The Nature of the Beast

'Have you found anything yet?' whispered Captain Lay-Hoc Barr into his transceiver 

'No sir.' 

'Well get a move on. I want to be out of here as soon as possible.' He almost added 'it gives me the creeps' but desisted. 

Around him the city radiated, like no city he'd ever been to in the known Universes. It held an awesome unnatural beauty that had been grasped in the minds of its designers and somehow thrust into reality. Huge ramping silver buildings rose dizzyingly into the air around him, their cracked mirrored faces glowing red in the late afternoon sun. Elegant, marble strewn squares abounded, surrounded by graceful colonnaded gardens run riot with wild flowers. Languid blue lakes that were once filled with glistening azure waters now crowded with tangles of overgrown lilies buzzing with insects.  

This was almost the fabled Shangri La of the legends of his home world. 

Almost. 

The teams had almost completed the laying out of the regenerators in the ivy covered square in front of the Captain. Each of the four great machines had been carefully levied out of the ship under the watchful eye of the chief engineer and situated at each corner of the worn flagstone arena. 

The regenerator operator looked up and called hoarsely across to him, 'Captain?' 

'Nothing yet.' 

The ships crew sat on the steps around the Captain waiting, in a silence so loud it almost hurt the ears. 

'What do you think killed them all?' Lieutenant Ug-Ga had sidled up to him. 

'If we get a sample we can find out.' 

'Got something. Not much. It might do,' the transceiver on the Captains wrist crackled. 

'Bring it over, we're ready.'

The technician studied the sample; it was not much of a sample. Every biological remnant they had found so far had decayed beyond regenerator use. The doctor had placed it carefully in his specimen bot with a warning; 'You've got just one chance on this, we'll be lucky to find another.'  

The technician carefully placed the sample at the squares centre and retired to a safe distance before powering up the main generator. The regenerators hummed and crackled. The technician attentively tapped the dials and checked his documentation was all in order. Regeneration was a dangerous thing. He could not afford to make any mistakes.  

For a few moments they waited apprehensively for the process to complete. 

The technician leaned forward and pensively peered into the cloud of chemicals thrown up by the regeneration. 'It's done.' 

When the mist cleared they could see her. She was small, delicately framed with a shock of blond hair. The dissipating cloud gave her a strange ethereal air, as if she had arisen from a mist covered lake on a cold spring morning. 

She appeared not to notice her nakedness and stood silently gazing out at them. 

The technician checked his watch and called out, 'Sixty.' 

The guard by each regenerator drew their blaster. The technician adjusted the translator. 

The captain stepped forward and called across the open square, 'What happed here?' 

She looked up, her voice calm and controlled. 'Dead. Everyone.'  

'How?' 

'It was long ago.' 

'We know. We can see. Look around you. What happened?' 

'Fifty.' 

She looked around, 'It came. From up there.' She pointed to their ship hovering above the city. 

'Forty.'  

'What did? What came?' 

'Where are you from?' 

'Just answer the question. What came?' 

'Thirty.' 

'Are you going to kill me?' 

'Twenty.' The guards levelled their blasters. 

'If you want to help us, answer the questions.' 

'Ten.' shouted the technician. 'Ready.' 

'I want to help.' she called wiping the tears from her eyes, 'You need to know otherwise it will come to your planet and the same will happen to you. Show me some compassion. I will help you.' 

'Stop, don't fire!' yelled the Captain waving his hand at the guards.

Of course it was against Command instructions not to have killed her. The dangers of re-animating something long since dead were well known. The accident on Rah Nine was testament to that. The Captain knew that but it was his responsibility, no one else's and he would be held accountable for it. He would probably lose the command of his ship but that would be worth it if one day he could save his race. 

Not that any of the crew apart from the regenerator technician objected. They were held in awe of her, almost beholden to her. Her radiant beauty held a strangeness borne from her race that captured their feelings. The problems he'd expected from bringing a single female back on such a long trip home in a star ship packed with male crew did not materialise. They were captivated by her, her presence bought a strange calm amongst the crew that in all his time as a serving officer he had not experienced on a star ship. Possibly it was out of respect to what had happened to her people on the planet that they allowed her to move freely amongst them as they went about their work. She in return went out of her way to talk to them and be interested in them, their jobs, the ship, and their families back home.  

The trip back had been unusually uneventful he was pleased to report to Command.  

     ****

'We are almost home,' he remarked uncorking the bottle. 

'Your home, yes,' she smiled briefly and put down her glass. 

'Our Senate are waiting to hear what happened on your planet.' The captain topped up her glass. 

She put her hand over his. 'Captain I want to say how grateful I am, for not killing me that day. Tomorrow I will address your Leaders and let them know what happened. That was our bargain. Then I will go home.' 

'To what?' he twined his fingers around hers. 'Why not stay ...with me.' 

'I can't Captain. It's not possible.' 

'Why not?' 

She sighed, a far off sigh. 'Captain I'm going to tell you now. So you know before tomorrow. It will be easier, for both of us.' She swept her golden hair away with one hand and carefully took her hand from his and folded hers together across her lap. 

'The city you came to was like all the cities on the planet. We had evolved to a point most civilisations could only dream of. Once, we had reached out to the stars and found all we wanted, all we craved. Or so we thought. We had drunk and drunk of all the knowledge we could consume, our thirst was insatiable. We saw that we had become bloated, ever greedy for more, constantly hungry, never satisfied. It was a moment of triumph for us, this revelation. We recalled our star ships and decommissioned them. We bent our minds to how we could live together happily, as one. And after time we succeeded. For all the things we dreamed of came to fruition. We built our beautiful cities, parks and lakes and our hearts soared with the realisation of what we had done. No hunger, no disease, no strife. And that bought peace to our race and our people's minds. We had reached our zenith. We were, in a word Captain, 'content.''  

'It's what we may all hope to achieve, one day,' nodded the Captain. 

'Exactly. It was our Nirvana.' She raised one delicate hand and rotated the glass stem in her long elegant fingers and pointed through the star viewer. 'Then, one day, it came from out there, space. A ship we did not recognise. It was sharp, elongated and foreign to us, like a shard of glass. We had long since stopped traversing the stars, what was the point? We had everything we wanted. We checked our records to see if we could understand its origin.' 

And?' 

'Our records showed nothing. We concluded it had come from a long way off, way beyond the galaxies we had once explored.' 

'Why did you allow it to land?' 

'It was small. It seemed harmless.' 

'But still.' 

'But still Captain, we had some weapons in our museums. They were still operable. We had them, just in case.' For a moment she seemed to drift off into her memories. 

'So you allowed it to land,' the Captain prompted. 

'Yes, and to our surprise this alien Star- ship had just a single occupant. A child.'  

'A child. How was that?' 

'Yes you're right, how could a child have come to us across the vast reaches of space, alone, unguided. To us it seemed harmless, this child.' 

'Where was it from?'  

'We asked it where it came from, it said it could not remember. It, she. She called herself Sha-Raga-Neg. She was like us, humanoid, sensitive, caring, gentle.' 

'So what happened?' 

'Nothing, nothing for a while. She lived with us. We allowed her to go to our schools, gave her accommodation.' 

'And then?' 

'The form it chose, the child. It was a form which had beguiled us. We let it wonder among us, it represented no threat. Or so we thought. All the time it was watching, learning. When it was ready, it began.' 

'What did she, it do?' 

'People began dying, in the city where it lived. At first we thought it was a disease, but it travelled so fast we were unable to do anything or understand anything about its cause.' 

'The girl?' 

'Within days our cities were falling. Our great metropolis filled with the dead, cause unknown.' 

Then we realised it was her, she alone had survived to be transported by our caring society from one city to another only to consume its inhabitants.' 

'But how?' 

'Something in her was unleashed; it spread amongst our people like an infection but worse. It led them to despair, a despair in her that consumed them all. They killed themselves, driven to it by her.' 

'Suicide? What everyone?' the Captain gasped. 

'A few ships tried to leave but they never left the atmosphere. After a while it seemed pointless even to try.' 

'Could you not stop her, after all it was just one individual. Just a child.' 

'The child was the form it took Captain. But it was much older and wilier than that to have evaded us. A team was sent to kill it, they never returned. Then we who were left despaired. We could not track her movements, billions of our people had died. In our despair we realised we too had become infected and it dawned on us that the situation was hopeless.' 

'When they realised there was nothing they could do, they made a plan with the few hours they had left. A deceitful, horrible, ghastly plan. They destroyed the ship she came in as well as every space ship they had. There were not many, they had not traversed the stars for millennia. If they were to die, she would die too in this planet prison they'd create for her.' 

'They?' the captain sat back confused. 

'And when the last inhabitant died she was left alone to wonder the planet, the Nirvana they'd created would become the hell she was to die in. Countless years she wondered the deserted cities consumed by a haunting loneliness and at her own anger for being so foolish. And when she became old she sat down and watched the sun rising over the deserted crumbling cities that she had created and that had become her tomb. And there she died to be absorbed by the planet and turned to dust.' She paused and looked at the Captain. 'And then one day, quite by chance, a star ship happened by.' 

With one trembling hand the captain unclipped his blaster from his belt under the table. 'How do you know this?' his voice wavered. 

She seemed not to have heard his question. 'In her there was an unquenchable rage Captain, an insatiable urge to kill all living things she came across.'  

'But that meant she would die too, stuck on the planet. Alone.' 

'She needed to, to kill. To kill everything alive that she saw.' 

'But why?' He clicked the safety off his blaster. 

'Why? There is no 'why 'Captain. That is the nature of the Beast.' Her voice was suddenly harsh. 

He lifted the blaster to the table and turned it on her. 'I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.' 

'So am I Captain.' 

She watched as he put the blaster to his head and pulled the trigger.  

Then she turned, took a sip of her drink and looked through the star viewer to the green blue planet beyond.  

Such a beautiful planet. So full of people.

.

.

.