“It’s not funny,” I said hollowly. “Do you want to tell Andy he’s going to get one of his eyes ripped out?”
“I didn’t say it was funny,” Tobias said. “Just bloody weird, that’s all.”
He didn’t get it. I could see that. He hadn’t stood there in the corridor and seen it happen, the same way I’d come across the ridge and seen the Endeavour lying in the snow – months before I actually did it for real.
“You trust these soldiers?” I said quietly.
Aaron… the Endeavour said.
“Yes, I do,” Tobias said. “I know you think about Puckapunyal a lot, but it’s not the same, Aaron, it’s not the same at all. I don’t blame the men at Puckapunyal. I’m sorry we had to kill them – it was self-defence, I don’t regret it, but I’m still sorry it happened. But it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen desperate people do desperate things.” He nodded down at the valley. “These guys – and the rest of them waiting at Wagga, we’ve got more coming in soon – they’ve been drawn from a few different bases. They would have been sitting around waiting to die just like those guys at Puckapunyal. Now they have a purpose. Now they have something to live for. Now they don’t feel trapped. Same people, different situation.”
“Saying they’re the same people doesn’t fill me with relief,” I said.
“Why not?” Tobias said, looking askance at me. “There are no bad people, Aaron. Well, some, but they’re pretty rare. Most people are ordinary decent folk who do bad things when they get pushed. Don’t tell me nobody’s ever called you a murderer or a thief or whatever since all this started.”
I thought of Angus – thought of the sheer fury he’d brought to Eucla, the conviction that Matt and I had kidnapped and murdered his people. Convinced to the end that he was the good guy. But he’d been crazy.
“You said you’re drawing these troops from different bases,” I said. “Not Puckapunyal, are you? There were men still alive there when we left.”
“No,” Tobias said. “Not Puckapunyal.”
“So it’s not any different, then, is it?” I said, probing his hypocrisy. “If they were just doing something shit because of the situation they were in…”
“We’re not bringing anybody from Puckapunyal because there’s nobody left alive at Puckapunyal,” Tobias said. “It went radio silent after the night we stopped there. Satellite photos suggest a zombie outbreak, which was probably caused because we had to shoot a dozen of the fucking idiots. So no more Puckapunyal.”
I stared at him. “You didn’t tell me that. When did you find that out? You didn’t tell me that!”
“What difference does it make? Anyway, the point is – you need to trust these men. We’re not getting anywhere unless we all trust each other. Besides, they’re more scared of you than you are of them. You’re a teenager who can talk to an alien spaceship, for Christ’s sake.”
Anybody can talk to me, the Endeavour said.
“You know what I mean,” Tobias said. “Go chat to some of them, Aaron. They won’t bite.”
I didn’t, of course. I went back to my cabin on the Endeavour and roped Matt into some more mental training. If I’m going to get uncomfortable futuristic visions delivered into my skull while I sleep then it’s a skill I want to understand as best I can.
Mental training is going fine, anyway. I can tell Matt’s there: I can sense him, I can even sense that he’s trying to say something more to me. But that’s all. It’s like butting your head against a brick wall. The Endeavour says to keep at it. Easy for the Endeavour to say: it’s been doing this its whole life, or existence, or whatever you call it. Like Blake telling us to just keep practising combat. I’m sure after you’ve snapped a few Taliban necks on some tactical compound night raid it’s like riding a bike, but…
I don’t know. I wish I hadn’t had that fucking dream.
July 15
More soldiers arrived today, the same choppers coming in from Wagga Wagga, depositing another thirty men – the rest of so-called J Company. According to Blake a company is actually supposed to have about a hundred men in it, but what with one thing and another these days, well, you know. There may be more arrivals later. I don’t envy whoever has to figure out the logistics of this sort of thing.
We spoke to some of the soldiers tonight, since they came to hang out around our campfire rather than the ones by their tents. I got the impression it was Captain Tobias and Captain Sanders pushing that, like anxious parents trying to make sure their kids get along at the new school. Matt and I ended up talking to Private Rickenbacker for a while, since it transpires he’s originally from Perth – not just that, he’s actually from our neck of the woods, and went to Rossmoyne High School a few years above us. “Jesus,” Matt said. “What are the odds?” Rickenbacker didn’t have any brothers or sisters, nobody in our year that we could relate to, but he remembered all the old teachers just as well as we did – Mr Richardson the cheerfully socialist History teacher, Ms Seames the psychotically strict Maths teacher, Mr Rooksbury the PE teacher who never let anybody forget that he’d played a few years for the Brisbane Lions. The demountable classrooms that weren’t air-conditioned and sweltered terribly in the summer, the bike shed where people used to go to hook up, the year when people had arrived at school before a sports carnival to find that some local pranksters had not only dug a six foot trench across the sports oval, but had somehow removed all the dirt…
It was nice. It was good to remember. Until the laughter and reminiscence died away, and it sank in to all of us that we were sitting around a campfire in the Snowy Mountains a thousand kilometres away from home, eating military rations, the snowy dark pressing in all around us.
Matt shifted in his seat, holding his hands to the fire. “So why’d you join the Army?”
“I dunno,” Rickenbacker said. “I wasn’t going to go into uni. Thought I might do a trade or something but I wasn’t sure what, and my dad said if you do a couple years in the Army they’ll pay for your TAFE or whatever later. But I guess that doesn’t really matter now.” He tossed an empty noodle cup into the fire, and we watched it shrivel and burn. “I got stationed at Lone Pine Barracks, near Newcastle. That was fucked. When Sydney fell there were refugees coming in every direction. We didn’t last more than a week. Had to abandon the place, got the fuck out of there, headed west. Didn’t hear anything on the radio, everyone said the government collapsed, thought it was basically the end of the world.”
“You and everyone else,” Matt said.
“Yeah. Well. We were on the road for a while, then we found a big group of survivors on a farm near Dubbo. Stayed there a couple months. Then we started hearing about New England, about Draeger.”
It rang a bell; I think I’d heard Blake mention it at some point. New England is just a name for a big part of northern New South Wales. General Draeger was one of the rogue ADF commanders, in control of a bunch of territory there.
“Isn’t he the Christian nut?” Matt said.
“Sounded like it,” Rickenbacker said. “I mean, it’s safe up there. That’s what they say. Towns with walls, thousands of people still alive. But they bang on about all this other shit on the radio, the zombies being God’s punishment, atonement through suffering… I mean, I heard they throw gay people off roofs. Like ISIS.”
“That can’t be true,” I said. “Australians wouldn’t go in for that shit. How many people have you ever met who even go to church?”
“In the city, none,” Rickenbacker said. “When I got posted to the country, plenty.”
“I’m sure they’re not chucking people off roofs,” I said, a little uneasily, because I wasn’t sure of that at all. I was looking at the back of my hand, in the firelight, at the little black number the men in Kalgoorlie tattooed to my hand. A permanent reminder of what human beings are willing to do to each other these days if they think the people in charge will keep them safe.
“Well, anyway, we had a good set-up at Dubbo and we felt all right and nobody
wanted to up sticks,” Rickenbacker went on. “They encourage that, on the broadcasts, they say it’s a sanctuary or whatever and everybody should try to get there. But we stayed put.
“Then maybe a month later a convoy comes past. And they stop, and they’re Army. And they’re from New England. From what we heard on the radio we expected a bunch of psychos, but these guys were nice. Perfectly friendly. One of them actually went to Duntroon with our lieutenant from Lone Pine - there was about ten of us left alive at this point. And they encouraged everybody at the farm to relocate up to New England. The civilians, anyway. For us soldiers, there was no encouragement about it. They said it was our duty. And it started to get unfriendly. Nobody actually drew their gun, but there were about forty of them, and ten of us from Lone Pine, plus about forty civilians. So we were the bigger force, but they were better armed, and it could have gone ugly.”
“So what did you do?” I said. “You obviously didn’t go.”
Rickenbacker shook his head. “Fuck no. Eventually they left, but they said they’d be back. And there was a lot of arguing, between our lieutenant and the civilians in charge of the farm. There’d been tensions in the group before, anyway. You know how it is. So in the end they thought it was best we leave. If the New England guys came back, they could say we’d left to go join them, and if we’d never arrived, well, dangerous out there on the road, isn’t it?
“So we went south, in the other direction. On the road again for a month or something. Sometimes you find a place, you think it’s safe, you find other people, you think things will be okay – always goes to shit. Lost a lot of people. The lieutenant got sick and died after he cut his hand and it got infected – the stupidest fucking thing. By the time we ended up in Wagga Wagga it was just me and a bunch of civilians we’d fallen in with. So I’m the last guy left from Lone Pine.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It happens,” Rickenbacker said. “I’m glad I joined the Army, anyway. If I hadn’t I would have been back in Perth when all this shit went down, being a brickie’s labourer or something, and I’d be dead now.”
“You don’t know that,” Matt said. “We got out okay.”
“Mmm,” Rickenbacker said. “Funny world, though. After all that, Lone Pine and Dubbo and everything, and I get down to Wagga and they put me in this new company and send me up here – and now I’m sitting around a campfire with guys who went to my high school. Hey, was Ms. Parker still working there last year? The hot French teacher?”
We lapsed back into talking about the old days, about a school campus that had once defined nearly the entire geography of our lives, and now felt like some vanished Garden of Eden. I’d always hated high school, hated having to learn stuff I didn’t care about, hated half the dickheads who put me through shit every day – I’d been waiting for graduation, for university, for my life to properly begin. How could I have had any idea of the hell that was waiting for all of us this year?
It was a way of pretending, I could tell, for Matt and Rickenbacker. Of pushing this world out of their minds, floating back to the old one, savouring it. I couldn’t do it. It made me too sad. It made me think of what we’d lost. It made me think of Dad, nagging me to study; Dad, driving me to school when my bike was getting fixed; Dad, sitting in the audience at our graduation.
I don’t want to talk about the fucking past. I don’t want to talk at all.
July 16
Hello matt. You hear me be here me.
That was it. That useless baby talk was the total sum of all the time Matt and I had spent sitting there with our eyes closed, trying to blank our minds and reach out to each other. In terms of cost-benefit analysis, it wasn’t the best use of our time.
On the other hand, the alternatives were chopping firewood or digging latrine pits. That was a factor. But at the same time Sergeant Blake was instructing people in combat: shooting, stealth, martial arts. Once upon a time people would have spent a few hundred bucks a class to have a former SAS sergeant dunk their ass on the ground as some kind of team building exercise, and here we could have it for free! So why sit around inside a derelict, crippled spaceship doing glorified meditation?
I’m joking. I know it’s important. But there’s a ring of truth there. I find it hard to sit around thinking about entirely theoretical stuff – and Matt is even more exasperated about it. “This is bullshit,” he usually says at the end of every session. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
Patience, the Endeavour says. Or some variation thereof.
We have a lot of ammunition now – like, a lot, more than we could ever need. So we’re doing target practice, lying on our bellies in the snow and shooting at paper targets at the south end of the valley. Blake’s even set up a little competition – prize is nothing but bragging rights – marking all our scores and setting up a leaderboard just inside the Grand Entrance. (I suspect this is a ploy to make the soldiers feel more comfortable about coming close to the Endeavour – most of them are skittish about it.) It’s been a surprise to see none of the SAS, not even any of the military, in the top spot. That’s gone to Simon.
“Told you I’m good,” he shrugged, but brushed off any other questions about it. I know everyone at Eucla always talked him up as a good shooter but I didn’t think he was that good.
“You know he went to the Olympics?” Jonas said. “Told me when he was drunk, ages ago, back in Eucla.”
“Huh,” I said. “He never said.”
“I don’t think he likes talking about it. Didn’t win any medals.”
“So? Even going to the Olympics means you’re bloody good.”
Jonas just shrugged.
I may not be any Simon – or any SAS trooper, for that matter – but for somebody who’d never fired a gun a year ago, I think I do okay. I can hit a paper target from two hundred metres. But I guess anybody can, when you’re lying on your stomach and peering down a Steyr Aug scope. It’s when the targets actually start stumbling forward and screaming at you through rotted lips – get a tad harder then.
July 17
We were doing more combat practice with Sergeant Blake this morning, up by the edge of the snow gum forest, me and Matt and half a dozen soldiers. I got paired up with Rahvi, which I thought was a bit unfair. His leg’s almost completely healed from the incident on the way to Jagungal, and he can get me on my ass in a couple of seconds – even when he’s toying with me. Well, if I actually count them, it’s probably ten or fifteen seconds, because he’s trying to teach me. Which is a long time. But still, in some ways, a very short time.
“I’m not pulling this out of nowhere,” he said. “It’s not magic. I’m knocking you down when you make a mistake. You see – look? – you shift forward like that, I can see you’re shifting your weight, you’re moving that way, you’re going to come at me with that arm. Your body’s all linked together. Your moves are predictable.” He stuck a hand down to help me up out of the snow, where I was panting with exhaustion. All around us, the others were still sparring in the snow. It gave me only slight relief to see Blake knock Rickenbacker on his ass just as quickly as Rahvi knocked me on mine.
“This reminds me,” I puffed, “of that David and Mitchell sketch about Gordon Ramsay. You ever see that? Gordon Ramsay’s screaming at this cook in the kitchen and the cook breaks down in tears and goes, you’re just better at cooking than me.”
“You think I was doing this when I was your age?” Rahvi scoffed. “I was fucking scratching graffiti on train windows when I was your age. Give it time, you’ll learn. It’s all training and experience. There’s no natural skill to it.”
“Great,” I said. “I’ll wait thirteen years. At which point we’ll either be dead, or I won’t have to use it anymore.”
“Mate,” Rahvi said, “I don’t know what’s going down in the near future, but long term, I wouldn’t say you’ll never need to use this. I mean, we’re never going back to the 9-to-5, are we?”
I looked across the snow
at the other sparring partners, Blake walking through the snow between them, barking orders, encouragement, praise and criticism.
We’re doing this because we have nothing better to do. Because we’re sitting here, waiting for orders from on high. Waiting for the next thing to happen.
But can I picture myself at sixty? Or fifty? Or even twenty? The Endeavour says there are machine craft orbiting the Earth even now, up there every night, even as we sit around our campfires and wrap our jackets tightly around ourselves and look up at the stars. It will go one way, and we’ll all die, in which case I don’t need to worry about developing my survival skills. Or it will go the other way, and hell, maybe I’ll live to be a hundred.
Nobody knows.
Rahvi and I kept sparring. The sun sank across the valley. We ate dinner around the campfires (chicken soup tonight) and I played a few rounds of cards with Matt and Rickenbacker and a few of the other soldiers. And now here I am going to sleep in my cabin.
This is all an illusion. It might feel safe here. But even if the soldiers don’t betray us like I still fear in my gut they might, even if raiders from the plains don’t come up and kill and burn us with no care for what the Endeavour represents - if we can’t ultimately wrangle some kind of protection deal from the Alliance… our days here are numbered. The machines will destroy this planet.
I go to sleep thinking about that every night.
July 18
The eastern patrol came across a group of survivors today. They brought them in – as per standing orders – and by the time I was emerging from afternoon mental training with Matt, they were being processed, the Army medics giving them a check-up in one of the big tents.
“I thought this place was supposed to be top secret,” I said.
“I think that’s sort of gone by the wayside,” Simon said, chopping wood by the campfire.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 9