The Harvest
Selected from Annex B-5489T.
The following is the Account of Dr. Allison West, lead researcher on Operation Unexpected Guest.
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Saalkyeth was tired of this planet. He and the rest of the Harvest Force had spent nearly five hundred of its rotations deployed upon the surface, far longer than they had planned for. Whatever resource the Acquisition Overmind so desired on this humid, stinking rock must be rare indeed for the Aggression Overmind to have agreed to such an overdrawn effort. Saalkyeth was just a soldier of course, a mere instrument of the twelve Overminds’ wills; he possessed no say over where, when, or for how long he was put to use. He never complained, always performed his duty without the barest hint of questioning, but now, after this deployment that had come to seem eternal, he couldn’t help but think that this particular world was too thorny to be worth the fruit.
Everything about it seemed designed to make his kind miserable. His quadropods ached beneath him, every day straining more and more against the stronger gravity of the oversized planet. The world’s microorganisms were abundant and surprisingly short lived, meaning they were better able to adapt to his species’ biological systems, causing him and his fellow soldiers to suffer no small amount of painful and debilitating infections when they managed to slip past their suits. His weapons and equipment, designed to function best in the arid atmospheres of the galactic “average” planets, sputtered and tweaked in the moist air that blanketed this annoyingly oceanic world. More than once their humidity-induced spasms of inoperability had nearly cost him his life when he faced off against the greatest threat to walk this world – the enormous, barbaric bipeds that were savage beyond comparison, even in their apparent defeat.
Though the Technological Pacification Plan had worked flawlessly, the advance reconnaissance force had slightly overestimated the indigenous intelligent species’ reliance upon their own computer linkage network as far as it related to their survival. It seemed that, in the void left by the loss of their technology, the bipeds had immediately found strength in one another, banding into a seemingly infinite number of groups unified in a single purpose – the repelling of the Overminds’ Harvest force. A futile endeavor to be sure; no species armed with little but sticks and crude projectile weapons could hope to ACTUALLY defeat an invasion fleet sent by the Overminds, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make the whole endeavor absolutely miserable for everyone involved.
Saalkyeth felt he must be the most miserable of them all at this exact moment in time, though he couldn’t be certain of that. The data stream that connected him to the rest of the Harvest Force’s collective emotional monitoring system was being intermittently severed by magnetic fluctuations in the upper atmosphere, apparently caused by an unexpected series of spasms being experienced by this stupid planet’s stupid star. Apparently, the solar storms were so bad that the bulk of the Harvest fleet had been forced to shelter behind the planet’s sole moon. How complex life had EVER emerged here, let alone risen to such heights (before the Overminds noticed them that is) was beyond Saalkyeth. Everything he had learned in the Educational Immersion Streams told him that such a place was impossible. All the more reason why they were right to wipe out all life on this gross little planet – it never should have existed in the first place.
His rumination on the foulness of his present situation was interrupted by the return of a persistently annoying error caused by sudden increases in atmospheric moisture. The water falling from the sky was causing his guidance and comms systems to short, and he slowed his march through the forest to a stop and waited for it to come back online. Of all the places he could have been deployed on this confounding world, he found himself in what had to be one of the worst. It was a wet, convoluted mountain range, easy to get lost in, and FULL of small pockets of the nasty, stubborn bipeds that he was here to eliminate. Apparently in the savage tongue of the natives it was called “Appalachia”. Saalkyeth didn’t care what the awful creatures called it though; he only knew what the rest of his regiment had come to name it: the Murder Mountains, for more of his fellow soldiers had lost their lives HERE than anywhere else on the world.
The bipeds here had barely seemed bothered by the loss of power and computerized technology. Recent intel stated that the area had, apparently, clung to many ways of living present prior this world’s industrial and informational revolutions. An even more barbaric pocket of an already barbaric world, Saalkyeth thought. He had been careful though, never daring to tempt fate more than necessary. If any extraneous factors arose that seemed able to threaten his longevity, he hunkered down and adopted a defensive position, even if he was only performing a perimeter sweep like he was today. Cowardly, some of his regiment had called it; but many of them had vanished into the thick and foreboding woods while he still drew breath.
This particular squall was a long one, and Saalkyeth settled into an intermittently dry space beneath the boughs of a great tree. He was in the midst of another futile attempt to reconnect with his regiment’s comms network when his vibrational sensors detected it. Cutting through the ambient rush of rain, there was a spiking sonic vibration emanating from somewhere in the woods around him. A rhythmic twanging he knew all too well – it was a sound he had heard many times before back at base when reviewing the final helmet-cam footage of his fallen soldiers. It was produced by a string instrument native to this region, and almost always preceded an attack.
When they first heard it, him and his comrades had laughed. How dumb must these creatures be to announce their arrival with music? Didn’t they know that giving away one’s position with noise was a sure path to defeat? The melodic din had stopped being funny and started eliciting fear after they heard it ten more times in half as many days, always while reviewing their dead comrades’ final moments. Now, hearing it in person for the first time, Saalkyeth understood its purpose fully as fear washed over him and he began to shake in his suit.
This couldn’t be happening. There was simply no way. He was less than two clicks from his regiment’s base in this valley, and the bipeds had never been so bold before. They knew that coming too close to the base was tantamount to suicide, for despite the native’s towering stature, freakish strength, and apparently innate savagery, their carbon based forms still disintegrated like all the rest when they caught a beam from the barrel of the Harvest Force’s personal weapons. It was one such weapon that Saalkyeth now clutched tightly to him, swinging it in a wide circle, scoping the woods for any sign of approaching doom. He saw nothing, not with his thermal vision, advanced optical scope, or even the infrared visor, but the volume of the sound still increased, steadily, steadily, steadily, until it seemed to be all around him.
The rain began to pour even harder, turning the small trickle in front of the tree into a swollen torrent that washed away both fallen leaves and the very last pieces of Saalkyeth’s bravery. He would have to make a run for it. The base was close, it would only take him a few minutes to get back to safety. Even in this higher gravity he was fast – faster than the savage creatures he was meant to be hunting. With a last look back towards the deep woods, he took off, sprinting through the thickets and back toward the distant lights of his regiment’s base. Yet as he fled from the twanging sounds of death, they only grew louder and louder. Panic rose within him, and his four feet moved so fast through the undergrowth that he nearly tripped over a fallen log in his path. Vaulting over it, he cast another look back towards the woods, and was relieved to see no two legged demon in rapid pursuit behind him. He never even saw the baseball bat whipping toward him from the path in front of him; he only felt it as it cracked him across the helm, knocking him prone on the ground, and could only gurgle a weak cry as it came down upon him over and over and over again; until his corpse laid still and cold on the alien forest floor.
Billy slung the limp, small body of the four-legged alien over his shoulder and sauntered back into the woods, meeting up with Glenda and Jon as he did. They had already stowed their banjos on their backs, and they clapped Billy on his shoulder when they saw him carrying dead creature. Together they wound their way back through the rain-soaked forest for half an hour until they reached their hidden hollow – a tiny cluster of wooden shacks that had once been the entrance to a long-lost coal mine. They disposed of the dead alien down the old mine shaft after stripping it of its weapon which Billy had been careful not to damage with his bat. They brought the weapon down into the main building, turning it over Oliver, who grinned widely as he began extracting the power core from the center of the weapon. Just because they couldn’t fire the disintegratory beam weapons didn’t mean they couldn’t make use of them Oliver had said when he pitched them on using the power cores to make a bomb big enough to wipe the invaders’ enclave off the map. With the final necessary power core collected, they now had enough to make pull off such an operation.
Billy stood at the doorstep, dragged on a cigarette and watched the rain fall hard and heavy outside. The storm was likely to continue, which boded well for their operation. The alien’s technology didn’t seem to like the moisture much, and they played that vulnerability to their advantage every chance they could. They had a long night ahead of them, but this evening’s explosion was only the beginning. First, they would free their holler – then, they would free the world.
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