The Last Watchmen Read online

  While there had been much interference in the sensor sweep, life signs had registered in the community, lots of them. The readings made the situation that much more peculiar. Dekker tightened his grip on the pilots’ yoke—it likely meant trouble.

  With breathers on, Dekker’s team exited the vessel with weapons drawn. Muscles tight and senses alert for whatever this unseen threat might be, they spread out through the sphere and secured the area, assessing the current situation.

  Dekker partnered himself with Vesuvius and Guy. All of the Investigators joined up in groups of three and linked comm frequencies.

  Guy pointed to an airlock with a closed set of blast doors. Dekker nodded and clicked his communicator. Guy trotted to the entrance to check it out.

  “Shaw, Nathan, scope out the perimeter of the landing dome and look for access doors, breaches, anything like that. According to the schematic, there should be a maintenance tunnel leading to Beta station, but the map was outdated. Try and use the service routes to find a secondary route in—just in case we need flanking support.”

  “How convenient,” Shaw responded dryly. “Why are the maps always outdated?”

  Dekker almost chuckled. “Just keep your eyes open. You never know what you might find. Remember the Dromeus incident.”

  “You really think it might be like that?” Nathan’s first mission with the team had been the investigation at the former military installation-turned refugee camp on Dromeus. He shuddered, remembering the grisly massacre scene created by the vicious insectoid race previously unknown, but now extinct courtesy of the Dozen.

  “Matty, monitor our progress from the Crusader. Give us ten minutes, then follow my path and watch my six.”

  “I got your six,” Matty confirmed. Former military, Matty was the driest of the team leaders. What he lacked in personality he made up for with skill.

  Dekker jogged over to the blast doors where Guy fidgeted with a wiring system to rig explosive charges on the doors hinges. Dekker pulled him back.

  “We don’t need to blow up everything,” he chided as he pressed the control panel. The doors slid apart with slick, hydraulic ease.

  “Well maybe you don’t.” Guy muttered.

  Vesuvius chuckled as she cut in front of them, entering the black tunnel nonchalantly. The sensors registered her presence; the lights flickered twice and turned on.

  “You know,” she commented to Dekker, pushing a suggestive nuance into her voice, “I remember Dromeus. Do you remember after Dromeus?”

  “Not now, Vees.” The brief romantic involvement complicated things. Dekker had managed to sidestep this particular conversation for almost a year so far.

  “And why not, now?” She drew the disruptor pistol at her thigh and covered a long hallway that spread before them. She stalked down the corridor to scout ahead. “‘Not now,’ don’t talk about it, or ‘not now,’ you’re not interested in us anymore?”

  “Ya know, I’m not sure, but let’s not talk about it right now.”

  “There’s no harm in talking, you know.” She checked the hall, and then swung around to clear a nearby service closet.

  “Well, there could be. I seem to recall how our break-up went.”

  Guy, the third wheel, laughed, “I remember that; it was hilarious. But seriously, Mom and Dad, you gotta stay together for us kids,” he teased.

  They ignored him. “You stabbed me. Right in the arm,” Dekker shot Guy a glare as he spoke to Vesuvius, “and it wasn’t funny!”

  “Oh yeah,” she giggled. “It was kinda funny.” She flipped her crimson hair playfully and turned her back to him, trying, as ever, to tempt him back into her arms. Her carefully manicured persona belied the fact that she was one of the deadliest persons in the home sectors.

  Matty’s voice crackled through the airwaves. “Full sensor sweep complete. Whatever the threat is, it’s not airborne.”

  “Alright,” Dekker sighed, knowing that it narrowed the potential options into a more pressing sort of danger. He took his mask off. “You can remove rebreathers if you like.”

  Static momentarily crackled from Dekker’s comm unit, again. “We’re in the service corridor,” reported Shaw. “Nothing out of the ordinary here. We’ll see you guys inside Beta Station.”

  ***

  Guy peered around the corner of the passage, leading with the barrel of his disruptor rifle. He pulled back quickly and signaled for the others to join him.

  “We’ve got bodies around the corner,” he whispered. “Big splatter. Cover me while I check it out.”

  Guy ducked around the corner as Dekker and Vesuvius covered him, but all remained silent. They lowered their scopes and joined him at the scene. The hallway straightened so there was no way they could come under attack without having time to respond.

  Dekker stepped into the middle of the morbid scene. Little distinguishable pieces remained to identify the poor creatures that had been ripped apart. Blood and gore splattered the metallic, corrugated walls of the main passageway like some sick avant-garde painting.

  Vesuvius crouched down and examined the remains more closely. She traced a finger through the blood; it had congealed since spilling. Much of it had dried and the bits of shredded flesh had browned at the edges. Dekker reported their find to the other teams as Vesuvius sorted sifted through the mess. Patches of torn, feather-like hair stuck to the refuse.

  “My best guess is this was the krenzin relief team. I don’t think they had a very warm reception.”

  “I guess that we’d better be on our best behavior, then,” quipped Guy.

  “That’s right,” said Dekker. “You’d better play nice.”

  Vesuvius nodded with a macabre smile.

  ***

  The trio worked their way through the passage that connected the landing pod to the main colony. Just before coming to end of the hallway, unmolested, Shaw reported in.

  “Entering Beta Station, now. The lights are dim, but everything is on, and it’s quiet. Like there’s nothing here.”

  “Same conditions here,” Dekker responded. He, Guy, and Vesuvius exited their passage just after the report. The dim lights provided just enough light for visibility.

  “Keep your eyes and ears open. Report in if you find anything.”

  They fanned out and scouted ahead in an overlapping pattern. Osix Station Beta was little more than a small, company mining town: the ever-growing home to about five hundred souls who either worked in alternating shifts or served the miners and their families in some way, providing them with some semblance of a normal Earth life.

  Beta Station, the hub of the Osix mining network, linked via monorail to Alpha station where the mines and industry were located. Gamma station also linked to Beta by another large, highway-tunnel. Gamma contained the main operations and mechanical divisions while Beta Station held all the living quarters for all workers. Everything outside of Beta was the property of the Halabella, which held a century-long lease from the Mother Earth Aggregate.

  Guy turned over an MEA propaganda sign with his foot. The MEA, Earth’s political body asserted that if you were human, you were subject to its rule by heritage. And even though Halabella had a lease, the MEA owned Osix. Guy scowled at the sign. His thoughts had always leaned towards conspiracy.

  Dekker noted the surroundings. A multifaceted, geodesic bubble spread overhead providing a greenhouse-like atmosphere. An alien flora unlike any he’d seen before sprouted through cracks in the liquirock. Vegetation had taken over so quickly in the absence of man.

  Through the transparent metal panes, a weak sunrise peeked over the horizon. An orange, hollow light emanated through the massive panes. The system’s second star, Alpha Centauri B, did not offer any significant illumination for Osix; it merely colored everything in burnt solar colors. Proxima Centauri, the system’s red dwarf star, nearly always hung in the sky like a crimson beacon. Soon, the moon would rotate enough to start the sunrise of the system’s primary.

  The trio contin
ued to scout the settlement. They passed shops and dwellings also molded from the same kind of liquirock as they walked upon. Everything appeared abandoned—eerily silent.

  Voyaging ahead, Vesuvius planted herself against the corner of a building. She waved her comrades off, signaling for them to take cover. After a second, lingering look, she regrouped with them.

  “Central Square’s up ahead, some kind of park—where the life signs came from. Something really weird is going on there. Bodies: hundreds of them, all lying down.”

  Dekker pressed the mic button. “Matty, you on your way?”

  His voice crackled in, “Be right there.”

  ***

  Dekker and his team crept into the park. Nothing jumped. Nothing shot at them. Nothing moved. Regardless, they readied their weapons before tiptoeing over the bodies as they tried to understand the situation.

  Two hundred and six men, women, and children lay strewn about. Face up and eyes wide open, they breathed shallowly and gave occasional twitched. An electrical cord protruded from the base of each human’s head, and a black, honeycombed solar-plate was riveted to each ones’ clavicle. Dekker and Vesuvius traced the cords to their source while Guy continued investigating.

  At the center of the park they located four cabinet-sized boxes. Obsolete flash-tower processing drives strobed intermittently on the cabinet’s exterior as they accessed the synthetic memory crystal cores. Each linked hub connected to the cables and also coupled to a single monitor. A small black box with a telescopic antenna towered high above the jimmy-rigged system.

  Dekker leaned over to examine the unit. Its monitor and analog keyboard appeared oversized and bulky compared to the pocket-sized, collapsible terminals most technicians carried now. The entire system looked archaic at best. Several dozen floppy data chips littered the ground. The text on the screen scrolled with commands faster than Dekker could read.

  He radioed his computer expert. “Nibbs, I have a computer question for you.” Dekker described the thing to him.

  “That’s an ancient unit,” Nibbs replied. “And it sounds like a very old programming language… the self-writing kind.”

  Dekker stared at the screen and grimaced. “I thought auto-programming was outlawed—even impossible.”

  “The MEA certainly restricted it after the Mechnar Contra. But, that’s been so long now that very few can even come close to programming AI to run sentient androids. All post-MC hardware actually has hardwired fail-safes.”

  “Could that be what’s happening here?”

  “On an old, cobbled together heap like you described? I dunno. It sounds antique. Without seeing it, I couldn’t tell ya what’s goin on.”

  “Ok, then. Nathan, take your team over this way and replace Shaw. I need Nibbs’ expertise on the computer thing—I’m sure it’s important. Shaw, check out Gamma Station. Matty, how close are you?”

  “Almost to Beta, now.”

  “When you get here, take the west corridor and investigate Alpha Station. We’ve got two hundred bodies here; that’s less than half of the population. I want to know where the other three hundred are.”

  ***

  Nibbs squatted in front of the bulky interface. He scratched his head. “This thing is just a front-end. Underneath the hood here,” Nibbs peered below the machine where several self-contained hardware modules had been soldered and wired into each other and finally into the ancient machine.

  “See here, this command that keeps repeating? This program is replicating something over and over.”

  Dekker looked over his shoulder. He had no idea what the techie meant and he couldn’t distinguish one line from the next.

  Nibbs got up and traced cables and connections from their terminals and ports.

  Vesuvius took over with Nibbs as Dekker’s comm unit crackled. Dekker paced a few steps away to take the report.

  “Alpha station’s completely shut down,” said Matty. “Massive cave in, everything is rubble, piled up right at the mouth of the cavern.”

  “The other exits?” Dekker hoped that the workers might have evacuated.

  “They’re all on the surface and end in airlocks. Report from control says they’re still sealed. Logs show that they haven’t been cycled in three weeks. The whole crew must be dead inside.” Matty paused for a moment of silence.

  “We found a text logging terminal. Lots of entries: the men inside pleading for help, but it never came. They get more and more desperate and then they just cease entirely.”

  “All right,” Dekker said. “See what else you can find.”

  “How could a mining operation of this caliber have a collapse right at the main mouth of the mine?” Dekker wondered aloud. Only if it was done intentionally, he recognized.

  ***

  Guy tossed an orb in the air and caught it absent-mindedly, over and over. He kept watch until Nibbs and Dekker figured out the computer thing, but he didn’t see the point. The whole dome was dead.

  Vesuvius approached, “You’re gonna blow yourself up,” she told him as he juggled the highly explosive, metal sphere.

  “Yeah, I know.” He grinned, “That’s what my mother always told me.”

  “C’mon. Dekker wants us to explore the town. Maybe we can find some answers there.”

  “Which way, then?” Pleased with a less mind-numbing task Guy followed.

  Vesuvius and Guy entered the tiny convenience center in the compact residential zone. “Might as well do some reconnaissance where I can find something to snack on,” he suggested.

  Rummaging through the shelves of junk food, Guy lost Vesuvius. Not letting himself panic, he ran through the service doors and into the rear of the facility where he found her. She slowly crept towards a faint thumping noise that he only now noticed.

  Vesuvius unsheathed a long knife. Guy leveled his disruptor rifle and nodded a ready signal to his partner as she leaned towards the cold storage unit. Vesuvius yanked the door open.

  A shaking humanoid figure fell out and shuddered upon the floor. He held his hands out in surrender when he saw the rifle in his face.

  “Wait, wait!” His feather-like, crimped hair stood on end from the cold he’d endured. “I am with the Krenzin relief team—surely you saw our ship?” His vaguely feline features ruffled at the sight of their weaponry. “You are mercenaries?”

  “Investigators.”

  “Mercenaries,” the gutsy Krenzin corrected. “Destroyers of life: men of the sword… and women.” He eyed Vesuvius cautiously.

  “Wrong,” she said, “we’re advocates of life, just in a different way. Sometimes it takes a little force to maintain order, to keep the peace.” Her fiery side begged to come out. She spoke passionately, like her father, the military genius who raised her to never let her hackles down.

  “Tell us what happened here,” demanded Guy.

  “My name is Dachan; our team came down to investigate our neighbors’ fate.”

  “So you could see if the time was right to steal Osix from the humans,” Guy added condescendingly.

  Dachan rolled his eyes. “We found the horrible scene in the town park. A thing… a man, I think, was hooking up a machine to the bodies… bodies everywhere. He saw us, chased us; I split off. I thought that he might chase me and give the others a chance to escape, but he did not. They didn’t make it. I found their remains… later.”

  “Why were you in the freezer?” Vesuvius interrogated.

  “I’ve been hiding in this building for the last few days. Whenever I venture out, the sensors track my location. He is looking for me. He wants to finish the job. Whenever the sensors lock down my position, he comes out and tries to find me. The freezer throws off the sensor readings.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who killed my team—he did it with his own bare hands. He’s unmistakable. The one who did all of this. He has a machine attached to his chest and wires hanging off him.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Vesuvius, grabbing her comm. “If he could t
rack you anywhere in the base, then he must be located in the operations center at Gamma Station!”

  ***

  “Did you hear that?” Nathan turned to Dekker and Nibbs at the computer console.

  “No, what?”

  “I heard it too,” said Jamba, the third man on Nathan’s team. “It sounded like whispering.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Nibbs, who still focused on the coding. “This is definitely Mechnar technology; Dekker’s hunch was right. The old programming here escaped the MEA’s software and hardware purge after the Mechnar Contra when they destroyed all old systems that were capable of producing the kind of coding necessary. This old machinery, the data discs, combined with this retrofitted stuff down here, it must be replicating the code. But, where is it being fed to?”

  Dekker held up a hand, silencing Nibbs’ ramblings. He looked down to the bodies. They each began to whisper, almost chanting.

  Just then, Vesuvius’ warning blared across the radio. “Everyone on your toes! We found a Krenzin survivor. He says something killed his teammates with its bare hands, and it knows where we all are.”

  “It’s a Mechnar,” cut in Dekker. “Use EMP weapons when you see it. We’re gonna blow this ancient control unit up. Guy, get down here with your explosives.” He had to shout above the crescendoing chant.

  “They’re already down there,” Guy commed. “They’re in the brown leather satchel. It’s next to that computer tower unit… thingy.”

  Before Dekker could grab the bag, bodies simultaneously sat up all over the park. The commands on the computer screen had stopped compiling. The cursor stopped at the bottom of the screen and blinked.

  Bodies suddenly leapt in front of the computer unit and with vacant eyes stared down the investigators who now stood back to back, surrounded. The fighters switched disruptors to EMP mode: a setting rarely employed since the MEA’s dismantling of all Mechnar technology so long ago.

  Dekker screamed commands into the mouthpiece. He issued a full retreat to the Rickshaw Crusader.

  The well-trained fighters poured bolts of azure energy into the bodies; they’d shot off enough rounds of pure energy that it should have knocked back half the Mechnar force. But, the undaunted cyborg forces began shambling towards them anyway. The EMP blasts had no effect.