Free Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series by J. Joseph Wright Page A

wielding its razor-sharp talons. In that split second he was back in the moment, when he’d nearly lost his life to this savage and mysterious beast. Now he just wanted to know what this thing was, and swallowed down his terror long enough to peel back an area of its torn flesh. Maybe with a look at its soft tissue, Harvey could determine something about it.
     
    But he didn’t see soft tissue. No bone either. What he did see shook him to his foundations. Optic fibers. Actuators. Metal components. Circuitry. The thing was artificial. A machine made to look like an extraterrestrial being. An alien cyborg.
     

 
     
    5.
     

    Over the next several days, Harvey pondered the odd finding. The alien being was no being after all. The first and most obvious question the discovery raised was—who? Who owned the machine? Who built it? And who sent it to exhume those graves and, ultimately, try to kill Harvey? Who? That question he mulled over again and again, and the dearth of answers was starting to make him paranoid. His only solution—work.
     
    And there was no shortage of work.
     
    He spent a good amount of time overseeing the reburials of nearly four thousand residents of Cemetery Planet. The automated machines took care of most of the groundwork, so to speak, though he did get down in the dirt on many occasions, manually operating a digger, overseeing the DNA scans and making damn sure the right bodies were being placed in the right graves. It was a round-the-clock operation, and Harvey took almost no time off, never letting his mind or body go idle for even a moment. If he did, he knew where his thoughts would turn—to the myriad unanswered riddles surrounding him like a fog.
     
    Along with cleaning up the gravesites, there was much work to be done on, in, and around the visitor station. The main power generators still needed attention, and after what that robotic monster did to it, Harvey needed to give it quite a lot of care before he got it running at peak capacity. One good thing, the life support and air-conditioning systems only needed minor repairs.
     
    Lea helped more than he could ever measure by just being there. She appeared to him most times over the computer terminals which were ubiquitous throughout the station. At times, only rarely, she materialized out of thin air, manifesting as a blurry medley of color and light and prismatic shapes.
     
    Of course she didn’t follow him every second of every day. There were those hours, usually when she thought he was sleeping, when she would go off somewhere and leave him alone with his thoughts. He spent that time working on something special. Something he knew both he and Lea would appreciate. It took him several days of lost sleep, and he had to actually lie to her once, only it was a white lie, and he knew she’d forgive him…once she saw.
     
    After a week of preparation, gutting the old architecture to bare metal, starting basically from scratch, recreating and recovering every last qubit of data. After rebuilding every centimeter, faithfully restoring every optic fiber, every nanoconnection, he was ready.
     
    “I have something to show you,” he told her when they were in the food court. He put his tray in the recycler. Her glowing form graced the menu display.
     
    “Don’t tease me,” she giggled. “Tell me what it is!”
     
    “I can’t,” he teased her anyway. “It’s a surprise.”
     
    “Oh, come on,” she whined playfully. “Tell me!”
     
    He laughed out loud.
     
    “I can’t tell you. I have to show you.”
     
    With that he hopped on a PMD and whisked down the ramp to the café’s first floor, out the automatic doors, and into the visitor center concourse. And at every turn, appearing in each successive wall-mounted computer display, appeared Lea, squealing with anticipation, telling him how cruel he was for making her wait. He rolled past the auditorium and the viewpoint overlooking the vast sea of grave markers outside. Her