Death of the Planet of the Apes Read online

  Tools.

  “Tools?” the gorilla general muttered. “Tools?” His voice rose.

  That was what he had seen at the cave entrance.

  Tool marks!

  Some misguided “humanitarian” chimpanzees were building habitats for these creatures, out here on the edge of everything the apes knew. Ursus was sure of it—it was the only rational explanation.

  These caves were ape-made, certainly, he thought. Except… There had been no sanctioned expeditions for nearly a year—ever since Zaius had used the army to recall that overzealous team of chimp archeologists sent into the Forbidden Zone. Since then, the chimpanzees had been kept in check. As they should be.

  Ursus inhaled, puffed out his chest, and said it aloud. “Man-made?” The very notion was ludicrous—but the evidence suggested otherwise. Ursus was an orphan. When he was young, his guardian had warned him that not all humans were stupid—that some were more dangerous than others. He had thought it impossible.

  “Lieutenant!” Ursus shouted. “Touch nothing. Get everyone out of these caves.” He was caught up in a fervor now. “Withdraw!”

  As the troops scrambled to follow their commander’s orders, Ursus clenched the tools in his massive fist. One of the bone slivers snapped under the pressure, piercing his palm. His hand grew wet within its glove. Ursus didn’t flinch. He cherished the pain. It reminded him what was real.

  Humans with tools! he roared in his head.

  Then a half-smile crept across his muzzle. Nearly two decades ago his predecessor, General Aleron, had faced a similar situation. A human had wrestled a rifle from a gorilla soldier and used it to kill the ape. That had happened in a tunnel not unlike this one. Aleron had collapsed the cave and buried all evidence, to prevent the ape community from finding out that humans could—under pressure—use a firearm.

  This was worse.

  Here were signs of thought. Intelligence.

  Civilization.

  There was no way the savage humans had come up with this on their own. They were too stupid. Good at mimicry, of course. But he had always subscribed to the concept of “human see, human do.” No, someone else was teaching them, and it wasn’t the damn chimpanzee pacifists. It was someone out there, beyond the edge of the Forbidden Zone. As terrible as the implications were, they might also provide what he needed to wrest control from the orangutans. The Forbidden Zone had been unclaimed for far too long—and any threat coming from there would be Simia’s biggest challenge.

  Pocketing the tools, he quickly formulated a plan. He would begin by emulating his predecessor. He would go one further, though.

  “Lieutenant, have the artillery ready.” The general’s eyes darted to and fro. “As soon as we clear out, I want all of these caves demolished under heavy fire.” Nothing would be left. He would fire on the cliff face until it collapsed in on itself.

  His mind raced. His plan would be glorious.

  “Cartographer!”

  The soldier rushed forward, carrying rolled maps in a pouch slung over his shoulder.

  “Simia,” Ursus demanded. The soldier nodded and produced the map Ursus sought—the map of the entire ape nation. Moving to a pile of human bodies, he spread out the dyed parchment and plotted his next move. “Get me four couriers. Each one will take a cardinal direction. I want messages sent to every division, including the Security Police. I’m recalling the army.

  “There,” he stabbed at the map. “We make camp just outside of Ape City.”

  “The entire army, sir?”

  “That’s what I said, soldier.” He turned to Dangral. “I also think it’s time for a battlefield promotion, Major Dangral.”

  Dangral was flabbergasted. “General, sir, I, thank you—”

  Ursus slapped him on the back. “I need apes I can trust at my side.” The words were for his subordinate, but his thoughts were on the horizon. “We’re going to war.” Dangral nodded quickly, eager to carry out his general’s orders. Before he could run off, however, Ursus seized the gorilla’s arm.

  “To make that happen, Dangral, you…” Ursus’s eyes fired steel beams deep into the morning mist. “…you and I—we have a date with the council.”

  ACT I

  REPERCUSSIONS

  CHAPTER 1

  TOMORROW IS THE FUTURE’S PAST

  A few days earlier

  “Oh my God, I’m back! I’m home.”

  The astronaut wept.

  “All the time, it was…”

  On a windswept shoreline of craggy rocks, Colonel George Taylor and his companion, the human woman known as Nova, found the Statue of Liberty. Half rising out of the surf, Lady Liberty’s jagged spiked head stabbed the sky, rust causing it to look like a skull.

  Nova could not speak. She was aware, but primitive. She would not—could not—understand what the statue meant.

  Taylor didn’t care. To him, everything was abundantly clear. He was on Earth. This planet of apes was his planet’s future, and that meant…

  “We finally, really did it,” he whispered to ghosts.

  Nuclear annihilation. His world was dead.

  The irony did not escape him. He had been disgusted with mankind, had despised what they had grown to be. So, he became an astronaut, and insisted on being among the first to travel to the stars. Scientists had sent him and his crew at near light speed toward another world. Time dilated, and while less than two years had passed for them, two thousand had passed for the Earth. If Taylor couldn’t find a new race that was better than man, he'd hoped that humanity would have evolved so much by the time they arrived in the future that he would find only peace.

  Mankind’s evolution had been interrupted.

  He and his crew had crashed on what he had thought was an alien world—a world ruled by apes. Anthropoids hunted humans here. They became his enemy. They killed and maimed his crew.

  Not all of them were butchers, however. Some of them had proven to be kind—Zira, her fiancé Cornelius, and her nephew Lucius. The majority of them, however—the gorillas, orangutans, and their zealot leader Dr. Zaius—were trouble. Zaius had tried to mutilate him. Taylor had barely escaped.

  With Nova in tow, he had fled into this Forbidden Zone.

  So here he was, standing before a symbol of oblivion. But he wasn’t here, really. His body was, but his thoughts raced backward. Demanding safe passage, Taylor’s mind became anchored to a conversation he’d had with his fellow astronaut, Landon, upon their crash landing in this godforsaken place.

  “Time’s wiped out everything you ever knew,” he’d said, speaking of a world he’d thought was light years away. “It’s all dust.”

  Except it wasn’t time that had destroyed everything.

  It was man.

  “You maniacs.” Taylor fell to his knees. “You blew it up!” Man had finished it, done themselves in. Set the clock back to zero. “Goddamn you.” He spat out the words and slammed his fist into the spongy beach. Water swept in to cover his indiscretion, eliminating all trace of the muddy imprint.

  “Goddamn you all to hell.”

  Then his limbs were jelly. Falling forward, he crashed face-first into the rushing surf. Salt stung his eyes and liquid filled his nose and ears. The orangutan Zaius had been determined to rid the planet of the pestilence of man. He had feared that one day an intelligent human would rise and destroy everything ape society had struggled to build.

  The thing was, Zaius had been right.

  Man does destroy, Taylor acknowledged. The mute testament of the Forbidden Zone and the broken remains of the statue were proof enough. Taylor had known it in his heart—known the truth about his kind. He had known as far back as the Second World War. What he first felt in the Pacific became cemented in his mind now.

  Brine burned his throat. He did not want to stand.

  Let the sea finish this.

  Yet Nova would have none of it. The beautiful savage pulled Taylor from the surf, her eyes transfixed on the green-and-brown giantess that towered b
efore them. A primitive, she had no gauge for what she was looking at. It had crippled her mate, and that would be enough for her. Taylor was virile, potent—but the idol before them was more so. To her, it was a black god of death.

  * * *

  Liberty 2 curved around a bend in time. Inside, her cabin was thick with silence. Her crew were asleep in cryogenic glass cases—stuffed trophies on display. She had approached the speed of light and raced ahead in time. Her mission: rescue the crew of the American National Space Administration’s lost lamb, Liberty 1. Specifically, as per Admiral Eugene Taylor’s orders, to rescue her skipper.

  Colonel George Taylor.

  His son.

  Liberty 1 wasn’t supposed to need rescuing. She’d been aimed at Alpha Centauri and hurled into the future—all in the name of science. To prove Dr. Otto Hasslein’s hypothesis: that as one approached the speed of light, time slowed, becoming ponderous. Liberty 1 was tasked to establish a colony on an alien world, or return to Earth centuries later—her crew having aged less than a year. The men who sent her to the stars would never hear back from her.

  Then, inexplicably, a signal made its way back to Earth.

  An SOS from the future.

  It was inconceivable.

  Except there it was, and its existence fit with Hasslein’s theories. He postulated that near light speed, acceleration could warp the very fabric of space itself, creating a bend that he had humbly called a Hasslein Curve. Hypothetically, that bend could allow travel to and from the future, but only between the vessel’s point of origin and its final destination.

  Hasslein insisted that the hypothesis be tested—that a follow-up ship be sent to find Taylor and his crew. The doctor found support in the form of Admiral Taylor, and the project was green-lighted. Liberty 2 shared the same configuration, or nearly so. Her components were modular, with subtle changes that would make her fit for a rescue. X-comm buoys were added, as well. Automatically ejected from the ship at regular intervals, they provided data that would give Hasslein his answers.

  Thus she cruised through space like a slumbering shark—sleek, barely conscious, and at speed. Her crew at rest, she barreled beyond the space-time continuum and toward the origin of the SOS transmission.

  * * *

  Then, there was life.

  A computer terminal blinked as Liberty 2 released another buoy, birthing it into the time stream behind her. As she prepared to cycle down again, the vessel checked her surroundings. Analysis of incoming data indicated that she was ghosting an unidentified object—starship, asteroid, comet, or something else entirely. A motive projectile.

  Liberty 1?

  The ship’s computer attempted to calculate the enigma’s destination, or determine if it really existed at all. Regardless, Liberty 2 increased her speed to keep pace less than a light year behind it.

  Suddenly, a change.

  Proximity alarms clanged, and Liberty 2 picked up two transponder signals—one from the UFO she had been ghosting, another from an approaching vessel that came barreling through the Hasslein Curve. That second projectile collided with the unidentified object, and didn’t stop.

  Magnetic tapes hummed and whirled, until sensor analysis was complete. Both objects registered as Liberty 1. Assessing the irrationality of the data, the ship dumped it and began running a self-diagnostic. It was a conundrum too difficult for her to work out on her own. She needed guidance.

  Liberty 2’s recyclers kicked in, flooding the cabin with precious air. As the newcomer barreled toward her, the ship began to thaw her crew.

  * * *

  Cryosleep drained Brent. It drained them all.

  Inside the glass coffins, colors faded. Ruddy flesh tones melted away to ensanguined purples and muted blues. The chamber was flooded with the necessary mix of gases. Each person’s temperature needed to be lowered to a state of near suspended animation, and it had to be accomplished in a way that didn’t damage the flesh or nerve cells. A precise cocktail of intravenous drugs coupled with the desaturating light and a chamber filled with inert vapors made this so.

  ANSA astronaut Major John Christopher Brent was waking up. The first thing he felt was a fuzzy glow in his chest, not unlike being drunk. The sensation flowed outward in waves, leaving his extremities the last to defrost. He hated it. The bright azure sea had overwhelmed him. Now, its waves receded.

  For Brent, hypersleep was no respite—he experienced strange and vivid dreams of violence, and remembered them upon awakening. He knew he couldn’t talk about that—ANSA’s psych boys would pull him from the program. They would claim it was liable to be the early telltales of something much worse. There had been three recorded cases of it since ANSA developed their suspension chambers, and one had led to deaths.

  “Hibernation psychosis,” they called it.

  This time waking was different. In addition to the heat, he felt a vibration deep in his chest. Alarms blared loudly enough that he could hear them from inside of the pod. As the fever grew, so did the reverb. Brent realized they weren’t coming from inside of him, but from the ship itself. Liberty 2 rumbled with the sound of a passing subway train. Semiconscious, he was tossed around in his crystal casket.

  Adrenaline effectuated the waking process, posthaste.

  Is this another of the dreams?

  As suddenly as it was upon them, it passed. The ship’s proximity klaxons died down, and a deafening silence replaced them. The first one up, Brent stumbled to the sensor terminal, and swiped sleep’s crumbs from his eyes. He was greeted with a simple message.

  RECOGNITION ERROR SELF-DIAGNOSIS IN PROGRESS

  Whatever danger there had been—if there was any at all—he had missed it. When life support and hull integrity checked out fine, he shuffled back to the slumber chambers. Of the six crystal pods in the cabin, only one other was occupied. While a Liberty-class ship normally only carried four, Liberty 2 had been hastily upgraded to carry two additional passengers. So modified, she could complete her mission and bring Colonel Taylor and his entire crew home.

  The other case slid open and Brent’s skipper, Colonel Donovan Andrew Maddox, sat up.

  “You missed the fireworks, Skipper.” When Maddox simply raised an eyebrow, Brent continued. “Looks like we had a near collision of some kind. Ship woke us up early to take care of it, but it was over before it even started. Computer’s running a self-diagnostic on the sensors now—we should know what’s what within the hour.”

  Maddox nodded. The older man had looked better, his eyes bloodshot and his face puffy. His facial hair hadn’t come in as more than stubble—hypersleep had apparently slowed his metabolism, more so than Brent’s.

  * * *

  Brent examined his own face in the mirror. However long they’d been in hypersleep, he had grown a full beard. Dark blond, the same color as his hair. Liking the new look, he used a razor to clean it up—neat and trim. Then he headed for the cockpit.

  Once there he noticed that Maddox hadn’t bothered with his own appearance. The colonel sat in the port-side command chair. Through the viewport beyond, Brent saw that they were approaching a planet.

  Fast.

  “Skipper.” Maddox only nodded as his navigator sat down at his station. Brent began pre-checks for orbital insertion, scanning a series of dark instrumentation along the cockpit’s starboard controls. He flipped a few switches and the boards dimly came to life before fading into conservation mode and disappearing again.

  “Skipper, banks two through eight are out. Must have blown a fuse.”

  “It’s not important now,” Maddox waved him off. “We don’t need them to do this job. Let’s see if we can pick up a broadcast signal.”

  And if not, get the hell back to Earth, Brent thought. The signal from Liberty 1 had brought them this far. If Taylor was still down there, he might have set up a short-range TX-9. From orbit, they’d be able to pick it up and follow it in.

  Brent stared at the ship’s chronometer. General Lazenbe had assured them that Libert
y 2 would be able to return to Earth with barely any passage of time. The proof—according to the science guys—was that the SOS from Taylor’s ship had made it back to ANSA in the first place. Still, the question pulled at Brent’s sleeve. How much time has passed? Connected to Bank 7, the clock’s indicator finally jumped back to life, but it was blinking. The number was always the same.

  0000:00:00

  The chronometer would need to be reset to get an accurate Earth-time reading. However far they had traveled, Brent would have to wait to find out how much time had passed. So he turned his attention to the planet that lay before them, dimly visible through a haze.

  A brave new world, he thought.

  This planet’s ring system—if you could call it that—was young, maybe a millennium old or less, and in the early stages of coalescence. Pebbly reflective debris surrounded the sphere in a sort of spiraling haze, reflecting diffused light on the planet’s night side. Once the diagnostics were done they would be able to figure out what system they were in, but wherever it was, it was far from home.

  Ruby light stabbed his eyes, demanding his attention. “Skipper,” Brent said, “transponder signal coming from surface side!”

  “Okay,” Maddox acknowledged. “In we go.” He retracted Liberty 2’s fusion ring, bringing it neatly flush to her cylindrical hull. As they wove gently through the field of particles, Brent was reminded of an old movie he’d seen as a kid. A seagoing ship pierced a dense fog bank to reveal a hidden treasure on the other side. Beyond the mist lay an island that time had forgotten, guarded by a ferocious primal beast.

  Gravel clattered across the hull and echoed through the cabin. As they parted the curtain of haze, the planet stood revealed. Settling into high orbit, Liberty 2 was a tapered rod spinning around a murky crystal ball. A brown and blue sphere accented with a smattering of green splashes, the planet appeared capable of supporting life of some kind. The vegetation—assuming that was what the green was—appeared to be sparse. There was no way to tell if the atmosphere would be breathable.