Night of Flames Read online

  Night of Flames

  Prequel to Space Colony One

  J.J. Green

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Space Colony One: Night of Flames

  The story continues...

  Cover Design: Covers by Christian

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  ALSO BY J.J. GREEN

  STAR MAGE SAGA

  SHADOWS OF THE VOID SERIES

  CARRIE HATCHETT, SPACE ADVENTURER SERIES

  THERE COMES A TIME

  A SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION

  LOST TO TOMORROW

  DAWN FALCON

  A FANTASY COLLECTION

  (Amazon.com links. Scroll to the end of the book for links to your country's Amazon.)

  Night of Flames

  First published in The Expanding Universe 2

  HE WAS BAREFOOT, AND the strange, mossy turf of the new world was rubbery and cool against his skin. After the night lamps of the barn, the outside world was pitch black to his eyes save for the string of lights that led to the latrine. He strained to listen. He was sure he’d heard the thunk of something large hitting the ground out there, but now he couldn’t hear anything other than the wind rustling the fronds of vegetation that surrounded the camp.

  Back in the newly built barn, the rest of the colonists were sleeping soundly. More than two hundred men and women lay on rows of low cots, exhausted after a long day spent bringing down essential supplies from the ship. It wasn’t surprising that no one else had heard the noise.

  The sound was probably nothing, he told himself. Maybe just a dying plant toppled by the wind. None of the probes the scientists had sent from Earth and from the ship over the years had found signs of complex animal life, nor of plants capable of locomotion.

  Holding up a lamp and peering ahead, he went on. The lamp’s glow wasn’t strong, and the moonless planet with its faint, unfamiliar constellations was a dark place at night, but he had an idea of the direction the sound had come from. His eyes adjusted to the darkness as he went. Dim gray shapes came into view—the boxes of supplies piled in heaps around the compound.

  Another thunk. He stopped. This noise had come from farther away than the first, in the direction of the comm module they’d set up to talk to the ship. He ran a hand through his hair and glanced back at the barn, tall and wide behind him, blacker than sky. Should he tell someone? Dr. Crowley, perhaps? One of the Woken, the doctor always seemed to know what to do.

  No. The old woman needed her rest, and he was just a Gen farmer. What did he know? Besides, what else would you expect on an alien planet but weird noises? He would walk the perimeter fence and satisfy himself there was no cause for alarm, then return to the barn and his well-earned slumber.

  A third thunk. Off to his right. What the...? He swung around and gazed into the night. Beyond the dim circle of his lamp’s light was nothing but darkness. He hesitated on the verge of returning and waking someone in authority, but he was sure he was nearly at the fence. It would only take him a moment to have a quick look around. He decided to go on.

  A shriek splintered the calm of the night. The cry had come from the barn. Lauren. An almost inhuman howl of agony shot through with terror followed the shriek. He sprinted back the way he’d come, his bare feet struggling to grip the damp ground cover. He slipped and fell. The lamp sprang from his hand and skittered away.

  He leapt up. The lamp could wait. The shriek had been joined by shouts and screams. The barn doors flew open and people poured out. Lauren. Where was she? The people raced off, spreading in disorder throughout the camp, pushing each other down in their hurry to get away. The fallen couldn’t stand and others tumbled over them, crushing them in the stampede.

  He was at the barn. He forced his way against the tide of escaping colonists. A woman came rushing toward him, her eyes popping and her mouth wide. She held up bloody, raw hands, palms out.

  “Don’t touch it,” she wailed. “It burns.” Then she was gone.

  Behind the remnants of the people rushing from the barn lay the object of their fear: A grayish-brown mass covered most of one of the cots, leaving only the cot legs visible beneath the misshapen lump.

  A man ran past, colliding with Ethan’s shoulder.

  “We can’t get it off of her,” he said, his deep voice choked with barely suppressed sobs. “We’ve tried everything. I’m going to call the ship.”

  The barn was nearly empty now. Only the brown thing remained and a young woman standing over it, hitting it with the broken leg of a cot, her face wracked with anguish and despair.

  “Lauren,” he shouted.

  “Ethan,” she exclaimed. She threw down the cot leg, ran to him and grabbed his arms. “Where have you been? The others all panicked and ran away. Can you help? Only don’t touch it, it—”

  “It burns. I know. Someone told me.”

  Ethan stepped closer to the thing for a better look. As he saw what lay beneath it, the strength went from his legs and he nearly collapsed. Poking out from the upper end of the creature were the head and shoulders of Dr. Crowley. The alien life form was on top of her.

  “We can’t move it,” said Lauren. “It’s stuck to her like glue, and we can’t even touch it because its skin is caustic.”

  Dr. Crowley was still alive, barely. The shriek Ethan had heard must have been hers. Whatever the creature was doing to her, it had nearly finished the job. The doctor’s eyes were half-closed and her lips were blue. The organism was suffocating her or—Ethan recalled that its skin burned—was it digesting her?

  He turned to try to find something to lever the thing off the woman. There had to be something no one else had tried. But the thought of what the creature was doing to Dr. Crowley overwhelmed him. Blood drained from his head and he became dizzy. He fell to his knees, vomit erupting from his stomach.

  “What?” said Lauren.

  Ethan looked up. She was bending over Dr. Crowley, trying to catch the doctor’s words.

  “Don’t go near that thing,” he exclaimed, forcing himself to his feet and drawing his arm across his bile-stained mouth.

  “The what?” Lauren repeated. “The...the fence?” She turned puzzled eyes to Ethan.

  The fence? The electric fence. How had the creature gotten into the camp? Why hadn’t the fence stopped it? The thunk he’d heard must have been the organism hitting the ground. And he’d heard more of them. More of them were in the camp. Where were the rest of the creatures? And where were all the people who had run out of the barn?

  “Lauren, we have to go,” he said. “I think the fence might have shorted, and there are more of those things inside the compound with us.”

  DR. CROWLEY WAS THE only Woken Ethan had gotten to know.

  She’d been one of the first to emerge healthy and sound from her hundred and eighty-four years spent in a twilight state somewhere between hibernation and death as the Nova Fortuna carried them to their new home. Just as the Manual instructed, the Gens had begun to revive the founders of the mission two years before Arrival. Of those they attempted to return to life, more than fifty percent didn’t survive the process, and those they managed to wake suffered strokes and aneurysms, or had brain damage, or were blind, or their limbs turned gangrenous when blood flow could not be restored.

  Dr. Crowley had been standing in Main Park beneath The Clock when Ethan first saw her on his morning run. She was looking at the glowing figures that counted down, not up. Figures that marked the seconds, hours, days, months, and years that passed on their deep space flight.
/>   At the sight of Dr. Crowley gazing transfixed at The Clock, Ethan had been reminded of the time when he found out what it was measuring. He’d been in kindergarten, and the teacher had explained that the children were lucky Gens who would be alive when the Nova Fortuna reached her destination. Soon after they were grown up, the teacher had said, they would leave the ship and travel a short distance to a planet where they would live out the rest of their lives.

  Dr. Crowley’s fascination with The Clock had made sense to Ethan. The figures on its display had counted down nearly two centuries while she’d lain in her vat of frozen slush. Though he was usually a little intimidated by the enigmatic Woken with their odd dialects and distant eyes, he couldn’t resist the temptation to talk to this one. She seemed more approachable than most of the others, who were aloof and stuck together.

  He jogged over and stood next to her, joining her contemplation of the steadily counting figures of The Clock. The older woman seemed to sense his nervousness, for she smiled kindly at him.

  “Do you have any plans for Arrival Day?” she asked.

  “I guess I’ll spend it with my girlfriend,” Ethan replied. “Unless there’s something ship-wide planned.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dr. Crowley said. “I believe the director intends for everyone to celebrate in their own way, as it will mean different things to different people. May I ask what your occupation is to be?”

  Ethan shrugged. “Just a farmer. I didn’t do too well at school.” He gave an embarrassed smile.

  Dr. Crowley frowned. “Forgive me for saying so, but you seem ashamed. Being a farmer’s nothing to be ashamed of. Your job is just as important as anyone else’s, Maybe more important than some. The colony won’t last long without food.”

  When Ethan didn’t react to her words, she tilted her head. “Don’t you want to be a farmer?”

  Ethan glanced around. No one seemed close enough to hear their conversation. He didn’t like to express his discontent with his allotted role publicly. He wouldn’t be punished as such, but failure to conform to the Mandate wouldn’t do much for his reputation. “If I could have chosen, I would have been an explorer.”

  “Oh, now that’s a fine profession,” Dr. Crowley said. “Why didn’t you select it? Surely you don’t need good grades to be an explorer?”

  “It’s a Second Generation occupation.” Ethan sighed. “Maybe if I have kids and they want to take over the farm when they’re older I’ll get my chance.”

  “No explorers?” Dr. Crowley exclaimed, loud enough to cause Ethan unease that they would be overheard.

  “No explorers until the Second Gen,” he said. “It’s in the Manual.”

  “The Old Manual or the New Manual?” Dr. Crowley asked, narrowing her eyes. “As if I didn’t know.”

  “The New, I think,” Ethan replied, glad that he wasn’t the object of the annoyance that began to cloud the doctor’s features.

  “Hmpf. I’ll have a word with the director about that. Old Manual, New Manual...” She waggled a finger. “There’s only one Manual, and that’s the one I and the other founders wrote before we departed Earth. There was no talk then of drafting an updated version mid-voyage. What do you pups know of settling a planet? Living out your lives on a starship is hardly preparation for...” She paused and took a breath. Her gaze flicked to Ethan. “Forgive me. It’s not your fault.”

  After she’d calmed down a little more, she gave a short laugh and said, “It’s strange. You’d think that tens of light years would be sufficient distance to leave behind petty politics and meddling in the affairs of others. But wherever you go, there you are, I guess.”

  “Is...is that what you wanted?” Ethan asked. “To leave all that stuff behind on Earth?” He’d had no choice but to be born aboard the Nova Fortuna and become one of the first humans ever to set foot on an extrasolar planet. But the Woken had chosen to risk their lives for the opportunity. That had always struck him as odd. He imagined that Earth must have been a terrible place for them to want to leave it so badly, despite the positives that the vids and books showed.

  “Yes, politics, and more,” the doctor replied. “Much more, though I don’t know if you can understand. Truth be told, I feared for what would happen to humankind. We seemed not to be progressing, but regressing. It wouldn’t surprise me if the technology of the Nova Fortuna were the peak of human achievement and everything went downhill after we left. But it wasn’t only that. My eyes were on the stars all my life. I was glad to come along, even though I knew I might never wake up.”

  “You think technology might not have progressed on Earth in all the time that’s passed since we left?” Ethan asked.

  “I’m almost certain of it,” the doctor said.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Mainly because in the years leading up to the departure of the Nova Fortuna, we seemed on the verge of inventing a Faster-Than-Light starship engine. Sure, the popular trend was against anything unnatural, and there were protests and demands that space travel funding be cut because it was wrong for humankind to leave its birthplace, but the scientists were close nonetheless. So close that some of the founders even wanted to postpone the Nova Fortuna’s leaving date. Why spend two centuries traveling by fusion propulsion when you could arrive within a few years?

  “Yet here we are, and there’s no sign of anything from Earth. If an FTL engine had been invented while we were traveling, it would have caught up to us by now. We wouldn’t be trying to decipher scrambled Earth comms sent decades ago. The fact that another ship hasn’t followed us tells me a lot.”

  Ethan nodded. The Woken woman’s way of explaining things made much more sense than many of his former teachers’. “So, what do you think Earth’s like now?”

  “So much time has passed...I really couldn’t guess. Does it matter? We have a whole new future ahead for all two thousand, two hundred of us. The beginning of a new civilization.” She returned her gaze to The Clock.

  LAUREN HADN’T SEEMED to hear Ethan’s words when he told her they had to check the fence. She was closing Dr. Crowley’s eyes. “She’s gone,” she whispered.

  Ethan heard her, but he couldn’t process the words. He swallowed. “The fence,” he repeated heavily. “We have to find the switch.” He took Lauren’s arm. “Come with me. Get away from that thing.”

  But Lauren was shaking her head. “I have to find Belle. I have to make sure she’s okay.” Belle was Lauren’s nursery-mate. They’d been inseparable since they were three years old.

  “There isn’t time. She could be anywhere,” Ethan said. “And there are more of those creatures out there. I heard them dropping into the compound.”

  “No. I have to find her, Ethan. She’ll be terrified. You go and check the fence. I’ll meet you at the comm module. I’ll be careful.”

  Ethan closed his eyes. There was no time for him to think. There was no time for anything. “Okay. Okay. But please, stay the hell away from those creatures.”

  As Lauren ran off, calling for her friend, Ethan forced his reluctant legs to move. He was terrified of what might happen to Lauren, but he had to stop any more of the life forms entering the camp. He grabbed another night lamp and left the barn.

  Ethan sped away on the quickest route to the fence. It had been the first thing to be erected after Arrival. The builders had sunk metal posts and fixed high-tensile alloy fencing to them four meters high and a meter below ground, enclosing the compound. But Ethan hadn’t been a part of the building crew. Where was the switch to turn on the electricity? He didn’t recall seeing it.

  Another shriek split his ears. The noise came from somewhere to the right. Someone else had been caught by one of the creatures. Sweat ran from Ethan’s pores at the memory of what had happened to Dr. Crowley—at the thought of what was happening to another person. The shriek evened out to a long, howling wail of someone in terrible torment.

  The horrible cry stopped abruptly. Had the creature moved onto its victim’s fac
e? Had someone put the person out of their misery? Ethan steered his thoughts away from the idea. He had one goal: turn on the fence.

  From out of nowhere, a child ran into his side and rebounded from the impact. The kid rolled to a halt and sat up, crying. Ethan went over, crouched down to the boy and held his arms. “Are you okay?”

  “Mommy! I want my mommy.” The child was only six or seven years old. He must have been separated from his parents in the mad rush from the barn. What was he even doing on the planet surface? Ethan wondered. He hadn’t noticed the child during the day’s work.

  The boy continued to sob into his fists. Around them, screams and shouts were filling the air. Ethan didn’t know what to do. He had to go to the fence, but he didn’t want to leave the kid alone with those creatures roaming the camp.

  “Come with me,” he said, straightening up and holding out his hand. “Come on, we’ll find your mommy.”

  The kid didn’t look up. He buried his face further into his hands and shook his entire body from side to side, signaling his refusal of Ethan’s offer.

  “Come on,” Ethan urged. “It isn’t safe for you to be out here by yourself. Come with me. We’ll find your mommy, I promise.”

  The kid lifted his head long enough to shout, “No, leave me alone,” before he thrust his face into his hands once more and fresh sobs rocked his little body.

  Ethan didn’t have time to waste. He reached down and grabbed the kid, intending to carry him over his shoulder while he continued his search for the switch. But the boy struggled and kicked as Ethan lifted him.

  “Whoa, take it easy,” Ethan protested, trying to get a firm grip on the wriggling child. A small, booted foot struck Ethan full in the stomach. He grunted in pain and dropped the boy, who landed on his feet and ran the second he hit the ground, quickly disappearing into the darkness.

  Ethan ran after him, but he couldn’t see where he’d gone. He stopped and called out, telling the kid that it wasn’t safe and that he had to come back, but he heard no response. The child was nowhere to be seen. Ethan’s heart weighed heavy. He returned to his quest to find the switch.