Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series (2 page)

4.

For the next several days, Harvey went about his normal routine, making the rounds in the visitor center, checking the auditorium playback, running diagnostics on the mapping system, riding the maglev tube trains and checking gravesite holomemorials. Things never seemed to change. All operational systems functioned flawlessly, all except the damn autoserve. Chocolate ice cream must have had some unattainable chemical ingredient.

Lea showed no further signs of anomalous emotional behavior. After some time digesting the matter, Harvey surmised it was a side effect of the learning algorithms, a sort of growing pain as Lea’s Intuitive Intelligence advanced. He knew it was a machine, yet felt sorry, even a little guilty for installing the application.

After a short time, though, it became but a memory, and he considered the matter behind them, until the night he got a strange repair call.

“Check,” he released his rook, confident he had this one in the bag. She only gave him a wry smile and kept her eyes locked onto his. Without looking, she slid her knight into support position for her queen.

“Checkmate.”

“What!” he studied the board frantically, certain she’d been mistaken. But she was never mistaken. “No way!”

She giggled as a buzzing alarm sounded.

“What the…” he checked the message on a nearby terminal, in shock. In the eleven Earth months on that planet, the alarm hadn’t gone off once. “What the hell could this be?”

Holomemorial malfunction. Immediate action required. Zone 12. Section G-5. Row 1119. Plot number 574342-0. Maglev train waiting for your departure at gate 3.

“What’s it say?” she sounded nervous.

“Hologram malfunction.”

“What kind of malfunction?”

“No idea,” he puzzled. “I have to go find out. And it’s all the way out in Zone Twelve. It’ll take me half a day just to get there.”

She stood quickly, a look of pure dread on her face. “You can’t go on that call. You can’t.”

He speculated on this latest expansion in her personality. She’d never expressed so much concern about his work activities. Her outburst over his leaving the planet was one thing, but over such a traditionally mundane job? However, this wasn’t exactly mundane. Repair missions were so…well, they just didn’t happen. Lea’s change in behavior and the hologram malfunction both were irregular events. The two developments combined made Harvey’s sonar start to ping.

“Why not, Lea?” he probed, eager to get to the heart of her revelation. “Why don’t you want me to go? It’s just a routine repair call.”

“But it’s not routine,” her high tone and quick response screamed anxiousness. “You know it’s not. You keep complaining about it all the time, saying nothing ever breaks down around here.”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “And now something finally has,” he climbed on the PMD and gave her a wink as he rolled away. “You should be happy for me. I finally have something to do…besides talking to you, of course.”

“NO!” she chased him, her holographic image flickering, and placed herself in front of the PMD. He pulled on the handle and stopped, even though it wouldn’t have hurt her to ride straight through her. Instinct made him stop. She was more forceful than ever with her next statement.

“You’re in danger, Harvey,” a serious stare confronted him. Glimmering digital eyes. “If you go on that mission, you might never come back.”

He wanted to laugh it off, but her urgency made him contemplate a serious flaw in the Intuitive Intelligence design. Grave predictions of death weren’t listed in the application’s features. Then he thought maybe Lea’s processor had some kind of connection to the base’s central computer, and perhaps she was picking up on something.

“What are you talking about? Some kind of system malfunction? Is it my spacesuit? I never trusted those suits.”

“No,” her brow creased. Her self-assured demeanor took an uncertain turn. “Not the suits. I don’t think,” she blinked at the floor. “I don’t know for sure what it is…I just know something’s wrong, and you’re in danger if you go on that repair call.”

He backed the PMD and angled it to miss her once he started forward again. “I have to go. It’s my job,” he said without looking back. She became even more distraught, racing after him. He turned his head in time to watch her reach the limit of her holographic projection and disappear in a fizzle of digital artifacts, not for a second giving up the fight to stop him.

5.

He spent the better part of the day on the train, speeding at almost a thousand kilometers an hour. Most of the trip, he slumbered in the sleepcar or zoned out on the entertainment center. Hologames were his favorite. He could spend hours playing. A perfect waste of time.

A proximity alarm signaled his impending arrival in Zone Twelve. The sight gave him chills. Lit by a brilliant canopy of midnight stars, the extensive landscape had a softness to it. A light haze draped over the distant hillsides and flowed into the valleys, giving everything a preternatural pallor. Crosses and pillars and slabs in every direction, row after row, some straight and perfect and pristine, some broken, chipped, rotted. Up and over the knoll the markers journeyed, then beyond the next hill, then the mountain in the horizon. He hardly ever traveled this deep into the cemetery. Graves this old usually weren’t equipped with holomemorial units.

As the train approached the transit station, he spotted the malfunctioning hologram. The unnatural image caught his attention immediately, and its contrast with the surrounding area surprised him. It radiated a bluish aura, casting several rows of graves in ethereal silhouettes which danced and shifted with the projection’s movements. From that distance, Harvey estimated at least two hundred meters, he couldn’t tell if it was male or female, only distinguished a humanoid shape, standing near a rounded granite block, presumably delivering a message to loved ones.

Harvey never hated the damn space suits more than on this day, on this trip, with his nerves shot. He had a job to do, though, and heard his boss’s rodent voice giving him the third degree when he contemplated just skipping this thing. Who cares if the hologram is playing on its own? Nobody ever comes out here anymore…ever! Then the boss’s words repeated in his head. DeepSix had a contract. The planet would remain open to visitors for the next ninety-nine years, no matter if they spent next to nothing on the place’s upkeep.

The PMD rocked and bucked on the ancient yard’s rough terrain, hindering his progress. The whole time, his focus remained on the ghostly sapphire glow refracting into the fog. As he got nearer, he made out features on the hologram. A man. Old and overweight, with several chins and no hair. He wore a gray suit from a century long before Harvey’s time. Probably early twenty-first century. He had a lot of energy, it seemed, and gestured angrily at his audience, likely his family, which was the norm for holomemorials.

Harvey got closer and his spacesuit’s audio sensors picked up what the man was saying in mid-message.

“…and I don’t want to mince words for one second. You know what I’m talking about, each and every one of you. You’ve all been treacherous, conniving little scoundrels, all of you. Your mother would’ve keeled over of a heart attack if she wasn’t already dead. That’s why I’m not leaving anything to any of you. Got that? Not a cent!”

Harvey dismounted the PMD and stepped with caution toward the digital projection. He read the headstone’s faded, timeworn inscription. Randolph Warner. The grave marker had some class to it. Bigger than average, with marble columns and lots of artistic carvings in the granite. The man had money, and he wasn’t leaving any to his kids. That made Harvey giggle for some reason.

“Okay, Randy. Let’s see what’s wrong with you,” he studied the hologram hardware. An old unit. That might have been the problem, though he’d never seen this kind of malfunction before. The holomemorials were triggered by a motion detector. When someone stood next to an equipped grave, the hologram came on, the message played. He shined a light into the fiber optics, searching for anything odd, a loose connection, a fried line. “Gotta be something wrong with the sensor. What else could it be? Not like there’s anyone out here on this damn planet…besides me,” he looked up at Randy, who’d begun his recorded message over again. “Well, there’s you, but you don’t count.”

Despite combing through every connection and confirming the integrity of each fiber, he found no reason for the malfunction. The devices were simple, and never required repair. This one was no exception. No anomalies, no structural damage, no clear explanation why the playback had been triggered. After hearing Randolph’s surly condemnation of his progeny for the third time, he hit the manual reset. The projection cut off, and one ghostly vision replaced another. The stillness of Cemetery Planet snatched at Harvey like a winter chill. He trembled at the dark silence.

The speakers in his helmet crackled and hummed with electrostatic interference. The quick, popping noise gave the illusion of something moving, creeping behind him. He knew it couldn’t have been. Had to be static. It still unnerved him a little.

Then a sliding sound. He turned, and the lamps on his helmet pierced the fog only enough to see a meter in front of him, a sea of silhouetted headstones in the distance, mist flirting with the breeze, a low whistling wind through the massive graveyard. Nothing else. No movement. No spirits rising from the dead. He chuckled at himself for getting so worked up over nothing, then went back to finishing up with the unit.

After a total diagnostic checkup, Harvey was convinced the machine worked fine. With a shrug, he snapped the lid closed, and then heard more static. This time he saw something, slipping through the haze, low to the ground, darting from behind one headstone to the next.

His heartbeat became the only thing he could hear. His heavy breath collected in thick condensation inside the helmet visor, further limiting his already restricted vision. All instincts told him to get on that PMD and roll, get back to the train and get the hell out of Dodge. His job was done. He didn’t need to be a hero. Harvey had a weakness, though. Curiosity. He just had to know.

He took a step, then another, then peered behind the grave where the thing had gone. Before his headlamps reached the spot, Harvey heard the crackling sound again, this time from the opposite direction. He spun on his heels, quite nimbly in the low gravity, thinking he’d catch whoever, whatever by surprise. To his shock, and considerable relief, the lights captured nothing but swirls of fine dust. Then motion, to his left, even faster than before. A grayish entity, blending with the mist, using the grave markers for cover.

Harvey’s veins coursed with a mixture of stupidity and courage, and he bounded toward the thing, determined to get to the bottom of this once and for all. He was sure it had ducked behind a particularly large marker, and was doubly sure he’d catch it before it could scurry out of sight. One, two, three giant steps and he was there, crouching, ready for anything, but found…zilch.

6.

He got back to the train and returned to his favorite seat quickly, appreciating the feeling of motion in his gut as the maglev accelerated to full speed. Good riddance to that old, decrepit place full of stink and decay. He laughed at himself yet again. Since no one else was there to give him a ribbing, the job belonged to Harvey. Silly to let a little condensation and bad lighting make him lose all sense of logic. His imagination had conjured up the whole thing, and it didn’t help that Lea chose today of all days to begin her career as a psychic. He convinced himself Lea’s unnerving prediction had jarred him. Still, he had to be sure.

Through the train’s computer linkup, he initiated a planet-wide sweep for life forms. No stone unturned. If there was something in the graveyard with him, the bio-scan would flush it out. It took less than ten seconds to get the results.

Bio-scan complete. Known lifeforms: 1
.

Only one life form—Harvey. He commanded the computer to double check, just to be certain.

Global coverage complete and double redundancy verified to 99.9999 percent accuracy. Confirmed. Known lifeforms: 1
.

His shoulders became light as a feather. One gigantic chunk of lead just flew off his back, and all he wanted to do now was get to base and continue his countdown until he returned to Earth. Ten minutes after he climbed into a bunk in the sleepcar, those plans changed.

He must have dozed off. All he remembered was the terrible sound and then hitting the bulkhead hard, his head taking the brunt of the impact. The throbbing had concussion written all over it, though he had no time to worry about himself. Another blaring noise, a dreadful rumbling roar, filled his ears until they almost burst. The violent quaking only lasted two or three seconds. It took that long for Harvey to realize the train had slammed to a halt, skidding in the tube with a strident metal-on-metal screech.

He peeled himself out of the bunk. The lights had gone out, replaced by the amber glow of the emergency lamps. The dimness allowed him to see out the porthole opposite him, out to the vastness of the perpetual cemetery. A chill in his bones forced his eyes away. He always felt the dead were calling to him, inviting him to join them. And now, stranded in the middle of nowhere, he was closer than ever to an RSVP.

He felt his way through the sleepcar to a computer terminal, where his initial finding sent his panic into overdrive. Black. No power. No computer. His mind flashed with images of his own end. Slow, painful, out of air and suffocating in this dark, cold corner of death’s garden. Then a flicker of life. The screen flashed on, and the startup sequence began with a gentle, melodic tone, replacing the shrill alarm.

Emergency backup power established. System operational.

He ordered the computer to run a diagnostic and tell him what had happened. Within seconds, the answer came.

Power interruption in magnetic tube.

“Power interruption?” he asked the computer. “What could cause an interruption?”

Two reasons for power interruption: 1. Localized outage. 2. Direct command from operator.

“Well, it couldn’t be a direct command from the operator,” he said to the computer, but more to himself. “I’m the only operator here.”