The Day of the Nefilim

by David L. Major

  The missiles were easy enough to deal with, but the distraction they created was almost too much. More heat beams surged upwards from the ground. Most of them were intercepted as the ship’s defenses learned from what was happening and its reactions grew faster, but a few of them got through, tearing pieces from its hide as though it was an animal being flayed.

  ‘It hurts!!’ The words tore through Pig’s mind. ‘It hurts! The fire! Make it stop! Please!’

  Pig jumped to his feet. For some reason, he knew what he was hearing. It was the ship; he was hearing the ship. The ship had consciousness…

  “It’s speaking to me! The ship… this ship!” he said to Reina.

  Reina was well past being surprised by anything. “What’s it saying?” she asked.

  ‘Let me, let me… Give me control of the weapons! I can do it! My defense array is young and inexperienced, it is struggling. I can do it! Please!!’

  Pig told her.

  “Then I hope it succeeds. If it fails, we’ll all be dead very soon,” she said. An explosion rocked the ship. Another missile had come too close.

  “I don’t think the ship is talking to me, though,” Pig said. “I can just hear it, that’s all. I think it’s talking to the pilots. It wouldn’t be asking anyone else for control of the weapons.” Pig was right. The ship was indeed talking to the pilots. It screamed as another beam cut like a scalpel into its skin.

  ‘Yes, yes, time to try anything,’ the pilots replied, and took the defense system offline. ‘Do what you can, ship, and quickly.’

  The ship’s intelligence leaped into the spaces left by the younger entity of the defense system. The alleviation of its agony was the only thought in its mind as it wrapped itself around the terminals of the weapons and without pausing lashed out, firing first and then taking control of the rays as they randomly traced powdery paths of dissolution across the landscape.

  It was as though the surface below had been put into a blender. Clouds of snow flew into the air as the ship searched out the sources of its pain and turned them into dust. Bit by bit the surface weapons disappeared into the chaos of the rays, and the attack on the ship grew less, until suddenly it stopped as the last of their weapons disappeared, and the gray dust drifted slowly away in the wind.

  The ship contemplated its wounds. ‘I’m hurt,’ it said to the pilots, who knew what had to be done.

  The ship released its control of the defense systems and allowed itself to be moved, slowly and painfully, a few hundred meters away from the enemy base. It sank onto the ice and sighed deeply to itself.

  ‘How long?’ asked Nibat.

  The ship replied, and the pilots swore softly to each other. They would rather be away from here, but if the ship needed time to repair itself, there was nothing they could do about it.

  “Can we help?” Bark asked. “Is there anything we can do?”

  ‘No. The ship can do it by itself. We will help when we are asked. Apart from that, we just wait.’

  “The ship hurts, doesn’t it,” said Pig. “It feels pain, just as we do.”

  One of the pilots looked at Pig. ‘Yes, it does. The intelligence is distributed throughout the ship. It feels everything that happens to it; it is sensitive to any change in itself or its environment. How do you know this, animal?’

  Pig wondered about being called an animal, but replied without commenting on it. He told the Nefilim how he had heard the ship talking.

  ‘I see. We communicate with it in the same way. You’re a mutant, yes? Otherwise you wouldn’t be speaking.’

  Pig agreed. He was going to say he was as mutant as you could get, but then he remembered Geoca and thought better of it.

  ‘You could help us, animal,’ thought another pilot. ‘We can only converse with the ship while we are at the controls. We need to be connected with it. For us it is not a natural ability, as it seems to be with you. We need to look at the damage, though. Would you be our…’ The Nefilim paused. ‘…medium? Ears…? Would you tell us what the ship says?’ The pilot paused, searching for the word, rubbing the gray dome of its head.

  ‘Say yes!’ It was the ship. ‘You can talk to me!’

  ‘I can?’ Pig thought. ‘Oh, I can…’

  ‘Yes, you can…’

  “Of course,” Pig said to the pilots. ‘Are you badly hurt?’ he asked the ship.

  ‘No worse than has happened in the past.’ The ship had regained its composure. ‘I can repair some of the damage, but there are some parts of me I can’t see. I have a darkness inside me, as though it is something living and has grown out of the corners into which light cannot reach. I’ll do what I can. Most strange… it must be the damage.’ The ship sounded calm now, almost philosophical, as though the matter was merely of intellectual interest.

  ‘Oh.’ Pig was thinking about light, and the blue woman. The others had told how she had provided light for them during the darkness, and how she had given Bark and Reina the ability to see when they had gone out to get provisions. Since then, there had been several occasions on which he had watched her sitting quietly, the strange hues on her skin rising and falling in tides of color flowing across her. Pig’s thoughts spiraled in a decreasing orbit around the problem that confronted them, and it wasn’t long before his snout was twitching in the way it did whenever he had an idea.

  He went to where she was sitting motionless, her eyes closed. This was something she did a lot. She had never offered any explanation, no one had pressed her for one, and she was allowed to sit in silence, communing with whatever it was that she communed with. He was just opening his mouth to speak when she opened her eyes and turned to him.

  Her eyes were white orbs. The pupils and irises had disappeared, as Pig had occasionally seen them do when she came out of one her trances. If she had been an ordinary person, there could have been no question that she was blind, but then, Pig knew as they all did that she was no ordinary person, and she was most certainly not blind.

  “I’ve been following your conversation with the ship’s mind, Pig. You have a special gift.”

  “Well, so do you then, if you heard it as well.”

  “Not so special, for me. But something new for you, I think.”

  She was right, of course, but Pig couldn’t see anything to be gained by dwelling on the fact. “You heard the ship, then, when it said that it has darkness inside it. Places that it can’t see. It has been hurt.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “Can you help? Could you give it some light so it can see to do its work, just as you did to Bark and Reina?”

  For a few seconds the blue woman sat in silence, so that Pig began to suspect that she was going to ignore him. Then she stirred.

  “I see no reason why it wouldn’t work, but I can’t communicate with the ship myself. Although I can hear it, I can’t talk to it. That seems to be an ability that you alone possess. I would need to have direct contact with the ship in order to give it light. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “It might be possible for you to be the intermediary, the channel between the ship and myself. A bridge, if you like.”

  “Then I’ll ask the ship?”

  “Yes. Ask the ship.”

  Pig closed his eyes and sought out the ship with his question.

  ‘Yes,’ said the ship, its voice again rippling with urgency. ‘It is impossible for me to tell how damaged some parts of me are unless I can see them. Let’s try. What’s your name?’

  ‘Pig.’

  ‘Pig… tell your strange friend I’m ready. She must be unusual, if she can give me light to see by, mustn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ thought Pig. He told the blue woman.

  “Close your eyes, then, Pig,” she said, and just as she had done in New York with Bark and Reina, she reached out and placed her fingers over his eyes. In an instant the darkness behind Pig’s eyelids fled, replaced by a flood of pure light that poured into the most remote corners of his mind. Just as Bark and Reina had
been able to see everything in the external world with absolute clarity, so Pig was able to do, except that his vision was directed inside himself.

  He could see the pathways and meeting places where his thoughts gathered and conversed with one another, where they combined and created his mind. Hidden, forgotten places were illuminated as the light swept through them. Pig was clearly visible to himself, down to the smallest detail, as though he was made of the hardest and purest crystal, shot through with rays of light that might have come from the stars. He felt a calm detachment from the processes of his own mind. He had become an observer, fascinated with this overview of his own mental processes.

  The ship’s intelligence was swimming beside him, humming with anticipation.

  “It sees the light,” Pig told the blue woman.

  “Good. Now I need to enter your mind, so that I can pass from you to the ship.”

  ‘There’s no need,’ said the ship, entering Pig, playing in the light it found there, wrapping itself in it like a cat amusing itself with sheets of paper.

  The ship led Pig over the space that had once divided them. The light followed them, flowing in their wake like a river. In contrast to his own mind, which had no strict order and which was built out of structures he had created himself and which had no reason for existing other than that he had made them, the ship’s mind was a vast and ordered labyrinth of paths and connections and nexus points that possessed none of the comfortable chaos and disorder that Pig had seen inside himself. This mind was like an irrigation system that kept branching off again and again, decreasing in size, until the pathways became impossibly fine threads that wove through the physical body of the ship like a nervous system.

  ‘I like this light!’ The ship was happy. ‘I can see everything inside myself the way it really is; look, Pig, here’s where my pilots are when they talk to me!’

  Pig saw two empty spaces, recesses in a featureless black surface that seemed to be nothing more than the absence of the all the other things that surrounded them. It reflected no light, and seemed to mark the border of the ship’s internal world. It didn’t feel hard, or soft, or anything. It just seemed to be behind everything, in the same way that the ground is below everything. Around the depressions the ship was talking about, columns of light stood arranged in groups, waves of some kind of energy pulsing through them. A low noise grumbled in the background, as though somewhere far away gears were grinding together, their teeth wearing down slowly and inexorably.

  Pig looked into the closest of the columns and saw shapes shifting, moving in and out of focus. It was impossible to tell what they were; perhaps it was some landscape, but there was no way of telling whether it was an internal one or an external one, or whether it was just some part of the ship’s functioning which was incapable of having any meaning for him. He was on the verge of turning away when the image shifted, as though it was adjusting itself to him, and suddenly the scene was suspended in space before him as clearly as if he was there.

  He was looking at the landscape around the ship. In the distance, the wrecks of the two Nefilim ships were visible. Closer, the remains of Bark’s ship lay, still burning. The ground in front of the wrecked ships was pockmarked with craters from the small war that had just been fought. Snow was falling. Something was moving through the floating drifts; he couldn’t tell what.

  When he looked more carefully, he could see nothing, and thought that he must be imagining things, or that the movement of the snow was playing tricks on him. It was just the ambiguous shapes that the snow was creating, swirling as though they were being disturbed by the passage of something through them. A mirage of light and shadow, he told himself.

  And yet… he wished that he could see more detail, and as if his thoughts were being read, the scene flickered again, dissolving momentarily into a blizzard of static and snow, before presenting him with another, magnified view.

  He had been right. There was something there. The realization came to him suddenly out of a chance combination of snow, wind, light and a group of the invisible objects. The snow was being caught against them, attaching itself for an instant before being swept away.

  They were people, or at least humanoid. Their shapes were almost disguised by the fact that he couldn’t see them, but was instead looking at the holes they made in the falling snow. But it was clear enough. They were carrying objects that could only be weapons, and they were heading this way.

  ‘Ship, look at this! Can you see? Can you see what I see? People in the snow?’

  ‘Yes. They must be using some sort of cloaking device. Wait, while I scan through the frequencies. I doubt that they would be cloaking anything but the visible spectrum.’

  The image flickered again, and the colors changed swiftly, racing up and down a rainbow of hues, causing the scene to contort wildly as energy fields appeared and then as quickly fell back into oblivion. Pig was wondering what it would feel like if he were to get a headache while he was inside someone else’s head, when the ship found what it was looking for, and the image suddenly settled down.

  ‘Found it. They were more thorough than I thought…’ Almost in negative, the picture was hard to decipher at first, but after a few seconds Pig’s mind stumbled on the key, and the flickering mosaic of heavy purples and yellows suddenly made sense. They were soldiers, and they were wearing the same symbol as the one he had seen on the coats that Sahrin and Thead had returned in. And they were definitely coming this way.

  ‘I’ll tell my crew,’ said the ship, and it alerted the pilots, letting them know that it wanted to talk with them. One of them would go to a console and activate the link that allowed the ship to communicate with them.

  Within a few seconds a circle of color appeared in one of the depressions. It grew, like liquid rising, until it resembled a shining translucent lens set into the floor. It trembled slightly, resonating in sympathy with the low sound that rumbled through the distance. The ship told what it had seen, and passed the image of the soldiers in the snow to the pilots. The pilots asked a few questions, which the ship answered, but they were technical, and Pig couldn’t follow what was being said.

  When the conversation had finished, and the substance that appeared to be more liquid than anything else had retreated back to wherever it had come from, the ship’s intelligence moved away, down a passageway. Pig followed. He imagined them both to be blood cells traveling down an artery, and that at any moment they might meet some other blood cells coming the other way.

  Pig could see the damaged areas ahead of them. The black surface was twisted and torn, thrown up in folds and convolutions so misshapen that it looked as though a volcanic eruption had taken place, or some fungus had taken hold. Some of the torn edges glowed sullenly, while others appeared to be covered with gray ashes, as though they had gone cold. Sparks flashed across the gaps, as though struggling to maintain a connection, but mostly they failed, falling away to become dwindling threads, sucked into the dark vacuum of the outer world. Whatever or wherever that is, Pig thought.

  ‘Here is where my power is going, leaking away,’ said the ship. ‘But it’s not as bad as I feared.’ Without saying anything further, the ship wrapped itself around one of the wounds and worked its way into the torn edges, making itself thinner so that it spread out.

  ‘It looks bad enough to me. Can you fix it?’

  There was no reply. The ship was busy. Where it was moving over them, the broken edges were reaching out, straightening themselves and joining together. The angry colors of the wounds faded, and when everything was as it should be, the ship moved on, selecting a new section and setting to work on it. There was nothing he could do here. Pig had time to have a look around.

  A short distance down the passageway, he came to a large opening in a wall. He entered and found himself in a large room, the center of which was taken up by a huge whirlpool of blue and white light. It moved lazily as it spiraled towards its center, where it disappeared into the depths, its mass draining
away somewhere. A narrow ledge ran along the outer wall to a point on the other side of the room. There, another exit led to another passageway.

  Pig stood on the edge of the whirlpool, wondering what it was. He looked up. Suspended high above him was another whirlpool. It was a mirror image of the lower one, moving in the opposite direction. It was, Pig decided, very impressive, an awesome spectacle. But he still didn’t know what it was.

  He was still wondering when the ship appeared beside him.

  ‘Fixed?’

  ‘Yes, all done,’ the ship replied. ‘Everything should be fine now.’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘You like it? When the currents are running, I sometimes come here just to watch. This is the vortex. My power source. This is my point of contact with the grid. In fact, what you are looking at now is the energy of the grid itself. It is calm now, because we are stationary, and my need for power is not as great as when we are in flight. But you should see it when the vortex is operating at its maximum. I never tire of watching the display. It is like looking into the heart of the universe.’

  Pig realized now that the vortex was the source of the sound he had heard. The low, mechanical growl was coming from the depths in front of him. And it would be that sound, he surmised, that would rise in pitch and intensity as the vortex sped up to provide the ship with power.

  ‘Well,’ said Pig, tearing his attention away from the psychedelia in front of him. ‘If you’re done, I should be getting back, I suppose.’

  ‘But you will come again, won’t you? You are the first visitor I’ve ever had. Come again, and I’ll show you some things that will amaze you…’

  Pig felt some affection for the ship. It seemed young and enthusiastic. ‘Of course, I’d like that.’ He was beginning to feel disorientated by the physical impossibility of his situation. ‘But right now, you’ve got things to do.’

  ‘I have. I’ll take you back to yourself.’

  Seconds later, Pig shook himself back into the real world and opened his eyes. The blue woman was still sitting beside him, and the keeper was lying unconscious nearby.