chapter 3

Chapter 3

It was about three weeks after Aridail and I shared that awkward night together.  We had successfully planted a large crop of potato like vegetables on the outskirts of our camp.  We had discovered despite being small and covering in hair like roots, with just 2 of them prepared in a stew provided a grown man enough nutrition to work for a full day. It tasted foul, but the weeks of rationed supplies made them very popular among the survivors.  We were off checking the crops when we saw them approach. At first glance they appeared to be survivors like us, but something was wrong. Their clothes were torn, they carried no supplies, but upon seeing us they seemed even more distressed.

“Run! Run” one of them yelled out, sprinting towards us, gasping for air.

We hesitated for a second, until we heard a scream from the forest, with some unearthly bestial growls,. We needed no further encouragement,  and started sprinting towards the camp. I yelled towards the group, about 6 or so people.

“This way! The camp is this way!

We ran into the camp, the rest of the survivors rushing to see what was wrong. I turned to the new arrivals, desperate for information

“who are you? What's going on?”

It doesn't matter! We need weapons, they are coming! Don’t stand around come on!

“What do you mean they? Who is coming!?”

“monsters! I have no idea what they are! They look like us, but they are crazy strong and attack us! Don’t let the fact they look like people trick you!”

First officer Vargbran quickly took command of the situation and began issuing orders

“All crew members break out the weapons locker and prep weapons. Everyone else grab a large branch, something to use as a club, and stick together. Form a circle like we practiced, and cover your partners to you left and right- And Doctor- get these new guys looked at and be ready to treat patients. NOW STOP STANDING AROUND PEOPLE! MOVE IT MOVE IT!

The camp exploded into a wave of activity as the terrible cries came closer, I ran over and saw the new arrivals, a number of them had serious injuries from what looked like claws, and bite marks. They looked like they could barely stand. Adrial helped the others inside the makeshift med bay, while I looked at the most critical patient. He seemed delirious, in a high fever, his chest ravaged with a deep pattern of scratches, Painful but not life threatening. He began shaking, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me.

“They don’t want to kill us! They want us to hurt! They need our pain! Arghh!

“Adrial! Get over here, hold him down, I need to sedate him”

He continued to thrash, until I managed to inject the needle into his arm, holding him down until he went limp. I had barely began to clean the wound when a  wall caved in behind me, and something knocked me off my feet.  I was terrified, a figure was tearing at my body with sharp claws, I couldn’t get a clear view. I heard screaming but all I could focus on was thrashing, fighting this shadowy figure on top of me. I threw punches, kicked, the pain and adrenaline fueling my fight or flight instinct, knowing everything depended upon fighting off my assailant. A survivor swung a makeshift crutch at the figure, knocking him off me, as I scrambled to my feet seeing my attacker for the first time.

At first he looked  human like, though his limbs stretched out too far. He was crouching, hissing at me, his fingers laced with sharp claws, his head long and bird like, with sharp teeth, dripping with drool  poking out of his jaw. His skin looked human like, but was grey, almost ashen. His hair was clotted and greasy, clinging to his face, as his large orb like eyes dug into me with a fierce hatred.  I barely had time to take him in before he delivered a vicious kick to my chest,  knocking me to my knees.  My vision went black, as he turned to the wounded survivors, tearing them apart before I could even react. He slit their throats with his teeth, tearing vast chunks  as they screamed,  even punching a claw into one poor souls heart. He gave a final gasp before falling to the ground. He turned towards Adrial, who had frozen in terror, shaking with fear. I screamed out to run, but before I could do anything he stabbed his claw into her gut.

He turned to me, his face twisting into grim smirk of satisfaction, letting off a growl of pleasure seeing my horror.  Then before my very eyes his appearance began to shift. His body warped, buckled and shrunk in, his features melding, growing, until before me stood a mirror image of myself. He had even replicated my clothing, glasses on his face, even with the tape over the frame. He twisted my features into a smile,  his features lit up with a murderous hunger. He began to stride towards me, licking his lips trying to form words

“The forrrm- is sssuffficent. Your role is needed. But you are no longerrr neeeded…  I will be you now yessss….  MMMM youur fear will fuel me, your meemoriees  will be mineeee!”

His hands morphed into claws once more, his teeth jutting out ready to tear me apart. I was terrified, but seeing this thing kill the woman I love, the people I tried to save and now to take my face? I could take it no more. With a feral cry I seized a scalpel and leapt upon the imposter, my desperate final attack taking it by surprise, squealing driving the scalpel deep into its eye.  It thrust its arms at me , raking me with cuts, but I kept stabbing, again and again and again, screaming in a berserk rage  until finally it was still. I watched as my features faded from the creature, reverting back into it inhuman appearance. I barely left time to check it was dead before running over to Adrial, who had gone into shock.  I worked in a fury, righting the makeshift surgery table, lifting her up and desperately trying to clean and seal her wound. I could see her weakening, her pulse slowing but I kept fighting, screaming at her to live. Finally I heard others approach the room, but I took to time to explain, I screamed at them to help me. After 2 hours of frantic surgery, I had done all I could with the supplies we had. It was down to her body now, as I had no idea if she could endure the injuries she had sustained on top of the fever she had developed, most likely from the creatures claws.

First officer Vargbran lead me from the blood drenched med-bay and sat me down by the fire.  He was stressed, angry, and demanded to know what happened in the med bay. It took me a while to calm down enough to speak properly, I had been so hyped up on adrenaline and rage I hadn’t had time to process what had happened. Eventually I managed to tell him what happened, though I paused before telling him about the beast transforming into me. It was crazy and I could hardly believe it myself. There was no way he would believe me. He would think I was out of my mind, and odds are would lock me up, and who would treat Adrial then? So I lied,  omitting the strange creatures transformation abilities. He seemed to accept my story in the end, and told me what had happened in the main camp. They had been attacked by a large group of them, about 20 strong. They managed to drive them off, killing a large number of the creatures but they managed to snatch a number of survivors away into the forest. He said he was going to form up a rescue party and go after them.

“Get some rest Dr Swift- you look like hell, and Adriel needs you up on your feet as soon as you can. I’l  handle everything tonight, and you need some rest.

Grateful for dismissal I stumbled over to my quarters and promptly passed out  on my bed without a second thought.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

In the first few weeks following our landing it was clear that that our new lives on Perda would not be easy. While the atmosphere, gravity and climate were survivable for humans, the slightly heavier gravity made physical labor even harder, and the air had slightly less oxygen than earth, making our attempts to build a settlement and establish a fresh food supply via agriculture and hunting difficult. In time I hoped our bodies would adapt to the new conditions, as our original plan of terraforming the planet to suit us was lost with the colony ships, the complex geo-manipulating systems and equipment destroyed, too complex to rebuild with our resources. Despite this we did manage to build a solid settlement, cutting down the tree’s to build houses and buildings- I think we all realized pretty quickly that we had to make do with what we had. After all, the prefabricated buildings and supplies had been destroyed during our arrival. We had no contact with any other survivors, our coms system was either too damaged to pick up distant transmissions, or the other pods also lost their coms devices. None of us really wanted to face the possibility of us being the only survivors on the planet.

After the initial rush of injuries from the crash had been dealt with I found myself in a new role, assisting our agricultural scientist in inspecting local flora as potential food supplies- it was out of my area of expertise, but our food supplies from the pod had ran out, and our genetically engineered seeds from the pod were struggling to grow as effectually as we had hoped, resulting in careful rationing. We needed to find a new source of food and fast. After giving me a quick crash course in key traits or combinations to spot in plant genetic code, Aridail, our Agricultural Scientist and I set off, wandering the hills around our crash site.  The work was slow,  our trekking for new specimens was time consuming, and waiting for our basic lab equipment to finish analysis held us back. In time, we did make a fair amount of progress, finding a number of plants, fruits and vegetables suitable for widespread farming and consumption, though this process took a number of weeks.  So we made the most of opportunity, using the down time to talk and reminisce about our pasts, and get to know each other.  At least, the few good parts of our pasts, neither of us initially wanted to bring up what life really was like back on Earth, the real reason we became colonists. We tried to avoid the topic, bantering, bickering and joking, trying to ignore the fact we had escaped from hell only to end up in purgatory. In time, we grew closer, and one evening we sat down in her cabin, and I took the nervous first step of sharing my past with her.

I had been a moderately successful doctor in a small town in Austria before I signed up for the colony program.  At the time Europe was embroiled in a turf war, the overpopulation meaning the smaller countries were desperate for more land, and had eye the fresh and bountiful lands of their rivals, hungry for conquest and glory. Even the massive advancements of technology by the 22^nd century could not change the lust for war in man’s heart. As the years progressed, I grew tired of the constant clashes between the countries around us, constantly patching up the young men of my country so they could go and die another time fighting for a mere scrap of land. It broke my heart to see these passionate young men and women brought before me, their bodies ravaged by bullets and wounds, dying for a war that they did not understand, for a war that was not theirs.  I confessed, I could take it no more, I wanted to be free of warfare and the sick politics of Earth, to find a new way to protect and save my fellow man.   So I signed up for the colony program,  as a respected and experienced doctor in his mid thirties, in good physical condition I easily qualified, and signed up for the voyage in stasis, on the condition I unthaw in the last year of the journey to assist in preparations for deceleration and arrival.

After I told my story, she was silent for a long time. I thought for a while I had somehow offended her, but just as I was about to speak she began to speak. She was a young woman of Indian heritage, an orphen from the civil war. She had grown up in poverty; her family was one of a lower caste, struggling to survive.  There was no way she was even supposed to have basic education, but he father had taken time to teach her as a child, an incredible oddity considering that even as a man, his lower caste meant he had no chance of an education.  One day while out on an errand for her mother, she returned to find her village in flames, a victim of one of the many radical revolutionary groups desperate to gain power through fear and oppression.  She grew silent and trembled telling me this, her whole body wracked with silent sobs. I reached over and held her hand, until she began to speak again.  She was taken in but a foreign aid worker who was witness to the massacre and brought to Australia and adopted her as his own. She spoke of a burning desire to help her people, to save them from poverty and the desperation to turn to war and violence simply to survive. She studied hard, and moved back to India, determined to take a role in helping her people, by introducing new ways of farming and new crops to plant, to help her people rise out of povety.  But her people would not listen. They saw her lower class status, and refused her right to speak, to work denying her the one thing that had kept her strong growing up, the desire to save her country. She was cast out of village’s when she tried to speak, men insulted her, the police beat her. She gave up, she said. I ran away, I could not stand living on earth any more, being reminded of my failure and my people’s suffering every day. So I signed up for the colony program,  lying to the recruiter, all to escape her past. At this point she broke down once more and kept sobbing. I drew her close into an embrace as she cried herself to sleep. I longed to find the perfect words to comfort her, but everything I came up with seemed inadequate. I simply whispered  “I’m so sorry” as she fell asleep in my arms, curled up on mat next to me.  I felt so powerless, all my medical knowledge, all my experience and I could not help one women with a broken heart.

We woke up the next morning,  I tried to speak to her about last night, but all simply whispered “I don’t want to talk about it, can we get on with our work?”  We got on with our duties, but it seemed like there was a distance between us from then on. I had no idea what to do, I had no close friends to consult for advice or support,  so I simply tried to put my feelings aside and work professionally. It almost worked, until that day where everything changed…

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“hello? Is this thing on?
Ah good there we go. …. Phew where do I start? So much has happened, so much strife and hardship…. I guess I should start by telling you my name. My name is Dr Augustus Swift, and I’m leaving this message as a historical record of what really happened on our early days on Perda, so that maybe whoever you are, you don’t copy our terrible mistakes. Odds are this recording will be completely at odds with what you have learned about the history of our planet, and you may question my intent or even my sanity as I tell you this tale. I beg of you, give me time to tell you the truth so that you may see the truth for yourself.

We never really did find out exactly what happened on the fateful day our race arrived on Perda. Our massive colony ships arrived from the warp jump, hovering in orbit over our new home, but something went terribly wrong, either as we arrived, or before we were ready to descend onto the planet's surface.  Only a few managed to make it to the escape pods, moving as many of those in stasis as they could.  Barely half of the pods were launched before one of the ships warp drives went critical, enveloping the surrounding 4 colony ships, tearing them apart. Barely 4000 people of the 2 million strong colonists survived long enough to begin their entry into the atmosphere.

The pods screamed down through the atmosphere, a magnetic storm throwing the pods far off course, spreading them out across the alien landscape. Many of the pods landed badly, the occupants killed from the botched landings, their pods landing in the sea, shooting to the bottom of the ocean, drowning them long before they reached the surface. But enough of us survived, stumbling dazed and confused from our pods, still groggy from effects of emergency stasis release. My pod came down on the northern section of a large continent on the upper hemisphere, the climate warm, with mild winters, well suited to farming.

It was hard to adapt in those early days after our emergency landing. Not all of us had made it in one piece to the surface. We had managed to escape the destruction of our ship, but the situation was dire. Of the 40 people who had managed to reach the pod, eight of us had died during the emergency landing. We had barely enough food to last a week with our numbers, and our only power was from the emergency generator. As the only doctor on the pod, i had to quickly shake my feverish state from the emergency thawing. I worked in a blur, setting broken limbs, inspecting injuries as we tried to comprehend what had happened. Thankfully we still had our comms and geo-mapping systems, though they were limited in range and we had no idea how long they would last on the emergency power.

 We had intended to arrive on the planet with plenty of resources and tools to quickly adapt to our new lives, but those had been on the colony ships. All our emergency pods had were basic food supplies and limited basic tools. Thankfully though, our group of survivors had a broad range of skills, we had an engineer, a trio of builders, a few crew from the colony ship, an agricultural scientist, and most importantly a first officer. The rest of us of us were civilians, shocked and scared from the sudden crash, and to this day i'm still amazed with the way first officer Vargbran managed to take control. Though scared and out of his depth himself, he went between us, reassuring, comforting, supporting us, before making a speech to the group. He outlined the situation, and that our existing colony plans could not be used, and we would have to adapt based on what we had. He sent out a small squad of crew members to find a nearby river and bring back some fresh water, organized the engineers and builders to salvage what they could, assigning a few volunteers to bury those who died in the crash.

When the crew members came back with fresh water it was getting dark. We had a fire going, and held a brief funeral for those who had died. We barely knew them, most of us were linked by the coincidence of just happened to be closest to this particular pod d but we still felt like we owed it to them. After all, any of us could have easily have been in their place. I remember that night clearly, lying on my back staring at the new alien sky, unable to sleep, terrified but at the same time ashamed of my own excitement. I could see the wreckage from our ships dropping through the atmosphere, burning comets against the clear sky. It seemed sick that something so beautiful to come out of such a tragedy. I remember. After hours of lying awake, exhaustion finally took me and I surrendered to the peaceful oblivion of sleep.