Nothing ever really changed on Cerise.
The sky was a fiery orange in every direction. A uniform red sea of rock stretched from horizon to horizon, almost uninterrupted, except for free standing stone hills that erupted from the surface on occasion. These hills, sometimes hundreds of metres tall, did not look like anything produced by blind geological forces. Thousands of granite steps folded and locked together to form one intricately patterned hill. Anywhere but on Cerise, one would think them abstract monuments to a forgotten race of giants. But here, their geometric precision was natural, and did nothing to detract from the timeless permanence of the world around them.
Nothing quite changed on Cerise, except for the monsters.
The exterminator was looking at one right now. Lying flat on his stomach, he peered through the telescopic lens briefly again. Yes, it was definitely a yuni. It was roughly the size of a horse, but that was where the similarities ended. Every inch rippled with powerful muscle, where it was not covered by a near impenetrable scaly armour. Between fissures in the plates, two metre spikes would be propelled like bullets, if the creature felt threatened. And this was all what he could see of the back of the beast, because if he was looking at the front of it, he would be dead in a second.
The digital watch on his wrist beeped numbers at him. (The exterminator insisted on calling it a watch even though checking the time was what he did the least with it.) Eighty two metres it said. The yuni’s mace like tail swished once, as it scanned for prey.
He could take it out with a bazooka from this distance if he wished, but then he wouldn’t have it to protect himself from something bigger and deadlier than yunis. And yes, such things existed. He continued to crawl forward.
Sixty metres. Beep.
Fifty metres. Beep.
Forty four metres. The watch beeped something different, a lower frequency tone - an alarm. He was too close.
“Alright, alright,” he told himself.
He had heard of exterminators being ripped to shreds before they could aim an already loaded gun and let a shot off. The statue like creature in front of him was deceptively quick. Taking a deep breath, he fell into an almost deathly stillness. His forefinger tensed, ready to pull the trigger.
And then suddenly, he felt, rather than saw a movement off to his right. The exterminator had no time to see what it was because, in a blur of motion, the yuni had swivelled around and was looking at him directly. He resisted the urge to shield his head from the inevitable barrage of spikes. It would make no difference. Instead, he ignored the whizzing and clanging of the flying missiles all around him, and slapped a button on his skin suit to switch to the bazooka.
The yuni charged.
Where one would have expected a face, there was something, but it was hard to call it a face. A lipless, gaping hole where the mouth should have been, was full to bursting with teeth. Where the nose should have been, there sprouted an immense horn. If there were eyes, they weren’t like any he had seen on Earth. But its face was not the most terrifying thing about the yuni.
It was its speed. The yuni had a pair of wings, because of course it did, but it could not really fly. Instead, it combined the lift generated by the wings with the power from its four strong limbs to accelerate to incredible velocities.
Clawed hooves screeched, and wings like blades swished, louder and louder, until his whole world was nothing but sound. The bazooka clicked into existence by his side. He had no time to aim, but hopefully he didn’t need to. He punched the side of the cylindrical surface of the weapon, and there was an explosion of fire. And then, there was silence.
The exterminator became aware of the thundering of his own heart. It felt like he was about to burst. He watched the yuni disintegrate into chunks of flesh that sprayed in all directions. The watch beeped an upbeat tone. One down, three to go. There was blood, a lot of it, but now, only a second later, he could not see it at all. He knew it was there, but it was so well hidden away in the red gravel and the red rocks, that it might have never existed. The display on his watch told him that he had no bazookas left, and advised that he request an extraction as soon as possible.
He was safe for now, but he stood there for a long time and stared at the fist sized chunks of flesh that lay all around, as the sky howled at him. There was no wind on Cerise, there would be no drifts of sand that would pile up and bury them away. But nonetheless, when his heart no longer hammered a painful beat in his chest, a long time later, he could no longer see anything but rocks.
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The exterminator had done this many times before, but something was different this time around. He could feel the beginning of a strange new emotion gnawing at the edge of his consciousness.
“It’s just like a hangover,” he told himself aloud. You don’t stop going to parties just because you have hangovers the next day. That was all it was - the aftereffects of a nightmarish experience. The yuni would have cut him open in an instant. It was do or die, right? Besides, he was doing this for the greater good, because the future of humanity was at stake. Even in the comfort of his own mind, the grand pronouncement rang hollow.
He was nearly back at the shelter when he recalled that something had spooked the yuni. It had to have been a lizzo that had unwittingly stumbled into his hunt. Just as the thought occurred to him, he spotted one foraging in the distance. He made a snap decision; he would destroy the nest. While lizzos were usually no more than inconvenient pests, they were hive animals and they had been known to take down exterminators in packs.
“Better safe than sorry, “ he mumbled.
Unscrewing a tiny pouch attached to his utility belt, he picked up a marble sized something and tossed it in the direction of the lizzo. The creature paused to watch it arc towards the ground, and then continued to forage like nothing had happened. Momentarily, his watch beeped that the lizzo had swallowed the bait.
He didn’t really need to follow the lizzo, because the nugget that it had swallowed was a smart explosive that would go off once it detected that the lizzo was back in its nest, but the experience with the yuni must have dulled his senses. Scrambling up smooth granite steps, he climbed the hill higher and higher, until his legs began to wobble at the thought of a fatal fall. Presently, a cave opened into the heart of the hill.
Chittering surrounded him all around as lizzos of all sizes snoozed in warm recesses. A part of his brain half heartedly noted that he was in grave danger. But he only had a moment to observe that the lizzo he had followed dropped its collection of rocks on the cave floor, and that other lizzos - identical in every way, except they were much much smaller, no bigger than chameleons - were crawling towards the stash, when the cave lit up in a flash of light. The exterminator turned and left before the bomb went off. The howling sky masked the unearthly screeching from the cave. Nearly.
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He was back at the shelter. It was a spartan room, and there was barely any space apart from a bed, a bathroom, a small fridge, and a workstation. The yellow and black logo of Terraforming Corp was slapped on everything from the computer wallpaper to the faceplate of his skin suit. Considering they were the ones arranging his trips to Cerise, it wasn’t that odd. A caption accompanied the logo: “Planet of Monsters”.
The exterminator was still a wealthy man, by any measure. He had made his money by being one of the first to start a grey market interplanetary shuttle service, and he had made a lot of it. One trip to Cerise was a dream for your average Earth billionaire; this was his sixth. He had made a lot of money, but most of it was gone. Suppressed rage simmered under the surface. He sipped a beer as he contemplated his situation.
If he culled two more yunis, Terraforming Corp would reimburse his travel fare. The monstrous face of a yuni appeared unbidden in his mind’s eye, and he shivered. The adrenaline of the hunt seemed like a distant memory. He could try and tag a dino instead, but he put that thought out of his head. He had never heard of anyone even seeing one, let alone tagging one, so that was a pipedream. While a part of his brain coldly worked through the numbers, another part wondered how he had ended up in a situation like this. He had so much money! He had thought he would keep coming to Cerise forever. He had even entertained a vague notion that when the terraforming project was complete, and the first human settlement had sprung up, he would stay and volunteer as a glorified security guard. But that was before today; that was before he had almost died trying to conserve ammo. Was it the sense that he was moments from death that bothered him though, or was it.. was it that a friend’s betrayal had brought him to that edge?
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It was a new day, but the term was arbitrary. Cerise always had the same amount of light, a pleasant cloudy tropical illumination that never varied. The sky continued to howl its perpetual lament. He had heard that massive planet wise storms raged in the upper atmosphere hundreds of kilometres from the surface, and the only sign of all that violence was the howling that seemed to come from all directions at once.
The exterminator checked his watch. He never booked the same map each time, so he could not go off on memory. Green lines lit up indicating the sectors he had already covered. A tiny ticker on the right blinked that he had 42 hours until extraction. He turned left towards an unlit sector.
The rhythmic clomping of his boots on the gravel lulled him into a stupor. Despite his best efforts, his thoughts drifted in a now familiar direction. He chuckled at the irony that the only business partner he had ever truly trusted, even gone as far as calling a friend, the only one he had rescued from crippling debt, the only one he had cared about, had been the one to betray him. He had stolen all of his business, and most of his wealth away from him. Perhaps it was a fitting lesson. In his line of work, the murky semi-legal world of human transport, there were no true friendships, only alliances of convenience.
“Every good deed is its own punishment.” He chuckled at his own wit.
And yet, he knew deep down that he did not truly believe that. In fact, he had only got into this business as a way of helping a friend who had found herself on the wrong side of the law.
“What now?” He frowned at the watch. All it ever did was beep and boop, but the exterminator felt like it understood him, and he understood it. Now, it was telling him that he was very close to the edge of the map, and that he had to turn away. He sighed, but complied. Another sector done, and no yunis spotted. How many more trips to Cerise could he afford?
Something glinted in the distance, and nothing should ever glint on this planet. The exterminator instantly fell to his stomach and clicked a button on his skinsuit for his rifle. Scanning back and forth with the zoom lens, he quickly spotted the source. There were only two ways he could ever spot another human being on Cerise, and both were so unlikely that he never planned for it. But it was undeniably a human being that shambled slowly into the crosshairs. It was a pirate.
Annoyance flashed across the exterminator’s face. He had heard about pirates who had somehow missed extraction and been stuck on Cerise for longer than they intended. They survived by stealing from other exterminators. If the pirate spotted him, he would kill or maim him for sure. Yes, he could not see what kind of weapons he was carrying, even through his zoom lens, but..
He watched the pirate shuffle and stumble aimlessly. His finger hovered over the trigger. It would be so easy. Pirates were no longer tracked by Terraforming Corp and he was perfectly entitled to kill anything that moved in his map. Besides, if the pirate hung around in his sector, he might mess up his hunts. And he might have weapons and ammo he could use. He snorted and pressed the button to launch a flare instead. The pirate flinched at the light and sound and ran. The exterminator watched him through the lens until he was sure he had crossed over into a different map, and disappeared behind a rock hill.
“Just perfect.” He shouted at his rifle, as if it was the rifle’s fault he didn’t shoot. When it didn’t answer back, he smacked it with his palm and it collapsed back into his skinsuit. All his previous trips had passed without the slightest hitch - there was not even a stray lizzo attack - but this one, the one that he needed most to be issue free, the one after the betrayal that had left him with next to nothing, was just one disaster after another.
“Ah well, it can’t get any worse, can it?” The sky continued to keen, and he took it for assent. But he was wrong. It would get worse.
It was the last sector in the map, and he was almost done with it. There was nothing there, no yunis, just a solitary granite stepped hill. He stopped to press a button to confirm extraction. Four hours, the watch beeped back. He was only a few hundred metres away from the shelter, when he spotted a lizzo dashing away in a mad sprint. But the strange thing was, it was not running towards the hill, where presumably its nest must be. It was running away from it. That was when he saw the hill move.
The world shook. Rumbling that jarred him to the bone threatened to knock him off his feet, but somehow he managed to stay upright as he sprinted towards the shelter. The exterminator swore to himself that if he survived this, he would never again come to Cerise. He was done. He was done. With each planet shattering step, the rumbling got louder, and the dino closer. With each planet shattering step, everything in his eyeline danced a mad dance, rocks rose in the air, stayed suspended for too long, before they fell to the ground. And then they jumped again, higher this time. Distant hills throbbed in sync with the inexorable drumbeat.
And then he was inside the shelter. He curled into a foetal ball until the rumbling and shaking went away, after what felt like hours. A flashing light on his work station told him that there was still three hours until extraction. Calmer now, his brain observed professionally that he had just spotted a dino. All he had to do was report the coordinates, and his trip costs would be waived away.
“I know. I know.” He told his trembling fingers. Instead of doing anything, he opened the hatch to the surface, and sat on his haunches. His watch blinked red warnings, but he ignored it. A lizzo scuttled into view. The exterminator pulled out his pistol, the smallest in his weapons cache, and pointed it at the creature. The lizzo froze.
“So you know what this does, eh?”
A strange feeling gnawed at the edges. He put the pistol away.
“It’s your lucky day. One of your kind saved my life today. Maybe it was you?” He squinted and peered closer at the beast, that was peacefully scooping up Cerise rock, only a few metres away. It was about the size of a dog, but scaly like a reptile. A frill of tough skin surrounded the monstrosity that was its head. He ignored the teeth, and the claws, and focused on the frill. It was folded away into a saggy pouch at the moment, but he knew that it could flare into a hood twice the size of its head when the creature felt threatened. He knew that already, but what he found interesting was that it was covered with an intricate orange pattern.
“You are one ugly bastard, you know that.”
“And you could take my leg with one bite, so I have to take you down. But next time. Off you go!” He finished, the last sentence a touch louder. The lizzo paused at the sound for a moment, but then scuttled out of sight leisurely. The exterminator finished his beer, and left the planet.
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Three months later, he was back, and to the same map. He told himself that it was because of the dino. He hadn’t reported its coordinates, and he wanted to hunt it himself. Bringing down a dino would mean free Cerise trips forever. Terraforming Corp would probably even send him a nice hand written letter thanking him for his services to humanity.
It would not really be that hard. You did not have to be an expert tracker to follow a building sized creature on a planet that did not even erase footprints, even if said creature could camouflage itself as a hill. And he was a good tracker. On the other hand, if he didn’t take down the dino, he would not only never return to Cerise, but he would likely be in a lot of money trouble. From the richest man in the world - or close enough - to swimming in debt, a tale as old as time.
It would not really be that hard. So why rush? He grabbed a couple of bottles of beer and refilled them with a touch. Snapping open a small foldable stool, he sat down under the flaming sky and sipped beer. Was it really an unchanging world? The atmosphere in Cerise was hundreds of kilometres thick, but the giant red star it was locked to was immensely bright, and close. Surely, if he only tried hard enough, he could spot it? Were the clouds really uniformly thick and opaque? The star was so close to Cerise that it would take up half the sky. He stared, unblinking at a patch of sky, until he was convinced he could see the faintest arc of starshine.
He closed his eyes for a second.
Chunks of flesh rained all around him. Wind - wind? - whipped them into a demonic maelstrom, as rivers of blood rushed in torrents and disappeared into black volcanic rock. The howling sky melted into screeching, and the cave, and burning lizzo children, and his eyes snapped open.
There was a lizzo standing in front of him, less than two metres away. Had he really fallen asleep on the surface of a planet of monsters? The lizzo was so close, he could count the fangs in the gaping maw that passed as its mouth. The frill around its head pulsed, as if in anticipation, but did not flare out. The intricate orange pattern around it was beautiful. Why had he never noticed that? A part of his brain wondered if this was the same lizzo that had run away from the dino and saved his life, and the same lizzo that had come to see him later. The rational part of his brain scoffed, assuring him that such an occurrence was exceedingly unlikely. Besides, lizzos did not go to ‘see’ anybody.
He sat as still as he could. “So you are here to get me before I can get you, eh?” he whispered softly. There was no way he could draw a weapon before the lizzo reached him, and strangely the thought comforted him. Perhaps it was not quite comfort, but a lack of tension. He did not have to be on edge anymore, it was out of his hands.
The lizzo scuttled away, with the chaotic, yet perfectly balanced, gait of a chameleon. The exterminator tried to let out a sigh of relief, but he had not been holding his breath. He wondered about the yunis. Were they pack animals too? He knew their only food source was the lizzos, and the dinos preyed on the yunis, but he wondered what the yunis did otherwise. Did they have elaborate mating dances? Did they even have sexes? Did they even reproduce? The image of the charging yuni was branded in his mind. The whirring blade like wings, perfectly adapted to the planet, cut through the thick air like butter, the cloven hooves that gripped the gravelly surface for maximum speed. Swish. Crash. Crash. Swish. Crash. Crash. A mad symphony, with the howling sky an enthusiastic participant.
Even the hills did not seem as eternal as they used to. Subtle changes in light caused the granite steps to gleam dully. He wondered for the first time how they came to be. Why was he here on Cerise? His head throbbed and his skin burned with a fever. The exterminator shut the hatch and lay in bed, but his racing thoughts would not slow.
The planet of monsters had an austere beauty. All he needed was to track the dino, shoot a couple of bazookas at it, and he would never have to return again. Even if he could. The planet of monsters was not an unchanging vision of hell. It would only take a couple of hours to track down the dino. It was an absurd video game world of exterminators versus pirates, yunis versus exterminators, dinos versus lizzos, humanity versus monsters, monsters versus monsters, it was all a synthetic lie. Humanity’s saviour - remaking an ugly, cruel world into a golden haven. Revulsion flooded through him, and his stomach clenched into a painful knot. His trustee watch beeped that only an hour remained until his scheduled rest. There was no point heading out now. He drifted into a tortured sleep.
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The next day, the exterminator walked directly to the nearest edge of his map, and crossed over. His watch blared warnings, so he ripped it off his wrist and tossed it away. It had been his only companion, but his decision was made. He continued walking in spurts, pausing to scan the surroundings with his most powerful lens, until finally, he spotted the other exterminator. He looked ridiculous in his orange camouflage skinsuit, as he lay flat on the ground, clearly tracking something. Was it his dino? He jiggled the lens until it focused on a yuni in the distance. The yuni hadn’t seen either exterminator yet, and continued to serenely, methodically scan for prey. It was a difficult shot at this distance but he could take down the yuni, and then the other exterminator would have a couple of options. He could shoot him dead, no questions asked, because he was trespassing after all. Or he could agree to negotiate some form of resource sharing with him.
The exterminator pointed his weapon at the yuni, and pressed the flare button. The yuni was probably too far away to spot him, but he did not care. The yuni started and charged in the direction of the flare, and within moments was out of range of the other exterminator’s weapon. The other exterminator turned his gun towards the direction of the flare, and sprayed bullets wildly, but there was no one there.
