Author: R. J. Erbacher
I came out of the ship carrying equipment and my sightline went up to the base of the hill we had landed next to. The preacher was standing there, looking down at the captain. Captain Lane was crushed under a boulder the size of a compact car. The preacher’s stare came up to meet my eyes and I saw the apathy of a blind statue.
Dropping the container I was holding, I charged in that direction. He calmly turned and jogged up into the heights. It took me maybe fifteen seconds to reach the spot where the captain was lying. He was dead, the rock having crushed everything below his shoulder blades. The area around his head was splattered with what must have been a fountain of expelled blood. The massive stone could not have been lifted by one man, maybe not even ten men, and it could not have fallen off anything as there was nothing above it. I only hesitated a few moments before continuing the chase.
I was the Load Specialist of a five-person team that was sent to this planet to investigate its mining potential. Somehow, Dr. Sayer, a hierarchy for the God of Gaps, managed to weasel passage on the trip as well, through his powerful contacts. He was supposed to be a religious ambassador. To who, we wondered? This place was believed to be uninhabited, though not yet confirmed. Throughout the whole journey, the rhetoric of his dialogue with us was about the miracles his deity could perform. Quelling storms, healing the lame, vanquishing enemies of his faith. Possibly moving boulders?
I followed the tracks his boots made in the dust, turning indiscriminately as he ascended the mountain. And then suddenly there were no more. It was as if a strong wind had swept the imprints away. Or he had inexplicably been lifted off the ground. I searched in every direction. There was only an opening up ahead. I cautiously went that way.
Over the decades, the religious order had diminished in popularity and fellowship, as more of the earth’s mysteries were solved by science. But with the advent of hyper-space travel and the discovery of habitable planets in the last century, renewed optimism had caused a resurgence in the faith of the masses. ‘He was the creator of all worlds.’ Dr. Sayer seemed to be the leadman on that front. Yet a discovery of intelligent life in another star system could derail the fragile theology permanently.
The first crew member to die was our science administrator and co-captain, Lieutenant Mason. He never made it out of hibernation. Somehow a toxin leaked into his oxygen line that our engineer explained should not have been able to happen. Mason was set to substantiate the prospect of life on the planet. This close to our destination it was determined that the voyage would go on. Then, a week later Nancy Singh, the world’s foremost astrogeologist, was found dead in her room, apparently from a suicide. There was no note, no medical history even hinting that she had a psychological problem and before she retired to her quarters, she talked about how enthusiastic she was to see the new planet. There was, however, documentation that she had rebuffed Dr. Sayer’s advances on several occasions. And finally, as we were orbiting the planet to descend, an antenna had been dislodged and had to be reconnected by our engineer Chambers before it was lost in the landing. While outside on the EVA something pierced Chambers’ spacesuit that came from the direction of the ship at a high velocity. He tumbled off into endless space. The cameras could not pick up what the object was or where it came from. We were instructed by mission control to land, deploy the surveying instruments and return immediately. Captain Lane was killed even before we were finished unloading.
As I entered the clearing, I came to the edge of a precipice. Standing on the other side, across a gorge of about twenty-five to thirty meters was the preacher. I scanned for any way that he could have traversed the distance but there was no bridge, no vines, nothing. Dr. Sayer stood there, his arms raised in supplication as he loudly voiced a prayer up to the sky, claiming that he had been the conveyance of the pious purpose to this mission.
I pulled out my pistol and shot him in the chest. He fell the distance off the cliff and crumpled below into a mangled lump of human.
I guess his god didn’t see that coming.