Escape From Asylonia, page 6
part #1 of The New War Series
The mandolin faded to a delicate, yet somehow much more disturbing whistle, a scream, flowing from an intricately carved shoot of bamboo. It was played by a figure much different than the gangly, brown Temüjins Noah normally met on the battlefield.
The flute-player's flesh was a bulbous, bright green colour. It hung loose over a haunched frame and pyramid-shaped skull, from which bright yellow eyes seemed desperate to escape. Over every knot and crevice of damp flesh, the creature wore a wine coloured silk robe, covering him right down to the two bare feet, kept above the shallow, sparkling water by a dull-green pad. A second player, identical in appearance to the first, added to the symphony. In between them, a third Temüjin emerged from the pool.
This amphibian was as different again in appearance. Whelmed in the undeniable aura of authority, his head stood on his shoulders in the same smooth pyramid shape as the others, yet his skin was as jet black as the silk robe he wore. Two wide yellow streaks rising from his shoulders and covering the area around his deep white eyes like warrior paint. The beast pursed his lips and unfurled his arms out in front of him.
'Let it be,' he said. His bold and joyless voice made Noah suspect that the creature had never known what it was like to be either elated or afraid.
Behind him, clear water spilled gracefully from the mouths of golden statues, each fashioned in the image of some reptilian monster whose appearance owed more to a lizard than the frog-like features of the Temüjin race. From there, the flow forked into the two streams where the black-and-yellow warrior and his two musicians floated, before meeting again in a benign whirlpool which suddenly presented two more guards. Another Temüjin knelt between them, his head bowed, his hands and feet bound together by a whip.
The leader spoke again.
'You failed,' he began, his voice cold and stern. 'Osana Osari Kehmer of the Kehmer tribe of the Temüjin Empire, you failed in your task to bring back fuel from the star they call Oceania. Your failure has put the lives of your fellow Temüjin in grave jeopardy, and brought shame to your tribe.'
The leader lowered his eyes and bowed his head.
'Your plea?' He whispered.
Osana raised his head. A crowd - Noah presumed them to be the members of the endangered tribe - stepped closer, and he could swear he felt the odd blend of shame and apprehension they brought with them seeping through his own skin. Osana returned his gaze to the ground. The leader looked forward again and folded his arms.
'And so it is.'
From the sides of the grand hall, two more creatures stepped forward, their flesh as green and their eyes as yellow as the musicians, their robes a pale blue colour.
Noah looked left, looked right, made certain he was safe behind the column, then fixed his gaze on the ceremony before him. The vividness of his subconscious gave the whole scene a hellish red glow.
The Temüjin warrior on the left bore a solid Slayer Rifle in his grip. His comrade on the right carried a large pewter sword, its slender black handle trimmed with green jewels. A hush fell over the low chatter of the crowd. The leader spoke.
'Osana Osari Kehmer, today you restore your honor, and with this act, make amends to the Khemer Tribe of the Temüjin Empire, who surround you to witness, and share in, your salvation. Today, we bid you farewell, noble warrior.'
Noah swallowed to stifle the rumbling in his stomach, watching as Osana turned the sword in on himself, and plunged it deep into his own abdomen. Glutinous brown blood and flowing entrails spurted from his body as he raked the sword left across his stomach, carving at the flesh with neat precision. He pulled it right, then up, then down again, until the gaping scar resembled a cross. His face wore no emotion, no fear. His eyes fell shut.
The leader gave a dignified nod. The rifleman took this as his cue, and pointed his weapon at the back of the Osana’s head. His finger embraced the trigger, and Noah Fallon felt the barrel of a gun breathing down his own neck.
There was a shrill clapping noise, a blast of fire and the stench of gunpowder. Noah's head snapped forward as he bolted upright on the sofa.
*
Drenched in an icy sweat, as cold and wet as the beasts of his nightmares, Noah sucked air into his lungs and felt his nerves scream against his skin. A blade of sunlight stabbed through a crease in the door of the pedestrian carrier, bringing the severity of reality back to him. In a passing lucid moment, he recalled that the scene had not ended like that at all. He had felt no bullet tearing through his throat that night. Instead, he had witnessed the closing of the ritual, the blood and entrails and flesh and bone, all washed back to the magnificent waterfall by the sullied streams. After that, he had swept quietly through more mahogany laden corridors, until at last he reached the heart of the Temüjin battle station. There, he had successfully planted the bomb before making his escape in a stolen Temüjin cruiser, carrying with him the dead body of Lieutenant Maponos.
Yet still the bloodshed of the nightmare lingered within the breaking dawn of reality. He looked over his arm at the name Lieutenant Marcus Manopos, the third in a list of many, each engraved permanently in his skin as a tribute, as a reminder, as a reason to never again take arms. Coughing furiously, Noah Fallon reached for a bottle of gin.
.
VIII.
Grains of dirt trickled into the shallow grave. A shovel scraped against the damp ground and caught the the crumbling earth in its mouth. David Attreus flung the shovel over his shoulder, splashing more dirt onto the growing mountain behind him.
The rain had eased off. Only a freezing wind kept him company, skipping and twirling about as he worked wearily at the grave, and pulling the rich, smoky smell of a recently subdued fire through the sleeping marshes,. Daylight was not far from the horizon. The suns of United Earth swarmed around a sky bleeding with watery reds and shallow puddles of indigo. Passing by on either side of the moon, they dusted the tips of broad green hills and forests with a soft, golden hue. Clouds rose and arranged themselves to mimic dragons. The dragons chased angels, swallowed them, turned into huge, prehistoric birds, and floated away from fresh dragons, dragons who swept up specks of dust and dirt in their whistling wind and scattered them about. Some of the dust settled between the strands of David’s hair, some fell about his shoulders and slid down his back. The grass was springy and wet underfoot. David had a horrible vision of it giving way beneath him, a black void opening up and dragging him down, through the centre of the Earth, to something that almost looked like Hell Itself, where dragons were no longer light, benign clouds, but flesh-eating, fire-breathing monsters. In his vision, he saw the monster-dragons flapping their tremendous, blue and green scaled wings over large, luminous pyres, all crepitating wickedly among banks of decomposing skulls with impossible grins. Perhaps his mother would be there. Perhaps falling through the Earth would not be such a bad thing if it led him to her, if he could save her from Hell’s embrace.
David wiped his brow with his sleeve and exhaled through pursed lips, as if blowing the troubled scene from his mind. He was tired, that was all. A man leaves himself vulnerable to all sorts of weirdness if he doesn’t get enough sleep, he thought. The bitter chill froze his sweat, and his plump cheeks glowed with the deep red of exhaustion. A fine, artificial light broke through the basement window, spraying two defeated UEF ships with sat in the yard.
David had discarded the body of the Temüjin in his basement, laying its sinewy limbs, head and torso on a wide, plywood table like loose pieces of a 3D jigsaw. He would deal with that later. First, he had more pressing matters to attend to, like building a grave for Patrol Sergeant Hogan Ferris.
More than once, David had stopped and second-guessed himself. Of course, preserving the Lieutenant's body and arranging for the Home Guard to collect it would be the best course of action in most circumstances, but not this one. By handing the body over to the UEF, Hogan could be sent to the heavens in a manner more befitting one who had given his life for the planet they called home. He could be buried before his family and loved ones in a resplendent coffin, adorned in the colours of his motherland, and of the United Earth Force. There would be a grand procession through streets aligned with solemn, proud faces. This would culminate in a ten-gun salute, and the announcement that posthumous honours would be lavished on the fallen war hero.
Instead, Hogan’s final journey saw him bungled into a dirty hole in the ground by an out-of-shape UEF engineer. As David took up his shovel and began the tiring slog of burying the man, he once more rationalised with himself that he was doing the right thing. Calling the Home Guard would mean preserving the body until they were able to collect it, yet the mangled remains of the Patrol Sergeant were in such a deformed state, that preserving them would mean folding the Sergeant’s body over itself, like a duvet being put into storage for the spring, and shoving the whole thing into the chest freezer in the basement. David decided against this. The inert heart inside the body had once beaten proudly to the drum of the United Earth. The arms and legs and eyes and ears had once been used to protect the planet, to fight for The Greater Good. Those who served deserved better than to be stuffed into domestic freezers like slabs of meat. A burial, no matter how basic, felt far more appropriate.
Besides, there were the torn limbs of the Temüjin scum to think about. He could bury them, but a burial the likes of which David knew from Earth displayed a mark of respect which he refused to grant any Temüjin slimeball. He could incinerate them, but with morning approaching, those living in the area would be roused from their sleep by the stench of cremation. Rather, David reasoned that he should preserve the limbs of the Temüjin, and have the Home Guard collect those instead. Hopefully, some genius in the UEF could extract some vital piece of information from the DNA, and use it to cement victory for United Earth, putting an end to The New War once and for all.
The United Earth government were fond of urging its people to play their part, be involved, do what they could for The Greater Good. As the last drop of soil spilled onto Hogan Ferris' grave, David bowed his head and wondered if there had ever been a point in his own lifetime when it had not been necessary to Play Your Part.
If there had been, he could not remember it. Even in the brief period of peace following General Fallon's triumph in the last moments of The Final War, there had been a concentrated effort to restore the destruction inflicted on the planet. The citizens of United Earth had been besieged with reminders to Play Your Part as much then as they were now.
As he planted a small UEF flag in Sergeant Ferris' grave, David was reminded of his father’s stories, and of the stories immortalised in the history books he so passionately devoured, all telling of a time when Play Your Part had not been one of the universal mottos of the planet. Indeed, when the people of Earth had no motto, nor very little else, to bond them.
*
As recently as the turn of the millennium, the Earth had been a very different place. David's father had regaled him with tales of an almost unrecognisable world. It was a world divided by power, by wealth, by conflicting laws and belief systems. Countries - a number of which no longer existed in the form described by history - were all ruled by their own individual governments, and fought primitive, bloodthirsty wars against one another in the pursuit of yet more power and more wealth. They fought on land, they fought in the seas, and they fought in the skies. They fought wherever they could fight, for whatever reason they could find. They fought because one country did not take too kindly to another placing its faith in a particular god, or because they disagreed with the laws of other lands, even, as was usually the case, when those laws bore no effect on the offended country.
Sometimes, countries would form pacts, sign treaties, and agree to work together in the ostensible pursuit of peace, peace which could apparently only come from overthrowing a common enemy, commandeering their natural and technological resources, and killing as many people as possible. Yet even those countries were secretly prepared to turn on each other if it would help them seize all the wealth, power and religious dominance needed to become the bearers of peace on Earth and unity among all men.
Most nations had their own currencies, their own armies and agendas. The whole planet had existed in a constant state of turmoil, of debt and disease and bloodshed, all which were somehow deemed vital to the pursuit of peace.
And then it had happened, just as some had predicted and others had discarded as lunacy for many a century.
Since the dawn of the Dark Ages, men, mostly regarded as fools by their peers, had warned of something huge, something catastrophic, something that would forever alter the course of human civilisation. A number of those apparently foolish men had predicted that this event would transpire on the twenty first day of the twelfth month of the year two thousand and twelve.
To the surprise of many who had once naively assumed themselves to be sane, rational creatures with a sound understanding of logic, the prophecies had indeed revealed to be true.
It had not been the end of the world as some had foreseen. Rather, in many ways, the very beginning of it.
On December 21st 2012, a gaping chasm in something known as the Ozone Layer - itself regarded by hardened skeptics as nothing more than pure fallacy - had made way for a menacing solar storm to engulf the earth. The storm had captured the planet in its wrath like a small stone trapped in the eye of a tornado, and had done its absolute best to destroy the blue-green rock known as Earth.
Some claimed it to be the second coming of Jesus Christ, others the arrival of Satan Himself. Those who still believed themselves to be rational blamed it on the Moon’s relationship with the oceans turning sour. Those who had been right all along said nothing, they were too aware of the consequences to waste any time basking in smug self-righteousness. Instead, they hid, and they watched, and they prepared for a life on whatever would be left of the planet, should it survive the storm. That was, if they themselves could survive.
Many did not survive. Victims were killed without mercy, buildings were trampled and great monuments of the world - Mount Rushmore, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids of Egypt - were all destroyed. Oceans swallowed small countries whole. Larger ones were mashed together, and moulded into new shapes by the raging onslaught of the elements.
The great chasm in the sky widened, grew deeper and hungrier. Gods were praised, mortals slayed and nature ravaged. Night time lasted for weeks, and day time announced its presence with the kind of heat that made lakes and rivers boil.
When the last moments of the storm subsided, the chasm dropped behind a second sun, granting Earth a direct solar pathway to a whole other region of space which would have previously taken a lifetime to reach. The planets of this new solar system enjoyed atmospheres to rival that of Earth. Each one of them teemed with a multitude of lifeforms,all capable of traversing the vast wilderness of space between planets with the same kind of ease that aeroplanes had crossed continents on Earth. This was the solar system where the Temüjin Empire had been waging war, plundering planets in search of water and vegetation. In the span of six Earth days, the Temüjin race had located this new intruder into their solar system, and drawn up plans to invade.
IX.
Life flourished all throughout the endless galaxy. On every surface, colonies evolved. All around them turned a seemingly infinite, certainly indefinite number of planets, none of which the Temüjin bore any real claim to as their own.
They had once made their home on the dark, cool, moist planet of Temüji, a planet which gifted them with an ecosystem conducive to their prosperity. Existing peacefully with the rest of the galaxy for centuries, the Temüjin had plundered their natural resources without restraint, marching forward in the relentless pursuit of progress and, in the process, developing technology far beyond even the most advanced of their neighbouring planets. Much as on Earth, some had warned that this lack of regard for the environment would spell trouble somewhere down the line. Others, namely those doing the damage, had scoffed at such warnings and dismissed them as fairy tales.
As a result, the population of Temüji were unprepared when a heat wave washed over the planet, leaving in its wake a dry, desert land which the amphibian-like race found totally inhospitable.
In the midst of the madness, the Temüjin Empire had ordered at once both a mass evacuation of Temüji, and a full scale invasion of any planet on which they might settle.
The strongest, most skilful of the males took up careers as Temüjin warrior soldiers. It was they who moved between the stars and fought to secure themselves a new permanent home. Below them in the pecking order were the Foot Soldiers, the guards, the muscle, the shields of wet flesh thrust into the line of fire to protect the Warriors when needed. Those not on the frontline built and patrolled new Temüjin Battle Stations, vast, floating islands constructed from what little wood and greenery had been salvaged from Temüji.
Using the network of battle stations as temporary homes, the new Temüjin Empire had begun waging wars on the planets of their own solar system, and of any other that they could reach in their lifetime. They plundered vast swaths of foliage and forestry and whatever water they could syphon, all the while scouring each planet in the hope that it would provide a suitable environment for permanent settlement.
And then came this new planet, lush with forests and trees and plants, bathed in vast oceans which rushed inland, and recoiled again into yet deeper seas. It was perfect. With a vow that Earth would become their new home, the Temüjin rulers had set out to conquer. All the while, they kept enough soldiers behind to pilfer a constant supply of water and greenery from other planets.
As a consequence, this alien race had inadvertently succeeded where the humans’ every war, political structure and religion had failed. The infighting and global civil wars had all ceased within weeks of that initial attack. Earth became United Earth.
