The Moldy Dead by Sara King Read Free Book Online

 
     
    Unnamed Planet,
    8 th Turn, 193 rd Age of the Huouyt
     
    It took eight and a half turns to reach the mold
planet.  During the envoy’s journey to the Outer Line, seven members of their
crew died; three to suicide, two to old age, and two more simply didn’t wake
up, their bodies rotting inside substandard Congressional casks. 
    Esteei had risen that morning to find that only
eight of their original fifteen were left.  The Ooreiki were whispering foul
play, giving the Huouyt suspicious glances, but Esteei was accustomed to the
inter-species angst.  He was more worried about the other Jahul, whose frozen
corpse now drifted somewhere in their wake.
    The senior Jahul Emissary was one of the three who
had simply put on their spacesuits and thrown themselves into the ship’s
backwash while everyone else slept.  It left Esteei, the only remaining Jahul
on the ship, in charge of an ill-fated mission nobody wanted anyway. 
    Now, staring out at the clammy,
glistening black landscape spread out before him, Esteei wondered if he should
have done the same.
    The entire planet was covered with
mold.
    The only areas clear of the
glistening ebony organism were along the beaches, where their ship now rested. 
The rolling black waves halted at the highest flood line, leaving about five
rods of shoreline where Esteei and his envoy could set up for their turn-long
stay.
     It was a pointless gesture.  There
were no beings here for Esteei to make contact with.  Anyone could see the only
thing that lived here was mold.
    Endless miles of mold.
    Grimacing, Esteei stepped back onto
the ship to fill out the death reports.
     
    #
     
    Crown’s peers buzzed with
conversation.  The ship had descended at an angle perpendicular to the ground,
as the Philosophers had thought it might.  It meant their visitors were well
beyond the aero-based technologies, as they predicted.  In fact, everything
about their visitors had been theorized long in advance…except for the way they
looked.
    Not even the Philosophers could
out-guess Nature.
    Nature, it seemed, had produced at
least three other sentient species, each vastly different from the next.  Most
of them were short, squat, brown things with tentacles bearing long metal
instruments, probably some form of energy weapons.  They had large brown eyes
with slit pupils, the surfaces sticky with clear mucous, their simple intentions
clearly written in their expressive faces.
    They were the guardians.  The brown
bipeds spread out in a fan, testing the area, ready to draw enemy fire from
their wards, should they encounter hostility.
    Of course, they encountered none.
    The Philosophers had been waiting
for this a very long time.
    Soon, they would be free.
    The other two aliens were
different.  The first was tall, with white cilia coursing over its skin, giving
it a downy appearance.  It alone had the biological compatibility to leave the ship
without wearing a protective suit.  It walked on three muscular legs and
appeared to have some aquatic ancestry, since it had trouble keeping itself
upright in the sand.
    It was the eyes of this one that
bothered Crown’s peers.  Those who could see them said the tripod’s eyes were
unnatural, blue-white and difficult to read.  They determined that he was a
leader of sorts, as it was he who struck out along the shore, following the
waterline.
    The third alien was the one that
intrigued them, though.  The guardians ringed him, their sticky brown eyes
alert and watchful.  If he was not the leader, he was very important to their
group.
    He walked naturally on six legs,
though from the way his splotchy green skin folded in the center of its back,
it appeared as if he could shift its weight onto the back four legs and
manipulate objects with its two front, three-fingered hands.
    The hexapod was not physically
strong.  Like the aquatic alien, it appeared to be struggling under the gravity
of the Philosopher planet.  Its six legs were spindly, almost