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  Two large, wide-bodied machines landed first. Hatches sprung open and armoured soldiers flooded out, forming lines in front of the two small buildings beside the airfield gate. The remaining three craft, smaller and sleeker in appearance, hovered above the field for a few minutes before settling beside their larger companions.

  Three workers stepped from the door of the office. Echo's heart skipped a beat; before the men could take a step further, the new arrivals cut them down with laser fire. Only then did she comprehend: the colony was under attack, not by humans, but by alien invaders.

  The teachers in the school had often mentioned the Tolleani, the only other intelligent species encountered by humanity. Everyone knew about the war, but rarely spoke of it. The Federation fleet had stationed several warships on Corros in case, but nobody expected the aliens to bother about a place this far off the space lanes, and so far from the tollean home worlds.

  Lines of soldiers now stood on the tarmac. A handful of individuals broke away to search the hangers, while another small group stepped over the bodies of the slain men and entered the airfield office. Seconds later, they emerged and moved around to the smaller barracks. Echo knew it would be empty; only the crews of the cargo transporters used that building, when they arrived once a month to take away the ore.

  The bulk of the troops turned and marched through the gate into the compound, a third of their number continuing on to the town beyond. The remainder scattered through the works buildings and over towards the mine entrance.

  The day had descended into nightmare! A dull thump, the sound of her heart beating as the blood pounded in her temples, reverberated through Echo's head. Lasers flashed, and someone too distant to identify fell to the ground on the mine apron. With a subconscious swipe of a hand, Echo wiped away the tears streaming from her eyes. It was clear the invaders intended to murder everyone in the settlement, including her family and friends.

  On the tarmac below, a tall, thin alien jumped down from one of the smaller ships. Something, a defined arrogance in his stance, marked him as an officer. He wore armour, but different to that of the ones routing the township. This, Echo thought, must be the leader of the force.

  He paused for a moment beneath his ship, looked around and then strolled across to the gate. Minutes later, Echo saw him again on the concourse near her father's office. New movement caught her attention as two soldiers dragged a man in front of the commander.

  Father!

  Despite the distance, her father was easy to identify by his bright red shirt. He argued with the tollean officer, who stood motionless without responding. Without warning, the alien raised a pistol and shot his legs from beneath him. Echo stiffled a scream as he collapsed to the ground: she knew instinctively the soldiers around the hangers were close enough to hear her.

  Her body shaking uncontrollably, she pushed back from the lip of the outflow and swam to the back of the pool. Grabbing her clothes, she dressed and then picked a way down the streambed.

  Thirty metres further on she hesitated. The alien task force numbered at least one hundred soldiers, all heavily armed. Without a weapon, and with no chance of getting one, the odds that she, a seventeen-year-old girl, could do anything to stop or hinder them was not worth considering. If she went home, she would die. Home was no longer an option!

  Sitting on a rock, she wiped away the constant tears and began to examine her alternatives. “When in doubt, hide,” her father always taught. “You lose a few minutes of your day, but if something's amiss you get time to think before you react.” Turning aside, she scrambled into the thick brush at the back of the watercourse.

  Far in under the trees, she crawled into a small water-worn cavity in the face of a limestone outcrop. The rock shielded her from detection from above, but she was still close enough to hear when the aliens left. Curled up against the cool stone she closed her eyes, sobbing so hard her lungs hurt. She tried desperately to control the shaking of her body, and waited for the sound of the ships.

  * * * * *

  Barbus Koll lifted his craft from the airfield and began a slow grid search, one eye fixed on the readout from the heat detector. He wondered why he bothered. The detectors could not locate a human inside the mine – not that there was anyone left alive down there – and the insulation in many of the structures interfered with the readings. In many places, the device was useless, overloaded by the presence of nearby burning buildings. Most of the bodies still showed traces of a signature, but there was no movement.

  None of it worried him in the slightest. The men had picked through each building, checked under the floors and above the ceilings. He was sure every human was dead.

  Almost satisfied, he commenced a circuit of the outer edges of the valley, searching for survivors hidden in the surrounding forest. Ten minutes later, he gave up. The job was complete, and the mine, in accord with standard tollean policy, remained intact, in case of need by the Empire at some future time.

  Chapter 02

  Everywhere Echo turned, she heard only silence, bar the whispering of the long awaited breeze. Even the animals in the distant field had gone quiet. Nothing moved, and bodies lay scattered on the concourse. This was a massacre, not an attack, she thought, shuffling from the airfield gate towards her father's office.

  How long she huddled at the back of the hollow she did not know, but eventually the roar of the ships warned her the invaders were leaving. The high-pitched whine of one of the smaller craft remained, growing softer, then louder, until at one stage it was overhead. That also faded in time, leaving only the sound of her sobbing.

  Slowly, willing her rebellious legs to take a step at a time, she approached the body on the ground outside the mine office. It was indeed her father, the man she idolised, who had raised her with the love and devotion found only between father and daughter.

  He was a massive man, but kind and gentle. Never in memory had a hand been raised in anger against her, her brother, or her mother. He loved them all without reservation, and Echo adored him in return.

  On occasional trips to an old mining hut deep in the nearby mountain gorges, he taught her how to survive and live off the land, not an easy task on an alien world. Echo never understood why, but she had been happy to spend the time alone with him regardless. She suspected he had always wanted her to be a boy!

  From him she learned how to defend herself and rely on her own resources. The knowledge had never been needed; the mere thought of what he would do to any man who touched his little girl served to keep her safe in this community. He was – had been – her favourite human being. Now he was gone.

  Echo took another swipe at the tears that stung her eyes, took a deep breath and glanced down. The man was heavy. Burying him would not be easy, but she would find a way. Several other bodies lay nearby and she expected more would be inside the buildings. She could not bury them all.

  In the past, she had been into the workings with her father, but she did not know her way around alone, and the tunnels were dangerous. They frightened her. Any bodies there would remain untouched, the mine their tomb.

  The breeze began to pick up, dropping the humidity to a tolerable level. As Echo walked along the dirt road to the town, she almost convinced herself it was a normal spring afternoon. Only faint wisps of smoke rising from a handful of burnt buildings betrayed the reality of what had happened.

  The village resembled the compound. Bodies lay where they fell and a deathly silence hung over the once happy and bustling little community. Echo forced herself to ignore the horrors as she headed towards her house. Father taught her to be strong, and now she was determined to live up to his teachings.

  On the way home, she walked by the school, her eyes finding only death and carnage as she passed. She would not search for her brother yet; if he were alive, he would be home. If not –

  There was no trace of him in the old homestead. Echo’s mother lay in the front room, silent and alone; Echo could do nothing but sit on the verand
a, numbed by shock, her world awash in denial.

  Rescue must surely arrive within the next few days. The ore carriers arrived every month, so they would be on their way now. Considering the distance between Corros and the primary worlds, they would not be aware of the attack, and so would continue to come!

  For hours, she sat on a slippery-slide to despair, her thoughts in turmoil, her chest aching from the wracking of her misery. Then, remembering her father’s words, she jumped to her feet, heaved a deep sigh and wiped the hair from her eyes. Shaking her arms and legs to drive away the numbness, she stepped down to the yard. There was work to do, and anything was better than dwelling on hopelessness.

  Survival would be a concern for at least a short time, and a way had to be found to defend herself. If the attackers returned, she would not make the job easy for them. The colony possessed few weapons, but old mister Bennett owned an antique pistol, and there was a laser rifle in her father’s office.

  The bodies in the settlement needed attention. In the hot sun, they would soon begin to deteriorate. On this world, disease did not concern Echo. With the artificial immunities given all colonists, nothing here could harm her, but decomposition would be a problem.

  Besides, leaving them where they lay was somehow improper; they deserved some kind of closure. Set on her first task, she walked around the house to the storage shed, and fetched a shovel and hoe.

  Digging was hard in the heat of the day, but Echo forced herself to keep working until the hole in the garden looked adequate. Perhaps it was not quite deep enough. It might have been a little longer for her father. It was not as wide as she would like, but it would serve.

  She found her brother in the schoolyard. Teachers and children lay in small knots where the staff and some of the older students tried to protect the younger ones. Their attempts had been in vain. All were dead!

  By one mangled body, she paused and collapsed to the ground, her vision blurring as her emotions surged once again. It was obvious that Jonathon, the only boy she had ever been close to, had attempted to fight back, and the attackers had cut him to pieces. For a moment guilt wracked her mind, and anger that she had not been here to help. Then she realised the truth: if she had, she would be laying beside him.

  Determined to push on with her plan of action, she retrieved a canvas tarp from the school workshop and wrapped her baby brother's remains before taking him home.

  Father was a different matter. Echo accepted he would be difficult to move, but the compound, filled with machinery, soon offered a solution, a gravel-loader stored in a garage behind the workshops. Small enough for her to handle, it had a bucket scoop at the front to carry her father. All she needed was the key. It took only minutes to find the right set, on a rack in the operations office.

  The problems began when she turned the ignition. Never having driven a tracked vehicle before, or any with levers instead of a steering wheel, her first attempt to move the machine demolished the back wall of the shed. As she manoeuvred forward, the doorway connected with the corner of the scoop, collapsing the frame onto the cab of the loader and causing almost terminal damage to the structure.

  Once outside the ruined building, Echo spent fifteen minutes driving around the yard, backing up, turning, and learning which levers raised, lowered and tilted the scoop. Satisfied that she would not kill herself, she drove out to the concourse and lined the loader up with her father's body, then tilted and lowered the scoop flat on the ground. Slowly and with great care, she rolled her father into the bucket, then raised it and drove the machine towards the town.

  The following morning Echo sat outside the homestead drinking a glass of fruit juice, and contemplated her next course of action. Her chest still ached, but the tears were gone, replaced by a grim determination. Overnight, her mind had become colder, faced with the grim reality that she was now alone, possibly the only human left on Corros.

  The previous evening she had buried her father, mother and brother together in the garden, planting three rough grave-markers at their heads. Over the disturbed soil, she laid rocks stolen from the garden borders and roadway edges. The result did not satisfy, but exhausted as she was from a long, sleepless night of tossing, turning and tears, nothing would.

  Later in the morning, she used the loader to take Jonathon’s remains to his home where she buried him with his mother. Of his father she found no trace; the man was a shaft worker, and was almost certainly somewhere below ground.

  The townspeople were next on her mental agenda. Originally, she intended to use the loader to dig a mass grave, but the experience of the previous day proved that impractical. Designed to carry loose fill, the scoop dug poorly, undoubtedly as much through lack of operator skill as the abilities of the machine.

  It was impossible to bury everyone by hand, and for the rest cremation was the simplest alternative. With the loader, she cleared the village center as much as possible and built a pyre in the square, setting the piled bodies ablaze with fuel from the workshops. Her mind still cold from shock, she no longer acknowledged the horror of death; it was just cordwood, not the friends with whom she had grown up. Unable to bear watching the flames, she left the pyre to its own devices and moved on.

  The remaining victims, including those from the houses nearest home, she collected and placed into piles on the roadways, again using tractor fuel to burn them. No doubt, she had overlooked many of her fellow villagers: a scattering of buildings lay beyond the perimeter, and there would be workers in the fields.

  The remains of the fires would be obvious if the aliens returned, but that did not concern her. In that event, she would not survive anyway, and at least she had given her people some closure.

  The next day, noises from the stockyards alerted her to a problem she had not considered. Bellows of pain reached her ears as she ran towards the dairy. The cattle on Corros were hybrids adapted to digest the alien, grass-like vegetation on this world and produce vast quantities of milk. Dependent on humans, they required milking twice daily and now the pressure building in their udders from several days of inattention was causing them pain.

  At first Echo thought to milk them – like almost everybody in the colony she knew how – but then realised the impracticality of attending to fifty cows on her own. Soon she would be either leaving or dead, and nobody would tend to them when she was gone. The alternative horrified her.

  A short while later she returned, the laser rifle from her father’s office under her arm. Thirty petrifying minutes more and the distressed creatures lay dead. Echo returned to the veranda of the house, wondering if the dairy was far enough away to leave the carcases where they lay. If the smell became a problem, she would just burn the milking shed.

  Drained from her efforts, she felt something inside her had died. Those cows were her favourites of all the farm animals, but her action was the only one possible under the circumstances.

  Over the next few days, she dealt with the other animals. The beef cattle, pigs and goats, she released from their pens and paddocks, excepting a small number kept in case of emergencies. The chickens, ducks and turkeys also went free, again with a handful of exceptions. Echo knew the town had enough stored food to keep her alive indefinitely, but there was always a marginal chance that rescue would be longer in coming than expected.

  Several days after the attack, satisfied she had done her best, she settled down to wait. Only then did the possibility she was the sole human alive on the entire planet hit her with full force. The thought overwhelmed her. A ship had to come soon!

  * * * * *

  Three years later.

  Base Coordinator Koll kicked a boot into the hard gravel and cursed loud enough to startle Under Leader Brask, his second in command. The place was unchanged, the buildings a little run down with lack of maintenance over the years but still serviceable with some work.

  In the transport ship above, a scientific team even now prepared to descend to the surface of Corros, their mission being to use this
old human base for the development of weapons intended to end the war, and the human problem, for good. The research was extraordinarily dangerous, so military command dared not locate it on any of the inhabited tollean worlds for fear of political repercussions.

  The compromise was to put it somewhere accidents would not matter, and inevitably, this world, not far from the newest and biggest tollean base in this sector, was chosen. The work was also an outside chance, and Command did not intend to waste its best men on something that might never produce a useable return. A military contingent of officers and men considered dispensable would support and protect the scientists. The word 'dispensable' made Koll livid.

  The order to return here came as a complete shock. Koll's career had gone well until the fateful day he insulted and upset a superior officer. A momentary loss of control, a moment when the difference between the way he was treated and the way he thought he ought to be, blossomed into an indiscretion destined to limit his future prospects forever.

  An unexpected promotion came the next week, followed by assignment to the position of coordinator in the most out-of-the-way hole in the galaxy. Forced to leave his wife and children – he would never expose them to a hellish place like this – he was nursemaid to the researchers. There was no glory here, and no future. With luck, the fools would complete their work quickly, so he could get back to the war, and a better posting.

  On arrival, Koll ordered the disposal of the human bodies left here three years ago. There would be little remaining, but for reasons of morale if nothing else it still needed dealing with, at least from the compound area.

  Skeletons filled the underground workings, but other areas were clear. Here and there, scorch marks from fires told the story, the ash now washed away by the constant and oft-times heavy rains of this planet.