On the planet Siddim. Part one of colonization: extermination of hostile alien life.
Steel-lined boots sunk two inches into the slick greenish mud as Sgt. Edmund Hope jumped from the back of his cruiser and onto the battlefield. For now, the fight was over. The enemy retreated to lick their wounds.
But all things, barring death, are temporary, and he tried to avoid death at all costs. He’d been face to face with it once and, in his darker hours, he could still smell its hot breath on his face.
Edmund slung his heavy, Church issue gun off his shoulder and used the thick, cylindrical barrel to turn the head of one of the dead creatures at his feet. On Earth, they were depicted as demonic dragons equipped with forked tongues and long, serpentine bodies. The propaganda depicted Eden-esque devils under the dainty feet of Mary or skewered on the tip of St. George’s spear.
In reality, they were more akin to giant, ugly bats.
They had wings that made a sickening sound that could only be described as moist flapping, like a bird stuck struggling, and failing, to free itself of an oil spill, but the wings didn’t appear to give them any capability of flight. Their heads were massive, shaped much like a camel’s, but with eerily human eyes and lips, the later distorted by protruding, feline teeth. Their hair too, was long and unnaturally human, and their lean, bipedal bodies were covered in scales right down to their plated, insectoid tales. Mites, they called them. They were a good deal more annoying than mites.
They were supposedly rational, though Edmund didn’t want to believe that, partly because that way he wouldn’t have to pity them and partly because it would make them a thousand times more frightening.
Though they moved like gimped ostriches and had no language man had been able to decipher, there was evidence of their rationality on Siddim.
Edmund returned his gun to the holster attached to the back of his Strife Suit, letting the alien’s head fall back into the briny muck, and looked toward the horizon. The skyline was terrestrial. Some of the boys owned shirts that boasted it’s silhouette, a crouching Mite baring its teeth in the foreground, and flashy, neon looking letters that read Siddim. New sky, same high.
The towers they built were tall and the wood came from tree’s native to the planet which were gray in colour, but looked silver in the moonlight, making their cities more closely resemble human metropolis’. On closer inspection they had stark differences, such as no windows, and massive doors to accommodate their nine foot bodies. These towers were placed in central locations, the size seemingly dependent on population. They grew and harvested food. They lived in colonies. They were born, they built, they died. Like bugs. Like men.
The battlefield Edmund stood in had once been a literal field of a blue alien crop. The tall blue leaves had been either ripped from the soft soil or crushed underfoot in the skirmish, but as they lay now they appeared almost as if spread intentionally; a bedding for the dead.
Edmund knelt, pushed aside the dead Mite at his feet, and gathered a fistful of the blue leaves. He crushed them in his gauntlet and they crumbled to a fine, cerulean powder.
This is why they came, year after year, the battle for Siddim raging on with no end in sight.
Of all the scientists on Earth and all the multi-billion dollar corporations that owned them, none could find a way to make this plant grow off it’s native planet.
A sharp whistle pierced Edmund’s ears. He squinted and looked again toward the alien skyline as a missile struck one of the towers, burrowing a hole through the dry wood. The tower crumbled like a sand castle beneath a child’s fist, and even from this distance Edmund felt the trembling beneath his feet. The missile left a blue trail of smoke in the sky, a bright blemish on an otherwise pristine sunset.
Edward shook his head, dropping what remained of the plant in his hand to the battlefield. The MegaCorps wanted to harvest it, process it, and sell it. Best trip short of a spaceship, was just one of their many slogans. They sent soldiers to annihilate the Mites, take the plant, and kill anyone who got in their way.
The Church wanted to destroy the drug. They sent the Knights Hospitaller to annihilate the Mites, salt the earth, and kill anyone who got in their way.
A war waged on Earth and on Siddim, between the Church and the Corps—and somehow the Mites were winning.
“Hope, let’s go.” Corporal John Remus, a short man who looked comically like an action figure in his reinforced synthetic Strife Suit, was the only man below Edmund’s rank who had the nerve to demand things of him. Edmund didn’t mind. Everyone needed something to keep them in line, and for Edmund, that something was Remus and God. But Remus was usually louder.
Edmund waved the shorter man on toward the lone tower at the edge of the field. Three other humanoid silhouettes preceded him, their forms bulky in their suits and fuzzy through the bank of fog.
Edmund took one last look at the now flaming and distorted city in the distance before continuing through the field after his men.
There was a crumbling, smoldering hole where the doors of the tower had been. The siege tanks had made quick work of it and most of the Mites that had been inside. Oozing corpses sat like limp dolls against the interior wall, little more than skeletons, their soft brown innards liquefied and spilling onto the stones. One of the creatures who’d either survived the assault or had followed the team in after, lay splayed on the floor, it’s head blasted open by one of the pop-guns.
Edmund ran a glance over the man who still had his boot on the alien’s ribcage. The tall, dark haired pilot was the only one of them carrying one of the short, deadly little weapons. When fired they were silent, but made your ears pop like a dip in altitude, earning them their name. Trent had spray painted his lime green and he held it on his shoulder, barrel pointing to the ceiling as he grinned like a schoolgirl. The kid couldn’t be more than eighteen. Edmund had never asked. It was hard enough burying the nameless and faceless.
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Trent should have been flying drones from the safety of a bunker block, that’s why he’d been enlisted, but when you were dropping missiles the size of subway cars you didn't get to see an alien’s head explode, you didn’t get to see much more than a pixelated mushroom cloud of dust on a eight by ten screen while you ate peanuts out of a ration bag. You didn’t need to know how to get extraterrestrial blood out of a new uniform shirt, and you certainly didn’t get to use prohibited spray paint to graffiti the walls of the mysterious Mite towers.
So, by way of strategic misconduct and dumb luck, Trent had ended up serving in Edmunds squad.
Edmund turned a blind eye toward the hot pink cross Trent was already tracing above the fallen alien, and looked up to where a shaft of light illuminated a tall monolith standing in the center of the tower. It was formed from an alien stone that had a matte black exterior, a solid shadow in the belly of the dark hollow tower. The Hospitallers called such towers Silos, and each had one of a curious monolith at its core. It had taken a long time to figure out why. Eventually, and completely by accident, someone had blown a hole in one of the structures and discovered it was filled with an intricate network of dark wires. Wires covered in a thick, brown slim that looked like feces and smelt worse.
The actual workings of the alien tech was incomprehensible to Edmund. He was a Knight, not an Engineer. But he knew it had shot Earth into the next technological revolution. Spaceships had been rehauled with the new tech to travel double the distance in half the time, matching the speed and strength of the Mites’ ships—though it had done little good as the battles were all fought on Siddim. The Mites, for reasons no one had yet to discern, did not partake in space battles despite their highly equipped ships.
Miller, one of the few Knights knowledgeable enough to handle the alien tech, was already lying on the packed earth floor of the tower with his head inside the monolith. He couldn’t rehaul a cargo ship for deep space travel, but he could tell you which wires and gears would sell well on the black market. He pried loose a handful of wires, dripping with brown slime, and his head emerged from the body of the monolith. A bandana covered his mouth and nose to protect his sinuses from the harsh stench, the black cloth embroidered with a white dove. Miller handed the jumble of wire to Gafton who wrapped it in a rag before putting it in a plastic resealable bag. From there, it went into a steel cylindrical cooler to insure safe transport. Gafton’s face took on a look of great disgust each time Miller gave him one of the slim covered components.
“Any luck with this one?” Edmund asked.
Miller sighed. “Yes and no—awwwk.” A gagging sound echoed up the interior of the monolith before Miller rolled to the side and removed his head from the structure. His bandana had slipped and hung scrunched around his neck. “Oh mercy, I think I swallowed some that time!”
“Maybe you’ll get super powers,” Trent said, giving his spray can a hardy shake. “Like Spiderman.”
“Miteman?” Gafton smirked.
“Come on, guys,” Remus said, looking over his shoulder at the door. “We’ve got to get this done fast. You know the drill by now.”
Miller crawled back into the monolith as Trent and Gafton continued debating the theoretical abilities or mutations of Miteman and what superheroes he could or couldn't beat in a battle to the death.
Edmund had to stop himself from glancing superstitiously at the hole in the wall as Remus had. He tried to adopt the same nonchalant composure as Trent, telling himself his own lack of ease wasn’t because he was about fifteen years older, but because he was fifteen years wiser.
The Church banned the selling of alien tech, but if they didn’t take it the Mega-Corps would, and they’d sell it to the highest bidder. Vatican engineers studied the alien technology to improve their own ships, but they weren’t permitted to make a profit off it. And neither were Knights.
“Boys?”
Edmund, Remus, and Trent all spun toward the opening at the same time, weapons raised, Remus’s blaster humming to life as he flicked the safety on the grip.
A thin woman in a red spandex-like suit stood in the demolished wall. A white sash hung over her shoulder, crossing down over her chest. It was impossible to tell where her suit began and the short red skirt she wore ended as it was all formed of the same synthetic fabric. A red bandana similar to Miller’s covered the crown of her head.
“Holy Mother it’s hot in here,” she said slipping off the bandana and wiping her brow with it before tucking it in the waistband of her skirt. “What are you all doing in here, and why wasn’t I invited?”
Edmund relaxed and lowered his gun. The other knights let out a collective sigh of relief, one uttering a curse under his breath.
“Edith, I’m going to put a bell on you if you scare me like that one more time,” Edmund said. “Are the sisters already out there?”
“Bagging and tagging,” Edith replied. She had a long seed shaped board under one arm, much like a surfboard. She dropped it and it hovered just above the muddy ground. She stepped up onto the white surface, decorated with a red cross, bouncing a little to check her balance. The hover boards let the Sisters of Sorrows get to the wounded quickly and efficiently after the battle was over, but lately there had been too few wounded and too many dead.
Edmund didn’t worry about Edith. She’d caught them raiding the monoliths before and had never spoken a word, at least not any that had gotten back to anyone important. Edmund couldn’t tell whether she didn’t want to be partial to the crime, or simply didn’t care.
“Are you boys alright then?” She asked. A red blinking light from the black band on her wrist drew her attention. Medic alert. She was needed elsewhere, probably many places at once. The Sisters were always stretched thin.
She cursed and looked back up at Edmund. “You sure there’s no boo-boos for me to fix?”
Miller mumbled something from inside the monolith, but Grafton punched him in the thigh and he kept working. Edmund shook his head at Edith.
She replaced her bandana and turned her board aside, guiding the board with her feet until she was zipping off over the battlefield. Her board hovered off the ground, parallel with the fog bank, her silhouette slithering in and out of visibility before disappearing entirely.
Edmund managed to relax a little as he turned back to his men. They’d all survived the battle uninjured, their spirits unbroken as they joked with each other, making light of the perpetual darkness they’d lived in for the past six months. The barracks were little more than slums, built on mud and sinking into the alien earth. Everything they ate came out of silver retort pouches and none had had a proper shower since their pod landed on Siddim.
But tomorrow they would go home and spend two glorious months at the New York monastery while Miller sold their pirated tech on the black market and Remus secluded himself in near constant prayer, and the rest of them played video games or enjoyed the cool clean waters of the rooftop pool, surrounded by fresh cooked meals and as much of the monks’ special brew as they could guzzle.
Home. It felt so damn close.
The unmistakable squish of Strife boots in mud made Edmund’s blood freeze in his veins.
A second later, a deep, chewing-gravel voice confirmed Edmund’s fears.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
Edmund turned, slowly this time, all thoughts of the New York skyline fading into obsolescence. He prayed he’d find Edith standing in the burnt out hole, come back to badger them, or to crack a joke she’d forgotten to make the first time. But a much larger figure occupied the space now.
The tall man wore a suit similar to Edmund’s own, but painted white with a gold pallium draped over his shoulders and chest. He held a long crosier in his left hand while his right rested on the blaster holstered at his hip. His dark skin glistened from the heavy humidity, beads of sweat visible on his bare head.
Edmund heard Remus’s gun humming again, but Edmund held up a hand, indicating they drop their weapons.
Tech piracy was one thing—he wasn’t about to add shooting an archbishop to his growing list of sins.