End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds

by Carrow, Shane

  Tobias hesitated. “Thanks. But we’ll post a guard anyway.”

  I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep – my head is too busy, buzzing away with questions – but I’m exhausted, after spending most of the day trekking to the lodge and back. I found one of the smaller rooms down the Endeavour’s main corridor, and rolled my sleeping bag out in it for a bit of privacy. It’s warmer inside the Endeavour than out, but still pretty cold.

  It’s funny. Lying here, zipped up in the dark with only my little flashlight, scribbling away. I can feel the others more clearly than I used to. I don’t know what I mean by that – I can feel that they’re there, I guess. I can tell the Endeavour is there, the sense of a thinking mind all around us – and I can most definitely tell that Matt’s there, snoring away in a room down the corridor from me.

  But I can just… sense them. I can tell Andy is already asleep. I can tell Tobias and Jonas are awake, out near the warmth of the campfire, standing watch. Rahvi’s mind is hard to grasp, invisible and slippery – he’s semi-comatose, not even dreaming. And Professor Llewellyn is still awake, I can tell, because I think he’s talking to the Endeavour, just as he has been all day, a scientist given an open-ended conversation with an entity which can tell him all about the next three centuries of technological development up the curve from us.

  And I could read Tobias, today. When I was looking at him. I could tell when he was nervous or worried. I could tell when he was hiding something. I’ve never been very good at reading people, but today I knew.

  Maybe it’s being close to the Endeavour that does it. I’ll have to ask.

  July 2

  I woke today for the second time inside the eerie blue light of the Endeavour, and for a second time I felt discombobulated, unsure of where I was – before it all came flooding back to me.

  Inside the ship it was still completely dark. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, pulled on my snow gear and fumbled blindly out into the corridor.

  The others were all still asleep. I had to take a leak, so I headed out towards the gash in the hull. Andy was asleep in the corridor, rifle in hands – I guess he’d been on last shift, but had taken the Endeavour’s word that it wasn’t necessary to post a sentry.

  Outside it was bitingly cold, the wind whipping flakes of fresh snow along the ground, the fire burnt down to embers. I put a few more logs on and then headed up the slope to the east, intending to take a leak and figuring I may as well look at the sunrise.

  The pale snow gums ran all the way up to the top of the slope, and when I reached the peak I looked back down through the leaves at the Endeavour in the valley. From up here it didn’t look like much at all. You could easily mistake it for a landform, covered in snow. I suppose it must have looked very different when it first came down, in the bare grass of summer – and will look like that again, once winter passes and the snow melts.

  In the next valley over a fine mist was hanging over the landscape, broken by the occasional patch of snow gums. I unzipped and took a piss down the slope, standing and watching the sun rise, and lingered a little longer to watch the sunrays cut down into the mist.

  Aaron? Where are you going?

  “You’re awake,” I said, surprised, finishing up and turning to look back down into the valley.

  I do not sleep.

  “Just attending to a call of nature,” I said. “How can you hear me?”

  I can hear everything in this valley. And the surrounding valleys, as well. But I don’t need to hear you. We can speak with our minds.

  “You said you weren’t doing that anymore,” I said suspiciously.

  I said I was not reading your mind any more. I am still projecting my own thoughts, and I am still picking up yours.

  “I’m not projecting anything. I’m just talking.”

  You don’t realise you are. But you are. You are a Telepath, in part. So is your brother. Your abilities may not be what they should be, but they are latent. You could be trained.

  “That’s… well,” I said. “Well, yeah, maybe. Bit early to think about that sort of stuff.”

  I turned and watched the sunrise a bit longer. You have a beautiful planet, the Endeavour said.

  “Some bits of it, anyway,” I said. “What’s yours like?”

  Quite similar, with considerably less biodiversity. Oxygen atmosphere, but much thinner. Far lighter gravity. The mountains are more dramatic.

  “These aren’t really mountains, in Australia,” I said. “Go to the Himalayas, you’ll see mountains.”

  The tallest peak on our own world is eighteen thousand metres above sea level.

  “Fair enough,” I said. I noticed that it used the word “our.”

  This is what I know second-hand. I was built in orbit. In fact I never made planetfall before I came here. I was not designed for it.

  There was an unmistakeable sense of sadness emanating from the Endeavour’s mind. “Wow,” I said. “How, um… I mean, apart from being stuck here. What’s it like?”

  It has been some time. I don’t know if I will ever grow used to it. It feels… claustrophobic.

  “Well…” I said awkwardly. “At least you have some company, now.”

  Indeed. Captain Tobias is awake. He is looking for you.

  “Tell him I’m on my way down.”

  I gathered some more firewood in the snow gum forest on the way down, and dropped it in a clump by the campfire where Tobias was waiting and looking irritated. “Don’t wander off like that on your own,” he said. “You should know better than that.”

  “I was five hundred metres away,” I said. “Anyway, it’s safe here. The Endeavour can tell if there’s anything moving. Not that there’s anything around here for miles.”

  “Do I need to remind you, Aaron, that we were attacked by zombies a week ago? Out here where there wasn’t supposed to be anything for miles?”

  “Yeah, well – that was the first chopper, wasn’t it?” I said. “The one that ran into the barrier. That was them.”

  I glanced up at the bulk of the Endeavour. It said nothing. Technically it was responsible for the deaths of everyone aboard that chopper, but it hadn’t said anything. I suppose it was an accident.

  “It was,” Tobias said. “And that shouldn’t have been too far from here. After I call Christmas Island I’m taking Andy and Jonas and we’re looking for it. And you and your brother are staying put.”

  He took the satellite phone and trudged up the same hill I’d just come down, up into the snow gums, M4 on his back. I don’t know whether it’s military discipline or if he just flat out refuses to put his trust in the Endeavour. Maybe a bit of both.

  Andy and Jonas were the next to wake, and we cracked open some of the last cans and warmed them up for breakfast. “Gonna have to go down to Trish’s and pick some more food up,” Andy said, slopping an unappetising dollop of baked beans onto my enamel plate. “Not much of this crap left.”

  “Tobias wants to go find the other chopper crash,” I said. “To hunt for zombies, I think, but there might be some supplies in it.”

  “Not sure what our long term plan is,” Jonas said. “Are we sticking around here?”

  “Where the hell else would we go?” I said. But I glanced up at Tobias on the eastern ridge, talking into the satellite phone, and I had to admit I felt nervous. Five thousand kilometres away on a tropical island, a bunch of politicians and generals were about to decide what to do about all this. The Americans had tried to wipe out their machine base before they even understood what it was. What if the idea of a talking spaceship spooked our own government so much they ordered an air strike?

  Not likely. But still. I didn’t like the idea of it. Matt and I are the ones who dreamed about it, the ones who were supposed to come here. I still don’t know how to feel about the idea of being an alien seed, or soul, or embryo, or whatever the fuck it was. That’s something I can’t quite wrap my head around. Maybe I never will. But I still feel a sense of ownership here.

/>   July 3

  Tobias’ orders are to remain here for now, establish a rudimentary base, and await reinforcements for further study. That was the word he used, “study,” and he didn’t elaborate further. I can’t imagine he held anything back when telling them about the Endeavour, although I can imagine how difficult it must have been to convey what we’ve found over a crackly satellite phone to a room full of unseen people on the other side of the continent.

  “What reinforcements?” I asked. “Where the hell are they coming from?”

  “Well, if they want more eggheads like Llewellyn I have no idea,” Tobias said. “But there are a few platoons in bases across New South Wales they could airlift up here, once they get some choppers in place. So we’re not just sitting ducks for the next zombie horde or band of survivors that wanders up here.”

  I doubt very much that any survivors would willingly wander up into the Snowies in midwinter, and if there are any zombie hordes around we probably would have heard them by now, but whatever.

  “Couldn’t you just put that barrier up again?” Andy asked the Endeavour.

  Not while you’re inside it. In any case, it would be ineffective against the undead.

  “Speaking of,” Tobias said. “Get your shit together. We’re going to find that chopper.”

  “Maybe not the best day for it,” Andy said, nodding at the northern horizon.

  It wasn’t a blizzard, per se – not anything like what we experienced on the way out of Barton Dam – but it was a thick enough snowfall that Tobias decided against venturing out in the valley. We stayed inside the Endeavour all day, the wind howling and scraping against the hull, playing cards and reading and talking to the ship. It had sent its own report back to its homeworld the previous night, but was waiting for a response.

  “I still don’t understand that,” Llewellyn said. “You say it’s not radio. It’s the same telepathic ability you use to speak with us now. Yet you can send it over light years. How?”

  The Endeavour was at a loss to explain it to Llewellyn’s scientific sensibilities; the words it used would translate something along the lines of message or transmission, but we could tell there was more to it than that. It digressed into another discussion about faster than light travel, which Llewellyn maintains is flatly impossible, and which the Endeavour says is possible, because it’s done it. Which only flummoxes Llewellyn further, because the Endeavour can’t explain how its own engines work any better than Tobias would be able to build a rifle with scrap metal and a forge – just because you use something, doesn’t mean you know it perfectly. “These aren’t negotiable rules of physics,” Llewellyn said. “You don’t get to operate under your own rules. They apply to everything in the universe!”

  All matter in the universe must obey the rules of physics, the Endeavour agreed. We have read further in the rulebook than you. If I had landed on Earth five hundred years ago you would have thought I was a sign from God. Neither humans nor Telepaths nor any other species in the galaxy is operating at the peak of scientific accomplishment.

  “Well, you can throw that on the pile of technology to give us,” Llewellyn said.

  “Hold your horses,” Tobias said. “We’re not in a rush to go anywhere. Weapons and engineering first.”

  The Endeavour seems uneasy about that whenever they talk about technology sharing. It’s not that I think it’s not allowed to; it would have said so outright. It’s because it doesn’t personally know as much as they assume it should. It comes from a more advanced race, but is itself just a reconnaissance ship. Like how it talked about landing five hundred years ago: if me or Matt or pretty much everyone here except maybe Llewellyn went five hundred years back in time, and had to explain to peasants in the Middle Ages how the internet or smartphones or even an internal combustion engine worked, we’d be stumped.

  The weather cleared the next day, and Tobias took Andy and Jonas out early to search for the crashed Army chopper to the north-east. The Endeavour’s barrier only extended about two kilometres, back when it was still up, so it can’t be any further than that, but it’s obviously rough terrain.

  While they were gone the Endeavour encouraged Matt and I, once again, to try experimenting with our own telepathy. Or what it says are our “latent abilities.” Matt doesn’t like it. “My mouth works just fine,” he said. Personally I’m excited by it, can’t wait to get started, but I know that if I push Matt the wrong way he’ll get stubborn and refuse to even try.

  “It would be worth doing,” I said, as we walked along the eastern ridge, stretching our legs. Yesterday’s snowfall had covered the entire valley in a fresh, crisp layer, erasing the criss-crossing tracks we’d built up over only a few days. “It’s sitting there in our heads anyway. Why wouldn’t it be useful?”

  “It just seems dumb,” Matt said. “You don’t really think we’ll be able to, do you?”

  “Why wouldn’t we? You heard what the ship said.”

  Matt made a non-committal noise.

  “It’s not like we’d be poking around in each other’s heads,” I said – because that was the impression I was getting, that he didn’t want me to be able to read his mind. “It’s just talking. Like the Endeavour does now. We could…”

  “Sure,” he said. “Fine. We’ll try it.”

  He looked down at the valley, at the Endeavour lying broken and crippled with a crusting of snow atop it like frosting on a cake. “Did you ever think,” he went on, “back when we were in Eucla… I mean, did it ever strike you how crazy it was? How everything changed that quick? We were finishing up school, you were thinking about uni, everything was ticking along like normal… and then it was all that shit. Zombies and death and running for our fucking lives. And maybe Eucla was the first place we could actually catch our breath and step back and look at it.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Everyone had to deal with that.”

  “It was just weird,” Matt said. “Sometimes I couldn’t believe it had actually happened. I couldn’t accept it. I’d wake up at two in the morning and think it couldn’t really be happening. Have happened, I mean.” He gestured down at the ship. “And that’s how I feel now. Again. Eucla seems completely fucking normal compared to this.”

  “It’s good, though, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, it might not be what I expected, but… I’m glad we came.”

  Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. I was getting used to the idea that maybe things would be OK. Even after we lost Eucla. I thought maybe we had a good group, a solid group, maybe enough people would survive that one day things would be OK again – not back to normal, but not fighting to survive every single day, you know? And now this thing says that none of it matters because in a few years we’re all fucking dead anyway.”

  I shifted my weight uneasily, tucked my hands into my armpits. A wind was picking up from the south, and a cold wind was cutting into the exposed skin by the neck of my parka. “That was true anyway,” I said. “Not knowing wouldn’t have helped. Staying on Reeve Island wouldn’t have helped. At least this way we can do something about it.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Matt sighed. “Fine. We’ll experiment with this mind reading bullshit. But don’t get your hopes up.” He trudged off down the hill, and I followed after him.

  Captain Tobias, Jonas and Andy returned to the valley in the early afternoon, trailing a couple of jury-rigged sleds made of scrap metal behind them. Tobias didn’t look happy. As they came down the valley – the Endeavour had told us they were returning – we saw the sleds were bearing large packages wrapped in canvas. Bodies.

  “Chopper went down about two kays to the north-north-east,” Tobias grunted, unstrapping his heavy backpack and dropping it in the snow. “Landed in some pretty thick bush, took us a while to find it. One zombie pinned in the wreckage that I put down, and I reckon maybe one other body that was too damaged to reanimate.”

  “You reckon?” I said.

  “It was a chopper crash, Aaron. It was messy.”


  I glanced down at the canvas packages. One of them looked too small to hold a full human body.

  “Why’d you bring them back here?” Matt asked.

  “To bury them,” Tobias said.

  The Endeavour hadn’t said anything. Jonas and Andy were stuffed from hauling the sleds – such as they were – across two kilometres of mountains, so Matt, the professor and myself went to help Tobias dig a pair of graves by the edge of the snow gums on the far side of the valley. It wasn’t easy, since we don’t have a shovel. After we’d scraped the snow away we ended up hacking at the wintry earth with scrap metal from the sleds, which it looked like Tobias had fashioned from the chopper crash. I think I was using the end of a rotor blade.

  “How many people were meant to be aboard?” I said.

  “I need to check with Christmas Island,” Tobias said. “Probably no more than a dozen. And I don’t remember how many attacked us on the way from the lodge. That’s tomorrow’s job. We need to get Blake and Simon. I can check for bodies on the way.”

  Eventually we lowered the bodies – or what was left of them – into shallow graves. One of them had been the pilot, Captain Brett Pisani; Tobias had recovered his dog tags, and hung them over the crude sticks lashed together to make a cross. The other’s name we couldn’t know. Tobias says maybe we can work out who it was if we find the other bodies, by process of elimination, if he gets the names from Christmas Island.

  The thought running through my head – though I never would have said it – was, who cares?

  The answer is that Tobias cares. There’s something I can respect about that. When I think of how many people we’ve had to leave dead and unburied along the way, I lose count - all the way back to that pier on Albany where my stomach twists and my memory doesn’t want to go. But I guess it’s something for him to focus on, in the midst of all this strangeness, of all these new things he has to think about. Military honour. Respect for the dead. A tangible task at hand.

  “Are you going to say anything?” I muttered to the Endeavour, trailing behind Tobias as we walked back towards the ship.