief moment of silence.

  “We have no clues to go by, no information to reveal the nature of the incident. All we can do is play this by ear, folks. Assume full hazmat protocols, possible contagions, and the like until I say otherwise.” His team nodded grimly.

  A klaxon wailed briefly and the mercenaries heard the distinct whining, like giant turbines spinning up. In minutes, the FTL drive would spit the galleon back into regular subspace.

  “One more thing,” Dekker said, “I want to thank you all for sticking with the unit through our current… money troubles.” Dekker’s Dozen had recently received heavy fines for excessive property damage during an earth-side mission, plunging their finances into ruin.

  “Ain’t nowhere else I could have this much fun,” quipped Guy. The rest of the crew assented. Guy, an explosives expert who loved to see things blow up, may have been a wisecracker, but he packed it where it counted.

  “Thanks, Guy. Remember I promised that we’d all come out of this one with credits in the black, but if we don’t, Guy owes you all a round at the nearest cantina.” The crew cheered.

  Moments later, the Requiem reverted to realspace. The Rickshaw Crusader spun on its axis, angled away from the giant galleon, and departed.

  ***

 
Massive tree trunks formed the ceremonial circle on the face of the planet Rico. Osix glowed brightly overhead with the light from the twin suns of the Alpha Centauri system.

  The Arbolean council, a ring of ancient timbers, made up the elect—the eldest that would lead their species to conquests planned since long before the dawn of man. They had reawakened a century ago to reassess their battle plan.

  Those unassuming bipeds scattered across the galaxy paid little attention to the arboleans. None could see past their own xenomorphic viewpoints and recognize the arboleans’ sentience. That fact only played into their strengths.

  Pieces long in motion finally begun to bear fruit. They could feel the arbolean presence strengthen on the seed-world of Osix every day. With every cycle they gathered more information about their enemies. The arboleans would remain in the shadows, undetected until the mighty seed finished germinating; soon their most ambitious sowing would be obvious to all—and stopping it at that point should prove impossible.

  ***

  The Rickshaw Crusader passed the Krenzin deep-space outpost and entered Osix’s orbit around Rico. Dekker, from the copilot seat vectored his approach and toggled on the communications equipment. If any new signals emanated from the silent community, the sensors would pick it up.

  Angling for the landing bay, the Rickshaw Crusader cut a jet-stream through the atmosphere. It berthed within the massive geodesic dome near Osix Station Beta. The unmistakable form of the Krenzin skiff sat parked nearby; it must have belonged to the team that came to explore and offer support. Several other vacant crafts lay dead, moored to the surrounding tarmac; none of them emitted so much as a transponder signal. Aside from a creeping, foreign vine sprouting from near the landing pads, everything remained completely placid and painted in shades of drab gray and brown: typical for a mining planet.