All Fall Down Read online




  planetfall

  by

  astrotomato

  legal stuff

  planetfall – book 1 – all fall down

  Copyright © Graeme Maughan 2012

  The right of Graeme Maughan (writing as astrotomato) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Contact the author:

  [email protected]

  Twitter: @astrotomato

  Cover art (c) Robert Ellis 2012. Contact on Twitter for commissions @MoviesSimple

  planetfall

  book 1:

  all fall down

  Chapter 1 – The Oncoming Storm

  Out on the edge of the Fall solar system, the wormhole glowed green. Whatever had come through was in silhouette, a black iris. The object accelerated to the inner system. It was about three metres long and two tall and two wide, with no obvious engine. Quickly it reached the dust cloud which sheathed the system, passing through it without leaving a wake. The object, black against the black of space, exited the dust clouds, and passed the system's gas giant. It sped to the inner system, faster than any ship, and orbited a planetoid near the yellow sun for a minute, before moving outwards again, to the desert planet Fall, where it passed the planet's orbital sensors.

  It moved into the planet's atmosphere. The whole journey had taken it ten minutes.

  Huriko stood on the surface of Fall by her science experiments. She was bewildered, as if she'd woken too soon from a sleep. She checked the time on her wrist comms device, “Oh no.” She looked up to the horizon, which had already purpled with the oncoming storm.

  Quickly, she put away the tools littered around her into the small bag she'd brought with her. The scientific experiments would have to wait. Huriko tapped her wrist device with gloved fingers, “Colony, I'm ready for pick up. Colony? Kiran, are you there?”

  A dust devil danced across the desert floor. The horizon bruised further.

  She kept a hand on her wrist to feel for its vibration; a reply.

  Another dust devil danced, quicker, more turbulent.

  “Where are you? Colony? Kiran?” She pulled scarves tighter around her face mask and checked her suit. Should she start walking? Her environment suit was only rated for a single sun.

  The horizon was darker, almost black. Soon it would lighten as the second sun rose.

  Her comms device remained silent. She tapped it frantically, screaming through her protective face covering, “Kiran? Kiran, where are you? I need urgent pick up!”

  The first biting specks of dust and sand whipped past, pattering against her goggles.

  Panicking, Huriko broke into a jog, racing into the rising wind and against the light, trying to reach the Colony entrance before she was baked by the double sun or battered by the storm.

  Fall was the only habitable planet in the system from which it took its name. Its orbit was a strange loop around the twin suns.

  The planet's permanent sandstorm raged across Fall’s desert surface. The blue dwarf sun was high in the sky. The slowly rising yellow sun drove the storm around the planet’s curve. With the combined solar radiation, the surface started to become a deadly, irradiated place. The planet surface was featureless, except for one area. Towards the equator were the only signs of habitation. The floral surface features of an underground Colony were near Fall's only natural feature, a storm eroded rock island, an inselberg.

  Still two kilometres from the Colony, and approaching the inselberg, Huriko battled against the roaring wind, heading towards the horizon where the second sun would show. The leading edge of the storm was upon her. Her shoulders were hunched; a headscarf was wrapped tightly around her face, leaving the thinnest gap through which the glint of goggles was just visible. Briefly, she leaned into a particularly strong gust of wind, unable to move forward. The wind dropped slightly, and she stumbled back into a laboured stride. Each step forwards was an effort, and she dragged footfalls of sand with each step.

  She tapped her wrist pad constantly, having long since given up trying to shout above the wind. Her goggles misted as tears of frustration and dread evaporated. Where was Kiran? If she was still stuck out here when the yellow sun broke the horizon she would be dead within minutes. And she estimated she only had twenty minutes until the full storm front hit her. She battled to avoid death.

  Sand filled the air, the desert floor shifted. The fury of the sandstorm was mindful for a moment, relaxed to a strong wind. Visibility improved, the air turning from a yellow-black blur to a smudge of different colours.

  The horizon started to change colour, too. Huriko risked a look above ground level: second sunrise was fast approaching. She must hurry. In the distance, hidden in the storm was the Colony entrance, her destination. The immediate sound of the storm diminished to a dull roar, filtered through her suit's head piece and mask. Casting a quick look behind, Huriko saw her footsteps had been obliterated. There was no trace of her struggle. Beyond, behind her, the darker horizon was a sickly black, the dust clouds refracting the blue dwarf’s cool glow.

  Behind her face scarves, radiation shield and breathing filters, she could smell the dry tang of the desert, the aroma of a landscape thirsty for water, for nutrition.

  She checked the external air temperature: 52ºC already. Her environment suit was working hard to keep her cool.

  Reaching the outcrops of the inselberg, Huriko rested briefly in the weak shadows on the lee side. There wasn’t much time to spare. When the second sun rose, the radiation levels would be more deadly than the storm and temperature combined. Adjusting her headscarf, she set out once again for the Colony entrance, staying in the shadows of the rocky outcrops wherever she could.

  She grit her teeth and struggled to save her life, tapping on her wrist as she went.

  “Pilot.”

  Kiran Ha'Doek looked up from the aircar, where he was uncoupling power cables. “Yes, Ma'am?” He straightened out his jump suit for the Operations Director, Sophie Argus.

  “I'm re-assigning you to Doctor Currie. Please help him move some equipment.”

  “But there's a scientist still up top.”

  Sophie held Kiran's gaze, “I'll go, Pilot. There are some issues at an air exchange site I need to see to.”

  “Yes, Ma'am.” He moved to go and looked back, “Be quick. Storm's coming fast. The scientist's name is Huriko. Huriko Maki.”

  “Thank you, Pilot. That will be all.”

  Kiran nodded and left the hangar.

  Sophie watched him go and waited. The hangar was otherwise empty. In the aircar, the comms device burst into static life, “Colony, I'm ready for pick up. Colony? Kiran, are you there?” Sophie leaned in and shut it off.

  There would be no need to update the aircar's flight log. Sophie would never make the journey. But then, Kiran wouldn't remember that Huriko needed collecting.

  Satisfied, Sophie left the hangar and went to find the Colony's Administrator. On her way, because the Fall Colony was a classified installation, she sent a standard signal to Military Intelligence informing them of the loss of one of their scientists due to exposure.

  But other than that, it was easier than she imagined to forget about Huriko.

  The storm strengthened and whipped the air into submission. Huriko struggled through, following the inselberg's flank. The
rock surface was smooth on this side, though riddled with deep fissures, cracks and some gaps like valleys. She trailed her right hand along the rock to keep balance as the sand shifted underfoot and the gusting air tried to force her back.

  Halfway round the inselberg, Huriko approached a small valley. Dust and sand howled through the air. Visibility dropped to less than a metre. She laboured on for a few more metres, wind howling around her, unable to see. And stopped. It was an abrupt stop, leaving her prone to the gale. Huriko turned to the valley and looked into shadows, her posture and attention caught between curiosity and flight.

  Protected from the storm, the valley entrance at an angle such that the wind howled past and left all calm within, and wreathed in the shadows, hovering a metre above the ground, was a black mass, an entity, three metres long and two tall, with a surface pitted like acne, organic. It showed no sign that it had been discovered. It hung in the air, brooding, sandwiched between hundreds of metres of rock on either side. It could almost be sheltering, though in Huriko's racing thoughts she would not have been able to say from what: the deadly scouring of the sand, or the intensity of the approaching sun? Long seconds passed. Huriko had to use all of her strength to stay standing still, at the edge of this valley, on the leading edge of the oncoming storm.

  The windward horizon brightened a little more. The shadows in which the mass brooded deepened.

  In the inselberg's valley, the darkness increased as the storm worsened, and the entity became more and more a presence in shadows.

  Huriko took a step forward, one foot in the valley, the other in the storm. She felt a pull in her stomach. All thought of the storm and the deadly sunrise was whipped away. Slowly, she loosened part of her headscarf, exposing more of her face covering. When they were clear of material, she lifted up the goggles, to look on the thing with her own eyes. The planet was supposed to be sterile. Nothing lived here, except the colonists. There was no water until seventy kilometres into the crust. There was no vegetation, algae, microbes, fungi, eukaryotes. Nothing. And humanity had never discovered alien life. So what was it?

  Tentatively, she stepped into the valley and reached out a hand, palm outwards. She pulled her trailing foot in from the storm. The entity didn’t move. Huriko glanced out of the valley towards the horizon line. Maybe there was a little time to spare. She pulled the glove off her outstretched hand, took a deep breath, and put it against the entity, the thing. She touched it and it felt familiar. It didn't move. There was no smell, no movement. It was still. She closed her eyes and in her mind she heard it sing to her; sing to what was inside in her belly.

  And when she opened her eyes, vermilion lines appeared on the black pitted surface, surrounding her hand, poisoning the shadows. She froze, locked into a rigid angle of limbs. The song in her head matched the scream of the storm at her back. Her eyes filled with sickly red.

  Within seconds there was a soft fall of grey ash onto the valley floor.

  The vermilion lines cooled to black. The entity rose silently into the air, out of the valley, stretched its shape horizontally, and raced like the wind into the storm front, towards the dark violet of the opposite horizon.

  There was a flash of green as the yellow sun broke the Colony-side horizon line.

  And Huriko Maki was no more.

  Chapter 2 – Innocent Victims

  Doctor Masjid Currie waited by the grav-chair and holographic surgical space. He had much on his mind and wiping this young man's memory and implanting a false one, a memory of moving medical equipment, was a distraction he didn't need.

  Masjid needed to talk to the Administrator, Daoud, but he hadn't responded to his urgent communiques. Masjid wondered if he was falling out of favour with Daoud. Or maybe just out of usefulness, as his major research approached its final phase. But below the Colony, the situation had changed. The specimens, the twenty three, would keep him useful a while longer. It was a good idea to remain useful around Daoud.

  While he waited, he reviewed the records he stored outside of the Colony's Artificial Intelligence, in the secret computer network they had built into the Colony decades previously.

  His records showed this. The procedure on Huriko had worked, but she had become unstable. Her dreams gave her away. Her diary was littered with evidence. Her behaviour had become erratic. Daoud had ordered the experiment terminated before they were exposed.

  The twenty three specimens, the “pods” they called them, would not now be joined by a twenty fourth specimen grown outside the lab, grown in Huriko's womb.

  The pods. The mysterious, silent, inactive pods they had created over twenty years ago. Daoud wanted one more, a comparator. A final attempt at the experiment, to make it work. And he'd given over the last of the alien DNA sample he'd brought from – where? Daoud had never said, refused to divulge the information. It was highly adaptable genetic material. The original experiment had worked first time and created twenty three viable embryos. In the nutrient tanks they had turned from blastocysts to black spheres and absorbed all the nutrients Masjid could supply for a week and then. And then... nothing. They reached a size, about half a metre, and stopped absorbing nutrients. Their surfaces hardened and they'd entered some kind of stasis, something connected with the unusual DNA. It certainly had no relation to the human DNA they'd mixed it with. The twenty three had been put in individual cells, separated for safety, where these long decades they'd remained inactive, save for an occasional movement, a roll in a small circle.

  But now it seemed their long hibernation – gestation, maybe? - might be at an end.

  Why didn't Daoud respond to his communiques?

  The door chimed. Masjid straightened his lab coat. “Enter.”

  The door opened. Kiran Ha'doek walked in, dressed in a pilot's suit, a deep brown leather all-in-one, loosely buckled down the front. He was young, this boy. A triangular face, skin still soft, barely midway through his twenties. Hair still thick and dark. “Doctor, I was told to report to you?”

  “Come in. You're a pilot?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, no flying here. I just have some equipment to move. Can I show you where?” Masjid waved his hands at some crates. “I'm getting a little old for this kind of thing.”

  Kiran nodded and moved past him. When he was out of Kiran's eye line, Masjid put a dermal patch on a finger and pressed it briefly to the back of Kiran's neck. The pilot gasped and fell to the floor, unconscious.

  “I'm so sorry, young man.”

  Masjid raised the pilot's body onto the operating couch with a grav-field. He pulled down the holo surgical tool over Kiran's head. While it mapped Kiran's neuronal structure, Masjid looked at a nearby holo display. It showed the planet surface obscured by the oncoming storm. Somewhere in that was Huriko. She would be desperately signalling for help. Poor woman, he thought. She didn't deserve this. If only her gene type hadn't been so compatible.

  As he mapped Kiran's memory proteins, Masjid's mind wandered. In all his years, with all of the politicking he'd involved himself in to climb to the top of his profession, all of the professional backstabbing undertaken, he had never once created innocent victims. And now he had helped create two. He looked at the young man in front of him and thought that at least Kiran was only being lied to about his morning's activities.

  Masjid glanced again at the holo of stormy static. “I'm so sorry, Huriko,” he said, and switched off the holo of the storm.

  Masjid wasn't used to this kind of guilt. And now it was only Daoud's vision of the future which kept Masjid from going to the Central Cadre about the specimens, hidden in the dark, a secret known only to four people. He shook his head and started Kiran's memory wipe and modification.

  A light appeared on Administrator Daoud's wrist pad.

  The signal had bypassed the Colony's official comms traffic monitoring; Daoud's wrist pad had entangled electron pairs specifically linked to the comms relay. He had established this hidden part of the comms system while the plane
t was still being scouted and before its AI had grown and achieved sentience. Hiding other things from the AI after its awakening – as it was termed – had been more difficult, and involved what appeared to be a tragic accident. Daoud turned from the observation platform at the Colony's uppermost floor.

  Finally, he thought, the time had come.

  Sophie arrived at Daoud's office and waited for the door to open.

  When she entered, he was sitting behind his desk. Ever since she'd met him he'd only ever dressed in black. He was like a slice of night. Only his coffee-skin lightened his aspect: the black hair, black loose top, black trousers, black shoes. He nodded to her, and pressed his right thumb onto his wrist pad and waited a few seconds. “There, we're unmonitored.”

  “What is it, Sir?”

  “The herald has arrived.”

  Sophie raised an eyebrow.

  “I received the signal just before I asked you here.”

  “Our information was correct, then.”

  Daoud nodded. “What of the other thing, the tidying up?”

  “On the surface now.” Sophie's tone was neutral. “The storm is particularly intense, she won't survive.” There was a silence, which Sophie broke first, “Will that be all?”

  Daoud stood and walked to a holo-table. He waved his hands through its activation cubes and spoke some words in holoparse, the language used to program holographic computer interfaces and scenarios. “There's something I want to show you.”

  Sophie frowned and at a gesture from Daoud, walked over to the table, standing opposite him.

  “You don't remember our first meeting,” Daoud looked into Sophie's eyes.

  She shook her head, “You know I'm grateful for what you did. Pulling me from the wreckage. I could never have transmitted the signal to Qin Space for the refugees and their proto-AI if you hadn't.”