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Immediately, things are different. Almost the first thing my eyes land on is a large, rust-coloured stain across the floor. Blood. Definitely blood. Someone was wounded here - grievously - and their body dragged down the corridor. There’s no tang of copper in the air, and the stain looks dried out, almost faded, so it must have happened some time ago, but my body goes on high alert all the same.
Much like downstairs, all the doors are open. The bedrooms inside have been ransacked, furniture damaged and overturned, the bedding gone, the mattresses stained and dirtied. There’s an echo of a smell lingering inside them - grime and body odour, something about it sharper, more astringent than normal.
I’m heading towards the canteen area when I hear voices. At first, I turn towards them, thinking it must be someone from my team, the people I came here with. But as I shift, the sounds sink in, and I realise whoever is talking, they aren’t speaking my language. The voices are male, slightly guttural, lots of short clipped sounds. Mercenia made sure all its citizens spoke the same tongue in the very early days. Open communication breeds efficiency, cohesiveness. Other languages are for insurgents.
I move, twisting myself out of the corridor and into one of the bedrooms, pressing my back against the wall as I reach in my pocket for my knife, flicking out the blade. Edging closer to the doorway, I squint down the corridor towards the open door at the end, looking for any sign of enemy targets. Shadows move across the bright space of the front entrance, but I can’t make out faces, features.
Heart pounding in my chest, I begin to make my way down the corridor, treading as lightly as I can in my boots. I might not remember where I am or why, but my body remembers the motions of creeping up on an enemy encampment. I’m silent as I move, every muscle in my body braced for attack.
More sounds start to resolve, echoing down the corridor towards me. Several voices, similar, but different enough that I think I could count the number of speakers if I listened for a while. They don’t sound angry or aggressive. There’s a playful note to the conversation, plenty of laughter accompanying it.
Good, they aren’t expecting trouble. That gives me an advantage.
Beneath the voices, the distinctive crackle of an open fire. That makes me pause more so than the strange language these people speak. There are communities living off the grid, outside of Mercenia’s districts. Scavengers, scraping together a living from scraps and resentment, unwilling to follow Mercenia’s rules and structures and therefore unable to live a life within them. But those people tend to stick to the mountains, the last truly rural areas. Hostile, barren places. Not the kind of place you could build a military base and hope to go unnoticed for any length of time. Missions into those communities are all about the fast strike - drop in, sweep through, round up who you can and take out those you can’t. The time and investment required for an installation like this one… It wouldn’t make any sense to place it out in the wilderness.
Unease weighs on my shoulders, growing heavier by the moment. I sense that the memories I need are just out of reach, like words stuck on the very tip of my tongue. But the only thing I can recall when I try to think is that terrible face, roaring at me out of some nightmare.
Humanoid but not human.
Alien.
And then I remember. Exo-planet AZ470. A planet with similar environments and atmosphere to Earth, inhabited by a primitive species. A dangerous, savage primitive species.
Mission objective: protect the research team.
I glance at the smear of dried blood on the floor.
Looks like I failed that objective.
Emotions surge inside me - fear, guilt, shame and many other feelings that don’t serve me right now. Those dangerous aliens are outside. If I’m to understand what happened here, find my colleagues if any are still alive, rescue them and the women in cryo, and get us the hell off this planet, then I need to keep clear of them.
Get out, get away, hide, survive.
Then I can worry about feelings and everything else.
CHAPTERTWO
Maldek
The fire crackles merrily as we finish our evening broth, the flames fighting back the chill and the encroaching darkness, as well as some of the sense of unease the Mercenia hut sets in our blood.
I am not unaffected by it. I might have travelled here for watch duties more than any other in the tribe, but it still disquiets me to be here. The strange straight lines of the place are as unnatural to me as the egg that our tribe sisters arrived in. Their world is not like ours. This is something I have always known. But there are different kinds of knowing, different levels. I know that certain plants in Lina’s forests have healing properties, but I would not claim to know healing the way Shemza does. It is the same with my tribe sisters and Mercenia. I know that their world is a cold, grey sort of place. But I know this like I know the healing plants.
Seeing it here, a little piece of their world transposed onto ours, takes my knowledge a little deeper, and I do not like it. I do not like to think that my lovely sisters - fearsome Liv, delicate Lorna, cheerful Sam - once lived in a place like this. Not when just being around it puts a kind of chill in my spirit, a heaviness settling on my shoulders at the wrongness of it all.
First, the wrongness of the way it looks - as smooth and flat as the still surface of water, the colour of it the same grey everywhere. Not one variation, not one blemish across its entire outside. Even the most skilled builder of all raskarran tribes cannot bend the resources of the forest to his will entirely. Our own huts are uneven, the bend of the branches something that our builders worked with. The floors have been worn smooth by many seasons of feet stepping on them, but otherwise our homes, our tools, everything we use must be made in such a way that complements Lina’s natural bounties. A spear point may be carved to sharpness, but it still contains the grain of the wood it is carved from - those irregular lines that mark the different seasons of the tree’s growth. Leathers can be made soft by working them, but they will still vary in colour according to the skin of the creature that they have come from.
This Mercenia hut - it is hard to believe it is made from anything natural.
Then there is the wrongness that comes with wondering what it is doing here. It is the question that much preoccupies my sisters’ minds. My chieftess, in particular, is very concerned about her old tribe’s purposes with Lina’s forests.
“Mercenia never do anything for the simple good of it,” Liv explained, with Sally helping to translate her words, in a meeting held with the whole tribe before the first expedition back to this place. “They do not come to Lina’s forest for the joy of being here amongst your trees. They will be looking to gain something, and they will not care who they step on, what they destroy in the process.”
Sadly, this is not unfamiliar to me. There are plenty of my kin who have turned from Lina’s ways, sought to answer their own needs and comforts over any others. Tribes like Sarkry’s - who would have hurt Sally rather than protect her, had Jaskry not escaped them with his precious mate. Tribes like Basran’s, who took my dear friend Sam for the same purpose.
Even now, my gut clenches that I let them steal her away. What might have happened if her mate Dazzik had not been looking for her also? The memory of rousing her from her sleep, trying to hustle her away from the encampment and the attentions of Basran’s tribe, only for them to stumble upon us, plays once more in my headspace. Their eyes flashing in the darkness, the night not deep enough to hide the cruel nature of their interest. Too many for me to keep away from her by myself.
Walk, Sam.Walk.
