The flickering skies illuminated the island with a faint blue sheen, making it look even punier than it was - and the giant glowing cloud fragmented into a thousand smaller ones, each growing a minor appendage at its bottom - a thousand glowing typhoons. Just then, the bang of a million thunderbolts slammed into the carrier. Scores of its windowpanes shattered; the front windshields of the rescue helicopters popped and cracked.
The swarm of small typhoons began to move, reaching into the sea outside the lagoon. Several of them sank entirely underwater; others speeded out westward, at what must have been several hundred kilometers per hour. The rest of the night sky was in total chaos; clouds formed and dispersed in minutes, the wind alternately dropped away and increased to a gale without warning; the fleet had to retreat farther away. Alien Beach lay calm at the center of the chaos; a large blue typhoon stayed above it and held the outside weather at bay.
It was the last minute of the 123rd day, local Pacific Time.
Chapter Thirty
DAY 124
"This is Breaking News...
"In the city of Riyadh, King Khadi of Saudi Arabia is now making his first public speech since the attempt on his life. For the first time he is openly declaring war on the Sirian species, which he describes as 'demons from hell,' and vows not to rest until they have been driven away from the Solar System. Ambassadors of Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait are also present among his audience, and applaud him enthusiastically.
"Here is Albert Sayed, live from our newscenter in Cairo..."
"The official war declaration came just after the commencement of the much-awaited missile attack on Alien Beach, launched from the Saudi-Iranian strike fleet. The government of Iran has been strangely silent all the time, perhaps waiting for the divine sign that never came.
"But King Khadi is claiming in his live speech, that he was commanded by God in a vision, to give the strike order - never mind the illogic that God would have to ask for nuclear weapons and not intervene himself."
"From his tribune, in front of the cameras, the ruler of Saudi Arabia appears haggard and he has a disturbed gleam in his eyes - but he shouts and waves his fists energetically. A crowd of, maybe, ten thousand souls are cheering him - all middle-class city people, whose wealth is perceived as under threat by new, advanced energy sources that - still! - the Sirians refuse to share with humanity.
"I'm telling you, the man is insane! Now he's calling for a common prayer, and a mullah comes up next to Khadi - the crowd shouts and points to the clouded sky. A kind of blue glow is visible in the clouds - what was that?
"A bolt of lightning just struck the speaker's tribune, and destroyed the king's microphones! This is incredible! Nobody was hurt, but Khadi has retreated and is escorted away by security guards. The crowd scatters in panic, screaming hysterically that - "
"Albert, can you please hold on a minute? This just in - the missile attack on Alien Beach seems to have missed its target. The island stands unhurt - but fierce, unnatural storms are raging through the area. The U.N. fleet is mostly retreating, and no military moves against the Saudi-Iranian fleet have been reported as yet. From the White House, no comments have yet leaked out..."
Ann clung tightly to Oanss; she was convinced that if she lost hold of him, the storm would kill her. From her viewpoint, she saw only rainstorms and lightning outside the island; but here, in the eye of the largest glowing typhoon, there was almost no wind at all.
And yet, some of the deafening noise of the outside chaos could reach their ears.
Only in furtive glances did she look up into the sky - above them hovered the inside of a cylinder of wind and water, many hundred meters wide, winding upward into the diffuse dark-blue glow of a spinning cloud, two thousand meters up. Every few seconds, stray lightning illuminated the "walls" of this vortex; several palmtrees were struck and shriveled into black stumps.
Oanss kept clinging to the Sirian antenna tree, straining for breath as he kept intoning sentences - it sounded almost like prayers - but stayed fixed on the tree and the glowing vortex above them. Not one lightning-bolt came near them.
Then - Ann could not sense how much time had passed - she spotted a figure approaching them - and yelped intelligibly. Oanss turned in the direction of the soldier, who warily came closer.
All three were silent. Any speech, any language, was inadequate to the situation. There were so many things that the soldier could have said; a thousand lies that Ann could have uttered to hide her true feelings; Oanss could have been asking questions for the rest of his physical life.
The soldier held out his hands in a gesture of peace, and walked close enough to touch the pair. Ann stared at the long bulge that ran down the man's forehead. Oanss seemed uncertain, if not afraid; his arms moved into a protective position, tense and trembling.
But the soldier merely smiled, put one hand firmly on the side of the metal tree, and shouted over the wind: "Don't be afraid! It is not you who make them angry!"
From the sea came a rumbling echo of what might have been an explosion. A huge column of water cascaded up from the north, and crashed onto the empty army barracks. The sea flashed blue, and the boiling surface bulged upward ten meters.
Ann screamed, when something she thought was a giant whale shot out of the water and crashed down on the shore. It smashed the barracks flat under its weight.
A wall of dirt and steaming water was thrown up as the nose of the giant black shape plowed through the sand and stopped in a cluster of trees, a hundred meters away. The shape turned on its side with a ringing noise of twisted metal, and lay still.
It was a huge nuclear submarine; the markings on its sides were partly in Arabic. The soldier wondered for a moment if the stranded submarine might explode, or if all its crew were dead. Then the blue glow from the sea came back, and flickered away; up from the depths surfaced row upon row of floating black spheres.
The high waves swept the spheres ashore, and they popped open; inside each ball, curled up in a fetal position, lay a crew member - twitching or in shock, but visibly alive. In the next few minutes, at least fifty live crewmen were vomited up from the sea.
A few kilometers farther out west, a glowing blue typhoon re-surfaced, sucking the ocean up along itself as it rose.
It was carrying another submarine in its spinning vortex-tail, resembling a tiny toy caught in a net; with amazing speed, the typhoon carried the eighty-meter carcass to the brink of the lagoon and spit it out; the wrecked submarine crashed into the waves and sank instantly. More black spheres floated up and began to drift toward the island.
The rescued men from the submarines were too shocked to act coherently. Whatever they had gone through to get snatched from inside their vessels, it must have happened too rapidly for a human to comprehend.
Most of them just sat and shook like they were freezing, though the air was much hotter than usual. A few of them glanced in horror up at the glowing, flickering inferno above their heads - and knelt with their heads down before the great unknown power.
This sight seemed to disturb Oanss; the soldier was filled with sadness. No, it was not their deity the crewmen were seeing - not at all. Yet, several of them thought so, shut their eyes and averted their eyes to the storm, shouting desperately that God would show mercy and not kill them outright.
The soldier rushed out to one of the kneeling men, a clean-shaven Saudi Arabian or Iranian man in a blue uniform; his stripes indicated he was a submarine captain. The soldier mercilessly tugged at the man's sleeves, shaking him so that he would open his eyes.
"No! Look at me! Look at it! That is not what you think it is! It does not want you to worship it! Look at it!"
The terrified officer whimpered and shook his head in denial, convinced that if he looked into the eye of the storm, the power behind it would strike him dead. The soldier restrained himself, and let go of the kneeling man. He ran back to where Ann and Oanss were standing. Around the island, the storm continued unabated; it seemed as if the vo
rtex above them was sucking in all the clouds in the atmosphere.
The smaller cousins of the central vortex speeded away to the west; the opened black capsules that had transported the sailors ashore were dissolving into rubbery flat puddles.
The soldier shouted to the tall amphibian: "Where are the other scientists? Where is your ship?"
Oanss blinked uncertainly, and pointed out to the lagoon where the waves were crashing onto the beach.
"Are they all safe?"
Oanss nodded and grunted a yes, as was the Earth custom.
The soldier began to check the stranded sailors for weapons - not that any of the men had so much as a shred of fighting spirit left in them, but he didn't want anyone to attempt suicide. Some were still carrying guns, but they were rendered useless by the rubbery black substance that had crept into the barrels. If there were suicide pills around, no one seemed to be using them.
An hour or two the soldier spent wandering about the groups of shocked, defeated crewmen, finding those who were wandering aimlessly around, gathering everyone he could see at the stranded submarine where they could find shelter from the raging storm.
Eventually, he found one sailor who spoke good English, and was composed enough to listen. The soldier took him along to the scientists' storage barracks, gathered water bottles, blankets, food packs and first-aid, which they dragged back to the group.
The soldier saw that these men were people, not faceless hordes; they were just as much cannon-fodder as soldiers in any war - and he felt genuinely sorry for them.
For thousands of years, the same thing had happened again and again; young men were sent out to the slaughter, just to feed the bloated ego of some tyrant. But not this night - there was no enemy to kill these men, nor could they ever, ever have killed what they were sent out to fight. The soldier swept a blanket around a shuddering, crying Arab, who looked no older than twenty years - and talked soothingly to him, in what little Arabic he knew.
"It's all right. You are not a prisoner. Be calm. Here, have some water. Sleep if you can."
The man said something in Arabic - the soldier had spent long enough time in the region to understand. "Thank you, my friend."
The soldier began to walk off in no particular direction. His relief was immense; if he had been more the man he once was, he would have cried. Instead he looked out to the west, where quick blue flashes were illuminating the dark horizon.
He thought: And now what? You have shown them what you can do. You took their stupid atom bombs, ate them, and spat out the pieces. But a storm can't govern a whole people. They have to learn on their own now, whether you change them or not after this. I know you are changing me, and I'm grateful - your experiment is succeeding.
But are you going to change all of mankind? Even if it could be done, would it be right? If you do, they will make themselves your slaves - they will worship you, out of fear more than understanding. Is that what you want - slaves, not free beings? I cannot think you are that small-minded. Please, let them change themselves. You have shown enough to last a long time, to point them in the right direction.
I'll help them, I swear I'll do what I can. It's not much, but I'll try. Yet - why? Why this world? Why me? Why would you even care, when you have the entire universe? Could you just answer that question, and I'll never ask for anything again...
He shut his eyes and waited for a vision; he waited a minute and gave it up. A notion, fully his own, had taken shape in his mind while watching the stranded crewmen pray for absolution. If land-humans were so damned keen to worship things, then why not give them something worthwhile to look up to. As the storm continued outside, the soldier sought out Oanss again.
"It is important that I talk to your people soon," he explained. "I have a suggestion."
Chapter Thirty-One
Carl had finally fallen asleep inside the protective capsule, when it began to stir again.
"We're moving upward!" Lazar said hopefully.
The machine had served them some water, but done nothing else for hours - they badly needed to visit a bathroom. The machine vibrated and burred madly for several minutes, then lurched and turned over. The two round exit hatches sprung open, and the morning sun blinded the two men. All was calm outside, save for the sound of the gently rolling seas, the rustle of a faint wind in the trees, and flocks of seagulls circling the area.
The sky was a bright, uniform blue - as if last night had been but a dream... They awkwardly climbed out of the pod, onto the surface of the island, right where they had escaped into the pod the night before.
"Look!" gasped Carl, pointing to the huge submarine wreck on the northern side of the beach.
There was another wreck sticking up from the water out at the lagoon. Palmtrees were burned; scores of uniformed Arabs were squatting down in the shadow of the stranded submarine. Next to Carl and Lazar, several other pod-machines dug themselves up like busy ants - the other scientists were let outside, squinting in the sun. Carl was happy to see that Takeru, Edmund, and Mats came out safe and sound, if a little wobbly.
"Where's Ann?" he asked them; she had never appeared when the machines opened. "And Andrea, and Bruce?"
"Use their cell phone numbers!" suggested Takeru, already pulling out his own phone. Carl punched in the code and waited... No answer from Ann's number. Maybe she had lost her phone in the commotion.
"I've found Bruce and Andrea!" Takeru called out to Carl, phone to his ear. "They were evacuated by the troops just in time!"
"Good! It was great of them to volunteer for that little diversion. But maybe it wasn't necessary after all, fooling the troops into thinking we were in the submerged lander. Send my thanks. I've got to look for Ann..."
As he spoke, Carl and the others hurried back to their barracks.
Takeru stayed to watch the stranded newcomers. It unnerved him to see so many military people on the island, but they seemed passive. The noise of approaching helicopters, several of them, came from the sea. Was the military going to land and take over the island after all?
Takeru's concerns were answered by an uproar from the lagoon. The sound of the surfacing lander vessel was deafening - every man felt the vibrations in the air and in his feet. It rose on a bed of hot jet streams, forcing Takeru to run for cover even from a hundred meters away; the huge dark manta-shape hovered in a plume of clouds, and slowly moved in toward the beach.
The submarine castaways panicked. Some rushed into the water and tried to swim away, but soon gave up. Others just stared at the weird vehicle, that to them must have vaguely resembled a futuristic submarine. The lander vessel settled down on the lagoon's beach, throwing up clouds of sand; huge black pontoons were rapidly inflated under it to support its weight.
The vessel came to a rest several meters above ground, the pontoons creaking gently in the breeze. The arriving helicopters, a dozen of them, made a sweep around the island and retreated back to their base.
Carl, alerted by the thunderous noise, ran up to the lagoon's edge and stopped. He arched his neck backward to see the top of the sleek black hull - when a metallic sound came from up there. A Sirian peered down from the top of the vessel, and waved at the scientists standing below on the ground. By way of some sort of elevator, eleven Sirians descended to the beach.
First came Namonnae , somber-looking and holding one hand on the shoulder of Ranmotanii , beside her.
Then the young-looking Mnmnonns , carrying a bundle of flutes in a pouch.
Aonasann , communicating to someone (maybe the ship itself) via a small device clasped onto his blocky head.
Moanossoans , the tall female who smiled so much, pointing excitedly at the group of stranded newcomers.
Snaoosnee , the aged flat-chested female, her sleek face filled with wonder at the sights around her.
Tmmtenaa , shy but smiling furtively at the scientists as he set his feet on the ground. After him came a few others - only Oanss was missing.
And last came Oanorrn ,
the oldest one, sitting on the descending elevator, supported by... a soldier?
Carl vaguely recognized the uniformed stranger as one of the platoon members who General Harrod had posted out on Alien Beach. The man came up to Carl and extended a hand for a shake; he seemed controlled and upbeat. Carl mutely shook hands, frowning at the bulge in the soldier's forehead and his gray hair. How old was he really?
"Where are the other soldiers?" Carl asked him.
"They won't come back, Mr. Sayers. We just picked up a newscast; General Harrod resigned from his ECT post a few hours ago. The President has promised the amphibians, in public, that no more military personnel will come near the island for the rest of the one-year period. He apologized on behalf of mankind for the attack, and pledged to start immediate peace negotiations with the attacking states."
"Peace negotiations? You mean... negotiating for the Sirians?"
The soldier laughed. Oanorrn merely seemed puzzled.
"As if the amphibians were ever at war with anyone on this planet! They'll just go back to their schedule."
Carl took a deep breath; the situation was unreal.
"But... Oanorrn. They tried to kill you... what if they try again?"
"'Theey' wwill noot trry againn. Noow we wiill mmake musiic wwith thhose peoplle. Bee haappy, and llike soo wee thhank the Aancestooors!"
The old amphibian made a few click-sounds - a chortle? and slowly walked away, the soldier supporting his gait. The two were heading for the submarine wreck, conversing in English like old friends - Carl heard with increasing amazement that the soldier was using some amphibian sounds as well.
The man laughed with click-sounds and spoke a few land-language phrases with a hint of singing intonation. The female Sirian with the flute bundle hurried after them, joined by Moanossoans.
Yngve, AR - Alien Beach Page 28