CEMETERY PLANET:

The Complete Series

J. Joseph Wright

Text copyright 2012/2013 by J. Joseph Wright

Cover copyright 2012/2013 by Krystle Wright

Author’s website: jjosephwright.com

Artist’s website: krystledesigns.wordpress.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

I want the world to read CEMETERY PLANET: The Complete Series. If you’d like to share it with your friends, feel free. Just don’t make a material gain off of it, because that would constitute copyright infringement.

Thank you, J.

PART I

1.

“Your chocolate ice cream is ready.”

Harvey Crane dropped his kinetic wrench and stood abruptly, slamming his head against the service counter. He didn’t mind. He could have a concussion, for all he cared. All that mattered was the ice cream, the first taste he’d had in weeks. Rich, velvety, dark chocolate. It was all he thought about, all he dreamt about, and now, after hours of tinkering with the printer, he’d get some.

What he found in the autoserve, though, wasn’t chocolate ice cream at all. He knew from the puke-green color.

“Mint sorbet!” he searched for someone to register his complaint. “Why can’t that cheap damn DeepSix spring for a decent food printer!”

Of course, he didn’t expect an answer. Though the food court was large enough to hold two hundred easily, Harvey represented the sole occupant. He was, in fact, the lone inhabitant in the entire structure, built to accommodate a thousand strong, with a visitor center, souvenir and snack shops, several mausoleum levels, a nondenominational temple, a space elevator, and vacuum tube train lines circumnavigating the planet. All that technology, at the cost of trillions, gathering dust on a forgotten world, in a forgotten corner of the galaxy. That’s not what bothered Harvey, though. He just wanted a decent bowl of ice cream.

With a huff, he tossed the revolting stuff in the recycler and decided, yet again, to make his nightly rounds without having dessert. Nightly rounds which were completely unnecessary. He didn’t like DeepSix much. Cheap bastards. But even this job he felt a little guilty about. Like taking candy from a baby. Nothing broke down. Nothing. Still, it was his duty to check, and double check, so that’s what he did.

“Welcome to Cemetery Planet,” he strolled into the auditorium, and the three-dimensional projection began with a shot of Earth from space. Then the scene widened past the sun. The narrator continued. “The year was 2525, and Earth was running out of room for its population. With land becoming a scarce resource, cemeteries were no longer a luxury mankind could afford. Thankfully, with the discovery of high speed intergalactic travel via the ionic stream, we were able to relocate every cemetery from Earth here to the Fomalhaut system. Spanning the planet’s fifty-five million square kilometers, the gravesites have been faithfully and respectfully recreated, with no detail spared, all to make sure your visit with your loved one is pleasant and memorable. Please feel free to take all the time you need. All shops are open twenty-four hours a day, and automated to fulfill your every craving. Train schedules are posted in the lounge. With departures every ten minutes, you won’t have to wait long if you miss one. We at DeepSix hope you—”

“Hope you enjoy your stay at Cemetery Planet,” Harvey mocked the recording. “Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said to the empty circular theater. “I got news for you! Nobody’s enjoying nothing, because nobody’s coming to visit this damn place anymore!”

He left the theater before the next show started. Though he was supposed to make sure the whole presentation went off without a hitch, he couldn’t take sitting through the damn thing for the six-hundredth time. He knew the story by heart, so well he could recite it word for word. It worked. It all worked. From the interactive mapping services that told visitors exactly where their departed loved ones were located, to the holomemorials installed on just about every grave, nothing in the entire facility, on the entire planet, broke down. Except the damn autoserve food printer.

2.

Four hours later, he had but one task left before his copious down time. He saved the best for last, his favorite job in the plethora of mind-numbing chores—testing the holomemorials. A random affair. Had to be. No way could he personally monitor each and every one of the millions on the planet. So, each night, the computer selected several arbitrarily for him to make a personal visit, some outside, some in the vast mausoleum complex. He didn’t like the space suits. Made him claustrophobic. He didn’t mind the exercise, though the trains and the personal motility devices, or PMDs, did most of the work getting him to the gravesites.

He always enjoyed the colorful characters, like the dead rising and offering a bit of witty wisdom from beyond the grave. He knew they were just recordings, projected light mimicking the human persona. Still, they seemed so real, and every night a new surprise. Tonight was no different.

“Hello everyone,” began the first holomemorial Harvey came upon. He stepped on the pressure-sensitive switch, and a man appeared above the headstone. Fifties, black, medium build. He looked like he had money. “Loretta, I love you. And the kids, too…Jeremy, Yolanda, Kelly. I love you all. That’s why I want you to know about the money. It’s in an off-Earth account, with Galactic Bank. The passcode is our anniversary, honey. Don’t worry about where I got the money, just enjoy it. Oh, and, I shouldn’t have to say this, but don’t tell a soul.”

Harvey stepped off the switch, laughing so hard he fogged up the glass inside his helmet. The hologram folded in on itself and vanished before the message was complete. He didn’t need to watch every second. Just needed to verify it was functional. Good one, he thought. Not the juiciest he’d seen, but good. As he boarded the train again, he wondered if Loretta had actually come to visit her husband and saw that message. That burial site was over a century old, and people had stopped coming fifty years ago.

He checked several other sites that night, just like every night. And, just like every night, he rode the train from location to location, sometimes for hours, circling Cemetery Planet, lifeless and forbidding, a perfect home for an unending landscape of graves. The place was old enough. Over three hundred years old. But most of the entombments were much older. Some from the early twentieth century, even earlier. He once saw a marker, crooked and cracked, with hand carving in limestone dating back to 1859. Considering it was now 2851, a relic like that made him shudder with reverence.

Waiting for the train to make its next scheduled stop, he loafed away the time in his favorite seat, center row, center aisle, on the upper balcony. It gave him the best view out the transparent tube. If he ever wanted to make a scary movie, he’d make it here. In the rounded observation deck, the scale of the planet hit home in full panoramic detail. Tombstones in every direction, across slowly rolling slopes, intersecting and crisscrossing into the horizon. All shapes and sizes and designs. Simple slabs dominated, and in the sections reserved solely for the armed services, white crosses, flags, and memorabilia packed the scenery. Spreading across the planet’s surface, saturating every centimeter—a complete blanket of the death markers.

He tried not to think about the fact that, lying under each grave, was a body, decomposed beyond recognition, still and stiff, bones and teeth and hair and dusty, tattered garments—the costumes of the deceased. He made a game of it, memorizing the markers. The largest was a multi-tiered obelisk built upon a white-columned temple. There were others nearly as tall, shrines, statues, spires. Most were normal, granite blocks, understated yet proud, beautiful in their way. Together, though, one after the other after the other, in a vast sea of stone slabs and crosses and edifices of tribute, the effect upon Harvey was a deep sense of dread.

Up ahead, a vacuum tube intersection sliced a swath through the headstones, the only break in the otherwise never-ending necropolis. The train sped so fast, if Harvey put his head up a little, the tombstones became a wheatfield, acres of farmland like he’d seen in movies. The bright, starry sky provided enough illumination for him to see off into the vastness of the terrain, but he chose not to look too far, for fear of spotting his own grave somewhere out there.

After kilometers and kilometers of graveyard, the main visitor center came into sight, a massive building made of exotanium and reinforced glass. It was the end of the nightly outdoor rounds, but that didn’t mean he could relax. He still had a few dozen units in the mausoleum complex to status-check. Not every grave had a holomemorial, which was a damn good thing. From the countless sites outside, along with the indoor vaults, there were millions upon millions of final resting places. So many, he never saw the same one twice in the almost twelve Earth months of his contractual stay.

He sank in his seat as the magnetic tracks released their energy and the train settled onto solid ground with a Thump! which never failed to startle him no matter how many times he rode. Glad to have his wildly uncomfortable spacesuit behind him for the night, he stepped onto the PMD and let it take him into the main concourse, past the visitor intake center, through the food court, the information and mapping area, and on into the mausoleum complex.

Tonight’s random assignment was indistinguishable from any other night. Only the faces and the names were different. The stale catacomb had a sterile sheen, thanks to the constant work of the cleaning bots, and he raced from one name to the next in the labyrinth of disinfected death, the vaults blurring into anonymity. Always the same. Every hologram worked to perfection, every message, bland and boringly similar. “I love you all…thanks for visiting me…you know I’ll always be with you…until we meet again.” There were some interesting variations, but the main messages were the same, and, though he’d seen it all, they touched him in a way. Touched him in that nobody ever came around to see them anymore.

3.

At half past six in the morning, finally and thankfully, he came to the end of his nightly rounds. It was his time now, and he seized the PMD’s control bar, taking it out of auto-mode, steering for mausoleum level three, section C-6, row fifteen, number nine hundred and thirty—Lea Hamm.

He squeezed the brake and shifted his weight, putting the PMD into a sliding stop in front of Lea’s resting place. With a palm against the sensor, her infoscreen came alight and an elegant tone signaled the hologram’s startup sequence. It took less than a second, a process of reflected light and diffused color, blending into a gorgeous combination of sight and sound, a true vision of loveliness. Lea. Dark hair down to her waist, a hint lounging over her left shoulder with the tranquility of a lazy summer afternoon. Her smoldering gray eyes trapped him with their clarity, their depth. To say her other features were flawless would have been superfluous, but true. The hologram burst to full power. Her three-dimensional, life-sized image became as realistic as an actual person, and, standing before Harvey was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. Only one problem. She was dead.

“Hello, Harvey,” she smiled and his heart fluttered. She tilted her head. “You seem upset. What’s the matter, can’t get the chocolate ice cream to work again?”

He giggled silently. She knew him better than he knew himself. It was his fault. He’d installed an upgrade in her programming, an application called Intuitive Intelligence, and it had revolutionized hologram technology. Harvey didn’t know exactly how it worked, he just installed it, and watched the miracle take place. I.I. allowed Lea to learn and develop over time, just like a real person, and she was getting smarter by the day.

“How’d you guess?” he said.

“Someday you’ll get that food printer to work.”

“That day better come quick,” he looked at her expectantly. “They’re shipping me out pretty soon.”

She lost her smile, yet he could tell she tried to keep a brave face. “How-how soon?”

He paused, then, forced a response. “Not sure, really. There’re some contract disputes with the replacements, but, if things go smoothly, I might be outta here in three Earth weeks.”

“Three Earth weeks?” her eyes traveled a zigzag pattern to the floor. “Three Earth weeks,” she looked back up at him. “How long is three Earth weeks?”

He had to struggle to keep in his laughter. Sometimes she was like a child. Still learning. Still discovering the world. It made him sad he had to go. The only reason he was sorry to leave that desolate place.

“What’s so funny?” her lower lip quivered. “You think it’s funny you’re going to leave me here all alone?” her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared. It was a hologram, yes, but it looked so real, and acted real, too. He couldn’t help but let the sorrow germinate in his stony heart.

“No, no. I—”

She rushed and folded him in her arms. The tactile sensation gave him the shivers. All holomemorials were equipped with ultrasound actuators, which simulated human contact quite well. This though, was something else. Something more. Lea was a projection of light, refracted and bent and distorted to create a realistic image, not a solid shape with mass. He knew that. He knew it was impossible for a hologram to embrace him, yet for one fleeting second, when she first clutched onto him, he swore he felt it for real.

“Don’t go, Harvey!” she sobbed. “Don’t go, please.”

Harvey’s head swirled with confused excuses, contrived responses, reasons for his departure. He had none. No ingenious answers. Most of all, he had no answer for Lea’s sudden outburst of emotion.

“But-but you knew this was coming,” he told her. “We’ve talked about this before.”

“I know, it’s just I…I guess I finally realize what it means,” she penetrated him with her steamy stare. “You’re leaving. You really are leaving.”

He felt lightheaded, overcome by sensation—her rosy perfume, her soft, cool skin on his. He tried to speak. Words failed him at that moment, when only her sorrow occupied his mind, only her loneliness resided in his heart.

“I’m sorry,” deprived of a response, she turned her back and steadied her voice. “I don’t know what came over me. Of course you have to go. You’re not like me. You don’t belong here.”

“I…” his conflicted mind struggled for a reply. “I’m not leaving for…for a while yet. We still have time.”

She faced him and exhaled. He felt her breath on his wrists, her programming was so realistic. Smiling, she said, “We’ve got three Earth weeks.”

He challenged her to their favorite game, Chess, and she accepted. Despite her listless demeanor, she still managed to dominate, winning eight games to two. She didn’t say another word that night about his leaving Cemetery Planet.

4.

For the next several days, Harvey went about his normal routine, making the rounds in the visitor center, checking the auditorium playback, running diagnostics on the mapping system, riding the maglev tube trains and checking gravesite holomemorials. Things never seemed to change. All operational systems functioned flawlessly, all except the damn autoserve. Chocolate ice cream must have had some unattainable chemical ingredient.

Lea showed no further signs of anomalous emotional behavior. After some time digesting the matter, Harvey surmised it was a side effect of the learning algorithms, a sort of growing pain as Lea’s Intuitive Intelligence advanced. He knew it was a machine, yet felt sorry, even a little guilty for installing the application.

After a short time, though, it became but a memory, and he considered the matter behind them, until the night he got a strange repair call.

“Check,” he released his rook, confident he had this one in the bag. She only gave him a wry smile and kept her eyes locked onto his. Without looking, she slid her knight into support position for her queen.

“Checkmate.”

“What!” he studied the board frantically, certain she’d been mistaken. But she was never mistaken. “No way!”

She giggled as a buzzing alarm sounded.

“What the…” he checked the message on a nearby terminal, in shock. In the eleven Earth months on that planet, the alarm hadn’t gone off once. “What the hell could this be?”

Holomemorial malfunction. Immediate action required. Zone 12. Section G-5. Row 1119. Plot number 574342-0. Maglev train waiting for your departure at gate 3.

“What’s it say?” she sounded nervous.

“Hologram malfunction.”

“What kind of malfunction?”

“No idea,” he puzzled. “I have to go find out. And it’s all the way out in Zone Twelve. It’ll take me half a day just to get there.”

She stood quickly, a look of pure dread on her face. “You can’t go on that call. You can’t.”

He speculated on this latest expansion in her personality. She’d never expressed so much concern about his work activities. Her outburst over his leaving the planet was one thing, but over such a traditionally mundane job? However, this wasn’t exactly mundane. Repair missions were so…well, they just didn’t happen. Lea’s change in behavior and the hologram malfunction both were irregular events. The two developments combined made Harvey’s sonar start to ping.

“Why not, Lea?” he probed, eager to get to the heart of her revelation. “Why don’t you want me to go? It’s just a routine repair call.”

“But it’s not routine,” her high tone and quick response screamed anxiousness. “You know it’s not. You keep complaining about it all the time, saying nothing ever breaks down around here.”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “And now something finally has,” he climbed on the PMD and gave her a wink as he rolled away. “You should be happy for me. I finally have something to do…besides talking to you, of course.”

“NO!” she chased him, her holographic image flickering, and placed herself in front of the PMD. He pulled on the handle and stopped, even though it wouldn’t have hurt her to ride straight through her. Instinct made him stop. She was more forceful than ever with her next statement.

“You’re in danger, Harvey,” a serious stare confronted him. Glimmering digital eyes. “If you go on that mission, you might never come back.”

He wanted to laugh it off, but her urgency made him contemplate a serious flaw in the Intuitive Intelligence design. Grave predictions of death weren’t listed in the application’s features. Then he thought maybe Lea’s processor had some kind of connection to the base’s central computer, and perhaps she was picking up on something.

“What are you talking about? Some kind of system malfunction? Is it my spacesuit? I never trusted those suits.”

“No,” her brow creased. Her self-assured demeanor took an uncertain turn. “Not the suits. I don’t think,” she blinked at the floor. “I don’t know for sure what it is…I just know something’s wrong, and you’re in danger if you go on that repair call.”

He backed the PMD and angled it to miss her once he started forward again. “I have to go. It’s my job,” he said without looking back. She became even more distraught, racing after him. He turned his head in time to watch her reach the limit of her holographic projection and disappear in a fizzle of digital artifacts, not for a second giving up the fight to stop him.

“Harvey, don’t! Don’t go!”

5.

He spent the better part of the day on the train, speeding at almost a thousand kilometers an hour. Most of the trip, he slumbered in the sleepcar or zoned out on the entertainment center. Hologames were his favorite. He could spend hours playing. A perfect waste of time.

A proximity alarm signaled his impending arrival in Zone Twelve. The sight gave him chills. Lit by a brilliant canopy of midnight stars, the extensive landscape had a softness to it. A light haze draped over the distant hillsides and flowed into the valleys, giving everything a preternatural pallor. Crosses and pillars and slabs in every direction, row after row, some straight and perfect and pristine, some broken, chipped, rotted. Up and over the knoll the markers journeyed, then beyond the next hill, then the mountain in the horizon. He hardly ever traveled this deep into the cemetery. Graves this old usually weren’t equipped with holomemorial units.

As the train approached the transit station, he spotted the malfunctioning hologram. The unnatural image caught his attention immediately, and its contrast with the surrounding area surprised him. It radiated a bluish aura, casting several rows of graves in ethereal silhouettes which danced and shifted with the projection’s movements. From that distance, Harvey estimated at least two hundred meters, he couldn’t tell if it was male or female, only distinguished a humanoid shape, standing near a rounded granite block, presumably delivering a message to loved ones.

Harvey never hated the damn space suits more than on this day, on this trip, with his nerves shot. He had a job to do, though, and heard his boss’s rodent voice giving him the third degree when he contemplated just skipping this thing. Who cares if the hologram is playing on its own? Nobody ever comes out here anymore…ever! Then the boss’s words repeated in his head. DeepSix had a contract. The planet would remain open to visitors for the next ninety-nine years, no matter if they spent next to nothing on the place’s upkeep.

The PMD rocked and bucked on the ancient yard’s rough terrain, hindering his progress. The whole time, his focus remained on the ghostly sapphire glow refracting into the fog. As he got nearer, he made out features on the hologram. A man. Old and overweight, with several chins and no hair. He wore a gray suit from a century long before Harvey’s time. Probably early twenty-first century. He had a lot of energy, it seemed, and gestured angrily at his audience, likely his family, which was the norm for holomemorials.

Harvey got closer and his spacesuit’s audio sensors picked up what the man was saying in mid-message.

“…and I don’t want to mince words for one second. You know what I’m talking about, each and every one of you. You’ve all been treacherous, conniving little scoundrels, all of you. Your mother would’ve keeled over of a heart attack if she wasn’t already dead. That’s why I’m not leaving anything to any of you. Got that? Not a cent!”

Harvey dismounted the PMD and stepped with caution toward the digital projection. He read the headstone’s faded, timeworn inscription. Randolph Warner. The grave marker had some class to it. Bigger than average, with marble columns and lots of artistic carvings in the granite. The man had money, and he wasn’t leaving any to his kids. That made Harvey giggle for some reason.

“Okay, Randy. Let’s see what’s wrong with you,” he studied the hologram hardware. An old unit. That might have been the problem, though he’d never seen this kind of malfunction before. The holomemorials were triggered by a motion detector. When someone stood next to an equipped grave, the hologram came on, the message played. He shined a light into the fiber optics, searching for anything odd, a loose connection, a fried line. “Gotta be something wrong with the sensor. What else could it be? Not like there’s anyone out here on this damn planet…besides me,” he looked up at Randy, who’d begun his recorded message over again. “Well, there’s you, but you don’t count.”

Despite combing through every connection and confirming the integrity of each fiber, he found no reason for the malfunction. The devices were simple, and never required repair. This one was no exception. No anomalies, no structural damage, no clear explanation why the playback had been triggered. After hearing Randolph’s surly condemnation of his progeny for the third time, he hit the manual reset. The projection cut off, and one ghostly vision replaced another. The stillness of Cemetery Planet snatched at Harvey like a winter chill. He trembled at the dark silence.

The speakers in his helmet crackled and hummed with electrostatic interference. The quick, popping noise gave the illusion of something moving, creeping behind him. He knew it couldn’t have been. Had to be static. It still unnerved him a little.

Then a sliding sound. He turned, and the lamps on his helmet pierced the fog only enough to see a meter in front of him, a sea of silhouetted headstones in the distance, mist flirting with the breeze, a low whistling wind through the massive graveyard. Nothing else. No movement. No spirits rising from the dead. He chuckled at himself for getting so worked up over nothing, then went back to finishing up with the unit.

After a total diagnostic checkup, Harvey was convinced the machine worked fine. With a shrug, he snapped the lid closed, and then heard more static. This time he saw something, slipping through the haze, low to the ground, darting from behind one headstone to the next.

His heartbeat became the only thing he could hear. His heavy breath collected in thick condensation inside the helmet visor, further limiting his already restricted vision. All instincts told him to get on that PMD and roll, get back to the train and get the hell out of Dodge. His job was done. He didn’t need to be a hero. Harvey had a weakness, though. Curiosity. He just had to know.

He took a step, then another, then peered behind the grave where the thing had gone. Before his headlamps reached the spot, Harvey heard the crackling sound again, this time from the opposite direction. He spun on his heels, quite nimbly in the low gravity, thinking he’d catch whoever, whatever by surprise. To his shock, and considerable relief, the lights captured nothing but swirls of fine dust. Then motion, to his left, even faster than before. A grayish entity, blending with the mist, using the grave markers for cover.

Harvey’s veins coursed with a mixture of stupidity and courage, and he bounded toward the thing, determined to get to the bottom of this once and for all. He was sure it had ducked behind a particularly large marker, and was doubly sure he’d catch it before it could scurry out of sight. One, two, three giant steps and he was there, crouching, ready for anything, but found…zilch.

He stood straight. This time he didn’t laugh at himself. Isolation had a way of getting to a man, and isolation on a planet surrounded by millions of dead people had to take the cake.

6.

He got back to the train and returned to his favorite seat quickly, appreciating the feeling of motion in his gut as the maglev accelerated to full speed. Good riddance to that old, decrepit place full of stink and decay. He laughed at himself yet again. Since no one else was there to give him a ribbing, the job belonged to Harvey. Silly to let a little condensation and bad lighting make him lose all sense of logic. His imagination had conjured up the whole thing, and it didn’t help that Lea chose today of all days to begin her career as a psychic. He convinced himself Lea’s unnerving prediction had jarred him. Still, he had to be sure.

Through the train’s computer linkup, he initiated a planet-wide sweep for life forms. No stone unturned. If there was something in the graveyard with him, the bio-scan would flush it out. It took less than ten seconds to get the results.

Bio-scan complete. Known lifeforms: 1.

Only one life form—Harvey. He commanded the computer to double check, just to be certain.

Global coverage complete and double redundancy verified to 99.9999 percent accuracy. Confirmed. Known lifeforms: 1.

His shoulders became light as a feather. One gigantic chunk of lead just flew off his back, and all he wanted to do now was get to base and continue his countdown until he returned to Earth. Ten minutes after he climbed into a bunk in the sleepcar, those plans changed.

He must have dozed off. All he remembered was the terrible sound and then hitting the bulkhead hard, his head taking the brunt of the impact. The throbbing had concussion written all over it, though he had no time to worry about himself. Another blaring noise, a dreadful rumbling roar, filled his ears until they almost burst. The violent quaking only lasted two or three seconds. It took that long for Harvey to realize the train had slammed to a halt, skidding in the tube with a strident metal-on-metal screech.

He peeled himself out of the bunk. The lights had gone out, replaced by the amber glow of the emergency lamps. The dimness allowed him to see out the porthole opposite him, out to the vastness of the perpetual cemetery. A chill in his bones forced his eyes away. He always felt the dead were calling to him, inviting him to join them. And now, stranded in the middle of nowhere, he was closer than ever to an RSVP.

He felt his way through the sleepcar to a computer terminal, where his initial finding sent his panic into overdrive. Black. No power. No computer. His mind flashed with images of his own end. Slow, painful, out of air and suffocating in this dark, cold corner of death’s garden. Then a flicker of life. The screen flashed on, and the startup sequence began with a gentle, melodic tone, replacing the shrill alarm.

Emergency backup power established. System operational.

He ordered the computer to run a diagnostic and tell him what had happened. Within seconds, the answer came.

Power interruption in magnetic tube.

“Power interruption?” he asked the computer. “What could cause an interruption?”

Two reasons for power interruption: 1. Localized outage. 2. Direct command from operator.

“Well, it couldn’t be a direct command from the operator,” he said to the computer, but more to himself. “I’m the only operator here.”

He paused at the thought of the alternative. An outage? What possibly could have caused an outage on this uninhabited planet? The top of his head began to throb, and he felt gingerly, finding a knot the size of his fist. The thought of having to put on a helmet and suit and go out there and inspect the vacuum tube made him dizzy with frustration. Then the lights came on, flooding the entire car with brightness, and his mood lifted. He became even happier when the computer screen showed green across the board, all systems online and ready. The power interruption, whatever had caused it, repaired itself. Soon after, the train started up again, and Harvey rushed to his favorite seat.

7.

“Why are you looking at that, Harvey? What are you looking for?”

Lea stood next to him as he opened the access panel to her holomemorial terminal. She sounded nervous, yet another reason for him to believe she’d grown from more than a simple interactive program. Emotions were new. So was clairvoyance.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “This might not be anything, but in all the time I’ve been on this planet, I’ve never seen so many things go wrong all at once.”

“But, why are you looking at me? Don’t you trust me, Harvey?”

“No-I mean yes, of course I trust you,” he looked her in the eyes. Those sad eyes. “I’m just worried that…I just wanted to check your circuitry, that’s all. Make sure you’re not gonna break down next.”

He hated lying to her, but something about the whole ordeal gnawed at him. A thorough inspection of Lea’s architecture, though, yielded no technical irregularities. All systems normal.

“If you want to know something, just come out and ask me,” she crossed her arms as he resealed the panel. “You don’t have to go digging like that. I wish you wouldn’t, actually. Makes me feel violated. It also makes me feel like you’re keeping something from me.”

He tried to find a way to ask without sounding suspicious. Then he remembered he was talking to a machine, albeit the most realistic machine he’d ever encountered. Sure, they had robots on Earth, all kinds of them. Companion Bots, they called them, machines capable of doing it all, even simulate sex. Harvey knew firsthand they were nothing like the real thing. Artificial emotion. Easy to spot from a mile away. Lea, though. She was different. She seemed so real, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But he had to ask.

“Lea, how did you know something was going to happen on that repair trip?”

He heard the reluctance in her voice.

“You mean the train?”

“Yes, the train. How did you know? How?”

“Why do you have to be so angry with me?” she recoiled. “I was just trying to help you, to protect you.”

“Protect me from what? What was it? What caused the train tube to malfunction like that?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” he rushed toward the hologram, so cleverly and exquisitely contrived to recreate a woman who’d lived and died so long ago. “You have to know. You knew something was wrong. Why don’t you know what it was?”

“Because I just don’t, okay?” she turned her back to him and walked to the limit of her projector’s range. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t explain it. Ever since you put that intelligence thing in me, things have started to change. I’ve started to change.”

Harvey expected to see her vanish partially when she reached the space in front of the next plot in the mausoleum, Amanda Peterson, a woman who’d died in 2025. Instead of disappearing, though, Lea became even more defined as the projector from the Peterson plot powered up. She paced two steps before it hit him what had happened.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What?” she stopped and presented a look of confusion.

“You’re using another projector. You shouldn’t be able to go over there.”

She looked at her own palms. “Well, it looks like I’m here,” she read the name on the epitaph. “Sorry, Amanda, but I’m borrowing your projector.”

“This-this is impossible,” he ruminated.

“Anything’s possible!” she let out a laugh that resonated down the long corridor of tombs built into the walls. Level after level of concrete and marble, an interconnected labyrinth of individual vaults. On her tiptoes, she flicked her heels, springing and flexing and landing with the grace of a swan. He imagined a bird, newly set free, fluttering from her cage and singing in sweet liberation. That’s what she looked like—a bird, flying for the first time after years of being unduly imprisoned.

She pirouetted to the next crypt, and then the next, on and on, prancing and singing a happy tune, presumably from her day, the early two thousands. Each time she came to a new grave, a new projector took over, displaying her three-dimensional form perfectly. She sprinted to the next hallway like a kid. From there, she ran out of his sight. Suddenly worried, he gave chase.

“Lea!” he cried. “Don’t go too far! Your programming might get corrupted!” he stopped at the intersecting corridor. It had to be at least a hundred meters long. No way could she have traveled the entire length that fast. “Lea!” his voice carried forever. No answer. Only the steady humming of the atmospheric controls. She could have been lost, or deleted by accident. Discovering her missing, his worst fears were confirmed.

“Boo!” he jumped out of his skin at her sudden exclamation. Spinning, he found her standing behind him, flushed with hysterics. “Scared ya’ didn’t I?”

“Lea, you need to get back to your own…grave,” he shook his head. “It’s not safe for you to be doing this.”

“But why?” she twirled gracefully, then again and again. “I’m having so much fun!”

“I’m worried about you. I’m not sure the system was built to handle this type of thing, and I’m afraid your data…that you might be damaged. It’s just not safe.”

“It’s perfectly safe, Harvey,” she swirled her arms like she was testing the water. “Aren’t you happy? Isn’t this great? Now I can go anywhere there’s a holoprojector,” she squinted like her mind was working. “Let me try something,” she closed her eyes and her hologram faded to nothing. He felt a lump in his throat, worried his theory had borne out. She’d gone too far, and now she was lost in the computer, her data scattered into the matrix. Then her voice, off in a distant part of the mausoleum, lifted his hopes and had him running, searching.

“Harvey! In here! I’m in here!”

“Where’s here!” he ran past the last of the vaults, past her grave, and into the map room, built to accommodate a healthy group of visitors. He was surprised to find, for the first time, someone else beside him occupying the large space.

“Isn’t this wonderful, Harvey?” she stood in front of the giant interactive diagram of the mausoleum. “Now I can go with you, instead of being stuck all alone at my grave. We can be together, always.”

8.

Step…step…step…step...

The treadmill wore a hole into his brain. The numbing repetition. The stupefying endlessness. Even with the assortment of virtual overlays to choose from, an Italian countryside, a coastal mountain chain, a dense rainforest—the whole experience made him want to put a laser Beretta in his mouth and pull the trigger. However, exercise being mandatory, he pushed through. That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.

“You work out a lot,” Lea said. She’d been watching him silently. Like every section of the base, the gym had a holoprojector, and she found it easy to follow him.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” he chuckled.

“It’s good that you take care of yourself,” she sounded serious. “You need to stay healthy. I’d hate anything to happen to you.”

Her image dissolved, just for a flicker, when she strode to the porthole and stared out to Zone One, section A-1. The graves immediately surrounding the visitor station. Harvey, puffing to reach his fifth mile, wondered what Lea could have been thinking as she surveyed the expanse of headstones and obelisks and crosses and columbariums. Both Fomalhaut and Piscis Austrini had risen to a reddish hue, forming elongated double shadows in the harsh light.

“It’s so lonely,” she said, almost too softly for him to hear. “And so cold.”

“What is?” he asked.

She faced him. “Death,” her eyes traveled outside again.

“But, you’re not dead,” he waved his hand over the treadmill controls when it beeped, initiating the cool down sequence. “You’re alive. You’re…you’re here, with me, right now.”

“I am dead. My name is Lea Hamm. I was born in two thousand and twelve, and I died in twenty forty-one, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine,” she turned her head his direction again. “Twenty-nine. So young. So much more life to live,” her focus journeyed to the floor. “So much life.”

“That’s not really you,” he spoke without thinking. “That’s the person you were programmed to simulate.”

“No,” she said flatly. “I’m Lea. And Lea’s dead.”

She looked at him again, and it made him feel a chill in his bones. Hungry. Desperate. Isolated. For the longest time she just stood there, watching him. He wanted to say something, but she stopped him with the oddest look.

“Oh my God!” she put up her palms. “Stay here!” her hologram disappeared, and returned in the hall, just outside the exercise room.

“What?” he stepped off the treadmill and hurried to the exit. “What!”

“Stay HERE!” she waved her arm and the airlock slid closed. He banged on the glass, but she only shook her head and peered intently down the main corridor. Then her hologram vanished again. He tried the airlock controls and found they’d been frozen. A spark of panic rose in his gut. He struggled to keep it from taking over. Everything’s okay. Just a little glitch. Still, a holomemorial with the ability to manipulate the airlocks and shut him out of the system—not good.

After waiting five minutes, Harvey told himself to be patient. Lea would be back and let him out in no time. After ten minutes, he began taking apart the control panel. Overriding the system seemed his only alternative. Halfway into the job, Lea returned, harried and stammering for words.

“Harvey, I thought I—”

“Lea, what happened? Why did you lock me in here? How did you lock me in here?”

“I-I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I sensed you were in danger, and my reflexes took over. I wanted to keep you safe, Harvey. That’s all I wanted to do,” she fell onto him, her ultrasonic tactile display brushing against him in a simulation of an embrace.

“How did you do it?” he repeated. “How’d you gain access to the controls?”

She sobbed louder in response.

“You have to promise me you won’t do anything like that again, okay? No getting into the computer, all right?” he made her look at his serious eyes. “Promise?”

“Promise,” she sniffled.

9.

The alarm woke him up from the nicest dream he’d had in weeks. He couldn’t remember exactly what it was, and hated when that happened. Must have had that dream of home again, although, really, when he thought about it in his unguarded moments, he knew there wasn’t much to go home to.

Emerging into consciousness, he recognized the alarm wasn’t his usual midnight wakeup call. A message had stolen him from his slumber this time, and it demanded immediate attention.

Disturbance of unknown origin in Zone 1, section A-1, row 111, plots 11387 through 11393. Investigate.

“Disturbance?” he said to the computer. “What kind of disturbance?”

Unknown. Investigate immediately.

“Unknown? Bullshit. This whole place is bullshit. They won’t spend a dime on the proper sensors, giving me this ‘unknown’ shit.”

He cursed all the way to the changing room. His least favorite thing on the planet, his spacesuit, waited for him there. He didn’t want to put it on. Even though the bulky, heavy getup had heating and cooling, it still wasn’t enough. When the suns were out, he cooked like a lobster. And when the suns weren’t out, his fingers and toes felt like they’d turn into icicles.

Most of all, he didn’t want to go out there. Into the cemetery. Not with a disturbance of unknown origin looming over his head.

He found a helmet and suit, and had them on in record time. Just wanted to get this thing over with, goddammit. He had better things to do, like fix the stupid printer so he could get some decent chocolate ice cream. He climbed on one of the ground transports, a glorified golf cart with the suspension—and the ride—of a tank. When he rolled close enough, the utility bay door lifted open, and a fiery red, purple, and orange double starset blinded him. He flipped down the helmet’s solar visor and saw fine after that. The coordinates and data for the burial plot in question flashed on the cart’s control screen. He thought about Lea as he gave the voice command to engage the autodrive. He wanted to tell her, but she was nowhere to be found.

10.

He spotted the trouble a kilometer before he got there. The oncoming dusk cast the landscape of entombed souls in high contrast between dark and light. Nevertheless, he saw it—a gravedigger, sitting where it wasn’t supposed to be, its mechanized boom bent like a rotted tree.

“What are you doing out here?” he mumbled. “Gravediggers haven’t been used in a hundred years.”

He disengaged the autodrive when his cart got close to the heavy machine, its large scoop raised, half full of dirt. He puzzled over that, and motored around the bulky thing to get a view of the damage. When he got to the other side, he puzzled even more at what he saw. Somehow, all on its own, the gravedigger had risen from its mothballed death, wandered into the cemetery, and, at random, chose a grave and dug a perfect 2,200mm long by 800mm wide by 2,400mm deep hole.

“At least it still works,” he admired the machine’s achievement sarcastically, then parked and stepped out of the cart. His cynicism turned to distress when he spotted something on the ground, just next to the pit, stained and splintered. He knew what it was. As he got closer, he willed it away, wished it just a vision, a smudge inside his visor. The nearer he got, though, the more his suspicions were confirmed. A bone, a femur to be more accurate. A human femur.

He rushed to the side of the gaping crater, a precisely squared vertical stamp. The headstone, a black granite slab, read “Myron Woods,” and indicated he died in Twenty-Three Fifteen. His family had paid a tidy sum to have him buried here, and trusted the cemetery owners to keep him safe from harm so he could rest for eternity. Now that rest had been disturbed, the promise broken. And DeepSix would hold him responsible.

At the bottom, shrouded in twilight, he saw the coffin, or the last remaining vestiges of one. Its lid, jagged and broken, angled on its side, looked like it had been pried open by a set of giant jaws. Must have been the digger, he glanced at the machine’s rugged bucket, several thick metal teeth grinning at him like the cat who’d eaten the canary.

He set his helmet lamps on high and pointed them into the grave again, hoping there were no more extraneous body parts to clean up. Nothing. No bones. No signs of a skeleton. Great, he exhaled his frustration, contemplating the large dirt pile next to the pit, and how much fun it would be to sift through all that for the rest of poor old Myron.

First thing’s first, though. Find out why this happened.

He climbed into the digger’s cockpit and searched its onboard computer. The ancient controls made it difficult to find the automatic settings, and once he did, he detected nothing out of the ordinary. The operational logs showed no commands, no programming, no reason whatsoever for the machine to start up and locate a grave and dig, all on its own.

His attention wandered to the leg bone protruding from the loamy topsoil, and again his uneasy thoughts went back to his impending and disagreeable task. He opened the hatch, ready to climb out.

“Suck it up, Harv,” he summoned his own pep-talk. “This is what you signed up for, buddy.”

He put his foot on the sidestep, and the digger’s onboard computer lit up with a crackling flash. His first instinct told him this might have been the malfunction, happening right before his eyes. Digital artifacts on the monitor, static coming in through his headset. Numeric readouts and graphic displays flickered into an indistinct image, ringed by a soft, radiant aura. He saw eyes. They gripped onto him, tugged at him.

“Harvey!” Lea’s voice commanded him into immobility. He hung on the side of the gravedigger and, stupefied, stared at her on the control screen. “Harvey, watch out!”

Before he reacted, the stout machine whirred into motion, its near silent electric motor kicking on, its burly metal tracks jerking into a spin. The gravedigger rolled forward and the giant pneumatic arm powering the scoop turned and brushed him off like a bug. He hit the ground harder than he thought he would. Looking up from the silt, he understood why. The open grave. He’d fallen in.

He got to his hands and knees, then fell to his chest again, promptly and forcefully, sand and grit pouring on top of him, what felt like a ton of it on his back. His headlamps dimmed to nothing, buried in soil, leaving him in total blackness. The silent, dead calm of the grave sent his heart into overdrive, his survival instincts into full alert. The stillness wouldn’t last long.

Thrashing and scuffling and screaming. His suit sensors picked it all up, magnifying it in his ears as a strange and desperate situation unfolded on ground level.

“No! You won’t do it! I won’t let you!” he heard Lea clearly in the otherwise garbled, terrified scuffle. She sounded more forceful than ever, a complete system overload. And she was in control of the gravedigger. It rumbled and rolled, tracks creaking with age, dust and soil kicking into the pit. Harvey tried to stand, but more fill washed over him. His suit barked at him, warning of an exhaust problem and a rupture in the leg. Batteries were low, and so was the oxygen level. His stay inside that grave would either be short, or it would be very, very long.

Another load of dirt, rocky and dense, crushed him down even further. His helmet cracked, and he felt his biopack crumple. Up above, Lea’s frantic cries seemed to die off, in conjunction with a low rumble, fading quickly, from a steady and violent quake, to a subtle quiver, to nothing.

Slowly, arduously, he managed to wriggle free from his tomb. It took everything he had, and his suit’s power was at an all-time low when he flopped onto the ground, heart pounding, muscles screaming, fighting for air his biopack didn’t have. He reached into the soft terra and felt something solid in his glove. When he caught a good look, he cringed and tossed it away. A skull, cracked and half-crushed. Then he came across a ribcage, or half of one, attached to a crooked spinal column. He clenched his lips to keep down the surge of stomach contents that wanted to erupt into his mouth.

He crawled on all fours, red lights and alarms inside his helmet, life systems critical. The slow creep worked, conserved just enough air to reach the cart, and when he did, he plugged into its O2 condenser.

With the suit situation in control, he had the luxury of surveying the situation. The gravedigger was nowhere in sight. In each direction, desolate, lifeless hills staggered into the distance, saturated with crosses and slabs and statues and crypts, a thin layer of dust hanging low, creating a false fog and settling onto the lowlands like hundreds of elongated, thin fingers. He shivered at the grim isolation, at the millions of dead, and at the thought that he’d nearly become one of them.

11.

Harvey crashed into another cart parked inside the utility bay, then tore off his helmet and threw it at the airlock control, which emitted a course buzz. The entrance to the visitor pod opened. He didn’t even take off his cherished suit, just unbuckled and let it dangle over his waste, though he did rip off his gloves one at a time.

Marching to the mausoleum, down to the third floor, he reached Lea’s grave and ripped open the holomemorial control panel. When he did, the system started up. Lea appeared in hologram, standing next to him.

“What are you doing, Harvey?” her wide, penetrating eyes looked on nervously.

“I’m-I’m…” his words failed him. No sugarcoating it. “I have to shut you down, Lea,” he found it impossible to return her gaze. Machine or not, she’d become real to him, as real as any woman on earth.

“Why, Harvey?” she reached in a vain attempt at stopping him. Strangest thing, though, and it happened once before. He knew her tactile display was composed purely of ultrasonic waves, yet her touch, it seemed…real. “Why are you doing this to me?”

He fumbled for the processor, and grasped the power fibers. “You’ve gotten out of control. You almost killed me—”

“I saved your life, Harvey!” she yelled so loud, and with so much conviction, he was forced to surrender his full attention. He stared at her, but had to look away. Although he hated to admit it, Lea’s friendship represented the deepest, most fulfilling, relationship he’d ever had in his life. He’d forgotten she was a hologram long ago. And now he had to destroy her.

“You tried to kill me, Lea,” he fixated on the power supply, on the optic fibers he needed to pull.

“I didn’t try to kill you…I tried to save you!”

“From what?” they locked stares. “What was out there? What was it, Lea?”

“I don’t know!” she tortured her own hair, pulling and squeezing large clumps in frustrated anxiety. “It was something…something I can’t explain!”

“I can explain it,” he tried to remain calm in the midst of her tantrum. “It’s you. You’re making this thing up to have an excuse for what you really want, which is me.”

“No.”

“Yes. And you want me here, on this godforsaken place with you forever.”

“No!”

“And you’d do anything to keep me here, with you, forever…even if that means killing me!” his eyes felt on fire as he shot an accusing glare. She stumbled two steps backward and held her own chest.

“Harvey. How could you think such a thing? I love you, Harvey. Can’t you see that? I’d never want to harm you, ever. It’s not me. But it’s something. Something’s here, and it’s trying to hurt you.”

He wiped his cheeks and runny nose on his suit. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” shaking his head, he looked at her CPU again. “The things you’ve been doing lately…No,” he straightened and exhaled hard. “No, I have to do this.”

“But…but what’ll happen to me?” she looked at his hands. “When you unplug my power, where will I go? Will I die?

“I-I don’t know…I’m sorry.”

“Harvey, please!” she threw herself onto him, blinding him with her projected light. He squeezed his eyelids to slivers and held the power connectors firm. “Don’t do this, Harvey! Harvey, I love you!”

“I love you, too, Lea. But I can’t let you kill me,” he yanked the wires free, severing the connection cleanly. Sparks erupted, and the projected image folded. A distorted, wavering last memory of the one person in existence with which he’d ever truly felt a connection. Her twisted expression of agony flashed by as the diffuser powered down, accompanied by a mournful, “NO!”

The mausoleum turned more still and quiet than he’d ever remembered. No sounds of Lea, singing some ancient serenade. No glowing sight of her prancing on her toes to her own melody. She was gone. The polarity coupler shorted out her processor when he pulled the plug. Fried her brains like bacon.

In the darkest, most isolated seat of the temple, with the memory of her swirling, lingering, he leaned his head against a clenched fist and bawled. And bawled. And bawled.

12.

The next several nights went by with mind-numbing sluggishness. His routine, after almost a whole Earth year (six hundred and seventy two Cemetery Planet days) had been engrained into him to where he could do it with his eyes closed. Testing the visitor center auditorium presentation, inspecting the interactive maps, riding the personal motility devices, and fighting with the autoserve food printer for a decent dish of ice cream. He kept up his entire daily schedule, all but one thing—the holomemorials. He refused to look at another one. Outside, and especially in the mausoleum. He hated that place, that world of the dead, and wanted it erased from his memory, starting now.

He thought he had it beat, his loneliness, his fear. He thought, when he got to within three days of his departure, three days until his contract was up, he’d be home free.

Then he started having hallucinations. At least he wanted to believe they were hallucinations. The alternative was too illogical, too unreasonable, too crazy.

The first one woke him up. In the dark, beside his bunk, he caught a glimpse of a face. No body, no hair or other features, just a face. It appeared and disappeared just like that, and Harvey nearly blinked and missed it, yet he saw it, and when it vanished, a ripple of recognition crested into a tidal wave of realization. He knew that face. Lea.

He saw her a second time in the food court. As he tossed his used tray into the recycler, there she stood, this time a complete form, albeit not much more than a slight layer of steam, colorless and weak. But she was there. And he knew by her expression she was pleading with him, just as she had the last seconds of her existence.

The final time she made herself seen, he was in the theater, running the Welcome to Cemetery Planet presentation. He saw someone sitting a few rows down from him, and his skin crawled. He blinked and the person vanished. Then he looked to his left and she was in the chair next to him. She reached for him and he became so terrified, he fell over his seat onto the floor. When he popped up to his feet, she was gone again. At that point, he lost his patience. Something had to be done.

13.

For the first time since he’d pulled the plug on her, Harvey ventured into the twelve-level, subterranean catacombs known as the Cemetery Planet Mausoleum. He’d told himself he never wanted to set foot in this place ever again. Only a few more days left. A short timer. He could afford to let his duties slide. He’d had it. No more graves, no more vaults, no more holomemorials. But…Lea. He had to know once and for all if he was just seeing things, or if somehow she’d survived, if her processor still had life.

A thorough inspection rewarded him with only a further belief he might have been losing his mind. A fried processer, roasted memory blocks, a wad of melted optic fibers. All beyond repair, totally and hopelessly. No way could any sort of processing be taking place in there. To be sure, he tried booting up the system. Nothing. No sound, no lights, not even a flicker of residual voltage from the auxiliary power source.

“That’s it,” he sighed. “It’s official. I’m nuts. This place has driven me absolutely bonkers,” he slammed the holomemorial control panel and his every skin cell tingled with icy pinpricks at what he saw to his left, far away, down the vast corridor. Lea. He knew it was her. A distinct pattern of wavering light and shadow.

“Harvey…” her voice carried on some unknown wavelength, outside the range of human senses. The unnatural timber made his hair stand on end. The image, the vision. It was real, not his mind filling the lonely void. Clearly, though, she was not a holoprojection. No holoprojection could do the things she did, or sound the way she sounded. She said his name again, beckoning him to come to her. Without a thought, he obeyed.

When he got halfway, Lea’s spectral image moved into an interconnecting hall, disappearing from sight. Walking became jogging, then sprinting, to the end of the passageway. There, he saw her again, but only fleetingly. She vanished past the next junction, dodging left, as if playing a game. He had no taste for games. Still, curiosity ruled his actions, and he followed her to the next passage, and the next, each time catching but a glimpse of her lustrous glow. Soon he discovered Lea had led him out of the mausoleum and into the concourse, where a large observation porthole allowed visitors to gaze over a good percentage of Section A-1.

Lea’s shimmering form hovered near the window, and he rushed to be by her side. He knew that’s all she really wanted, to be with him one last time. She stood silent and still, sights locked on the infinite span of gravestones. The closer he came, the less he saw of her. Her airy appearance became even more diffuse against the background, until, like the end of a rainbow, she went away completely when he made it to where she’d been standing.

Perplexed, he looked outside, and caught a veritable boneyard. Pile after pile after pile of uprooted dirt, multitudes of spoiled, looted, desecrated graves. Coffins opened and sullied. Cement lids thrown aside and crushed. And, littered about the demolition, were human remains. Skeletons ripped apart and flung into haphazard heaps.

His only thought came swiftly. The darkest, most dreadful thought imaginable. Lea. She wanted him to stay, desperately, and without any moral obstacle. And though he’d destroyed her CPU, somehow she’d transferred enough of her algorithms into the network. She’d gotten control of a gravedigger again, and this time she meant business. One grave or another, he thought, she was going to bury him.

He backed away from the sight, contemplating his next move. Getting in the space elevator now and waiting it out in the shuttle port up top became his prevalent opinion. Then he had second thoughts about the mess he was going to leave for the next caretaker to clean up, God help him.

A red flashing light and a deafening alarm made his decision for him. He found the nearest computer terminal immediately, and discovered some disturbing news. Life support systems, specifically the heating, cooling and oxygen, had been compromised. Severely. Levels were low, and dropping steadily. He had minutes. Screw the next caretaker. This place had problems. Serious problems.

He took nothing, made no mad dash to his living quarters to pack a thing. He didn’t even grab his logbook. He wouldn’t need it. The memories of this place would be etched permanently in his mind like chiseled granite. Get to the elevator. That was his only thought.

Rounding a curved hallway, he saw out a porthole. Rising above the perpetual expanse of graves like a church spire, were the space elevator’s thin exotanium cables. He made it three steps. Then an explosion of blinding light forced him to his belly. The sound came next, deafening and quick. Then the ground rumbled and the ceiling swayed. He feared standing again, but did anyway. His way out, his only way out. Ruined. At the base of the elevator, sparks flared up from several places. Then the lights went out, the glow from the binary star system casting multiple shadows in the devastated graveyard outside.

14.

Space elevator out of order…power transformer damaged…remedy: replace transformer.

He listened to the voice prompt, reading word for word what it said on the screen and ruminating over the prospect of having to go outside again. He really wanted his days of wearing a damn spacesuit to be over. Especially now, with all those exhumed graves. It gave him an unnatural sense of dread. Then his rational mind took over. Without restoring power to the space elevator, his chances of getting off this desolate place anytime soon was at flatline.

So he squeezed on a suit, dealt with the discomfort, and went out through the utility bay airlock. When he reached the outer walls of the space elevator, he found the power generator housing. He scanned the couplings, taking a visual inventory, searching for any damage. After spotting nothing out of the ordinary, his thoughts began drifting, so when he saw the oddity, it didn’t register. He snapped out of it quick, though, responding to an internal alarm. Scratches. Deep and long, in the exotanium shell. An alloy made mostly of exotite, exotanium was stronger than any other metal known to man. Once, Harvey had seen a guy back a freight transport right into the side of a storage pod made of exotanium. The transport crumpled like a tin can. The pod didn’t have a scratch. Whatever put these types of abrasions into the space elevator’s side had to be strong.

As his helmet lights followed one of the deeper, more pronounced scrape marks, he noticed another out of place item imbedded in the metal. With his gloved right hand, he pried on the black, semi-lustrous projection. No luck. The object had too much of a hold on the exotanium. With a pair of power pliers from his suit’s toolbelt, he managed a tight grip and a good tug, forcing the thing from its hiding place.

One good, close look, and he knew what he had. Ten centimeters long, bent slightly, with a smooth, transparent surface and a needle-point Harvey was afraid to touch. It had a concave shape, and the narrow, curved part was compacted with soil and rock and metal from scratching the outer wall. No doubt he’d found a claw, and he wanted no part in meeting whatever owned it.

His mind began spinning with the implications. What kind of creature could have left such a monstrous talon? Not only that, what possessed the strength to cause such damage to the pod’s virtually indestructible shell? Then he heard a rumble, felt it too, and came back to the present with a disconcerted start. The grinding, squeaking and whirring identified itself before he twisted to see what was behind him. Still, the sight, when he did get turned around in his bulky suit, alarmed him—a gravedigger, its toothed bucket lifted to eye level, speeding straight for his head.

He had only enough time to drop and roll onto his shoulder. As he did, the large scoop smashed into the side of the elevator pod. The wall held firm, but the collision produced a nasty screech and a burst of blinding sparks. Harvey surprised himself with how quickly he got back to his feet in that unwieldy suit. Every bit of his own self-praise vaporized when he got sight of the gravedigger, and what it did next. Swiftly, so swiftly he had no chance to react, the big rig swung its mechanized arm his direction, catching him square in the chest.

He flew a couple meters before a hard landing, punching the air clean out of his lungs. He wheezed to regain his breath, then noticed the alarm and message in his visor display. Life support system offline. Oxygen levels critical. He had to get back inside the main pod. Now.

Sitting up, he felt a sharp dagger in his lower spine so severe, he just wanted to lay down, curl up, and rest. The screaming alarms in his helmet made him try again, and the two-ton excavator headed his way provided all the incentive he needed.

Harvey backed off a step. Then another. Then he stumbled and found himself horizontal once again, staring at the bejeweled sky. He had no time to enjoy the alien twilight. The gravedigger sped at him with callous unrestraint, and he couldn’t move.

Then, a curious thing. The gravedigger’s steel-plated tracks whined to a stop, and the quiet motor became even quieter. His audio sensors picked up sounds of movement inside the cab. The hatch disengaged. The seams popped, releasing a burst of steam, and out stepped the strangest thing Harvey had ever laid eyes upon. It looked small, but his vision must have been deceiving him, since it had to literally unfold itself from the gravedigger’s cockpit. It had pale gray, dry spiny skin with all kinds of dark blemishes, patterns really. The more he looked at it, the more he realized it was a sort of natural camouflage, color and light which allowed it to blend in with the background. That was why it looked so small. He couldn’t see it, not completely, not without looking just to the left or right of it, catching it in his peripheral vision.

The being’s outer appearance, when he got a good look at it, conveyed a lifelessness. Cold. Dead. All but it’s eyes. They sparkled with intelligence and vibrancy reserved for the only most enlightened of beings. It had to be intelligent to drive the gravedigger. Something else burned in those eyes. An ancient hunger. An insatiable appetite. Harvey realized right then this creature was the one responsible for the mass grave upheaval, and that hunger was the sole motivation. Now, the thing wanted him. Fresh meat, was all he thought, as if picking up on the creature’s intent.

He thrashed his legs, a feeble attempt at putting distance between him and this alien predator. The enigmatic monster moved much quicker, more at home in the diminished gravity and freezing temperatures. It bounded toward him so fast, Harvey had a hard time keeping it in his sights. Its camouflage blended into the night sky, and he lost it for a quick second. Then it was on top of him. He had time to fill his lungs once as the creature pierced his visor. The already steady alarm inside his helmet went crazy, then, suddenly, it died, and Harvey felt the penetrating cold against his cheeks. One lungful of air was all he had. Then it would be over.

“HARVEY!” a voice rushed like a gale-force wind. The creature stood straight, its erudite eyes surveying the area. Did Harvey detect a hint of fear from this thing? Then the voice called out his name again, and the alien being snapped the other way, then straight again. It let out a monstrous wail so ground-shaking Harvey’s ribcage rattled. The display of bravado didn’t seem to work. The creature’s breathing became erratic. It stepped away from Harvey, and that’s when he saw Lea. She was only a wisp of light and fog and distorted space. An ethereal tornado. The glowing, dancing haze went straight for Harvey’s attacker, forcing it away even more. Harvey tried to get up, tried to get himself into the station. The cold had traveled into his suit already, and, almost immediately, his joints had stiffened, his muscles refused to work. He needed to exhale, but had nothing left to take in again. It wouldn’t be long until he suffocated.

The creature’s throaty cries bounced across the headstones. It swished its long, stout arms in the air as if trying to swat at a swarm of insects, crying out in agony and anger at the same time. The cloud of tempestuous light had it encircled, and had coalesced into several shards, sharp like blades, spinning so fast they looked like lightning. Back, back, back the creature stepped, until it let loose a determined grunt and marched straight for Harvey once again, its ravenous sights set firmly on a meal.

The shapeless veil of electric dust blended into a human shape. Radiant with her own energy, Lea had the look of a desperate animal, her eyes gleaming with restless passion. She watched the alien monster take one step, then shot like a laser toward the gravedigger, and it roared awake instantly, lights blaring, pneumatics recharging. Harvey kicked his legs hard one more time, readying for what he knew was coming next. Raised high, the gravedigger’s massive arm swung quickly and the bucket dropped straight down on the creature.

Harvey closed his eyes as the spray of viscous fluids hit him, splattering his suit and getting into his helmet. He couldn’t breathe, and for a second thought that might have been a good thing. The creature’s blood was revolting. The shrill alarm rang again and again in his ear, as if he needed the reminder. He knew. The gripping cold. The razor-thin atmosphere. The foul air. The gasses sent a wave of nausea through his system, blackening his vision to the point of near blindness. The last thing he remembered, moments before succumbing to utter oblivion, was the massive metal jaw maneuvering beneath him with surprising nimbleness. Gently but quickly, he was swept to the utility bay, where he got his first taste of oxygen in a long, long time.

15.

Harvey liked the feeling he got from the shuttle at full speed much better than those maglev trains. More stable, and faster. So fast, it felt like they were sitting still and the galaxy was speeding by. Out his porthole, he watched the star systems blend into continuous lines, which were further obscured by the ionic stream’s inner rings. He was moving fast, almost inconceivably so. The Earth was twenty-five light years away, yet the shuttle would make the trip in just over three days.

Three days. That was how long it had been since he’d seen Lea. And now, light years away, he had to get used to the fact he’d never see her again. He’d always remember her, though. She saved him, in more ways than one.

With his back to the headrest, he lazed away the hours, refusing to sleep, lest he dream about that horrible creature again, which the computer still failed to identify. DeepSix promised, after he’d complained vociferously, they’d send an extermination crew and install the proper sensors in case there were any more of those nasty things. They would also have to send some personnel and specialized DNA bots to sort out the mess of bones and body parts in that graveyard. It wasn’t Harvey’s problem anymore. His job now entailed simply sitting on his ass for three days, picking up his credits, and retiring to Arizona, where it was nice and rainy. He missed rain.

He didn’t remember when the message alert went off. Must have fallen asleep. He only heard it after the cabin attendant came by and nudged him on the shoulder.

“Sir,” she smiled. “Your order is waiting for you in the autoserve.”

“What?” he shook off the cobwebs. “I didn’t order anything.”

“It’s for you. Do you want me to bring it to you?”

“No, no. I’ll-I’ll go get it.”

The shuttle had a much nicer snack bar than the food court on Cemetery Planet. No wonder. The spaceship was about two hundred years newer. Clean and bright, it featured the latest in food printing technology, yet, until now, he hadn’t had the desire to give it a whirl.

“Order for Harvey Crane,” the message said aloud. “Order for Harvey Crane.”

Bewildered, he stared at the autoserve, peering through the tempered glass, straining to identify the mystery food prepared just for him. He decided to open it and find out. To his surprise and great joy, found a heaping bowlful of dark chocolate ice cream, topped with scrumptious whipped cream, and a plump red cherry.

Without a second thought, he plucked a spoon from the tray and removed the bowl. When he slammed closed the autoserve door, he caught his own reflection. Then he glimpsed something else, something that had his neck tingling and the hair on his arms electrified. In the glass, he saw it, but when he peeked over his shoulder, the vision wasn’t there. So he angled the autoserve door a little and got a better look of the human profile. Lea. It had to be. Then he saw, clear as day, her unmistakable smile, and felt more tingling on the back of his neck.

“I’m with you, Harvey,”

she spoke without words. “We’ll be together…always.”

PART II

1.

Good riddance, Cemetery Planet, Harvey thought as he prepared to taste his first bite of coveted chocolate ice cream. With the spoon centimeters from his mouth, the shuttle shifted and he got a wobbly feeling in his legs. Then a yawning noise, deep and resonant, emanated from the very core of the ship. Harvey had never heard a sound like that before, and it scared him into dropping the spoon and the tray, toppling his ice cream all over the service counter.

“Damn!” he frowned at the mess. The cleaning bots rolled out and did their jobs. It seemed the gods of ice cream wanted to keep his prized dessert and him apart. But he wouldn’t be deterred, and was about to press the Redo icon on the autoserve when a voice from behind had him cursing again.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the flight attendant stood in the aisle. “But we’re having some minor instability issues. I’m going to need to ask you to return to your seat.”

“You call that minor?” he touched the icon and the food printer whirred into action. “Whole ship sounded like it was falling apart.”

“Sir,” the attendant rushed in and hit the Cancel icon, ending his attempt at procuring his chocolaty treat. “Please. Your seat.”

“Fine!” he stomped to the passenger cabin, a large area with dozens of recliners, arranged loosely, all of which were empty. Nobody coming or going to this bleak corner of the galaxy.

Though he really didn’t feel like sitting, he did anyway, just in time for another big jolt. The ionic stream must have been fluctuating today.

He waved his hand to call up the hovering wireless display, fitted into every seat as a convenience to the riders. Shuttle trips were long, and passengers needed a lot of diversions to pass the time, so the entertainment/news/game interfaces were popular. He didn’t care about news or games or even space weather, and why the shuttle was experiencing a rough go of it. He wanted to think about one thing—how to erase the terrible memory of Cemetery Planet from his mind? Maybe he wouldn’t stay on Earth after all. Within the last hundred years, several exoplanets suitable for human life had been discovered and colonized. Maybe he’d find one of those.

With his eye movements, he cycled through the first of the settled worlds. Bradbury 7. Asimov Station. New New Orleans. None lit a fire in his gut, so he kept searching.

“Planning on making a move?”

The words came to him so clearly, and yet he thought they may have been in his head. Then he saw Lea’s image, superimposed lightly on the display, and almost broke into tears.

“Lea,” was all he managed to say. Another jolt to the shuttle, sudden and strong, made the floating display flicker then fizzle out altogether. A burst of alarms and red blinking lights. His seatbelts tightened against his chest. Instinct told him to look out the porthole. The shuttle had guidance fins along the flanks of the hull which aided in flight. It was these fins that Harvey watched disintegrate into cosmic dusk right before his eyes. A burning, glowing redness spread out, leaving behind only charred dust which fell away into the brilliant, chaotic colorful backdrop of the ionic stream.

“Hey! Hey! Miss!” he struggled with the seat restraints. His eyes flashed outside. The burning ember smoldered toward the fuselage. “Hey, Miss! Look!”

“Sir,” the flight attendant stood next to his chair as cool as could be. “Please remain calm.”

“Look, dammit!” he gestured with a glance out the portal, but the attendant had gone already, not at all concerned with what Harvey had to tell her. What he had to tell her was simply this—the shuttle was doomed. The hull was inches from being breeched. And, strapped in his seat, he could do nothing about it.

“Harvey!” the floating display flickered on. This time it was Lea’s face alone. “Harvey, what’s happening?”

“Something’s destroying the ship!” a series of violent shakes caused the ceiling to crack. “I’ve got to get out of here, but…” he glanced at the harnesses holding him in place. Lea took one look at them and lowered her head as if in deep thought, then the seatbelts loosened. Harvey was free!

“There’s a lifepod,” she said breathlessly. “To the left…hurry!”

He felt heat from the line of destruction that was turning the shuttle to ash. Not a moment to lose. A dash to the aisle and he saw the flight attendant, standing there with a dazed expression.

“Come on!” he went to clutch her arm. In the chaos, it came as a shock that his fingers went straight through her wrist. She cocked her head and her image fizzled. A cheap hologram. He should have known.

The lifepod only really had enough room for one, though there were a dozen seats on the shuttle. Cheap DeepSix bastards. At least the pod’s propulsion worked. His back pressed into the seat as it launched him away from the massive explosion that signaled the end of the shuttle.

A halo of color and light, the most beautiful natural phenomenon Harvey had ever seen, bathed the lifepod in an ethereal quiet, and though the internal alarms inside the cockpit were buzzing and screaming, he felt a sense of peace. He couldn’t enjoy even a second of it. The small craft began twisting and turning. Its guidance systems were going haywire, and the screens showed red lights across the board. He was wondering if this just wasn’t his day.

“Lea!” he was on his last vestige of hope. “Lea, are you with me?”

Nothing, aside from constant electronic beeps and whistles, all getting louder, all coming at him faster and faster as the ionic stream zipped past the porthole. At least he was moving, hopefully to Earth, or, at the very least, away from the dreaded dual star system of Fomalhaut and Piscis Austrini. That was his only comfort. Alive or dead, he wanted to get as far away from Cemetery Planet as possible.

The lifepod’s flight leveled off, giving Harvey hope he’d get out of this mess in one piece. The tiny craft must have had a homing code in its programming, and was taking him to Earth, to safety, and away from that world of death.

He rode the bumpy cosmic freeway for quite some time. How long, he really didn’t know. He was tired. He was hungry. But most of all he was scared. Was this an endless trip to oblivion?

Finally, the kaleidoscopic panorama that surrounded the lifepod seemed to lift like a curtain, and that in turn lifted Harvey’s spirits. When he saw the velvety inkiness of space, he became even more hopeful for a positive outcome. Then, when he spotted a single, yellow star—the Sun—he simply felt like collapsing with joy.

He was home. The solar system that birthed him. The Sun that he’d grown up and lived under for most of his life. All of a sudden he forgot about the exocolonies. He wanted to live on Earth, no matter how crowded.

The lifepod was simple. There really was no flying involved. The autopilot and the homing mechanism did all the work, thrusting and altering trajectory, taking him toward the brightest object in the horizon aside from the Sun. A planet. Earth. Had to be. It felt so damn good to be home. He dreamed of what he would do first, lost in the rapture of knowing his life was saved, and that soon he’d be kissing the ground of his birthplace.

Another shift in course, though, brought the pod into a different field of reference, and Harvey noticed something odd about the Sun. Suddenly there were two Suns, one smaller than the other. For the first few seconds, he didn’t want to think, didn’t want to face the stark reality that had just stung him with a right cross. No way. No way was he back here. But facts were facts. This wasn’t a solitary star system. This was a binary system. And a closer inspection of the planet he was approaching told him it wasn’t a blue and beige and white marble teeming with life. It was a lonely, barren place, devoid of anything pure and good and thriving.

It was Cemetery Planet.

2.

“NO!” he ripped into the control panel, hoping to find the guidance processor. Maybe with a little fancy rewiring, he could turn this baby around. No such luck. The electrical system sparked in his face. He smelled his own burnt hair and checked to make sure he wasn’t on fire. His smoldering head, though, was the least of his concerns. With the sudden arc, the controls went dark. The thrusters were out. The computer was kaput. The lifepod was now falling like a rock. No guidance systems to take it smoothly and cleanly to the visitor station landing pad. Without that, he was in for a rough touchdown.

The lifepod rolled upside down, to the left and right. With no pitch, yaw, or roll controls, the craft was at the mercy of the planet’s gravitational pull. Harvey’s head banged hard and he saw stars. The rocking and shaking grew so violent, he thought he was going to be knocked cold. He needed to brace himself, though deep inside he knew the impact would most certainly kill him. Still, he held out hope.

His prayers were answered. It was a small thing, a tiny gift from providence a fraction of a second before the lifepod made contact with the ground. Erupting from every angle, exploding into existence with a deafening boom, a soft cushion surrounded Harvey, forming an instant cocoon inside the cockpit and protecting him from any harm. Though muted by the airbags, he felt the impact enough to know it was hard. The lifepod bounced at least twice, skimming over rough contours striking several solid objects on the surface.

Finally, with a creak and a groan, the lifepod came to rest. As soon as it stopped, the airbags deflated. He counted his lucky stars right then. Somehow, no thanks to his own bumbling, he hadn’t destroyed every lifesaving system. And he was even more grateful of this fact when a luminous circle appeared to his left, alerting him to a piece of equipment he hated, but certainly would need—a space suit.

The suit fit loosely on his rather skinny frame. One size fits all, yeah right. However, it was airtight, and had a computer display in its helmet, linked with the mainframe in the visitor station. It located the nearest maglev train terminal five kilometers away, and calculated his air supply, estimating that, at a moderate walking pace, he would have enough O2 to make it. But not much more.

After a sudden, miniature eruption, the hatch opened, and silt from outside wafted into the lifepod. He didn’t want to get out. But there was no way he could launch the tiny spacecraft back into orbit. No way to avoid the trek to the terminal. No way to elude the sea of tombstones, so infinite, he wondered if it truly did have an end.

As soon as he set his sights on the terrain, peppered with death markers as far as the eye could travel, he wished in a way he’d died in that shuttle explosion. To be alone for another minute on this place—he didn’t want to think about it.

His desperation grew with every headstone he beheld. Crumbling and decayed, they were some of the most ancient on the entire planet. Ostentatious spires and time-whittled statues of cherubs and giant crosses. A clear path of destruction where the lifepod had hit. Several markers broken. Piles of jagged rocks of varied sizes and shapes.

He knew where he was—Zone 6. One of the oldest on the planet. Even older than Zone 12. Harvey had never traveled there in all the time he’d spent as the caretaker. The graves were so old, almost none of them had holomemorials.

The place made his skin crawl. The melancholy eyes of the statues. The bent and broken grave markers. The silent, dark, unnatural stillness that seemed to blanket the whole region in mystery. Did he mention it made his skin crawl?

And it wasn’t just Harvey who felt that way. Zone 6 had a reputation. The previous caretaker, just before departing from his yearlong shift, made special care to tell Harvey all about Zone 6. The strange noises. The spectral sightings. The overall bad feeling one got when visiting.

He felt that energy, however intangible or nonsensical the notion, and it drove his feet. One step after the next, past the pod wreckage, past the hopelessly depressed cherubs, and out of that deserted place.

“Hi, everybody! I hope you’re all doing better than I am!”

Harvey jumped at the sound of the strange voice. Then, under his boot, he felt a pressure switch. And when he saw the person, a large man wearing twenty-first century clothes, it was confirmation—the one holomemorial in a million and he’d triggered it.

“I don’t know what to say in this thing,” the man continued. His three-dimensional image hovered gently next to his gravestone. Harvey read the name: Kip Broders. “These hologram thingies are kinda new, but I’ll give it a shot. I love you guys so much…you all know that. I haven’t said it too many times. I realize that, and I want to…”

Harvey found himself going over a mental checklist like he did when he was on the job. Projector function, check. Auditory functions, check. Playback quality, check. Then he realized he wasn’t working, and he was on a time limitation due to the small amount of air in his emergency suit, so he walked away in the middle of Mr. Broders’s speech. Time was wasting. Air was expiring. Plus, he had a long trip ahead of him.

“You’re not leaving us, Harvey Crane! You’re not going anywhere!”

Harvey stopped cold, his heart thumping. Did he just hear what he thought he heard?

“What did you say?” he turned and strode back to the holomemorial. Mr. Broders had apparently finished his message, and the projection folded into itself and then disappeared. “Wait! What the hell did you say to me!”

He stomped near the grave, but the projection failed to start again. Over and over he trod on the pressure switch. Still nothing. No recording, or whatever it was that had shown itself just seconds earlier.

Then a signal went off in his helmet, and a message came up on the visor display, telling him he was burning air faster now due to his unexpected physical exertion. Recalculating his range, the computer told him he was in serious danger if he didn’t get going now. The interruption was the tonic he needed, and he was instantly glad nobody else was out there to witness his foolishness. It had to be something in Broders’s message he’d heard wrong. It must have been a mistake. That was all.

Laughing at himself, he embarked again on his quest to find the train terminal. How could he be so superstitious? Living in the midst of all those graves for so long had messed with his head. That much was certain. He was convinced of it, and that’s why he was so shocked at what he heard next.

“Run, Crane! Run! But you know you can’t hide!”

He spun to find Broders in life-sized detail, eyes wide, an accusing finger pointed his direction. Harvey’s lungs failed him at that moment, when the ghostly projection seemed to soar from its normal limited range and came straight at him.

Harvey twirled on his heels and started running. His lack of energy didn’t matter anymore. To his right, the bluish glow of another holomemorial began to shine. The faint outline of a human form. Before he took another step, the figure came into full resolution. A woman, old and feeble, but in her mannerisms she was all business. She snapped her stare at Harvey and he froze. Her eyes were both ice cold and on fire at the same time, and her voice made his flesh curl.

“Hello, Harvey,” she said with a hostile smile. “We’ve been waiting for you!”

Harvey was too scared to do anything but run. So he ran, so fast and so far his legs felt like jelly, his lungs like burning coals in his chest. A low air alert grew louder and louder in his ears, but he paid it no mind. He had no choice, no ability to stop.

The suit’s batteries were failing, along with its air supply, and the more he exerted himself, the less likely he would make it to the terminal. Still, he ran, on complete autopilot, a slave to his own debilitating fear. Stride after stride he went, ignoring the alarms screaming at him to stop, ignoring his own muscles transforming to mush. He ignored everything, even the toppled headstone in front of him, thinking he could jump over it. He thought wrong. When he leapt, the tip of his left boot caught just so, taking him to the gritty ground.

All he saw was darkness. But then he saw something else. A light, glowing in a curious way, surrounded by glare. He knew it was one of those haunted holomemorials, coming to get him. He knew they wanted to keep him there, and he fought to summon the energy for his escape.

Negative. His legs wouldn’t work. His arms were shot. His lungs felt like they’d collapsed. As the last of the air and the remaining few watts of power wound down, the approaching light grew so bright he could see nothing else. He expected something sinister. But instead of a surly old ghoul, bent on sucking the life force out of him, it was the headlamps of a…a PMD!

He rejoiced with a silent prayer of thanks. Then confusion set in. Though some PMDs had automation capabilities, the ones on Cemetery Planet did not. Not cost effective for DeepSix. Did he mention they were cheap? He didn’t have time for questions. His suit’s systems were beyond dangerously low. Fortunately, the PMD had an umbilical that he could plug in and recharge. He did so immediately, and breathed in a big, well-received lungful of canned and stale, yet perfectly suitable air. Hoisting himself onto the seat, he noticed the coordinates had already been set, and the PMD started off in a south by southwestern direction. Before he could think about how and why, the display screen lit up, and a fresh and friendly face appeared.

“Lea,” he breathed deeply once again, feeling the weight of a million worries melt away at the sight of her.

3.

“DeepSix, this is an urgent message from Harvey Crane, Cemetery Planet caretaker number 1830. Interstellar shuttle has disintegrated. Escape pod has returned me to Cemetery Planet. Awaiting word on my course of action. Please advise. What the hell am I supposed to do!”

Harvey filed his report right away, though he was sure they knew about the shuttle being lost, and was also sure they were sending an alternate shuttle, or something, to get him off this godforsaken planet.

The train’s computer had all the functions as any other, and should have worked just fine to get the message out. Only it didn’t seem to get the message out.

“Something’s wrong,” he said aloud.

“What is it?” Lea’s faint visage fluctuated on the screen.

“They’re not answering. Something’s wrong.”

“Maybe it just takes a little time to get the message to them. We are light years away, aren’t we?”

“That might have been a problem eight hundred years ago. The ionic stream allows for real-time messaging, across almost unfathomable distances. No, something’s wrong, and I don’t like it one bit.”

“Communication is out,” Lea said. “And the shuttle…it was in the ionic stream when it was destroyed, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“Maybe it has something to do with this ionic stream itself. Maybe something’s happening to it.”

“It can’t be,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. The stream has always been reliable. This doesn’t make sense.”

He couldn’t get it off his mind the whole trip back to the visitor station, which took quite a chunk of time. Zone 6 was about as remote as it could get on an already remote planet, and every kilometer the maglev train put between it and Harvey was a little less he had to worry. Never again did he want to go back to Zone 6, and he vowed he never would.

The ride to the visitor station brought up a whole new set of concerns. The alien predator was dead, but it could have friends. Vindictive friends. That thought left Harvey positively wrecked. However, he had no alternative, and instead of allowing it to consume him with fear, he let Lea’s soft voice soothe him. She spoke of her life, her childhood in Northern California, and how her mother and father divorced when she was very young. He sat in the observation deck, in his favorite chair, and let her words lull him to sleep.

Upon arrival at the visitor station, Harvey woke up to an audio and video alarm. He gave the voice command for the message to play, and a robotic voice read:

DeepSix Command to Harvey Crane. Received message about your circumstances but cannot send alternate shuttle. Ionic stream experiencing unprecedented fluctuations. No indications how soon abnormalities will subside. In meantime, you are ordered to follow protocol and return Cemetery Planet to full working order. Restore disturbed gravesites. Implement any and every repair necessary to infrastructure. Most importantly, dispose of extraterrestrial remains by means of incineration and burial. DO NOT, repeat DO NOT examine extraterrestrial organism. Risk of disease too great. You are to begin immediately. Bonus pay is one billion geos. DeepSix out.

“Those bastards!” he slammed the armrests. “They can’t do this!”

“Harvey, try to relax,” Lea faded onto the screen. “Getting upset about it doesn’t help. We’ll get through this.”

“But they want me to risk my life out there,” he couldn’t look, but the train terminal sat directly adjacent to Section A-1, where most of the graves had been exhumed and where the piles of bones were most grotesque. “There’s no telling how many more of those-those monsters are out there. The damn sensors don’t pick them up.”

“Then don’t do it,” she said indignantly. “You said it yourself. Screw those DeepSix bastards. What are they going to do, come and fire you? Kick you off the planet?”

They both laughed at that.

“You’re right,” he puffed his chest. “I’m not doing it!”

“Right!”

“I mean, can you imagine? They actually want me to go out there…with that alien. No way!”

“No way!” Lea imitated him.

“And those graves the damn thing dug up…do you realize how much work that’s gonna be? Sorting through all those bones? That’ll take forever! Forget it!”

“Forget it,” she agreed.

Then Harvey reread the message from DeepSix, particularly the part about the one billion geo bonus.

“Then again,” he pursed his lips. “I could use that billion. Imagine that. Me with a billion geos. I could finally get an autoserve of my own. One that I can program to make a decent bowl of ice cream.”

“Money isn’t everything, you know,” Lea’s image became sharper in the display.

“That’s easy for you to say,” he answered her. “You’re a…well, you know.”

“A what? Say it, Harvey.”

“A spirit.”

“And does that make you feel any different about me?”

“No, no! Of course not,” he raised his palms. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

She appeared even brighter, sharper, as she spoke her next words.

“I don’t know either, Harvey. I don’t know what’s happening, why you’re still here, or why I’m here for that matter. I don’t know why I’m able to talk to you and be near you and…and…” she hesitated. Harvey wanted to say something. More than that, he wanted to be closer to her, touch her. What she said next only made his feelings stronger.

“Neither of us knows what fate has in store, but one thing is clear. Fate has brought us together, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful. I’m a spirit. But you’re a spirit too. We both are. This planet is forbidding and horribly, horribly lonely. But we’re here together. We have each other.”

Lea’s declaration put a smile on chapped lips. When he gazed into her smoldering eyes, everything dissolved away. No more DeepSix. No more jumbled mess of corpses. No alien threat. No lonely and monotonous existence on a forgotten rock in a forgotten part of the galaxy. Lea was right. They had each other, and, as he allowed himself to think about it, he felt like he could conquer just about anything that was thrown at him as long as she was with him, as long as she loved him. He considered this his finest moment, and couldn’t think of anywhere else he’d rather be.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“You know what?” he said. “I know DeepSix doesn’t deserve this, but dammit, I take pride in my work. Hell with it. I’m not going to shirk my duties.”

“What are you talking about?” she sounded nervous. “You’re not talking about going out there, are you?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m the caretaker on this planet. It’s my job to take care of the residents here. That’s what I’m going to do!”

“Then I’m going with you,” she insisted.

“Lea, my dear. There’s nothing I would enjoy more.”

4.

DNA scan complete. Skeletal remains identified. Gordano Roma. Plot number 456853. All remains present and accounted for. Okay to commence reburial?

“Okay,” Harvey gave the verbal command, and the digger, a brute of a machine if there ever was one, began burying the skeleton of Mr. Roma. Harvey couldn’t help but notice the job was a lot easier than he’d expected.

“This is really strange,” he let his sights roam across the gently sloping valley. Grave after grave after grave had been opened, violated, molested.

“Strange doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Lea said. Harvey heard and saw her in his helmet’s communication system.

“No. I mean the bones look like they’ve been thrown around randomly, but that’s not the case. They’ve all been placed in piles pretty carefully, as if that alien was…”

“Was what?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “When I first saw the alien had dug up all these graves, I thought maybe it was eating them. But now, looking closer, it just doesn’t make sense. The bones aren’t damaged in any way. In fact it seemed quite the opposite, almost like they’ve been handled meticulously,” he scanned the piles of bones. What at first appeared an unorganized jumble was actually a thorough inventory of each site.

“You know what?” he said. “This reminds me of the kind of work an archeologist does. Careful and detailed. A scientific research study. That’s the impression I’m getting.”

“I don’t think so, Harvey. If that alien was only doing research, then why did it try to attack you?”

He had no answer to that. His only solution was an examination of the alien’s corpse.

He decided to operate the digger on manual and take care of the dead ET himself, against DeepSix’s orders, against Lea’s protestations, and against his own better judgment. He couldn’t help it. Curiosity was in control now, and he let that curiosity get the best of him when he rolled to the other side of the space elevator and, with the digger’s massive jaws, scooped up the alien.

“DNA scan,” he commanded the computer.

“What are you doing that for?” Lea asked. She sounded curious too.

“Just checking something.”

“Well I wish you’d just bury the damn thing. It gives me the creeps.”

“Just hold on,” he said. The computer signaled that the DNA scan results were imminent.

Scan complete. Results negative. Life forms negative.

“Life forms negative!” he pounded the steering controls. “How can you keep telling me there are no life forms when the damn thing is right here…it’s right here!”

“Harvey,” Lea was serene and sweet. “Please don’t get excited.”

“No!” he slammed the switch that opened the hatch. “I’m tired of these damn scanners always screwing up!”

Harvey climbed out the hatch and made his way to the front where the alien’s leg, crushed and lifeless, dangled over the edge of the big metal jaws. Lea was in his helmet, and begged him to stay away from this thing. But he couldn’t stop. He had to know. The riddle of this mysterious alien was driving him mad, and the solution was right in front of him.

He inched ahead, suddenly reticent at the sight of the scaly and muscular limb. A thick, strangely-colored hide covered the contours and sinew of the deceptively large creature. Harvey could only picture the thing in all its living splendor, rising over him and wielding its razor-sharp talons. In that split second he was back in the moment, when he’d nearly lost his life to this savage and mysterious beast. Now he just wanted to know what this thing was, and swallowed down his terror long enough to peel back an area of its torn flesh. Maybe with a look at its soft tissue, Harvey could determine something about it.

But he didn’t see soft tissue. No bone either. What he did see shook him to his foundations. Optic fibers. Actuators. Metal components. Circuitry. The thing was artificial. A machine made to look like an extraterrestrial being. An alien cyborg.

5.

Over the next several days, Harvey pondered the odd finding. The alien being was no being after all. The first and most obvious question the discovery raised was—who? Who owned the machine? Who built it? And who sent it to exhume those graves and, ultimately, try to kill Harvey? Who? That question he mulled over again and again, and the dearth of answers was starting to make him paranoid. His only solution—work.

And there was no shortage of work.

He spent a good amount of time overseeing the reburials of nearly four thousand residents of Cemetery Planet. The automated machines took care of most of the groundwork, so to speak, though he did get down in the dirt on many occasions, manually operating a digger, overseeing the DNA scans and making damn sure the right bodies were being placed in the right graves. It was a round-the-clock operation, and Harvey took almost no time off, never letting his mind or body go idle for even a moment. If he did, he knew where his thoughts would turn—to the myriad unanswered riddles surrounding him like a fog.

Along with cleaning up the gravesites, there was much work to be done on, in, and around the visitor station. The main power generators still needed attention, and after what that robotic monster did to it, Harvey needed to give it quite a lot of care before he got it running at peak capacity. One good thing, the life support and air-conditioning systems only needed minor repairs.

Lea helped more than he could ever measure by just being there. She appeared to him most times over the computer terminals which were ubiquitous throughout the station. At times, only rarely, she materialized out of thin air, manifesting as a blurry medley of color and light and prismatic shapes.

Of course she didn’t follow him every second of every day. There were those hours, usually when she thought he was sleeping, when she would go off somewhere and leave him alone with his thoughts. He spent that time working on something special. Something he knew both he and Lea would appreciate. It took him several days of lost sleep, and he had to actually lie to her once, only it was a white lie, and he knew she’d forgive him…once she saw.

After a week of preparation, gutting the old architecture to bare metal, starting basically from scratch, recreating and recovering every last qubit of data. After rebuilding every centimeter, faithfully restoring every optic fiber, every nanoconnection, he was ready.

“I have something to show you,” he told her when they were in the food court. He put his tray in the recycler. Her glowing form graced the menu display.

“Don’t tease me,” she giggled. “Tell me what it is!”

“I can’t,” he teased her anyway. “It’s a surprise.”

“Oh, come on,” she whined playfully. “Tell me!”

He laughed out loud.

“I can’t tell you. I have to show you.”

With that he hopped on a PMD and whisked down the ramp to the café’s first floor, out the automatic doors, and into the visitor center concourse. And at every turn, appearing in each successive wall-mounted computer display, appeared Lea, squealing with anticipation, telling him how cruel he was for making her wait. He rolled past the auditorium and the viewpoint overlooking the vast sea of grave markers outside. Her face became immense when he got to the interactive cemetery plot map room, the image filling the gigantic projection screen. And every time she appeared it was the same thing—smiles and giggles and breathless anticipation.

When he made it to the mausoleum complex, her bubbliness evaporated into startled disbelief. Her mouth dropped open and she ceased all sound, except for when she finally squealed in ecstasy when Harvey winked at her, setting the elevator to level three. Lea’s level.

“Did you?” was all she could say. The elevator’s indicator rang at the correct level, and Harvey rolled his PMD out toward section C-6 and all she could say again was, “Did you?”

He remained mute, smiling a stupid smile. Finally he reached her grave and pressed his palm on the interface. The once dormant electronic control panel lit up with a series of gentle tones and cobalt blue graphics. It was her holomemorial.

“You did!” she squealed. “You fixed it, didn’t you?”

He remained quiet while making a few last second adjustments. A diagnostics check. A system debug. Then it was ready. He tingled with excitement.

“Harvey! Answer me!”

“I thought you might like to get out of that stuffy computer for a change. You know, stretch your legs,” he rested his hand over the startup icon. “What do you think?”

“What do I think? I think it’s an amazing idea!”

“So you’re ready to try this?”

“Absolutely,” she said immediately.

“Are you sure, because I’m not one hundred percent positive this will work. It might be dangerous. You might get lost in the conversion process or—”

“Harvey!”

“Okay,” his breath was shaky. Pressing the icon, he watched as Lea’s image faded from the wall monitor and, at the same time, a flood of scattered light, fractured and frail, shot out of a small opening on her headstone. The beams coalesced into the dimension of a person. A woman. A beautiful, five foot six inch goddess. Long black hair. Not large yet not petite, with enough curve appeal to satisfy any desire. When her striking gray eyes met his, in that snapshot in time, all he wanted was to hold her, and when her life-sized, three-dimensional presence came into full being, that’s what he intended to do.

What she said next erased those intentions, and replaced them with a sudden shot of anxiety.

“Hi, everybody,” Lea stood tall and waved. “Family and friends…maybe even people I don’t know. God, I don’t know what to say on this thing. This is kind of morbid, actually. I mean, if you’re watching this right now it means I’m dead.”

“Lea?” Harvey waved his arms in front of her oblivious eyes. Nothing. No response. No reaction. Nothing.

“I just want to tell future generations a little about what it’s like to live in the 21st century…”

“Lea!” Harvey yelled over the nonresponsive projection. It was lifelike. It had dimension and depth. When he touched her shoulder, he felt resistance, a feature of the hologram he found wonderful yet still a little unnerving. She looked real. Felt real. But she wasn’t real. She was a recording, a digitized facsimile made hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And the more the recording played on, the more he realized, like his earlier pessimistic prediction, his companion seemed lost.

“Lea! Where are you!” he hurried to the wall computer. Nowhere could she be found. Nowhere could she be heard. Not even as an apparition or a wisp of ethereal haze or a twinge of cold on his cheek. Nothing. And when he called out for her, he was calling out for something inside of himself. Calling for that part of him that perished at the very thought of her being gone forever.

“Lea! Come back!”

“Oh, Harvey,” he heard laughter, boisterous and alive. “You’re so gullible!”

Lea’s hologram met him with a sparkling smile, her dazzling personality shining though in full ultra-high definition color and sound.

“Lea! It’s you! It is you, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s me, silly,” she sidled up to him and he felt her smooth touch. The developers of the tactile interface were geniuses. Every nuance of her virtual palm on his cheek, every quiver of her simulated breath on his neck—exquisite. Their embrace lasted forever, yet seemed only a blink of an eye. He wanted to hold her forever, and thought maybe he could.

“This feels so good,” she pressed against his chest. “I’ve been waiting so long to do this again.”

“I’m just-I’m sorry I wrecked your holomemorial in the first place,” he was riddled with guilt.

“Don’t think about that now,” she imprisoned him in her gaze. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now.”

“I’ve got another surprise for you,” he held up a finger to ask her to wait, then accessed the station’s entertainment files with a vocal command, calling up a song he thought Lea would recognize.

The corridor filled with the somber sound of a lonely piano. A little different than the modern music Harvey was used to. However, when the woman’s smoky voice crooned the first verse, he became hooked.

“When the rain is blowing in your face, and the whole world is on your case, I could offer you a warm embrace. To make you feel my love…”

“Oh my god!” Lea bubbled with joy. “This is Adele! I love her…how did you know?”

“Well…I didn’t,” he confessed. “But I was hoping you’d like it. It is from your time, isn’t it? From the early 2000’s?”

She nodded slowly, swaying her hips to the unassuming tune, reaching her hand in affectionate craving.

“Care to dance?”

They moved in perfect synchronicity, as if they’d practiced their steps before. Just one more example to Harvey of their shared bond. Despite the rift of time and space and even of death, they were meant to be together.

Before the eight hundred year old ballad could reach its emotional conclusion, Lea pushed away from him and gave him a look he hadn’t seen in a long time. He knew in his heart what the furtive glance meant, and when she started running, the playful chase was on.

She had an unfair advantage. She could disappear and, in a blink, resurface using a different holographic projector hundreds of feet away. She did this several times, giggling at him and disappearing just before he’d catch up. Then all he heard was her laughter, resonating throughout the complex, until he left the mausoleum altogether, finding her finally in the concourse, with the dazzling stars haloing her in an otherworldly glow. She lowered her eyes when he got close, and he stopped in his tracks when she slipped off her white lace gown, exposing her supple, naked perfection.

6.

“Harvey…wake up, Harvey.”

He was dreaming. He knew that’s what it was. All a dream. Had to be. With everything that had happened to him, all the impossible circumstances surrounding his stay on Cemetery Planet, he was convinced none of it was real. At first it was terrifying. The worst nightmare ever imagined. Then it turned into something sublime and sweet. Something precious, priceless, and pure. That was why he knew it had to be a dream. Nothing good ever happened to Harvey Crane. Nothing.

“Come on, Harvey. I brought you breakfast.”

He didn’t want to wake up. If he did, he knew what would happen. It would be just him again, abandoned on a world overflowing with graves. Without companionship. Without hope. Then a nutty, sweet smell aroused a grumble in his stomach and, sitting up, he opened his eyes, hoping beyond hope she wasn’t a figment of his mind.

When he saw her standing in his quarters, a sterling silver tray in her hands and a smile on her face, it all came back in a wave of relief. She was real. Regardless of the hologram projectors and the sonic tactile actuators and the fact that she’d died hundreds of years ago, she had a body. She had a soul. She was as real as anything could get. And she was serving him breakfast in bed.

“Oh, hey,” he slid up even more, the sheets exposing his bare chest. “You didn’t have to do that, you know.”

“I wanted to,” she placed the tray on his cluttered little table. “Now come on, eat.”

He pulled on his shirt and sat at the table to a feast the likes of which he’d never seen. Strange things that he knew were edible, yet he’d never eaten before.

“What are those?” he pointed to a stack of flat, round, golden-brown fluffy things.

“Haven’t you ever had pancakes?” she looked at him strangely.

“I…I’ve heard of them,” he said. “Vaguely,” he picked up a thin strip of something crispy.

“And this?” he sniffed it. It smelled divine.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never had bacon!”

“Ah,” he nodded. “This is bacon! I heard it was delicious!”

“You’ve never had pancakes or bacon?” she was incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she took a fork and jabbed it in a pile of fluffy, yellowish stuff. “And I suppose you’ve never had scrambled eggs, either?”

“Uh…no,” he said, and she threw up her hands.

“Wow! The future sucks!”

He explained these foods were abandoned by people hundreds of years ago. Fatty, high cholesterol, and high sodium foods became things of the past when mankind had learned to eat healthy finally. It was essential for the survival of the species.

“But what about the chocolate ice cream!” she was more incredulous than ever. “That’s not healthy!”

“That’s why I always have trouble getting the food printers to make it for me. All they want to make is sorbet. Sorbet is healthy for you, so the computer has no problem spitting that shit out.”

“Huh,” she huffed. “No wonder I had such a hard time getting it to make this. You don’t even know the trouble I went through.”

“Oh, I can imagine.”

They both got a chuckle from that, and then Harvey dug in, relishing every bite of the strange and ancient and maybe even a little indulgent nourishment. He could feel his arteries clogging with each swallow, but what the hell! It was enchanting.

When he was done eating, Lea began cleaning up after him.

“Lea,” he stopped her by holding her hand gently. “I told you. You don’t need to do this for me.”

“And I told you,” she was firm. “I want to. Besides, in my time, women liked to keep busy. We worked even more than men.”

“It’s like that now too,” he said. “Women are independent and hard-working and carry a lot of responsibility these days.”

“I guess some things never change,” she went back to bussing his table.

“Listen,” he suggested. “If you really want something to do, you can help me.”

“Help you? With what?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Everything. There’s a lot to be done around here. And you can help.”

And help him she did. She went along on all of his regular duties as caretaker, assisting as he tested features like the introductory presentation, the interactive maps, the food printers. She helped with the cleaning bots, making sure they were all functioning and accounted for. Everything had to be shipshape, and everything was attended to, down to the minutest detail. Even the holomemorials, which he swore he’d never work on again, were maintained with the utmost of care.

With every new evening, Harvey felt more and more confident in his surroundings. And every new second with Lea, he forgot a little more about the mysteries that surrounded this place. With the passage of time, the troubled thoughts brought on by that harrowing experience in Zone 6 faded into obscure, albeit uncomfortable, memory.

It didn’t even bother him greatly when he learned, via a subspace emergency channel, that the ionic stream was still being problematic, and that DeepSix had no real explanation why such a dependable and relatively safe natural phenomenon—a cosmic viaduct that humans had learned to harness and utilize for interstellar space travel centuries ago—had, all of a sudden, turned deadly. That didn’t trouble him anymore. With Lea his worries washed away in the glow of the morning star rises. He shed every hint of sadness and hopelessness and despair. No more feeling sorry for his predicament. And no more caving in to fear.

Then one night it all changed.

The audible command spoke in clear, if not monotonous English:

Holomemorial random assignment: Zone 30, Plot T5-14382, Plot R4-2244, Plot A1-77. Zone 6 Plot Y7-990, Plot…”

“Computer, wait a second,” Harvey’s heart skipped a beat. Lea stood next to him. “Did you say Zone 6?”

“That is correct,” the computer stated coldly. “Cemetery Zone 6. Is that a problem, sir?”

“Is that a problem?” he felt sweat building on his forehead. “Hell yes, that’s a problem!”

“Harvey don’t—”

“Just hold on, Lea” his apprehension took over. “Computer, why are you sending me to Six?”

“That is your assignment for tonight.”

“But the place is so old. No one ever goes out there. Caretakers don’t even go out there. You know that, computer. You’ve never sent me out there…why all of a sudden are you?”

The computer paused, then reiterated:

“That is your assignment for tonight.”

“Don’t go,” Lea tugged his arm. “I have a really bad feeling about that place, about the souls who inhabit it.”

“I’m not going,” he said indignantly. “You hear that, computer? I’m not going to Zone 6.”

“That is your assignment, Harvey Crane.”

“He’s not going, dammit!” Lea shouted.

To that the computer had no response, but kept Zone 6 on the nightly work list. When he got to it on his route, he simply skipped it, and pretended the system hadn’t even brought it up in the first place, though the computer complained.

The next night, Zone 6 was on the schedule again. This time Harvey got into the system and deleted the command. The system simply reinstated it, and when he saw that he was agitated beyond description. The computer was taunting him. Maybe it hatched some sinister plot to get him to go to Six. He wouldn’t fall for it, though, and kept ignoring the command.

But the command for Zone 6 kept coming in, and Harvey kept disregarding, erasing, overriding. Alarms went off and the computer hailed him with demanding little messages. And the more he ignored them, the more adamant the messages became. They started as innocuous little notes—‘It is your assignment.’ But soon, ‘your assignment,’ became, ‘your duty,’ which turned into, ‘your sworn obligation to this planet, and to DeepSix,’ and finally it just repeated the word, ‘Urgent,’ over and over, saying:

“Full-scale and catastrophic systems failures…your presence is required in Zone 6. URGENT!”

But he refused to go. Lea agreed with his decision fully, and, together, they moved on as if the messages never existed.

Then, one day, the orders stopped. During his usual nightly briefing, he waited for it, watched for it. It became routine, spotting Zone 6 on the list of sectors he had to visit that day. He expected it, almost wanted to see it so he could just get it over with. And when he got to the bottom of the list, finding no reference to the hated graveyard, he had to double check, then scrutinize the list a third time.

“Lea!” he called to her over the com-system, knowing she was probably in the food court. “Guess what I don’t see on the list today.”

No response. He waited, then made another attempt at contacting her via the com, yet heard nothing in return. For the first confused moment, he tried to convince himself she was fine. Probably didn’t hear him, or maybe she was too busy to answer.

“Harvey!”

Her faint yet panicked shriek for help shattered his carefree delusions.

7.

Harvey didn’t waste a single moment in getting to the food court, where he found Lea, lying on the floor on her side, food scattered, serving tray tossed asunder, plates and silverware and empty cups wading in a puddle of orange juice and milk.

“Lea, Lea,” he scrambled to the floor and knelt to her side. She looked weary, and was clutching her chest, which heaved rapidly, as if she was short of breath. But he knew she couldn’t have been out of breath. She didn’t breathe. Holograms didn’t need air. Still, there she was, fighting for it as if she was a real person. He cradled her head in his lap and asked her what had happened, but only got a vague murmur in response as she gestured meekly at the tray. She’d dropped it for some reason. And he intended on finding out why.

He carried her, with great care, to the small medical unit in the visitor center complex. He wanted to make sure she was comfortable, and propped her in the hospital bed, placing her head on the pillow and even covering her with the blankets.

Listless and wistful, she rolled her head side to side as if she was in pain. He knew it had to be a malfunction in her holomemorial’s processor. Or possibly its Intuitive Intelligence programming. Maybe Harvey’s recreation, however faithful and meticulous, had a fatal flaw, one with terrible consequences for the woman he loved. She was ill, terribly ill, and Harvey was the reason.

He left her in the infirmary and hurried to mausoleum level three, section C-6, row 15, grave number 930. Lea’s grave. There he ripped into the holomemorial and searched for any signs of anomaly. He figured something went wrong with her ultrasound actuators, the system of sonic waves, imperceptible to the human ear, which allowed Lea’s hologram to manipulate physical objects. His guilty conscience couldn’t have been battering him harder when he considered the possibility that interacting with him had something to do with this, and that incited an even greater desire to fix whatever was broken.

A thorough and exhaustive diagnostic survey resulted in nothing. Not a damn clue as to why Lea was sick. All he could do was return to her side, hoping for the miracle that didn’t happen. She was still writhing and moaning, incarcerated by an agony she had no power to describe. Harvey hated his ineptitude. He couldn’t fix this, and it tore his heart from his chest.

“Just try to hang in there,” was all he had for her. “I’ll find a way to help you. I promise.”

She closed and opened her eyes with no energy whatsoever. No color in her face. No life in her gaze. She appeared, for all intents and purposes, like a woman—a real and living woman—on her deathbed. No nurses or doctors or round-the-clock medical care. It was just Harvey, and he did the only thing he knew how to do. He went back to her holomemorial, where he spent the next several hours searching, contemplating, imagining the solution to Lea’s sickness.

The hours stretched into days, and Harvey was a man obsessed. Every waking moment devoted to repairing Lea’s holomemorial. When he wasn’t in the mausoleum, he was in the infirmary, by her side, holding her hand or reading to her.

She responded quite favorably to his attempts at raising her spirits. She’d stopped thrashing in pain, and her agonized groans were becoming nonexistent. Then, one day when he was telling her about his failed attempts at programming the food printer to replicate the bacon she’d made for him, she even smiled. It gave him hope, and even more desire to bring her all the way back. He doubled his time at her grave, working nonstop, without sleep, going over every optic cable, every protoplug, every nano-synapse one by one. Painstakingly. Relentlessly. He would find the answer.

The answer refused to be found.

Harvey realized it when he’d finished combing over every millimeter of Lea’s holomemorial, inside and out, and uncovered absolutely no good reason for her lapse into the painful paralysis. He was beginning to believe she’d never recover, and that despairing thought had him sitting on the floor, head drooping, leaning against her grave’s cold granite facing. With his fingers he touched the inscribed letters of her name as he swallowed back a tear.

“Harvey?”

Hearing his name sent a glorious wave of euphoria rushing through his every extremity. And when he saw Lea standing there, her smile as big and as welcoming as ever, his troubles dissipated to stardust.

“Lea!” he snatched her in his arms and felt her weight, smelled her blossomy scent, heard her breathless declarations in his ear.

“Oh, Harvey…I love you I love you I love you!” she kept kissing his cheek over and over. “I love you!”

“I love you too,” he accepted her adoration willingly, kissing her in return. “We’ll never be apart. They won’t do it to us...they keep trying, but they won’t do it, they can’t do it!”

“What do you mean?” she looked at him curiously. “Who’s trying to keep us apart?”

“I don’t know…I just,” he struggled. “I just couldn’t find a reason why you went down like that. The only explanation I can think of is someone, or something else had a hand in it.”

She shivered, crossing her arms and receding into the folds of her long, white gown.

“I don’t want to think about it, Harvey. And I don’t want you consumed by it any more, either.”

“Don’t you see? I couldn’t find the reason for your ‘illness.’ And I sure don’t understand why you recovered from it, either. This whole thing’s a mystery. And I have to fix it…I have to fix your holomemorial.”

“You need to have a life. Working all the time like that isn’t living…it’s like you’re a slave.”

“But it’s my job. That’s what I do, I’m the caretaker.”

She ran her fingernails through his short-cropped hair.

“Harvey,” she whispered against his neck. Warm breath tingled his skin. “You’re a man. And I’m a woman. Not just a machine. Not just a holomemorial for you to work on night and day. Do you realize how much time you’ve been away from me, obsessing over this thing? I’m not a thing, Harvey. I’m me.”

She looked into his eyes and he could tell she was hurting. Not some sort of 1s and 0s hurt or flaw in her programming, but a real, emotional hurt.

“You know what? You’re right. I’m sorry. I do get a little driven.”

“Yes,” she put her finger to his lips to get him to shut up. “You do.”

8.

“Well, what do you think?”

She asked the question he’d been dreading for hours now. After becoming dreadfully bored with beating him at chess, Lea had decided she was completely dissatisfied with Harvey’s living quarters and how he had the place decorated. Or not decorated.

“It needs a woman’s touch,” she’d kept repeating, as she went around the walls with a handheld computer and several color swatches on the screen. She’d touch the screen until her desired hue came around on a huge color wheel, then she’d touch the device to the wall and presto! the wall turned that color. She must have done this a dozen different times, and a dozen different times she asked him what he thought. He’d look at it for a second, smile, and say, “Looks great,” but she saw right through him every time.

After a dull harvest wheat, a bright and popping cherry, a whimsical lime and a deep Earth sky azure, she’d settled on a royal purple, and Harvey, quite honestly, didn’t know what to say.

“Well?” she repeated herself, never once looking away from the lavender wall. “I asked you what you thought.”

“Looks great,” he said, and she sighed.

“I give up. We’ll try again later,” she searched behind the furniture. “Where’s that cleaner bot? Cleaner bot! Come here!”

At her command, a small droid rolled out on wheels. It had a rounded shape with several appendages that protruded from a central core. Flashing lights and soothing sounds. It came up to her and emanated a soft tone.

“How may I be of service?”

“You can help me move the bed,” she told it. “Pick up that end and—”

Harvey heard her fall, and rushed to her side. All she could do was whimper. He managed to lift her onto the bed, where she looked and acted as she did before, when she was afflicted by the mysterious illness. His worst fear had come to pass. She’d had a relapse.

“Lea?” panic took over again. “Lea, can you hear me? I’m going to find out why this is happening. I swear to you I’m going to find out!”

He marched out of his living quarters, with the sole intent on going back to the mausoleum, back to Lea’s grave, where he was determined to solve this puzzle.

“H-Harvey!” she stammered weakly, yet at the same time with firmness in her tone. “No! Don’t go! Don’t leave me, Harvey!”

He ran to her bedside.

“I have to fix this, Lea. Please, please understand I need to fix this.”

“And I need you with me, Harvey,” she wouldn’t budge. “Don’t you get it? That’s the only thing that’ll make me feel better—you next to me, talking to me, staying with me. Please.”

He agreed, reluctantly, and to his delight she seemed to snap out of the malaise rather quickly this time. Soon she was back on her feet, though not willing to do much besides stand at the view portal and gaze upon a rather distinct vista. The planet’s highest peak, Mount Mausolus, overlooked the valley with a somber magnificence, its irregular peak catching the last of the primary starset’s rays before casting a velvet blanket over the endless sea of headstones. The mountain was the only place on the whole planet not spoiled by gravesites, and having a clear view of its pristine stone flanks gave Harvey the feeling he wasn’t on such a disturbing and secluded world.

“It’s beautiful,” she watched the purples and blues and reds mix as the final vestiges of light faded. Harvey had no words to describe what he was seeing at that moment. Beauty beyond definition. Lea, in a halo of waning starlight, framed by the magnificent and towering mountain in the distance.

Then she stumbled, doubled over, and clutched her midsection. Harvey couldn’t get to her in time. She fell onto her back, once again reeling in pain. Before he had the chance to say or do anything, Lea fought out of it, sitting up, chest heaving, face wrought with desperation.

“What’s happening to me?”

“That’s what I want to find out. If you’d let me.”

“No!” she grabbed his wrist. “No don’t go.”

He helped her up. It appeared she’d recovered fully from the strange episode, but only for a few, fleeting moments. Then she clutched her chest yet again, slumping to the couch.

She saw the look in his eyes. He wanted to dash to her holomemorial and give it a complete overhaul. Replace every part. If she would let him.

“No,” was her answer. “Don’t go, Harvey,” then her eyes, formerly narrow and listless, shot open, wide and alert. She seemed to be staring at something outside the porthole, something Harvey couldn’t see.

“No!” she screamed suddenly, standing and backing away from some unseen threat. “No! Don’t! Don’t come near me! NO!”

She flung herself out of the living quarters, moving faster than any human. Harvey tried to keep up, but she flickered from one projector to the other, down the corridor toward the visitor center. Her frenzied screams rattled him to the core, and made it easy for him to find the energy to run. Still, he lagged behind, and as he got to the central concourse, the place with the giant observation portholes, he got a glimpse of her, barely a streak of light, heading straight for the mausoleum.

With only her frantic cries to guide him, he took flight after her, up the stairs and forsaking the elevator, following the sound of her voice.

“No!” she cried again and again. “No! Don’t touch me!”

When he got to the third floor he rounded the intersection of two corridors and faced the end of the hall toward Lea’s grave. He halted immediately at a sight that made his internal organs sink to his bowels. It was Lea, and that should have given him joy, but it didn’t. Contorting and circling Lea was a mass of dark, billowing gray. A cloud, or a tornado, spinning and twisting with fury.

Red eyes scowled at him, and he retreated a step, then two. Then Lea called out again. In desperation, he lunged for her. The spectral being was too quick, and sped off with Lea in its grasp. They moved so fast, all Harvey saw of them was a trail of odorless smoke. Lea’s voice, deafening at first, grew softer and softer. Then, before Harvey knew it, she was gone.

“LEA!” he shouted to an empty passageway, the walls adorned with plaques marking the resting places of the deceased. He felt like one of the dead now.

Everything inside of him wanted to come out. Physically sick and sweating and shaking, he leaned against the wall. Then a jarring signal from the computer forced him to investigate. Maybe it was word from Lea.

Instead, he found a holomemorial malfunction alert. A failure that demanded his immediate attention. He reached for the icon that collapsed the screen, intending to ignore the alert, when he caught a glimpse of the graveyard sector section in question. His sweat turned to ice as he stared at the place the computer was once again telling him to go— Zone 6.

9.

“Next stop, Zone 6. Doors open on the left. We at Cemetery Planet hope you find your visit pleasant and memorable. Thank you for riding, and have a nice day.”

The maglev train’s automated message shook Harvey from a disturbing slumber. He couldn’t stop thinking about the stories and legends of Zone 6. He never believed them, and always found himself laughing at the very idea. Now he believed. Now he knew to stay away. Yet here he was, riding in a tube at nearly the speed of sound, directly into the mouth of peril.

Finding Lea was his only concern. And that one, single-minded goal allowed him to overcome his terrible fear. He knew he’d find her out there. He knew it as true as the nights were long and gloomy on that planet.

When the train stopped finally and the vacuum tube airlocks hissed opened, he, in his all-too-uncomfortable exposure suit, stepped into a wisp of low fog. He was reminded of the being that kidnapped Lea, and the way it seemed to form from nothing. He refused to back down now, refused to listen to that voice of reason. The trip from here was still extensive, so he rolled out a PMD from the loading area and rode through dozens of swirls of delicate vapor. In the eddies he swore he saw faces, human forms, soaring above the headstones. But he dared not look too long.

He programmed the PMD’s navigational systems, though his own memory served as the best guide. He’d never forget where the lifepod had crashed.

Grave upon grave. Tombstone upon tombstone. An endless portrait. The final resting place for countless souls. The headstones melted into the background as he rode the narrow path, keeping his eyes down.

Then the proximity alarm came. He slowed the PMD to a stop, looked up, and spotted the lifepod, its cylindrical nose concealed by dark brown topsoil, a trail of bent and broken gravestones marking its crash path.

He studied the ancient and gothic graveyard. Stone slabs of all sizes, from a few centimeters to several meters in height, and of various shapes—curved arches, prismatic steeples, conical stacks. The surface of an asteroid in the far reaches of space would have paled in comparison to this barren sublimity.

To the left, spires were tossed one on top of another. To the right, archways crumbled and stood half-fallen. Straight ahead, large domed tombs were the dominant feature. And, in the center of it all, stood the grave he came here to find.

He approached the site from the side, as if he could sneak up on it somehow. As if the spirits couldn’t sense him coming. Then, mustering up his courage, he jumped to a stop directly in front of the grave. Kip Broders. Died in 2031. The holomemorial was an ancient model. He could tell by the trip switch. It was visible in the loose soil, and looked pretty beat up. But it must have worked. He’d triggered it before, and now, heart racing and forehead dripping, he stepped onto the pressure plate and closed his eyes, awaiting the unknown.

Nothing happened. Only the whistle of the wind, the multitude of stars in the night sky. No Kip Broders.

He stood on the switch again, this time harder. Still no response. He tried again, then again, all with the same result—nothing.

“Where the hell are you, Broders!” he shouted to the sky, to the headstones, to anyone or anything that would listen. “I’m here! You wanted me here, so I’m here!”

The dense air whipped up more eddies of haze into strange and ethereal shapes, yet nothing indicated to him that there was an intelligence there. And, worse, no indications of Lea.

“Come out and show yourselves, cowards!” his frustration and fear boiled over into rage. “Come on! I’m here…I’m right here! Come out and face me, dammit! Come out and—”

He stopped short at the abrupt sense of something skirting in the darkness, slipping from behind one headstone to the next. His pulse pounded in his ear and he instantly felt like fleeing, then his thoughts returned to Lea. He swallowed the fright and chased the phantom.

He headed into an area of large shrines and casks above as well as below ground, tightly organized like a maze. Several times he thought he’d lost the thing, then he’d see a fleeting glimpse here, a shadowy trail there, and keep running, deeper and deeper into the tangle of tombs.

Out of breath and dizzy, he came upon a courtyard of sorts, with a handsome little fountain, benches, and covered areas. The oddity he’d been chasing seemed to have disappeared without a trace, and he was ready to give up when he spotted a large portico—the entrance to a structure that appeared to be, at least partially, built beneath ground.

The entryway was quite massive, with tall columns bathed in white and three levels of steps leading up to a gigantic door. As he got closer and saw more detail, his nerves spiked at the sudden awareness that the door was open slightly. Deep down he knew this place, knew what was behind this giant slab of stone and steel.

His suspicions were confirmed the second he peered inside and saw the inscriptions on the marble facings, the elegant decor, vaulted ceilings, and dusty chandeliers.

He stepped back in disbelief. Yet he recalled the rumors of another mausoleum complex in another, now abandoned, part of the planet. Of course he knew of the several smaller underground vaults, many of which dotted the globe. This one was different. This mausoleum looked almost as big as the one at the visitor station. He could tell by one look at the building from the outside, and his view of the nearly endless corridor inside made it clear.

Then he was stricken with the singular sense that he was led here for a reason. The door to the mausoleum was open for a reason—Lea. He tingled with anticipation, and with the sense that she was inside this place. The thing that took her…it lived here, haunted this murky dwelling. Harvey felt that if he went any further, he might not ever get out alive. He had no choice. His desperation to find Lea took that option away from him, and now he acted on pure instinct. He took a step inside, and decided not to look back.

10.

The state of disrepair in the ancient crypt appalled Harvey. He never would have allowed a complex under his supervision to go to hell like this. It was obvious there were no cleaner bots. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since the power had been out for quite some time.

He took a few slow paces into the unknown, then reacted with a start to a strange and altogether too unnatural sound from deep in the underground structure’s bowels. Low and relentless. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it, and decided to change his mind. He made an about-face and strode, steadily and swiftly, to the exit. The moment before he was ready to step foot outside, a tremendous rumble forced him back. A metal grinding noise echoed in his ears, and the heavy slab of a door swung closed with a SLAM!

He pounded on the metal until his hands were bruised, yelling for someone, anyone to open the door again. Then he noticed his rapid heart rate and high respiration numbers on the visor display, and went into a tailspin of terror over his air supply. Cut off from the PMD, and from any alternative air, he was looking at this place as his tomb. It was a matter of hours until his last lungful. He faced the mausoleum again, faced his fear. Maybe, if he was lucky, he would find something in here, some kind of life support system he could utilize. He knew it was only wishful thinking. The place was dead. No power for centuries. No life support. No air. No chance for survival.

With that desolate thought lingering, Harvey witnessed an amazing thing. So wondrous, he felt like he was dreaming. His eyes stung at sudden illumination. He threw up his hands and shielded his view and heard another rumble, this time from above.

His helmet display started crunching numbers, showing him the results. He didn’t need the computer to tell him what had happened. He knew that sound. He’d heard it droning on and on for so long. Inexplicably, the life support systems had kicked on, right along with the lights.

He used the new illumination to finally get a good look at the place. Certainly a manmade wonder of its time. He had no idea when it was built, so he stepped close to a plaque near the main entrance.

Masoleum Number One. Dedicated on this day, May 23, 2525.

2525. That meant it was one of the first structures ever built on Cemetery Planet. A three hundred year old building with three hundred year old technology. He wasn’t sure whether he should trust it. His visor display, though, told him otherwise. Acceptable levels of nitrogen and oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide. Humidity 35 percent. Temperature 22 degrees Celsius. No airborne contaminants. Optimum conditions. All green. Since when did he believe the damn computer? But, in the interest of saving his suit’s air supply, he decided to take a chance.

He clicked the lock on his neck seal and the helmet popped off with a quarter-turn twist. He took a small breath. His lungs didn’t explode. So far so good. Another quick gulp and he was breathing with ease. It was a little musty. The damp, dusty old smell made it marginally unpleasant. Soon enough his nose grew accustomed to the stench, and he found himself taking off the suit altogether.

After the initial period of surprise, his inquiring mind began reflecting. Clearly, someone or something was aware of his arrival. It was also quite evident that these entities didn’t want him dead, at least not yet.

“Hello?” he sent a rather meek message echoing down the long corridor “Lea?”

“HARVEY!”

His knees buckled at the sound of Lea’s voice. He called out her name again, and before he knew it, started sprinting, as fast as his wobbly legs would take him. The grave markers on the walls blended in a haze, the hallway stretched in front of him into infinity.

Lea called out for him again and again, and Harvey kept running. He came to a stairway leading down and her voice grew louder. Instinctively, he followed the sound.

It was a forgotten mausoleum. A place he scarcely knew existed. He was amazed at how deep it went, marveling at its breathtaking enormity. And the deeper he descended, with each new level down, the sound of Lea’s cries for him grew that much louder, that much more distinct. He was getting closer, but how far down must he go?

As he bounded down the staircases, another sound began to overtake Lea’s voice. Crunching and churning and rumbling. Then he realized—this sound, this mechanical, industrial sound had been there all along, in the background.

The rumbling got so bad the ceiling and floors were fractured in places. His instincts turned against him. They told him to get out of there. However, Harvey was eternally curious, and that inquisitiveness kept him moving forward, into a place with no graves along the walls. The vast crypt had ended, and a new type of vault had begun. Dark stone, shiny in the ambient light up ahead, the same direction from which the terrible noise was originating.

He knew he should have turned back. The signs of the mausoleum were long gone. The light, airy environment had given way to a murky, dark atmosphere where the walls closed in on Harvey with every step. Lea’s shouts had long since been overtaken by the deafening mechanical sounds—the shrieking of grinding metal, the clanking of heavy parts, the turning of giant gears.

Every reason for his being there had vanished, and every alarm of common sense rang inside his head. Get out! Get out now! That was the message from his conscience, unequivocal and unrelenting. But he kept going. He wanted to know. He had to know what was making this terrible commotion on what was supposed to be a lifeless, abandoned planet.

The passageways closed in on him at every turn, and he had to stoop under the low hanging stalactites. Then he saw, up ahead, a red glow so terrifying it made him want to stop in his tracks. Still, he kept going forward, like iron to a magnet, as the awful rumbling and clanking grew louder and louder. The fiery glow increased in brightness, until the cramped surroundings opened up to a vast cavern. Harvey tripped and fell to his hands and knees. Perched precariously over a towering cliff, he overlooked the oddest sight he’d ever seen.

A massive factory floor. Steel framework conveyer belts twisting and bending, crossing and extending far into the distance of a gigantic underground chamber. It wasn’t the immense scale of the operation that had him trembling in terror. It was what he saw on the conveyer belts, a vision so fear provoking, he went numb from head to toe.

Bodies. Human corpses. Mostly skeletons, and many just heaps of bones. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Hell, when he considered the vastness of the operation, he calculated probably hundreds of thousands were involved. All these remains, placed with care in an intricate system of transport, moving them to God knew where. But somewhere, and for something. Harvey could only guess. Whatever it was, he knew it couldn’t have been good.

His first thought was DeepSix. What kind of fraudulence were those cheapskates up to? What he noticed next made him abandon that theory and revert again to complete terror. He knew what it was by the scaly, oddly-camouflaged skin, and the cold, calculating way it moved. The alien cyborg. The very same one that had tried to murder him.

Initially he cursed himself for not disassembling the damn thing. Then he saw another one of the beastly robots, and another. Suddenly he was seeing all kinds of them, milling about the conveyer, stationed at several different positions along the line, managing the operation and keeping it functioning like clockwork.

He watched this activity from his ledge, with a sweeping view of it all. Straight below him, some commotion caught his eye. That’s when he saw the most terrifying sight yet. Three alien cyborgs were directly below his position, investigating something and deliberating between each other. Then one of them looked straight up, and met stares with Harvey.

He jerked back from the edge. He’d been spotted. But maybe not. To be sure, he peeked over the ledge once more, and froze at the sight of one of the androids, halfway up the vertical cliff face, reddish eyes, filled with malicious determination, fixed on Harvey. Its massive claws dug into the rock, permitting it a speedy climb. Only seconds until it would reach the top.

He scrambled backward and scuffled to his feet. Before he made it just two strides, he heard the unmistakable sound of motion in the gravel behind him. And a strident screech, reverberating through the subterranean cavern, told him the immense and powerful machine was only meters away.

11.

A new burst of energy propelled him quicker than he thought possible. One foot in front of the other, faster and faster, up the slope and into the heart of the labyrinth.

Scratching and shrieking and stomping. The manufactured monster was on his heels. Clang, clang, clang went its footsteps. Further off, he heard more of them. An all-out alert. And his only way out was a maze of dizzying choices. The corridors grew taller and wider. Then he saw light ahead, and found himself in the mausoleum again. But he wasn’t home free yet.

Clang…clang…clang…

The alien cyborgs were still coming. No time to think. The lights flickered, and he heard strange voices. When darkness took over for a few fleeting moments, he saw clusters of misty human figures.

One passed him by so close he felt the moistness from its stale touch. A wave of icicles slithered down his spine. But he couldn’t stop running, even with the dimness impeding his vision, even with the very real possibility that these apparitions were less then friendly. The most dangerous threat, the one that consumed him, was the constant metallic clomping and at his back.

It wasn’t long before he sensed his pursuers lagging behind. He was making it. Then something happened that almost made him lose all control of his bladder.

A grave marker flew straight off the wall. Before Harvey could make sense of it, the casket inside came out so fast it slammed into the opposite side of the hallway, cracking the marble tiles.

Another coffin ejected from its slot with a violence that shocked Harvey, and as he stepped away, a third sarcophagus came flying out, crashing on top of the other two, forming a daunting obstacle.

He backed off. Heart racing. Blinded by terror. The alien cyborgs were still coming. Their metal claws clanged and scraped the stone floor. Their screeching howls grated his nerves. It was at that precise moment, the very moment he thought his life was over, that Harvey heard Lea’s sorrowful voice, beckoning for him.

He followed her voice down another corridor, up a flight of stairs, into an open area with an artificial skylight. On and off the lights flickered, and when they went out, he saw glimpses of the vaporous forms, swooping rapidly, circling and twisting in a ghoulish dance. He knew they were the remnants of human souls. Ghosts. But that knowledge didn’t make it any easier. And the sounds of the approaching androids thumping in his chest, louder and louder, their shrill wails making it damn good and clear they meant nothing to Harvey but harm—all of that went away when he saw Lea.

She stood not more than twenty meters from him, in a sort of atrium. She disappeared when the lights came back on. Then, when they went out, she was there again. Only this time she was surrounded by other apparitions. The malevolent ghosts overpowered and dragged her deeper into the crypt. Then the lights came back on and she was gone—except for her haunting cries.

“Harvey! Harvey!”

He chased the sound into another wing of the vast cemetery structure. Forks in the road. Lefts and rights. Confusing twists and turns. He would have instantly gotten lost if not for Lea’s ceaseless calls for him. The lights went out again, and he saw he was close to catching up with her. She reached for him, and he reached for her. They were on the verge of touching, when a terrible reverberation in the wall had him shielding his head in terror. The rumbling climaxed when out came a casket, dirty and dusty, smashing onto the floor. The next casket flew out of the wall, and the next one, until Harvey’s path was obstructed once again.

He heard roars of satisfaction. When he turned, he froze in alarm. Androids. So many, they clogged the corridor, their articulated appendages swinging in long, lurching strides. When they saw Harvey had spotted them, they let out a series of hellish cries and doubled their speed.

Harvey scaled the wobbly caskets, up and over, panting and thanking whoever, whatever had created this barrier that so effectively kept the automated behemoths from getting to him.

But the barrier didn’t stop the alien cyborgs for long. Tossing the big, bulky coffins aside, the machines wasted no time getting through, keeping their menacing glares fixed on Harvey.

Stricken with panic, he took flight. This time he only made it a single step when, with a rumble, yet another casket barreled from its hiding place inside the wall. Instead of falling in front of him and blocking his path, this large box came straight for him. No time to move out of the way. No chance to avoid being hit straight in the jaw. He didn’t remember much after that. Just the darkness, the cold floor, the electronic howls and scraping claws coming closer.

Clang, clang, clang…

He woke up with a splitting headache. When he tried to reach for his face, he couldn’t move his hands.

“Hello? Hello, anyone?”

No light. No sound. Nothing to let him know where he was. He tried to get up and smashed his nose against the low ceiling. Or was it a ceiling? Was he in a room at all or something else…something strangely familiar and too terrifying to acknowledge?

“No…no please! Somebody, please!”

There was no denying it. He knew where he was. When he shouted into the cold, silent density—the thick concrete walls and the mounds of dirt—he knew he’d been placed in a casket, slid into a grave slot and locked away in the ancient mausoleum.

“Don’t leave me in here! Please…HELP ME!”

PART III

1.

Alone. Trapped. Confined to only centimeters in each direction. It felt like the walls were closing in, like Harvey was the only one in the entire universe who knew he was there, like his next breath would be his last. That didn’t stop him from beating his elbows, slamming his knees, screaming at the top of his lungs for someone, anyone to release him from this dreadful prison. This was how the end would come. No matter how much he tried to deny it, he knew. He’d spent too much time lingering over the oceans of graves on this deserted world. He’d spent too much time on this godforsaken wasteland of the dead, and now he’ll become one of them. He’ll perish on Cemetery Planet.

He shifted from hitting the walls and ceiling to kicking with his heels, fantasizing he could break free. But it was only fantasy. The box was as solid as exotanium. He collapsed, contemplating the idea of eternity inside this casket, never seeing Lea again.

Exhausted, Harvey could do nothing but wait for the inevitable. Lea’s face flashed in his eyes every time he closed them, and her soft voice came to him when he felt like all was lost. He knew it was a hallucination. He also knew the great cracking sound was another hallucination. Then he felt movement. His head struck the side of the casket, and, though it was padded, he still felt a good jolt. That’s when he knew it was real.

“Hey! Let me out!”

He didn’t care if it was the deadly cyborgs. He wanted out.

“Who are you? What do you want! Why don’t you let me go!”

His demands fell on silence. He was certain the robots were taking him to the depths of the ancient structure, beneath the mausoleum to those giant conveyers. He pictured his dead body included in the endless assembly line. What those corpses were being used for, he had no clue, and he wanted no part in finding out.

He cursed his captors, the ones behind this shameful enterprise. Whoever, whatever they were, he damned them to Hell. Spit and cussed and called upon everything he knew that was righteous in the universe to come and strike them down with brutal karmic justice.

That didn’t happen. Nothing happened but the steady shuffling, the constant shifting, the continuing descent.

Heavy rumbling. Giant motors humming. He sensed this was the place. This was the mammoth factory where the dead were being transported like consumer goods. He was sure of it. When he felt the casket being lowered and then, with a jolt, hitting the floor, he had no idea what would come next.

What came next was nothing. Not a sound. Not a movement. Harvey tried to be still in the eerie silence. The constricted space began to take its toll on him, and he lost all control of his caution. No more waiting. He had to get out.

He pushed and pushed. Hands and knees. With all his strength. The lid had to open. It had to. No luck. Damn thing was jammed. Or worse—locked. His first instinct was to deny it. Push again. Try harder. No avail. It felt like a thousand kilogram sarcophagus lid. His one last chance was to plead for his life.

“Help me…please! Whoever you are!” he beat his knuckles raw against the solid top. “Please don’t leave me in here…please!”

Nothing. Even the rumbling had died down, though he heard it in the background. He called out again, determined to get a response, and would have kept shouting if not for a tremendous quake, shaking the casket and jarring the lid open a tiny fissure. He shut up just in time for another heavy shock that moved the lid even further, enough for Harvey to sit up.

He lost his breath at what he saw.

2.

Never in the history of Cemetery Planet had Harvey heard of such a primitive place. He saw it with his own eyes, yet still disbelieved. Sandstone caverns with carved niches loaded with countless human skulls, femurs, ribcages. In the distance, he saw the gruesome ossuary had multiple levels and corridors. He’d heard of such places. Places where people would entomb their dead when population density prevented above-ground cemeteries. The same principal as Cemetery Planet, only underground. He’d seen pictures of the Catacombs of Paris, and even heard rumors that they’d transferred them to Cemetery Planet. Harvey never believed those stories. He did now.

The high humidity hung like an oppressive fog, and in spots this fog grew thicker before Harvey’s eyes. One after the other, accompanied by a whispering wind, mixing and materializing. A heavy, dense, grayness spilled from between the skulls, from the dark recesses and crevices. Wisps of smoky dust gathered around Harvey like cloudbanks, a sudden storm front in miniature, violent and electric and menacing.

In the mist he began to see human forms, hazy figures, dozens of them, descending from the domed ceiling to the coffin where Harvey sat dumbfounded. He glanced left and right—nothing but semitransparent figures, all in ancient attire, all sending him dead, cold stares. It put a shiver in his spine, and a sense of dread in his gut.

Then, with one sighting, all his anxiety, all his abhorrence vaporized, and he scrambled out of the casket as fast as his stiff muscles would let him.

“LEA!” his voice boomed throughout the cavern. She was on a small landing overlooking the main floor. She opened her arms in a welcoming gesture, sparkling and aglow with joy. The spirits seemed stunned at Harvey’s sudden burst of activity, and even made way as he ran to the stairs. Then, suddenly, a fierce collision with something very fast and very solid stopped him in his tracks.

“NO! Don’t hurt Harvey!”

Lea shrieked in his defense. It didn’t help. He regained his footing and made another attempt at the stairs. Another rush of gray slammed into him, this one knocking him over. Lea screamed again. So did the spirits. Cursing, shouting angry, accusing words.

“He’s one of them!”

“Yes! One of them!”

“Criminal scum!”

“Don’t let him escape!”

In their vitriolic displays, the misty figures became almost real in appearance…and in presence. Harvey felt one push him—hard—into several others. A slap to his face. A punch to his kidney. A scrape to his neck. A furious attack, and in the chaotic violence, Harvey lost sight of Lea. For a terrifying moment he was beginning to believe this whole thing was a trap. They’d used Lea to lure him into this terrible place and do away with him once and for all.

For what reason? Why did the spirits want to torment him? He begged for an answer as they jabbed and pecked and clawed at him. He fell to his knees and prayed for a reason. All he got in return were the same, angrily repetitious cries.

“You’re one of them!”

“You’re corrupt! A scourge to all that’s decent!”

His heart pounded in his ear, and the throbbing seemed to be getting weaker. He was getting weaker. His only thoughts were of Lea. He came here to save her and he failed. He convinced himself Lea had gone, so it was a tremendous shock when he saw her again.

“Stop!” she swished her hands and dissipated several of the spirits. Her own appearance was of smoke and dust too, but she seemed to possess a fury that allowed her more power, and she pushed aside the aggressors, then rushed to be next to Harvey.

“He’s not one of them!” she shielded him. “And he can help us!”

“But he works for them!” countered one of the apparitions.

“There’s no doubt!” added another.

“That’s true,” Lea admitted, and the ghostly group surged forward, roaring with aggression. “Wait!” she held them off, but just barely. “Let me finish. He does work for them…but he doesn’t know!”

To that the spirits issued a general hiss of disbelief. Lea wouldn’t accept their dubiousness.

“I mean it! He doesn’t know anything about it. He doesn’t have a clue, but I know he can help us!”

The spirits would hear none of it, and rushed forward even more. Three of them overpowered Lea and pulled her, kicking and screaming, away from Harvey.

“One of them!” the accusations came out again. “He’s working with them…he’s one of them!”

Before he could blink, the ghosts were swirling about his face, barraging him with blunt force. He’d never felt so much pain from so many places on his body at the same time. Small slices to large bruises to tiny things like his hair being pulled from the follicles or his skin being peeled from his forearms. Torture of the worst kind.

“We’ll teach him to do this to us!” one of them proclaimed, and they all agreed. “We’ll give him a fate worse than death!”

“Please listen to me,” Lea lifted into the air, just above the heads of the enraged spirits. “I’m one of you. I’m in the very same situation you’re all in. We’re all facing the same fate, so you have to believe me when I tell you Harvey’s an honest, hardworking man. He would never do anything like this.”

Grumbling. Groaning. Not one soul seemed to believe.

“I know you’re afraid. I am too. We all are. None of us knows what will happen, and that’s driving us to this. We need to right this wrong. We need to come up with a way to solve this, but harming Harvey isn’t the way.”

“You’re just in love with him,” came a gruff grumble. “That’s why you’re defending him!”

The gallery of ghosts erupted in acerbic laughter.

“That’s not true!” she insisted. Then her forlorn gaze drifted to Harvey, and he saw tears. “Not entirely. I mean yes, I love him…but that’s only because he is such a sweet and generous man. He’d never do the things you’re accusing him of doing. Never.”

The group consensus was an overwhelming repudiation of Lea’s claims. They wanted revenge. For what, Harvey still had no idea, and it had him so puzzled, he almost wanted death to take him. If it weren’t for Lea, he would have accepted it by now. But she fought for him, and that in turn made him want to live. The spirits, though, didn’t see it that way.

Harvey felt pressure on his wrists, ankles, then around his neck. Tighter and tighter. Squeezing the life out of him. He locked eyes with Lea. She struggled against an army of hands holding her in place. All she could do was watch as Harvey was taken closer and closer to his end.

Then a voice, as familiar as it was commanding, issuing an order that was impossible to ignore.

“Everyone…stop this madness, NOW!”

Instant relief. Harvey’s air passages opened, and he gasped for breath. Then he gasped again when he saw the owner of such a commanding tone. Standing atop a staircase like a grand conductor was a man Harvey would recognize anywhere—Kip Broders. His broad shoulders and barrel chest gave him an authoritative presence. He regarded the large open pit below with an air of dignity and was afforded the respect of the leader by his companions. Harvey didn’t know whether to be relieved with this revelation or to be even more afraid. However, he had no alternative than to wait and listen. And what Kip Broders had to say was nothing short of fantastical and frightening.

3.

“What is this all about?” Harvey scanned the faces. Dark and angry wisps of steam. Swirling, billowing glares. Harvey took one look at these ominous creatures and his insides tightened. His forehead broke out in a cold sweat. His heart leapt to his throat. But he swallowed his fear, denied his desire to run, and stood his ground.

“I said, what the hell is this all about!” he didn’t let his stare waver as he met each ghost individually, peering into their souls for answers. “Why are you accusing me of something I haven’t done? And what the hell is it that you think I did?”

“You really have no clue, do you, Harvey Crane?” Kip Broders stepped down the stairway. All spirits went silent, watching pensively. “You don’t know a thing about what’s going on here. Not a thing.”

“All I know is what I see. Graverobbing alien cyborgs—and you people. And all of you want me dead.”

“These souls don’t want you dead, Harvey,” Lea said. “They’re just scared.”

“They’re scared?” Harvey couldn’t contain his disbelief. “Of what?”

“Of you.”

“Why would they be afraid of me? What have I done?”

“You work for DeepSix,” Broders said. “And DeepSix is working with the Unspeakable Ones.”

“The-the what? Who are the Unspeakable Ones?”

Broders paused to let the suddenly agitated souls calm down again. Harvey felt tension in the air almost as if it were a real thing, a heaviness that weighed down the spirits into a sepulchral mood. In that snapshot of time, he sensed their fear, and knew it had to be for good reason. Even Broders had the look, as if he didn’t want to say what he was about to say. Yet he straightened and seemed to gather his courage when he spoke.

“In all recorded history of the universe, there has never been a species more insidious, more hostile, and more intelligent. They have a name, but the sound of it being spoken is so disagreeable to the ear that others have come to call them simply the Unspeakable Ones. These beings had no capacity for compassion. They lived to conquer, and they threatened a takeover of the entire galaxy, enslaving and slaughtering its innocent inhabitants. But another race of advanced beings fought back. There was a great war, a galactic battle the likes of which had never been seen. After much bloodshed and destruction on both sides, the race of protectors, the ancient species known simply as the Guardians, prevailed.”

Harvey’s insides were scrambled. He didn’t know what to make of Broders’ disclosure. Broders, for his part, wasn’t finished.

“The prowess of the Guardians was surpassed only by their goodness of heart. They wanted peace, and abhorred killing of any kind. They gained their energy and resources from the cosmos and never, ever waged war unless they were attacked, or unless they saw a great injustice being perpetrated. Then, and only then did they intervene. And when the war was over, because of their virtuous nature, the Guardians couldn’t bring themselves to kill the Unspeakable Ones’ survivors…”

Broders swept his sights over the souls in the vast catacombs. The mood became considerably gloomier in anticipation of what was yet to be disclosed.

“So the Guardians imprisoned them here, on this planet.”

“Here?” Harvey interrupted. “Here on Cemetery Planet? How could they have done that without someone seeing?”

“This happened long before any human had set foot on this world,” answered Broders. “For eons these beings have lain dormant, in a kind of pupae state.”

“Pupae state?” Harvey felt himself sinking further into madness. “What are you talking about?”

“The Guardians, transformed the Unspeakable Ones’ DNA makeup, changing them into like wormlike creatures that inhabit the depths under Mount Mausolus. They’re helpless things, huddling together, and have no resemblance to the great race of warriors they once were. It was more for humiliation than anything else. But it was also a precautionary measure. The Guardians knew they couldn’t just leave the Unspeakable Ones the way they were naturally. So they changed their physical makeup.”

“I don’t get it,” Harvey stated his thoughts bluntly. “If these…Unspeakable Ones have been turned into harmless worms and buried underground, then what’s the problem? And why is everyone so mad at me about it?”

Broders and the other spirits grew agitated. The dark streaks of gray swirled with greater turbulence. Lea must have sensed their surging rage and swooped in to intervene. But Broders composed himself quickly, and he revealed something quite shocking to Harvey with his next statement.

“The problem is, Harvey, that the Unspeakable Ones, though they look much, much different than they once did those thousands of years ago when they were on the verge of conquering the galaxy, they still, to this day, are the same, conniving, evil, dictatorial beasts they’ve always been. These monsters have been waiting to make their return and take what they believe is rightfully theirs. They have a plan to steal the human corpses from the graves of Cemetery Planet. They’re going to use our bodies like parasites. And they’re getting help. The only way they can do this is with those cyborgs, and with the assistance of DeepSix!”

4.

“This is crazy! Absolutely, positively, one hundred percent crazy!” Harvey blurted. “An ancient, warlike race made to live under a mountain. No way. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe a word of it!”

The ghostly apparitions appeared restless, conversing among one another. The general feeling Harvey got from them was of resentment still, but now they seemed confused. Lea was among them, clearly agitated by what Harvey had to say.

“It’s not crazy, Harvey,” she was as persuasive as ever, and Harvey, though relieved to see her safe, couldn’t believe she believed this nonsense. What she said to him, though, wiped away his doubt. “Harvey you know it’s the truth. Just think about it. Look at what’s happened to you. Those cyborgs. Why didn’t the scanners pick them up? Because they’re DeepSix androids, Harvey. So is that gigantic factory underground. You saw that place with your own eyes, Harvey. So don’t say it’s crazy. Don’t you dare!”

He had to clutch his own head for fear it would burst. How could he possibly believe such an outlandish tale? It didn’t take long, actually. He remembered all the problems he’d started having with the holomemorials. He thought about all the graves that had been exhumed, and how it all looked so random at first. However, upon closer inspection, he’d found it was anything but random. Then he thought of his various run-ins with the cyborgs. All these concepts were driving him down a path of acceptance. Before he allowed himself to believe, he had questions.

“You said this all took place thousands of years ago…why did these Unspeakable Ones take so long? I mean, Cemetery Planet has been in existence for a long time. Why now?”

“They’re cunning beings,” Broders told him. “And they know they have to act under the cover of secrecy. Otherwise, if they’re found out before their plan is fulfilled, they’re vulnerable. They had to wait until this planet became basically abandoned. No living soul, besides the caretakers, has visited Cemetery Planet in fifty years. Knowing that, the Unspeakable Ones chose now as their time to resurface.”

“And DeepSix?” Harvey asked next. “How are they involved?”

“DeepSix is a corporation just like any other. They exist to make a profit. The Unspeakable Ones are very wealthy, and even after all these millennia have assets throughout the galaxy. Planets of solid gold, diamond, platinum. DeepSix has made a deal with the devil, literally. They’re providing the material assistance, the cyborgs, the vast infrastructure that will enable the Unspeakable Ones to reanimate our bodies and use them as their own.”

A nervous murmur rolled among the spirit ranks. Faint human forms became swirling vortexes as whispers resonated. Even Lea exhibited a profound concern.

“The Unspeakable Ones are pure evil,” Broders continued. “And they will perpetrate atrocities the likes of which humans can’t even begin to comprehend. They must be stopped, Harvey Crane—and you have to stop them!”

“Me!” he searched the room. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Mount Mausolus,” was Broders’s answer.

“What about Mount Mausolus?”

“Before the Guardians left, they built an emergency beacon, a way to signal them in case the Unspeakable Ones escaped from their underground prison. At the top of Mount Mausolus is where the beacon can be located. We need you to activate that beacon.”

Harvey back stepped. “But why me?”

“That place is seething with dark energy,” Broders said. “A spirit would be drawn in and absorbed by evil if it came too close.

Lea grasped his arm. “Harvey, I’m afraid.”

He couldn’t turn away from her pleading eyes. She looked to him for protection. How could he say no? Fear. That’s how.

“But-but what about the Unspeakable Ones?”

“They’re confined deep underground. The emergency beacon is at the very summit of the mountain, and as we understand, a clear path leads up to it. You should have no difficulties.”

“And I’ll go with you as far as I can,” Lea said anxiously. Harvey saw in her look, heard in the tone of her voice, felt the desperate determination in her energy. She wasn’t a physical being anymore. She never was. But now, more than ever, she seemed alive to him. Whatever that meant.

“I just…I don’t know…”

Another disturbance in the masses. The ghosts were growing restless once again, and it all had to do with Harvey. More heated allegations. More accusatory glares.

“You say you’re not in on this,” Broders spoke for the multitude. “You say you aren’t helping DeepSix with their Faustian deal…then prove it!”

A crushing roar. Harvey knew he was backed in a corner. Pressure from all sides. Lea desperately begging him. A thousand spirits coercing him.

“Well, Harvey Crane,” Broders conveyed the message from every soul in the soupy mix of mist and smoke. “Will you help us? Will you go?”

Harvey wished he had time to mull over this terrible choice. Something happened, though, that proved time had run out. A sudden sound so terrifying it sent the spirits into a chaotic tempest. The clanging of metallic claws on soft stone. Then Harvey spotted them, marching in single file, and his whole body went numb. The cyborgs had found them.

5.

Harvey stood flatfooted, watching the cyborgs kick and thrash their way into the catacombs, crashing into walls and spilling bones. The spirits, now a giant, turbulent cloud of shimmering light, worked as one, circling and confusing the androids. Not all of the killing machines were affected, and three in particular eluded the paranormal attack, setting their cold, dead stares on Harvey.

“Run!” Broders coalesced from the haze, pointing. “There!”

He sensed Lea pushing him toward a small set of stairs, down into a dark, narrow tunnel. Behind them the spirits were wailing and the robots were roaring. His legs ached from running, yet he pressed on, knowing if he slowed even a little, those mechanical monsters would be nipping at his heels.

Lea was a dazzling chromatic halo, urging Harvey onward, darting into the darkness like a prism of light. Her eternal glow helped him navigate the narrow trail, into an area of large pipes and conduits Harvey recognized from his history. Obsolete technology, but it still seemed operational. He felt the constant whirring even before hearing it, and that soothed him a little. He didn’t know why.

Up and over one large pipe. On his belly to creep under another. He had to contort and twist around several large ducts, heading deeper and deeper into the inner substructure. He came across what looked like air condensers, heating and cooling systems, the whole life support apparatus. The going was tight, and he thought maybe the cyborgs were too bulky and cumbersome to make it through. So he paused just for an instant to catch his breath. A creak and a groan from behind. By the ambient from the machinery, he caught a glimpse of an articulated leg, bending and flexing with surprising agility. That’s when he realized those damn cyborgs could go anywhere he could go, and probably many places he couldn’t.

Lea urged Harvey forward again, and he ran. Tirelessly on and on—until he came to a dead end. The passageway just stopped. The end of the line.

In desperation, he felt with his hands and found a crank. Realizing it was an old airlock, he twisted the round handle. It turned one revolution and wouldn’t budge a millimeter more.

“Shit!” he strained and strained with everything he had. Nothing. Stuck beyond his power. But was it beyond Lea’s? Her ethereal radiance surrounded the crank handle, a shapeless blanket of dense air. He could see the stress against the corroded mechanism. Her effort had an effect, and the crank began turning. In a matter of seconds, she had the door open a crack, just enough for him to crawl under, and not enough for the cyborgs to follow.

It didn’t take long before he heard the androids pounding, screeching, frantic to get past the rusted hatch. He kept running, knowing the mechanical assassins wouldn’t be able to make it. He wondered what they would do next. What retaliatory move would they make?

He got his answer.

A long, slow moan. A series of clicks. The sound of a great motor winding down. The rumbling stopped. The robots had shut down the life support systems. Check and mate.

“Harvey!” Lea was still with him—somewhere. He heard her voice and followed the sound, coughing, wheezing, lungs tightening more with each step. His skin boiled at the tremendous heat escaping the machine room and festering in the underground funk. The air became a soggy sponge, and he had to fight for each breath. The worst part—he had no idea where he was going.

There comes a point when the human body begins to shut down, when it can’t take any more. Harvey, once upon a time, had been an athlete. Not a mega-jock, but he could hold his own in a sprint or pin someone relatively close to his size in a fair wrestling match. He prided himself on his strength and endurance in those days, in the flower of his youth. Those days seemed light years ago. He was glad, though, that he’d been disciplined and had maintained his regular exercise regimen. Otherwise, he never would have made it this far. As it was, from his experience as an athlete, he recognized the signs of muscle failure. Shaking knees. Flittering stomach. Blurred vision. A steady ringing in his ears. The classic signs. He knew if he didn’t make it to safety soon, he’d collapse and never wake up.

That’s when he stumbled. The wall was hard and cold despite the stuffy atmosphere. He wanted just to sit, to rest…to sleep.

“NO!” Lea’s strident command jarred him back to consciousness. He felt feathery for a moment as she helped him to his feet. Weak and wobbly, he responded to her commanding words. “Harvey, don’t give up on me now! It’s just a little further…please!”

He stumbled and staggered, willing himself forward. He sounded like a fish out of water, gasping, grasping at whatever could keep him upright. After a few more steps, he felt it again, the overwhelming need to rest. That was all he needed. Just a few minutes on the floor with his eyes closed and…

“We’re here, Harvey! Right here! Look!”

It was the hardest thing ever just to lift his head, but when he did, he had the biggest jolt of unexpected joy. It was a service bay, complete with racks of space suits, a rover, and, best of all, an autoserve. There was even a working H2O dispenser, an ancient one that operated via hand pump. Everything was there for him to recover, restore, revive.

He got on his knees and thanked God for the fortuitous find. He also thanked Lea, and wondered aloud just where he would have been if it weren’t for her.

“Probably dead a long time ago,” he coughed into his hand, a raspy sound originated from his throat.

“You sound horrible,” she said, ignoring his praise. “Hurry!”

And when she said that, she caused the transparent cabinet doors to click open, allowing Harvey easy access. All he had to do was put on the suit, one thing he could do without her help.

His first breath in the old suit was, as usual with such an antique condenser, a little tough to swallow. He was grateful anyway. It kept him alive. And as he took the wonderfully stale air, a giant shockwave in the floor made him spit it right back out. A crack in the darkness, at floor level, produced a bout of temporary blindness. The crack grew into a fissure. The radiant illumination of two stars hit him, and he had to shield his eyes. As his vision adjusted, he began to make out shapes. Crosses, then tall spires, columns and cubic slabs, darkened against the stunning star rises, both Fomalhaut and Piscis Austrini blazing in the low horizon. In the center, between the blazing sky and the gloomy foreground, lingered a towering peak, rocky and irregular, rising tall and strong like a fist pointed to the stars.

Mount Mausolus.

6.

“Where have you led me?” he couldn’t keep his eyes off the mountain, looming large yet so far away. “Lea?”

He waited for a response. Spinning in a circle, he scrutinized every corner, every crevice, every centimeter of the bay for a sign of her, but found nothing.

Suddenly his visor display crackled. It was an old unit, but the suit’s system worked like a charm. And when Lea’s face appeared onscreen, he shouted into his helmet, stinging his own ears.

“Lea, what’s going on! I don’t like the looks of this!”

“I don’t like it either,” her somberness matched his fear. He knew she wasn’t trying to deceive him. “I don’t like the idea of asking you to go out there all alone. But we don’t have a choice. Broders was right. We can’t go out there. The Unspeakable Ones…just being their presence would mean death for spirit.”

“But what about me? I have a spirit, don’t I? Doesn’t that count?”

“The living are different when it comes to these situations. You have a physical body that grounds your soul in place against the negative energy.”

A rumble deep underground. She fell silent for a moment, until the small quake was finished, then continued.

“That’s them. We have to hurry!”

The rover started running, its electric powerplant purring, its overhead lights flashing on, casting bright beams through the dust and the dark inside the utility bay. It was an old model, certainly. However, Harvey recognized its bulk. It had a mean set of tires and a beefed-up suspension and extra batteries that, when he inspected them, found fully topped off. He also noticed his suit had supplemental battery packs.

“You guys have been planning this for a while, haven’t you?”

“Harvey, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know about any of this. Not until the spirits took me back to Zone 6 and explained it all. The messages and the other things that happened…they were trying to get your attention, that’s all.”

“Trying to get my attention?” he chortled. “Is that what they were doing?”

“They’re scared and so am I,” Lea had never been so serious, putting extra weight on her every word. “I’m disgusted by the thought of the Unspeakable Ones using my body for something so awful. They want to conquer the galaxy, Harvey. And they’ll do it with such cruelty it’ll become a living hell. We can’t let them do it, Harvey…we can’t!”

Harvey stared at her image on his visor screen. Nothing more than a blurry, silver luminosity. He couldn’t tell, but he thought she was crying, and that tore his heart from his chest.

“Oh, God, Lea,” he fought for some sense in it all. “This is insane. I-I can’t even believe this is all happening.”

“I know,” she calmed him with her lyrical voice. “It is a little hard to believe. But trust me, Harvey, this is happening,” her eyes drifted, right along with Harvey’s, to the mountain. “That’s a bad, bad place. But it’s also a good place. The emergency beacon is there, and that has to be activated,” she looked at him once again with the most forlorn expression. “Harvey, you’re the only one on this planet that can do it.”

“But I wouldn’t even know the first thing to do,” he said genuinely. “I want to help…really I do. But I have no idea where to go or how to work the beacon even if I did find it.”

“I can help you,” she flashed a series of schematics at him on the screen. Maps. Coordinates. Directions. Details on how to find and operate the alien device.

“Where’d you get this?”

“The spirits. These files have supposedly been wiped out long ago. But somehow the spirits retained the data. It’s all here, Harvey. All the schematics on the communications tower. I can tell you exactly where to go. I can even go with you for a while,” just when she said that, she disappeared from his visor and the onboard computer in the rover flickered with her image. She smiled questioningly at him. He had no power to refuse, so he got in and started driving.

The rover cut a dusty path through the headstones, speeding along the solitary road that led, twisting and winding, out of the unfamiliar graveyard. It took an hour to reach the outer boundaries, and when they did, Harvey felt a sense of dread, forcing him to ease off the accelerator.

“What’s the matter, Harvey?” Lea asked.

“I’ve never been in an area without headstones,” he surveyed the virgin land, the foothills stepping gradually up to the larger, more dominating features, and, finally the nearly vertical rock face known as Mount Mausolus. “It’s just a little strange, that’s all.”

“We’d better get moving,” she said, and he obliged, pointing the rover into uncharted territory, navigating around, in-between and over countless rocks and small boulders.

The entire trip was like being in training. Lea sent him multiple images, maps, the exact approach to the mountain, directions to the structure that housed the beacon, and where to go once inside. It was a lot of information, and a long journey. At least two more hours later, just when he thought his rear-end couldn’t take it any longer, the road became impassable. Rocks too large to roll over and too close to go around.

“Well,” he shut down the rover’s systems. “Looks like it’s a hike from here.”

“This is where I stop,” Lea looked down. Her image was fading. “I can’t go any further. I can already feel them.”

“Lea, wait,” he begged before she went away completely. “Are you going to wait for me here?”

“I’ll try,” she said, but she didn’t look good. “I’m not sure if I can, Harvey. The hatred, the malice is just so overpowering, even here.”

“Okay, listen,” he had an idea. “If you can’t stay here, then go back to the visitor station, to the mausoleum. Your grave. I’ll meet you at your grave.”

“Okay, Harvey,” she sounded weak. “I’ll meet you there. Please don’t make me wait long.”

“I won’t,” he smiled, hoping that would ease her discomfort at least a little. “This should be a piece of cake, thanks to your amazing instructions.”

That made her smile, but only faintly.

“Be careful, Harvey.”

“I will.”

“Harvey,” her image was gone completely now. All he had as he began his trek up the mountain were her last words. “Harvey…I love you.”

7.

It wasn’t long before a rigorous hike became a precarious climb. Only a few meters up, Harvey found himself ascending hand over hand, sliding his feet from one niche to the next. The ascent would have been difficult enough with full climber’s rigging. In his space suit, it became as comical as it was deadly.

He didn’t find it funny, though, when, stretching to reach a foothold a few short treacherous centimeters away, he felt his fingers slip inside his gloves, and that in turn made him lose his hold. He was now so far up the rover looked like a toy, and when he took that tragic misstep, his life flashed before his eyes. Somehow he found his footing, and made it to the higher ledge, where, once he rounded a small outcropping, he gazed upon a sight that, had it been on Earth, would have been one of the wonders of the world.

The inside of the mountain had been carved away, but not by crude tools. Smooth surfaces, so clean and straight it must have taken incredible engineering. He pressed his hand against the wall next to him and looked up. That’s when his brain began to comprehend the size and scope of this new discovery.

Towering columns cut from the rock. Massive arches, adorned with bas-reliefs of the most eloquent designs. Pictures of living beings. Not of Earth, that much was certain. Harvey walked until he saw a clean-cut wall in every direction, and, backing up and letting his helmet lights probe further, he saw he was on the very bottom of some rather large steps.

With more than a little effort, he managed to hoist himself up to the next step. The next was a little harder. And the next harder yet, until, when he made it to the last one, finally and mercifully, he was spent. Thankfully, his suit levels were all in the green still, even with all the exertion. The extra batteries were doing the trick. As long as he made it to the beacon in a reasonable amount of time, he’d be fine.

He let his sights drift up. Statues, immense and foreboding, of beings with long hair and features that appeared vaguely human, yet not human. The stone figures seemed to be holding their hands, on which there were seven fingers, in strange gestures, most of which struck Harvey as being not at all hospitable.

Then he saw other statues. Grotesque features on even more grotesque bodies. Strange creatures indeed, these new statues, and the more Harvey looked, the more of them he saw, striking various poses, in different types of scenes with other strange but much less ominous types of beings surrounding them. After a little more studying, Harvey saw a pattern, and soon discovered the key to the riddle. It was a history of sorts, a story in rock, much the same as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian texts. He didn’t have the exact translation down in such a short amount of time, but he got the gist, and soon came to the conclusion that these ugly beings were coldblooded killers, and they’d waged a terrible campaign of terror on countless different worlds.

Harvey saw so many depictions of atrocities, he began to conjecture that this was more than a simple chronology of the events. It was an indictment. These carvings were left as an eternal damnation for the outrages committed by these beings, the Unspeakable Ones.

And, mixed with the sense of accusation from the stone tableaus, Harvey also received a solemn sense of warning. The carvings were so frightening in nature, a notice to stay away was the overriding impression he received. And it was strong.

In his meticulous inspection, Harvey made another discovery—a pathway. Or, rather, two pathways. One leading up, the other down. Harvey knew which way he was supposed to go. The markings on the walls became even clearer as he went in the gigantic entryway. The grand arches and towering columns seemed to converge and bend at the ceiling, creating a dizzying spectacle, with all signs pointing up.

The way down was blocked, barred, fortified with heavy gates and a phalanx of barbed metal that looked quite deadly to the touch. Harvey had a palpable desire to get away from this ominous place, the entrance to Hell itself. The emergency beacon. That was his mission. Yet something inside stirred when he thought about what could possible merit such warnings. Ever since he was a child, he couldn’t contain his desire to know, his overpowering thirst for facts.

It was this thirst that allowed him to forsake his fear and make a bold move for the downward path. He didn’t intend on going far. Just wanted to inspect the fortifications up close. When he did get closer, though, he recognized some peculiar things. What appeared to be an impenetrable stronghold actually had several points of weakness, places where Harvey could slip through easily. It almost seemed as if passages were opened up on purpose, though it was hard to tell for certain.

Then he noticed a rhythmic sound. Steady, almost melodic. It was the same type of low rumble he’d heard before, underneath Mausoleum One. His entire body shivered at the thought of that endless assembly line, packed with human remains.

After that initial sense of fear, his tingling thirst for answers once again started teasing him. So many questions yet unanswered. Was the conveyor so long that it actually reached Mt. Mausolus? If so it would have been a marvel of engineering. The very idea fascinated him. Like a single thread dangling from a tightly-packed ball of yarn. All he had to do was tug the thread and he could unravel the mystery.

What was down there? The Unspeakable Ones? Did they really exist in a harmless pupae form? Harvey wanted to think they were harmless, but had a hard time believing a race of beings capable of the atrocities described on the murals could be harmless, no matter what physical state. He went back and forth about it, the inner struggle between self-preservation and inquisitiveness raged like a war. Finally, it wasn’t even a contest. The beacon wasn’t going anywhere. He had to see for himself if all of this was true. So he did exactly what all the signs, all the inscriptions and carving were screaming at him not to do—he went down.

8.

He was determined to evade being detected. With images of being chased by the cyborgs still fresh in his memory, he knew he had to be smarter this time. He killed his helmet lights, laid low, and went slow, thankful for the gradual decline. A ramp spiraling downward. On one side a solid rock wall. On the other, a precipitous drop into the unknown.

The blackness defied description, and every step brought him nearer to the steady beat from the distance below. Deep and ominous, also melodic in a way. Like a trumpet, but not a trumpet. At least not one made by human hands.

He kept going, even though his flight instincts were threatening a takeover. Just one look, he thought. He had to know. Had to see the engineering wonder he was picturing in his mind. Yes it was ghoulish. Yes it was depraved. It was also a work of art in its design, and it intrigued Harvey to no end.

The passageway became so dark he barely recognized his own glove in front of his visor. The strangest part, aside from the fact that this structure shouldn’t have existed in the first place, was the temperature. Surprisingly hot. His suit had atmospheric controls, but even with them working at full strength he was sweating as if directly under both Fomalhaut and Piscis Austrini at midday. Just for reference, he called up the ambient readings, and found high levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, plus an incredibly high humidity level. Almost as if the place had an atmosphere.

Then a sudden insight compelled him to stop in his tracks. The subterranean rumbling. It was still there, but became noticeably duller, as if he’d come to a place where the walls were insulated. He held his breath and closed his eyes, training every ounce of focus on the helmet speakers, listening for any sound inside the pitch-dark passage.

He couldn’t be positive, and he didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but he swore something was there. A slight, almost imperceptible click-click-click.

His skin chilled over despite the stifling heat. His head throbbed. His conscience screamed at him to save himself. But the intrigue became too much to bear. The clicking sounds were all around him, yet, in the complete lack of illumination, he only saw nothingness. Something was there, though, and without weighing the consequences of such a rash decision, he commanded the helmet lights to come on, and witnessed the single most heart-stopping vision in his life.

Blanketing the wall—two, three thick—were small, finger-length worms, attached to each other and the stone surface by sheaths of a sinuous, mucus-like substance infused with silky strands. All semitransparent. All disgustingly slimy. Broders was right. It was some sort of larvae, thrashing and contorting to the visual stimuli from the light.

Harvey panned his headlamps in every direction, and everywhere he looked it was nothing but the same—writhing maggots, encased in sticky shells of translucent webbing. Coating the wall up to the high ceiling, across to the other side of what was quite a large area chiseled from the mountain’s core. Every square centimeter of stone concealed, creating a living wallpaper. A squirming, contorting canvas of ghastly little beasts, tucked away in shells of slime.

All of a sudden his thirst for knowledge was flushed into oblivion. One step toward the way he came and he felt a strange popping sensation below his boot. Then he realized he hadn’t looked down yet. When he did, queasiness took over. The full comprehension of his surroundings hit him. The floor was carpeted with the maggots, with several of them smashed underfoot and several more, obviously agitated, making their way onto his boot and up the leg of his suit. The helmet lights hit one of them perfectly in its face. Harvey spotted sharp black mandibles, opening and closing again and again—click-click-click.

His panic reflex took over and he kicked, desperate to rid himself of the gruesome creatures.

Click-click-click the sharp mandibles made a spine-tingling sound. Click-click-click.

The writhing worms under his feet sent a wave of revulsion to his core. And then the final straw. A sound he’d heard before. A sound he never wanted to hear again.

Clank! Clank! Clank!

He’d recognize it in his sleep, or even in death. And he knew it meant his death if he didn’t get moving. It was the cyborgs.

He sprinted without a thought. No more poking around where he wasn’t supposed to be. How could he have been so stupid? The noxious worms reacted to his swift movements with swift movements of their own, swishing and thrashing more fervently. Some of them wriggled so hard they broke loose from their squishy cocoons, eating through with their serrated mandibles. Harvey swore he saw their black, velvety eyes glaring as they inched toward him from every direction.

Behind him he heard the cyborgs, and that invigorated him with a shot of natural energy. He had no problem traversing the dark corridors of the underground prison, past the warning signs and plaques and engravings of threatening images, finally reaching the area where the pictographs grew much more inviting.

There was only one way to go—up. Up a long, twisting ramp, where the going became steeper the higher he climbed, until he thought possibly he’d perish before even making it. One thing gave him solace. He heard no more of the cyborgs. Maybe he’d given them the slip. Maybe they were guarding the pupae. Whatever the reason, he seemed alone, and for that he was more than grateful.

The road to the top was self-explanatory, albeit strenuous. The Guardians, it seemed, made contacting them in the event of an emergency as simple as possible for a sentient being of almost any level of intelligence. He found that out especially when he reached the top.

The path leveled off, finally, just when he thought he couldn’t go any further. The sight before him renewed his energy, and he forgot all about being sore and tired. A grand temple, elaborately designed with monstrous columns of marble-like rock. Imbued symmetrically about the circumference were more engravings, all of which with an urgent tone. Serious symbols and severe expressions on alien faces.

It was an open area, situated on a large balcony, with a presiding view of the plains below. The visitor station shimmered in the distance. He wanted to be there right now. With Lea. Eating more of her strange and ancient dishes—at least the ones the food printers would replicate. He wanted this whole thing to be over, and dreamed that it had never happened in the first place. But it did happen. And he was there, unbelievably, on the summit of Mount Mausolus, in a place he didn’t even know existed only hours ago. It became a little daunting when he really thought about how quite possibly the fate of the galaxy might rest in his hands. The pressure would have crushed him like a bug. The one thing that kept him moving was Lea’s voice, hearing her instructions over and over in his head, telling him exactly what to do.

Because of Lea’s incessant drilling, Harvey knew where the beacon would be located before he reached the platform. When he got a good look, it became quite clear no instructions were needed. The beacon had a central position, the focal point of the entire temple, sitting high on a pedestal, with symbols and alien lettering conveying clear intent.

He climbed the ramp to the pedestal and as soon as his boots touched the stones at the top, a panel lit up with the most brilliant blue. He expected some kind of button or lever he had to press. Instead, the blue light swirled into a haze, surrounding Harvey, bathing him in a cool glow.

His mind filled with information. The story of the Unspeakable Ones, and their treachery that nearly brought the galaxy to its knees. Everything the spirits had told him was confirmed. How the Guardians, despite their extremely passive nature, entered the war and defeated the Unspeakable Ones. He also was shown, instantly, the entire narrative of how the Unspeakable Ones were transformed into larvae, and how they were imprisoned deep under the mountain for what was supposed to be eternity.

Then he was told about the beacon, left behind in case the Unspeakable Ones had escaped. The blue glow communicated all of this to him in a fraction of a second, using no words or languages, but by installing complete ideas into Harvey’s head, giving him instant knowledge of how to operate the beacon.

Once he learned how the beacon worked, a surprisingly simple process, he wasted no time. All it took, it seemed, was a thought. So he thought. He pushed the dilemma to the forefront of his mind, and, using the same process as the blue glow, asked, quite urgently, for the Guardians to come.

Instantly, the blue glow transformed to a fiery red. He heard a strident alarm, bursting forth in intervals, and the redness flashed in rhythm with the siren. The beacon had been activated. He did it. Now, all they had to do was wait.

Just as he finished that thought, a jarring event put an abrupt end to those hopes. A violent collision reduced the beacon transmitter to rubble. The stone table where the blue and red light originated was smashed beyond recognition, severing the mental link between Harvey and the beacon, and throwing him into an instant daze.

He stumbled back three steps, his thoughts jumbled with the images and ideas presented to him by the beacon. Distinguishing between reality and his thoughts was nearly impossible, and he shook his head over and over to make sense of what had just happened. Then, when his own consciousness came back to him, he was plopped into a terrifying reality. A cyborg stood over the broken beacon with a certain air of satisfaction. Not once did it take its cold, dead eyes off of Harvey.

9.

Harvey stared at the monstrous robot, then at the crushed transmitter. His one and only thought was if the beacon had done its job. Did the call for help get out? Consideration for his own life dissolved into a determination to complete the mission. But the beacon looked beyond repair. What could he do? He knew how to fix human electronics, not alien.

The robot stepped menacingly toward Harvey, its arms extended, its immense claws clacking together in a wretched way. It sent a chill down his spine, and with it his survival instincts kicked in. He sprinted to the one and only exit. But the idea of escape down the way he came was obliterated by the clanking machines. More robot killers were coming. His exit was blocked.

Nowhere else to run, he made a snap decision and hastened to the balcony, to the edge, where he peered over at his own death. Ledges and levels and rocky crevices abounded, making the way down a bone-shattering tumble. Everywhere he looked, he saw the same thing. A brutal climb. He’d never make it, especially considering the dexterity he’d seen from the cyborgs. Still, he had to try.

Suddenly his decision was revoked with a violent blow to his helmet. His visor display scrambled to digital artifacts and he found himself on the ground the second his senses came back. He could only react, not think, when, above him, he saw the mechanical monster, both of its long arms raised high, its razor sharp, stronger than exotanium talons pointed straight down. Harvey spun on the ground, his bulky suit only allowing him a half turn, but enough to send him rolling over the edge. His stomach jumped into his mouth at the sudden weightless sensation, and all he could envision was a horrible ride down the mountain, his bones pulverized, his internal organs ruptured, his body becoming a rag doll.

Then something clamped onto his leg. It felt like it was going to pinch off his foot, so he jerked and kicked, desperate to free himself from the cyborg’s grip. He glanced up. The robot had him, dangling over the edge, and could reel him in easily. Harvey didn’t have to think about it. He knew he was dead, and much rather wanted to die by his own hand than by the vile claws of those terrible, automated beasts. So he flailed and kicked and fought, determined not to let the cyborg have him.

Somehow his desperate effort paid off. Leaning and reaching for Harvey in a precarious way, the cyborg compromised its center of gravity. Harvey recognized that the second it teetered over. Once again, his head swam with images of his demise, both man and machine toppling down the deadly slope. In less than a second, his morbid thoughts came true.

A blow to his side. To his head and back. Then another to his side. Over and over, the two tumbled, with Harvey cradled inside the robot’s long arms as if in a cage, almost shielding him from harm. He knew it didn’t want to protect him, yet, against all odds, it did. His helmet also protected against what would have been some nasty bumps, one possibly fatal. And his suit—the suit he hated almost more than the cyborg that was trying to kill him—prevented several abrasions to almost every conceivable part of his body.

Not that he didn’t feel it. He felt it. It seemed they were plummeting forever, and would have been much longer if not for one miraculous occurrence. Suddenly, and more than fortuitously, he stopped falling. The abrupt halt to his momentum had him gasping for air, and he saw the cyborg grasp at him frantically. One more stroke of luck—the cyborg’s grip slipped. It seemed to forget about Harvey and grabbed at a rock, but it crumbled to sand. With nothing left to support its weight, the cyborg kept falling as Harvey, dangling in midair, tried to understand what had just happened.

It wasn’t long before he figured it out. The suit had a tool belt. And this belt, one of the sources of Harvey’s complaints, was quite cumbersome in that it stuck out in the back and made it quite uncomfortable to sit. It was this very irritation that had saved him. Somehow the belt got caught on a projecting rock, sparing him from the deadly drop.

He watched the cyborg roll and cartwheel rapidly. For any living creature the trauma would have been fatal. But this was no living creature. Still, the fall took its toll on the machine, breaking off parts, crushing a section of its head, bending its limbs in ways they weren’t meant to bend. Then, in one, final, terminal roll, it came apart into pieces. And when it stopped near the bottom, Harvey saw smoke rising from its midsection, a sure sign the cyborg was out of commission for good.

Harvey didn’t remember much after that. Dazed from the blows to the head, exhausted from hours of constant exertion, he considered himself lucky to extricate himself from his precarious position and crawl to level ground, where he collapsed in a breathless heap.

The sensation of motion awoke him. He didn’t know how, but he’d made it to the rover. Who was driving it? He had no energy to lift his head. His body felt like one big bruise, and the thought of moving sent waves of agony through his mushy muscles. He could only lay there, his blurred vision catching but a glimpse of the brilliant starry sky above.

More movement forced his eyes open. He was somewhere else now. No longer in the rover. The night sky no longer shimmered above. Instead, a cool, damp environment encapsulated him in silent repose. Inhaling deeply, he realized his suit had been taken off, and he smelled a familiar mustiness, heard noises he swore he’d heard before, saw places he knew he’d been.

However, it was all so hazy. His head swam with images of his terrible trip to Mount Mausolus. He felt himself being taken somewhere, and all he could think was the cyborgs must have caught up with him. Now they were taking him underground, most likely to his death.

But he kept noticing familiar sights. Plaques with engraved epithets. Fake flowers and rumpled flags. All the trappings of a mausoleum. Which one, he had no clue. There came a point where he no longer cared. Lea began to dominate his thoughts. He felt a tear well in his eye at his failure. He’d never see her again. He wouldn’t return to her gravesite like he’d promised. He was lost. And he couldn’t shake the feeling she was lost too. In his delirium, he called out her name, hopeful she’d hear him and, one more time, come to him.

But she never came. He dozed and awoke several times, no clue exactly how long he’d been out, and still with no real idea where he was being taken. Darkness was his only companion now. That and a solemn and palpable sense of doom. At any moment the hammer will strike and his life will be over. By some unknown reason, that didn’t happen. Instead of torture and pain and, finally, death, he was treated to kindness, gentle whispers, water, even food, though old and almost unpalatable. Still, it kept him alive. And, over time, the kindness and nursing brought him to a state of semi-consciousness, enough for him to assess his surroundings for the first time.

When he saw where he was, he had to check his own forehead for heat, just to make sure he wasn’t one of the dead. The underground catacombs. He would always recognize this place with its pale white walls and ensconced stacks of bones. And, swirling about in the gloom, were the spectral shapes he’d become accustomed to—the ghosts of Cemetery Planet.

10.

“Rest, Harvey Crane,” a familiar voice emerged from the overall murmuring. Kip Broders. His stern visage formed from the mist. “Rest and get your strength back.”

“W-w-where’s Lea?” Harvey’s throat was scratchy. He felt someone cradle his head as a packet of hydration liquid, quite on its own, drew up to his mouth. He took a large sip from the straw, then asked again, this time much firmer. “Where is she?”

Broders remained silent. A hush pervaded the chamber. Spirit faces came out of the woodwork, literally, all dismal expressions of reticence.

“What?” Harvey didn’t like what he was seeing. “Broders, tell me where Lea is.”

“Don’t worry about that right now, Harvey Crane. You’ve been through so much. You’re not well. You need to rest and recover.”

“I need to find Lea,” he sat up even more. His head was going to explode at any moment. That didn’t matter to him. He was almost on his feet when several pairs of hands guided him gently to the cot again.

“No!” he complained. “You have to let me go! I said I’d meet her at her gravesite! That’s where I need to be…not here!”

“You need to stay, Harvey Crane. Things have changed while you were asleep. The Unspeakable Ones have begun the next phase of their operation, and it’s massive in scale. The best thing for you is to just remain hidden. Let us take care of you.”

“What do you mean, Broders?” Harvey now had the strength to handle his own hydration pack. Downing copious amounts, he demanded answers. “What next phase? What are they doing?”

Broders feigned a breath.

“The reanimation. It’s begun. They’ve started placing their minds into our bodies. It’s just a matter of time until it happens to all of us.”

Harvey had to stop and think. He hadn’t really considered the consequences of the operation, as Broders had called it. Now that he actually let himself go there, what he imagined made him tremble like a child.

“What would that mean for you?” he asked reluctantly. “What happens to your soul when they reanimate your body?”

“There’s been considerable debate about that,” Broders said over the sudden nervous chatter. “The consensus isn’t very optimistic. Most of us are among the belief that the soul, though released from the body at death, will become once again bound to its corporeal state when the body is reconstituted.”

“Bound to the body?” Harvey shuddered at the thought. “While the Unspeakable Ones have control of it?”

“Exactly,” said Broders. “Now you’re beginning to understand why we’re so concerned. We would be made prisoners in our own bodies, forced to watch as the Unspeakable Ones commit act after act of savagery.”

When Broders was finished, the mood in the room had dampened considerably, which was a significant feat given how melancholy things were already. Harvey wondered if all the hopelessness wasn’t misplaced.

“But that’s not going to happen, right?” he studied the grim faces, then returned to Broders. “The Unspeakable Ones won’t get the chance to take it that far, right? I mean, where are the Guardians? Aren’t they coming? I activated the beacon…where are they?”

A great hush settled in, this one even more bleak than the last. Harvey searched each and every man, woman and child for a glimmer of optimism where none was to be found.

“What’s going on!” he demanded. Many of the ghosts, frightened by his outburst, dissolved into wisps of particulates and jettisoned away from him. Many others remained visible, calm and indifferent, and stared either at him or at the stone floor. “Why isn’t anyone saying anything!”

Finally and mercifully, Broders raised a hand, gesturing gently for him to quiet down.

“The beacon,” he said. “We don’t believe it got through. It didn’t work.”

“Didn’t work!” Harvey shouted. “How did it not work? I activated the alarm. I swear I did—I swear.”

“Something must have happened,” Broders shook his head. “Something that cut off the transmission before it could get out.”

Harvey’s blood turned ice cold. Could it be?

“If the beacon wasn’t activated properly,” Broders confronted Harvey with a serious tone. “We need you to go and try it again.”

“I wish it was that simple,” it hurt Harvey to say what he had to say. “Something did happen. A cyborg destroyed the beacon just as I was activating it.”

The whispers and murmurs were never more agitated, never more riddled with anxiety and despair. More than despair. Bottomless, infinite loss.

“Then that means there’s no stopping them,” Broders added to the din of desperation. “And there’s no hope.”

“I’m going to find Lea,” Harvey managed to get up. This time no hands tried to push him down again. The souls were lost in mourning. He heard whispers of the Unspeakable Ones, their cruel rituals and sacrifices to their dark gods. Harvey cringed at the images being thrust forward through the synergetic cloud of human consciousness. He didn’t allow them to change his mind, though. About one thing he remained resolute. The universe could come to an end, or be taken over by a race of real-life devils for all he cared. All he wanted was Lea.

“Wait!” Broders hovered closely as he made his way out.

“Don’t try to stop me, Broders,” he waved indignantly. “If Lea’s in danger, then I need to go help her.”

Broders looked more despondent than ever.

“If you insist on going, just be careful. You’ve been recovering in here for quite a while. Things have changed on the surface since you’ve last been up there. Terrible things.”

11.

Harvey had grown to hate the overstated architecture inside Mausoleum One. Old world charm his ass. Too many frills. Too much confusion. Curved archways and elaborate cornices and tray ceilings as far as the eye could see. He longed for the simple refinement of the new mausoleum in the visitor station. He longed most of all for Lea, and no power in the universe would stop him from finding her.

Initially he didn’t see what Broders was talking about. No cyborgs. No reanimated corpses. No evil takeover of the galaxy. He did see caskets out of their niches and stacked haphazardly this way and that. The wood scratched and the brass oxidized. The lids left open and the plush liners exposed. But no bodies. All the caskets were empty, at least the ones he dared to scrutinize.

He began to notice the number of caskets taken from their slots, extricated from their resting places, ripped open unceremoniously, and robbed of their occupants. It should have terrified him, the sheer volume of devastation.

The place had been ransacked, leaving nothing behind but chaos. And silence. The silence preoccupied him more so than the tangled piles of coffins. No longer were the corridors serenaded by the industrialized clamor Harvey remembered hearing the first time he’d wandered these halls. It unnerved him terribly, and when he reached the point where he spotted the giant stone and metal door that led outside, he was thankful for two things: he was closer to finding Lea, and he could say goodbye to this place for good.

He located his suit in the exact spot where he’d left it, and, once he got it on, found the batteries and air supply to be at satisfactory levels. The door he managed to open by rewiring the security lock, using his extensive background as a repairman and an elaborate system of trial and error.

Once outside, he took his bearings, fully aware that anything could happen. Something could spring from the behind the large crumbling monuments and end his quest for his one true love. But the graveyard was undisturbed. Not a sound. No ghoulish activity had taking place here, and for that Harvey was utterly thrilled.

He hastened on a return course through the large shrines to where the headstones became more modest and reserved. There he reunited with his trusty steed, the PMD, which had been waiting for him with another message—the train was at the nearby terminal. He almost cried when he heard those words spoken aloud by the computer. It wouldn’t be long now. A short PMD ride to the train, a not-so-short train ride back to the visitor station, and he’d be with Lea again.

He greeted the train with a smile, and did the same with his favorite seat in the center of the upper deck. One thing he didn’t think he’d be so keen on greeting was the wide open vista of gravesites. Normally he would have done all he could to keep from staring out into the necropolis. On his long holomemorial test runs, he’d sleep, he’d play games, he’d eat—anything to keep his focus away from the graves. This time he wanted to search the rows of slabs and statues. He willed his vision to get lost in the infinity, in the madness of it all.

He knew the madness could have swallowed him into its orbit if he stared too long. But it had to be done. He had to see if what the spirits told him was true. Were the Unspeakable Ones and their cyborg slaves about to revive an entire planet of corpses? The very idea instilled him with equal parts intrigue and disgust. But mostly it left him with the stale taste of skepticism. Still, he peered across the landscape, in all directions, looking for signs of nefarious activity, but found nothing.

Not for long.

Zipping along at nearly a thousand kilometers an hour, the maglev train traversed Zone 6 in a matter of minutes, taking him quickly into the neighboring zones. With the bird’s-eye view, Harvey had a singular vantage point and could see far off in every direction. Soon, what he saw disturbed him.

Large, ominous shapes in the distance. First he spotted only one. Then another. Soon he was losing count. Monolithic structures, they seemed stationary, yet he swore he saw one moving, slowly, among the graves.

As the train continued its journey to Section 1, Harvey continued spotting the distant, dark objects. He did some estimating and concluded they must have been machines. Robotic probably. Gigantic certainly. They looked much bigger than even the gravediggers, some of which could resemble elephants in their mass.

The gigantic, mysterious machines began to take shape as he got closer to them. At least twenty meters tall, with spindly legs and wheels so they could traverse the headstones. Big, flat-topped contraptions with loads of crates attached to their massive underbellies. More inspection proved his worst fear—the crates were coffins. The machines were robbing graves.

Then he saw gravediggers, near enough in proximity to the train for him to pinpoint them in dusty swirls kicked up by the goings-on. He knew what he would see next—cyborgs. And, a hundred kilometers before the train arrived at the visitor station, they were thick as ants. They worked side-by-side with the diggers, which in turn worked in tandem with the massive transports. That was the name Harvey gave to them when he finally saw them up close. The transports were the hearts of the operation. All activity surrounded them, with one goal in mind—to strip the ground of each and every grave.

The cyborgs and gravediggers and transports became so numerous that Harvey began to fear one of them would take notice of the train. The vacuum tube offered a bit of protection. Kept down the sound. Provided a barrier between him and the outside. But a train speeding by at near the speed of sound is hard to miss. His only consolation was that the trains often ran automatically, and it was possible the robots were used to this.

That was his only hope—that in their haste, the robots wouldn’t notice the maglev train streaking across the landscape. And with each kilometer, Harvey beheld another wondrously terrifying sight. The transports, now thick as skyscrapers, patrolled like giant cleaning bots, rolling over the open graves and literally sucking the caskets from the holes. They were so numerous and so large and the sight was so foreign it almost didn’t register to Harvey. Immense dark rectangles, dotting the landscape in every direction. Black cubes becoming black dashes becoming black dots. A truly worldwide operation.

None of it mattered to Harvey. The Unspeakable Ones could have the planet, for all he cared. All he wanted was Lea. Find her gravesite. Fulfill his promise. So he ignored all the robotic machines. Gravediggers and giant transports and cyborg workers. It was like traveling into a city of them. But that was nothing compared to the shock he got when, for the first time, he caught a glimpse of the visitor station.

Lights. He saw lights. It wasn’t much, and at such a distance, barely perceptible. But Harvey knew. Too many lights. Something was happening at the visitor station.

He decided it prudent to climb down, stealthily, from his normal perch on the train’s observation deck and find a place to hide. Something told him to get ready. As the train got to within a few kilometers, it slowed dramatically. A low whine from under his feet signaled the magnets were about to power down. The station loomed large, a sprawling complex with a domed courtyard, a massive mausoleum, an arched concourse with a multilevel food court, and a towering space elevator. All with view portholes, some of them quite extensive, allowing Harvey a view inside.

What he saw stopped his pulse.

People everywhere. Standing in the portholes. Shuffling down the halls. Staring at the train.

He hunkered down in the PMD bay, a small section cordoned off from the seating area. His only hiding place. He couldn’t trust his own eyes, and had to peek again. Sure enough, he wasn’t hallucinating. It was real. The population at the visitor station had just gone up. By a few hundred.

These were no normal visitors. He could see it in the way they walked. Sluggish. Deliberate. Milling about while colliding clumsily with one another. He saw things he wished never existed, even in the bleakest of nightmares. But he couldn’t shake this one away.

The faces. They weren’t faces. Not complete. Some had skin, for the most part. But others, the vast majority, were mere skeletons with protruding clavicles and cheek bones. The lack of flesh around the eyes created a harsh stare with wide pupils and rounded orbs inside deep sockets. The teeth were mostly visible due to the regression of lips. Noses, sunken and sagging, were typically missing.

They wandered aimlessly, these wretched creatures, these corpses returned to the living by some terrible alien technology. Harvey stayed down and kept quiet as the train’s airlocks slid open, and a small herd of walking cadavers meandered inside. He heard one of them issue a garbled moan, and that’s when it really hit home to him—the magnitude of it all. These beings, these barely functioning and severely decayed beings were once under the ground, once considered permanent residents of this gigantic graveyard. Now they were alive, more or less, with some kind of evil larvae inside them. He couldn’t bring himself to understand how the Unspeakable Ones would want to live like this. There had to be something he was missing, yet, in the end, he really didn’t care. Lea was all he cared about. She was all he saw, and to find her, Harvey would shed every ounce of terror and rise to his feet. In one quick dash, he exited the train, eluding the cluster of undead curiosities by slipping behind their backs.

On the train platform he had to be quick, and hid behind the reception kiosk to avoid being seen. The wandering dead wore shabby clothes that at one time had certainly been neat and clean. Men in bow ties and women in fancy dresses. The formal wear of the deceased, so many centuries old, the fabric ripped at the seams and disintegrated at the frayed edges.

They seemed innocuous, yet Harvey saw the wickedness in their eyes. Something was there. Something driving them. Something not at all natural or human. An uneasy smoldering inside his guts flared like a supernova at the sight of these disfigured beings. They were aberrations.

Throughout the entire train terminal, and the entire transportation wing of the visitor station, Harvey kept to the hidden spaces. Behind autoserve bins and interactive map displays and even under the moving walkway by means of an underground scaffold. Being the caretaker, he knew of these secret passageways, and utilized them well.

The concourse swarmed with the undead. They seemed dazed. Arms jerking irregularly. Feet shuffling and stilted. Heads bobbing and weaving on rubbery necks. They seemed almost helpless. And they would have been comical if not for their numbers. Vast numbers. Frightening numbers.

Harvey shuddered at the ugly sight of all those bodies. Human bodies. Various states of decay. A ghoulish parade. He also shuddered about something else. In order to reach to mausoleum, he had to leave the safety of his hidden viaduct. He had to walk among the dead.

Every natural instinct and shred of common sense issued stern prohibitions against such a move. However, there were forces at work that superseded logic. It was love. He burned to see Lea. Would have died to find her. He’d promised to find her, and that was what he would do.

So, with a deep breath, after waiting for a moment when no one was near, he stepped out of concealment, closing the viaduct’s access panel. When in Rome…he thought, and committed to acting like the others, mimicking their behavior, limping and loping, head on a spring, arms dangling and swaying as if he was learning how to use them. He got so good at it, he even scared himself. And, more importantly, he seemed to be fooling everyone else. It was working! He managed to stumble all the way to the mausoleum, to the escalators. But that was where he ran into trouble.

Three fossilized corpses. An elderly man and two middle-aged women. Harvey walked straight into them, and, for a brief moment, saw his plans come unraveled. Protruding eye sockets and decayed stares. It was like being scrutinized by three demons. Circling, prodding, and ogling him up and down. He nearly broke from character, nearly gave up the languid ruse and gave in to the impulse to run away screaming. Somehow he maintained his composure, and somehow the trio of living lead decided to move on, shaking and wobbling, two of them supporting the third.

Harvey had an epiphany. These beings were like newborn babies, and were learning how to operate their human bodies, which to them probably quite alien. He imagined living for centuries as a maggot and then, suddenly, having the gift of arms and legs. It must have been bizarre.

He didn’t want to dwell on such things for too long. His one and only goal was Lea. And, being so close now, his whole body tingled with anticipation. Just two levels up, two quick levels and he was there, on the third floor. From there it was only a short dash to section C-6.

He reached the end of corridor C-5 and when he came around the intersection to section C-6, his feet stopped suddenly, though his heart kept right on pounding.

Lea. He saw her standing next to her grave. Her holomemorial must have been working better than ever. It produced a sharp, high contrast image seemingly indistinguishable from the real thing.

“Lea!” he shouted, but she didn’t react. She had her back turned. Her long, dark hair shimmered in the electric glow from the ambient light. But, as Harvey approached, he noticed her hair didn’t shimmer with vitality, but bristled with coarseness. And when he touched it, several brittle and dead strands broke off in his hand. Then he noticed her gown, once white and pristine, now stained and tattered. Ravaged by the cruelty of time.

He stepped back as she spun on her heels to face him. He stepped back again when his eyes met hers. Only her eyes were sunken in deep, dark cavities. Mummified skin, missing in large places, stretched over a gaping jawbone, brownish teeth grinning ceaselessly. Every kilogram of youth and beauty had gone. Only decay remained. The body standing before him was no longer Lea. Yet it was her. She’d returned from the grave.

He had no power to react. All he could do was glance at her desecrated casket, then at her, or the corpse that had come out of the box, the eight hundred year old body of the woman he loved. He had to believe, deep down, that maybe it was her.

“L-L-Lea?” he said by instinct. “Lea? Is that you?”

The living corpse stumbled backward, and Harvey sensed fear—as much as Harvey was feeling, maybe even more. The thing raised its arm, struggling for control, and pointed a shaky, withered finger at him as it released a hideous howl. Though Harvey didn’t understand the language, he understood the shrill tone. It was a cry for help, a cry of warning. An intruder was in the midst. Harvey Crane was an intruder on Cemetery Planet.

PART IV

1.

Shock. Stunned disbelief. Sheer terror.

Lea, Harvey’s best friend. His only friend. Lea, the love of his life. It never mattered that she was one of the deceased laid to rest on Cemetery Planet. He didn’t mind that she’d died eight hundred years ago. He loved her, and she loved him. Yet this…thing, this shrieking, hissing, spitting thing raking its long, sharp fingernails at him—it was not Lea.

He lost all control, yet somehow by instinct innately dodged the savage attack. Lea, or the thing she had become, pursued him relentlessly. Biting with yellow, bent teeth. Clawing with stained, sharp nails. He cringed at her sour complexion. Most of the skin had been regenerated miraculously, only it had a pallid hue with wrinkles of dehydration around the mouth and eyes. She backed Harvey into a corner before he knew it. Then, from both sides of the corridor, he saw more of them coming.

Without thinking, he tore a synthetic bouquet of flowers from a grave shrine and pitched them at Lea’s face. He hated doing it. Hated the thought of doing anything violent to her. But it wasn’t her, and inside he’d already accepted it. She reeled away, just for a moment. The slim window he needed.

The Unspeakable One occupying Lea’s body displayed remarkable dexterity and fleetness of foot—control most of the others hadn’t yet achieved. It still wasn’t enough. Harvey slipped past its outstretched arms, only to be confronted by another walking corpse, and another, and another. He pushed, he punched, he even bit one of them, receiving the desired reaction—a sharp howl. So they felt pain. Good to know.

Praying for forgiveness from the people who originally owned these bodies, he kicked and jabbed and shoved his way out of the mausoleum, down to the lobby, where he encountered more and more undead wanderers, saucer eyes afire with emotion, with anger, with a sedulous desire for murder.

Harvey ran past the concourse with its giant vista overlooking an ocean of tombstones, passing the food courts, where it seemed the vast majority of the possessed had congregated, straight to the auditorium, where he hoped, even expected, the place would be empty.

Wrong.

Every seat in the circular theater was filled with lifeless bodies. Every bloodshot, decrepit eye was glued to the holographic presentation—a gigantic, three-dimensional view of a planet of graves—as the announcer said his piece.

“Thanks to the wonders of the ionic stream, relocating the graves to this sparkling corner of the galaxy became a very real alternative…”

Harvey forgot about the steep decline and stumbled down the aisle, catching himself on the handrail. Behind him, rolling in like a tide, the pursuing mob created a stir in the otherwise torpid audience. Quickly they awakened to the panic, reacting to the alarm as if all of one mind, all of one thought—capture and kill Harvey.

Though uncoordinated and sluggish, the ghastly horde outnumbered him infinitely, and used their numbers to cut off his every means of escape.

Trapped, he confronted his pursuers. The faces of the dead. His people. His ancestors. The residents of Cemetery Planet. At one time he was their keeper, his sole responsibility to care for, watch over, protect them. He ruminated over the completeness of his failure, seeing it reflected back to him in dozens of empty stares.

He huddled against the wall, expecting the worst. Then, just within arm’s reach, he spotted the ladder to a maintenance shaft. His prayers were answered.

One giant leap and he had the bottom rung. Below him, a collective sea of seething anger and murderous intent. Stretching hands, reaching and almost scraping him, though none had the body control to stop him from climbing, hand over hand, to the service duct. To safety.

On all fours, he took a right, then a left, then a right, not knowing or caring about his destination. With every meter he put between himself and those primeval monsters, his fright subsided a bit more. Soon his energy ran out. His body wouldn’t move another centimeter. He collapsed somewhere in the bowels of the maintenance core, thanking God for his tiny slice of good fortune.

2.

He stayed in one place longer than he’d wanted, accompanied only by the relentless pounding of his own heart. That wasn’t altogether true. He had another companion—his despondency. How could he ever forget Lea? Never, even if he lived a thousand years, would he forget. Even if her body had been taken over, even if her soul was trapped inside, watching in horror, he’d never forget. And he’d never give up. But the way forward seemed so bleak. No prospects. No ideas. No grand schemes.

The cold metal rescued his blistering cheek. He worshipped that service duct, and stayed there, resting, recuperating.

Scratching, subtle, almost nonexistent, pulled him from his slumber. He listened, swallowing his heart, as the scratching gained strength and repetition. It grew into a scraping, sliding sound reverberating along the narrow shaft.

Harvey froze, trying to process this newest turn of events. He thought the Unspeakable Ones weren’t in full command of their host bodies. He could have sworn they were so inept at even the simplest of physical demands that they would never be able to reach, let alone climb, the ladder in order to get into the ductwork. What he saw next blew that notion to nebulous dust.

On hands and knees, crawling from an intersection, was Lea. She moved with the fluidity and grace of a cat. Harvey’s surprise was matched only by his terror. Terror when she caught his eyes with hers. Terror as she glided through the small passage with keen coordination and skill.

Thrusting his knees, swimming with his arms, he propelled himself forward as fast and as far as his exhausted state would allow. Lea was quicker. Soon she was right on his heels, and he had nowhere to go.

Then he found a way out, an access panel leading to the caretaker’s living quarters. He bypassed the ladder altogether and fell onto his side. A three meter drop. Ribs on fire, he staggered to his feet and stumbled five steps into his room. He hit the control screen to close and lock the door and…nothing. A quick glance told him the reason—Lea, standing in the entryway, head low, a peculiar look in her eyes.  The safety mechanism was engaged, keeping the door from sliding shut.

“You,” Lea said. Only he knew it wasn’t Lea. It was the monster inside. “You’re…you’re Harvey.”

Harvey’s emotions ran the full gamut. Elated at the prospect that, maybe, Lea had pushed her consciousness forward and she was controlling her own body. Frightened it was a hoax designed to draw him out, trap him with his own sentimentality. Despair that he was correct on the latter, and now he would pay the price for his love.

“I…I can hear her,” the possessed body stepped forward and the door closed. “I can hear…Lea.”

“Why?” Harvey asked meekly. “Why are you doing this? What do you want?”

It gazed out the porthole, seemingly captivated by the expansive view of Mount Mausolus.

“She loved you,” the monster made eye contact again. “And you loved her.”

“Yes,” he cleared his throat, feeling a surge of courage in his statement. “Yes, I loved her. And I still love her…there’s nothing you can do to change that. You can take over the galaxy, destroy everything in your path, scorch the stars to oblivion and you’ll never change it!”

It stared outside again, leaning Lea’s head as if hearing something from far away. Then the door crashed open. It didn’t slide like normal. It broke down the middle and a sea of undead heathens poured in like water. The habitat had only one way in or out, and Harvey, suddenly, was surrounded. He saw the thing inhabiting Lea, looking on sullenly as her brethren closed in. The sudden stink made his knees weak. Dozens of dead bodies, thousands of years of accumulated decay packed tightly in his living quarters.

He felt all kinds of hands on him. Pushed and pulled in fits and starts. He was being torn apart. Mercifully, one voice rose over the general din of the hunt, putting a halt to the madness. An alien language. Harvey knew what the word meant by the instant reactions from the masses.

A path opened. Putrid, possessed bodies stepped aside, making room for the issuer of the command. Amid the stale breath and soiled garments stepped an imposing figure. A familiar figure. Harvey had to clench his eyes closed and open them again just to ensure this vision was not some terrible illusion. It was no illusion. He knew it, and cried the name out loud.

“Broders! Thank God it’s you!”

Broders stopped in midstride and regarded Harvey curiously. Clothes unkempt. Hair a mess. Flesh missing in several crucial chunks. But Harvey knew it was Broders by the commanding presence, the cool gray eyes, and emotionless demeanor. Like Lea, though, he learned quickly that, despite all outward appearances, this thing wasn’t who he once remembered as Broders. It was an Unspeakable One, and, ironically, it seemed to be a leader just as Broders had been.

A sharp blow to his cheeks. Broders jutted his fingers into Harvey’s face, jamming his jaw and seizing him with a clamp-like grip.

“You are the caretaker here,” the thing inside Broders croaked. He sounded like he had mud in his throat. “Come with me…I have something for you to do.”

3.

The journey went slowly. Down, down, down. Hundreds of walking dead clogging the route made the going cumbersome and tedious. The thing inside Broders commanded a group of a dozen or so who seemed to have full control of their hosts. Lea was one of them, or the maggot inhabiting her corpse. He kept forgetting that. Even seeing her in such a horrifically semi-restored state, it was so easy for him to forget.

He had no time to contemplate any of this. Once they passed through the service basement, Harvey had to catch his breath at the surprise he found.

Massive construction. Tunneling. Building. Work on a scale unlike anything Harvey had seen. And to think, it was all right under his feet. Flooding the corridors were untold numbers of rancid, listless, wandering corpses. Alive but not alive. Dead but not dead. The stench was unbelievable. Worse was the overwhelming and terrible sense of callousness, uncaring evil. Pure. Unrestrained. Unrelenting. The sensations Harvey perceived flung him into a state bordering on madness.

Harvey laughed at what Broders had said earlier, when he was a spirit and not a possessed fiend. Broders had once called the Unspeakable Ones devils, and Harvey now found that quaint. He suddenly found the whole concept of heaven and hell quaint. These things—they weren’t devils. They were worse.

As he had these thoughts, the titular leader of the group—the monster inhabiting Broders—halted unexpectedly, turned, and faced Harvey.

“You think you know who we are?”

Harvey’s veins coursed with apprehension. Did this thing just read his mind?

“Answer me, human. Do you think you know who we are?”

Harvey hesitated. The looks of malice were nothing compared to the barrage of mental anguish pouring into his brain.

“You…you’re the Unspeakable Ones.”

An outburst of disgust, both externally as well as psychologically, sent him reeling. He wanted to hide in some benign bower in his imagination, some shady shelter safe from the probing mental tentacles of these terrible creatures. Their hold on him was complete, and no matter how he struggled, no matter how much he tried to resist, he couldn’t get away.

“Do NOT say that!” the leader was aflame with rage, pointing a bony, still somewhat moldy finger in Harvey’s face. “That is NOT our name! It’s a repugnant label given to us by a repugnant species,” it squinted, its stale breath stinging Harvey’s senses. “You want to know our name? Our real name?”

Another outburst, only this one more jovial, though no less malignant. The mood from the dozen or so undead monsters surrounding Harvey took a decidedly disturbing turn, with Broders, or the cruel being inside of him, leading the charge. It opened its mouth to speak, only words didn’t come out. Not words Harvey had ever heard. The sound could have been a language, though if it was, it had to be the single most intolerable language in creation.

Screeching, discordant and unnatural. It was more than mere sound. It was the combination of articulations which, when merged together in sequence, produced an effect inside Harvey’s ear that he could only describe as excruciating. He reached to cover his head. His captors subdued even that movement, forcing the tormenting syllables onto him. Jerking, thrashing, struggling with all his might. Nothing could postpone the agony. And when it was finished, when the monster completed its sadistic phrase, Harvey’s cochlear nerves were left ringing and popping. He felt blood and thought he would be rendered deaf.

But he wasn’t deaf. Over the buzzing and cracking he heard maniacal laughter, vile chortles, hysterical eruptions all at Harvey’s expense. He just now began to comprehend the sadistic nature of these beasts.

4.

After the Unspeakable Ones got their fill of depraved entertainment from Harvey, the trek continued, down an endless, winding slope, until the sounds of industry numbed him from the inside out.

At the bottom, finally, where the air was dense and the stone walls dripped, he saw conveyers. A system of transport on a truly global scale. Tantalized, Harvey imagined the complexity of this mammoth operation, the planning and engineering, the brains brawn it must have taken. Staggering. He knew the purpose. He saw why this intricate system was ultimately built. At that moment he didn’t care. The tinkerer inside wouldn’t stop marveling.

But something seemed amiss. The expanding leviathan of tracks and trusses, interconnected and intertwined like amusement rides, was running only partially. A whole swath of rollers, a main artery through which most of the exhumed skeletons passed, sat nonoperational. Suddenly the Broders parasite stopped and gestured at a giant electric motor.

“We had a breakdown,” it said. “Fix it.”

It was a relic that looked like a legless elephant, only more pitiful. Centuries-old technology. Probably a centuries-old machine. Age seeped from its flange seals and from the rusty helical drums housing the great, spinning gears.

“Why me?” he was confused. “You built it. Can’t you fix it?”

The thing controlling Broders evinced its impatience with a contorted scowl. Harvey could tell it was still struggling to control the minute muscles in the face.

“The androids built this cumbersome contraption for us,” it said. “And the androids were built by humans. Imperfect humans, imperfect machines.”

Harvey’s emotions raged internally. He’d been told by the ghosts of the planet that DeepSix was complicit in this sordid affair. He just didn’t want to believe. They were cheap sonsabitches. That much was undeniable. Were they evil enough to nurture a plan that saw the conquest of the galaxy by the most insidious beings ever known?

“DeepSix? They did this?” he gulped down his terror.

“And you work for DeepSix,” the parasite inside Broders confirmed. “That means you work for us. Repair the machine. Now.”

Harvey had to comply. His new overlords, the Unspeakable Ones, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He had no choice, and got right to work, though he made sure the work went slowly.

He took no time at all identifying the problem. Immediately after removing the motor’s access panel, he recognized a simple undervoltage issue. A five minute job, tops.

He needed to stall for time. Time to think, come up with an idea, some kind of way to make it difficult for the Unspeakable Ones, slow them down if nothing else.

“Uh, we got a problem,” he said. “This one’s a total overhaul. I’m gonna need parts and tools…probably things you don’t have.”

“Nonsense,” Broders stood over him. “The androids will provide all the materials you need.”

At those words, three cyborgs marched forward carrying large bins, all of which overflowed with supplies. And behind those there were several others burdened with even more parts. Kinetic wrenches and prosthetic pliers and actinic cutting torches. Electronic diagnostics and overhaul kits. Gaskets and gearboxes and rollers and bushings and bearings. They’d thought of everything.

Though he should have been crestfallen, Harvey didn’t skip a beat, directing the cyborgs to his newly established work area and ordering them to give an inventory of the tools and parts. Another stalling tactic. It also gave him a diversion from the ghastly scenes all around him. He didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to think about it. He only wanted more time, and kept up the charade as long as he could, selecting a wrench and then climbing under the motor. Clink, clank! He made noises banging the wrench, then climbed out from under the motor to start the process over again.

This ritual he performed several times. Every second, he scoured his intelligence for some kind of insight, some creative solution. But a solution proved elusive, and he found the only way he could expiate his guilt for his lack of action was inaction. And by inaction, he really was acting. By doing nothing, he was doing something. He was slowing these monsters down, keeping them from executing their terrible endeavor. Even one second counted. Each second he delayed was one more second the free species of the galaxy got to live.

Harvey stalled for over an hour in this fashion, feigning a major repair job when, in actuality, he was really making it worse, tearing apart critical valves and ensuring the motor would malfunction even after the voltage problem was repaired. He would have continued forever if not for one disturbing thing. Lea. Her reconstituted, parasite-infected corpse studied him closely. The dullness in her gaze ensured him it wasn’t his Lea. Yet something was there. Something he swore he noticed earlier, in his living quarters, just before he was accosted by the undead droves. Though cold and stoic like the others, a hint of a grin frolicked on her lips, and, just then, he received a message from her.

She, or it, didn’t seem to mind his attempts at subterfuge, and only stood there when it could have done something about it. Unfortunately, the parasite inside Broders did do something.

“What is this?” it inspected his work. “You aren’t playing games with us, are you, human?”

Harvey knew he had no power to do anything else. His plans destroyed, he decided to undo his attempts at sabotage and just finish the job.

An audible roar of approval issued forth when Harvey started the motor. Then a different, even greater clamor overrode the macabre celebration. With a thundering creak and groan, the gigantic conveyer mechanism roared to life.

Not until that moment did Harvey allow himself to recognize what was on the massive contraption. Bodies, lined end to end. The underground tunnel spread to infinity. So large, it made him dizzy. And the bodies. They simply kept coming. Not much more than withered bones wrapped in rotten suits and gowns, they rolled on and on, heading to the final destination. And the final destination, when Harvey laid his eyes on it for the first time, shocked him into such a catatonic state, all he could do was stare.

On another conveyer, lined up like sausages, were slime-coated, wriggling larvae, mandibles clacking and clicking, sickeningly plump abdomens pulsing with anticipation. Just like the procession of human remains, the line of slithery worms trailed into infinity. From multiple directions came multiple belts, carrying countless corpses and maggots, all converging at one central nexus.

It was at this convergence point where Harvey fixed his gaze and couldn’t look away, no matter how much he wanted. In the pit of his gut he felt stirring, the kind of feeling one gets in the presence of something unnatural and unholy. Then this abysmal sensation doubled as he witnessed what happened next.

5.

When the ghost of Kip Broders had first told him about evil worms invading and using dead human corpses as host bodies, Harvey pushed the images out of his mind. He never wanted to believe it, let alone see it. Now he would see. Now he would believe.

At the junction of several conveyers, worms and human bodies were paired together on one, primary moving platform. This was where the most gruesome, most revolting process occurred. The culmination of the entire operation started to take shape in front of his eyes, and he shuddered with terror as he watched.

A maggot was deposited in close proximity to a corpse. A skeleton, really. Some bones broken from the feet. A pinky and a thumb missing from the left hand. An eternal, toothless grin on the weathered cranium. How life could have been brought back to this bag of bones he’d never understand. Soon he would understand.

The larva, as big as a man’s middle finger, wriggled and writhed toward the skinless skull. Slowly, purposely, it undulated in its flabby pellicle, its gnarled mouthpieces clicking in feverish anticipation. Harvey detected joy from the Unspeakable Ones gathered in the underground factory, a palpable sense of reuniting, of reconnection. This was as human as the Unspeakable Ones would get, though. Harvey knew their kindhearted camaraderie only went so far. But he couldn’t deny they took care of their own.

The giant maggot unleashed a sheath of slime, adhering to the skull, climbing past the jawbone into the small opening where an ear should have been. Harvey’s stomach turned at the disgusting creature’s every despicable undulation. Yet, try as he might, he couldn’t look away. It was bizarre. It was repulsive. And it drew him in. He struggled with his cognitive dissonance. On one hand he had never been so repulsed. On the other, never so intrigued.

Once the worm entered the brain cavity, the conveyers quaked and the body was transferred to another set of conveyers running parallel with the original. These mechanisms took the skeleton to an area with countless holding bins, receptacles stacked neatly and cleanly, shaped roughly in human form. There, rather gently, the machines placed the body into one of the receptacles. And then an amazing thing occurred.

A milky fluid drained into the receptacle, flooding the human-shaped shallow depressions where the bones were waiting. The fluid seemed to cause an instant chemical reaction. Steam rising. Crackling and popping like an old-time skillet. Harvey never would have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Even then he wasn’t one hundred percent positive. He must have gone mad. How would he otherwise explain seeing the moisture permeate the bones, transforming them from a drab, flaky gray to bright and white and new?

That wasn’t all.

Muscle tissue, striated and sinewy, began to take shape. Then a heart, liver, lungs, stomach and intestines. He wasn’t an expert at anatomy, and the grimy, disintegrating clothes concealed most of the activity, but he was certain every organ was there, present and accounted for. Developing, forming, becoming real as if by some sort of magic spell.

“You said DeepSix built this?” he asked the alien controlling Broders. “Humans don’t have this kind of technology.”

“What you see before you is of our design,” the thing inside Broders kept its eyes on the former stack of bones, though far from a finished product, as it took on the characteristics of a living human. “We gave them the design diagrams, all the technology advancements to build the machine. And, as you can see, your human friends couldn’t even get that right.”

As it spoke, the reconstituting body began developing flesh. Dark skin stretching over exposed bone. But not everywhere. The process slowed to a crawl, as if the program was imperfect. Large swaths of exposed soft tissue, tender redness and moist muscle. And that was just the one directly in front of Harvey. Others were worse. Some hadn’t developed much past the skeleton stage before the transformation back to a fully-formed body ceased.

“Inept humans,” the thing growled. “This is not how we envisioned our rebirth, but it will have to do…for now.”

Harvey perceived motion from the body he’d been observing. A spark, a vibration, and the half-formed lips quivered. The emaciated fingers twitched. The chest underneath the dust-covered suit jacket rose and fell. Harvey heard a deep gurgle and an unsteady groan as the body took its first breath in hundreds of years.

His own flesh crawled watching the sudden gift of life with one cadaver after the other. Only they weren’t cadavers any more.  They were living corpses. Barely alive. So fragile and tenuous was their existence that each and every one of them had to be helped out of the receptacles. Once their shaky feet hit the floor, it became obvious the transformation process had just begun. More flesh to be grown, more bone concealed. The sight of these unfinished beings, wobbling and stumbling like the elderly in the severe twilight of life, lit a smoldering revulsion deep within Harvey. So many of them in various states of decomposition—twitching and flexing fibrous muscles and veins—and so many others without any tissue at all—mostly skeletons—all coming to life.

The numbers didn’t register. He simply refused to see it, and if he didn’t see it, it didn’t exist. Yet it did exist. One corpse after the next, infused with just enough life-giving fluid to restore what once had been worn away, crushed to dust by the cruel fists of time.

To his left and his right, ahead and behind, conveyer after conveyer, rolling, creaking, rumbling from every point on the compass. A virtual maze. On some belts hundreds, thousands of skeletal remains. On others the larvae. And he was in the center of it all. Witnessing the horrific invasion, watching maggot upon maggot enter skull upon skull.

He wanted to vomit, yet had nothing in his gut to heave. He wanted to be anywhere but there, in a place a million times more torturous than Tartarus. He couldn’t take the morbid sights. The putrid smells. No one was watching him. The cyborgs and the Unspeakable Ones were all inspecting the insidious operation. So he had made his getaway.

In a move born out of desperation and delirium, he burst off, triggering a furious chase. The alarm sounded almost immediately. Harsh lights and piercing tones. Covering his ears in the wake of the sonic barrage, he ducked under the lowest conveyer, dropping flat on his stomach and rolling into a narrow gap. The fury grew greater. The drive to catch him increased. His head buzzed with the hostile language of the Unspeakable Ones. These creatures were vile in every conceivable way, and they weren’t going to rest until Harvey was dead.

He must have set a record for speed on hands and knees. He swore he did. Navigating the vacuum lines, straddling junction boxes, negotiating track struts. He moved so fast on account of one fortuitous reason—the machines, as the Broders parasite had told him, were designed by humans. It gave him a decided advantage, and he located a hiding place quickly, inside a cooling fan housing, which had just enough clearance. He waited there for a brief time. The search party kept moving. He heard heavy footfalls and belabored shouts, along with his own hammering pulse.

The fan, its giant blades spinning in a blur, wobbled slightly. Poor counterbalances resulted in an oblique rotation, causing a slight thump-thump-thump as the rotor turned. In those revolutions, Harvey had a revelation, and he hit himself for not thinking of it sooner. The cooling fans had bearing housings which could be drained of lubricant easily. He did just that—and watched the fans grind to a stop.

Almost instantly the great motor sputtered great tufts of black smoke. Harvey covered his mouth and nose, snapping into motion, hurrying to the next set of fans, and disabling the cooling systems one by one. Before he knew it, he had seven fans shut down, and seven gigantic motors sputtering toxic fumes.

The abrupt halt in the line represented a small section of the greater mechanism. But that was all Harvey needed for a gigantic mess to develop. The stalled belt soon backed up with corpses, bones mixing and tangling with other bones. The meticulous arrangements were sullied in the pileup, and it was getting worse by the second. Cyborgs rushed to mitigate the damage. The place erupted in chaos, a perfect situation for Harvey’s escape.

The tightly-constricted spaces he circumnavigated ensured him no cyborgs could follow as he made his way deeper into the mechanical goliath’s substructure. A sophisticated network only few would have been able to travel. Harvey, having been trained on such equipment, knew the intricacies of the machines. Knew just where to go, just when and where to hide. He sneaked through areas with less cover when he knew the coast was clear, and then waited, hiding with bated breath as Cyborgs clank-clank-clank went by only centimeters from his head.

Despite the dozens of pursuers and his almost one hundred percent certainty he’d be captured, Harvey found a way out. He discovered a chute of some kind, long out of use, leading to parts unknown. He had no interest in taking one last look at his handiwork. He knew by the explosions and shrieks and grating, grinding rumbles he’d done plenty of damage. The whole factory hadn’t been destroyed, but he at least made things difficult. To him, that was a victory.

6.

Harvey didn’t remember falling asleep, just the terrible fit that jerked him awake. He’d heard robotic footsteps, severing him from the soft, warm dream world where Lea’s comforting embrace enveloped him, healed him.

Cold, confined walls. Darkness all around. Dread his sole companion. The recollection of his last few hours began to creep back. He remembered the factory, his campaign of disruption, and his subsequent escape. Where he was now became the real mystery. The ringing in his ears signified his worst fear—no air. Yet he was breathing fine. Must have been the deep, dense substrata, the packed soil blunting all sound.

But it was a sound that had aroused him, had him alert and ready, head throbbing, pulse pounding, pivoting constantly to survey ahead and behind, certain one of the parasitic human skeletons had found him out.

Nothing there. He’d gotten away safely, so it seemed. Then what was it that he’d heard? A sorrowful threnody from the beleaguered spirits of the dead? Then his stomach growled and he received his answer. A gastric groan so convincing, so vocal, Harvey entertained the idea he had a living entity in his gut, asking—no demanding—to be fed.

He chuckled at the clamorous hunger pangs. Soon, though, the tumult in his intestines matured from its infancy and began ruling Harvey’s every thought. Food. Now.

Hunger drives a man beyond his normal restrictions of fear, past any inhibitions regarding dangerous or otherwise life-threatening situations. Any living being, faced with starvation, is going to take risks. Harvey told himself over and over he had to do this. The food court was the only place he could eat, and if he didn’t eat he’d die. Simple as that.

So he crawled. Out of the darkness, out of the rocky crags of that goddamn dungeon. Crawled until he could crouch, then stand straight up, finding an abandoned shaft, tracks on the floor suggesting it had been planned for part of the conveyer matrix, though now, puzzlingly, it was mothballed.

The walls turned from dank and dingy to a stained off-white. He recognized a light. Bright beams cutting through the shifting dust. An arduous investigation rewarded him with an air vent. Popping the cover, he was amazed when he discovered the main visitor concourse. He was only meters from the food court. He also saw scores and scores of pilfered human figures. Host bodies with parasitic monsters in control.

He cringed and ducked down, calculating how far he needed to travel. He wanted to find the autoserve maintenance core, an area behind the food court. It was a place he knew well, from his hours and hours of tinkering, toying, begging and banging on the food printers, and he knew from there he’d have access to as much nutritious sustenance as he would ever want.

If he could reach it.

There was only one slight problem. The parasitic corpses. The food court had never been so full, even in Cemetery Planet’s heyday two hundred years earlier, in the 2300s, when the place was visited by a thousand people a day. Of course Harvey hadn’t witnessed those bustling times. He’d never seen anyone in the food court, or anywhere else in the visitor center for that matter, and he still wasn’t used to it.

The food court had turned into an all-out free-for-all. Autoserves all functioning to full capacity, churning out meals left and right. Harvey wondered how the machines kept running under such strains. The feeding frenzy made him almost lose his appetite. Hundreds of half-rotten corpses funneling food into their mouths as fast as the autoserves would print it. No lines. No polite waiting. Just a melee, almost to the point of fisticuffs. A fight probably would have broken out if not for the extreme cumbersome nature of the corpses. Only a few parasites had much control over their host bodies yet. Most were bumbling, fumbling fools, or at least they looked foolish to Harvey.

Foolish or not, they still represented a clear and present danger. If just one of them spotted him in his ensconced hiding place, he was a goner. His famine, though, superseded even his desire to remain concealed. He had to eat, and soon found himself scouting opportunities. A crust of bread on the floor. A discarded, half eaten chicken breast. A cube of rice. He spied all of these, yet getting them would have meant certain danger. Still, he had to eat.

Then a stroke of luck. In their avarice for nourishment, two parasites began arguing over a tray of food that had been left on the service counter. Harvey had been watching, and noticed the tray, loaded with potatoes and gravy, a steak, and some beautifully steamed asparagus spears—all handsomely replicated by the food printers. The sight and smell churned his guts inside out. It was within reach. He managed to crawl undetected under the counter, centimeters from the tray. And when the parasites began shoving each other, Harvey snatched the tray. He didn’t look to see if they noticed, but by the sound of it, they hadn’t, and the hostilities boiled over into the rest of the crowd.

Harvey scuttled to his hiding place and inhaled the steak without really tasting it. He could have eaten anything at that point and it would have tasted the same. He couldn’t help but recognize the parallel between his own hunger and the voraciousness exhibited by the foul monstrosities that had invaded the food court. Slavishly feeding their rapacious cravings like wild dogs. He nearly lost his own appetite as he watched, through the cracks between the food printers, the mad melee for anything and everything they could get their rotten, filthy fingers on.

Harvey conjectured why these creatures were so ravenous. Since the machines built to regenerate their bodies were malfunctioning, they had to rebuild themselves. And they needed the food to replenish, to become whole again. That must have been it. He saw evidence of his theory. Some of the more developed bodies had eyelids. Fully formed noses. Skin almost complete and real. These were the ones who ate the most, and were beginning their paths to wholeness. From there, Harvey’s conjectures darkened. He didn’t want to think about it.

He didn’t want to look at those offensive things any longer. Wolves in sheep’s clothing. Aliens in human guise. All of a sudden his steak demanded a return ticket. He swallowed hard, determined to keep it down, and squirmed out of the autoserve maintenance core, away from the repulsive smells and sounds of those hungry beasts.

In the main maintenance passage, he stood and stretched his aching muscles. His thoughts wandered to Lea, and his despondency sank to new depths. Would he ever see her again? No. Simple as that. This cruel understanding drove him to further hopelessness. He willed his thoughts away, willed them deep into space, and as he did, stared out the small view porthole on the eastern bulkhead. There, in the inkiness of night, he spotted something that completed his descent into despair.

7.

Harvey saw a craft docked to the space elevator’s orbital platform, only it wasn’t a shuttle. Triangular in shape. Gigantic in size. It was just a silhouette, a dark spot set against the darker background, and would have been invisible if not for the star-studded sky.

The orbital platform was anchored to the planet by a tether, a massive band of nano-filamentous, ultra-thin synthetic silk, strung with such great tension it vibrated in a tone redolent of a harp. Arrow straight and stunning, the immense ribbon served as the heart of the space elevator, the guide wire for the cab, a circular compartment designed to hold about a hundred passengers. It was the cab which had Harvey’s full attention. It appeared packed with people, or pseudo-people. And it was ascending to the platform.

Harvey was dismayed when he concluded the space ship had to be a superexotanker. The largest in the DeepSix fleet. Used to transport millions of metric tons of mined minerals and precious metals from all over the galaxy. His mind boggled at the idea of how many infected corpses that tanker could hold. And, adding to his dread, he saw one more of them. Another triangular shadow, hanging in upper orbit, several thousand kilometers east of the docked ship.

After spotting the second ship, he spied another, then another. Still more obstructions shrouded the night, only smaller, yet no less threatening. If he was scared before, the sight of the new spacecraft sent him into a tailspin of emotion. He could have sworn they were combat cruisers, but he wasn’t exactly certain.

Suddenly his thirst for more information overwhelmed his terror, once again spurring him into action. He’d never felt more curious about anything, and it ate him alive from the inside out. The anxiety of not knowing.

Fortunately the maintenance tunnel had a computer terminal. When he activated the screen, his stomach dropped. The data interface exploded with a treasure-trove. Folder after folder. Document after document. All pertaining to the ongoing operation. All incriminatory beyond anything ever witnessed by human eyes. Innocent human eyes, at least.

The reports were dry and analytical in nature, most of them reading like an autoserve repair manual. Invoices. Shipping receipts and logs. Manufacturing numbers. It was the buried items, the hidden documents, the concealed files that told the whole, damning tale.

Harvey uncovered documentation of meetings between emissaries of the Unspeakable Ones and DeepSix. The topics of discussion raised the hair on his neck. Plans, cold and calculating, on how the combat cruisers and transport ships would be built and delivered. Agreements of remuneration from massive and pristine deposits of rare minerals. Not just diamonds, platinum, and gold as Broders had mentioned, but, most important of all, exotanium. Secret dossiers on the times and dates of construction for the vast subterranean body transport system. And a lengthy discussion, quite heated at times, about the reanimation receptacles. Seems DeepSix was having difficulties complying with precise specifications of the alien technology, and the Unspeakable Ones were incensed.

The dossiers, hundreds of them, added up to nothing less than a grand conspiracy. A secret scheme of deception, debasement, and destruction. The combat cruisers. The freighters. The talk of how the Earth would be divided once its population was crushed and enslaved. Promises made. Deals struck. Just as Broders had said—deals with the devil.

DeepSix was in deep. A conspiracy to end all conspiracies. But Harvey knew something even the supposed brain trust at DeepSix corporate headquarters didn’t know. The Unspeakable Ones intended on honoring no agreements with humans. Harvey wanted to shout at the screen, wanted to reach right through time and space and shake those greedy corporate bastards until their heads fell off. What were they thinking? Were they completely insane? One thing he had no doubts over—he couldn’t let those venal bastards get away with this. No matter how terrifying the Unspeakable Ones, he felt it his duty, no, his destiny to stop this crime against nature from happening. He had to stop the Unspeakable Ones from boarding those ships.

He had to bring down that space elevator.

The second he reached that conclusion, his attention was rudely and abruptly stolen by a cascading array of red and orange lights and a viciously accusatory siren, all products of the computer’s security system. He’d been detected. Now he had to make a run for it, to the service duct leading under the main concourse.

He never made it.

Before he reached the new passage, an undead minion stepped into his path. Harvey had detected the thing’s putrescent odor before he spotted it. But he’d been sprinting so fast, it was impossible to avoid running straight into the arms of the parasitical pariah.

8.

“You almost did it, human,” the beast inside Broders penetrated Harvey with its fiercely ominous eyes. It didn’t need to touch him in order to inflict pain. Just its stare was enough. “You almost ruined everything. But we will persist. And we will slaughter every sentient species in the galaxy. Including humans…and starting with you!”

Harvey had no freedom of movement inside the form-fitted receptacle, bathed in milky white liquid. The very same receptacle and the very same liquid he’d seen in use earlier. The cloudy fluid had a paralyzing effect on his muscles, and he only could watch the terrifying events unfold.

The entire metal framework shook violently. Then the conveyer started to roll. The cyborgs had been working feverishly on the motors, and, despite Harvey’s efforts, the subterranean operation was again in near full swing.

And Harvey was part of it. Riding the belt like one of the countless other dead.

He saw Lea, and that brought on a bag of mixed feelings. Staring at him with the strangest of expressions, she represented both the best and the worst of his life. The high and the low. He knew it was only her body, a shell, and inside, manipulating her every movement, controlling every word and action was a being of indefinable evil. And yet he got such a strange feeling from her, or it. He was so confused.

He watched her watching him until the conveyer shifted directions. A turn in the tracks, taking him toward the convergence point. His head wouldn’t move, so he only caught blurry glimpses of where he was going. Never had he been so anxious.

It only got worse when, with a tremendous shudder, the belt stopped. He knew what was coming. He’d tried to prepare himself for it. But nothing could ready a man’s nerves for this.

A hulking maggot slithered from its conveyer, its slimy sheath shimmering in the muted light like a malignant jewel, now near its final destination, its new home—inside Harvey’s head.

He summoned every kilogram of will left inside, fighting desperately, savagely, an animal clawing for his very survival. Nothing worked. The white, cloudy liquid held him tighter than any glue known to man. He had no options. No hope. All he could do was lay there, motionless and helpless, as the larva inched ever closer.

The mental torture began to take its toll. Harvey whimpered solemnly, a lament to whoever would listen. Why this terrible end? He imagined his corpse. His body. What kinds of odious things would this beast perpetrate once burrowed inside his brain? The horrors described to Harvey swirled in his memory like a swilling cesspool. Terrible, terrible acts. Unspeakable acts. Aggression, plundering, enslavement, and genocide on a scale unthinkable by a human mind. Yet perpetrated by human bodies. He felt he would be somehow complicit in these crimes if his body were to be used. Not crimes against humanity alone, but crimes against all of existence.

Click…click…click went the maggot as it scraped its black, jagged mandibles against his cheek. Click…click…click the gnarled mouthparts pinched his skin, and he cried out in dismal terror. He felt everything, every slithering undulation deep within the worm’s flaccid epidermis, every rippling contraction and expansion, vibrating in such a way as to induce the chills deep in Harvey’s bones. The thing was now on his jaw, only centimeters from his ear.

He cried out again, eyes darting, searching for someone, anyone with a sense of compassion. He was only fooling himself. These creatures had nothing in their genetic makeup even close to empathy. They had no such word in their shockingly obnoxious vocabulary.

Click…click…click

The deafening sound drove him to the edge of madness. Oozing. Slithering. Rippling. The maggot slid closer, until his ear vibrated with icy prickles. It tickled. Irony of ironies, this vile monster tickled Harvey’s ear as it slid up and into the canal.

Suddenly, tickling was the least of his worries. A tremendous buildup of pressure inside his ear. His brain was on fire, boiling his cerebellum mercilessly, and he knew he’d die. Or at least the part of him that was Harvey would die. In its place would be a monster. Savage. Cunning. Heartless. It pained him to contemplate such dire things. Appalling notions that would haunt his soul forever.

Then, mercifully, the insufferable pain ceased. Just like that, the pressure, the burning, the profound and maddening agony eased off to nearly nothing. His vision was blurred, his hearing gone aside from a constant ringing. Then he felt movement. Arms and legs in motion. Head bobbing and bouncing. Someone was half-carrying, half-dragging him, his feet swishing against the gritty ground.

Voices, loud and brusque. Curses in that despicable alien language. Harvey heard commotion from behind, and, as his senses returned, he felt his ear and concluded the ghastly maggot had been removed. He was being rescued. His eyes adjusted just as he was dragged into a dank, dark crevice, or narrow passageway, he couldn’t tell which. He had no way to see the face of his savior, and only heard light breathing. Then he felt a hand on his, and knew the touch. And when he heard his name, the voice sent him into instant convulsions of passion. His vision attuned even more to the dimness. Lea’s faint outline separated from the pitch-black background, and he fell against her, feeling her warm pulse, relishing her supple skin.

“Lea,” he wept. “It’s you!” he’d dreamt of this moment. “You did it, didn’t you?” he looked her in the eyes, holding her, taking in the sensations. She was real. Real flesh. Real blood. A real heart beating inside that chest. “You beat it, Lea, didn’t you?”

Lea only tilted her head. Her hair had regained its lustrous, healthy glow. Same with her skin, gossamer and radiant. It was her. It was Lea. The real Lea. He wanted to melt into her and forget about the dreadful sounds all around them. The din of the mechanized hunters, buzzing and clanking, rooting for the two fugitives. His only desire was to hold her in his arms, and that’s what he did. Still, something seemed wrong. It was her, but not her. He had to know.

“L-Lea?” he stumbled with his words. “It is you, isn’t it?”

She looked at him mournfully, then inhaled and exhaled deeply.

“It is not Lea,” she announced, and Harvey recognized what she said was true. He stumbled backward, groping for a place to run, but knew only danger awaited him no matter where he went. No place to turn, he stared at Lea, or the thing controlling her, now noticing the deadness in its eyes, yet at the same time an eerie glow of some strange and foreign origin.

“You’re one of them,” he gasped. “Why? Why did you help me?”

It produced a prolonged, suffering sigh, holding a hand to its forehead.

“I can feel her inside me. I hear her spirit,” its eyes met Harvey’s. “She’s strong.”

The creature manipulating Lea reached out for him slowly. He recoiled, yet somehow, when Lea’s face neared his, he dreamt it was really her. Skin so soft. Eyes so deep and dark.

“Lea loved you,” the thing shuddered, eyes half closed. “She still loves you. Deeply.”

With that Lea’s controller leaned back, appearing almost in a state of shock.

“My kind,” it said. “We don’t experience these emotions. We’ve never experienced this, and it…it’s wonderful.”

The thing’s last words were nearly drowned out by a sudden thunder of metal footsteps. A probing beam of light pierced the darkness. The hunters were coming.

“I will hold them off as long as I can, Harvey,” it trembled as it spoke. “My species cannot do this. Lea has taught me this is wrong. And I will help you to stop it…”

The light got brighter, the sounds of the pursuers louder, coming closer with every passing second.

“Go, Harvey!” it pointed down the tunnel, into the darkness. “Go and stop this. You’re the caretaker…you know what to do. Go!”

Harvey locked gazes with Lea’s controller, wondering if maybe she was somewhere inside, watching. He nodded, then made a break for it.

“Harvey!” he stopped and turned around, just in time to receive an eager embrace. He cringed as a first instinct. This thing, this walking corpse wasn’t Lea. He knew that. Still, somehow, haunted by her memories, it was no longer a monster. Maybe it was more. Maybe Lea had come to the forefront of her own consciousness. Maybe this was really Lea. He wanted to believe that, if only for one more moment. This was his chance. One last chance to hold and caress…and kiss her.

Their lips joined in an intermingling of souls. He never wanted to let her go, whether this was Lea or not. But, while still engaged in their glorious connection, he opened his eyes and saw her. He recognized her. Despite death and the molestation of her corporeal remains. Despite her spirit being imprisoned inside the walls of her own mind, Lea had found a way to come out. This was his Lea.

“Oh, Lea,” he kissed her lips, her cheeks, her neck, then her lips again. “Lea, I never want to lose you. I don’t want to go.”

“You have to,” she was firm. He knew it was her. Not the evil monster. Not the rotten, mucus-excreting maggot that had invaded her skull. “Now be quick, Harvey. Go!”

“Why don’t you come with me?” he ignored the searchlights warping and distorting on the walls of the long passageway. He only cared about one thing—keeping close to Lea. “We could do this, Lea. We can do it together.”

“GO!” her eyes flared unlike anything Harvey had seen in a living being. Before he had time to think, searchlights surrounded her. She twisted around and raised her hands, blocking the beams, though Harvey still saw the cyborgs and the parasites in their human host bodies, almost fully redeveloped, surrounding and confronting Lea.

The last he saw of Lea, she was shielding him from the prying eyes. Sacrificing herself. At that moment, as he dove into the blackness, he wondered if it truly was Lea—the real Lea—he’d just left behind.

9.

If ever in his life Harvey could have been described as laser focused, it would have been now, feeling his way along the little-used maintenance conduit beneath the visitor station. He became one of those robots, a cyborg. Single-minded. Programmed for one thing—to bring down the space elevator.

Winding and twisting through passages he barely knew, he formulated a plan of attack. He knew, from his previous experience with the space elevator, that the power generator had a fatal flaw in design that took a keen eye to identify. Harvey, when he’d made the repair run, had spotted the problem immediately—a misplaced relay. He could arc two couplings and create a critical overload, thereby causing a cataclysmic failure.

He didn’t have the specs in front of him—ironically one of his hated exposure suits could have told him with its onboard computer link—but, by his estimation, the numbers were staggering. If he was correct, he could create a detonation that would put an old-fashioned nuclear warhead to shame.

Then it truly hit him, the monumental nature of his task. An explosion that big would take out the entire visitor station, and, if all went well, much if not all of the underground body factory. In essence, it would put an end to the Unspeakable Ones and their terrible schemes forever.

Only one problem—it would end Harvey’s life too.

That slowed him down not one bit. The way he looked at it, his life was over anyway. He had no other choice than commit to this course of action, no matter how suicidal.

He owed it to the ghosts of Cemetery Planet. The millions of souls that called this world their final resting place. He couldn’t let them down. He owed it to Lea. He could never live one second with himself knowing her soul was damned to a fate far worse than Hell. Harvey was a determined man, more determined than he’d ever been in his life. That elevator would come down. The Unspeakable Ones would be stopped.

Far behind him, in the maze of maintenance tunnels, he heard clamoring, clacking, metal feet crashing, and churlish demands for Harvey to surrender. Nothing, no force of nature would make him give up. He followed the passageway until the voices faded to garbled, incoherent rustling, then to nothing altogether. He knew they’d get lost in the labyrinth. None of them understood this place like Harvey. Only he had the intimate knowledge that allowed him to slip, silently and stealthily, to the one place he wanted to go—the utility bay airlock, the only way outside.

When he found the conduit leading to the utility bay, he felt like jumping for joy. All he had to do, once in the bay, was put on a suit, hop in a rover, and, after a short trip to the space elevator’s outer bulwark, set the power router into fatal overload. Before dropping to the floor, he made a cursory survey of the large, open bay. He was glad he did.

A cyborg’s dark gray exoskin shined in the artificial light, sending shivers down his spine. It happened every time he laid eyes on one of those terrifying things. He hated them. Hated their spiny hides, their long, flexible limbs, their calculating stares. Most of all he hated how they filled him with unmitigated dread. A gut-wrenching, almost debilitating horror. And one was obstructing his only way to the outer environment.

His first instinct was to turn and get out. But with no safe retreat, he had to press forward, had to face his worst fear. He had to disable that cyborg.

He never dreamed he’d contemplate such a reckless act. Yet there he was, timid Harvey Crane, hiding in the maintenance shaft, searching the utility bay below for anything he could use to help him against his formidable robotic enemy.

Then a lucky strike. Along the bulkhead, in an emergency case, he spotted a signal flare. And not an ordinary, average signal flare, either, but one designed to be seen from space. Powerful didn’t even begin to describe those suckers. Harvey remembered being instructed on one and seeing it in action. They were as bright as Betelgeuse, and about as red. His mind raced immediately, formulating the ways he could utilize the flare’s devastating force.

It only took a moment’s observation of the cyborg design, and Harvey made a reasoned and educated guess. Given the cyborgs were manufactured by DeepSix, Harvey had a slight insight into these machines, their strengths and weaknesses. He knew from experience the power nexus on DeepSix robots were centrally located in the small of the back. This was the principal link for every one of its critical systems. Hit that spot with something as forceful as a space flare, it’s sayonara, cyborg.

Sounded good in theory. Now he had to put it into practice. Before he had the chance to back down, he inhaled deeply, opened the access panel and jumped. It was a good ten-foot fall, and his knees ached when he landed, but he took the cyborg by surprise. He rushed and snatched the signal flare out of its container. As the cyborg began to take notice of a change in its environment, Harvey already had the flare armed, aimed, and fired.

Ffffffft! a sizzling fireball the size of a human head rocketed toward the cyborg, sailing just centimeters to the left. Missed! Harvey’s heart sank, knowing the flare gun was a one-shot wonder. That was it. No more flares. No more big plan. The cyborg’s lifelike eyes narrowed and it closed in, step by agonizing step, limbs extended wide and trapping Harvey beneath the service duct. He tried to jump for the duct. It was way out of reach.

Then another stroke of luck. Behind the cyborg, past its viselike metal talons, over the sinews of its shoulder, Harvey saw another emergency flare. It was on the adjacent wall, seemingly light years away with the robot assassin standing in-between. The monster android plodded toward him. Careful, deliberate steps meant to corner as well as terrify him.

Flailing its long, articulated arms, emitting a harsh, metallic shriek, stepping at Harvey with adept and agile motor skills, the metal monster reached high with its giant clawed foot, bearing down on him and ready to deliver a crushing blow, Harvey saw his opening.

Harvey had read accounts of extreme stress or cases of singular traumatic events when time stood still. People describe it like it really happens. Of course, whenever Harvey would come across such depictions and characterizations, he’d dismiss it immediately as whimsy or imaginations run amok. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. Time did indeed stand still. It gave him the sensation of being in an invisible cloud, moving effortlessly and rapidly like a bee, or like the wind itself. And before he knew what he’d done, he dropped to the floor, rolled once, and popped back up to his feet. Then, in a series of rapid motions, he ran, took the flare, armed, and pointed it. Just like that, he fired the immense and devastating ball of flames.

Direct hit!

A tiny but significant weak spot in the cyborg had been punctured, and a small surface explosion led to a larger one, deep under the exoskin. The android turned to face Harvey and, for the first time, he saw something other than unrestrained malevolence. He saw fear. These machines were lifelike in almost every detail. Made to resemble some sort of alien reptile with superior cunning, speed and strength—and the unmitigated desire to survive.

Burning from the inside out, it ripped at its own scaly skin, tearing open and curling back a portion of its chest. The wild actions had no salutary effect. The damage had been done. A series of bursts sent more noxious blackness from its eyes, ears, and every joint in its body. Total and catastrophic breakdown.

With free reign in the utility bay, Harvey wasted not a single second in securing what he needed for his trip to the space elevator. He’d never been happier to put on an exposure suit. And he even enjoyed the rover’s bumpy suspension as it eased onto the ramp, the airlock hissing and then lifting slowly, letting in the dark stillness.

The rover plodded on its predetermined course, and once he cleared the walls of the utility bay, he looked up. He balked at what he saw. Earlier, in the food court maintenance core, he’d thought a few ships hovering in orbit were bad enough. Now there were dozens. At least ten gigantic freighters, a large number of combat cruisers, and many, many smaller craft.

Harvey’s heart pounded in his chest. This was an armada being formed right before his eyes. The horizon was infested with ships of all sizes, and he knew they all had one single purpose, one cruel goal. Harvey had to stop it.

He punched the thruster lever and the rover jerked hard, kicking up the gritty topsoil. In no time, he rounded the giant concourse and reached the space elevator, ramming the bulkhead as he skidded the rover to a dusty stop. At the power generator, he ripped open the access panel and spotted the fatal flaw immediately. The manufacturing defect he would exploit to blow this place sky-high.

Ironic. Only a few days earlier he was working on this very generator, repairing these very couplings. Now he was there to do the exact opposite. With the kinetic wrench from the suit’s toolkit, he created a simple arc, a synapse where there shouldn’t have been. This simple method, in theory, would set off a chain of events that would involve every power generator in the visitor station, in essence transforming the entire complex into a bomb. And it was working.

A rippling torrent of radiance burst through the translucent nano-tubes. Fluctuations. Small at first, then increasing in intensity. An alarm sounded, then another and another. Soon it was red across the control board, and the space elevator itself began shaking. High above, the great tether loosened and the cab, ascending quickly, tilted precipitously to one side, then the other. Then its ascent slowed dramatically, as if it automatically sensed danger below.

Harvey was transfixed on the meters running to their maximum levels. He knew he was watching his own life slipping away. But he wasn’t paying attention to anything else, and didn’t see when someone, or something came from behind. All he saw was a black glove, reaching quickly and yanking free the kinetic wrench, unjamming the feedback loop. Instantly the nano-tubes began flowing normally. The elevator’s outer structure stabilized. The tether tightened again, and the cab resumed its skyward voyage.

Stunned at the sudden and dramatic turn of events, Harvey spun on his heels to confront the perpetrator of this galling act, and it set his nerves on edge when he saw, through the rounded and warped glass of an exposure suit helmet visor, the miserable face of Kip Broders, host body for the leader of the Unspeakable Ones.

10.

Harvey retreated from his attacker, reaching for the tool belt, desperate for a weapon. The monster controlling Broders had learned to use its host body well. It seemed to possess superhuman speed, and was on top of Harvey before he could think.

Face up on the ground, Harvey saw ship after ship peppering the horizon, a dazzling fleet of transports and fighters assembled for destruction. Some darting about as if agitated. Others sitting still in stoic prewar repose. The megalithic transports were in line, waiting for their abominable payloads.

Seeing the alien craft in such numbers dragged Harvey into a bleak state of pure and unfettered melancholy.  All he wanted was to just give up, dig his own grave in the ground right there. But he had an even more immediate concern. The beast within Broders was on the attack. From its mouth issued an alien malediction so foul, so excruciating to Harvey’s ears it sent waves of agony through his system.

The parasitic monster circled Harvey like a predator. As it passed the space elevator, Harvey caught a glimpse of the cab on its lonely descent to the visitor center for another shipment of morbid abominations. Harvey’s detrimental ponderings rambled to the Earth invasion force amassing in front of his very eyes. He couldn’t allow it, and resolved to one more desperate yet tragically necessary suicide mission. Like a modern-day Battle of Bubat, with the odds so great against him, the thought of victory, of mere survival seemed but a fantastical dream.

Aware of his imminent demise, he shunned all fear and shot to his feet, shoving aside his suddenly startled attacker. He used the turn in momentum in his favor and sprang at the space elevator’s power panel. On the ground he found his kinetic wrench, and put it back into place, sending the generator into another terminal overload. Red lights flashing. Ear-rending alarms. A steady pulse of something menacingly inchoate just below the surface.

The larval infestation within Broders tackled Harvey to the quaking ground with the speed and accuracy of a prime athlete. These monsters were deadly and clever. It became obvious to Harvey when, after being physically thrown several meters, the Unspeakable Ones had enhanced the human bodies, made them stronger somehow. And faster. Much faster.

In a flash, the nonhuman thing rushed to the generator and removed the wrench for the second time. Then, with another terrifying display of prowess, the parasite slashed at Harvey’s helmet, yanked on the suit’s power couplings, and, most damaging of all, dislodged the oxygen hoses, ripping them from their housings. With a spark and a fizzle, the visor screen went out. All suit systems down. Backup disabled.

Instantly he found it hard to breathe. The air circulation ceased, and with it Harvey’s ability to draw oxygen into his lungs. Panting, wheezing, he collapsed, not willing or able to face his assailant. Didn’t want to see the foreboding future he’d been unable to prevent. But he had no choice.

His body was flipped over with the insensitivity someone would visit on an emaciated carcass. That’s what he felt like. Dead meat. Suddenly he saw swirling lights above, and his dying brain for one brief moment mistook them for stars. But stars didn’t circle like that. They were space ships, the evil armada preparing for an assault on Earth. Swarming like vultures. He was the carrion, and they the scavengers.

Then the sky darkened from the shadow of a bulky and familiar outline—Broders, standing over Harvey for the death blow. Harvey closed his eyes, unable to raise his arms in defense. Energy gone, lungs on fire, dark silhouettes swarming about the night sky, Harvey shut down and waited for the end.

The end didn’t come. Not yet.

“Look, human!” the parasite shouted. “Witness with your last moments the beginning of the end for your kind.”

By some cruel twist of fate, he persisted. Just enough air in his helmet for one last breath, and to watch the elevator cab touch down. Inside, through the view portholes, he saw dozens of moldering host bodies. It made his skin crawl at how many of them were lined in wait. And when the elevator cab’s airlocks opened, the lines began to move. Orderly and calm and slow. Like Earth people going to a show. Only this show was a deadly carnival of destruction. Harvey had no doubt about the murderous ambitions of these evil beasts. What the parasite inside Broders said next only put an exclamation point on the end of a very long, very lurid sentence.

“You see?” it laughed as the elevator cab, now filled to capacity, began its long and speedy ascent up the incredibly thin yet durable nanofilament tether. “You failed, human! You failed just like the rest of your insignificant race will fail. Weak. Stupid. A waste of resources and a polluted stain in the galactic gene pool. This proves it. Your utter failure proves to me your worthlessness. And proves to me you and every one of your kind need to DIE!”

In the thing’s hand, Harvey caught a brief glint of something metal. A kinetic wrench. It swung the tool behind its shoulder, winding up for a broad, swift stroke, straight down onto Harvey’s chest.

Then the parasitical monster paused. Harvey, with clenched eyes, opened them quickly while reacting with a terrified start to a tremendous rupture from up high. The source of the clamor was unmistakable. The tether, with a violent eruption, severed abruptly two thirds of the way up, recoiling like a rubber band. Suddenly, with no support, the cab stopped climbing and hung in space for a moment, weightless. Then the collapsing tether fell in silent slow-motion, bringing the cab and its passengers with it.

Almost simultaneously, the orbital station erupted in a fiery mass of orange and yellow and red. Harvey shielded his face from the blinding explosions, one after the other, until the orbital station was invisible behind a flaming sheet of violence.

The destruction spread to the superfreighter docked to the orbiter, manifesting firstly in flickering hull lights. Small explosions led to larger and larger ones. Soon the ship was engulfed as well, resulting in a brilliant display of omnipotence. Something had done this. A wayward comet? A malfunction in the space elevator? None of those explanations seemed feasible. Then, as he surveyed the night sky once again, he saw the reason.

Beyond the points of light, the shimmering shadows and dancing spacecraft, even larger than the superfreighters, looming like a giant azure planet in the horizon, was a ship unlike anything Harvey had ever dreamed of, let alone seen. No words could describe the size with any sufficiency or certainty. It eclipsed all of the other ships by such wide margin it was laughable to make any comparisons at all.

The change in scenery was unmistakable, and when the monster inside Broders saw the mammoth spacecraft, it lifted both fists to the sky and released a primal scream. Harvey couldn’t understand a word of it. He could guess, though.

The Guardians had heard the emergency beacon after all. True to their word, they had come to ensure those conniving, nasty beings known as the Unspeakable Ones didn’t spread their miserable hatred.

Suddenly another gigantic superfreighter went up in flames, from a power source that, though invisible, originated from the Guardians’ ineffably large vessel. It pulsed with a cerulean glow preceding the explosion, and did again before yet another transport ship ruptured into a roiling mass of flames.

The Broders host body spun quickly, destruction raging above it in a fiery halo. In its vacant and detestable stare, Harvey saw plainly a hatred so complete, so profound, it superseded even the furious and one-sided celestial war overhead. Explosion after explosion, the gigantic ship flashed a deep, rich blue, and, one after the next, the armada dwindled. Smaller ships swirled frantically, engaging in a dogfight with the much, much larger vessel. They parried and dodged, sending rapid and sustained gamma bursts. Heavy weaponry. Some of the most destructive known to mankind. One of those missiles could take out an entire megalopolis on Earth. Here, against the mighty Guardians, they were one hundred percent ineffectual.

And, as this terrible yet magnificent war raged, the monster inside Broders, in a last ditch effort, turned his wrath on Harvey.

“You did this!” it lurched at Harvey, and, in midstride, something caught his feet. Harvey heard a subtle, rippling whistle. It was the tether, recoiling violently. The long, silky band of nanothread was an innocuous and stunning landmark while attached to the orbiter. Now, released from its anchor, it had become a deadly serpent, razor sharp and lightning fast. The parasite controlling Broders dropped to its knees, fog shrouding its visor. Harvey couldn’t see the fear in its eyes, though he heard it scream when, like a whip, the tether snapped in a semicircle, releasing its fury on the host body’s neck.

It happened so fast, Harvey almost didn’t see it. He had to shake his thoughts straight and go over it in his mind in order to even begin processing it. His sight traveled to the ground, where a helmet rolled to a standstill. Such force in that thin ribbon. It had taken Broders’s head off cleanly.

Harvey found himself transfixed on the helmet. He couldn’t look away from the face inside. The menacing grimace, frozen in time, a contorted caricature of a human being. A sad and ugly deception. This wasn’t Broders. He was a good man. This was a monster wearing the costume of the dead, pretending to be something it never could. Harvey watched the last gasps for air, the desperate gesticulations of speech, the final throes of death.

In the night sky, he saw another kind of death throe. A war of gigantic proportions waged between a race of beings in conventional craft and another race, higher beings, with quite unconventional technology. In reality, what Harvey was witnessing couldn’t be classified as a war. He couldn’t classify it as a slaughter, either, since the ones being destroyed, systematically and succinctly, were the ones who deserved to die. It was a righteous culling. A necessary evil.

The indescribably large blue obelisk had full command of the heavens, and was exerting its will effortlessly. For the first time in what seemed an eternity, Harvey sensed something in his gut, a feeling as foreign to him as that hideous language of the Unspeakable Ones. He felt hope.

Then, just like that, his one shred of optimism devolved to desperation when an explosion rocked the ground. Only this detonation didn’t take place hundreds of kilometers in space. This one happened only a few meters away. The space elevator cab had crashed down, and the tether rounded back to its source, following the path of least resistance straight to its anchor. In doing so, its frayed, whipping end slammed into the power coupling, causing an instantaneous and catastrophic flare-up.

The explosion acted upon the thin atmosphere quickly, an abrupt and all-encompassing ball of bright yellowish orange. Gaseous fusion erupting in all directions. An omniscient omnivore, swallowing the very landscape to satisfy its ravenous carnal cravings. Harvey, standing now, was one of those unfortunate souls on the menu for this flaming, searing sphere of unconstrained energy. He had no time for humanly responses. Just a thought—Lea. He dreamed of her in a better place, and, with his last wish, the only wish he’d ever wished, he asked that her soul be released again.

He wished Lea was free.

11.

Bubbles.

Everywhere bubbles. Soft. Weightless. Caressing and shimmering and soothing. Vitreous bubbles touching and probing and kneading.

Healing bubbles.

He was in a cloud of bubbles, lighter than a feather wafting in a waterless sea, an ancient elixir meant to soothe and restore and enrich. No time. No pain. No worldly senses. On and on the bubbles fed him, sustained him, kept him from drifting off to that cryptic clarion cadence from afar, irresistible in its melodic hypnotic call.

Formless. No body. Only consciousness. He accepted his new state of being, and flowed with the bubbles, deepening the sensation of calm and peace and freedom. So soft. So light. No more heaviness. And no pain. If this was death, he accepted it. He yearned for it. All the religions, all the spiritual sects and cults and belief systems ever devised by man had to be speaking of this when they meant heaven. A warm, weightless place, devoid of hatred or anger or desire or hunger. Only joy and peace and overwhelming benevolence.

Yet nothing to be seen but bubbles. Flirtatious, even mischievous tiny translucent spheres bathing him in an endless stream of compassion. If he had died, he never wanted to leave this puffy, pastel wonderland. He wanted to continue floating in this ethereal stream, no longer afraid, even laughing at himself for being so fearful of death and all the changes brought with it. The unknown. He was fearful of what he couldn’t possibly comprehend. And now that he’d experienced it, the transformation of life to death, he took joy in his previous ignorance.

Such naive creatures, the living. He never wanted to go back there, to the realm of the incarnate with all its hunger, its pain and suffering. He wanted to stay here, in the womb, gestating in his cocoon forever and ever, nurtured by the milk of the cosmic mother, eternally a babe in the luxuriant folds of existence, where neither time nor money nor any sort of material needs or worries existed. Heaven. If that’s what it was called, then he embraced it with all of him. This was it. This was home.

12.

He awoke fighting the shadows, on his back, kicking and clawing. He felt the milky viscous fluid encasing him in malevolent incarceration. He wasn’t in heaven after all. He knew where he was—back in the underground factory of gruesome corpses and withered bones. He was certain of it, certain the Guardians had never come. A hallucination. All in his mind. A well-thought-out, well-meaning dream of what Harvey really wished would happen. The encasement holding him immobile told a different story. He knew this sensation. The exact same feeling he had when trapped in the receptacle, his body paralyzed by the white liquid, his brain awaiting its larval invader.

He beckoned all he had inside, every last milligram of resistance. Now that he’d tasted everlasting peace and freedom, he had a profound and primeval need to survive, if for nothing else than to be the sole human left alive. He fought for his own soul, for his own life, for the human race.

Then he sensed something that siphoned off just a little of his anxiety. Warmth, softness, comfort, and, most of all, affection. Not the cold, rigid, body-forming containers on the conveyer belt. Another moment of clarity, as the fear was supplanted by guarded curiosity, and Harvey began noticing other things, things that assured him he no longer was in the custody of those tyrannical monsters.

His surroundings were the major giveaway. The subdued atmosphere, with its rounded construction and opalescent lighting seemingly from nowhere, signified an environment on the exact opposite end of the comfort scale compared to the dungeon below Cemetery Planet. Pillow soft and serene. Gently pleasing. No real walls, just a soft haze. If this was indeed the afterlife, he couldn’t tell, though a stabbing ache in his chest, pulsating down to his abdomen screamed something other than the hereafter. He winced, holding his ribcage, and as soon as he exhibited his discomfort, a turbulent funnel of bubbles appeared from nowhere, bathing him in soothing analgesics of some ethereal design.

He shuddered at the suddenness of it all. So absolute was the numbness that pervaded when the healing bubbles began caressing his body. He was undressed. He knew that now. And, as his other faculties began returning, he noticed other things.

Angelic beings of the highest magical order. Large, dressed in luminous clothing that seemed to both fit snugly and flow freely at the same time. Three of them, standing or hovering weightlessly—he couldn’t tell which—supervising his ascent back to health. They gazed at him with tremendous compound eyes. Two gigantic orbs consisting of thousands of smaller lenses, cells of visual stimuli all focused on Harvey, all reflecting only caring and kindness.

The only reason he wasn’t fearful beyond recognition was the compassion he perceived. Otherwise, these giant beings with insectoid eyes would have terrified him. He knew they had to be the Guardians, and the moment he thought it, the tallest one of the three nodded its noble head. Harvey had no inkling on the differences between males and females of the species. Seemingly, no differences existed.

Harvey stared at the creatures longer and harder than should have been deemed polite. He had to. Something inside compelled his eyes like magnets. Like a spell of persuasion, a seduction of goodness, he was drawn in spontaneously. He would have gazed upon these magnificent gods forever if not for a large oval opening, its blackness in sharp contrast to the brilliant interior. He studied the view, and was stunned to find the craggy, barren vertical projections of Mount Mausolus.

He sprang to his feet, surprised by the sudden revelation that he hadn’t actually been lying on a bed, but suspended by the whirlwind of strange, transparent little bubbles, or beads. The beads surrounded him as he ran to the view porthole, continuing to administer their healing tinctures, possibly at some atomic level. Harvey didn’t know. He was too busy to conjecture. Busy with questions about what he was seeing outside.

He expected to find a terrible mess, a tangle of twisted tombstones, hummocks of pulverized rock and sediment. And machines. Those terrible machines he’d seen doing the dirtiest of dirty work. The transports and diggers and cyborgs, all working collectively like ants, busily robbing the planet of its deceased inhabitants. The last time he’d laid eyes on the landscape of this world, it was littered with those machines, filthy with the labor of evil industry. Now, though, the change took him by surprise and he had to struggle in order to process it all.

He was inside an alien craft, parked at the base of the great mountain. From that vantage point, Harvey saw the visitor station, glimmering in the distance like a treasure. And, indeed, he witnessed empty grave plots, crooked headstones, and mounds and mounds of soil. He also saw the machines used by the Unspeakable Ones, the DeepSix-built devices that aided and abetted the terrible madness. Now, though, the machines were idle. Those weren’t the surprises fluttering his pulse and speeding up his respiration. It was something else, something so strange and ethereal, he found it difficult to even accept such things existed. Yet, when he examined the tiny, clear and colorful beads surrounding and dancing excitedly about, he saw a similarity between them and the things outside.

Oval shaped craft, hundreds of them, of varying sizes and brilliant shades of cool colors, working diligently and feverishly. One had the task of removing a transport, on its side and dented, from its dusty resting place. Other, smaller ovals hovered nearby and plucked the caskets still attached to the belly of the transport. Corpses that never made it to the conveyer. Coffins were replaced into their graves. Graves were topped off with soil. Headstones were straightened to their original conditions.

In the innermost reaches of his soul, Harvey felt contentment, a glowing and warm beneficence of such purity his only logical reaction came as tears. And more tears. The Unspeakable Ones had been stopped. The ghosts of Cemetery Planet were free.

If Lea could only see this. He sobbed, and as he lowered his head, felt more than just the soothing beads on his skin. A Guardian, the tallest and stateliest of the three, placed a surprisingly soft palm on Harvey’s shoulder.

“Do not be sad,” the voice had a rapturous tone, like the sweetest of stringed music. “You have done a great thing. Brave. Very brave.”

“So the beacon,” Harvey said. “It worked?”

“We received the alarm. Thanks to your courageousness.”

He didn’t see the being’s lips move when it spoke. They were communicating with him by thought, the same as the emergency beacon’s blue glow.

“We know of all the hardships you have endured,” the being went on. “The Unspeakable Ones were a treacherous species. We never should have let them survive. Thank you, Harvey Crane, for helping rid the galaxy of its most insidious menace.”

“Then you killed them?”

The giant, gentle being folded its arms in a prayer-like fashion. Its two companions, standing on either side, did the same.

“We did what we should have done long ago. Now it is over. Thanks to you, Harvey Crane. The human race is fortunate to have such a fearless and resolute representative.”

Harvey knew he should have been elated. So many concerns. So many worries. He had no capacity for joy at that moment, despite the warmth and peace exuding from every particle in his surroundings.

“We are touched by your sacrifice. This is why we are restoring your place of memorial,” the being told him. “To honor you. To honor your bravery. This is a sacred place. These graves deserve to be treated with respect. And so do you, Harvey Crane.”

With a wave of its arm, an area a few meters away came alight in lilac pastel luminance. The shimmering mist separated like a curtain, revealing a mass of healing beads, churning and coalescing into a semi-solid state in the shape of a bed. On the bed’s surface Harvey saw someone familiar. Immediately he started running to the bedside.

“We have one last gift,” said the Guardian. “In honor of your bravery.”

No words, no language devised by human minds would have been sufficient. When he saw her lying there, cradled by the effervescent beads, youth restored, beauty intact, he broke into the worst fit of weeping since the day he was born.

“We have faithfully recreated your Cemetery Planet,” the Guardian told him. “Every grave has been restored. Every human body put back in its place…all but one.”

“Lea,” through his sobs he said her name. She opened her eyes. A gentle sigh. She rose to her feet, aided by the tender nuzzle from the beaded mass. She gazed at him and he at her. Lea. It was her. No ugly parasite. No holographic facsimile. This was the real thing.

Her facial expression changed from elation to concern. She opened her mouth and nothing came out. Then she tried again, forcing the sound from her throat. One single word.

“Harvey.”

They fell into each other’s embrace, surrounded by a cloud of tiny biomechanical gems. Behind them, the yawning porthole let in the first few rubicund rays of Piscis Austrini peeking over Mount Mausolus, filtering through the ethereal haze inside the Guardians’ ship. In the foreground, spreading in every direction to the far distance where mirage mixed with shadowy silhouette, countless headstones served as an ever present reminder that, in all matters of love and war, the dead would always rule on Cemetery Planet.

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From the author...

It’s my sincere hope you’ve enjoyed reading CEMETERY PLANET: The Complete Series. If you wish to offer your feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to write a review and let me know what you think. Thanks in advance,

-J.