“Well, this is just fine,” Sahrin said out loud and to herself. “What are we going to do now?”
Even as the question left her lips, she had seen it. At the far end of the beach, with its bow listing in the shallows and its prow dug into the loose sand, was the ship. Her ship. Their ship.
She hadn’t seen it at first because of the mist and the waves that were breaking around it, and, of course, because she wasn’t looking for it. It seemed to be in good shape. Too relieved and surprised to wonder at what it was doing here, she started towards it.
She saw people. One was standing on the deck, talking to two more on the sand.
“What is it?” Geoca couldn’t see anything. To him, the ship was invisible.
She told him. Geoboy and Geogirl twittered excitedly.
“They’re relieved,” Geoca said, “because your ship might be a quick way to the surface. We might be able to use the difference chimney.”
“The what...?”
“If we use it, you’ll see. If we don’t, it doesn’t matter.”
The people at the ship had noticed them. The two on the sand started walking towards them.
It was Bark! And the person with him looked familiar. It was one of the people from outside the place where the tunnels had been. She had seen him on the side of the sand dune, sitting with two other people. She didn’t know his name, but he was wearing one of her shirts.
She ran to Bark, and they hugged each other, Geoca and Bryce looking on and inspecting each other at the same time.
“Are you okay?”
“Of course. We’re down in numbers, though. And you? Are you all right?”
“Yes. I won’t go wandering off on my own again, though. I don’t know what possessed me.”
Geoboy and Geogirl made some of their chirping noises.
“How did you get here?” Bark asked, at the same time noticing the Geocas, and that there were three of them.
“A longish story. You’ll hear it all eventually, no doubt.” She introduced Bark to Geoca, and watched as surprise registered on his face. Geoboy and Geogirl must have put thoughts into his head, as they had done to her. That had been only a few hours ago. It seemed like eons.
“Geoca here says there is a way back to the surface. We have to get there; we have something to deliver.” She took the crystal from her pocket and showed it to Bark. “It’s something to do with making sure that the Nefilim and the human government don’t take over. It’s part of some kind of energy system. On the island, they called it the Stream.”
“Later. Look at this.” Bark was curious, but their immediate situation was his first priority. “The ship needs attention.”
* * *
As they worked, Bark told Sahrin how they had been dragged into the shaft behind the Pilot’s Station and how they had emerged from it to be thrown onto the beach, scattering themselves, their belongings, and the cargo everywhere. There was some reorganizing to be done, but luckily the damage was minimal.
Sahrin, in turn, told Bark everything that had happened to her after she had left them in the caves. She told him all that she could recall of Obirin’s history lessons, and what had been said about the photon belt, the Nefilim invasion, and the intentions of the human rulers. And she told him about Thead, and the slaughter on the island.
“None of them sound all that delicate, do they,” said Bark, shaking his head and wondering why they had to be involved in this at all.
The sound of gunfire was still coming from the island. Clouds of smoke drifted across the water. They could smell burning.
Geoca didn’t help the others work. He sat on the sand, arms folded on his knees, looking at his former home. He stayed like that, unmoving, until the others had finished and Sahrin called him up onto the deck. As he climbed up, she saw that not only Geoca, but also Geoboy and Geogirl had been crying.
“We need your help,” she said. They had seen a helicopter flying around again, after a few hours during which nothing had seemed to be happening on the island. The invaders were on the move again. It was time to go.
“Of course,” replied Geoca, pulling himself together. “We have work to do.”
He paused, his head lowered. One of the small Geocas was speaking to him. “We have the crystal to place. The route from here to the node is simple enough, though. Is your ship functional?”
It was.
“The difference chimney, then,” said Geoca.
“What?” Bark asked, as confused as Sahrin had been.
“I’ll explain, but in the meantime, head towards those rocks.” He raised a thin hand and pointed towards a distant formation protruding from the cliff face.
They raised the sails and tuned them as finely as possible, so as to catch the faint currents that drifted around them. The ship rose, hesitantly at first, as though it needed convincing, but Bark was doing his job well, and as the polarities shortened, they picked up speed. Carefully, so as not to imbalance the flow into the sails, they started towards the rocks that Geoca had indicated.
Rather than sail in a straight line, which would take them closer to the island than seemed advisable, Bark took them near the beaches, and low, gliding over the surface of the water, taking what cover they could in the patches of mist that floated above it.
Their progress was slow, and Geoca had time to do his explaining. Difference chimneys were anomalies in the planet’s magnetic field. The result was a pillar-shaped zone of either reduced gravity, or in a few extreme cases, a total reversal of gravity. They were scattered around the planet, with no apparent pattern, and the majority of them began somewhere in the planet’s depths and terminated at or below the planet’s surface.
There were a few – three, to be precise – that extended above the ground, up into the atmosphere and out into space, where they gradually faded away, along with the rest of the planet’s field. These ones were all full difference, in other words anti-gravity, and they were in far too much use by the military, and far too developed with bases and research facilities, for the curiosity of the population to be accommodated. Accordingly, their existence wasn’t known to the public, who of course weren’t told that there was a lot more going on in orbit around their planet than they suspected. So that it should stay that way, all the known difference chimneys were out of bounds to them.
But the populations of the underworld were under no such restrictions, and they made much use of the chimneys. Among other things, they used them to travel to and from the surface. The chimney they were heading towards, Geoca said, was a major thoroughfare to the surface, frequently used by the mutants and rebel Nefilim. It was also one of the biggest, he said, easily large enough for the ship to fit inside.
While Geoca was speaking, the two smaller Geocas had left their place in his torso, and had climbed up and perched on his shoulders like parrots, looking around at the ocean over which they were traveling. One of them squealed and started pulling Geoca’s hair to attract his attention. The mutant leaned over the rail and looked down. Something swimming in the water was in trouble, and floundering.
Geoca turned to the others. “We have to pick up a friend of mine.”
Bark, who had come over to look, rubbed his chin and considered the situation. Of course, they could cope with another passenger, but the process would be time-consuming. “We can lower a rope,” he said.
They came to a stop. The creature stopped swimming and trod water, looking up at them as the rope descended.
“But he won’t be able to hold it,” said Geoca. The creature tried to grasp the rope between its teeth, but it couldn’t get a grip. Geoca inclined his head towards one of the small Geocas.
Geogirl slipped down his arm and out onto the rope. She swung downwards, letting the rope slip through her grasp until she had reached the mutant. She dropped into the water and disappeared, holding the end of the rope. When she reappeared, the rope had been tied around the mutant’s body.
On Geoca’s signal, Bark, Bryce, and the Se
nator began winding the rope in. The mutant at the other end of the rope was heavy, and the winding was hard work.
It was a pig. A large boar, to be precise, with a long, heavy snout and large curved tusks, and massive flanks covered with coarse, black hair. It was almost unconscious when they heaved it onto the deck.
Geogirl scurried to Geoca and climbed back up to join her twin.
Geoca bent over the pig. The others stood back, surprised. This didn’t look like any mutant at all. It looked like an ordinary, everyday pig.
The animal stirred, coughing up water. It turned its head towards the circle of faces above it.
“It’s you,” it said to Geoca. “I thought I was finished. Are we safe?”
“A talking pig?” In a day of firsts, it was yet another one for Bryce.
“Yes, a mutant, he’s one of us. And yes, Pig, we will be safe soon.” Geoca smiled and smoothed the coarse hair on the animal’s brow. “These are friends of ours, and they are helping us.”
The ship had begun moving again. Pig coughed more water and sat up. He looked around at the others as they went back to their posts. He felt reassured; this was infinitely preferable to drowning.
Bryce went below deck to check on Reina. She had fallen heavily when they had landed on the beach, and she had a bruise on the side of her head. Luckily there was only a small cut, and not much blood at all, but she had been unconscious since her fall. He went to where she lay and sat down beside her.
She was coming around. He stroked her forehead, brushing hair away from her face.
She opened her eyes. “Shit, my head…”
“You knocked yourself out, mate. You’ve had a bit of a sleep.”
She propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him groggily. “Where are we? Did we make it all right?”
“Yeah. There’s no damage to the ship. In fact that bump on your head is the worst of it. And we’re away again now, but we have to be careful; those helicopters followed us here, and they’ve trashed a whole town full of people and set fire to the place.”
“Why would they do that? Are they total assholes or something?”
“They must be. They tried hard enough to waste us, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.” Reina shook her head and stood up. “Psycho fucks.”
“Yeah. And this girl Sahrin showed up just before we took off. She’s a friend of Bark’s. She seems OK, Pretty cute, actually…”
Reina laughed, almost. “Fuck, my head. Stick to the plot, greaseball.”
“She had this total freak with her. Name’s Geodesa, or something. You wait till you see him. He’s got this hole in him, with these two little dwarfs in it, and they can get out and run around.”
“No shit. Somehow I’m not surprised.”
“And then we picked this pig up out of the water.”
“You mean something almost normal happened?”
“Not quite. The pig can talk.”
Reina didn’t reply. She was putting her boots on.
“Let’s go see what’s happening.”
They went up onto the deck. The ship was approaching a range of cliffs that was broken up into a labyrinth of dead ends and fjords that seemed to disappear in every direction. “Here,” Geoca said as they approached the rocks that he had pointed out from across the water.
Following his directions, Bark steered the ship under an overhang and was about to take it up into the blackness behind it when the Senator, who had been standing at the bow looking back towards the island, called out. Five helicopters were speeding towards them across the water.
“This isn’t good,” said Pig, standing upright with his front legs on the rail.
“They’re onto us,” said Reina, forgetting that a pig shouldn’t be speaking.
“Quickly,” said Sahrin, remembering what had happened on the island. “Whatever we’re going to do, we need do it right now.”
They floated upwards into the darkness, and were instantly caught up in the difference chimney’s anti-gravity. Swirls of light spiraled upwards and around them, heading for the surface like a giant corkscrew.
“Are they below us?” Bark had given up trying to control the vessel. There was no choice but to surrender it to the current. They traveled smoothly upwards, circling around the axis of the vortex as they went.
Bryce and Reina leaned over the side and looked down. The helicopters had entered the shaft and were visible below them. They were rising, accelerating as they came.
“They’re chasing us, all right,” said Bryce.
“You are so bright it scares me. And they’re gaining on us,” said Reina. “They’ve got props. We don’t.”
But their advantage wasn’t doing the helicopters much good. The power of their rotors was interfering with the force of the current, making it unbalanced and unpredictable. They were gaining on the ship, it was true, but they were reeling from side to side, tumbling erratically.
One of the helicopters went too close to the edge of the shaft. Its blades clipped the rock and it spun around and smashed against the surface, exploding in a ball of fire. Pieces of debris flew in all directions. One of them struck one of the other helicopters. It lurched violently, flying straight into the helicopter beside it, sending pieces of glass and metal flying everywhere.
The two machines were tangled together like mating insects rotating around a common center. Fire broke out in one of them. Flames began to spread, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. Soldiers began jumping from the helicopters. Some of them were on fire, and they floated in the current like fairy lights, bobbing up and down as though they were suspended on springs.
“Don’t waste any sympathy on them,” said Geoca, as one of the soldiers drifted into the spinning blades of one of the remaining helicopters and was turned into goulash. “They’ve got plenty to atone for. Their abuse of my people has gone on forever.”
The burning helicopters were closing on them. Something on one of them exploded, tearing a hole in the side of the fuselage. More soldiers jumped ship and abandoned themselves to the mercies of the vortex.
The two remaining helicopters, one black and one red, hung back, wary of getting too close to the confetti shower of flesh and metal.
The two tangled helicopters passed harmlessly upwards through the hull of the ship, and appeared through the deck. Even though there was no danger to them, it was still disconcerting to have a burning hulk pass so close.
As the helicopters drifted through the deck, a Nefilim, splattered in both human blood and the paler pink blood of its own species, appeared in the twisted door. It clung to the door frame, injured and deciding what to do. From the way it was looking around, it was obvious that it could see them.
Events took the decision out the Nefilim’s hands. The helicopter was about ten feet above the deck and still rising when it lurched suddenly, tipping the Nefilim and the bodies of some dead soldiers out. The soldiers floated away towards the outer edges of the vortex. The Nefilim landed gracefully on the deck like a huge ugly swan.
“Oh well, this is very interesting, isn’t it,” said Geoca.
Before anyone could do anything, the Nefilim reached out and took hold of Bryce. It lifted him off the deck and held him to its chest.
The ship lurched, caught in an eddy in the difference current. Everyone stumbled, holding on to anything that they could. Bryce tried to escape from the Nefilim’s grasp, but the creature’s grip was too strong and its reflexes too fast. It slashed his throat with a single talon.
The sight galvanized the others. As the Nefilim threw Bryce’s twitching body overboard, Pig charged, throwing his mass against the alien’s knees. There was a cracking sound as they shattered under the force. Pig dug his tusks in and tore with all his strength. The creature fell, screaming and flailing, but its arms were held by the rest of the crew who had rushed to join in. Pig jumped onto its throat, and sliced it open with his tusks. The Nefilim made a sound like nothing any of them had ever heard before, th
en it was dead.
Reina hadn’t joined in the attack. She was standing still, in shock. “Bryce…” Her friend was dead. She tilted her head back, unwilling to see what was before her. She saw something appearing in the shaft above them, and the sight of it brought her back. She would have to wait until later to think about Bryce.
“Look!” she called to the others. The vortex was splitting like a hydra into smaller paths that branched off the main shaft. From where she stood, it looked like a Mandelbrot set, the pattern repeating itself as it flowed away into ever smaller versions of itself, upwards and away into the darkness. It was though they were traveling up the stem of a huge transparent plant. (Actually, they were, but that is another whole story.)
Geoca gave Bark directions, pointing towards one of the smaller branches. Bark maneuvered the ship towards it, taking care because the rock walls were closer now, crowding in on them.
Behind them, the helicopters, which had been relying on the Nefilim for directions in their pursuit of the ship, now had no idea which direction to take. They disappeared up another of the passages. They’d lost them.
“That’s the first good thing that’s happened,” grumbled Bark.
“It’s been a bitch of a day so far,” said Sahrin. “I feel as though I’ve been walking around in a slaughterhouse.”
“Let me tell you about it sometime,” said the pig.
“Sure thing, Pig. But maybe when we have more time. What do we do now?” she asked Geoca, who alone among them seemed to have any idea of what was happening.
“We are about to… what do you call it with a vessel like this… dock? land?”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever. We are near our destination.”
“You mean where we have to drop the crystal thing?”
“Yes. I know exactly where to go. It shouldn’t present any problems at all.”
“That comes as something of a relief. I hope you’re right.”
The channel had opened up like the head of a giant mush-room. They entered a cavern with a huge domed roof. The trails of the vortex dissipated, leaving them floating calmly in a fine sparkling mist.
The Day of the Nefilim Page 13