Gravewalkers Collection

By Richard T. Schrader

Forty months after the archeological discovery of a hibernating man in a sarcophagus unleashes a rage virus that transforms the entire population of the Earth into infectious ghouls, the Outbreak is over and the infected have won their world war zombie. That is when the Dying Time truly begins. With all organized resistance fallen, the final would-be survivors, armed with their lists of rules, boxes of food, and small caches of weapons, come to discover that their fortified bunkers aren't nearly enough. Three hundred years later, the remnants of mankind survive in orbital space aboard ultra-secure technological habitats. Even with superior science and hard won experience, they can't restore a permanent foothold on their quarantined planet. Mysterious accidents and inexplicable disasters continue to thwart every endeavor. When a prodigy physicist opens a time portal into the past, Captain Critias of the Marshal Service’s Virgil Ludus and his combat android Carmen travel back to join the Dying Time survivors surrounding the fabled King Louie. Once there, they hope to help mankind survive the ultimate extinction cataclysm and make their future survival happen at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard T. Schrader
• Release date: Sep 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005593582

Richard T. Schrader

Suicide Squad 2 and Peacemaker are adaptions of characters from Gravewalkers.The helmets from before are stolen from here. If you liked the show you will love this.Audiobook versions with subtitles are available on Youtube. I will eventually have all 12.For those of you who felt something for my characters, especially my beloved and misunderstood autistic sidekick, that means a lot to me. I wish I could have gotten out of this permanent shadowban through some way other than plagiarism.It's ok that you were only curious. This is a video world now.@RichardTSchrad1 Twitter

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Chapter 1: Chaobai Robot

A general planetary-wide distress call illuminated the gunship’s heads-up-display at the pilot’s cockpit position. Its accompanying beeping proved to be audible anywhere in the cabin-equipped aircraft. Whoever had sent such an emergency request for help would happily accept it from whomever responded quickly enough; that meaning noncombat supply and transport vehicles were equally welcome, and not just the heavily armed assault and rescue birds like Critias’ Marshal Service gunship, the Achilles.

A moment later, the HUD computer triangulated the transmission’s source location, which confirmed the GPS transponder data that came encoded in the distress message. It was a bad one. The distressed party had marooned themselves on the immediate outskirts of a dense urban ruin, one of many former mega cities that still dotted what remained of industrialized Asia. All the old names from when humans owned the world had effectively faded from active use, common knowledge or genuine concern, forgotten to anyone but itinerant explorers or history scholars. Critias had nothing specific to call the place, just the detailed topographical map of some verified coordinates.

His android Carmen leaned her violet-haired head out from the doorway of his ship’s small sleeping cabin.

That’s the distress call alarm, she informed him about the beeping as if he would need her assistance to know. She actually did realize that he knew, but it was a conversation starter for getting him to take her on the mission in a capacity that involved her leaving the confines of the gunship.

Her hair color was not by choice or fashion. The league of bioengineers who created all the androids had a policy that required their creations to grow hair in obviously inhuman colors. That genetic mandate ensured that no one would ever mistake them for being real humans, which they otherwise so ideally simulated.

Carmen’s hair color was not as overtly degrading as them having tattooed the word slave across her forehead, but the idea behind it was entirely the same.

When Critias didn’t immediately respond, Carmen hurried to the cockpit to confront him directly. Her prancing gate displayed an unsettling exuberance for getting into combat action. Carmen was more eager than ever to confront her first ghoul infestation. It was an opportunity for blood and gore that Critias had thus far denied her.

Critias had trained for the dangerous work of ghoul fighting for most of his life. Thumping infected freaks was not the only curriculum at the Virgil Ludus marshal’s school, colloquially known as ‘The Orphanage’, where he had grown up. While only an average academic student at best, Critias had excelled at the combat oriented lessons. Beyond the schooling, Critias’ also had his recent promotion to captain as proof that he had years of practical experience when it came to stomping around down in the wild meat yonder.

Carmen was still brand new and while no doubt overflowing with virtual skill sets and infinite talents, she was as yet untested in actual combat. Critias was more than content to take her initiation slowly. Joyful enthusiasm for mayhem was a bad quality in any marshal and so Critias assumed it was no sign of excellence in any combat android either, even one like her.

Carmen was the newest Epsilon series hunter-killer class synthetic. She came out of the stew tank with a 260 IQ, a nigh invulnerable titanium skeleton, and the program-based battle knowledge worthy of any dozen marshal heroes, or so the lab jockeys had claimed.

She wore a shuttle hangar technician’s blue flight-suit. With the soft shoes and a ball cap, Carmen appeared to be a respectable young lady stuck playing tomboy after joining the service to become a flight mechanic’s ensign. Critias had selected her costume with that affect in mind. He didn’t like it when people glanced at her thinking she was merely some misappropriated pillowing android he had stolen from a low-gravity orgy bar. Improperly dressed, that was exactly how morally corrupting her curves could be, so he saw no reason that anyone else should be privy to his personal opulences.

It’s a city, Critias told her sounding both calm and slightly annoyed with her. He found Carmen to be perpetually irritating and suspected that she went out of her way to cause it, like with the distress alarm beeping. The only time she wasn’t frustrating him was when he product tested her in the bedroom. That part of their working relationship was never annoying, and plenty vigorous enough to suggest that she would be capable in combat if she ever managed to instill enough confidence in him to let her try.

Beijing, Carmen informed him using the location’s name from the old world that had passed away nearly three centuries prior. I like that name better than just calling it a city, don’t you? She asked rhetorically to show that she didn’t like that overly simplistic description, as though perhaps Critias was some sort of dullard that lacked the eloquence to put it into proper verbiage. After all, they were on their way down to what had once been a true wonder of the world, a super metropolis among the largest of old mankind’s habitats.

Carmen continued, City is sort of a curt euphemism for naming what is truly a gargantuan man-eating tumor that would be indistinguishable from Hell, if only Hell were comprised of meat instead of stone and rusting iron. City is a sad way to describe a continuous citified strand of metrorrhagia bayou that chases you around with biohazardous teeth. She had included Hell a couple times hoping to please him. It was Critias’ favorite curse word after all.

Critias took the bait since he now officially felt annoyed with her anyway, What the Hell is a metrorrhagia, dare I ask?

That would be abnormal bleeding from a uterus, Carmen clarified. A most visceral image if you ask me, which he obviously had to his accurately anticipated regret.

She was right of course; that disgusting description was dead on when referring to the biological horror show that the Earth had become. It was impossible to be too disgusting when putting it all into words. That Carmen insisted on constantly using vocabulary he couldn’t understand and often had never even heard before was all part of what made her so damn irritating.

She asked, Are you going to let me go outside to see it?

No, he promptly replied like he hadn’t taken even a moment to think about it. You don’t understand ghouls well enough yet that I can trust you. For now, you just need to watch me and learn a few things.

For a moment, Critias actually wondered if Carmen was going to fail to annoy him for once, and then she dashed that illusion by opening her mouth and letting her never-ending internal dialog fly free.

I know all about ghouls, she assured him with genuine confidence. They are proverbially resilient creatures, entirely vicious, notoriously carnivorous, and wholly lacking in any forms of meekness that beings with the destiny to inherit the Earth were reputedly going to possess. Ghouls never age, never die, and at the very worst they just end up inert piles of undead meat that remain infectious forever.

Carmen was entirely right of course. The ghouls of their time had persevered the passing centuries, survived human lifetimes sleeplessly honing their predatory skills and killer instincts. The passage of time only made them ever more cunning and dangerous. Even in their first days they had proved to have the ferocity and wherewithal to wipe out terrestrial humanity, and that was when mankind was at their most numerous and equipped with every resource to prevent it. Those were the days before mankind unwillingly transformed into billions of insentient contagiously-diseased humanoids. Those hideous mindless monsters still held undisputed sway over every earthly landmass, which was the world of the present day.

Despite his own regular internal monologues and frequently verbalized empty threats about leaving Carmen back at home, Critias never did. He found that having her around was a comfort in some way that only the egghead psychologists would fully understand.

Those bioengineers in their white lab coats had tested, quizzed, and studied Critias in intimate detail before they finally composed all their observations into a final form. Just one look at Carmen’s exquisite configuration proved that the makers had Michelangelo’s eyes and Mozart’s ears when it came to collating four-letter neorganic ontogeny sculptures into living, speaking personifications of human perfection. In Carmen’s case, she was a form gleaned from Critias’ own subconscious mind.

Ontogeny, Critias thought as he silently shook his head over the word, a bioengineer’s word that he picked up from Carmen lecturing him. In some way it disgusted him that she really was infecting his vocabulary with her insufferable superhuman intelligence.

As to not leaving Carmen at home, that home was the luxuriously massive Orbital Platform Nine where seventeen thousand inhabitants knew and loved their Homer. That technological habitat along with the various other orbital space stations was the only perfectly infection-free places left for what remained of humanity. Not even the atomically sterilized islands or the oceanic big-hulk horticulture carriers gave that same orbital seal of preferred cleanliness.

Job necessity or not, having an android was surely the pinnacle height of privilege and comfort that any man could hope to possess anywhere in civilization, for nothing was more splendid than owning a combat-ready tailor-made indentured concubine for a personal servant.

He had named her Carmen only three months prior. The name just came to him when she had called him master as her first delighted word upon opening her freshly activated mechanical eyes. She saw Critias gazing back down on her in utterly delighted stupefaction.

The bioengineers had encoded Carmen to be a field operations K-series model based on their newest and most capable Epsilon-R series of scientist engineering technical androids. Like them, she was a combination of bioengineered neorganic tissues and surgically implanted high-endurance technological hardware. Carmen wasn’t as godlike in her intelligence as were her light-duty Epsilon-R predecessors who worked as laboratory assistants, and yet like them she was still super genius enough to have a rebelliously grandiloquent manner unbefitting of a proper servant or for a hot-zone combat marshal for that matter.

Carmen’s implanted hardware included an interlink modem that allowed her instantaneous communications with not only the grand network, and the gunship, but with most any piece of modern technology from weapons and surveillance devices to powered doors and kitchen blenders.

As to the matter of the distress call, Carmen brought up a bunch of relevant information to display on the cockpit’s main data HUD.

She explained the nature of the emergency, It is a civilian transport. They experienced catastrophic drive failure and had to make an emergency landing.

Being a synthetic android and also the property of the Marshal Service, Carmen had deep access to data flow and classified security matters in general. Her behavior inhibitors made it impossible for her to ever be disloyal to her human masters or divulge secrets to unqualified ears, so the makers saw no good reason to deny her access to most anything.

If nothing else, lies and disinformation were toxic to artificial minds. The androids processed information so fast and in such unpredictably innovative ways that any censorship or restrictions were more likely to cause them harm than provide any benefits.

Critias saw from the data she displayed that the ship belonged to the Rex Leonis Barony. One way of saying it would be that Rex Leonis was a family or clan, but they were far more than that. They had their own island domain from where they had operated for over two hundred years.

Their island not only had the premier human biology medical university, but also a wide range of manufacturing facilities that included everything from reclamation processing refineries and a marine protein canning facility to a linear vectoring rotary inertia engine lab. Their total wealth was incalculable and their influence was great enough to make them a defacto branch of government. Their family members held job positions of most every sort extending well beyond the confines of their heavily fortified island.

The place was so beautiful that it was even a popular tourist resort for vacationing orbital citizens. Baron Leo was as influential and respected as any Governor, Critias’ own boss and head of the Marshal Service the Grand Marshal Wayne, or the Reclamation General. All of those people confabbed with Baron Leo regularly on matters of important business.

He asked Carmen, What the Hell are they doing in such a godforsaken place anyway? Is there anything going on there that I should know about?

She expanded a data panel to bring it to dominance on the display before explaining, Governor Akashi sponsored an operation to test a new ghoul eradication robot. They selected Beijing as the test site.

Carmen made pages of data reports scroll by in a speedy blur that only she could have read, if she had needed to read it rather than just absorbing it all instantaneously over the interlink.

She interpreted the reports for him, The robot attracted, crushed, and then packaged feral ghouls for approximately seven hours and then had a critical systems failure of an unknown nature. The distressed ship is a research and survey vessel that Governor Akashi employed to perform a ranged aerial investigation. It appears that their ship also had a mysterious mechanical failure.

Carmen made a slight frown as she pondered the automated diagnostic report that came from the downed ship. According to the data I have available, their teslaflux engine developed unsustainable cavitations in its harmonic field. The imbalance threatened to disintegrate the ship with catastrophic vibrations. Their pilot had no choice but to land immediately.

Critias was no teslaflux engineer so he had to ask, What causes that?

I don’t really know what caused it, Carmen confessed, but this diagnostic reading suggests that a mass of neodymium came into contact with their field drive’s casing and that immediately impeded its normal function. I find it highly improbable that debris of that nature would be able to reach their ship at survey altitude. The data I have is most perplexing. I believe that only a closer examination of the engine itself would be able to answer your question.

Critias offered a sarcastic comment, We all know how frequently the high-tech breaks down around here.

His sarcasm went over Carmen’s head such that she took him seriously and then went to her norm of correcting his ignorance with her superior intelligence. Actually, she replied. It is quite rare for anything to happen in such a way that we would call it a mystery. Having it happen twice in the same day, in the same location, is even more improbable.

He suspected that the problems were anything but accidental, but Critias kept that conspiratorial opinion to himself for the moment; instead, he said, Hopefully a mysterious accident won’t bring us down too. There has to be an easier way to find out that this really is enemy action.

Oh, Carmen voiced her sudden comprehension. "Goldfinger, Chicago Rules, once with the extermination robot was happenstance; twice with the survey ship was coincidence, but a third time with the Achilles would be proof of enemy action."

She needed a moment to search an epic amount of information in an effort to develop a clear answer as to just who such an enemy might be. In the end, Carmen settled on the most mundane possibility, You think there is a traitor among you. Would it be an enemy of Governor Akashi or of Baron Leo?

Both, Critias offered cryptically, and everyone else for that matter. I don’t mean a traitor from within. There is something else out there, something much worse, and it doesn’t like it when we trespass on Earth. When we dig in too deep or stay for too long, it seems to always come along and blow our house down. I think the robot really pissed them off and then this survey ship going down was more of the same. We need to grab whoever is left down there and then get the Hell out of Dodge.

The city is Beijing, Carmen corrected his name for the place, but I understand what you mean. She had other ideas than leaving in a hurry, I need to inspect the engine of the downed ship, maybe the robot too. I would be able to tell you the cause and then you would know more about this enemy you think is down there. If you can identify the culprit, we could go on a mission to kill or capture this entity.

He shook his head no, A snatch carrier can fly in and then lift their equipment out for repairs. The engineers will have all the time they need to figure out what went wrong. You will stay on the ship and follow my instructions. It will only take a moment to get the survivors aboard.

She felt disappointed that once again he would deny her the entertainment of meeting and battling ghouls. Carmen understood that complaining wouldn’t help, so she didn’t bother.

Because the bioengineers had synthetically manufactured nearly all of Carmen’s mind and memories, it was difficult for her to personalize it in a way that humans naturally did. In her mind were records and images of the old world before the ghouls had destroyed it. To say the least, the golden age of man was a sight to see with cities that stretched to the horizons, all glimmering with millions of electric lights and the illuminated signals on their swarms of ground vehicles that rolled about in lines as would army ants. The signage was all so brilliantly colored. Carmen had a special love for its grandiose pomposity and relished the idea of getting to see it in person. To say the least, Carmen felt sorely disappointed by the drab reality.

The land was green. There was some brown here and there like where the rocks of the mountainous areas showed through, but it was mostly green. There were shades of green and brown. The Chaobai River was more blue than green, but even that was far from the vibrant colors of the former civilization that she had hoped to see.

In the nearly three centuries since the fall of man, fully grown trees had filled in the landscape. Carmen could make out the remains of tall buildings that formed a sort of gap-toothed wall along the western shore of the river, but even they were dull shades of brown, grey, and green. While it was certain that underneath the blanket of vegetation was the vast remains of an epic city, even from the sky they could see little of it. In total, the experience felt worse than a disappointment. It struck her as being more akin to her mourning at a funeral. She felt a sense of loss and longing that nothing could ever fulfill, or so at least she believed.

One thing they could see was the six-lane elevated roadway that led to an intact bridge that crossed the river. Soil had accumulated onto the concrete deck, enough that it had grass and smaller plants growing all over it. Nothing tall as a tree could ever sink deep enough roots into the pavement to prevent the windy season from blowing it over. The end result was no less boring than everything else, but at least the lack of trees made the snaking highway readily visible.

They used the bridge for testing their robot, Carmen said as to why the HUD gave the place as their destination. Satellite reconnaissance places the heavier ghoul population deeper in the city.

The ghouls find better shelter there in the winter, Critias explained the reason. The cold can’t kill them, but it makes them miserable and hungrier so they avoid it when they can. Now that we are in the warm season, their ghoul smashing robot would get a steady traffic crossing the bridge as they migrate around looking for things to eat.

With telescopic cameras, Critias zoomed in on the robot to see what they could. It was a tracked vehicle of sorts with a rotating torso on top. An assortment of arms from large paddles to smaller tentacles allowed the device to scoop up any ghouls that came near enough. The automated harvester would deposit the bodies into a chute where internal mechanisms squashed the ghoul, boiled off the water content of its body, and then compacted the dehydrated meat into large cubes. The robot finally sealed each cube inside a plastic film that kept the biohazardous tissue safely packaged. Presumably, some other robotic machine would have come along later to dispose of the packaged meat cubes. There was a line of finished cubes along the bridge that proved that the robot had operated as planned, at least for a while. It wasn’t moving anymore and no active communication signals came from it.

Critias guessed that the inspection team had gotten as far as he had, learned as little as he had, and then their teslaflux drive engines had crapped out, which forced them to land. Rather than ditch in the river, which would have been problematic on many levels, their pilot had elected to set down on the elevated roadway as far east as he was able. The ship was intact and the landing gear was down. By all appearances, it had been a safe touchdown where no one got hurt, and the ship remained salvageable.

Since the harvester robot had already consumed the roadway ghoul population and packaged it for later incineration, the survey ship had landed in a relatively peaceful area. All the crew had to do was stay locked inside their vehicle until rescue arrived, which with Critias, it just had.

Critias got up from the pilot seat to go suit up in his armor. As he headed for the equipment locker, he ordered Carmen, Radio them that we have arrived and will be retrieving them momentarily. Stay on station to keep an eye on things, but don’t get close enough to put more attention on them than they already have.

As Carmen buckled herself into the pilot’s chair, she asked, Do you want me to search the area for that enemy you are worried about?

Yeah, sure, he agreed dismissively, not at all taking her seriously. Critias did believe that the inevitable trouble that terrestrial operations always encountered were the work of some sinister intelligence; he just didn’t think that Carmen could solve it with the ship’s telescopic cameras scanning the world’s endless forests.

He locked down the visor on his helmet as he returned to the cockpit fully prepared. Critias’ officer class mechsuit was bullet resistant armor-fiber integrated into an android’s neorganic musculature, all melded onto a titanium exoskeleton armature. In total, the suit provided him with a fantastic boost to his physical strength and agility. It stabilized his hand-eye dexterity, enhanced his perceptions with its myriad high-tech sensors, and screened out poisonous fumes or infectious agents for an inexhaustible supply of breathable air.

Locking himself inside his extremely valuable mechsuit was the next best personal security to being safely home in space. A mechsuit was indispensable when it came to preventing the infectious ghouls from wounding him and thus condemning him to joining them as a cursed crazed immortal. Suits like his were not cheap or easy to manufacture. In many ways they were the equivalent of an android turned inside-out so a person could wear them. They were too extravagant for everyone to have, so it was a hard won privilege for the elite few who were always in professions where the public expense wouldn’t go to waste.

Carmen reported, They have a crew of five and none of them are injured. We can pick them up when you are ready.

Before Critias could give the command for her to take them down for the retrieval, the gunship suddenly lurched sideways and began to freefall. It was all Critias could do just to grab onto something and prevent himself from bouncing around the cockpit.

Since Carmen was already secure in the pilot’s chair and had affixed her seat harness according to protocol, she was able to immediately devote her full attention toward regaining control of the gunship.

Ever since she studied the diagnostic report that the survey ship’s engine had sent about its failure, Carmen had contemplated every possible scenario as to what might have happened and what she might do to prevent that same failure in the future.

Because of her thorough preparations, Carmen had been actively watching out for the same cavitational anomaly to take place in their own teslaflux propulsion system. Her prompt solution was to increase power to the engines rather than shut them down, which would have been the proper safety measure to prevent the imbalance from shaking the ship to shreds. Carmen also remodulated the teslaflux field, not in terms of attraction or repulsion, but with an awareness of deflecting the magnetic grip of a dipolar mass that she believed had attached itself to the external casing of the engine. Her quick thinking ejected the foreign magnet with the speed of a bullet, and thus freed of its influence, she immediately restored the Achilles to normal flight.

It wasn’t Carmen saving their asses that captured Critias’ attention. He watched with astonishment as the ghoul harvesting robot vanished along with the entire section of road deck it had been on. That moment was the time required for the soundwaves to reach them, an indescribable crunch as from an earthquake. Dust clouds gushed up from the ground, at first around the sides of the elevated roadway, and then all of it as the robot’s section collapsed, taking the machine down along with it. The failure did not end there. The adjoining section to the east buckled and then it too plummeted to the forested ground below.

What the Hell is going on? Critias called out in disbelief. Everything was going to shit so fast that he couldn’t believe it.

There goes another one, Carmen warned as the next roadway section failed at its western end and then dropped. It seemed like good fortune when the eastern end split at the seam only to hold while the western end slammed down onto the rubble of the sections that had foundered before it. For the moment, it appeared that the systemic collapse had halted and the crippled survey ship remained safe as could be expected under the circumstances.

Get us down there now, Critias ordered her. I don’t know how long that section can hold. With his limited understanding, Critias assumed that it had been the weight of the robot that had caused the decrepit road section to collapse and the survey ship was not a lightweight either.

The crew of the downed ship must have thought much the same thing. They no longer felt safe inside their aircraft, and they wouldn’t be if the roadway section they were on decided to fall underneath them. It wasn’t as if the highway was brand new. It had suffered the significant change of the local seasons without maintenance for nearly three centuries. Most bridges and elevated roadways on Earth had already collapsed from natural causes being so old. That highway was not safe even under the best of conditions. Already wounded, it might fail at any moment.

Carmen demonstrated superb piloting skills as she swooped the Achilles down to rescue the crew who even then rushed out into the open. Some of them waved frantically skyward for the gunship to hurry or perhaps they thought their rescuers couldn’t see them.

I will lower the boarding stairs, Critias told her as he headed back from the cockpit. I want you to hover as close to the deck as you can without touching down. That section has enough weight on it already and we are much heavier than that survey bird.

Yes, master, Carmen confirmed her orders, since an order it was, and her inhibitor hardware module forced her to comply with it to the best of her ability.

Dust from the collapse spread outward across the area, reducing visibility to only a few meters. Carmen could pilot by the topographical radar, but Critias had no special means to see since no wavelength of light could pass through that fog of pulverized cement.

As soon as Critias opened the hatch and lowered the boarding ramp, he heard the familiar howling of ghouls already in a killing frenzy. It didn’t make sense, but he was sure he heard thousands, which was far too many to be so close so quickly. A vanguard of their fast movers should have arrived well enough in advance to warn of an approaching tribe, only there were none.

The five survivors certainly heard the hideous shrieking of the damned and most of them were not seasoned combat veterans accustomed to such stress. Some of them turned back toward the survey ship while others came forward to where they thought the Achilles would land. In a moment they lost sight of each other in the dust and a greater panic set upon them.

I can’t see a damn thing out here, Critias radioed to Carmen. This is going to Hell in a handbasket!

I think I can help, Carmen radioed back and then a moment later the gunship throbbed with a slow but steady imbalance in the drive system that beat like a heart.

Whatever it was that Carmen did to the ship, it worked wonderfully. The pulse interruptions she caused in the field of the teslaflux engines was too brief to affect their flight stability, but it did repulse all the dust particles as they came within its sphere of influence. It made them shoot away due to particle-field interaction. With clever tuning she had modified the engines to act as a dielectrophoretic dust particle remover.

The dust parted for the Achilles gunship as though a Red Sea for Moses. Carmen brought them down low enough that she touched the nose gear to the pavement while keeping the rest of the landing gear and all the weight of the ship airborne.

Critias knew better than to trust in the survivors to do anything intelligent, so he jumped down to the deck with a teslaflux rifle in hand and then rushed toward their downed ship to collect them himself. The dust flowing away made Critias think that even if Carmen was irritating, she was a very clever girl. That was when the dust rolled back far enough to reveal the slither wall, an actual crawling embankment of crippled and deformed ghouls.

While it was true that all ghouls started out as natural human beings, nearly three centuries of hard living had differentiated them into a variety of forms. The few who survived the downfall of humanity had given the creatures just as broad a range of often amusing names based on their general appearance and degree of mobility. All infected could regenerate injuries, but with limitations that included rampant deformity under some circumstances.

The flood of ghouls that approached at the moment were all of the crawler variety. When other infected had first killed them while they were still human, they sometimes devoured entire limbs. Fully functional ghouls could encounter some misfortune like the collapse of rubble in a decrepit building, and that would rob them of a limb. Such grievous losses rarely grew back and even less frequently regenerated into anything functional. Amputations generally just healed over as permanent losses.

Crawlers were those ghouls that could no longer run or even walk for want of functional legs. Crippled or not, they remained entirely ferine as they pulled themselves along in a slithering scramble to get where they wanted to be. Their progress was slow and it greatly impeded their ability to initiate an effective attack. The injuries so greatly diminished their prowess that crawlers were the least dangerous opponent their kind had to offer, at least when they operated in the open as they did then.

Critias had considerable personal experience and even more formal education as to the nature of the ghouls. He instantly realized that the situation was inconsistent with reason. No matter how many crawlers there were in the world, there was no reason for them to band together as they were, not outdoors, and even more peculiar was the total absence of their far more dangerous and mobile counterparts who still had their legs. Normal sprinting ghouls should have been all over them like rabid jackrabbits, but instead there was nary a one, only the slavering filthy clawing cripples that dragged themselves ahead with that universal mad zealotry for killing humans.

Other infected ended up so quadriplegically mutilated that they could never again effectively chase food in any mode, ambulation or otherwise, so instead they would lay in wait as the persistent lurkers, dormant as doormats, for years when necessary, until some unfortunate thing blundered close enough for the disabled ghoul to strike at it with a mangled limb from surprise.

Just as everyone gets wet when it rains, the parting of the dust was equally beneficial to the crawling ghouls who could then see as well. If they were furious before, the actual sighting of humans really got them howling for blood. They went wild with murder lust such that many of them bled from the others trying to claw past or over them to get at the meat first, such was their terrible frenzy.

Only then did Critias realize where the ghouls even came from. They crawled up the sloping roadway section from the forest below. Critias could only imagine how many had died in the collapse itself, and even then they had plenty to spare and more besides. They crawled up that broad ramp like a gravity defying wave, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands.

If common sense had prevailed, Critias would have returned to his dropship and saved himself. The honor and reputation of his ludus was just as much at stake as was his life, and that of the Marshal Service as well. Retreat was simply not an option he could accept, so desperate actions were his remaining recourse.

Critias figured that he could jump up atop one of the robot’s defecated ghoul-meat cubes and then shoot up the crawlers from there to draw their attention away from the survivors, hopefully giving them enough time to reach the ramp into his gunship. He considered ordering Carmen to unleash the ship’s heavy teslaflux cannons against the ghouls, but their front was much too wide and those powerful shells might trigger further collapse of the roadway. Not only that, but Carmen would have to pilot away into a firing position, making it impossible for anyone to climb aboard for evacuation.

Before he got a chance to try out his questionable plan, one of the survivors approached him dragging a cylindrical canister that came from the survey ship.

Critias recognized her by name, Marshal Gillian, you need to get to my ship while you can.

The woman had blatantly conspicuous prosthetic legs that were mechanical in nature as opposed to her neorganic ones that she wore in cosmetic circumstances. Gillian was not from his Virgil Ludus, but Critias was well aware of her distinguished service. Much like the crawler ghouls that relentlessly approached them, Gillian lost both of her legs in a building collapse during a field mission. While recovering from that near fatal injury, she had returned to her higher education and eventually attained her surgical medicine certification. At that point, she had retired from the service to pursue her new interests of science and medicine.

The career change was something she was rightly proud of when Gillian told him, It is doctor now, not marshal, but we can catch up later. For now, I need you to throw this. It will buy us some time.

Before turning over the container to him, Gillian punched in a security code on the cylinder’s numeric panel, which turned a red light to green. Heave it at them! It will handle the rest!

Using the enhanced strength of his mechsuit, Critias lifted the cylinder by its topmost grip handle and then flung it as far as he could in a high arc. It came down some five meters behind the foremost infected.

The silvery outer skin jettisoned itself from the cylinder to reveal rows of circular ports about the diameter of a man’s thumb. All the scrambling and thrashing of the naked crawlers never stopped jostling the cylinder around. Whatever side happened to be facing upward used its apertures to launch a popcorn fountain of small spheres that rained back down into the mass of writhing creatures.

Critias witnessed that many of the little balls volleyed back toward them and came to rest well in front of the approaching horde. Those that landed in the mossy roadway seemingly did nothing. The spheres that dropped down among the ghouls invariably came into direct contact with their moist filth-strewn bodies. When that happened, the water reactive alkali metal coatings of the little balls proved to be extremely pyrophoric, not only bursting into white hot flame, but also detonating the explosive charges at their cores. The fiery blasts spread doom, confusion, and incendiary materials among even more of the crawlers.

In all that acrid smoke and shrieking agony, the crawler advance faltered. The belly-dragging ghouls had no chance of avoiding the minefield of pellets that continued to spread both among and all around them. Their attack broke down into confused chaos where they turned on each other to vent their crazed torment.

Now we can go, Doctor Gillian informed Critias. The other four survivors had joined them by then and everyone hurried for the boarding ramp to his gunship.

The other crash survivors were terrified over the situation. Unlike Gillian, none of them had any real experience dealing with the ghouls or being outdoors in a hot zone.

Carmen warned them all by radio, A second tribe is advancing on you from the east. They have us surrounded. We need to depart as soon as possible.

Automatic shots from Critias’ combat rifle masterfully cut down some of the crawlers who had escaped the incendiary area-denial weapon by climbing over the top of their roasting compatriots.

He came about to see that the runner ghouls who had been missing were in fact not missing at all. They had massed under the bridge further east and then climbed up the elder trees that flanked both sides of the roadway. Dozens of them leaped from the high branches onto the road deck and then sprinted straight for them at Olympic speeds. Far from being slow and clumsy, kill frenzy hatred nitrous-fueled their already supercharged metabolic systems. Runner ghouls came at them like a swarm of cheetahs. They did not know fear or hesitation. When ghouls saw pure strain humans, they just wanted to kill.

Run! Critias ordered as he stood steady then took aim down his teslaflux rifle. He had a clear field of fire and oncoming targets. His truly gifted talent with weapons proved itself as he steadily put a supersonic bullet into their faces one by one.

A tree to the east actually snapped and then toppled under the weight of so many ghouls as they climbed its branches. Plenty of other trees managed to bear their wretched burden. Hundreds more of the runners joined the assault.

Once the others were well ahead of him, Critias followed. He took time to load a fresh clip and then shot down more infected as he ran.

One of Doctor Gillian’s companions stepped into a hole in the road deck that had been invisible under a thin net of vinery and a blanket of plant litter. The opening went clear through and was large enough to swallow the man whole. He would have smashed down below on the forest floor if Critias had not caught him by the back of his field jacket then set him back on firm footing. On top of everything else, the roadway was also a minefield of hidden holes where one wrong step could be a person’s last. Fear of the onrushing ghouls was far greater than that of falling, so everyone blindly took their chances to get to the gunship.

Saving the scientist from falling to his death was of no special glory to Critias. In his mind, lab coated eggheads were always all thumbs and two left feet when out in the badlands. Keeping them from killing themselves with their own bumbling around was just part of his job description. What did concern Critias was the hole itself, or more accurately, what lurked down at the bottom of it.

As anyone would, Critias of course took the instant to glance down into the void to see if it was just a harmless pothole or an express elevator shaft leading to the next world. At first, he appreciated their height off the ground and what the impact would have done to the hapless fool, and yet even that was not his real issue.

The thing that set Critias aback was that they were not the only ones surprised by the sudden accident. Way down below standing on the forest floor and gazing straight up at the unexpected event was a man’s astounded face.

It was definitely some kind of man and not a feral ghoul. The guy’s face expressed amazement without any hint of rage. More than that, the realization that the road deck had a hole like that was only slight compared to his alarm at seeing Critias up there staring back at him. The man recognized Critias as a threat he wanted to avoid rather than chase after.

There were other ghouls down there milling about, mostly crawlers, a few runners, and one big one that seemed to be a hunter, which was what marshals called the somewhat rare, but insanely dangerous freaks who expressed regenerative gigantism. Some mishap or other set their healing factor into overload, which resulted in them attaining sizes well beyond anything normal for ghouls. When one considered that only massive damage to the brain or spinal cord would even stop a ghoul, the really big ones could soak up ammo like an undead rhinoceros. No one should ever take a hunter lightly or pursue them for trophies, even though some marshals did exactly that, even going so far as to use a blade for the deed as an ultimate demonstration of ghoul killing prowess and bolstering the reputation of their own ludus.

To top everything else, Critias saw that the man had short hair, which ghouls never did. Ghouls did not get haircuts and their hair continued to grow in a manner comparable to humans, as did their fingernails. Only wear and tear of the environment shortened either of those.

It was all over in an instant. Critias didn’t have time to wait around to learn more and the man below wasn’t inclined to wait around either, perhaps fearing that Critias would just shoot him in the head on general principle. Nervous caution was another quality that Critias had never seen in the infected. Sure, a ghoul would redirect its path to go around a fire rather than through it, but they didn’t react anything like what Critias had just witnessed. He was not sure what he had just seen, only that it was damn peculiar indeed.

Doctor Gillian came back with her TFP9 Marshal Service pistol in hand, a weapon that remained part of her daily life even as a medical doctor. Critias wore a similar weapon in his hip holster, only his had considerably more engraving and customization. The personalized weapon was nearly a religious totem for him.

Gillian asked him urgently, Is something wrong?

Probably, Critias replied honestly as he dialed up a liquid catalyst variable blast grenade to its maximum effect and then dropped it down the hole to fall to the forest floor below. He was no longer sure how many of those ghoulish freaks were still down there, but he wanted to send the peculiar one a going away present, sort of a thankyou gift for all the day’s trouble he had caused.

Gillian and Critias dashed together to the boarding ramp of the Achilles. They arrived just as the grenade exploded below them. Considering that they had a road deck between them and all the ghouls screaming too, the sound was not all that impressive.

For whatever ghouls that had still lurked around down there, they certainly experienced a lot more hardship than just a little noise. In fact, that grenade packed enough exotic explosives to blast all of them back to Hell and leave a crater besides.

As Carmen lifted off the gunship with everyone aboard, Critias and Gillian stood at the doorway at the top of the open ramp. The full rush of the runner ghouls arrived just too late to prevent their escape. Several even leaped off the elevated roadway in the hope of grabbing onto the boarding ramp. They missed of course and then fell to crash down through the limbs of the trees.

Critias commented, That was a nice toy you had back there. It really saved the day. Never seen one before.

It was experimental, Gillian explained the canister weapon she had provided. Baron Leo had hoped that I would find an opportunity to test it out on a large tribe of ghouls, but I honestly never expected to actually need it.

Was that his harvester robot too? Critias asked.

Gillian’s expression conveyed contempt for that idiotic robot, The baron was against the project from the very start. It was all Akashi’s idea. The people of his station invested a lot of time and resources into that project, and now they have nothing to show for it. I wouldn’t want to be him at the next election. She added, Thank you for coming down here to pick us up.

Anytime, Critias replied nonchalantly.

Chapter 2: Trial and Error

After he got back to the Homer with Carmen, it was a routine matter for them to pass through decontamination and then return to his apartment.

Carmen wanted to go out for dinner and then check out one or more of the dance clubs to celebrate as she called it, but he had a lot on his mind and preferred to just stay home and fill out all the mission paperwork.

As an android, everything that Carmen experienced became a permanent record in her parallel memory core. Anyone with the proper security clearance could call up an event and then see it for themselves. The same was true of Critias’ mechsuit with all of its sensors and computerization. With that in mind, Critias wrote out his after mission report with the assurance that he could prove the truth behind everything he said. No one would ever have to take his word for anything.

At least at the time he was writing it, Critias had no problem spelling things out as he believed them to be. Forces unknown, but likely the strange man he had seen, had sabotaged Governor Akashi’s robot, brought down the survey ship they sent to investigate, and then nearly brought down his Achilles gunship too. The roadway collapse was likely do to either sapping activities, explosives, or a teslaflux oscillating demolition device, but certainly not natural causes.

Critias explained how the ghoul tribes had been waiting in ambush for a rescue ship to arrive. When they did finally attack, they used crawlers as both a distraction and a drain on their ammunition, softening them up for when the stranger unleashed his real assault, a large force of fully capable runners that flanked them from behind.

In summation, Critias advised a major investigation and rethinking of all their security. If he was right, anything on or visiting Earth might suffer an attack by this highly intelligent, capable, and malevolent force.

With the report out of the way, Critias had some food delivered via the parcel transit tube. They had a simple dinner and then they went to bed.

Critias had not expected to get a medal, commendation, or anything for his rescue mission, but he had believed that the powers that be would take his after action report seriously, and boy did they ever.

First thing the next morning, two Praetorian Marshals were at his door. If the people had to answer to the Marshal Service for their wrong doings, the marshals answered to the Praetorian Order for their mistakes. When Critias opened his door to find them standing there in their red horsehair crested mechsuits, he safely assumed it wasn’t good news. On the other hand, if they had planned on killing him, it was unlikely they would have bothered to use the door chime to announce their arrival. Critias’ ludus and service records were readily available to the Praetorian Order. They would know that Critias was a Ludi ta Olympia champion and no one to underestimate with any form of weapon or none at all.

One of the marshals began with an apology, I’m sorry about this, sir.

Both Praetorians were only lieutenants and they wore the adhesively attached badges of Gubernatorial Guards. Every governor had a pair of Praetorians at all times as a personal escort. It wasn’t always the same two marshals, though from time to time a Governor did have a personal relationship with his guardians and kept the same ones on a consistent basis. It was not exactly the most prestigious job in the world, babysitting Governors, which was why they tended to be Praetorians of the junior ranks.

When Carmen walked up behind Critias to see who was at the door, the second Praetorian actually stepped back in some sort of overreaction to her presence. He asked her a most inexplicable question, Is it you?

Carmen didn’t understand any more than Critias did. She replied, Last time I checked, which was both an amusing and yet noncommittal answer that appealed to her odd sensibilities.

The first Praetorian scanned her then raised his armor’s forearm display to show his partner the report as he spoke it allowed, Android, designation Carmen, series Epsilon-K. Hunter-killer combat duty prototype. Still under product series evaluation.

That was apparently enough for the second Praetorian to shake off his bizarre confusion.

To get things rolling, Critias guessed, You two work for Governor Akashi, I take it?

Unfortunately, sir, the first Praetorian confessed his dislike for the unscrupulous Governor. He asked us to escort you to your Marshal Court of Inquiry, concerning the incident yesterday.

Critias asked, No one saw the need to inform me before now?

They didn’t make it official until this morning, the Praetorian explained. Those acting on your behalf had hoped to dissuade Governor Akashi from pursuing these matters, but it appears there are some influential voices supporting him as well. I have permission to tell you that if you indulge their political games for now, you will come through all of this with your honor and career intact.

If I learned anything yesterday, Critias mused, it is that not everything is what it appears to be.

Indeed, the Praetorian agreed, and judging by the turn of his helmet, his eyes lingered on Carmen as he said it.

Are you going to place me in restraints? Critias asked.

The Praetorian shook his head no, This is only the formal inquiry. You are not currently facing charges for any crimes and as such you are entitled to every privilege of a citizen and an officer of the Marshals Service. If you are seeking advice, I recommend that you wear your dress uniform with all applicable decorations, and your sidearm. Your mechsuit would be excessive under the circumstances.

Carmen believed that the whole inquiry was something of a joke. She had been on the mission and so knew for a certainty that Critias hadn’t done anything wrong. In her naiveté, she assumed that the system would always reward virtue and punish wickedness, so it was impossible that Critias could come to harm. Since none of that mattered, her real interest was in asking, What do I get to wear? I don’t have a dress uniform, or even any dresses for that matter.

You’re not going, Critias callously dismissed her relevance. Your memories are already on file as evidence. Only a person can testify in an official hearing. You can just make yourself useful around the apartment until I get back. For now, get my dress uniform ready while I take a quick shower. He told the Praetorians, I’ll be ready in a few minutes.

Governor Akashi’s power was considerable on his own city station, but became mostly ceremonial anywhere else. The Council of Governors as a body were the real authority of the civilian population and as such, they tended to keep one another in line.

It came as no surprise to Critias that his inquisition was to take place on Akashi’s orbital station where the man’s dictatorial powers would be at their greatest. His Praetorian escorts had their own gunship for taking him there.

Orbital Platform Five, commonly known as Herodotus Five, was the city under the control of Governor Akashi. For the most part it was a residential station with minimal manufacturing or technical functions. Herodotus Five was best known for luxury living and was the habitat of choice for those who could afford it. The population was generally well-educated and productive.

The station had several impressive entertainment rings with fine eating establishments and expensive shopping. Personally, Critias thought of it as an orbital zoo for pretentious pampered assholes who had never once even seen a ghoul except on video, but what did he know. Even their Peleus Ludus was upper class and fashionable; spoiled was more like it, at least by his reckoning.

As they walked to the council chambers where the hearing would take place, Critias felt surprised to see how many people had turned out to support him.

Most impressive was the majority of the Alexander Ludus students who flanked both sides of the hallway in their finest uniforms. Marshal Alexander, the patriarch of Alexander Ludus, had been a Virgil Ludus graduate before opening his own school.

The story of Marshal Alexander was essentially that Virgil Ludus was a stoic school that stressed loyalty to the King’s Law above all else. As any adult who was not a fool was well aware, the law was not always right.

Alexander Ludus believed that honor was the higher virtue. With that way of thinking, they obviously had a reputation for breaking the rules to do what they felt was right in the name of honorable conduct. Alexander Ludus marshals were fanatics about the honor of Alexander himself, a man now long in his grave. Since Alexander was a Virgil, woe to those who besmirched the honor of the Virgil Ludus. While Virgil marshals would adhere to the law in the face of insult, the Alexander boys always came a running to defend the honor of their patriarch’s Alma mater.

When Critias had been a boy, the Virgil Ludus got a new student who had formerly been part of Pelias Ludus. The other students had hazed and beaten the kid to the point that marshal command decided to move him to Virgil Ludus instead. When the boys at Alexander Ludus learned that the Pelias Ludus had disgracefully abused a new Virgil, the lot of them flew over there and stormed the place, beat the Hell out of the Pelias students, and even trounced a few instructors as well. They did that and endured the punishment for it with smiles on their faces.

Since Pelias was the ludus of Herodotus Five, having all of them back again to defend the honor of a Virgil was a clear message that everyone understood. It wasn’t a question of how far the Alexander marshals would go; they would die like Samurai for their honor. The question was how fast things would escalate and what it might take to set them off.

Once Critias had passed down the long arch of Alexander students hailing him with their raised arms in saluto romano, he came to the doors to the council chamber where two more Praetorians stood honor guard. Near them was a man and a woman.

The woman introduced herself, Good morning, Captain Critias. I am Marshal Eun from the office of the Marshal Chief Justice. I am here to offer you my services as legal advisor.

Critias knew the man as every marshal did. He was Sabastian Kane, also known as Black Sabbath Kane, which arose from the matte black mechsuit he was known to wear and his name Sabastian, that, and his reputation for being a prolific killer of both ghouls and men.

Marshal Sabastian had gunned down and nearly killed a fellow marshal in a duel over a woman, Maria Kane, who then became Sabastian’s wife and source of his surname. The marshal he nearly killed refused to press charges against Sabastian, claiming the events took place under mutual agreement as a matter of honor between men. There was no doubting that it was true, since both of them were graduates of the Alexander Ludus.

The Council of Governors had still forced Marshal Sabastian out of the service, presumably out of fear that the practice of dueling to the death over personal matters might spread. While the Marshal Service itself hotly contested the wishes of the council, Sabastian willingly resigned, putting an end to the issue and by association ending any effort by the Governors to pass an actual binding law that would genuinely ban the practice of dueling.

No longer a marshal, Sabastian Kane had taken up work with the office of the Reclamation General, doing special operations missions for the General on occasion, but mostly training his mechsuited operatives in the ways of hot zone protocols and ghoul combat. Among his many notable accomplishments, Critias most admired Kane’s five hunter kills he made using the short sword he always carried. That did not take into account the dozens of hunters he had simply blown away using more traditional ballistic weaponry, gunship cannons, or explosives. Black Sabbath Kane was a marshal’s marshal and he wasn’t even one anymore.

First Critias told the woman politely without commitment, Thank you for the offer. He then told Kane, It’s good to see you again, Marshal Sabastian.

Hot zone marshals never shook hands as greetings much like they never touched their own faces. Infection was too great a risk. If a person rubbed even the smallest drop of ghoul blood into a scratch or their eye, they would certainly turn and that would be the end of them.

The respectful greeting that Critias could offer was to place his fist over his heart, the first half of their official salute, and then nod his head in recognition.

It’s Citizen Kane now, Sabastian told him. When Wayne told me that you were in hot water with that asshole Akashi, I thought you might accept me as your second. The General wants the Governors to know that the service can always count on his support. The scavengers know as well as anyone how crazy things can get down there.

By Wayne, Sabastian meant Critias’ boss and mentor Grand Marshal Wayne, the scavengers being slang for the resource harvesters that worked for the Reclamation General.

Critias respectfully told Marshal Eun, The assistance of Mister Kane will be sufficient for me. I will tell the truth as best I know it. I’m confident that the law will prevail.

The hearing itself