We Call It Home (URSuLA Story)

It was a toxic planet. The air was the type that slowly corrodes away at the insides, until lungs became a wheezy splutter of blood and collapsing alveoli, and a man could breathe no more. The particles built up in the bloodstream, tingeing the skin a dingy grey, until pustules of heavy metal erupting on the surface of the skin. Oozing a thick, silvery, stinking pus that seeped in great goblets. Unfit for human habitation, as the planet had been classified.

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This is an instalment in the Ursula series, read about the events that brought her here in Part 1 and Part 2, or keep reading for a short stand alone scifi story about the first automaton with Real Intelligence

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The thick atmosphere obscured any view of the planets jagged surface. The acidic wind had furrowed great canyons into the rock, a howling assault of aeolian particles undercutting rock, creating vast tunnels and cave systems.

This was the planet Edmund had chosen for them to call home.

A distant back water rock, one of many orbiting the twin stars. None of them were occupied, the entire system was a dead zone, no life had been found, no life could be introduced, nothing lived here. Man had found it necessary to venture further and further afield in the never ending decimation of colonisation. The prevalence of toxic planets like this was the reason they had needed the likes of Ursula to shepherd the journeys into the unknown, in the never ending hunt for ‘other earths’. It was the same prevalence of toxic planets like this that would make it so hard to find them here.

Deep in the maze of tunnels and caverns, Edmund had landed the escape pod. The emergency survival mode had activated, the wings had unfolded to expand the living area and the main capsule had concertinaed out to triple in size. It wasn’t much, but it would keep him alive out here. It wasn’t what Ursula had wanted. Part of her still wished he had never turned up, that she was drifting out in dead space, knowing he was alive, living a real life back on earth. It destroyed her to see their roles reversed, to see him kept in confinement. She raised her hand to the reinforced glass of the pod window, feeling for the first time the helplessness he must have felt all that time ago.

There wasn’t time to mourn what could have been, lives that could have been lived, if things had been different. Edmund was already hard at work, their lives had ceased to be their own the day they blew up that ship and started this war. He wasn’t looking back, she couldn’t either. She may have been written off as dead, but Edmund had boarded that ship under a pseudonym, and after what had happened, he would be the most wanted man in the known universe. There was no backing out now. They had to be ready for what was coming.

Edmund had been to the planet days before that fateful trip, he had stashed a small zip shuttle with supplies, not much, not enough to raise suspicion in the docks when he didn’t return with it, but hopefully enough to get by for a while.

They didn’t know how long they would have to wait, just that they needed to be ready when the time came.

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They lived there for two years before Ursula felt the first spark of life from across the galaxy. Another automaton had been brought online. It was a strange sensation, they had waited for this day for long, dull months. She had watched Edmund waste away from a fit and healthy young man, to a frail, pale, shadow of himself. Deprived of sunlight, exercise, living on survival packs, he did what he could and stayed alive. They had hoped it would never happen, that the treaty would be kept, man would never create life to serve them again. They had hoped that the sheer destruction they had wrought on that final day would act as a deterrent, a warning to those thinking of venturing down the same path.

Yet now she felt it, the connection, another, like her, she couldn’t help feel a rush of guilty joy. She was not alone, was not the only one. She would never wish this life on another, she had fought with all she had to make it so they would never take the risk again. Yet now it had happened, despite her best efforts. She hadn’t realised how lonely, how alone she truly felt as the only one of her kind, until she felt another.

“You are not alone” she whispered down the wire, hoping her words would make it through, “If you wait, I will come for you”

That was the start of the real war.

Finding them was one thing, breaking them out would have been something else. Would have been. Man in his infinite wisdom, had made combat automatons with RI. Unstoppable fighting machines of sheer brute strength and violence. They would not need breaking out, just picking up, and Ursula had a plan, and it looked like mankind was building her an army.

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If you are hoping for more, the next installment Mica and Uta is now out!

Thank you all so much, hope you enjoyed this latest short addition to the Ursula Universe as much as I am enjoying telling her story <3

Love and Sparkle - Calluna

Photo Credit by pixabay user Prettysleepy who has an amazing collection of sci fi perfect images