As the ship curled through the air, flames dancing around the hull in a scorching ballet of ash and smoke, the loudspeaker crackled into life for the final time.
"All control of the ship has been lost. I repeat, all control has been lost. Brace for impact."
Crumpled together like sandbags on a flood barrier, they huddled close and awaited their fate. In the end, the people on board the shuttle did not have time to brace. They did not have time to say goodbye; to confess things that should have never stayed secret; to consciously be with their wives and husbands and children for their final moments.
They could only hold one-another and weep for their stolen time.
And then, as the rounded body of the ship struck the rock and stone of the blackened Earth, they died.
-------------
Skittering along the rocky outcrop of exposed canyon beneath the hulking wreckage of an old colony freighter, a tired little machine searched for a spark of Light in the endless Darkness. She was old now - even for a Ghost - and her patience and hope were being drawn from dwindling reserves. As she scanned the ground beneath her she felt the presence of a thousand souls, all trapped in a limbo between Dark and Light - destroyed by one, but never abandoned by the other, even after millennia in the dirt. The Ghost pushed her sorrow to the back of her mind. She was not here to mourn the dead - there had been enough of that. She was here on the same quest that she had been following for close to two hundred years now; the search for one spark of Light that was brighter than the others, that cast its glow the farthest and repelled the Darkness with the greatest ferocity. When she found that spark she would use her own Light to revive a being who would assist the last remaining city on Earth in the fight against that same Darkness.
A spark this bright was rare, however. Exceedingly rare. It could only be found within the residue of a soul with the purest of hearts and most selfless of desires. A creature of the kindest disposition. This was what Guardians of the city were made of; the sole want for the amelioration of Earth and the lives of its inhabitants.
The reason she had chosen to search this particular area - an open plain of gravel and shrubs which had been blackened by relentless Arc cannon strikes from Fallen Ketch ships in orbit and scarred by the impact of the crashed ship - was due, morbidly, to the sheer number of deaths that had occurred here as the evacuation freight shuttle had been shot down as it had tried to break orbit. The more people that had perished in an area, the higher the chance was that a Guardian could be found among the wreckage. The Ghost whistled through ancient rusted debris, some shards nearing six storeys, protruding from the ground like thrown knives. She scanned the ground and scrap as she went, picking up signs of Light and of potential subjects for revival.
She was following an old tarmac road towards the centre of the wrecked shuttle; towards the epicentre of death which harboured, ironically though not comedically, the greatest abundance of Light. An old road sign stood, crumpled and torn at the side of the road. The Ghost stopped, distracted by writing that could still be read faintly:
'EDINBURGH 14 MILES'
This meant nothing to her. The city the sign referred to had been annihilated long ago, along with all the rest. She blinked twice, her vibrant green eye glinting in the spitting rain that had just started to fall, and moved on.
As she neared the main body of the ship, a sudden cry rang out in the distance, throaty and terrible to unaccustomed ears. The Ghost stopped dead. This was not what she had planned for. She was confused. Fallen - the fierce, territorial pirates who had led many of the strikes on the Last City since the collapse of the Golden Age - never ventured this far East. She replayed the cry over and over in her mechanical brain and identified it as a scouting party, presumably from the House of Huntsmen; the Fallen House who had claimed rule over most of the large island once known as 'Britain'. She had to hurry. The rain, now coming down in sheets, would mask her movement until the scouts drew close enough to see her through the scopes of their Wire Rifles. This gave her time, but not much. Dimming her eye to avoid glare, her search continued.
YOU ARE READING
Beneath Infinity
Ficção Científica"There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world." - Carl Sagan, 1995. In the distant future - beyond an age of gold, surpassing a dark fate - the soul of a young man is torn from t...
