Everlasting
Science fiction short story
The forest smelled of pines, and dry grass, and childhood summers far, far away.
Captain Hellbrooke knew he wasn’t on Earth. Hell, he wasn’t even on a United Federations planet either, which all had the same look and feel to some degree. This place - Aurix-3, according to their starmaps, which was as far as the kuar had run - was so far off the grid that the likelihood of pines and grass wasn’t even on the scopes, not in a million years.
And yet - the smell was there.
Hellbrooke inhaled, closed his eyes for a moment, and just held the smell.
Dry pines, baking in the summer heat. Cones on the ground, old needles underfoot, the still-green needles clinging to the trees. The hint of sap where bark had split and released gummy yellow crystals.
Dry grass, long dead from the winter, mixing with dry soil. Dusty smells, summer smells, the smells of an empty lot you pass on the way to the market, or the pastures which had been stripped and not yet rewilded.
Fine soil under your fingertips, thin and pale when you reach down to check your boot laces. Powder that puffs up with every step and coats your black boots in a fuzz of tan, khaki, and cinnamon. Soft, easy to read, with tracks sketched in the fallen needles and the humped ridges of shifted granules. Something dragging, raising ridges in the resistanceless surface; something scuffed, prints sharp but already softening in a surface so powdery that it almost flowed like water.
Hellbrooke opened his eyes again, and looked at the forest.
It was red, in all the shades of blood - human blood - that you could imagine, and the trees had coppery trunks that bulged, about a metre of the ground, with the fat belly of an internal water reservoir. Their leaves were pine needles, sure enough, but the colour was all wrong. Red chlorophyll evolving under a dim red sun, with less ultraviolet and more heat, had created a world that seemed to simmer and boil whenever you looked at it for too long. The grass that coiled around the edges of the paths was red as well, fading into orange tips, and long creeper coils ran from the ground and up into the trunks, blending the forest floor with the trees and the sky in an almost seamless wave.
Red ground, red horizon, red sky.
A world that looked like it was soaked in blood, and yet smelled of home.
Hellbrooke remained crouched at the side of the path, feeling the heat move across his arms and shoulders as the wind overhead shifted the branches of the forest. The smell of fallen pine needles swelled whenever the sun baked the path ahead for more than a few moments, the light flashing and fading as the clouds overhead shifted and continued their race to whatever destination they had in mind that day.
“Bravo Actual, in position on the west.”
“Gamma Actual, holding to the north.”
“Kappa One, east is secure.”
“This is Alpha Actual. I’m moving up from the south.” Hellbrooke whispered into the throat mic once the other sweeper elements had signed off, and turned around to beckon the men behind him to get ready to move. They were lumpy red and black shapes along the edge of the path, barely visible under their adaptive camouflage and the shifting shadows.
He rose, carbine in hand, and slowly resumed his stalk deeper into the forest. His combat monocular, clipped over his left eye, ticked off metrics and analytics as his gaze swept over the terrain; his right eye, laced with augmented photoreceptors from one of the Black Division labs, saw heat plumes and pockets of hot and cold air moving through the surrounding vegetation like clouds. The day was too warm for the heat vision to help as much as it did at night, but Hellbrooke had become so used to it over the years that it now felt utterly normal to him even in daylight.
His nose was still normal, for the most part. It still smelled the memories even as his eyes saw alien sights that his brain - at least the human part of his brain - did not fully recognize. It smelled pines and dry grass, and Hellbrooke looked out at the red foliage around him and could almost see the memories there.
The forest path split, a fork showing more sandy ground and dappled light, and Hellbrooke slowly went down on one knee to study the ground again. Patterns in the sand slid by, the fallen red needles drying and shading into orange, and almost - almost - covering the ground completely. Hellbrooke could not imagine that anyone had been maintaining these paths in recent years, not after the start of the war.
The ground was a betrayer, though. Even of its own. It showed tracks where the needles had shifted, breaking the near-perfect cover, and once Hellbrooke found two definite scuffs in close proximity, he told his tactical overlay in the monocular to focus on it. Machine intelligence - partly in the eye-piece, partly in the webbing he wore, partly in the fibrenetic implant in the back of his skull - looked and digitized and spun through a thousand thousand patterns before pointing out more tracks as he looked up.
On the path that led left, the tracks continued. On the path that led right, nothing.
Hellbrooke took the left path, and kept moving.
The minutes ticked by, the ground inched by underfoot, the voices in his ear checked in regularly - and slowly but surely the noose tightened.
“This is Kappa One. Two tango down. No casualties.”
Hellbrooke nodded to himself, and mentally adjusted the numbers in his head as he continued. The headcount was down below twenty by now.
“Bravo Actual here, we just took five. I say again, we just took five.”
The monocular ticked and updated. Hellbrooke reached a clearing, a rarity in the forest, and paused at the edge. There was a simple monument in the middle - an orb, or egg, rising on a pedestal and leaning to the side, and shaped from the same smoothed rock which they had found elsewhere around the forest perimeters. Grey flanks, streaked with white, baked in the sunlight that struck it. Nothing else in the clearing stood out.
They skirted the clearing, and Hellbrooke observed how the tracks had clustered around the strange monument before heading off again. Seen from the other side, the stone showed fine creases all over its surface, and Hellbrooke wondered if it was meant to be a seed of some kind. It certainly had that look, from the new angle.
There was a flurry of updates over the tactical net, and when the monocular stopped updating the new numbers matched the count that Hellbrooke had been keeping in his head.
Three left.
The location beacons for the other sweeper teams had converged all around them, and there were mere kilometres separating them now. Hellbrooke felt the heat and dry grass shift around him, welling up as the clouds parted and the path around him flushed with light, and somehow he knew.
It was time.
“All units, hold your positions.” The words felt heavy in his throat. “The codeword is Penultimate - I say again, the codeword is Penultimate.”
Faintly, far in the distance, there was the sound of two gunshots even as Hellbrooke spoke.
“Bravo Actual, solid copy on Penultimate.”
“Gamma Actual, solid copy on Penultimate.”
“Kappa One, we just took down two. Solid copy on Penultimate.”
Dry grass, warm and thick in the back of his throat. A summer at the lakes, with his family, and the long walks in the plantations there. The smell of heat, and plants thriving, and things dying and fading into dust.
Hellbrooke’s squad spread out behind him on his signal, melting into the forest, and he took a moment to shuck his pack and hide it under a nearby coil of grass before taking a last look back. The southern skyline was just trees, red and coarse and gently waving. The city was hidden. The valley was out of sight. Not even the smoke pyres from the orbital strikes were visible any longer.
The sand and dried needles were dry on his skin when he peeled his gloves off. The dust clung to his skin like paint as he slowly and methodically rubbed first his palms and then the back of his hands with handfuls of gritty soil. Powder smoked around him as he finished, his hands transformed into two tan paws.
He left his carbine at the pack too. The dagger from the back of his belt, in its traditional horizontal sheath, was a black strip of no-light in his hand when he drew it. Light struck the blade and vanished, leaving a gash in reality that trailed from his hand as he moved. He had only used it twice before, in all of his time on this job.
Never in anger, never in haste. Always calmly, and only when the black blade was needed.
“Helios Command is standing by. Upload link is ready and waiting.”
Hellbrooke acknowledged the satellite link without using his voice. His feet were carrying him down the path, silently rising, slowly descending. Not even the dust noticed his passage now.
Heat on his face. A parent smiling, some words that were lost to time and memory. An immense sense of contentment and of ending, twining together until he could not tell where the one ended and the other started.
It did not matter.
Not any more.
He walked some more, as slowly as the sun shifting overhead, and he found the cat at a fork in the path. It was lying down when he first saw it, but rose up when it noticed him. Dark orange fur covered it from neck to foot, striated in lighter lines, and muscles pulled taut along its neck when it opened its jaws and hissed at him.
Hellbrooke still did not understand why they had chosen to take this form. Of all the divergent evolutions of life, and of all the possible shapes, they had gone for something that looked like an anthropomorphic cat. A humanoid body, limbs that seemed in human proportion but bent the wrong way when you paid attention, and a leonine head that was framed in a black mane. Fur covered every inch of that shape, dark in most places, mottled and light along their backs, and the eyes that locked on Hellbrooke were a vivid green with uncanny - and unmistakeable - traces of intelligence.
Kuar.
Hellbrooke sank to his haunches when he was still a good twenty metres away, and watched the shape ahead of him twitch. He could see the heat plumes rising off the shape, could see the way the foam clung to its jaws, and spotted - when his eyes flickered into the surroundings - the discarded equipment belt that lay beside it.
Two water bottles, both with their caps off.
It bared its teeth at him, hissing, but it did not approach - nor did it try to run. The forked paths behind it led off to the north and the west, and it must have known what was waiting there for it.
“You know why I am here.” Hellbrooke watched the green eyes narrow, intelligence warring with incomprehension, and slowly reached up to activate the translator module clipped to his chest. He repeated himself, and listened to the device hissing and barking a moment later.
The kuar stopped when it heard the synthetic voice, then raised itself up and roared back, spittle flying from its jowls. Hellbrooke could see the heat emanating from it in intensifying waves.
“Destroyer! Eater of the young! A curse upon your line!” The translator talked directly into Hellbrooke’s ear-piece, and he smiled when he heard the words. His teeth flashed, white against his painted face, and it drove the distant creature into a heightened frenzy.
“You have taken everything from us, filthy <unknown>,” the kuar roared, and slashed at the tree trunk closest to it. Dagger claws ripped the bark into a twinkling storm of copper chips. “We offered you everything, and you chose this path. You chose this!”
“Yes. We chose this path, together,” the translator module spat back, and Hellbrooke raised the black dagger in his hand and held it out to the raging creature. “We chose it, and now we are here, and the path must end.”
He could hear the creature panting, breathing fast and shallow, but its eyes were locked on his now, and its claws were retracting, one by one. Hellbrooke breathed with it, slow and steady, and saw in his mind’s eye again the summer forest of his youth.
“You came to us looking for help. We helped. You came to us looking for protection. We protected.” The translator hissed and barked, an echoing counterpoint to Hellbrooke’s words, and he slowly rose as he spoke. “We let you into our cities, and into our homes. We trusted you.”
There was a deep rumble emanating from the kuar at this point, low in its chest, but it did not respond. Its eyes did not leave Hellbrooke as he slowly drew closer, even as its fur rippled. Long muscles, lean and powerful, twitched along its limbs, and seemed to dance in the shifting sunlight that covered both of them at this point.
“It is our right,” the creature rumbled at Hellbrooke, and opened its jaws wide on the last syllable. Fangs gleamed, wet and yellow, less than ten metres from the advancing man. “It has always been our right.”
“No. You were a mistake, all of you. An accident.” Hellbrooke watched the eyes in front of him narrow, green orbs turning into slits. “Something that should never have been.”
“Something that will never be again, after today.” The translator hissed and yowled one last time, then fell silent as it waited for Hellbrooke to continue. The moments ticked by, white eyes locked with green - and Hellbrooke saw the one eye twitch.
He was twisting to the side, torso heading one way, legs kicking the other as the kuar leapt at him, and the leonine form streaked past him in a rush of heat and fur and lashing claws. Something snagged the side of his webbing even as he spun, and then he was bouncing off the forest floor, dagger still in hand, the other arm explosively throwing his body weight back into the air. Behind him, twisting in midair, the kuar landed, spun, and leapt again in a single fluid motion - and this time Hellbrooke had the dagger up and ready. Claws raked into his one arm, shredding flesh before scraping off bones, and with his other arm he was dragging the black blade across the kuar’s flank even as they both fell back.
Dust bloomed around them as they struck the forest floor, the hot scent of blood spilling from both bodies, and Hellbrooke took a gouging kick to the stomach that sent him spinning back into the coiling grass. He felt wetness down his midriff, and the stabbing of grass against naked skin, and then he had his legs underneath himself again and he was up, airborne, one hand outstretched and high, the other low and still clutching the dagger.
The kuar was up too, on all fours now, and leapt even as Hellbrooke came down. Fangs cracked down on his exposed forearm, crashing against titanium-spun polymer bones, and its rear legs came up and kicked at his midriff with claws extended - but Hellbrooke had the dagger up, and the first kick impaled a taloned paw on the no-light blade even as the other gouged deep into his own belly. The beast howled around the arm still jammed into its jaws, and when it pulled back its wounded paw, Hellbrooke hammered the dagger into the base of its ribcage, right where the last ribs turned into the tense muscle plate of the stomach.
Something bloomed in the creature’s eyes, then, something that Hellbrooke saw and recognized even as the taloned limbs continued to thrash against his own body. It was not fear, not exactly, but it was a realization - that something had changed, that a corner had been turned.
“Helios Command, this is Hellbrooke. Codeword is Penultimate.” Hellbrooke kept the dagger pressed to the kuar’s midriff even as it thrashed, and the blood pouring from the wound mixed with his own blood as his flesh shredded under the frantic kicking and mauling of the kuar’s claws. “I say again, codeword is Penultimate.”
“Helios uplink is now active. Godspeed, Captain Hellbrooke. We’ll see you on the other side.”
A claw swatted at his face, and suddenly half of the world was dark, but Hellbrooke clung on. The heat from his implant was merging with the heat of the blood flowing from his wounds, and the blood of the thrashing kuar that was slowly but surely covering both of them. Hellbrooke breathed in one last time, smelling the dust and the blood and the dry pine needles, and saw his family the way they had looked in the report that first landed on his desk all those years ago.
Faces torn off, limbs mauled, bellies opened. His son, unrecognizable except for his small stature. His daughter, half-eaten, with her neck torn out. His wife, stretched out and bloodied, the bedsheets a red desert around her battered form.
The light was fading from his remaining eye, and Hellbrooke thought the kuar’s kicks were getting weaker, but he wasn’t sure. He pressed harder with the dagger, not even sure whether his arm was still obeying him, or whether any of the implants were still doing their job. Something wet and warm was slowly covering him, and Hellbrooke looked up and saw the clouds overhead. They were thin, and the sun was breaking through, and then there was just darkness.
* * * * *
Waking up in the tanks always took a while to get used to. Sounds never quite translated correctly for the first few hours, especially before the draining started, and the gel temperature never seemed quite right either. Hellbrooke felt like he was being hugged by a wet, cold blanket, and only when they had pulled him out and clipped the wakeup mask to his face did things begin to make sense again. The two technicians who decanted him were calm, and quiet, and did not ask any questions despite the fact that they must have known who he was. Hellbrooke did not feel like talking either, and left it at that.
Later, once he had rinsed off and gotten dressed, the operations officer found him in the dressing room. The officer was young, probably fresh out of one of the Division academies, and the look of reverence that soaked through him, and his actions, was impossible to miss.
“Captain Hellbrooke, welcome back. How do you feel?”
Hellbrooke fought - and failed - to suppress the gas that rose from his throat and burped out.
“I’m sorry. New bodies always do this when you wake up.” Hellbrooke massaged his throat before indicating the bench opposite him. “Sit down. Did we get everything?”
“We did, yes.” The young officer sat down, awkward in his stiff uniform, and regarded Hellbrooke. “Your final upload was successful, and we had the video feed circulating the moment we parsed it out of the consciousness stream. The public response has been extremely positive. There is talk of a commendation, and the senate is going to debate it in their next session. The rebellion is finally over. The kuari are officially extinct now.”
Hellbrooke looked at the soft face opposite him, and wondered if the man understood what he had seen on Aurix-3.
“Has there been any news about my family?”
Awkward eyes, a glance that swept sideways. Hellbrooke thought of the green eyes that he remembered, and wondered if the grey eyes opposite him would ever understand.
“I’m sorry, sir, but there has been no update. The reconstruction efforts have not improved since your last request, and despite all of our efforts…” The man’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry, sir, but they are saying it won’t be possible to get them back. Between the damage done by the kuari attacks, and with the time that had transpired, the cerebral damage was just too extensive.”
Hellbrooke nodded, and the officer eventually got up and left, and he found himself looking at the line of lockers on the opposite wall. Straight lines, up and down, in flat greys that caught and reflected the light without changing itself. Air that smelled wet, a rubber-padded floor that gently yielded when he shifted his feet.
Nothing felt the way it was supposed to, and nothing was ever going to be the same again.
No matter how many times he did this.
Not even after nine lives.
Great writing. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the red forest, with its evocative smells
I enjoyed this, tragic though it was.