End Times Box Set [Books 1-6]
Page 182
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s such a big deal that I can’t even think past it. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So never mind that, okay?”
But that was a lie, because of course I can think past it. Doesn’t take much imagination to consider what you hope will happen coming true. And the fact is I just can’t see myself leaving Jagungal. It’s not the camp, not the thousand survivors, not the friendships I’ve made. It’s the Endeavour. It just wouldn’t feel right to be apart from the Endeavour.
“I know,” I said. “Like Liana said. I know I’m welcome here.”
“Of course you’re welcome here,” Geoff said. “I’m telling you I think you should come here. That’s my advice, all right?”
“I get it,” I said, as we approached the wharf. “You promised Dad you’d look after us if anything happened to him.”
Maybe that pushed it a bit too far. Geoff grabbed my arm, stopped me in our tracks. “Yeah. I did. You see Claire back there? How did that make you feel? I know you’re not Matt, I know it’s not the same thing, but how did that make you feel?”
I swallowed. The truth is that I am Matt, now, after his death, more than Geoff could ever understand. “Like I’d do anything to protect her,” I said.
“Good,” Geoff said. “That’s how I feel about Ellie. That’s how your Dad felt about you and Matt. And, you know – we didn’t know each other for more than a couple of days in Albany. We never would have met each other, except that you kids did. And we promised each other: we’d take care of the other’s kids, if anything happened to us. So I promised your dad I’d take care of you. And I shouldn’t have let you go that day. Or I should have gone with you. I mean – I trusted Jonas, I trusted Simon, but I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have let it matter…”
He was rambling a bit. The funny thing was, I could see past those outer shields of his mind. Geoff had never been sworn to whatever promise he’d made to Dad. I could see him through Matt’s eyes, Matt’s memories, standing at the wheel of the Sea Vixen the day after we fled Albany, when I was suicidal and Matt was the guy who’d been fucking his teenage daughter, when Geoff looked on both of us as recalcitrant liabilities. It wasn’t until Norseman, when we’d been abducted to Kalgoorlie, that the guilt set in. And when we later showed up at Eucla – well, it wrote itself by then. Of course he looked at us as sons now. As family. Of course he felt terrible about Matt’s death. And of course he was rearranging facts and history in his own memory, overwriting and erasing his previous thoughts and memories from March, when – I could see this clear as day now, looking into his eyes, even though he no longer could – he’d considered abandoning us, when he and Ellie’s survival had been the only thing he cared about.
That was fine. Geoff isn’t a bad person. That’s just what we do as humans. That’s how our minds work. I probably do it myself. God knows my thoughts about Matt are a minefield. The point is that now – looking at him, looking back at myself – Geoff considered me a full-blooded family member, just like Colin and Liana and Ellie and Claire. And it wasn’t just the baby. Even if that hadn’t happened, I knew he’d feel this way. It was about what we’d all been through together.
“You should come back here,” Geoff said. “When everything’s done and dusted. Jonas and Simon, too. But I’m proud of you, all right? I want you to know that. Your dad would be proud of you, too. You and Matt both.”
And he surprised me with a hug, wrapping his arms around me. The son he never had. Colin hugged me too, and of course Liana did. I promised to come back – kept that promise vague, a promise to visit, not to permanently return. Down on the pier Len was firing up the engines of the seaplane. Tobias shook everybody’s hands, and we climbed down the ladder onto the lower jetty.
“You all right?” Tobias asked me, on the flight back to Point Boston.
“It’s fine,” I said. I was staring out the window at the cerulean sea, the low and puffy clouds, the stark blue sky. Wondering if I’d ever see the Raes again.
December 24
I am alive. They don’t have me. I am alive and I am free.
December 25
This is what happened.
We were shot down. It was afternoon; we were flying from Port Lincoln to Wagga Wagga. Just me and Tobias on that big, empty turboprop, and the two pilots up in the cockpit. I hadn’t slept much the night before, and I was exhausted, so I was dozing – sprawled across three seats, falling in and out of sleep every time we hit a bit of turbulence.
Then there was an explosion – or a banging, I guess, big enough and loud enough to know that something was badly wrong. The plane lurched. I sat bolt upright, looked across the aisle and locked eyes with Tobias. He was buckling his seatbelt on. I had just enough time to get my own on before there was another explosion towards the back of the plane and we were suddenly pitched into a steep dive.
I didn’t realise we’d been shot down, even though this had happened before. I thought it was a typical crash – something wrong with the engine. I thought we’d come all this way and now we were about to die because the skeleton crews at airfields in Wagga and Carnarvon and Christmas Island didn’t have the manpower to run proper maintenance checks.
The oxygen masks dropped down and I put one on but I still blacked out. Or maybe I was knocked out in the crash, and can’t remember that terrifying plummet down to earth. Either way, the next thing I remember was waking up after impact.
Reality drifted back to me slowly: the hot sun on my face and arms. The sound of the wind scattering grains of sand across the fuselage. Blinking, opening my eyes, seeing nothing but blinding sunlight. Aches and pains all over my body.
There was no longer a row of seats in front of me, or a roof above my head. The plane had broken up on impact. I was still buckled into a jagged row of seats, and in the sand around me was more debris: wings, seats, ragged bits of metal. At the time I had no idea where we were – beyond the crash scene I could make out heat-blurred glimpses of sand and scrubland – but thinking back on the flight path now, I guess we must have been in the Mallee, somewhere near the Murray River.
I tried to stand up and couldn’t, and realised I still had my seatbelt on. I reached for the buckle with trembling fingers. My vision was blurred. I was still fumbling with the buckle when suddenly everything around me was in shadow.
Something had moved above me, silently, blotting out the sun.
I looked up and was choked with terror. I’d escaped once before, in the helicopter crash in the Snowy Mountains. I’d watched that alien vessel hover above the wreckage, reach down with its horrifying black tendrils, drag up both the dead and the living and carry them away to the south. But I’d escaped, fled with Matt deeper into the mountains, avoided that awful fate.
This time I wouldn’t be so lucky. I screamed, and I managed to unclip my belt and stumble out of the seat, but it had already wrapped a thick black rope around me – coiling, pulsing, like metal but somehow alive. I was pulled off my feet, hauled upwards, screaming, upside down, a carnival ride from hell. The blood rushed to my head and then I was surrounded by darkness and I was unconscious again.
Everything that happened after that is hazy. We’re talking about intelligent, alien-crafted machines here: things from across the galaxy, from other worlds, centuries or millennia old. Their technology isn’t just more advanced. It’s entirely foreign. So I’m sure it wasn’t as simple as saying that I was injected with something, or gassed, or whatever.
But my brain chemistry was tinkered with. They could put me to sleep and they could wake me up. They could make me feel calm or happy. They could paralyse me.
They took me to the machine base, in Ballarat. The ground station. They must have – where else would they go? But I could have been anywhere. I was suspended in darkness. There was no time, to space, no light, no sensation.
I don’t know if that’s what happened to the others they took, from the Sea King in the Snowy Mountains, or if it was special for me. I didn’
t know if Tobias and the pilots had been taken, or if they’d even survived the crash.
I had long conversations inside my head with Matt. Not on that mystic, spectral beach – although that would have been a welcome holiday. Just in the darkness of my head. It was impossible for me to tell whether it was just a product of my imagination or whether he really is in there somewhere, deep in my mind and my soul, some tiny bit of him that transferred into me at the moment of his death, or which was already anchored there from everything we’ve done together. We spoke about what was happening, about the terror, about the anguish of not knowing what was going on outside or what the machines were going to do to me. We spoke about Ellie and Claire. We spoke about times back in Jagungal or Eucla, and back in Perth before the fall.
Sometimes I had… Dreams? Nightmares? Visions? Visual flashes of the machines, of the base in Ballarat, the terrifying geometric architecture, squatting in the sunburnt plains of central Victoria. I saw their homeworld, coated in living metal, one gigantic organism, enormous solar collectors stretching for trillions of kilometres in rings around their fiery red sun. Billions of vessels coming and going, trickling off to distant star systems to fight the Alliance and to wipe out life wherever they found it.
I don’t know whether that was an intentional injection of visions – to show, to educate, to inspire or intimidate. But soon – hours, days? – they spoke to me directly.
Speaking is a difficult word to use. A long time ago, when we first made contact with the Endeavour, I had to decide how to transcribe it. Because the Endeavour doesn’t use words, or anything we could consider a language. It just transmits a series of thoughts and concepts into your head, with an undercurrent of the appropriate emotion it feels, because it is, after all, a sapient being. Anyone who’s been to Jagungal will know what I mean. I turn those thoughts and concepts into solid words, and it’s not too hard, because the Endeavour is clear and precise in its communication.
Speaking to the machines was something like that – but also very different, and much harder. They don’t speak like the Endeavour because they don’t think like the Endeavour, or like us; they’re alien not just in origin, but in what they are. I could understand maybe a quarter of what they “said.” I’ve set it down here because I have to try, but I can’t guarantee that I interpreted all or even any of it correctly.
The first thing they did was relax whatever biological tampering or mind controls had been placed on me – whatever had been keeping me in a floaty, drugged, dreamlike state. Not all the way; I still couldn’t see or hear anything, I still felt like I was floating in a zero gravity sensory deprivation chamber. But I could feel my own limbs again. I could feel pain – residual aches from the plane crash. And I could feel the terror leaking back in, because my mind was once again sharp enough to realise that I should be scared.
When Matt and I had been communicating from hundreds of kilometres away, we could always tell when the other person was suddenly there: suddenly inside your brain, ready to talk. It was like hearing a family member come home through the front door while you’re in another room in the house.
This was more like hearing somebody climb through a window. An intruder, someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. Something unpredictable and dangerous.
What do you want? I said.
telepath they said. At least I think that’s what they said; they were narrowing me down, identifying me as a member of that particular species that was part of the alliance waging war on them.
Human, I said.
telepath alien alliance war they said. A jumble of images, their passage through my head leaving me nauseated.
What do you want? I asked again.
speak they said. The concept of communication; of having something to tell me.
But they didn’t. They just flooded the darkness back in, and soon I was once again dreaming. They were real dreams, genuine dreams, which is to say I don’t remember them.
It could have been an hour later or a day later that the machines brought me back to the edge of consciousness once again to speak.
stop fighting/resisting they said.
I don’t understand.
alien alliance/coalition stop fighting/resisting
You’re trying to kill us, I said. You started it.
That seemed like a dumb, almost childish thing to say, but it was the truth – and in a way, speaking to the machines was like speaking to a child. We were communicating across a massive rift. I can’t say for sure I understood them correctly, but they honestly seemed to be telling me to tell the Alliance to give up. As though they just... would.
It was around then, in my bleary, fucked-up brain, that I realised this might be the first time any member of the Alliance had ever communicated with the machines. From what I recalled from the Endeavour, the machines had been immediately hostile from the day they were first encountered. No negotiations, no attempts at peace, no demands. They just killed. That was all they did.
end/prevent life necessary/important they said.
Why? I said. Why? You can’t expect to kill things and not have them fight back.
life/sentience wrong. must end.
Why! I yelled, getting agitated now. I was starting to think I was going to spend the rest of my life inside this base, however long that might be, trying to communicate with what was effectively a computer.
But they could tell I was agitated, and they flooded the darkness back in, and soon I was dreaming again. And I remember this dream, because now I was Matt: stumbling through a wet and rainy forest with nothing but a sharpened stick for a weapon, hungry and lost and half-insane, coming across a crashed 747. Not my memories. But they’re all swirling around in there somewhere.
When the machines brought me back again they tried a different tack. life wrong/incorrect they said. fallacy/mistake/error.
The implication, from their point of view, was that it had never been supposed to happen in the first place.
Life occurs naturally, I said. How can you say life is wrong? You were created by life.
At least, that was what the Endeavour had told us. It occurred to me now that it might just be something the Alliance assumed – that the machines were an AI project gone rogue, turning on their creators. But who knew where they really came from?
we/us also wrong/fallacy/mistake/error. continue with existence/commitment/duty. Remove/end life. Remove/end self.
Self? You’re going to destroy yourselves?
yes
Why?
should not/never exist
When? When all life is wiped out in this galaxy? What about other galaxies?
does not exist in other galaxies
How can you know that?
does not exist in other galaxies. fallacy/mistake/error
Fine. If you say so. But life will arise again after you destroy yourselves. It’s supposed to happen!
no. single (fallacy/mistake/error). will end/remove (universe? spacetime? existence?) must end/remove
What? I said. You’re saying humans will eventually destroy... everything? The universe?
For all that it felt like I was talking to a child, or a piece of machinery, I felt like I had gleaned something important there.
humans no. life/sentience. destroy universe/spacetime/existence no. erase capacity for possibility/circumstances of universe/spacetime/existence
But? Then what’s the point? Even if you say that will happen – even if you’re right, and you can’t know this, you can’t know it for sure – isn’t that many years of something better than that many years of nothing?
do not understand. stars/nebulae/galaxies/everything. nothing no.
But what’s the point if there’s nobody there to see it?
do not understand
Nobody will see your stars and nebulae and galaxies! What’s the point in saving them if there’s nothing, human or telepath or machine or whatever, left to appreciate them?
do not understand
do not understand
And I raged at them a little longer until they brought the darkness back, and I drifted into unconsciousness.
I spoke to Matt – or was it myself? “They think they’re saving the universe,” I said. “They think they’re the good guys.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” Matt said.
“I don’t want to put up with this. I want to leave.”
“It’ll be over soon.”
“How?”
“The nuke. The military must know the plane went down. They might be able to guess you ended up here – especially if Tobias or the pilots survived and got away, they would have seen the machine that nabbed you. They don’t know if the machines can read your mind – we don’t know if they can read your mind – but they’re going to push the plan ahead after something like this, I’d say.”
It wasn’t such a bad thought. I’d go straight from dreamland into death. Probably wouldn’t even know the difference. I thought for a moment, talking to Matt, that maybe I was already dead – that I’d gone to wherever the dead go, and that was why I could speak to him so often.
But then I woke up, with the hot summer sun beating down on me, lying on a road in the middle of a street.
I was nauseous, sunburnt, and dehydrated. Even as I pushed myself up, palms on hot bitumen, vomiting bright green stomach bile, I knew that this was no longer a dream. This was real.
It took a moment for me to pull myself together. After I vomited I sat up, but my vision was blurry and I still felt sick, and could only sit for a moment. The street was not a place familiar to me – a row of Victorian-era buildings, four or five storeys tall, an old pub with a faded VB sign out the front. It must have been at least forty degrees, and my back and armpits were soaked with sweat. I was still wearing the clothes I’d been in when I was on the plane. I still had my Glock at my belt, and the journal tucked inside my shirt.