“Change it how?” He leaned in.
“Well ... you can re-write the story so to speak. Say you wanted to change something like you never quit school, dated that girl or took that job. Well, with that you could. That’s the kind of power it holds. It could even save Harrison’s life.”
“Bullshit!”
“Believe what you want Truck, but I have seen it with my own eyes.”
“Where?”
“At Destiny.”
“You’re kidding me, you’ve been there?”
“Truck, I helped build it.”
“Build what?” he said, immediately realising the answer.
Truck was speechless, of course he knew a lot about the people who worked inside the apartment, but never really had to ask questions. This was a family that’d taken him in after his days in the army and asking questions wasn’t something he was good at, nor comfortable doing.
He took orders, that is what he did.
He was a soldier through and through, spending over twenty years in service. Once he left that family he joined this one and was here to protect them. He tried to leave the more intelligent stuff to better minds, minds like Harrison’s. Truth be told, he didn’t really care either way, he just wanted to look after his family.
It didn’t concern him that Suni knew of Destiny, or even if she helped build it, all that mattered was his family. “Tell me how this helps Harrison?” he asked.
“The device that I sent you after, it acts as a translator for something called a thread. If we could’ve found both and then connected them, the power we could wield would seem to be limitless, we could change fate.”
“That Alison lady, is she …?”
“Yes Truck, Alison is currently trying to find a thread over in Greece, she’s really close to finding something too. I needed you guys to find the device so that the two could work together, and then we could have really stirred the pot.”
“How so?” Doc asked this time.
“It’s only limited by our knowledge of it, but I do know one thing it can do. It has the power to take life, or ...” she cleared her throat, “… to restore it.”
Truck knew he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed but he looked straight into her eyes, took a moment to comprehend what she’d meant, and piped up. “If we had that thing, we could save Harrison?”
“If we had both, then yes,” Suni replied. “We need the device and the thread.”
“I know where it is then,” he said, trying to stand back up from the floor.
“What, the device?” she asked, forcing him back down.
“Yeah, you said it yourself ... Destiny, right?” his eyes asked, pleading with her.
“Truck, we don’t even know where they are. I wouldn’t even …”
“And I can’t just leave Pigeon in the street. I owe him more than that, I need to bury him.”
“Truck! The police are all over the place, it’s not safe.” Doc interjected.
“I’ll start where it ended last night.” He got up off the floor, tugging at the I.V lines as he did so. “I can take it from there, I can find them ... and then I can save him!”
- -
Alison
It was another hot day on the Greek island of Santorini. With the wind not stirring for days, it made the heat almost unbearable. A woman, standing on a rocky mountainside, looks up disdainfully. With not a cloud in sight she observes the sun and silently curses its existence, mopping the sweat from her brow as she does so.
She looks back to the earth, the dry, rocky terrain is typical of Grecian landscapes, but also surrounded by the blue of the ocean. She wished she was down there now, cooling her parched skin from the warmth of the sun.
Of all the places she’s been in the world, this island, Santorini, is the one she cherishes being on the most. It is not the romantic towns, the food or the culture that she loves, nor the breathtaking views out over the caldera.
She cherishes the island for a completely different reason. Thirty years ago, she unearthed a man in the desert, a man who was alive. The strange man told her many things, chief among those was of an ancient civilization at the height of power before his demise. That civilization, as he told it, was on this very island.
Her gaze wanders the caldera and she dreams of a time before the eruption, of what life might have been like here. What kind of technology did they possess, what Gods did they worship and what ancient knowledge was lost when their revered city perished?
Her eyes close as she looks out over the water, she breathes in and out slowly and dreams. Dreams of another time when things on this island were different. As she dreams she feels a light touch of the wind on her cheek, the earth is talking to her, telling her its story.
She can feel whatever was here, despite their recent lack of success. She knows the mystery to the island is true, she can feel it in her very soul.
Her eyes open again and she looks out over the caldera, spying a luxury yacht drifting below her. Her curiosity gets the better of her and she leans down to see who’s abroad.
Lovers are out front, drinking champagne and celebrating who knows what. She looks at them rather funnily, wondering to herself what it would be like to be down there, in love and living carefree.
Truth be told though, Alison Benchley isn’t known for her beauty, quite the opposite. She’s tall, 6ft 6in in the old scale, her hair’s a strange mix of blonde, red and brown and isn’t well looked after. It’s curled in sections, frayed in others and poorly tied up with a rubber band at the back. She’s never taken an interest in her appearance, as there was little point, she wasn’t an attractive person to look at.
Her skin is worn and brown from years spent in the sun and even though she’s only in her late fifties she has the appearance of someone much older. To top it all off she has a large black mole, the size of a sultana, resting on the left side of her nose, a final beating of the ugly stick.
It was long ago she’d forsaken the need for love or to look attractive, changed by a meeting with the strange man, a man who she dug out of the desert alive. It was he who showed her the many truths about life.
Truth be told her appearance had kept the men at bay, something she’d never been comfortable with. But still, when alone, sometimes she dreamt she was someone else.
She is a geologist foremost, spending years of her life devoted to studying the earth, its solid and liquid matter. She was fortunate to have travelled the world as a younger person with her father Graham, who’d also spent a great deal of time teaching Alison about his work.
Her father was an archaeologist and historian, and after she completed her studies, the two spent years in Africa, unearthing several ancient archaeological sites. He would teach her about the forgotten histories of the world and she would teach him about geology in return. Combined, the two of them made for great explorers.
Digging was her passion, finding out what was in said dig was his.
Her father Graham had long been an explorer into the ancients, his passion in life to find the origins of man. It was along this journey he uncovered information in Egypt, about a lost civilization. Academics at the time had dismissed the work as fiction, but her father didn’t subscribe to their mainstream theory, so set his life to proving it.
It was in Armenia they found evidence speaking of a great flood that crossed the plains of Earth, wiping out anything in its path. They knew floods carried in their wake evidence that would prove the theories correct, which led them to continental Australia, to the desert.
But her father had passed before they’d even made the journey, dying of a mysterious illness. His dreams of uncovering the truth were lost, his dream of knowing man’s origins disappeared.
Alison spent months mourning his passing, until an unlikely meeting changed her fortunes. She met a young, enthusiastic woman called Lucinda, who alon
g with her group of friends were on a similar path to that of her father. Their common goal quickly united them in one purpose.
Still shattered at the loss of her father, Alison had continued, determined to finish her father’s work and find the answer to the greatest question of all, who are we and where do we come from?
Less than three months later, Alison uncovered a man in the desert. A buried man who should not have been alive.
It was a discovery she was betrayed over.
Now, some thirty years later, she is in Santorini, Greece, searching for something she isn’t even sure is there. She’s come here after unearthing something else, something like what she unearthed all those years ago.
That something was called Yonas and he pointed her here, to dig again, to find another.
They were only a small team working atop the mountain, four in total, led by Alison. They’d spent the last month up in the mountains mining a specific territory in search of something known as a thread, something she’s had experience with before.
Alison has unearthed many strange things in her lifetime, this is no different.
She’s come up from the mine for a brief respite from the suffocating heat down below, but now that she’s above ground, she’s not sure the temperature is any better. She smells the air and tastes it, thankful that at least the air was a little purer above ground.
“Miss, hey Miss, you ready, continue?” a dark-skinned man of Aboriginal descent asks her, wearing only a loincloth.
She takes a long gulp of her water bottle, replaces the cap and replies, “coming Wally.”
The two enter a tunnel, which has been covered by a desert camouflage tarpaulin. It’s a very rudimentary tunnel they’ve dug down at a sharp forty-five-degree angle. A cable with globes attached lights their way down.
At about a hundred feet the tunnel levels out into a small landing where a makeshift room has been carved out of the rock; they use this as their base. It has several tunnels that lead off it, Alison and her Aboriginal assistant enter the only one that is lit. The others are dark, abandoned excavations.
As they move along the tunnel, Alison slides her hand along its walls, feeling a series of cuts in the rock wall, small incisions that’ve been made as they progressed the dig in search of something. It was like a timeline of what they’d been doing down here, each scratch a calculated one, albeit ones that had not yet yielded the results they wanted.
Finally, at the end of the tunnel, the other two men came into view where they could be seen working together, two other Aboriginal males. It was poorly lit, but well enough for Alison to notice them standing by a section of the wall with small pick axes held at their sides.
“What have you got Wally?” Alison asks her man.
“Missus … form around rock here …” Wally points with his long black fingers at the rock. “This what look for?”
Alison moves in for a closer look, squinting her eyes in the darkness and trying to see what he’s pointed out, but struggles with the poor light, “Bring light, here.” She instructs another man, in his native tongue.
She leans in closer and notices a barely discernible black streak in the rock. She pokes at it with her finger, then retrieves a small rock hammer from her side belt, and chips away at the dark section. Eventually a small piece comes away and falls into her waiting hand, she holds it up to the light and studies it with an expert’s eye.
After looking at it intensely for a long time, she turns it between her large fingers, crushing the small rock to dust in her grip. She observes the way it feels, looks and smells.
Then she puts her fingers into her mouth, tasting it.
Her shoulders drop instinctively.
“Hey missus! Hey missus!” The men start to get excited as they pick up on Alison’s body language, they knew she was excited by what they’d found.
“We find it Miss?”
“Burn marks Miss, I find them!”
“Did we find it Miss?”
“Boys,” she muses. “I think we may have something here ... Yonas was right.”
“Aye miss, he right alright, he right alright, we find the light!”
She removes her scarf and wipes at her brow. “Took us bloody long enough!”
“Good missus!”
“Now I guess I better get a hold of Suni and the crew hey?”
- -
- -
Catlin
The buzz returned quickly to the installation after Ma’am had intervened between the two ops men. Catlin returned her gaze now to Ursula and asked her who the man was.
“Who?”
“That man, the one with the stubble and the big temper, the South African?”
“Oh, they call him the Viper.”
“The Viper hey.”
“Hmmm, why do you ask?”
“Umm,” Catlin checked herself. “Just wondering, no reason.”
“Yeah? Wondering about what?” Ursula replied sarcastically, seeing the look in Catlin’s eye.
“Hey!”
“Why are you so interested in him?” Ursula asked coyly.
“Nothing, what was that all about?” she asked, referring to the incident.
“Best not to ask.”
The comment frustrated Catlin. “Why does everyone keep saying that, it’s bloody annoying!”
Ursula reeled visibly at Catlin’s frustrated comment. “Sorry. Ms.”
“I’m sorry” Catlin apologised. “It’s just so ... errrgh! How am I supposed to learn anything when people keep saying things like that, all I want to do is learn, ok?”
“Hey, we’re all just robots here working for the man ... or the Ma’am.” Ursula replied, with a wry smile.
Cat rolled her eyes into the back of her head. “This place and its bloody tyrant!”
“Make sure she can’t hear you when you say that.”
“Or what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what’s she going to do, spank me?”
“Catlin,” Ursula dropped her voice and used her name for the first time. “You don’t wanna see her angry, trust me, ok?”
“Why?”
“She can do things, things you’ve never imagined possible. Things that will make you regret it.”
“Ok.” Catlin relented and changed the subject quickly. “So what do you think those two guys were fighting about anyway?”
“The two men? Oh, they were Ops guys. They must have been arguing about the operation we ran last night.”
“What was it?”
“The operation? Oh, it was a retrieval mission for something.”
“What, you don’t know? Don’t tell me they keep you in the dark too?”
“Umm, no, it’s …” she stumbled, “I’m actually just the assistant here at Station Eight.”
“So?”
“Well I’m not as fast as Marion, she can get things done quicker than me. And I don’t know everything that happens, I just take the orders and try to fulfil them.”
“Oh, what happened to this Marion?”
“Nothing.”
“Ursula?”
“What?”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know if I should.”
“C’mon, it’ll be our little secret.”
“Well I guess you are …” she went silent.
“Are what?” Catlin asked.
“Nothing. Sorry.” She answered the original question first. “Ma’am put her in detention because she didn’t do as she was told.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, a cell down the hallway.”
“Wow, I guess you were right then ... I better keep my mouth shut.” Catlin shuddered, thinking back to her time in confinement.
“I don’t really know w
hat happened last night, but I can tell you that the Viper guy is not around here very often.” Ursula whispered.
“Why?”
“He has a reputation.”
“Which is?”
“Not good.”
“So why use him?” she wondered.
“Oh, he ahhh …” Ursula struggled to answer properly. “He’s a bit rough.”
“Seems like a rough character?” Catlin’s eyes followed him as he left the room in a huff.
Ursula could sense Catlin had more than a mild interest in the man, which she understood as well being a woman. The Viper was a rugged, but attractive looking man and the danger he presented excited her, intrigued her.
“Have you seen him before?” Ursula asked.
“No, why?”
“No reason.”
“Can we look him up?” Catlin asked. “On the thread?”
Ursula leaned over again and with a knowing look, grabbed the mouse and keyboard from Catlin and began typing commands.
“Ok, this is main view again.” She said, relinquishing control of the computer back to Caitlin. “Now, we need to run a search for him.”
“Okay.” Catlin manoeuvred the mouse with uncertainty.
“Now we can’t just type in his name and hope to have everything pop up on screen, it doesn’t work like that. For starters, he isn’t even part of the thread.”
“Eight!” Ma’am called from across the room.
“Ma’am?” Ursula replied, wincing, her head disappearing into her shoulders.
“Personnel are not for examination here, understood?”
Ursula gulped and froze where she sat, Catlin turned back around to see the figure of Ma’am staring over at them from another station.
“Yes Ma’am, sorry.”
“Find another target.”
“Understood.” Ursula replied.
“Understood? Who then?” she demanded.
“Umm, Ma’am … I … I’m not …”
“Quick Eight, you have to think quick.” She called, moving over to the desk and examining papers that had been left behind where Marion’s seat was.
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