March of the Monsters
Amber's call
Sast brought the birds. She was good with birds, they were rattled but quiet as she released them into the run along the back wall. Small but reliable layers we thought they would be worth the mess.
Em brought the pantry supplies, grain, canned foods, dried meat, tubers and gas. Food that would last and basic cooking kit. Wok and bowls. The food stocks, ammunition and batteries lined one wall with the bedding lofted and living space underneath. Nin brought blankets. It was getting hot during the day now, but the nights were still chilled up here on the ranges. Vee was hooking up the header tanks and pump to the bunker plumbing.
I was out opening the gates and cutting fences for the herd of brindled Kel so they could run if they needed to. They skirted around the fenceline in a tight pack, not sure of the new opportunity or the land beyond. Dust storms striped the western sky. Amber, the second moon was crossing overhead, close and fast this time of year. Her pull bringing the tides high and rumored to be a factor in the migration of the Ovine Mesh. The Mesh was always a concern in Spring as they headed for the salt pans, but when Amber crosses overhead in Spring we bunker down. We were a small outpost doing quite well, but with no interest in risking our lives. Other teams had been lost, there was no point in joining them just for the sake of bravado.
I made my way back across the winter brush towards the bunker set into the western face of our ring of hills. The homestead was shuttered and quiet. All the clutter which hung about the verandahs was locked away, stacked into the main hall. All bar the big old prayer wheel which spun slowly, creaking and singing into the wind near Para's aerials, more of a scarecrow than an item of faith with the current team, but a familiar landmark nevertheless. The garden looked new and tender, spring shoots just breaking the surface. I wondered how much of it would be there when we surfaced.
Nin and I were gardening when we first heard the noise two days ago. Rumbling and cracking of timber in the east. The lead beasts calling across the miles to each other hungry for feed and salt. It was hard to imagine those massive flocks on the move, and having seen the damage at other stations I wasn't keen to have a front row seat this time either.
We were packed in, heavy steel clad doors waiting overhead. Para sat in the front corner with his microframe cluster head, fine tuning his latest aerials. He had a theory about the comms they used. A mast with a vertical colinear array stood against the sheer face of the northern ridge. A translator hummed away in an access pit at the base of the mast. Its cabling fed into well drained and heated armoured pipes running back to the bunker. Helical turbines whirred, charging the battery banks and powering the sensor arrays and the microframes. Building QRP comms was Para's speciality. One of those lucky people who's hobbies and work aligned, he was quietly happy managing checksums, finding patterns, uncrypting and decyphering. His bunk lined with books and references, some biographies of the old fox hole radio opers from Earth.
He sent a last transmission off to Gobi. The inter-planet radio comms used phased microwave arrays. This early in Spring he had to aim through the thinner patches in the heavy ionosphere, often bouncing off one of the moons to get a clear trajectory on the regional centre.
Locked down, we all settled in, fine tuning the packing and digging out the last of the winter reports and mending to keep our hands busy. Vee cracked jokes about Earth nations which lived on the sheep's back and wondered if we should export. The rest of us were quiet, listening, waiting.
Night fell, Pushna set northeast, Amber shadowing on her southern side as she hugged close overhead. We could hear them call again now. Their march reverberated through the ground.
Para had been researching the Mesh the previous Spring. He explained how the lead beasts, maned and with with yellow eyes, would step out, the green eyed followers in the clan responding to the yellow frequency. The Mesh was formed by the yellow beasts communicating with each other, creating a moving fabric of hungry thunder. Mainly herbivorous, they hankered for salt in the spring, taking out any other creatures which did not respond to their comms. Para described the ambush of a herd of Kel, their horns useless against the thick fleecy hides, quickly trampled into a bloody saltlick.
The thunder moved closer, we could hear trees crack and animals flee over our heads. I hoped our Kel were long gone.
Para was still typing. Somehow he had rigged up the old prayer wheel so that he could adjust its frequency by modding the output of the oscillators that were down in the bunker. We watched the video feed from the homestead as he keyed in the Yellow Mesh data and hit send. The wheel started slowly but we could hear it creak and whine into action, the feed horns started to sing as the oscillators warmed up. The gentle glow from the ancient glass enclosed amplifiers gave the wheel a ghoulish appearance.
We coudn't hear the transmission but the Yellow Mesh certainly could, an earsplitting call repeated across the hills, we could hear their anger and confusion as they tried to make sense of this foreign pattern jamming the yellow frequency. The yellow beasts fell mute, listening. The green beasts milled, stressed and confused, and finally angry. Their collective sweat maddened them and they attacked the silent leaders, taking down their mesh in a crush of heavy horns. The green pods drank, blood spattered and wild eyed. Dawn saw them standing around processing election data to choose new yellow leaders and reorient themselves.
Para was asleep against the microframes. Nin had thrown a blanket over him. We waited.
Thanks to adhoc