by Mark Lingane
“Where do they leave from?” Sebastian asked, ignoring the words catapult and death.
“Usually where the pull of the void is strongest. For us, it’s near the capital.”
Sebastian drifted away, muttering to himself. “Hmm, pirates.”
When morning came, Nikola roused everyone from sleep. The old man had gone missing.
“Did anyone get haunted during the night?” he asked.
Sebastian hid. No one answered. Everyone was quiet.
“Pack up your troubles,” Nikola said, “and let’s get going. Anyone want to swap vehicles?”
No one responded. They still hadn’t woken up properly.
“Fine. We continue as we were.”
There was a general muttering of discontent, but within the hour they had packed up and were cruising away from the town.
Sebastian rode along at the back of the group, thinking about flying, voids, and certain death. He accelerated to the front of the group alongside Nikola. “Nikola,” he said, “what happened to Andana?”
“He helped me, which prevented me killing him. He set off for wealthier skies, quickly, after he stole one of the zeppelins.”
“Why didn’t you get him?”
“He stole a good one, the Defiant, the fastest. I think he still has a role to play in all of this. But I know where he is and how to find him.”
“He was a pirate, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Even though he’d deny it for tax purposes.”
“Was he a good one?”
Nikola looked at Sebastian. “I think you misunderstand the word ‘pirate.’”
“How would you go about finding him if you needed to?”
“We could track the zeppelin using search-and-rescue automatons once we established the general region he was in.”
“Don’t they all fly out of the capital?”
“At the moment, but they follow the void as it shifts.”
“Ah, yes, the void. What is that exactly?”
“It’s a super storm that covers a significant area of the Pacific Ocean. The void catches the outer arms of a storm and whips them out over the ocean at tremendous speed. Pirates and traders use it to catapult across the ocean. If the timing’s wrong, it can all go bad. Too early and they get crushed in the forces. Too late and they have to wait for the next revolution, and that can be months. For a trader, that’s a bad result. In fact, being too early to the void is better than being late.”
“Hmm.”
The next few nights passed without incident. On the fourth, clouds started to roll in. Lightning forked violently in the dark, and heavy clouds painted against a charcoal-sketched sky. Rain whipped around them, driving through their heaviest clothes. An occasional respite in the blanket of darkness flashed a defiant moon, but eventually, that also succumbed to the ferocious elements.
“This storm seems unseasonal,” Michael shouted to Nikola over the howling wind. “And especially severe, considering there was no warning.”
“We need to get the bikes out of the weather. This kind of rain could blow them completely,” Nikola said.
“Just staying upright’s a challenge,” Melanie yelled.
“You don’t need to brag about your Friday-night activities,” Parker said.
“Pull the vehicles into a circle,” Nikola shouted to everyone. “We need to set up some kind of shelter.”
“Are we safe on this plain in a monsoon?” Melanie said. “You know, with floods and stuff.”
“Would you prefer to be on a hilltop shouting at the gods on a night like this?”
They pulled all the vehicles into a circle, with the two SUVs taking the brunt of the storm. They strapped a tarpaulin over the bikes, but, within minutes, it had worked free and tumbled away in the cyclonic winds. They repositioned the bikes in the SUV windbreak and sought whatever shelter they could find. They huddled together closely, collars up and coats tightly closed, and settled in to wait out the storm.
Lightning continued to stalk around the plain, lashing down and searing the ground.
“Smoke?” Colonel Parker said, fumbling for a cigarette.
The others looked at him. A wave of torrential rain swept over them, drenching their already saturated clothes.
Sebastian sat up straight. He looked around wildly. “Something weird’s going on; I can feel it.”
29
“IT’S THE ELECTROSTATIC charge building up,” Albert said. “It’ll go once the storm passes.”
“No, this is different. It’s real power, and it’s being controlled. I can feel it.”
“Oh god,” Melanie said. She elbowed Sebastian and pointed up.
Clouds, highlighted by near-constant lightning, swirled in a tight circle above them, turning faster and faster. A low-pitched sound rumbled through the atmosphere, shaking the ground. As the clouds circled faster, turning a disturbing purple, the pitch became higher.
“Either we’re coincidentally in the worst spot ever, or this storm has something personal against you,” Melanie said.
“Has anyone seen anything like this before?” Nikola asked everyone. The consensus was that if anyone had seen this before, they would be dead now.
A lightning bolt as wide as a house speared violently into the ground, and everyone except Sebastian was thrown clear of the area. He stood still as the lightning’s energy coursed down on him; he felt the power surrounding him and feeding him. He looked at his hands; they were glowing white.
Another bolt of lightning crashed down on him, then another, but he hardly noticed. He was looking ahead.
A distant and dark figure, outlined against the flashes of light, raised its hands toward him. Pain eclipsed everything as electricity roared across the plain and streamed through him, tearing at him. In an instant, he felt every part of his body come apart, then smash back together, as if he was made of rubber. He clutched at his head, struggling to focus his thoughts. Electricity swirled around him, caging him. He dropped to his knees.
Through the pain, he looked up at the advancing figure, which moved with the light. In the middle of the light stood Isaac, with his cape flowing behind him. A few paces to his rear stood @Summer. Power was radiating off of her and being sucked into Isaac, who glowed with it. The two figures produced a wall of pure energy that spanned the horizon.
Sebastian stared at his hands. Each cell glowed brightly, independently and individually. He could see through them. He floated apart from the world. Energy seared through the air toward him. He blocked it, and let it hang in the air before sending it flying skywards. Another bolt came in. He waited as it spun around him, and then he disbursed it with a simple wave.
Isaac stood before him, floating, made up of millions of dots.
“What’s happened to you?” Sebastian said.
“He has been improved,” came Iris’s voice.
“Why are you speaking to me rather than Isaac?” Sebastian said. At the edge of his hearing he could hear a cry—of pain, of sadness. “You’re killing him,” he cried.
“He will survive,” Iris replied.
“You have no probability trees here, how can you be sure?” Another bolt of lightning struck him. He let it flow through. “Let him talk to me.”
Sebastian felt a subtle change in the charge surrounding Isaac. His old friend appeared to become more solid. Light no longer flowed through him, and he looked like his former self.
“Isaac?”
“Look what you’ve done.”
“Me?”
“You pushed and pushed, always being mean, always thinking of yourself. All that power and you wasted it.”
“I didn’t waste it. I didn’t know how to control it.”
“You could’ve changed everything,” Isaac said. “With Iris, we could’ve dominated the world. But we don’t need you now. We have a new ally with an unstoppable army. Your demise is coming. And it’s all your own fault.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t meant to end this way.” Sebastian sighed.
“I’ve grown up a bit, enough to know I didn’t treat you the best. But now it’s your turn. You’re better than this, Isaac.”
“I never had a chance to be better. I never had your powers. This is my chance to be someone.”
“This isn’t the way to do it.”
“What would you know?”
Sebastian paused, unsure about what to say that could convince his friend not to follow the path he was taking. “I’ve learned plenty, the kind of stuff I wish I’d known before. I’ve learned that we need to treasure the things that are important to us. I don’t want to throw our years of friendship away. You mean more to me than that.”
Time slowed and Sebastian felt the tug of an unseen force. He was pulled along a twisting tunnel of light until he stopped a few feet in front of his friend.
“Next time we meet, you’ll save me,” Isaac said, although his mouth didn’t move. The words seem to be built into the fabric of the light.
The sky erupted and struck down with all the elemental force of nature. Sebastian was aware of two words echoing through his mind: Not yet. He was blown out of the domain and left flat on his back in the mud.
“I saw him,” Sebastian said.
Melanie had Sebastian’s head cradled it in her lap. “Who?”
“Isaac.”
“You have to be kidding me.”
“No. I’d know his outline everywhere. Especially the cape.”
“Wait, forget that,” Michael said. “You just got hit by prolonged lightning, yet there are no signs.”
“He’s a tesla, remember,” Albert said. “Teslas can absorb power.”
“Not like that. That was like one of the Omegas appeared and rained down on him. Give me your arm,” Michael said to Sebastian. He examined the texture of Sebastian’s muscles, pushing his thumbs into the fibers and twisting. “An ordinary tesla would’ve been ripped apart. They hardly have any muscle.”
“Ow! You don’t have to be so rough.”
“Look at his muscles,” Michael said. “They’re exceptionally dense, like a thoroughbred horse. You’d be terrible at swimming. You’d sink like a rock. Do you do any rigorous physical activity, Sebastian?”
Everyone laughed.
“Do you eat a healthy and balanced diet?”
Everyone laughed again.
“This is exceptional. Where does the muscle come from?”
It was a rhetorical question, but everyone shrugged.
Sebastian finally dissuaded Michael from prodding his muscles, and managed to break away from the group with Melanie.
“He spoke to me,” Sebastian whispered.
“Who?”
“Isaac. In the lightning. There was a message.”
Melanie was lost for words.
Sebastian, who never had this affliction, pushed on with his recollection. “Maybe it’s something teslas can do, send each other messages inside electromagnetic waves. A kind of electromagnetic transponder wave-mail.”
“That’s a bit wordy.”
“How about emai—” he started before Melanie interrupted him.
“Its name isn’t important. What did he say?”
Sebastian looked around to see who was nearby. Nikola was staring at him. “We need to move further away,” he whispered. The two moved out of the shelter of the SUVs. “This is going to be difficult to explain. It was like we were in the actual Omega and he was talking to me, but it was like—this is going to sound really stupid—from the future.”
“Eh?”
“He spoke about what would happen the next time we meet. It was a warning.”
“It’s all very heartwarming and everything, but you’re talking about time travel. Come on, Sebastian, get real.”
“Not time travel, not really. I’ve been thinking about it. A tesla can control energy, right? But it’s now energy. That’s all I, and the other teslas, have done. Who says we can’t delay what’s controlled? What if there was some way of sending a message on the electrowaves that slowed the decay of the waves? That would mean you could send a message now, but it would be delivered in the past. After all, from the perspective of the future, right here, right now, is in the past. But it could only work between teslas.”
“Whoa. Heavy stuff.”
He squinted and looked off into the distance. The wind whipped around them, flapping their outer clothes. “I wonder if I can do that.”
30
“HOW LONG TO New Toowoomba?” Sebastian asked Nikola.
“Still a couple of days.”
The two rode beside the SUVs through the mud until they were back on solid ground. Sebastian finally spoke.
“Is it true that all the cyborgs are being poisoned?”
“Yes, most of the cyborgs will die. There’s nothing we can do for them. If they’ve grown up as cyborgs, they can’t be anything else now. Even if we could un-cyborg them, there’s no guarantee they’d want to be the alternative.”
“That’s sad.”
“You seem to forget they came after you specifically—a whole race of people dedicated to the extermination of Sebastian.”
“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t personal.”
“It’s about as personal as you can get. Everything they did was about you. You were the ultimate threat. And they ended up being right. You’ve condemned them all.”
“You know it wasn’t on purpose. Okay, blowing up the core was, but I didn’t think it would, like, kill them all.”
“These are the consequences we take to the grave with us. Joshuz!”
Parker’s SUV had veered violently to the side, nearly knocking Nikola off his bike. There was a loud thump, and the sound of skidding tires on the dusty surface.
“Hey!” Sebastian called out to Parker. “What did you do that for?”
“Didn’t you see him?” Parker shouted. He jumped out of the SUV and went down on his hands and knees to look underneath.
Everyone had stopped and was watching Parker.
“Who?” Melanie said.
“The kid,” Parker said. “He ran in front of me. Surely you all saw him.”
They all shook their heads.
“What did he look like?” Sebastian asked.
“Green.” Parker stood up and dusted off his hands.
“Green?”
“Must’ve been wearing green clothes or something. He was moving like blazes.”
Nikola dismounted and examined the front of the SUV. He wiped his hand over the front, picking up a small amount of what looked like oil from the metal. “You’re leaking,” he said.
“But all the mechanics are at the back of the vehicle,” Parker said. “There’s nothing to leak from up here.”
Nikola looked at his hand again. He caught the reflection of the sun in the thick fluid, which had a green tinge. “Well, it’s not blood.” He wiped it on his trousers.
Melanie scouted around the area. She trekked a short distance into the surrounding sand, placed her hands on her hips, and squinted into the sun. “Where did he come from?” she shouted to Parker.
“What?”
“Which direction?”
“From the right,” he said. “Your side.”
She looked around. The sand was dead flat for a considerable distance and devoid of any vegetation or obstacles. A hundred yards away, there was a large outcrop of boulders. She turned back to Parker.
“He couldn’t have run from over there without you seeing him,” she shouted, indicating the boulders. She looked over at the rocks. “Or maybe your eyes are failing, old man,” she muttered to herself.
She turned around to look back along the dusty track. A sick-looking child was standing in front of her. She screamed. The young boy reached out for her. She shied away from the startling sight, momentarily appalled, before her sensibilities clicked in.
She leaned toward the boy and smiled. “Hello there, what’s your name?”
With a shaking hand, the boy handed her a small vial full of blackish-green liquid. She took it f
rom him and held it up to the sun. When she looked back at the boy, she screamed. His mouth was being ripped open, exposing a row of razor-sharp teeth. He dropped to his knees and fell forward into the dust.
Melanie gave the boy a gentle nudge with her boot. There was no response. “Eloise Goodbody almighty,” she muttered, shaken.
Michael and Nikola ran up.
“He scared the living daylights out of me,” she said.
Michael knelt down and examined the boy’s body. “He’s got a broken leg. I assume this is the boy Parker hit. His skin is pale. There’s a slight greenish tinge to it, possibly gangrene or leprosy.”
Nikola examined the ground. “He walked here, by the look of the prints. But they look normal—there’s no sign of a broken leg. Unusual, wouldn’t you say, Michael?”
“Not if he had either of those afflictions. They would numb the pain.”
“But his mouth was like … erg.” Melanie shivered. “The whole thing was creepy.” She looked around at the great open plain. “Where did he come from? There’s nothing out here.” She looked back at the boulders. She handed the vial to Michael and said, “You keep … er… whatever. I’m going to look behind the rocks.”
There were some animal bones behind the boulders, bitten in half. The child had obviously been hiding here. She jabbed the end of her sword into the sad pile of rubbish. No skins or discarded innards. She noticed a dog-eared piece of paper. She picked it up and turned it over. It was an old photograph of a young lady. She wondered if it was his mother.
An inventory of the rest of the shelter revealed little else except a bag of rags pretending to be a bed. She prodded it. The smell of defecation and rotting meat wafted up, repulsing her. It reminded her of her own time living in a cave, when she was waiting to die … uh-oh. She ran back to Nikola and Michael.
“Look at his wounds,” Michael was saying to Nikola. “It looks like he’s been bitten by something with a large mouth, like a bear.”
“No bears around here,” Nikola said.
“A dingo?” Melanie said.
“The teeth marks are too wide for a dingo,” Michael said. “It’s odd. Most animals that bite into flesh have muzzles. This was something with a big, wide mouth. And another thing, look at his arms, they’ve got needle marks.”