Awakening on Sorenson’s Planet
Lawrence Barker

The controls of the Red Ball Express IV, named for a supply unit in some old-time terrestrial conflict, jerked beneath Pravat O’Grady’s hands. Burning insulation’s scent filled the cockpit. Pravat bit his lip, unsure he could keep the craft aloft. The inexplicable blue gunk that had arced up through the clouds to attach itself to the Red Ball had spread fast. The stabilizers had failed, and other blue goo-swamped systems threatened to follow. Despite Pravat’s efforts, the Red Ball had sunk beneath Sorenson’s Planet’s highest cloud layer. If the transport dipped below the second, Pravat doubted Emergency Transit’s most talented pilot — which he wasn’t — could avoid plowing into the mud below.

“Mayday, mayday!” Julian M’botah, seated beside Pravat, shouted into the microphone. His Euro-African face contorted as though his beloved Ouagadougou Warthogs were behind by one point in a soccer game’s last minute. Maybe the exo-archeology team, to whom the Red Ball was to deliver medications, would hear. No one else would. The signal would fade far short of the Emergency Transit carrier at the jump point, three-point-something light-days distant. Julian understood his effort’s futility: the radio-opaque clouds might as well be a mountain range. But Julian had to do something.

Pravat understood persevering despite the odds. So did the exo-archeology team. They hadn’t given up after two of their three tilt-rotors inexplicably crashed. Now Pravat had a good idea what had happened, even if he didn’t know the "why" behind the goo attack. Now a team member had a bad case of Ebola C. Ebola C was lethal if untreated, but could be easily tamed by antivirals. A mudslide had swallowed the archeologists’ medical supplies, and their radio signal had taken days to reach the jump point.

Relief flights were the reason Pravat had joined Emergency Transit instead of going on with school, like his sister Tasanee had. He would have volunteered for this mission even if Tasanee hadn’t been the exo-archeologist whose life depended on the medication.

The Red Ball lurched. For a moment, the monitors showed the lowest cloud layer’s old-ivory fog. The transport dipped. Pravat glimpsed a mud volcano, about fifty kilometers away. Twenty beyond that lay the mountains where the archeologists excavated their ruins. The craft spun. A spot of orange fungus, the only brightness on the horsetail-covered sea of mud below, swung into view. Of course, the brownish pseudo-plants weren’t really giant horsetails, and the unexplored orange spot probably wasn’t fungus. Pravat wondered if everybody had such random thoughts during a crisis. Then the spreading gunk took the sensors. Lights failed. Controls froze. “Going down,” Pravat shouted. The world spun.

Then came a metal-stress creak. Then nothing.

Pravat, eyes closed, regained consciousness. He ached all over. The Sorenson’s Planet reek, like Okefenokee might smell if someone built a paper mill there, assaulted his nostrils. Only this place was colder than warm Okefenokee … 17 C tops, a terrestrial cool autumn day. At least the atmosphere resembled Earth’s; small differences in composition meant big trouble breathing.

Since he wasn’t dead, Pravat knew that the Red Ball hadn’t exploded. He opened his eyes. He lay in a hummock, a relatively dry spot in the sea of mud. The horsetail forest dropped off a hundred meters before and resumed fifty behind.

Where was the Red Ball? Pravat sat up. The craft lay to his left, nose buried in mud. The back balanced on something that resembled a tree-sized lobster mushroom. Pravat blinked. Where was Julian? Before he had a chance to call his co-pilot’s name, Julian wriggled from the Red Ball, carrying two backpacks. Julian leapt aside just as the transport overturned, burying the hatch.

“You’re alive!” Pravat exclaimed.

“Obviously.” Julian wore his usual half-smile. He was undamaged, save for the loss of the Warthogs patch sewn onto his uniform. Julian nodded toward Pravat. “After I dragged you out, I went back for what I could grab.” He hefted the backpacks. “The antivirals, a machete, and a few Earth days’ food.” Pravat nodded. Sorenson’s Planet’s ten-hour days were much shorter than Earth’s. “And this,” Julian said, flourishing a small black cylinder.

Pravat struggled to his feet. Julian’s half-smile was warranted. Julian had rescued Pravat’s personal log. Once Pravat punched in the code, the black cylinder would serve as a radio. Below the clouds, they could communicate with the exo-archeology team.

Julian handed Pravat the log. Pravat entered his code and the device clicked to life. Pravat switched to ‘radio’ mode and spoke into the cylinder. “Sorenson’s Base 1, this is Red Ball. Do you copy? Over.”

The cylinder crackled. “We copy. Over.” Hisses and pops half obscured the voice. Pravat didn’t care. The archeologists had received his message.

“Red Ball is grounded, but we both made it out safe.” Pravat glanced at Julian. “Can you send a tilt-rotor? Over.” Pravat continued. The archeologists could find Julian and him by triangulating on the signal.

“Negative on the pick-up, at least during the storm,” came the crackling voice. “Over.”

Pravat glanced up. Yellow streaks churned the clouds. Flying a tilt-rotor in that would be near suicide. “But what of Tasanee O’Grady?” Pravat forgot to end with "over."

The pause made Pravat’s heart pound. “She’s in a bad way, but holding,” came the eventual reply. “Over.”

“How much longer does she have? Over.”

“It will be tight.” The voice sounded uncomfortable. “Over.”

Pravat glanced from the clouds to the antivirals. He studied the mud volcano’s steam cloud. Pravat made a decision. “We’ll come to you. If the storm clears, send a tilt-rotor. Over.”

“You really want to hoof it?” Concern came through, despite the tinny speaker and the static. “The short days can disorient the unwary. Over.”

Pravat nodded. “We’ll be fine.” Pravat tried to look confident, although the person to whom he spoke could not see. “Over and out.” He clicked off the radio.

Julian wiped at the mud on his face. A worried look had replaced his half-smile. “You think we’ll gain enough time to make going overland worth it?”

Pravat shrugged and surveyed the horsetail forest. “No animals larger than rats, and none are aggressive. What’s to worry about?” He motioned toward the distant mountains. “Warthogs, advance,” he muttered, the Ouagadougou Warthogs’ team cry.

Julian did not respond to the playful reference. Instead, he frowned and stared into the forest. “You hear anything?”

“No,” Pravat replied. The truth was not always best.

Julian glanced at the sky. “A few more hours until sunset. Let’s get moving.” Julian handed Pravat the machete.

Pravat nodded. With care, he could avoid stepping in mud over a few centimeters deep. Pravat couldn’t just wait for the storm’s end — not while he had Tasanee’s medication. And he wasn’t about to let imagination — telling him that something large moved through the forest — stop him.

Pravat swallowed the dry survival rations. They might serve, but they weren’t the soda bread and masaman curry his Thai-Irish tastebuds preferred. He stared into the darkness. He wanted to keep going, but Sorenson’s Planet nights were almost as dark as they were frequent. Of course, some ambient light pierced the clouds, and human eyes adapt … but not well enough. For the dozenth time since sunset, he wished for a fire — fire would serve him better than a kilo of holmium, the precious metal that made interstellar flight possible. But with everything too wet to burn, the lighter in the machete’s handle was useless. No sense moping — he had to do something besides waiting for dawn, listening to the buzz of the planet’s ten-legged tree-frog analogs. Pravat pulled down a horsetail, placed it across his lap, and began to carve with the machete.

“What are you doing?” Julian asked.

“Spear,” Pravat answered. If Julian’s night vision equaled his, Julian saw only an outline. “These horsetails are the equivalent of fire-hardened wood,” Pravat explained.

“You anticipate a stone-age attack?” Julian playfully made the Warthogs’ fight gesture, hands imitating tusks.

“With an archeologist older sister, you learn how to make all kinds of things,” Pravat laughed. “You have any idea how long it takes to knap a flint axe? Or what you can do with an atlatl?”

“A what?” Julian idly picked up the radio and buried it in his backpack.

“An atlatl throws a spear harder than any man could unaided,” Pravat answered. “Just about every Earth culture developed them, but forgot as technology advanced.” He brandished the spear, testing its balance. “When I was younger, I practiced atlatl a lot. Once nailed a dragonfly at fifteen meters.”

“How about Sorenson’s Planet? Did the twigs have these atlatls?” Julian using the colloquial term for the planet’s extinct stick-insect like intelligent aliens.

Pravat sighed. Tasanee referred to intelligent aliens as "indigenous sentients, fill-in-planet-name." Tasanee said slang terms reminded her of how colonial-era Europeans used names to dehumanize native peoples. Pravat didn’t know much history, but he had picked up Tasanee’s habit. “According to my sister, this world’s pre-technological society is pretty much a mystery,” Pravat replied. “They were in the early atomic stage when they vanished.” He paused, listening to the swamp’s throaty buzz. “No war, plague or resource exhaustion. There one minute and gone the next.”

Julian tossed a small flat stone. The repeated whacks said that he had skipped it, although darkness hid the stone. “Nothing but mud. What an awful place.” Julian’s voice shivered. “Nine alien worlds that birthed intelligent life, and all rat-holes like this one,” Julian continued. “You think that’s telling us something?”

“Maybe someday,” Pravat replied, “we’ll find a civilization that hasn’t gone extinct, and we can ask them. Maybe one that’s made it into space.” He struck the final machete blow, finishing the spear. “Humans can’t be the only species to reach for the stars. Wouldn’t it be something to make contact?”

Before Julian could answer, a sickly sweet odor, like a choking honeysuckle miasma, rode on the wind. The native life forms fell silent. Something large crashed through the horsetails. “What was that?” Almost-fear nervousness tinged Julian’s voice.

Pravat’s fingers tightened, the machete’s rough grip sandpapering his flesh. “Maybe it’s not as near as it sounds,” Pravat whispered.

As if in response, two dark shapes — slightly longer than human, but very thin, and moving on multiple-jointed limbs — lunged from the night. One threw itself directly into Julian. The other charged Pravat.

Julian went down while Pravat managed to sidestep. From its rear, Julian’s attacker shot a long, thin appendage — like a terrestrial whip-scorpion, but horribly larger. The whip sliced toward Julian’s head. Julian gave a pained scream.

Pravat cursed himself. Why hadn’t he handed Julian a weapon? Too late for regrets. His attacker was all he could handle — maybe more. A spiked limb wrapped Pravat’s leg. Pravat went down. He stabbed the spear where he thought the creature’s head should be. The horsetail bit into something hard with gelatinous material underneath. Pravat’s strike barely slowed his attacker. Another limb wrapped his chest and squeezed. Pravat thought his ribs might crack beneath the pressure.

A dreadful stench, like an untended latrine at summer’s peak, filled the night. Pravat’s stomach flopped. The pressure on his chest grew. But, carrying Tasanee’s only hope, he couldn’t give up. With a furious cry, he swung the machete. The blade bit into the dark shape above. There was a moment of no response. Then the pressure on Pravat’s chest ended. The dark shape collapsed, its front and rear halves separated by Pravat’s blow.

A glow appeared on the horizon — sunrise. Pravat stared in horror at what lay before him. Deep cuts furrowed Julian’s face. Far worse, Julian’s intestines spilled from his opened gut, the source of the dreadful stench. The creature atop Julian resembled a ten-legged giant stick-insect; only this insect’s six rear limbs ended in snowshoe-like structures and it had five rows of diamond-like eyes. Its whip-like appendage lashed as if to say, "I killed him, I can kill you too."

Pravat glanced down at his fallen foe. Except for the absence of the whip and the thick blue goo that dripped from where he had bisected it, this creature appeared identical to Julian's attacker. He turned back and raised the machete, ready to charge. Before he could, the creature waved a forelimb before his face. Gripped in that limb was the radio. Pravat grabbed for it. The creature pulled away. It turned and ran on its six rear legs.

Pravat took one step, and then realized that chasing was hopeless ... he could not match the creature’s broad-footed speed if he had an airboat. Pravat checked Julian’s pulse. There was no mistaking it — Julian would rise no more. Heart pounding, he checked Julian’s backpack. The antivirals remained, but the radio was beyond recovery.

Pravat fingered the spear. Had he given it to Julian, it would have changed nothing. That didn’t keep him from flogging himself, wondering if he could have done something differently.

Pravat prodded the dead alien with the machete. The fallen creature certainly resembled "indigenous sentient, Sorenson’s Planet." Earth’s Neanderthal population had hidden in the Ural Mountains from the last ice age until the twenty-first century. Might the Sorenson’s Planet sentients have done similarly? But why? Tens of thousands of terrestrial years separated their culture’s fall and the first human probes. Pravat was no biology whiz, but this body struck him as very, very wrong; instead of organs and systems, a uniform blue gelatin filled the corpse.

Pravat’s hands became fists. He had more immediate concerns than mysterious aliens. While Julian was beyond help, Tasanee was a different story. He eyed the mud volcano’s distant plume. He had to reach the mountain. He would give Julian an old-fashioned burial — the planet was too wet for cremation. And then a desperate race with the clock would begin.

Pravat sat beside a fallen giant lobster mushroom. He had gone far in the planet’s short day. The tiny hummock he had found provided a place to pass the night. The swamp’s buzzing voice filled his ears. Were more of those things that had attacked waiting? Had they caused the Red Ball’s crash? The creatures had displayed no technological savvy besides taking the radio, and that might have been a random grab. Even if they understood it, the device would only flash lights and beep without Pravat’s code.

The swamp’s voice fell silent. Something rattled in the darkness. Heart pounding, Pravat leapt upright. He barely dared breath, straining to listen. Pravat gripped the machete. Something approached — there was no mistaking it.

“Pravat?” a familiar voice said.

Pravat frowned. What his ears told him made him wonder about his mind. But insane people never wondered about sanity, so the outline he saw must be real. “Julian?” Pravat could barely believe that he spoke the words. “Is that you?”

Julian, clothes in rags, emerged from the darkness. “Who else would I be?”

Pravat reached for Julian’s hand. Then something stayed him. No sign of Julian’s wounds remained. Instead of his usual half-smile or worried look, Julian wore no expression whatsoever. “Don’t take this wrong,” Pravat said, pulling back. “Why aren’t you dead?”

“It’s complicated.” Julian gestured in the general direction of the orange patch that Pravat had noticed during the Red Ball’s descent. “I can show much easier than I can tell. It’s not far.”

Pravat’s eyes narrowed. “You can cover terrain in the night?”

“I told you,” Julian answered. “It’s complicated.”

Pravat nervously bit his lip and sniffed. Was the honeysuckle scent real? “What is your older brother’s name?” Pravat demanded.

“You doubt I am really Julian? Well, I am. I don’t have an older brother. My younger half-brother is named Marvin.”

That was correct. Still, Pravat remained uncertain. Then he remembered the blue gel that had oozed from the creature he had sliced in two. He held the machete point toward Julian. “Prick your thumb,” he ordered. “I have to see blood. I want red liquid, not blue gel.” He pushed the machete forward.

Julian advanced. A sickening honeysuckle scent confirmed Pravat’s suspicions — this was not the real Julian. Before Pravat could act, the false Julian batted the machete away. With a wild yell, rendered surrealistic by utter lack of expression, the pseudo-Julian was on Pravat.

The fake Julian knocked Pravat down. Pravat pushed and shoved, kicked and choked. He even tried half-forgotten maneuvers from his brief teenage martial arts infatuation. His struggles were pointless. Pravat had always been more athletic than Julian. Not now. The false Julian’s strength exceeded Pravat’s by half again.

With a kick, Pravat propelled himself back. His flailing hand sank into mud. That was his answer. Pravat brought back a handful of mud and planted it in Julian’s face.

The blinded imitation Julian released its grip. Pravat grabbed the antivirals and the machete. He ran. Running was a risk — a misstep could mean drowning. That sounded better than whatever the Julian-thing intended.

After what felt like hours, but could only have been minutes, Pravat found a rock outcropping above the mud. His savaged circadian rhythms — the effect of exertion on a short-dayed planet — made him feel that someone inside his skull had punched his eye. Exhausted, cold and wet, he climbed the stone. Elevation would make him harder to surprise. Besides, with horsetails and machete, Pravat could prepare his own surprise for whatever emerged from the darkness.

Hours passed. Pravat worked away. He had barely finished when he noticed the half-dozen dark shapes circling his rock castle. One walked erect — the Julian-thing. The others crouched low — more of the creatures that had attacked him and Julian. Pravat reached toward his newly-completed weapon. Instantly, his attackers were on him, overpowering him.

Prickly bands wrapped about him as the creatures carried him into the swamp. He managed to turn his head enough to see that the Julian-thing carried the antivirals and the device that Pravat had constructed — that gave Pravat some glimmer of hope. Then the band around his neck tightened, and consciousness faded.

Pravat awoke to a honeysuckle scent so strong he thought he might vomit. He opened his eyes. Yellow storm bands no longer churned the sky; Sorenson Base I could send a tilt-rotor. Dim light revealed that an orange fuzz covered the horsetails and rocks. Before Pravat’s position loomed a strange geometric hill. Orange fuzz grew thicker there, covering everything but one dot of bright blue. Was this the area he had spotted as the Red Ball descended? Probably so.

More pressing matters worried him. Giant stick-insects surrounded him. Half bore whip-tails, the rest did not. Sexual dimorphism? Subspecies? Pravat did not know or, at that moment, care.

Two humans, with faces poker-tournament stony, joined the stick insects. One, a tall Scandinavian-looking man wearing the Sorenson’s Base insignia on his tattered shirt, probably was from a lost tilt-rotor. The other was the Julian-thing, antivirals and the artifact Pravat had fashioned in its grasp.

“We know you are awake,” said the Scandinavian. He spoke with an odd accent, as though he preferred his ancestral language to the almost universal Punjabi-English.

Pravat glanced at the Julian-thing. Did Julian’s half-smile break through the lifeless non-expression? If so, it lasted less than a second.

Pravat started to rise. “You do not have to get up,” the Scandinavian said. “In death, you will cooperate.”

Pravat frowned. “What?”

The Scandinavian laughed. At least that was how Pravat interpreted the sound, which resembled a howler monkey’s pained cry. Julian, face now stony again, kicked over an orange mound. Within lay a black, decomposing human corpse. Pravat could just make out the Sorenson’s Base insignia on its uniform.

A mound of blue gelatin — with a black, multi-tentacled grub-like being at its heart — slid into Pravat’s sight. It stopped next to the corpse, a malign intelligence radiating from the compound eyes that circled its body.

The gelatin resembled the substance that had felled the Red Ball. Was the soccer ball-sized grub inside responsible for the crash? What else could have been?

Understanding dawned. The orange fuzz was clearly alien to the dull gray ecology of Sorenson’s Planet. With this knowledge, Pravat glanced at the "hill;" what could it be but a wrecked spacecraft, one humanity never built? The black grub had to be a member of the species that had built the spacecraft. Pravat O’Grady had just made humanity’s first contact with a starfaring intelligence ... except maybe for the dead Scandinavian, a still voice whispered in Pravat’s head. Pravat swallowed hard. He had never imagined first contact like this.

One of the grub’s tentacles extended into the decaying corpse. The gelatin heaved and, from its depths, a small duplicate of the Scandinavian appeared. Writhing and squirming, it grew into a full-sized ragged pseudo-human in a matter of moments.

“After we kill you, you will join us,” the Scandinavians said, speaking in perfect unison. The first Scandinavian produced the radio from its tattered uniform. “You will enter your code, and a tilt-rotor will come,” the first Scandinavian said. “We will kill the archeologists and send for a rescue ship,” the second continued. “Then our long wait will end,” the Scandinavians said, again in unison. “The stars will again be our hunting ground.”

Understanding struck Pravat like a kidney punch. The black grub created and controlled simulacra of the dead ... including the indigenous sentients, the Scandinavian and the faux Julian. But that was not the worst. The grub wanted off this planet. Its motivations might be beyond human comprehension, but Pravat knew in his gut that the black grub, and others like it, explained the absence of non-extinct intelligent species.

The stick-insects clicked their forelimbs, bringing Pravat back to the moment. Whip tails flailed. Spiny forelimbs flexed. The creatures advanced.

Pravat licked his lip. He had barely escaped one creature when he carried the machete. Now, unarmed, he faced a dozen. The twin Scandinavians watched in silence. But did the false Julian wear just a trace of a worried expression? Might the real Julian lie somewhere within the nightmarish copy? If so, what would bring him out?

In desperation, Pravat made the Warthogs’ tusk gesture. Then he threw back his head and shouted, at the top of his voice, “Warthogs advance!”

For a second, light flashed in the imitation Julian’s face. That was enough. The counterfeit Julian threw the device that Pravat had carved at Pravat’s feet. Pravat triumphantly snatched up his prize — an atlatl and dart, the tool that had made ancient humans the Earth’s ultimate predator.

Pravat grabbed the weapon. If the grub or its servitors understood the atlatl, they gave no sign. Pravat breathed a silent prayer to all his ancestors and took aim. He let the dart fly. The dart struck home. Blue gelatin spattered as it transfixed the black grub.

The grub flailed. Its tentacles struck the orange fuzz. Where they struck, creatures of a dozen strange worlds rose. No sooner had they risen than they collapsed into puddles of blue gel, as though the grub’s simulacra-creating ability failed. Then the grub stopped moving. As though a switch had been pulled, the stick-insects, the twin Scandinavians and the phony Julian collapsed.

In moments, the bodies decomposed into featureless blue gelatin. Pravat scooped up the radio and wiped it clean. He entered his code. “Do you read? Over.”

“We read,” the crackling voice came back.

Pravat stared down at the pools of blue. Another intelligent species still lived — a parasitic species that the universe would be better off without. Others could decide what to do about it. He might feel differently later, but for now, Pravat’s personal concerns outweighed the deaths of alien civilizations.

“Tasanee O’Grady is just hanging on. Do you have the antivirals?” the radio voice continued. “Over.”

Pravat glanced at the antivirals the false Julian had dropped. “I have them,” he replied. “Come and get me. Over.”

He sat back to await the tilt-rotor. The antivirals clutched to his chest, he finally allowed himself to drift into sleep.

For more fantastic Sword and Sorcery fiction,
check out Pitch Black Book's Lords of Swords anthology.

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