The Resurrection of Samhain: A Halloween Sci Fi Love Story Read online

  The Resurrection of Samhain

  Copyright © 2014 RuneWright LLC. All rights reserved

  First Printing: November 2014

  Originally published in The Scribing Ibis: An Anthology of Pagan Fiction in Honor of Thoth

  from Bibliotheca Alexandrina in August, 2011.

  Also published in “Out Through the Attic” from 7DS Books published in 2014

  All contents of this work of fiction are subject to this copyright notice. No portion of this work may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated or otherwise used without the express written approval from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in a review.

  United States laws and regulations are public domain and therefore not subject to copyright. Any unauthorized copying, reproduction, translation or distribution of any part of this material without permission by the publisher is prohibited and against the law.

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Resurrection of Samhain

  About the Author

  Originally appeared in The Scribing Ibis: An Anthology of Pagan Fiction in Honor of Thoth from Bibliotheca Alexandrina in August, 2011.

  Also appeared in “Out Through the Attic” from 7DS Books in 2014.

  I can’t believe that old bugger Kyteler actually bought the thing. Earth must really be short on credits.” Lieutenant Quintin Hayes scanned the lased crater before him and fed in the data to an analyzer at his hip. The pit, a perfect cylinder, was three hundred meters across and twenty meters deep. A ring of portable force-field generators resembling little Kilroys, their noses dangling over the edge, lined the perimeter at ten meter intervals and kept the sides from caving in. The deep-green turf of the region, an inches-deep carpet of what looked like curly jade hair, ran right up to the edge of the pit.

  Numbers slid by on Quint’s visor: dimensions were accurate out to five decimals; latitude and longitude were dead on right down to the microsecond; the geological magnetics were as near a match as they were likely to find on Stranach IV. He lifted his stratavisor and rubbed tired eyes.

  “And to ship the damn thing seventeen parsecs out here….” he said into the comm with disbelief. “What kind of money does that take?” A low-hanging autumn sun still cast warm light, but things would start to get chilly when it dropped below the horizon.

  “You don’t have that many zeroes in your head, Quint.” Captain Maggie Dunne kidded, laughing lightly as she stood in front of the lasing-rig control-panel and held her finger over the sys-check icon suspended in the panel hologram. Maggie reflected back to his arrival in an over-burdened, one-way transport pod two months earlier. They’d detected his transponder and received a brief message about why he was there. When he landed, he had a short list of equipment, including the force-field generators, the lasing-rig and a tidy set of orders to prep for the arrival of Kyteler’s new acquisition. “Did the numbers check out on the hole?” She asked in a rigid tone, all business once again.

  “Green across the board,” he confirmed. “The geo-magnetics came in at a ninety-seven-percent match, and we only needed ninety-five. It’s double-solid.” Quint took one last look at Maggie’s distant figure at the far edge of the pit and turned away, heading back to their small encampment. The tight coils of vegetation, Stranach IV’s equivalent of grass, were spongy under his feet, and he wove his way around the sparse maze of short, multi-colored blooms, fronds, stalks, and boles of the native plant species that covered the rolling, alien countryside around him.

  “Roger that. Running the sys-check and shutdown on this pig.” She pressed her finger through the projected icon and pulled it back.

  “Awwww … don’t say that,” Quint complained. “Machines are people too, you know. You could hurt its feelings.”

  Lifting its seven-ton mass off the ground on repulsor beams, the gray, egg-shaped rig powered up with a deep humming sound and began swiveling, extending and then retracting the half-dozen lasing arms that extended out of its cerametal carapace. Maggie stepped away from the unit and let it go through its sequence.

  “Machines are machines, Quint. You’re mental.”

  “Wrong on both counts, Captain. I’m an engineer, and that lasing-rig has more intelligence than a dog if you’d just give it a chance.” Quint reached their small group of inflatable shelters and hopped up on a fallen log that bordered the camp. He lowered his visor, selected magnify and scanned back towards the pit, picking out Maggie’s floating form. Her slim figure was flying back towards him, passing directly over the pit.

  “Dog-smart or not,” Maggie replied with an amused tone, “it’s still a machine,” She stared down into the pit below her as she sailed over it like a ghost, suspended in the field emitted by her grav-belt. She scanned for irregularities along the bottom of the pit. “Now get the stove up. I’m starving,” she added.

  He adjusted his visor again to zoom in past her to the colony ship that squatted in permanent retirement to the right of New Dublin where 2,000 Irish colonists had been living for four years. The Unified Systems Council based on Mars had granted Stranach IV to the Irish Culture Polity as a culture-integrity world ten years prior.

  Shortly thereafter, the colonists were tucked into the belly of a cheap colony-ship, The Monsterrat, and placed in cold-sleep for their journey to Stranach IV. A year later Monsterrat touched down and gave birth to Ireland’s third colony in the Vega cluster during the third phase of old Earth’s expansion push.

  Quint scanned south of New Dublin and could see harvest rigs in the fields as they went about collecting the last of the season’s harvest. The colony was booming and the people he had met during his brief stay in the township seemed happy and healthy.

  “Roger that,” Quint replied finally and stepped off the log.

  By the time Maggie was touching down by her shelter, he had water boiling and was dropping in a chopped assortment of the local roots and vegetables followed by a few pinches of spices that were also native fare. He was a much better cook than Maggie, and he seemed to have a natural culinary flair for working with the local flora. They waited a few minutes in silence, just watching the pot boil.

  “That smells great!” she said finally as she stepped up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, her hands instinctively starting to massage them.

  “That feels better,” he replied, leaning back slightly into her. “This stuff won’t take long if you want the tubers to be al dente.”

  “You’re the chef. Impress me,” she ordered and kissed his neck.

  “I’ll impress you once we get into your shelter. As to this, can you go grab us some bowls?” He kept stirring the pot.

  “Pretty sure of yourself,” she accused as she stepped away and reached into a container holding their supplies.

  “You just let me know when you have a complaint, and I’ll put in for a transfer,” he retorted then lifted the pot off the stove.

  “You don’t have any place to transfer to, lieutenant,” Maggie said, smiling. She held out a bowl in each hand, allowing him to spoon in some of the stew. With the vegetables chopped the way they were it looked like any stew one might find on old earth. He set the pot back, turned off the flame and they sat down next to one another, leaning against the fallen log. The comfortable silence lasted as long as the meal, and when they finished, they both set their bowls aside. Maggie leaned in to Quint’s shoulder as he put an arm around her, and they watched the sun start to slide behind a far-off hill. The gray dungarees of the Colonial Engineering Corps were warm, but the nights were getting colder as winter started to set in.

>   “So, when does it arrive?” Quint asked, squeezing Maggie and grabbing her hand.

  “In two days … on the thirty-first.” She squeezed back and cuddled in closer as the temperature dropped.

  “Seriously? It’s arriving on Halloween? How prophetic.”

  “The old man doesn’t do anything without a reason.” She stood and pulled him up behind her, heading for her shelter. “And you better get used to calling it Samhain, not Halloween. You’re on an Irish world with Irish colonists who want to get back to their roots.”

  “Sir, yes sir!” Quint said like a fresh cadet. He kissed her lips, stared down into beautiful green eyes and pushed a lock of fiery red hair off a freckled cheek. “Did I ever mention how much I love red-heads?”

  “Call me ‘sir’ again and you’ll have to love another.” She glared at him but couldn’t hold it. The glare turned into one of her witching smiles that never ceased to melt his heart; he was powerless before that smile. She held open the door and slapped his butt as he went in.

  O O O

  “Balor, rotate X aspect point-two-five degrees starboard.” Quint stared down into the descent display that tracked the incoming chunk of Terran soil and tried to ignore the blasting wind that pressed down from above. He dared not look up at the black shadow slowly dropping out of the sky towards him. It was large enough to blot out both moons now, and he could almost feel the hundred million metric tons of earth suspended in the Balor’s tractor beams. That he was sitting in darkness only made the situation that much more unnerving.

  The sun had set an hour earlier, so he sat in the middle of the encampment surrounded by black and shadows as he guided down Duncan Kyteler’s prize artifact. The darkness didn’t hinder his work, however, and he just barely managed to keep his hands from shaking. His eyes would never have left the screen for something like this anyway; the bonus for hitting the mark on the first try was incentive enough to do a perfect job. “Track point-eight meters to 183.25 degrees …” Quint’s voice sounded almost panicked in his ears, pitched way too high. He could only hope the crew didn’t’ give him too much grief when they were finished. “Steady.… Track point-two-three meters to 240.8 degrees….” His teeth started to ache as the perimeter of the starship’s drive-field crossed over him. He felt its sub-sonic hum, and the vibration felt like it was ready to shatter his skeleton and turn it to fine powder. “I’m in your field, Balor. Go to hover and maintain descent on tractors only.”

  “Roger that, ground-control,” a man’s voice said casually into the comm.

  Sure, Quint thought, it’s easy to be relaxed when you’re sitting on top of that thing rather than stuck underneath the son of a bitch. Quint gritted his rattling teeth and kept his eyes on the monitor. “You’re on the mark … package passing zero elevation … negative one meters….” A high-pitched whistling filled his ears, and a blast of air washed over him as the huge earthen cylinder slipped into the pit with less than two millimeters clearance all the way round. He maintained focus as one of the shelters blew over on its side. “Negative two meters….” Quint thought his teeth were going to jump out of his skull. He reminded himself of the bonus: I can buy new teeth … hell, a new head with that kind of money. “Negative fifteen … negative sixteen … Okay … slow descent ninety percent and increase field-dampers three hundred….”

  “Roger that, ground.” Quint wanted to slap the guy for being so calm.

  “Easy … you’re almost there … slow descent another ninety-percent … you’ve got centimeters …”

  Quint felt a gentle tremor flutter under his feet as the package bottomed out. The ground beneath him seemed to let out a tremendous, satisfied sigh as the bedrock once again took up the weight that had been stolen from it by the lasing-rig. The air stilled and the hum receded as the Balor drifted north, away and up from the surface. The drive-field receded, and then it was silent. Quint skeleton and teeth stopped feeling like they were being shaken apart.

  “Package delivered, ground-control,” the man above said. “Nice guide-in, by the way. As good as I’ve seen.”

  “Are you kidding me? I damn near crapped my pants.”

  Laughter came through the comm. “Kid, take my word for it. I’ve been doing this twenty years. You’re a natural. You ever decide to get off that rock, you look me up. I’d give you a job in a Mercury minute!”

  “Thanks, Balor,” Quint said sincerely. “I may take you up on that someday. Ground out.”

  “Roger that, ground. Have a better one.” The comm went silent.

  Quint pulled the comm-unit off his ear, shut down the terminal and pushed back on his chair, falling back onto the soft, green turf. He held up his hand before his eyes and could see it shaking slightly in the darkness.

  The only thing that kept him from freaking out completely was that he was now a rich man. The bonus would be enough for him to live quite comfortably on Stranach IV for the rest of his life—and without farming … Dea-Domhan, he corrected himself. He’d have to remember it now that the colony had finally decided on a name for their new home. Maggie had told him that Dea-Domhan meant good earth, and he wished she were with him. She’d said that she had preparations to make for the celebration of Samhain.

  She’d at least left him with a flask of imported Irish whisky to celebrate a successful guide-in or lament a failed one. He pulled the flask from his pocket, twisted off the cap and held the flask up in salute to the retreating blotch of The Balor’s massive hull against a black sky as it blotted out the stars on its journey back into space. He tilted the flask into his mouth and took a couple of long swigs that burned sweetly as they went down. Quint closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He was exhausted, and the adrenaline was starting to wear off. Before he knew it, he was sound asleep.

  O O O

  A chill as deep as the grave seeped into Quint’s body, startling him awake. It was an unnatural cold very different from the normal cold of the on-coming Dea-Domhan winter. He opened his eyes when his ears picked up an eerie, rhythmic chanting coming from down the hill towards the direction of where The Balor had delivered its payload. The cold deepened, and for the first time since his arrival he could see his breath as he exhaled into the sky. A ghostly shimmer at the corner of his vision forced him to turn his head and stare into the darkness as a tingle of fear gripped him. There was nothing there, but the cold didn’t abate. He stood up and put his frozen hands into his armpits, turning towards the project site.

  His eyes widened and his jaw dropped open. He found himself suddenly questioning his sanity and an even greater fear tightened itself around his insides.

  He could now see where the chanting was coming from. The area down the hill was surrounded with lit torches, and a great bonfire shone brightly at the center of the newly arrived circle of massive stones. Circles of people in white, hooded robes surrounded the bonfire, hundreds of them. The bone-chilling cold seemed to fade, and the temperature returned to normal, abating his fear somewhat.

  “What the hell?” All he could do was stare in disbelief. Stonehenge, Kyteler’s prize, was there just as it should be, but everything else made no sense at all. As he stood staring at the spectacle, he caught an occasional glimmer of faded, bluish-white forms, looking almost like glowing smoke, meandering through the sparse vegetation of the area moving away from the bonfire.

  One of the hooded figures detached itself from the edge of the circle and started walking up the hill towards him. He instinctively reached for his service-blaster and realized that they didn’t issue them on colony worlds where there wasn’t indigenous fauna. He spotted a few more ghostly wisps receding into the darkness away from the flame as the hooded figure approached.

  Quint struggled with a severe flight-or-fight conflict, but finally curiosity won out as the hooded figure entered the small clearing of the encampment. Delicate hands lifted up and pulled back the hood to reveal beautiful green eyes, fiery red hair and freckled cheeks.

  “Quint …” Maggie started but she
didn’t know quite where to begin.

  Quint grasped on to the tangible reality of the woman he loved as an anchor in the sea of confusion that threatened to wash him away. “You mind telling me what the hell is going on?” He didn’t know if he should be angry, scared or just chuck it all and go crazy right then and there.

  “This is what it was all about, Quint. I meant to tell you, but there wasn’t any way. You’d have to see it to believe it …. from the beginning.” She reached out her hand and smiled in the bewitching way that always hooked his heart.

  “Uhh … and what is this, exactly?” They moved closer and held each other. He latched onto the solid footing of her embrace, and the seas of confusion around him calmed.

  “Kyteler … he died just after buying Stonehenge from the Earth government. They needed the money and his lawyers were able to make the case to the Unified Systems Council that Stonehenge was a piece of Celtic heritage. He had himself buried there amongst the old graves around the monument. He wanted to live forever, and this was his only option.”

  “You haven’t answered me,” he said a bit more pointedly than he intended. Perhaps it was caused by the wispy ghost of a woman slowly walking by wearing clothing that looked like it came from the dark ages. The air chilled once again, and they could suddenly both see their breath in the night air.

  “Good, old-fashioned, Irish ghosts,” Maggie said quietly and without fear. “A new Irish world needs Irish ghosts. Stonehenge let us wake them here. We brought Kyteler back from the dead a short while ago along with the others.” She kissed him gently and hugged him. “Welcome home, Quint,” she said and never let go of him.

  About the Author

  Quincy J. Allen, a cross-genre author, has been published in multiple anthologies, magazines, and one omnibus. Chemical Burn, a finalist in the RMFW Colorado Gold Contest, is his first full novel. He made his first pro-sale in 2014 with the story “Jimmy Krinklepot and the White Rebs of Hayberry,” included in WordFire’s A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories. He’s written for the Internet show RadioSteam and his first short story collection Out Through the Attic, came out in 2014 from 7DS Books. His military sci-fi novel Rise of the Thermopylae is due out in 2015 from Twisted Core Press. Jake Lasater: Blood Ties, a steampunk western fantasy novel, is also due out in 2015.