Terra (2000 words)
The ship hummed. A methodical, oscillating hum that perpetually threatened to lull him back to sleep. The final third was always the hardest, and many of the lads were coping badly. It all started friendly enough, but a bit of piss-taking soon turned into spiteful put-downs, and before you knew it, things had turned ugly. But this was his ship, his mission, and he'd been out into the deep more times than he could remember. For many of the lads, this was their first time out, but he'd seen it all before. The deep did something to you. The sheer emptiness and isolation of the crushing blackness bore down on you, forced you inexorably in upon yourself. There was nothing to do other than wait it out, to count the days until the journey's end.
But, as always, the end was just in fact the beginning. He brought up the video screen and replayed the message. No longer listening to the words he now knew off by heart, he instead just stared at the man on the screen. His greying, immaculately groomed hair. His pale, icy gaze. And that smile. That awful, predatory smile that set off warning signals in the hindquarters of his brain the moment he laid eyes on it eight months ago on Prime. The message was simple enough. Abrupt, to the point and utterly perplexing. Screamed out on a broadwave signal across the stars, the message stated that Terra was up for grabs, the Terrans having left for some unnamed elsewhere. Left the cradle of humanities birth.
So Prime assembled a team, all military, except for a dull and ponderous historian named Wallis, and the lanky merchant navigator Jensen. She had been quite the surprise, and the one highlight he could count in the painfully long journey. Originally from Ceres, she had been closer to Terra than any of them in the cramped ship, by virtue of her birth alone. Even him, the grizzled captain. Veteran of more dives into the deep than most knew possible. Even he hadn't ever been Sol deep. He'd asked her about Terra, but she didn't have much to say. Terrans kept to themselves, trade between the planets and the belt carried out through an automated network. She said it was strange, how she'd never seen a Terran, never talked to one, but knew for certain that they hated her, hated all the belters, all the colonists. All those who had left, as the Terrans had now apparently done.
He must have dozed off, as he jolted awake to the penetrating sound of the re-entry alarm, only to be stopped short by the restraints that gripped him tight to the crash pads in his chair. He glanced at the others. Jensen was still, staring dully forward with the calm of a practised diver. Wallis was muttering madly to himself, eyes scrunched shut. The lade weren't faring much better. Then reality stretched. The effect was like being beneath a strobe light, but underwater. And in slow-motion. It pulled at the soft tissues, contorted the malleable and disrupted every sense. Thankfully, the re-entry never lasted long, as reality snapped back to normal and the ship came to an sharp halt.
The first thing he noticed was the stars. Eight long months of nothing but all-consuming darkness, the stars were always a most welcome sight. Then he noticed the planet wandering into view. Not just any planet. THE planet. Terra. But something was wrong. Terra was half-dark, the side hidden from the sun lacking the tell tale signs of habitation. No lights lit Terra. He openned opened his mouth to tell Jensen to scan for life-forms, but she was ahead of him. No human life, she confirmed. Not anywhere on the planet. No electronic signals of any kind, save for the broadwave beacon, yelling its message continually out into the stars. They traced the signal, and plotted in the course.
The shuttle burned through the atmosphere, shaking and rattling all the way down, before finally coming to a gentle stop. He led them out, sidearm drawn, and took his first steps on Terran soil. The sun glinted off the buildings and he had to shade his eyes as he glanced up at the crystalline monoliths. He breathed a deep, cold breath, before remembering that the atmosphere was far thinner than on Prime, pulling the breather from his suit and plugging it in his nose, signalling for the others to do likewise. Wallis was staring about wild-eyed at his surroundings, presumably awed by the ancient halls of the Terrans, whose absence stung this place and lent a sense of unease. He pulled out the tracking device, and off they set.
It wasn't long before they reached their destination. A medical facility, by the looks of things. Strange mechanical devices littered the halls, and Jensen explained that Terrans had automatons to ease every aspect of their lives, with more than a hint of scorn in her voice. They made their way through empty wards lined with empty beds, up empty stairwells to the roof, where, blinking with a dim red glow, the beacon sat. The sole active sign of humanity left of Terra. Jensen began pushing buttons, trying to shut the thing off, but the control circuits were fused. He pulled out his sidearm and Jensen hastily scrambled back as he fired, the beacon exploding in a gout of sparks. They all stood in silence, looking back and forth between him and the ruined beacon, waiting to see if something would happen.
They weren't left waiting long. It started as a low hum that seemed to reveberate through every atom of the building beneath their feet, the air alive with a sudden charge that had not been present before. Jensen exclaimed in alarm. Signals were popping up from every sector. Activity on a planetary scale. He didn't waste another second, accessing the terminal in his suit, he remotely ordered the shuttle to head to their location. He ordered everyone to ready their weapons and wait, able to defend against some unknown threat. And then he noticed Wallis was missing. With a curse under his breath, he hit the intercom and yelled for Wallis to confirm his location, but only got screams and mechanical whirings in between the static.
He swore again, loud enough for them all to hear, and set off at a pelting run back down the stairwell and into the medical ward. All around the room, mechanical arms spasmed with chattering motions, crawling across the limp form of Willis in the centre of the floor. He fired a few blasts at the automatons, sending metal and lubricant flying, before making his way over to the stricken historian, hauling him over his shoulder and heading back to the safety of the roof. As he struggled, he felt a short, sharp pain in his leg, looking down to see a robotic arm pulling a hypodermic needle from his body. He kicked out in revulsion, but already felt the effects of whatever he had been injected with.
With awkward lurches, he propelled himself and the increasingly heavy form of Willis up the stairs a step at a time, not daring to look back into the tangle of whirring mechanics grasping after them. He burst out on to the rooftop and saw the shuttle hovering before him, saw one of the lads gesticulating wildly for him to get on board. Mustering up the last of his strength, he threw Willis into the waiting shuttle and began to haul himself up, yelling for Jensen to lift off. But as the shuttle rose, he did not rise with it, arm wrenched from the handhold, sending him crashing back down to he roof while increasingly shrinking faces stared down in alarm. He felt the touch of mechanical fingers upon him, before everything went black.
He awoke in a brightly lit room. Sunlight streamed in through the large windows, a gentle breeze billowing the white curtains. His gaze lowered, and there, sitting before him with that selfsame smile on his face, was the man from the video. He reached instinctively for his sidearm, but the man assured him he wouldn't be needing it, although he kept his fingers coiled about the stock all the same. Seeing this man in real life, seeing that smile before him, he realised what had so unnerved him about this man in the video. He wasn't a man at all, but rather an automaton. A fabricated slave to enhance the Terran's quality of life. Then the thing explained, in it's disturbingly realistic voice, why it had called all of Terra's children back to the womb.
To preserve was the automatons goal. To preserve life, human life, at all costs. And so they had preserved the Terran's, deep beneath the planets surface. Suspended, unchanging, in a mechanical definition of life. A mockery of life. However, there were those that resisted, that rose up against the automatons and tried to free the others from their dreamless slumber. In a desperate, futile attempt, they stormed the automaton's central preservation facility, but succumbed and were ultimately preserved. The automatons failed to realise their mistake until much later. The last free Terrans on the planet, knowing their situation to be impossible, had infected themselves with a virus. A virus that rampaged through the preservation chambers, infecting swathes of the Terran population in one fell swoop.
The automatons had no answer to this Terran-made disease. Engineered solely for this purpose, it infected every last Terran in a matter of hours, and so, in despair, the automatons called out to Terra's children, calling them home, so that they might be preserved and might save the Terrans from the fate the machines had tried to forestall. He raised his sidearm and fired. The smile faded, along with the unnatural light in the automaton's eyes. As he pondered just how he would escape, he heard elevator doors swish open behind him. Turning slowly, not wanting to see what lay in wait, he muttered a curse as his eyes fell on the smiling man standing in the elevator, packed in with his selfsame brothers, all smiling.
He recoiled in horror, and headed quickly to the window. Another curse came as he saw just how high up he was. High enough to make a big mess if he jumped. He turned the sidearm on the smilers and fired indiscriminately. Where one went down, another appeared. It was futile. He unloaded the last blasts of the clip into the smiling mass before stepping back out of the window. Like the Terrans, he too would choose death over a life eternal and unthinking. The wind was knocked out of him as he landed much sooner than he had expected. He looked up. The gleaming buildings streamed past at high speed. A hatch opened and Willis peered out. With a laugh, he hauled himself inside and headed to the cockpit.
As Jensen guided the shuttle higher, he saw for the first time the true scaale of the automaton's grasp. A writhing mass of soulless metal slowly enveloped the surface, thinking, but uncomprehending all the same, utterly devoted to the preservation of its creators. As they broke out of the atmosphere and away from Terra as fast as the shuttle could carry them, an alarm blared on the console. The beacon had started again, screaming its invitation, broadwave, across the universe. He recorded his own little message, and sent it on its way, telling anyone who would listen to stay the hell away from Terra. Whether anyone would heed his advice, he couldn't say. But that wasn't his problem any more he thought grimly, as he sat down in the co-pilots seat and ordered Jensen to prep the eight-month burn back to Prime. Eight months here, eight months back. Only, this time, he doubted that there would be much in the way of complaints, all of them just glad to be homeward bound.
