Deathstalker 03 - Deathstalker War

Giles.
    "There isn't that much real information," Finlay said quickly. "Only one man ever got off this planet alive after whatever happened happened. He renamed it Haceldama, before he died. Whatever he saw down there destroyed his mind. He wanted to die, to escape from what he'd seen."
    "I have a copy of the man's original statement," Toby said diffidently. "Just the relevant points. He tended to ramble. I acquired the tape from a colleague, for a purely nominal price, which I'm sure the underground will take care of.
    Once they find out about it. Shall I run the tape?"
    "Run it," said Giles. "It might stop some of us from getting cocky."
    Toby nodded to Flynn, who accessed the ship's comm channels through his camera, and then had the camera run the tape in its memory banks. The main viewscreen shimmered, and the bright blue planet below was replaced by a man's face, wild-eyed and sweating, and so painfully thin that the bones of his face seemed to be pushing out against his skin. His mouth trembled and his face twitched.
    He'd been strapped to his chair, apparently as much to hold him up as anything.
    When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh but even. His eyes snapped back into
    focus, as though even in the depths of his pain he was still driven by some desperate need to tell what he knew, what he'd seen.
    "My name is Adrian Marriner. Survey scout, twelve years experience. I was the leader of a survey team sent to discover what happened on Shannon's World. They didn't tell us about the earlier teams. The ones that didn't come back. There were ten of us. Good men and women.
    They're all dead now. I am the only survivor. There's a war going on down there.
    Total war. No quarter asked or given. Forget about the missing people. They're all dead. They were the first to die, and they died hard and bloody, poor bastards. Forget about the pleasure world, too. It's a nightmare now. The worst dream you ever had. Terrible. Awful. A grotesque travesty of itself. Every man, woman and child who came here died horribly, but the war goes on. It always will. Don't send any more teams. What's down there is too much for any human to stand."
    He started crying then, great rasping sobs that shook his whole body. Flynn shut off his camera, and the crying face disappeared from the viewscreen, replaced by the enigmatic face of Haceldama, coming up to meet them.
    "That's pretty much it, I'm afraid," said Toby. "He just says the same thing, over and over. When he can stop himself crying. Or screaming. It's as though what he saw horrified him so much that his mind became stuck in a groove, forever repeating itself. He died soon after this tape was made, and it was probably a blessing. He was quite insistent that every human being on the planet is dead, which rather begs the question—who's fighting this endless war he talked about? People have come up with various answers, none of them conducive to a good night's sleep. If anyone has any helpful comments, feel free to chip
    in. I've watched this tape till it's coming out of my ears, and it still scares the crap out of me. I mean, this was an experienced survey scout. Seen everything. And Haceldama reduced him to a sobbing child."
    "I've seen the tape before," said Finlay. "I knew one of the people involved in his original debriefing. We have no idea why Marriner survived when the rest of his team died, or how he got offplanet. The Quarantine starcruiser was adamant that no ship had got past it. Marriner was discovered wandering the streets of Golgotha's main starport, crying his eyes out and telling his story to anyone who'd listen. Security picked him up, but they never did find his ship, or how he managed to land it on Golgotha without setting off all kinds of alarms. Which is, of course, supposed to be impossible."
    "For any number of reasons," said Evangeline. "How could he have guided a ship all the way from here to Golgotha, all on his own? Computers can only do so much. Someone must have been with him. Someone must have helped him."
    "If they did, they never surfaced," said Toby. "Despite an awful lot of people looking for them real hard. The Empress was breathing fire over the lapse in security, and she was not at all happy when the search came up empty-handed. She takes homeworld's security very seriously. I did hear there were a lot of sudden vacancies in Security's upper echelons not long after that."
    Julian bit his lower lip hard. He could feel the familiar debilitating ache