This story is a sequel and prequel to the story
Vile History.
It is a work in progress so forgive any roughness!
[20K] FAITHLESS
A 20K story by NoPoet
PART ONE
The scientist had been working alone for three days, without any human interaction, when the call for his attention came.
“What is it, Younger Wen?” Zhou answered in his usual, irritable fashion. He looked up from his experiment, the dessicated remains of a destroyed Croatalid, to the vox-speaker looming above him. Usually, it spoke in the passionless tone of a military aide demanding progress reports. Occasionally, Wen’s voice, silvery and bright, would request that he halt his work in order to eat or sleep.
“The Council of Leaders requests your presence at the Persian Gate spaceport, Doctor Zhou,” Wen replied. She showed no ire at her nickname, as she had never shown it, despite her chronological age of ninety-one Terran years.
“Again?” Zhou grumbled. He looked at the crystalline fragments that had once been a hostile alien. “There is so much work to be done!”
“I know that, uncle, but this is urgent.”
Zhou sighed, put down the sonic oscillator he’d been using to examine the alien’s body structure, then shuffled over to the hygiene station against his lab’s back wall. It was a small lab, little more than a window-lined shack on a hill, yet it represented the Chinasian Bloc’s greatest hope of long-term survival on this world.
If the place was uninspiring from the outside, the inside was primitive. He looked around at his equipment, all the experiment cases untidily shoved onto shelves and tables, and hummed to himself as the vibro-stat cleaned his hands. Croatalids did not host bacteria that might harm humans, but their crystal bodies were poisonous through prolonged exposure.
Zhou found himself smiling at the cleansing sensation. The water on this planet was contaminated by toxins even Zhou hadn’t been able to identify and the planet’s marine life was ferocious. Drinking water had to be rationed despite the growing number of processing stations, all of which were over-worked by exhausted crews.
Sometimes marine animals were sucked into the stations. Those that survived the turbines and cleansing solutions were a threat to the workers’ lives; many of the creatures were capable of crawling or sliming their way out of the water to exist, briefly, on dry land.
There was a snick as the vibro-stat shut off. Zhou hummed to himself as he headed for the door. Despite the enjoyable feeling of magnetic resonance from the vibro-stat, he still missed the sensation of washing and bathing in water. A trio of fresh water tankers from the Chinasian colony of Xiang-Su was overdue. Water was at a premium, even on this ocean world.
“So we take our hydration tablets,” Zhou said to himself as he left the lab. It was a warm spring day, though there were grey clouds on the horizon. “We engineer the sleep-requirement out of our bodies so we can work harder to bring this colony to life.”
He chuckled to himself. It did not occur to Dr Zhou that he had become rather peculiar since he’d eliminated his need to sleep. Not many people had volunteered for the process after seeing its effects on Zhou.
The air was very fresh. Two suns hid behind clouds: the larger, rather bloated Hwang-ti and the distant, reticent Guojiu. Spring was strange and unsettled here, but the temperatures were much more bearable than summer. Flowers were already starting to bud in the grass. The colony was surrounded by meadows and woodland. Humans might not be able to drink the planet’s water, they might have to seek shelter every time it rained, but the flora and fauna enjoyed it perhaps too much, growing outsized and aggressive.
There was a sensation that crawled on his skin, as if a storm was about to break. Most unscientific.
It was Zhou’s opinion that the planet was eminently suitable for human habitation despite its salt-clouded, toxin-saturated, violently-occupied oceans. Those imperfections could be engineered out of this world, just as his own human weaknesses were being engineered out of him. The Human Genhancement Project would succeed.
Children laughed and played as they ran between hab-units. Zhou stayed out of their way but tolerantly smiled when the boldest of them waved at him. Colonists wearing clean white tunics went about their business, making respectful gestures as they passed Zhou.
The colony took the form of a medium-sized city housing almost thirty thousand souls. It had originally been colonised in the seventh millennium. Seven thousand years had passed since the first humans made planetfall.
Seven millennia of war and disaster. The colony had been lost, forgotten, rediscovered and reclaimed many times. A schism had occurred on Earth. The Terran Empire began to pull itself out of the ashes of what had once been called the Western world, the Chinasian Bloc formed from an alliance of the East, and centuries of war and mistrust had led humanity to face the galaxy divided.
There were records, which seemed almost fanciful, that described a war against brutal, green-skinned aliens like something from Terran myth, being driven from the world at great cost. Now the colony belonged to the descendants of those long-dead warriors and pioneers.
Every so often a piece of alien technology would turn up: an armour plate marked with a fanged maw here, a battered, heavy-calibre machine gun there, nothing to match humanity’s current technical level but still formidable, albeit unusable; the ranged weapons lacked triggers or other firing mechanisms, and even where these were rigged to the weapons, they were unreliable and tended to jam or explode.
Zhou wandered between hills and weaved through the agricultural region, not really noticing the other colonists as they nodded to him in respect. The people wore white clothing. It didn’t get dirty, of course, it had been many millennia since humans had moved on from the easily-torn rags they used to wear. High visibility colours were worn as standard procedure on Chinasian frontier worlds.
“Of course,” Zhou said to himself, “if we hadn’t kept abandoning and re-settling this world, there would be a thriving metropolis here and not an assortment of small office buildings. In fact, we’d probably have conquered half the -”
“Hello Doctor Zhou,” a little girl called as he strolled past.
“Hello,” Zhou said without looking, due to shyness and obsession with his thought-train rather than ignorance. He rambled on to himself. “They really should have put more emphasis on the human genhancement project, rather than building giant robots. Now all people do is walk around trailing protest banners and shouting anti-genhancement slurs. After all, look at me. I show no adverse effects at all from the process. It is fear, pure and simple. I will cure that as well.”
Other colonists called to him and he didn’t even notice. They showed no signs of offence. Nearly everyone was used to his behaviour by now.
The name Persian Gate Spaceport had always conjured some nostalgic vista to Zhou’s mind, a romanticised version of a past almost forgotten. The reality was a collection of small hangars intended more for shuttles than anything else, a departure lounge that looked like an alcoholic’s sitting-room and a single control tower with an amusingly oversized transmitter dish.
They had a deep-space communications array which occasionally broke down and a Gateway-class space station. Every so often, with much fanfare, they would launch another satellite into orbit. Some of these carried weapons to defend the colony against Croatalid and Hrud migrations, while the rest provided all sorts of data services Zhou never used. They even had something similar to what the Terrans used to refer to as “television”, before humans finally realised that life was more rewarding if it was lived rather than watched.
It wasn’t until he saw figures waving at him from beside an enormous spacecraft that Dr Zhou wondered why they needed a geneticist at the spaceport. His heart began to accelerate. Had they found some new alien species for him to work on? Yet the spacecraft, for its unfamiliarity, seemed human in construction.
He felt a sense of disappointment as he looked at it. It was much larger than the Chi-Ha class landers the colony used. It was painted black, but there were scorch marks and, upon closer inspection, impact craters where large-calibre shells had failed to completely penetrate. The vessel had a sharply-beaked prow dominated by the emblem of a winged sword.
Each of the vessel’s wings was home to two massive turbine engines which shimmered the air with heat exhaust. Some kind of iconography, seemingly religious in nature, was sculpted, added and painted onto the craft in the undamaged areas. Zhou’s distaste rose. The iconography seemed Terran in nature, all cherubs and skulls.
“Welcome, Chien,” said Xu Cai. Cai was the colonial Leader. He was a short and round man with eyes permanently creased into happy-looking slits. His welcoming smile seemed smug to Zhou, but then again, Zhou didn’t exactly relate well to people.
“Leader,” Zhou said. He nodded to Cai’s staff who were clustered around their leader wearing various expressions of shock and fear. “I was close to a breakthrough with my latest specimen. My results could lead to a better defence against the Croatalid aggressors. If only I had the time to examine their biological makeup, I could -”
Then the pilots of this strange spacecraft came around the corner of their vessel.
Zhou’s voice stopped working and his mouth opened wide. He forgot all about Croatalids and defence projects.
The ground seemed to shake beneath their armoured boots. They were giants, at least eight feet tall, and while their stature was boosted by the sheer bulk of their wargear, even without it they would tower over the Chinasian colonists. Their armour, battered and rent in places, was black with outsized shoulder pauldrons bearing the icon of a winged sword. Aghast, Zhou looked at the damage torn into their suits, wondering what kind of weaponry could do this to such formidable armour.
The men carried rifles that seemed absurdly thin along the centre before flaring out into barrels wide enough to accommodate rocket grenades. They moved with a fluid precision which belied their bulk, their red-eyed battle helms flicking this way and that to assess their environment before they seized upon Zhou as if in a target lock.
Whoever these men were – wherever they had come from – they were clearly soldiers, probably warriors without equal. They looked like they could crush a Croatalid in their bare hands, never mind with their firepower. There was simply nothing in Zhou’s experience to compare them to.
