Had Sergeant Smith looked up, he would have seen the girl smile in satisfaction, as she turned in the air and, using the roof of a nearby building as a springboard, appeared to fly rapidly away across the dark sky.
One
How it all began, a long, long, long time ago....
As the first fingers of dawn stretched up over the mountains, the animals and birds in the forest changed their tune. As the nocturnal beasts all found their hidey-holes for the day, the day creatures started to awaken and called out to each other. It was breakfast time, so from the very smallest to the very largest, life entered once again into a battle for survival.
By the time the sun rose above the horizon and its warmth spread across the lush, verdant land, the level of noise had increased markedly, as had the evidence of their presence. Multi-coloured birds flitted across the tree tops, and a myriad of small mammals shook the trees as they scurried amongst the branches. On the forest floor, rodents and lizards vied for the multitude of insects in the piles of rotting vegetation and new shoots.
Far to the north, enormous tendrils of glacial ice continued their inexorable march southwards, covering whole vistas with their white mantle. Great beasts of these lands slowly migrated south, ahead of the great white cliffs, to find warmth and food, as the icy glacial deserts offered little comfort for all but the hardiest creatures. The vast grasslands and forests became more crowded, offering the predators a whole new menu from which to choose.
Into this scenario came a ship. Not with sails that floated on water, but a cylinder that sped between the stars. It was an exploratory scout ship with a crew of six. This new world offered their entire race a hope that was all but forlorn and almost lost. For their home world was no more, destroyed when their sun had burned itself into a giant nova and disintegrated. Enormous colony ships, each with many thousand individuals, were launched and sent out in the vain hope that one of the many small scout ships would find a habitable world upon which they might continue their existence.
After four years of confinement, the crew looked out upon this blue and green gem with optimism that none had felt for many years. Selecting a region that would offer the most compatible climate and potential for habitation, the ship landed by the border between a large forest and an expanse of grassland. The crew were eager to conduct the tests that would confirm or deny them their chance to colonise this beautiful place.
After several days of tests, the senior science officer informed the captain that the air was breathable and unless there was something as yet undetected, their kind could live here with little or no difficulty.
“I have yet to conduct more tests, but we can venture out with just bio-masks. Once the other tests come back clear, we can inform the colonial authority that we have found the one!” he said.
It was a momentous occasion, and one that all six wanted to be part of. However, the captain insisted that only three would be outside at any one time, so they drew lots to see which team would be first. Things after that, however, did not go entirely to plan.
“They’re crazy!” said Jay Bee, closing the airlock and entering the main living cabin. “I mean, they’ll attack anything, either because they feel threatened or to eat it!”
“Or both at the same time,” said Heera, with some feeling.
“I thought this world would really be the answer, but unless we can deal with them, we can’t leave the ship or send for the colonists,” muttered Kayra, the leader of the small expedition, stirring some uninteresting looking food in a bowl.
“You decided to land here,” Heera said bitterly.
“Okay, but I didn’t hear you complain,” Kayra retorted angrily.
“Okay, quit this, it doesn’t help. We all decided that this looked like a good proposition. Shit, anything looked good after four years in this bucket. If only we looked more like they do, then they’d accept us,” said Jay Bee.
They lapsed into silence, each to their own thoughts. Kayra looked at one of the monitors to the other three crew members who were still outside, erecting a palisade. They’d landed on a small plain in the foothills on the edge of a large mountain range on one of the larger continents. There was a lush green valley below, similar to a tropical forest on their own planet; before their sun had gone nova and rendered all life extinct, that is.
They’d spent the first few weeks gathering samples and establishing that it was habitable, with sufficient oxygen and relatively harmless bacteria and micro-organisms. The gravity was slightly greater than they were used to, but by such a small margin as to have little impact. After the first six weeks, they’d ventured out without full suits for the first time. Morale was high and all six were in good spirits.
It didn’t last.
They’d discovered that the planet, apart from looking perfect and being almost ideal on the micro-organism front, also was host to a myriad of life forms, most of which were lethal, and that included the flora as well as the fauna.
Amongst the fauna, there were enormous beasts, quite capable of dismembering any of the crew with little difficulty. Then there were smaller, highly efficient killing machines that were equipped with high speed, teeth and claws that seemed designed simply to kill anything that moved, regardless of size. Some were mammalian, some flew, others were reptilian, while even more lurked in the water, ready to remove a limb or simply strip flesh from the body if one were foolhardy enough to venture into a puddle.
However, all these were nothing compared to the dominant species of mammal.
Nicknamed “the Brutes” by the crew, for they found them ugly and disproportionate. These creatures had a degree of bestial intelligence, the proof of which was their ability to design and adapt to their surroundings and to make and use crude tools. All their tools seemed designed to kill, rip, shred, dismember or otherwise cause death or harm to anything that was stupid or ignorant enough to get close enough.
The Brutes lived in family groups, often with as many as a hundred individuals ranging from the old and infirm to the very young. Some sheltered in caves, while others sewed the hides of their prey together and stretched them over frames of sticks to form crude shelters. They lived a nomadic lifestyle, not that different from the crew members' ancestors from pre-history, moving to new killing fields when the current one was spent. They ate nearly everything they came across: animals, birds, fish, reptiles, grasses, fruits, nuts, roots, berries, and probably each other if times were hard. The crew were intrigued whether their digestive systems would be so eclectic.
The very old were never that old, not by the standards of the crew, at any rate. This new species seemed to die in their third or fourth decade. A few lived longer, but many became infirm, so had to be left behind to die when the tribe moved on to find food elsewhere, having eaten everything in one place. Newborn offspring, if defective in any way, were simply abandoned and left to die outside the settlement. They never suffered for long, as there was always some helpful scavenger ready to put the little things out of their misery.
They had only a rudimentary knowledge of medicine, capable of dealing with broken limbs only by binding them in a roughly straight fashion. If deep wounds were ever inflicted, by deliberate act or accident, then more often or not the victim contracted some form of infection and died. Their whole way of life rendered the term, survival of the fittest, as very apt.
The few attempts at making contact had failed, as the crew had been attacked without hesitation, forcing them to use their weapons and retreat back to their ship.