The Moldy Dead (4 page)

Esteei’s inner chambers stretched
to bursting, pumping rank fluids over his skin.

Bha’hoi’s face twisted.  “I thought
it might.”

To punctuate his statement, he
kicked open another box, to the resulting terror of the Geuji.

“Now,” Bha’hoi continued, “Of all
the creatures on that ship, I liked you the most.  You didn’t get in my way.” 
He kicked open another box, allowing the
vaghi
to course out over the
landscape.  “In fact, it would’ve been hard to split the Ooreiki up without you
taking up Nirle’s cause like that.  Truly noble of you, Emissary.”

Esteei shuddered at the cold,
psychotic emotionlessness of the assassin gripping his throat.

He was faking.  All this time,
he was faking his emotions.  It was all an act.

“The little Jahul finally
understands,” Bha’hoi said, smiling.  “Yes.  I can switch off my emotions as
you flip the incinerator switch on your body wastes.”  He cocked his head.  “I
have the feeling you picked up one or two real ones, but it never worried me. 
I knew your brain was too small to put it together.”

Absolute, psychotic nothingness
emanated off of the Huouyt—so devoid of emotion it
was
an emotion.

“Let me go,” Esteei whispered.

Bha’hoi released him.  “Stay within
sight.  If you attempt to call the Claims Board, your death will be much more
horrific than the simple one I have planned.”

“Please,” Esteei said, backing away
down the beach.  “Let me go.”

Bha’hoi laughed.  “You want to stay
on Neskfaat?  What will you do out there?  You have no food, unless you wish to
eat your Ooreiki friends.”  He motioned down the beach at the half-buried
corpses, laughing.  “You’ll die slowly, Jahul.  If I do it, at least it will be
painless.  Besides, you’ve got time.  I’ve still got three other continents to
visit.”  He kicked open another box.

Esteei continued backing up.  He
could outrun the Huouyt.  With six legs, running was one of the only things
Jahul could best other species at.  Seeing that, the Huouyt paused, a darkness
settling over his narrow face.

“Come here.”

Esteei froze.

The Huouyt assassin sighed and
started toward him.

Esteei ran.

#

Agony.

It was all around him.

The Philosophers were being eaten
alive.

Crown flinched as the tiny jaws ripped
at his flesh, burrowing into it, consuming him as he lay there, unable to
fight.  Crown’s memories were disappearing with the agony in his body; the
connections, the conversations, the theories that he had made during his
lifetime slowly being devoured with his flesh.

Crown endured it, but many others
couldn’t.

Around him, Philosophers were
losing their minds along with their bodies.  They rambled, they pleaded, they
cried. 

The vermin continued to devour
them.

When the first Philosopher died, it
was the most horrible experience Crown had ever felt.  It broadcast its final,
terrified moments outward to all the others to help the others understand,
maybe prevent their own deaths.

Crown wished he had kept it to
himself.

In time, they would all understand.

#

Esteei stumbled along the
shoreline, plagued by guilt, weak with hunger.  The
vaghi
were spreading
across the planet.  When Esteei could catch the squirming, biting beasts, he
ate them.

Jahul did not eat living creatures.

Yet Esteei endured the emotional
anguish in his
sivvet
and smashed the
vaghi’s
scaly heads open to
reach the tiny clump of edible flesh inside…anything was endurable now he had
to listen to the Geuji’s constant emotional scream.

They were being eaten alive.

Esteei was sure it was ‘they,’
since the Geuji along the coast had been whittled down to patches, now.  Each
patch gave a different type of emotional scream.  It built to an unending
crescendo in his head, driving Esteei to the very brink of sanity.  He had nowhere
to escape, trapped between the ocean of water and the ocean of Geuji.

After two weeks, Esteei turned
back, praying the Huouyt hadn’t left, willing to die to avoid the Geuji’s
scream.

Bha’hoi and the ship were gone.

“Please,” Esteei whimpered,
slumping against a Geuji-covered, tear-shaped rock.  “Please.  I can’t take any
more.”  He didn’t know how far he had traveled, or how long he’d been going,
but his legs would no longer carry him.

Slumped against the rock, Esteei
trembled from the pressure in his
sivvet.
  He slid into a ball, as he
had countless times the last couple weeks, knowing it would do no good against
the torment, but instinct taking over.

#

Suddenly, Crown understood.

The Jahul can feel us.

He passed the message outward,
sending it to everyone he could still reach.

Immediately, the Philosophers
silenced their emotions.  They knew the chance was slim, that the Jahul would
be more worried about his own life, but it was possible that he could help
them.

Could.  But
would
he?

From what Crown had seen of these
creatures, they were not like the Philosophers.

They were nothing like the
Philosophers.

#

The emotional anguish stopped.

Esteei tentatively unrolled.

His eyes fell upon a single patch
of Geuji, a ring of
vaghi
around it, eating it. 

The Geuji was clearly alive, its
glistening black flesh flinching away from the gnawing teeth as they chewed
towards its core.

Turning, Esteei saw another, only a
few feet away.  It, too, was being eaten.

And another, further up the hill,
bore its own ring of
vaghi.

But the Geuji weren’t screaming.

The silence in his head was as
absolute as if someone had removed his
sivvet.

Given the first peace he’d had in
weeks, Esteei’s mind was suddenly very clear.

“Get away from them!” he screamed,
diving at the
vaghi.

They scattered, only to resume
chewing on another patch of black, further away. 

A heavy, palpable fear hit his
sivvet
from the Geuji that was now being eaten at twice the speed, then disappeared
just as quickly.

“Get away!” Esteei shouted.  He ran
at the
vaghi,
making them flee over the rise.  Esteei felt the sudden
fear of the Geuji on the other side before it was contained.

They’re doing it for me,
Esteei realized, stunned. 
They’re dying silently so it doesn’t hurt me
anymore.

Behind him, another
vaghi
had found the Geuji the others had fled.

Furious, Esteei reached down,
plucked up a rock sticky from Geuji residue, and threw it.

It hit the
vaghi,
making it
shriek.  It ran over the hill and disappeared, needing no further encouragement
from Esteei.

Amusement coursed through the air
around him, coming from many directions at once.

“You understand, don’t you?” Esteei
said.

“
Yes,
” the one upon the
tear-shaped rock flashed.  It was the only one that was still mostly whole,
saved by the shape of its perch, but even that wouldn’t last.

“I can survive,” Esteei said.  “You
don’t need to endure it.”

But, as one, they continued to hide
their pain from Esteei, allowing him peace.

“I can’t save you,” Esteei
whispered. 

The Geuji sent him an emotion that
broke his heart.  Understanding.

Fury uncoiled in Esteei’s soul.

He picked up another handful of
rocks, and this time he aimed to kill.

#

Esteei went back to the Ooreiki’s
bodies and collected their rifles.  He staked out a territory encircling the
tear-shaped rock and patrolled it during the day, when the
vaghi
fed,
and gathered surviving clumps of Geuji from the surrounding areas at night,
bringing them into his circle. 

When Esteei’s nightly journeys grew
too long, when he began collapsing from exhaustion, unable to focus during the
day, Esteei whispered apologies to those he couldn’t reach and stopped seeking
out survivors.  He knew there were more out there.  He felt them die, even as
he felt gratitude from the ones he protected from the
vaghi’s
gnawing
mouths.

The
vaghi
eventually moved
on, finding easier pickings deeper inland. 

Without
vaghi
to eat, Esteei
began to starve.

As weakness overcame him, Esteei
propped himself against the tear-shaped rock and continued to watch his tiny
domain, rifle across his lap.

Esteei’s days became a haze of
sunny delirium, followed by a night of rest.  When he was lucky enough to kill
one of the vermin, he crushed its scaly skull open immediately and sucked out
the flesh raw.  Killing no longer bothered him.

Neither did dying.

Esteei was barely conscious most of
the time.  Several times, he lost a Geuji in broad daylight, too weak to
protect it from the now-starving
vaghi.
 

Give up,
a tired voice in
his mind told him. 
No one’s going to come.

Then, a louder, angrier voice said,
I am the Emissary of this planet.  I’m sworn to protect these people.

And so it went on.  His inner
arguments grew longer, what he remembered of his days shorter.  He lost more
and more Geuji, the
vaghi
growing bolder with every passing hour.

I’m going to lose them all,
Esteei realized.

No.

Just hold on.

Just a little longer.

Esteei wasn’t sure if the words
were forming on the Geuji’s glistening bodies, or if he was imagining it. 
Either way, he somehow found the will to stay alive.

Every horrible day, Esteei stared
up at the sky, felt himself slipping away, then dragged himself back to shoot
more
vaghi.

Just a little longer.

#

The planet was dead.

Except for their tiny patch of
survivors, the entire planet was dead.

Crown knew it as surely as he knew
the Jahul was dying.

Soon, maybe only days, the respite from the
vaghi’s
gnawing jaws would end.

Crown wished he could do
something.  In the beginning, the Jahul had communicated with him, scribing in
his flesh, giving him words to show their rescuers, if they came.  Then, over
time, the Jahul had stopped responding.

Now, he said nothing, wrote
nothing.  He just stared out over the tiny patch of ground, killing the
vaghi,
losing consciousness in broad daylight.  The other Geuji were failing with him,
no longer connected, no longer having anyone to speak to but themselves.

This wasn’t what was supposed to
happen.

Fury overtook him when Crown
realized his people would not have the bodies that they had hypothesized, had
waited for.  He knew that somewhere, this alien culture had the power to grant
them mobility, but they were never going to get it.

They were all going to die here.

He could only watch as the Jahul
began to slip away.

And somewhere, over the rise, he
heard the
vaghi.

Please,
Crown wrote. 
Please
stay awake.  Just a little longer.

#

Neskfaat,

10
^th
Turn, 193
^rd
Age of the Huouyt

“Excuse me?”

“A Jahul, sir.  He’s clearly mad. 
He’s staked out an acre of land inside our claims territory and is refusing to
leave.”

Pingit put down his pen and sighed. 
“Who’s he with?”  Just what he needed—another trade dispute.

“Sir?”

“Which company?”

His assistant gave him a nervous
look.  The slowness with which he responded suggested the kid knew more than he
was saying.  “Sir, he’s been here a very long time.  He’s been eating
vaghi
to stay alive.”

Pingit recoiled.  “
Vaghi?
”

His assistant nodded.  “Has piles
of corpses around him.  We think perhaps since the first exploration.  He
matches the description of the Jahul who went missing.”

Pingit snorted, thinking the kid
had lost a few bolts along the wretched trip out here.  “Jahul don’t kill their
food.”

Reluctantly, the kid said, “He was
starving, sir.  He’s
been
starving a very long time.”

Pingit sighed and glanced at the
ceiling.  Why couldn’t mineral extraction at the edge of the known universe be
easy?  Why did it have to involve politics originating thirty turns away?  “Bring
him here.”

His assistant’s headcrest started
to tremble.  “He won’t leave the area, sir.”

“Why the hell not?”

“He’s defending a patch of Geuji
against the
vaghi.
”

This time, Pingit’s own headcrest
quivered with surprise.  “Some of the mold survives?  Congress registered it as
extinct two turns ago.”

“A few patches still live inside
his territory,” the kid assured him.  Again, Pingit got the idea he
was…nervous.  Holding back.

“It’s our territory, now,” Pingit
reminded the furg.  “We’ve leased it from the Huouyt.”

Headcrest trembling harder, his
assistant finally admitted his mistake.  “The Congressional recon force stayed
to help him fight off the
vaghi.
  Sir.”

Pingit scowled.  “You let him
commandeer our troops?”

“The Ooreiki decided to help him,”
his assistant babbled.  “Everything he mumbled was gibberish—I don’t think he
even knew we were there—but he had rank, sir, still pinned to his tattered
atmosuit.  An Overseer of some sort.  I couldn’t stop them.”