Chace Randolph

Hello all. New month, means a new update from The Descendant Saga, welcome to Tight Beam, the newsletter for updates on our beloved Sci-fi book series. I have good news and bad news to share before I get to the usual updates, and then after the updates, we get our tasty short story for a little fun.

Good news is, I am now 100% dedicating all my time to the books, the publishing and all that editing and stuff that goes along with it. Bad news is, I am focusing on it now, because I lost my job. I don’t know why. I could guess, some personal issue they had with me, or supply chain issue going to interrupt our work flow until August or something else. Doesn’t matter, I had considered what it would take to for me to focus on my writing full time, and well this is it. The choice was made for me. That being said, I’m going to need everyone’s help and support of my work now more than ever.

Now, for the updates, Nerd-Smith Consolidated and I are making good progress on getting the new publisher set up. They have an EIN and the trade name is registered, and all that’s left is the LLC and then we’ll get printing books. My progress with the audio book has continued steadily too. I have finished editing Chapter 19 and already recorded chapter 20, which has the big climax in it. It’s a long chapter, but there’s not much left after that. There’s 24 chapters in the book and the last 4 combined are about the same length as chapter 20 was, by page count. I already have a beta listener lined up to give the books a dry run for me too. We’re kicking around idea for stickers, t-shirts and other merch ideas to put on the existing Etsy shop (https://nerdsmithconsol.etsy.com) for the book. Altar Of Scales is closer than ever!

Sometimes I despair because there’s not been as many people interested in this as I would have hoped. But those that are here could not be more supportive and have given me the hope to continue with this project. This is my life’s work, and now it’s the only work I have left. We’ll see if it’s enough once I finally get it to market. To those vocal few who have been here since the beginning, since The Descendant with the now defunct Immerser publishing, and all the heartache when the publisher shut down during covid, and the piles of rejections I got as we sought out new agents and publishers and the journey of self publishing, the quasi scam ‘editors’ and now forming my own publishing company, thank you, thank you for your patience, for your support, for your belief in me, and all the hours we’ve spent beta reading all these books. I have a seven complete manuscripts, almost a half million words, and four more books in work. I’ve come far enough we’ll see this through, together, and it will just have to be enough. The dragon has come to roost, and now it’s time to fight.

Now, for this month’s short story. This one is called “Across the Valley” and is an actual cannon event in The Descendant Saga, so take note, and see if you can piece together when in the story it happens.

“Across the Valley”

Max looked out from his post inside bunker number twelve. His eyesight squeezing through the narrow horizontal slit in the wall of his concrete cage, looking out into the green valley beyond. The lush rolling mountain trapped beneath a layer of conifer trees like the rolls of a wrinkled and vegetation coated rug spread out before his eyes. Mist slithered in, filling the bottom of the valley, swept in from the not far off ocean, as the clouds hung low and heavy with their full loads of congealing precipitation. The air itself felt nearly saturated. Max felt as if he were going to drown with every breath. The sunlight stubbornly found its way down through the cloud layer and managed to illuminate the valley well enough that it didn’t feel dreary or tired despite the watery blanket between the ground and the starlight.

Compared to the desert wastes he had come from, these valleys, filled with plants as far as the eye could see, the near-daily rainfall, with soil so dark and rich that it seemed to writhe with a life of its own as fresh growth pushed through the leaf litter, where the birds sang and the small mammals scampered, Max was unsure if it was decadent or heavenly. Perhaps one because of the other.

The beauty and peace always distracted Max from the job he was supposed to be doing. Not more than a week ago, aliens had come to this system. Their seemingly unstoppable march across the galaxy had brought them to this sleepy, lush world. Where Max had been sent to stay out of the fighting. This was supposed to be a backwater planet, far away from the front, isolated enough to be left untouched by the alien’s genocide. Yet they had arrived anyway. They fought the alien fleet in orbit, and after much loss and effort, eradicated. With Sir-Isaac Newton on their side, Max and the rest of humanity managed to fare well enough when fighting the blue devil aliens. The problem now was, some of the wreckage had fallen to the planet’s surface. Among that wreckage was almost certainly an unknown number of these aliens clad in blue armor made of some metal, yet unknown to humanity. The aliens having somehow survived uncontrolled atmospheric entry and now an unknown number of them were loose on the planet’s surface.

That’s where the difficulty lay. On a one-on-one basis, humanity would lose to these aliens. An individual was more than a match for entire battalions of soldiers that were unfortunate enough to call themselves human. Max and his battalion were ordered out to watch posts, spread throughout the mountain range where the wreckage had fallen and now had the job of keeping an eye out for something, whatever that something was.

Many men had already fallen. Found at their posts, slain by the aliens. Many patrols sent out never returned. Never to be seen again. Presumed dead with no bodies ever recovered. The men were terrified. Some whispered plans of desertion, others sat at their posts drenched with cold sweat. No one knew how many of these aliens had made it to the surface. No one was entirely sure what they looked like. There wasn’t even an official name for them. The colloquialism “blue devil” had stuck and now was an unofficially accepted term for the aliens. Come from some illiterate colonists on a forgotten planet.

The aliens never made any attempt at communicating. No one knew what they sounded like, what their spoken language was, if they even had any. No one who had met one had lived to tell the tale. The only visual evidence of their appearances were pictures or glimpses on video. But all were from long distances, or blurry and distorted. There was no clear image of what their foe looked like. Rumors ran rampant amongst the soldiers. If it wasn’t for the billions dead, many orbital colonies vented to vacuum and planets left uninhabitable in the wake of their passing, they could almost be a hoax. With hardly more evidence than the noises, they would saturate most radio channels with upon their arrival. A strange rhythmic pounding noise that was never the same twice. A sort of war song, the soldiers hypothesized.

Max wasn’t afraid, and that only confused everyone else in the platoon even more. He had spent his entire life living in a place where a messy, painful death was liable to descend upon you at any given moment on any given day from any given source. This living in constant fear of a messy and untimely end was not a new phenomenon for him. Instead, he was disappointed with his fellow soldiers. They were supposed to be hardened warriors, trained killers. Space marines with weapons, technology, formal training, medical support, comrades standing shoulder to shoulder with them. Men who knew where their next meal was coming from and didn’t have to go hunt it and kill it themselves. Yet they were still afraid. Afraid of their job, to go forth and fight to defend, to be the protectors of their fellow humans. If these really were the best that humanity could muster, then maybe they really did deserve the constant defeats they were facing. These ‘men’ have lived their lives with such luxury as running water and microwave cooking should have had that much more time to practice their trade as warriors. Yet they were weaklings, both mentally and physically, in Max’s opinion.

Max’s meandering mind was interrupted by the sound of distant gunfire. It erupted from somewhere, splashed across the valley’s steep sides as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint against the walls of foliage. Echoing several times over. His eyes focused in the mist as his mind returned to his body and his concentrated will once again took hold of his motor functions. Another burst of gunfire got him moving. He readied his weapon and made for the concrete shelter’s entrance, emerging from the man-made shadows onto the mountainside, weapon already snugged to his shoulder. Carried on shuffling feet that moved with controlled purpose, his ankles never crossing as his boots scuffed across the concrete. Each movement sharp and precise, like the practiced dance of a cage fighter. Pavel, the soldier stationed out here with him, was a timid fellow at the best of times. He sank to his knees, rifle across his lap, still in the shadows of the little bunker’s doorway. Max’s eyes plied the depths of the forest for answers from inside the structure’s shadow.

He and Pavel were not alone on this watch. The entire company was strewn about the valley. These little bunkers nestled between the trees every few hundred meters, each with two or three soldiers in it. For no one was permitted to fight alone. Shouting in the distance caught Max’s ear, yanking his head around, forcing him to pay attention. These bunkers were arranged to take advantage of the oldest surveying equipment known to humanity. The people. After the battle in space, many of the satellites had been destroyed, and the weather this close to the coast often made it unreasonable to launch aircraft, even unmanned ones, to survey the landscape. Instead, every soldier in the corps got an up-close and intimate experience with the weather, the trees, the cold, the grasping wind and the constant wet.

Another burst of gunfire. This time the sound grabbed hold of Max’s feet and drug him forward, across the slope. It had come from some place closer this time, perhaps from the position of the next team up the valley. His boots hardly audible as Max moved deftly through the deep leaf litter. His heavy footfalls muffled by the mattress of dead pine needles.

As Max closed in on the bunker in the line, his nose struck with the sweet pungent smell of charred meat. A gap in the trees let him find the dark, hunched concrete structure. As he drew closer still, a dark howl gave him pause. Only his eyes moved, shifting rapidly inside his immobile bulk. Searching for something, anything, he wasn’t sure what. A flitter of motion amongst the ferns caught his eye. His head snapped around to track the movement. Seeing something in the distance, he dropped into a crouch, his knees splayed wide, with both heels still firmly planted on the ground as he tucked his weapon up to his shoulder and brought it up, aligning its sights with his eyes. The lense of the optic suddenly magnifying his vision. He spotted a strange, lanky figure. It was far taller than any human. The torso was not any larger than a man’s, but the arms were much longer, nearly as long as Max was tall, the same for its legs. Its movements were smooth and graceful, predatory, but so lanky that it looked like an armored gibbon. Its digitigrade leg looked like they had two knees, the entire body adorned with some dull, smokey blue metal. Its stride was long and bouncing as it slipped into the trees.

As Max watched it, its shape twisted. Its form undulated and warped. It made Max’s stomach turn as the colors squirmed over one another before slipping inside each other and disappearing. His eyes hurt and the tightness of a headache creeped out from behind his eyes and filled the back of his skull like the dark sludge at the bottom of an old coffee cup. His skin tingled with goosebumps and then puckered with a chill. Even though he could no longer see it, he could see the leaf litter shuffling and the ferns bending with the alien’s passing. It was still there, he just couldn’t see it anymore.

He waited, still squatted on his heels, watching the movement in the foliage get farther and farther away. As the motion slipped over the next rise, Max realized he had been holding his breath and he had to gasp for the overdue air. Straining to breathe as quietly as possible in case the thing came back. The world seemed silent now. The birds didn’t sing, the wind dared not to even stir the leaves. He waited minutes longer to make sure the coast was clear. Then he slipped between two young trees and onto the path worn through the leaf litter from the passing of the men’s feet.

He identified the origin of the burning meat smell. One man from this station lay in the leaves just outside the concrete hut. The fabric of his combat vest burned away, the ceramic plates meant for kinetic protection shattered from the extreme heat of the alien weapon applied to his chest. Flash boiling his flesh, explosively burning it away, leaving a hole the size of a football in his chest where his sternum should have been.

Max stopped breathing again. Not wanting the air in his lungs filled with another man. A man he had worked with. He stepped past the fallen inside the bunker. The remains of two more soldiers were strewn about inside. Torn limb from limb and splattered about the interior. It was a mess, worse than Max had seen even back on his planet of origin when hungry reptiles hunted humans out of spite. Another sound brought Max’s head up. His ears perked, and he readied his weapon again as he returned to the doorway. He found Pavel, helmet discarded as he heaved the contents of his stomach onto the side of the trail between the bunkers.

Max scanned the hillside with his eyes, sweeping with the muzzle of his weapon as he went. As Pavel finished and put his helmet back on with pale shaking hands, Max spoke, his gruff voice heavy with sadness and resignation. “We need to call this in. I saw it.”

Pavel nodded slowly, his voice squeaky with terror. “I saw it too, but I don’t know what we will say. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know what I saw.”

Max’s shoulders drooped. “Me neither comrade, me neither.”