When True Night Falls

Prologue

I Can’t Believe we’re doing this.

Colony Commander Leonid Case lay full length upon the damp Ernan soil, his hands clenched into fists before him. This whole plan was insane, he thought. His furtive departure from the settlement, his midnight stalk through these alien woods, and now hiding in this gully like some forest-born predator, alert for the scent of prey . . . in fact, the only thing crazier than the way he was acting was the situation that had brought him here in the first place. And the man responsible for it.

Damn Ian! Damn his delusions! Didn’t the settlement have enough problems here without his adding to them? Wasn’t it enough that people were dying here - dying! - in ways that defied all human science? Did Ian have to add to that nightmare?

The blackness of despair churned coldly in Case’s gut, and panic stirred in its wake. He couldn’t let it get to him. He was responsible for this fledgling colony, which meant that the others depended on him—on his advice, his judgment, and most of all on his personal stability. He couldn’t afford to let despair overwhelm him, any more than he could allow himself to openly vent his fury over his chief botanist’s behavior. But sometimes it seemed almost more than he could handle. God knows he had signed on for better and for worse, well aware of all the tragedies that might befall a newborn colony . . . but no one had prepared him for this.

Thirty-six dead now. Thirty-six of his people. And not just dead: gruesomely dead, fearsomely dead, dead in ways that defied human acceptance. He remembered the feel of Sally Chang’s frozen flesh in his hands, so brittle that when he tried to lift her body it shattered into jagged bits, like glass. And Wayne Reinhart’s corpse, which was little more than a jellylike package of skin and blood and pulped organs by the time they found it. And Faren Whitehawk . . . that was the most frightening one of all, he thought. Not because it was the most repellent; Faren’s corpse was whole, the flesh still pliant, the expression almost peaceful. But all the blood was gone from the body, impossibly drawn out through two puncture wounds in the neck. Or so the settlement’s doctors had informed him. Christ in heaven! Looking down at those marks—ragged and reddened, crusted black about the edges with dried blood and worse—he knew that what they were facing here was nothing Earth could have prepared them for. Monsters drawn from Earth’s tradition, their own human nightmares garbed in solid flesh and pitted against them . . . how did you fight such a thing? Where did you even start? When Carrie Sands was killed three nights later by some winged creature that had accosted her while she slept, he wasn’t surprised to hear her bunkmate describe it as a creature straight out of East Indian mythology. Something that fed on nightmares, he recalled. Only this time it got carried away, and fed on flesh as well.

Jesus Christ. Where was it going to end?

Thirty-six dead. That was out of the three thousand and some odd colonists who had survived the coldsleep journey to this place, to stand under the light of an alien sun and commit themselves body and soul to building a new world. His world. Now they were all at risk. And dammit, the seedship should have foreseen this! It was supposed to survey each planet in question until there was no doubt, absolutely no doubt, that the colonists would thrive there. If not, it was programmed to move on to the next available system. In theory it was a foolproof procedure, designed to protect Earth’s explorers from the thousand and one predictable hazards of extraterrestrial colonization. Like rival predators. Incompatible protein structures. Climatic instability.

The key word there was predictable.

Case looked up at the starless night sky—so black, so empty, so utterly alien—and found himself shivering. What did a Terran seedship do when it had surveyed a thousand systems—perhaps tens of thousands—and still it had found no hospitable world for its charges? Would there come a time when its microchips would begin to wear, when its own mechanical senility would force it to make one less than ideal choice? Or was all this the fault of the programmers, who had never foreseen that a ship might wander so far, for so long, without success? Go outward, they had directed it, survey each planet you come across, and if it does not suit your purpose, then refuel and go outward farther still. He thought of Erna’s midnight sky, so eerie in its utter starlessness. What was a program like that supposed to do when it ran out of options? When the next move would take it beyond the borders of the galaxy, into regions so utterly desolate that it might drift forever without finding another sun, another source of fuel? Was it supposed to leap blindly into that void, its circuits undisturbed by the prospect of eternal solitude? Or would it instead survey its last available option again and again, time after time, until at last its circuits had managed whatever convolution of logic was required to determine that the last choice was indeed acceptable, by the terms of its desperation? So that there, tens of thousands of light-years from Earth, separated by a multimillenial gap in communication, the four thousand colonists might be awakened at last.

We’ll never know, Commander Case thought grimly. The bulk of the seedship was high above them now, circling the tormented planet like an errant moon. They had brought all the data down with them, each nanosecond’s record of the ninety-year survey—and he had studied it so often that sometimes it seemed he knew each byte of it by heart. To what end? Even if he could find some hint of danger in the seedship’s study, what good would it do them now? They couldn’t go back. They couldn’t get help. This far out in the galaxy they couldn’t even get advice from home. The seedship’s programmers were long since dead, as was the culture that had nurtured them. Communication with Earth would mean waiting more than forty thousand years for an answer—and that was if Earth was there to respond, and if it would bother. What had the mother planet become, in the millennia it had taken this seedship to find a home? The temporal gulf was almost too vast, too awesome to contemplate. And it didn’t really matter, Case told himself grimly. The act that they were alone here, absolutely and forever, was all that counted. As far as this colony was concerned, there was no Earth.

He shifted uncomfortably in his mossy trench, all too aware of the darkness that was gathering around him. It was a thick darkness, cold and ominous, as unlike the darknesses of Earth as this new sun’s cold light was unlike the warm splendor of Sol. For a moment homesickness filled him, made doubly powerful by the fact that home as he knew it no longer existed. The colonists had made their commitment to Eden only to find that it had a serpent’s soul, but there was no escaping it now. Not with the figures for coldsleep mortality in excess of 86% for second immersion.

He heard a rustling beside him and stiffened; his left hand moved for his weapon, even as he imagined all the sorts of winged nightmares that might even now be descending on him. But it was only Lise, come to join him. He nodded a greeting and scrunched to one side, making room for her to crawl forward. There was barely room for both of them in the shallow gully.

Lise Perez, M.D. Thank God for her. She had saved his life a few nights back, under circumstances he shuddered to recall. She had almost saved Tom Bennet when that thing got past the eastern fence and launched itself into the mess cabin, and in any case she had prevented it from grabbing anyone else, until a cook finally brought it down by severing head from body with a meat cleaver. She was a competent officer, always collected, she had a nose for trouble—and she had been keeping tabs on Ian Casca for nearly a month now. God bless her for it.

“How long?” he whispered.

She looked at her watch. “Half an hour.” And glanced up at him. “He’ll be here before that,” she assured him.

If anyone else had brought him out here—if anyone else had even suggested that he should come out here, making himself the perfect target for every nightmare beast in this planet’s ghastly repertoire—laughter would have been the kindest of his responses. But Lise had suggested it and he trusted her judgment, sometimes more than his own. And Ian had to be dealt with. There was no way around that. Case should have jailed the man when this all started, but he had chosen to assign him to therapy instead, and now he was paying the price for that decision.

“Listen,” she whispered. “Here he comes.”

He nodded, noting that though her jacket and pants were dark enough for cover her pale skin glowed like a beacon in the moonlight. They should have thought of that. Rubbed her down with charcoal, or lampblack, or . . . something. Made her dark, like him, so that they could creep through the night unseen. Too late for that now, he thought. He cursed himself for carelessness and motioned for her to keep low, so that the weeds might obscure her face.

True night was about to fail. Less than half an hour now. Case told himself that the term was a mere technicality, that even on Earth heavy cloudcover might obscure the stars and moon, leaving a man in total darkness—but he knew that there was more to it than that. He had tasted its true power once in the field, by turning off his lantern so that the darkness was free to envelop him—a darkness so absolute, so utterly boundless, that all the shadows of Earth paled by comparison. The mere memory of it made his skin crawl. By now the whole camp would be alight with beacons, bright floods fighting to drive back the shadows of the triple night. As if mere light would help. As if mere walls could keep the serpent out of Eden, or prevent it from reading their secret thoughts, from turning their fears and even their desires against them.

As he listened for the sound of Ian’s approach, he remembered the night it had come for him, the serpent incarnate in an angel’s form. Remembered how all his fear and his skepticism and even his innate caution were banished from his soul in an instant, as though they had never existed. Because what had stepped out from the shadows was his son—his son!- as young and as healthy as he had been ten years ago, before the accident that took him from Case’s life. And in that moment there was no fear in the Commander’s heart, no suspicion, not even a moment’s doubt. Love filled him with such force that he trembled, and tears poured down his cheeks. He whispered his son’s name, and the figure moved toward him. He reached out his hand, and the creature touched him—it touched him!—and it was warm, and alive, and he knew it by touch and scent and a thousand other signs. Christ in heaven, his son was alive again! He opened his arms wide and gathered the boy up, buried his face in his hair (and the smell was familiar, even that was right) and cried, let all the pain pour out in a tsunami of raw emotion, an endless tide of grief and love and loss . . .

And she had saved him. Lise. She had come, and she had seen, and she had understood at once. And acted. Somehow she’d killed the unnatural thing, or driven it off, and she’d dragged Case to MedOps. Barely in time. Later, when he had regained the wherewithal to communicate, he asked her what she had seen. And she answered, steadily, It was devouring you. From the inside out. That’s what all these creatures do, one way or another. They feed on us.

In the distance now he could hear the low rumble of a tram approaching, its solar collectors vibrating as it bumped over the uneven turf. Ian. It had to be him. The trams had proven to be dangerously unreliable—two had exploded while being started up, and three more simply would not work—but Ian was one of the few who seemed capable of making them run, and they gave him no surprises. Likewise the man’s weapons functioned perfectly, while others jammed and backfired, and as for his lab equipment . . . the botanist lived a charmed life, without question. But at what price?

In his mind’s eye Case could see the grisly stockpile that Lise had discovered one night, after following Ian from camp. Small mammals, a few birds, a single lizard . . . all beheaded or dismembered or both, and hidden beneath a thornbush at edge of the forest. When Case had confronted Ian about them the botanist had made no attempt to dissemble or even defend himself, but had said simply, There’s power in the blood. Power in sacrifice. Don’t you see? That’s how this planet works. Sacrifice is power, Leo.

Sacrifice is power.

The tram was coming into sight now, and it was possible to make out the form of a man behind its controls. Lamplight glinted on red hair, wind-tossed: Ian Casca’s trademark. In the back of the tram was something bundled in a blanket, that might or might not be alive. Case felt a chill course through him as he gauged the size of the trapped animal, and he thought, Might be human. Might be. He couldn’t see Lise’s expression, but it was a good bet she was thinking the same thing.

The blood is the life, the Old Testament proclaimed. Lise had shown him that passage in Casca’s own Bible, underscored by two red lines on a dog-eared page. He wondered if Ian had made those marks before or after this horror began.

The tram had entered the clearing now, and after a few seconds of idling Ian braked and shut it down. The harsh purr of the motor died out into the night, leaving silence so absolute that Case’s breathing seemed a roar by contrast. Even the insects were still, as if they, too, feared the darkness that was about to fall.

Case tightened his hand about his gun. Waiting.

The old formulas will work, Ian had claimed. He was lifting a bag from the cargo section, a specimen case whose soft sides bulged when he set it down. From it he removed a long strip of red cloth and a canvas sack. All we have to do is learn to apply them. He hung the cloth about his neck so that its ends fell forward, brushing against his calves as he worked. Painted sigils glittered on its surface: geometries bordered with Hebrew figures, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, something that might have been an astrological symbol . . . Case shook his head in amazement as the man reached into his sack and drew out a handful of white powder. The trappings of his madness were so precise, so deliberate, so painstakingly detailed . . . which made him all the more dangerous, Case reflected. A careless madman would have gotten himself locked up long ago.

Lise touched him on the arm. He turned back to look at her, saw the question in her eyes. But he shook his head. Not yet. He turned back to watch the botanist, who was now tracing a circle on the ground, dribbling powder through his fingers to mark its circumference. When he was done with that he began to sketch out more complex figures, his fingers trembling with fear—or excitement—as he worked. On the bed of the tram one of the bundles had begun to move, and Case heard a soft moan issue from it. Human, he thought. No doubt about it. His jaw tightened, but he forced himself not to move forward. Not yet. Erna had no jailhouse, and at the rate things were going wrong they might never get the time to build one. If Ian’s madness had turned murderous, then for the sake of the colony he would have to be disposed of. Excised, the way one excised a cancerous tumor to save the flesh beneath. And as judge, jury, and executioner, Case had better be damned sure that what he was doing was justified.

The circle was finished now, and all the designs that the botanist had chosen to add to it. He poured the last handful of powder back into the bag, tied it shut again, and set it aside. Case tensed, ready to interfere the minute Ian went for his captives. But the man simply stepped back, so that he stood in the exact center of the circle he had marked, and shut his eyes. For a moment he was silent, as if readying himself. For what? Case wondered. What arcane operation did the man imagine would give him control over this violent, unpredictable world?

If only it were that easy, he thought bitterly. Draw a few signs on the ground, recite an ancient incantation or two, and behold, all problems disappear . . . for a brief moment he wished that he shared the botanist’s delusion. He wondered if he, too, might not be willing to spill a little blood, if he truly believed it would help the colony survive. Human blood? It was a disturbing question, and not one he wished to investigate further. God save him from ever discovering that the shell of his morality was as thin and as fragile as that of Ian Casca’s sanity . . .

The botanist stirred. Slowly, breathing deeply, he raised his hands up by his sides, and opened his eyes at last. The lamplight barely picked out his features, but even so Case could see the concentration that burned in his eyes, the sweat of tension that gleamed on his brow. He began to chant, in a manner that was half speech, half song. Case caught a few words of something that sounded like Latin, intermingled with bits that might be Greek, then Hebrew, then Aramaic. It was as though Ian had taken all the ancient tongues of Earth and sifted through them for words he needed, then mixed them indescriminately to create this custom-made ritual. Words of power, Case thought. For one sickening moment he wondered if Ian might not be right, if Earth’s magical traditions might not wield some true power in this extraterrestrial forum . . . but a moan from beneath the blankets brought him back to his senses, and his hand tightened about his gun. Even if it did work, he thought grimly, it’s not worth the price.

Then Ian stopped. Stared into the night. His whole body was taut, rigid with tension. “Erna, hear me,” he intoned. “I offer you this sacrifice. I offer you the most precious thing we possess: the lifeblood of Terra. In return I ask this: Take us in. Make us part of you. We tried to be aliens on your soil, and your creatures defeated us. Now make us part of this world, as those creatures are part of it. And in return . . . I offer you the heartsblood of Earth. The souls of this colony, now and forever.” He shut his eyes; Case thought that he trembled. “May it please you,” he whispered. “May you find it acceptable.”

His hands dropped down to his sides once more. For a moment he was silent; perhaps waiting for an answer? Case saw one of the bundles on the trams begin to stir, as if trying to free itself. Apparently so did Ian. The movement awakened him from his seeming trance, and he began to move toward the tram and its contents. Stepping over the line he had drawn, across the sigil-girded circle he had so carefully created. Drawing a slender knife from his belt as he moved.

That was enough for Case. He was on his feet in an instant, and Lise was right behind him. While she moved to intercept the man, to keep him from reaching the tram, he took up. a solid position at the edge of the clearing and leveled his gun at the man’s heart. “That’s enough,” he announced. “Party’s over, Casca. Stay right where you are.”

The botanist reeled visibly, as though Case’s words had not only stopped him in his tracks but had awakened him from some kind of trance. He turned toward the commander and gaped at him, as if trying to absorb the fact of his presence.

“Leo,” he said at last. Starting to move toward him. “How did you—”

“Stay where you are!” Case ordered. “And keep your hands where I can see them.” He glanced toward Lise and nodded; she was kneeling on the tram’s bed, inspecting its contents. “No fast movements, you hear me? Just stay where you are and keep quiet.”

Lise had cut the tie on one of the bundles and was freeing its occupant. “Well?” Case demanded.

“It’s Erik Fielder.” She reached a hand in to take his pulse, and added, “He’s alive.” Quickly she moved to the other bundle and unwrapped its upper end. “Liz Breslav. Out cold. I see bruises, some sort of impact damage to the side of the head . . . can’t say how bad it is without MedOps. We need to get her back to the ship.”

It took him a minute to put the names in context; when he did, he darkened. Ian’s choice of victims was all too practical. With true night coming, the colony’s other members would have been huddled together in their makeshift cabins, seeking the dubious safety that could be found in numbers. It would have been hard for Ian to single out one or two of them, much less knock them out and drag their bodies from the camp without being seen. But Fielder and Breslav had drawn special guard duty for the night, which meant that they were already outside the camp, standing watch over the ship and its contents a good mile away. They would have been especially vulnerable, Case thought, if their enemy was not a creature of Erna, like they expected, but one of their own kind. A glib man who might talk his way into their company, and then strike at them from behind when they least expected it.

His mouth tightened into a hard line as he raised the gun. “That’s proof enough for me.”

Sudden understanding gleamed in Ian’s eyes. Understanding . . . and fear. “Leo, listen to me—”

“The charge is endangering the welfare of the colony,” Case said steadily. “The verdict is guilty.” Something tightened inside him, something cold and sharp. Something that hated killing, even in the name of justice. It took effort to get the words out. “The sentence is death.”

It’s not a killing, he told himself. It’s an excision. A cleansing. Ian had to die so that the rest of them could live. Was that murder?

Call it a sacrifice.

“Listen to me,” the botanist protested. “You don’t know what you’re doing—”

“Don’t I?” he asked angrily. With the toe of one boot he kicked at the nearer side of Ian’s circle, erasing the chalk line. “Damn it, man! This isn’t some primitive tribe in need of a shaman, but a colony in desperate need of unity! I have enough trouble from the outside without having to guard against my own people—”

“And how many more deaths can you absorb?” the botanist demanded. “You know as well as I do that the death rate is increasing geometrically. How many more nights does this colony have before it loses the numbers it needs to maintain a viable gene pool?”

“Two Terran months,” he answered gruffly. “But we’ll learn how to fight these creatures. We’ll learn how to—”

“Erna will create new ones as fast as you destroy the old! And if you learn to kill one kind, then the next will be different. Don’t you see, Leo, it’s the planet you’re fighting, the planet itself! Some force that controls the local ecosphere, keeping everything in balance. It doesn’t know how to absorb us. It doesn’t know how to connect. But it’s going to keep trying.” With a shaking hand he brushed back a lock of hair from his eyes; it fell back down almost immediately. “Leo, this planet was perfect. No drought, no famine, no cycles of surfeit and starvation like there are on Earth . . . think of it! A whole ecology in utter harmony—a true Eden. And then we came. And threatened that harmony by our very presence—”

“And you think these rituals will change all that?” Case asked harshly.

“I think they’ll give us a tool. A means of communication. That’s the challenge, don’t you see? We have to impress the power here with Terran symbology, so that we have some way to reach out to it. To control it, Leo! If we don’t manage that, then we may as well pack it in here and now. Because all our technology won’t stop it from killing, when it controls the very laws of nature.”

“So you answer it with more killing? Feed it blood—”

“Sacrifice is the most ancient and powerful symbol we have,” Ian told him. “Think of it! When primitive man sought to placate his dieties, it was that blood of his own kind that he burned on the altar. When the God of the Jews decided to test Abraham’s faith, it was the sacrifice of his own flesh and blood that He demanded. Moses saved his people from the Angel of Death by smearing the blood of animals on their doorposts. And when God reached out His Hand to man with His message of divine forgiveness, He created a Son of His Own Substance to serve as a sacrificial offering. Sacrifice is a bridge between man and the Infinite—and it can work for us here, Leo. In time it can end the killings. I believe that.” When Case made no response, he added desperately, “You can’t understand—”

“I understand,” Case said quietly. “All too well.” He gestured with the gun. “Move away from the tram.”

“You can’t stop it now. The offer’s been made. The sacrifice—”

“Is canceled, here and now. Move back from the tram.”

For a moment Ian just stared at him; comprehension dawned at last. “You thought I was going to kill them,” he whispered hoarsely. Incredulously. “You thought I would kill my own people—”

“What the hell was I supposed to think?” Case snapped.

“You took them from the camp. You dedicated a sacrifice, then came at them with a knife. You tell me what conclusions to draw from that!”

The botanist opened his hand; the knife fell beside his feet. “I was going to cut them loose,” he said. “I brought them here so they wouldn’t get hurt . . . Commander.”

Case shook his head sharply. “You forget that we were here. We heard you. I give you the lifeblood of Terra-”

He stopped. Stared. Through the eyes of a man, into the madness that lay beyond.

And he knew.

He knew.

Oh, my God . . .

The sky to the east filled with light, with fire; he wheeled about to face the source of it, and the sound and the force of the explosion knocked the breath from his body as they struck. Flames were roaring upward from a point some five miles east of them, lighting the sky with a reflected blaze a thousand times brighter than lightning. He staggered back in despair as the hot wind buffeted him, laden with the smell of burning. “You fool!” he hissed. “You goddamn fool!”

The ship. He could see it in his mind’s eye, not the proud ceramic shell of their landing capsule but a ravaged, blackened husk, a cloud of shrapnel and ash where there had once been a wealth of computerware, lab equipment, bio-storage . . . and at the foot of the flames a sea of hot slag, a molten lake which was quickly dissolving all their hopes and their memories and their dreams . . . all their heritage. All gone now. All gone.

Eyes squeezing forth hot tears, he managed to regain his feet. A burning dust had begun to fall, fragments of metal and plastic charred black by that terrible fire. He shielded his eyes with one hand so that he could see where Ian Casca knelt—his hands clasped as if in prayer, a look of terrible ecstasy on his face—then he brought his gun hard about and fired. Once, twice, as many times as there were bullets, until the trigger clicked futilely against an empty chamber. And even then he kept firing. The fury in him had a life of its own, and even the sight of Ian’s chest and skull peppered with bloody holes could not quell the storm of despair that was raging inside him.

At last it was Lise who took hold of his arm, who forced the gun from his shaking fingers. Her yellow hair was dusted with ash, and blood smeared one cheek where a chunk of debris had struck her.

“We’ve lost it,” he whispered hoarsely. “We’ve lost it all. You realize that. Everything we had . . .”

Ever the pragmatist, she whispered, “We still have the settlement. A few trams. Two generators—”

He shook his head. “Won’t last. Can’t repair them. Oh, my God, Lise . . .” His hands were shaking. A cinder fell to the ground before him, extinguishing itself on the damp soil. He struggled to think clearly, to plan. Wasn’t that his duty? “We’ll have to record what we can. All the data we can come up with . . . before people forget. Put it down on paper, write down everything we know—”

“They won’t want to do that.” She said it quietly, but he knew as soon as she spoke the words that they were true. “They’ll want weapons first. Security. They won’t want to waste time recording dead facts when there are things out there waiting to eat them.”

“It isn’t a waste—”

“I know that. You know that. But will they understand?”

He shut his eyes. The sound of the explosion pounded in his brain, a heartbeat of loss. “Then we’ll lose everything we have,” he whispered. “Everything we are.”

There was nothing she could say to that. Nothing she could do but hold on to him, while the sky filled with the black ash of their dreams. The fallout of Casca’s sacrifice, the last shattered remnants of their Terran heritage.

In the firelight it looked a lot like blood.