9.30pm
Dinner in the mess hall at seven o’clock, far more packed and crowded than I remember it from the first time aboard the Canberra. There were a lot of men with Army fatigues on, cleanly washed but still faded and torn or fraying, and some guys just wearing olive camouflage pants with plain white t-shirts or blue polo shirts with the Navy logo on the breast. A lot of them had bristly buzz-cuts and red-splotched cheeks, suggesting hair that had just been cut and faces that had just been shaved for the first time in a while. They were all in good moods, too, laughing and talking, while the Navy personnel tended to be more business-as-usual. So: these were the lucky souls who’d been airlifted onto the Canberra a few weeks ago, as the ship made its way along the New South Wales coast, because Christmas Island had decided their bases were not worth the cost of defending. Good for them.
Some of them had clearly brought their families onto those bases, because there were civilians here as well. They were wearing the same mixture of surplus Navy clothing and their own washed-but-haggard clothes they’d probably been wearing every day for the last seven months, providing the only splashes of bright colour in an otherwise grey and green room: a yellow blouse here, a red t-shirt there, a scattering of blue jeans. And all of them with the same smiles and laughs and general cheery attitude as the Army soldiers. It reminded me of what my friend Owen had said, coming back from a holiday to the Greek islands with his family last year, before exams, when every day there had been Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing Islamic State, crossing through Turkey and then getting to Rhodes or Kos or wherever, where they filled the cafes alongside Western holidaymakers to buy a Coke and use the wifi. Owen had said he thought they’d all be miserable, until his dad had pointed out the obvious: they were the ones who’d made it. They thought their troubles were over.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve thought that myself. I can still remember the night we arrived at Eucla, the gravel dust in the headlights in the darkness, the guns and the spotlights, and then Ellie – the smell of her hair, her arms around me…
I don’t know why I’m writing that. She’s not dead. Considering how things at Eucla ended up I think most of us were luckier than we had any right to be.
Anyway. As I was finishing dinner, Petty Officer Mack came down to fetch me and bring me up to the commodore’s office. Time for a sitrep.
“So, really,” Mack said to me in confidential tones as we headed down a corridor, “you can just talk to each other like that? Like… in your heads?”
“We couldn’t a month ago,” I said. “But we can now.”
“They said you’re an alien.”
“Not exactly.”
He didn’t seem particularly nonplussed. “That’s what I thought. People going on about aliens, saying there’s some alien kid, and I was like – hang on, we picked you up off a life raft a couple months ago, I’ve seen you, you’re just a normal kid.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I said.
“Seriously, though,” Mack said. “There’s… an alien spaceship up there, right? In the mountains? And they say it talks to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “There is.” I wasn’t sure what else to add.
“Bloody hell. I’d like to see that one day.”
I imagined a distant future: the machine bases destroyed, the undead vanquished, the galaxy at peace, the Endeavour a tourist attraction with plaques and tour guides. Well, I guess it could be its own tour guide. If it didn’t get too snippy with people. Which it probably would.
Captain Norton had a whole bunch of folders spread out across his desk, various documents and reports and photographs. “Don’t worry, Matt, this isn’t all for you,” he said as I came in. “Thank you, Mack.” The petty officer nodded and left, closing the door behind him.
“What is all that?” I asked, sitting down across from him.
“Mostly stuff you don’t need to worry about. Now, I understand your abilities are limited, so I’ll keep it brief.”
“I can send as much information as you need,” I said. “Well… as much as I can remember in one sitting.”
“Well, there’s not much to say yet in any case,” Norton said. “We only did recon and mapping today. The Lincoln has come down on its port side in the shipping channel, facing north. There’s a hull breach in the vicinity of the engine room, a possible explosion, which may be how it sank – but that’s not relevant.”
“Aren’t these things nuclear-powered?” I asked.
“The nuclear engine drives the steam turbines,” Norton said, “so…”
“The what?”
“The steam turbines,” he said.
“You just said it was a nuclear engine,” I said. “Not a steamship!”
“The nuclear engine heats the water, which creates the steam, which turns the turbines, which power the shafts,” Norton said patiently.
“A steam engine, though? I didn’t know that. That’s… lame.”
“This isn’t The Jetsons, Matt,” Norton said. “All engines are just about compression and motion. The US Navy happens to use nuclear power, we use diesel – take a guess which is more efficient. To answer your concern, the hull breach was near the turbines. The nuclear reactors are undamaged.” He shuffled some papers and added, “As far as we can tell.”
“Oh, terrific,” I said.
“Don’t worry. We’re conducting radiation checks twice a day. Anyway. We’ve identified eight fighter jets and one helicopter on the seabed, presumably having been on the flight deck as the carrier was leaving port. There were suggestions from Christmas Island that we should investigate those, but they’re unlikely to have had nuclear armaments aboard while in a friendly harbour, and in any case the seabed here is eighty metres which is a problematic depth.”
“Eighty metres?” I said. “That’s not that much.”
“It is for divers,” Norton said. “Recreational divers don’t go half that. Commercial divers, military divers – it can be done, but it makes it more dangerous and more difficult for a number of reasons, and that’s back in peacetime. Whereas right now, we have an unknown number of zombies wandering around on the seabed.”
That gave me a gross feeling – the thought of all those dead people down there in the cold and the dark. “Can’t you kill them?” I said.
“More would wander in,” Norton said. “The bay’s infested. So we’re going in.”
“Inside the carrier?” I said uneasily. In my head I was playing over that dream I’d had, of one of the clearance divers surfacing and screaming. Maybe the same guy who’d given me a smile and thumbs up this morning. “Won’t that be even more infested?”
“It might not be so bad, depending on how fast the ship went down,” Norton said. “A lot of the crew could have made it off, in which case they either died anyway and they’re wandering down on the seabed, or they made it to shore and got the hell away from Brisbane. Anyway, it’s a moot point, because we’ll have to go inside the ship eventually for the PAL codes.”
“The what now?”
“Permissive Action Link. The safety override. Every nuclear warhead ever built – by the Americans, anyway – has one. It prevents unauthorised detonation. No PAL code, no explosion.”
“This is news to me,” I said. “So – if you’re some pilot, about to pull the trigger, you have to tap in a PIN number?”
“No, no, the process happens long before it’s in a pilot’s hands,” Norton said. “They’d be armed before then. Which is why the US Navy wouldn’t have been in the habit of having nuclear-tipped missiles sitting around already loaded on the planes while their sailors are having R&R in Brisbane.”
“So why do you have to go diving inside the carrier looking for them? Can’t you just get them off the Americans? I know that big base in Utah is gone, but they had other ships, other bases…”
Norton shook his head. “The specific PAL codes for any given warhead are only given to the officer responsible for that warhead. In the case of the weapons abo
ard the USS Abraham Lincoln, that would be the ship’s captain.”
“Shit,” I said. “So they’re onboard the ship somewhere. That’s… that’s a pretty big needle in a haystack.”
“It’s not as bad as that,” Norton said. “There’s more than one copy of the codebook, we have blueprints of the ship, the Americans have been as helpful as they can in suggesting where we might find them. I’m not saying it won’t be dangerous for the divers. But they’re experienced men, they know what they’re doing, and there’s no getting around this. We need a warhead, and we need a PAL codebook.”
“Okay,” I said uneasily. “Look, Commodore… there’s something I have to tell you.”
“Go on.”
“This whole… this psychic link, thing, that me and Aaron have,” I said. “Talking to each other, telepathy over distance… it’s not the only thing.”
“What else?”
“Well.” I shifted in my seat, not meeting his eyes. “When we were back in WA – just after everything started – we started having dreams about the mountains. About the Endeavour, although we didn’t know that at the time. That was how it manifested. Dreams.”
“I know,” Norton said. “Tobias told me.”
“Well, they came true. There was a day when we came to the valley and found it. And that… I mean, I’d never seen snow in my life, and I kept having these dreams where I was walking through the snow. Real dreams, not normal dreams. Dreams that felt like they were going to happen, or had already happened. And then they did. The Endeavour thinks… I don’t know, it said something about sleep being when the brain is most receptive. When your defences are down. I don’t know.”
“What did you want to tell me, Matt?”
“We’ve started having different dreams,” I said. “Aaron had one about one of our friends getting hurt. I had one about – and I mean, this is before I ever knew I’d be coming up here – I had one about a scuba diver coming up to the surface and screaming, and there was just blood, blood everywhere, in the water all around him.”
Norton regarded me across the table. The cabin was quiet – not even the distant throb of the engines I’d grown so used to on the way to Melbourne, now that the ship was silently sitting at anchor.
“Well,” Norton said, “thank you for telling me that, Matt.”
“That’s it?” I said. “Look, I know it sounds fucking crazy, but it’s true. I mean, you believe all the telepathy stuff, right? Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, Matt. But what can we do about it? I know it’s a risk. The divers know it’s a risk. They’re all experienced men, Matt. Most of them did mine clearance and dock security in the Iraq War, and anti-piracy operations off Somalia. Clearance divers are a special forces unit, you know that? Like the SAS. They’re not just ordinary sailors with scuba tanks. When they go inside that ship, they’ll be ready for what’s waiting.”
“Not according to what I saw,” I said.
“Matt, I take the safety of my men and women very seriously,” the commodore said. “But unless you can remember the face of the diver you saw – unless I can pull him off duty – I’m not sure what you expect me to do.”
I couldn’t remember his face. I’d been looking at the blood.
“Are you going to tell them, at least?” I asked.
“You said your brother had a dream where a friend was hurt. Did that happen?”
“Not yet.”
“Did Aaron tell him?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Well, there you go,” Commodore Norton said. “Look, Matt, I appreciate you telling me. I don’t think you’re crazy. There’s not much I can do with it, but it shouldn’t be your burden to bear anyway. Ball’s in my court. Don’t worry about it anymore, okay?”
“All right,” I said, knowing full well that I would. “Anything else for me to send down to Jagungal?”
“No, that’ll do for today. Thank you, Matt.”
I slouched back down the corridors towards my cabin – or rather, the cabin I’ll be sharing with the others – and found it empty, the rest of them either still down at the mess or off at the wardroom. I lay back on my bunk with my eyes closed, concentrating on my breathing, and eventually found Aaron’s mind swimming in to focus with my own. I filled him in on what the captain had said. I don’t really get the PAL code thing but the commodore said it’s non-negotiable, basically, I said.
yeah, Llewellyn was talking about it and… it sounds complicated, Aaron said. would’ve thought you could just take it in there and bash it with a rock if you had to but I guess they’re built to better standards than that.
I don’t understand them, I said. don’t understand how this ship works, or the planes, or the choppers, or… I don’t know. remember back in Perth when the water went off? and, like, the power I understood – but the water, why was that off? and I’d never realised till then how much I just used stuff every day, needed stuff, that I didn’t understand. And now here we are again. What the fuck even is a nuke? how does it work? what’s uranium? Is it still all right if it’s been in the ocean for half a year?
We don’t have to worry about that, Matt, Aaron said. there’s other people that will worry about that. Let them do it. For now, our job is carrying information.
Some job, I grumbled.
It beats building a wall outside Eucla.
And he’s right. He is right. I’d rather be here, doing this, attached in any way whatsoever to the resistance project out of Jagungal and the gradually shaping global struggle to fight the machines than… well, surviving. Just surviving. That was all we were doing before we went to Jagungal. Just getting by.
I didn’t tell him what the commodore said about the dream. I didn’t ask him if he’d told Andy. Like Norton said – it doesn’t really matter.
August 3
Norton had nothing further to report today. A big storm rolled in this morning and there was rain drumming down all over the bay, but that made no different to the divers. They’re still going all over the exterior of the Abraham Lincoln, photographing everything, documenting everything, before they venture inside. A few more of them – Norton showed me the photographs they took – ventured down to about the seventy-metre mark to try to do a better survey of the number of undead down on the seabed. It was blurry and watery and not very well-lit, but I know the shape of a zombie reaching out when I see it.
“Jesus,” I said. “How many of them?”
“Hundreds, at least. Probably more before that, carried away by currents or broken down enough to become part of the food chain. In fact if we were here six months from now I doubt we’d have a problem. But it is what it is.”
“And how many do you reckon inside the Lincoln?”
“That’s the great unknown,” Norton said. “We’ll just have to find out. Less than five thousand, at any rate.”
I’d thought he was joking. It was only later – talking to Corporal Rahvi in the wardroom – I found out that had been roughly the crew capacity of the Lincoln.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “That’s insane!”
“Well, it was a big ship,” Rahvi said. He was sitting in an armchair with a leg draped over the arm, reading a book called Goodbye To All That. I’d leafed through it before, it’s a World War I memoir – the military seems to stock its bookshelves with military books.
“Five thousand,” I said. “How the fuck are they going to neutralise five thousand zombies?”
“First of all, there won’t be five thousand,” Rahvi said. “Plenty would have made it off the ship. Secondly – they don’t have to neutralise all of them. Just the ones in between us and what we need to get.”
Lying here at night in my bunk I can’t stop thinking about it. A stone’s throw away and twenty metres down and there you are: the interior corridors of the Lincoln, flooded with water, full of grit and crud and zombies. And the clearance divers have to make their way through that, inch by flooded inch, with
a visibility of a dozen metres at most…
It makes me feel claustrophobic. Although sleeping in this bunk with the next bunk ten centimetres from my face, and Lomax’s snoring and Dresner’s stinking feet, probably doesn’t help with that.
August 4
I was up on the deck today. The Canberra isn’t running aerial operations at the moment so Norton and his officers have no problem with civilians and Army personnel accessing the flight deck, and after more than a month in the snow with howling winds and blizzards rolling in every few days, you’d better believe I want to go sit in the sunshine on a 23-degree day in Queensland.
Some of the other soldiers and civilians had found some balls and bats somewhere, and were playing a game of cricket on the flight deck. It had been going all morning and by the time I was up there they’d apparently lost several balls to the depths of Moreton Bay. I was never much of a cricket fan myself – it’s too complicated – but Lomax and Dresner were batting and it was enjoyable enough to watch. Close your eyes, listen to the thwack of the bats and the cries of the players, and you could almost imagine you were at a suburban park back in the old days.
In the early afternoon, as they were breaking for lunch, I was still standing up near the superstructure with a pair of binoculars I’d taken from the wardroom, looking down at the clearance divers. They’d established a floating pontoon and a few boats directly above the Lincoln – moored to it, in fact, since the superstructure just pokes above the water at low tide. There was a steady stream of regulator bubbles breaking the surface, and sailors in the boats dropping down fresh tanks.
“Man, I have to thank you for this,” Rickenbacker said. He was lying on his back on the deck by my feet with his shirt off, laid across his face, soaking in the sun. “I think I was wearing the same pair of thermals down south for two months. This is fucking bliss.”
“I hope you’re wearing sunscreen.”
“I don’t care. I can burn to a crisp. I’ll die happy.”
I lifted the binoculars and scanned the waters further east, the shores of the island which I now know is called, appropriately enough, Moreton Island. (Apparently Captain Cook himself named this whole area, in honour of some bigwig named Moreton back in England.) Gentle waves lapping against a long fringe of white sand, banks of seaweed stacked up by the tide, a verdant wall of subtropical bushland…
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 15