The Vigil - 1

The Return

The dead hours had always been the hardest watch, even buried deep beneath the surface where sunlight meant nothing. The space-eyes was quiet in its orbit high above the planet, its vast array of lenses and antennae receiving no signals. There was nothing on the screens, not even the quiet blip of merchants passing through the far fringes of the system. Kant was on no trade routes, far off the beaten path, significant only because of the crystal-filled caverns that riddled the sun-blasted world's crust. Even the crystals were insignificant, nothing but common salt and too far from civilisation to be feasibly mined.

It was the very isolation of the place that had first drawn settlers with their drills and sunlamps and seeds, tonnes upon tonnes of black soil, biodomes, air filters, and children. They had carved out a place for themselves, quite literally, and lived in their slice of nowhere quite happy to be ignored. But that had been centuries ago, and all that was left were a few hundred pale peasants farming luminous fungi and praying daily that the ancient filters would last one more turn, just one more...

The colony had dwindled to nearly nothing, but the chapel remained, because where there was life, there had to be the Mendicant Sentinels. They would need protection. They would need representation, and comfort in hard times, once hard times returned, as everyone knew they would. They would need guidance, and so the chapel remained.

Brother Joen knew all of that, and he knew why his duty lay with the fungus farmers and their glowing mushrooms, but he could have wished for a better location, or at least a higher degree in the Order. The watch was a miserable task, despised even more than the sewer patrols. Acolytes and apprentices were too young to know what to look for, and despite the ostensibly egalitarian nature of the chore selection, somehow the Masters, Mothers, Fathers and Lords always managed to avoid the watchtower like a plague of spacefoot. So it fell to the journeymen, deacons, proselytes and Joen.

"The lord in the manor has a nose made of brass," he sang under his breath, "A nose made of brass, a nose made of brass brass brass. The lord in the manor has a nose made of brass, but his lady likes him plenty for his plump tattooed-"

Something chirped at him from the dusty console, not the sound of a proximity alert but of old machinery complaining at a power fluctuation. He solved the problem by hitting the panel with the sole of his boot. The chirping stopped, but first it whined piteously in protest.

"Oh, stop it," Joen muttered, pulling irritably at his wooden earrings. Seven hours to go, said the chronometer by the door, its figures shining blue and far too optimistic. Seven hours, and only half a jug of jitterjuice left.

"The lady in the manor has a face full of pits," he sang. "A face full of pits, a face full of pits pits pits. The lady in the manor has a face full of pits, but her lord likes her plenty for her big bouncing-"

"Lights and love, Joen" a gruff voice crackled over the com, "it's bad enough having to listen to you singing that swolp all day without it keeping me up all night. Can't you turn off the ear up there?"

"Sorry," said Joen. It was hard to tell whose voice he was hearing, distorted as it was by the static of the com cables, but he thought that it might be the chapel's Father. "It's broken. I tried turning it off, but it keeps turning itself back on... I'll try covering it."

"Mmn, do that. Or you could try sitting up there quietly."

"Yes, Father."

It was almost chilly in the watchtower, but not too cold for Joen to spare his cloak for the overly-sensitive ear. He piled the grey fabric on top of the console, careful not to strike any buttons, then replaced his lost warmth with a mug of hot jitterjuice. The dark burgundy liquid steamed in his cup, a couple of shrivelled berries floating on the surface.

Another hour flickered past on the chronometer; another mug of stimulant disappeared.

Joen was falling asleep when the alarm sounded.

It started quietly, only the ping of a ship on the edge of the system, very possibly someone just passing through who would never come near Kant. A higher tone joined the ping, perhaps a pod breaking off from the larger ship. Next came a lower tone, a harmonic trio of mechanical voices, maybe denoting a convoy, traders or explorers, coming to see whatever there was to be seen in the barren corners of existence.

Then there was another, then another, and then the space-eyes was screaming, crying out in frantic warning. Fifty tones, seventy, a hundred, three hundred. The counter went blank just before it could reach five hundred, and there were sure to be more. It was a swarm.

Joen shot from his chair, a cascade of jitterjuice staining the front of his robes like a fount of blood. He fumbled frantically with his controls, focussing the space-eyes on the far fringe of the system. From that distance there was little to see but a haze of silver specks, but there had to be thousands of ships, perhaps a couple of million pods and plodders scuttling back and forth between them. There were too many for a trading convoy, too many for an Akashi archipelago, too many even for an invasion force.

The klaxon trigger sputtered and crumbled beneath the frenzied Brother's fingers, its warning wail silenced by the years of disuse. He wrestled the door open and careered down the stairs, sliding dangerously in the dark, and made for the nave. The bell rope slipped beneath his sweaty palms, but the rough fibres bit into his flesh when he tightened his grip.

The great bell's peals reverberated through the chapel and the streets beyond the walls, a panicked clangour that carried the promise of death and the memories of past horrors.

Father Imaltek stumbled into the nave, his head and face unshaven for once in the years that Joen had known him. His watery eyes found the Brother, blinking away plaster as it fell from the ceiling under the onslaught of sound.

"Ships!" Joen shouted over the din. "Ships, and they're headed here! Father, they're coming!"

Imaltek belted his robes around his burgeoning girth, nodding his stubbly head. "Keep the bell going," he called back. "I'll start evacuating."

Joen kept ringing, tugging down and down again and again until his shoulders and back screamed for relief and the great iron voice of fear had permanently imprinted itself in his mind. I could twist it just a little, he thought. I could make it louder, perhaps. Wake a few more people, save a few more families.

The rippling surface of spacetime draped itself across his vision, resonating with the bass timbre of the bell and a deeper throb of something coming, something huge beyond comprehension. It pounded in Joen's mind, shook his hands free of the rope and dropped him like a stone, unconscious on the cracked composite floor. The bell rang out again, slowed, and fell silent.

~~

Beyond the walls, the biodome began to spring to life. Imaltek and his children, the grey and brown Sentinels, four Brothers and five Sisters, scattered through colony with their assigned tasks. Yanu raised the artificial sun, throwing the bleak, colourless streets into a patchwork of light and shadow. Heldin Nal and S'dena went to work repairing the klaxons, the only way to alert everyone to the necessity of flight. Tannan Nal and Makek Tri rode to loose the water supply into a portable tank to be strapped to the belly of one of the antique plodders in the hangar. Raias collected the books and scrolls from the chapel, everything sacred to knowledge that could be picked up and saved. Calath Dor and Witawy Yer Witawy saw to emptying the colony's little infirmary of inmates and materials, packing the people and boxes into the fastest rollers in the town. Adriq saw to food supply.

Father Imaltek himself went to unlock the hangar doors, the last barrier between his flock and a chance at escape. The doors did not open. Years of dust and decay had sealed them shut, and shut they strove to remain despite the Father's prayers, curses and prising. He ran a shaking hand across his scalp.

"The doors!" he called to Joen through the ancient ears that should have connected his end of the dome to the chapel. He could hear that the bell had fallen silent, and the boy was as silent as the bell. "Joen? You have to override the lock. Joen!"

No answer came.

Raias arrived out of breath, her gills streaming with tears, arms full of paper and cases of crystals. The first few rollers full of families eked in behind her and began to shuffle toward the plodders. They were ragged with fear, pale from lives spent out of the sun, eyes puffy with recent sleep. If they made it out, it would be for the best, Imaltek thought. The salt caves had leeched the moisture from their skin and the light from their souls. They would do well to taste red fruit and breathe real air.

Raias deposited her load and ran to help Imaltek with the doors. She gulped harshly, lost to speech for the moment, but no words were needed. Her fingertips scrabbled and scraped against the rusted latch, a fruitless attempt.

"No good," said Imaltek, shaking his head. "The forcefield is likely broken anyway. We'll wait for the others. When everyone is in a ship, we'll twist it open and ride the decompression wave out."

Yanu arrived then with the next surge of frightened colonists, and the three Sentinels rushed to herd families into the yawning rear maws of the old plodders. The ships were rusted and decayed, bent and dented in places from some meteorite storm centuries past, but all of their seals were functional. No one would suffocate once they cleared the biodome.

Calath Dor and tiny Yer rolled in with the sick and the injured and a few of the elderly who could not have left their beds unaided. Adriq followed, then Makek and Tannan Nal, Heldin Nal and S'dena.

A head count was taken. A few families were missing pets, but every person was accounted for.

"We have everyone," Adriq said. He sealed off three of the plodders and signalled their pilot brains to start the engines.

"Not Joen," Calath Dor sent back through the ears from the second ship. "He was still at the chapel."

"Did something happen to him?"

A brief storm of argument swirled across the com, resulting in S'dena taking off at a run for the chapel. She twisted space as she ran, bringing an image of the nave to shimmer between her eyes and the darkening street. Joen lay beneath the bell, still and silent and somehow burnt out, like a conduit that had seen too much power. A tremor like an earthquake shuddered through her secondary vision, severing the fabric of space time as a violent blow splits skin. It came again, throbbing and pounding, and S'dena stumbled and fell. She brought a hand to her forehead and waited for the nausea to pass, then opened her eyes to blackness. The false sun, though fading fast, was still warm on the backs of her hands, but her eyes saw nothing. She felt charred inside, like what she'd seen in Joen.

There was nothing she could do but grope blindly, too afraid to run and too crippled to send up a cry. No use, she wanted to scream, Just go, just leave! But spacetime rippled and swirled around her, indifferent to her will, sliding away from all of her attempts to weave it into a message. She could scream all she pleased, but those in the hangar would never hear her.

The first drill hit the planet at an oblique angle, rocking the axis and sending the entire orb spinning off kilter. The plodders skidded across the hanger floor, three hundred people reaching for handholds or else crashing into one another.

There was no time left to wait. The last seal was set and all six plodders fired up their engines, filling the hangar with ion exhaust.

"We have to go now," said Imaltek. "Get the doors open. Make sure they blow outward, and get us in the air. If we scatter, maybe we can avoid notice."

A second drill struck, then a third. A deep rumble filled the hangar – the splitting and cracking of the planet's crust. It roared.

"Now," the Father said, clutching the wall for support. "Now!"

The eight Brothers and Sisters remaining pooled their strength, catching hold of space to blast their way through the doors. Reality twisted around them, gravity and time morphing into something malleable, plastic, as the cosmic fabric gained substance. The hangar doors shuddered.

A fourth drill struck, and the planet broke open like a ripe fruit.

The doors squealed with the strain of twisting metal, and a crack of starlight appeared overhead. Father Imaltek pressed his knuckles into his eyes, fighting the disorientation of suddenly lessened gravity. It threw him off balance, but the sense of wrongness went deeper than that. There was a pulse in his mind, something powerful and unclean, howling in the black void of space and through the quiet places of his soul.

Yanu and Adriq dropped beside him. Raias moaned and slumped forward in her seat, her gills flapping helplessly. One by one, the others went down, their tiny wrinkles in the fabric growing smooth. Imaltek kept fighting. The opening between the doors spread wider, little by little. They would not have to open all the way to let the plodders pass.

A little more, a little more, another foot, another cubit. The pale rim of Kant's moon appeared in the sliver of sky, and Imaltek slid to the floor with closed eyes. One of the plodders hit the ceiling, throwing off a spray of sparks, and spiralled back to the floor. A little more, a little more, another foot, another cubit... The doors ground to a stop, deformed and warped by the colossal force exerted by the felled Mendicants. It was not enough, too narrow to let the evacuees pass.

Then the moon was blotted out by a swarm of silver and black as a monstrous net filled the sky.