Engineer admired Captain for a moment. Despite how elegantly he spoke, he continued to question his mental faculties, because only utter melancholic insanity could convince him to botch the entire vision – a vision Captain himself had helped construct decades ago. An entire civilisation’s finances, resources, and hundreds of thousands of lives had been risked for this journey, and yet he would blow it all for the pretty eyes of a little girl…
With that, Engineer drew a gun to kill him, but Captain’s went off first. A back bullet went through Engineer’s head and he fell back, limp and dead.
With a nuclear meltdown imminent, the cloud’s occupants switched to panic. Technicians and nuclear physicists could do nothing to calm the raging reactor as it cascaded into an uncontrollable atomic mess. The pressure was beginning to erupt, and tanks within the clouds exploded with gas and fire. The floating ship jerked and gradually began to tip. Fire engulfed the ship, forcing large sections to be sealed off with heavy metal doors in attempts to stop the spread. Running Quakers were cut off from their exits and left trapped inside the burning compartments. Around them, the roof began to cave in, the walls bending with the pressure. Pipes of water and stream burst from every corner. All attempts to contact Engineer failed. The power was cutting in and out, cutting off the lights, the PA, the breathable air, while the engines keeping the cloud afloat began to fail one by one. The cloud tipped, gradually losing its position in the sky. The whole thing was going down.
When Ned emerged from the elevator a second time, he stepped onto a floor that was gushing with hurricane-strength winds. At first he thought it was a massive hole, blasted into the side of the ship, but when he came to the railings, he looked down to see a circular portal cut into the base of the platform below. The wind of the outside storm was blasting upwards at him, blowing his ragged hair about. The torrential flow of air overpowered the alarms, but it was fresh in his lungs and composed of the familiar balance of gas molecules as those of planet Earth. He was now on the lowest level, the underbelly of the ship, and that hole was his direct line back to solid ground.
‘The beams,’ he gasped.
A pink ring, running the circumference of the open void, hummed and glowed with an incredibly bright light; the beam was already switched on, sparking with bolts of electricity, blasting his ears with the whirs of a hundred jet engines. It was not sucking anything up, but instead was pushing downwards. This was Captain’s doing: he had kept the entire ship distracted to allow Ned to escape, and he had given him his one and only path home. Unfortunately, this meant taking a ten-thousand-foot leap of faith.
‘Shit.’
The ship jerked, and Ned grasped onto the railing to keep from being thrown sideways. The Quakers’ ship was gently tipping over, and there was a feeling in his bones that they were steadily losing altitude. The cloud had taken a dramatic turn for the worst, for which he also suspected was choreographed by the captain. He had put all this in motion so that Ned could escape, find Lara, and fulfil Lily’s plan.
He found a vertical steel ladder and clambered down to the lower platform. The moment his bare feet hit the floor, he was struck in the gut by the swing of a slender steel rod. Ned collapsed, clutching onto his aching stomach, and looked up just in time to see the second onslaught.
Psycho jammed the live end of the electric cow prod into Ned’s chest and watched the surging volts make him twitch and scream. He retracted his arm to stab again, but Ned rolled underneath him, leaving the prod to strike the ground and, in turn, send a short zap up Psycho’s arm.
‘Argh!’ he cried.
Ned was back on his feet, but only just. He lurched back with each swing of Psycho’s weapon, pulling his guts in to avoid being shocked. They danced around the brim of the beam as it hummed pink, air blowing in their faces and fluttering Psycho’s suit jacket wildly. Ned found his back against a wall, but managed to duck as another swing went for his head. The prongs of the rod hit a pipe and the electrical current went back up Psycho’s arm again. When he was doubled over, recovering from the sting, Ned punched him across the face. The blow to the nose left Psycho bleeding and dizzy. He collapsed against the wall. Both were panting. Both were in agony.
‘Why did you kill them?’ Ned cried, doubled over. ‘Tell me why you killed them!’
Psycho laughed.
There was an explosion somewhere on the ship, a big one. Both were flown across the platform by the sudden jerking motion. Ned rolled with the angle of the slanted ship. He skidded to a halt just inches before tumbling into the gaping hole in the centre of the room. The pink light of the beam’s outer ring blinded him, but through the gap he could see the cloud’s undercarriage disintegrating; chunks of metal began to rain from the sky; smoking, flaming debris clattered along the ship’s exterior and tumbled down to Earth. The whole machine was beginning to creak and moan as it tipped to a noticeably sharp angle. Flames erupted from various sectors, unleashing black smoke into the sky. The exhaust system soon failed, and so the cloud-cover which had kept the alien ship concealed behind a mirage began to retract and expose the behemoth underneath. It was only once the vaporous cloak had receded that the full marvel of the ship was revealed to the world bellow: a floating city, the size of a rotating hurricane, pregnant with all of life’s creatures, of DNA from two worlds, piloted by a race that had used this vessel to travel immeasurable distances across the Universe for a purpose far greater than any single human being could understand.
As unfathomable as the artificial storm was, it was not the time to be awe-inspired by its grandeur; in mere moments this feat of technology and engineering would come crashing down, killing everything in and around it.
Vet knew of the other clouds, the other ships which circled the Planet over continents and seas, all doing the same work as Engineer as part of their ‘great vision’. The other clouds were just as large, just as heavily stocked with sleeping cargo and mutant hybrids. None of them would come to their rescue, but Vet still managed to get in contact with other biologists like him, and they managed to make last-minute arrangements together before the nuclear meltdown consumed them all. After all, if anything should survive, it should be the natives which originally inhabited this place; they did not deserve to suffer the consequences of his own species’ mistakes. Thankfully, his correspondents agreed, and between them they found enough spare pods to take a vast majority of the hibernating animals currently on board. Not all could be saved, but it was good enough.
Vet stood alone in the warehouse, while around him the ship jerked, rumbled, and began to fall apart. At the control bench, he powered up the beams to extract the humans from their pods – all of them. The system was overloaded as it was, causing a rapid accumulation of nuclear power with nothing to ease the growing pressure and heat, so he needed to act fast before the reactor blew up completely. He pushed hard on the lever, moving it into its ‘lift’ position. A bright, pink light engulfed every capsule on every shelf, all one-hundred-million of them, illuminating the entire warehouse with an incandescent glow. Every sleeping human vanished into particles. Working swiftly at the control bench, Vet was able to connect to every cloud in the hemisphere, and they, in turn, were connected to their neighbours further out. Vet unleashed the beams by hauling the lever into ‘drop’, but this beam was not aimed down; it instead shot horizontally. Nuclear machines whirred. Somewhere on the cloud’s exterior, a pink beam was shot across the horizon, carrying within its radiance the hundreds of millions of biological specimens, large and small, intelligent or otherwise. The beam shot over the desert, over the seas, following the curvature of the Earth until it struck a recipient ship far, far away. It took several minutes to fully transfer all of its matter, but Vet held on tight, pushing down hard on the lever until his finger joints ached. When all the energy was consumed, the beam shut off. Darkness fell upon the warehouse. It was over.
Vet looked up and saw the room around him was now empty. Every little pod was left with nothing more than a two-inch
pool of murky brown water. He smiled at his own success. He thanked his colleagues for their help and said his farewell. The radio cut out short of his final words, but that was expected; the ship was tilting now. The walls rattled. Pipes were bursting and the smoke of raging fires began to seep through the cracks. Vet awaited death, but a pinging sound awoke him. He turned and looked up at the supercomputer, its massive digital screen looming over him with a soft, blue glow. The programs were still running, although the screen itself was cracked and the whole system was soon to fail with the failing ship. Vet approached cautiously. He looked down and realised the vial of that native boy’s blood he had inserted was now empty: every drop had been sucked up, and from what fragments of DNA the computer had found, it had made a brilliant genetic discovery. Sadly, with the ship’s imminent collapse, it would never be known to anyone outside of this room.
Ned needed to get back to Earth. Now.
No point in thinking too much about whether or not to take the leap: either the fall may kill him, or the eruption of the entire cloud would most certainly kill him. While the pink light around the beam’s brim still hummed, and the bolts of electricity still sparked, he considered now his best chance of escaping the Skyquakers.
He managed to get to his feet, as shaky as his legs were, and, with dwindling energy, he limped towards the fatal edge. He decided not to hesitate and simply take the plunge into the pink and purple mist. His first foot stepped up to the brim. The second took him over.
Psycho caught him by the arm, gripping him with razor-like fingers, and managed to pull him back. He swung Ned towards him and punched him across the face, connecting his knuckles to his lower jaw. Ned was thrown to the ground. Psycho, grinning through the streams of blood running down his chin, reached for the black gun in his belt. Ned looked up and kicked him in the crutch. He gave a cry and the gun fell from his hands, skidded along the metallic floor, and then toppled over the edge of the hole, gone.
Ned got to his feet and ran for the beam. He went to leap a second time, but Psycho spear-tackled him from the side. The two rolled away, kicking and scratching and ripping each other’s clothes. Ned was the first to get up. He looked down at Psycho and hit him across the face, again and again and again, each time with burning, raw anger. And each time, Psycho just laughed. Ned pulled him to his feet, and the two stood there at the beam’s edge, wind blowing about their hair, the pink, dazzling light shooting up from their feet. Ned had him by the lapels of his suit, now battered, torn and stained with smears of red. He held him close.
‘You’re going to die knowing the names of every single human being you murdered,’ Ned shouted at him over the wind.
‘That’s fine, take all the time you need,’ Psycho smirked back. Blood trickled down his nose and from his eyebrow. ‘In twenty seconds, you’ll be joining me.’
Ned saw the ship collapsing around him, worse now than before. Above, there was another explosion. The alarms kept blazing. The base of the ship was disintegrating and falling apart. Fires raged. Nuclear engines were grinding to a halt and steaming. Psycho may be proud enough to go down with the ship, but Ned had other arrangements. If only he had more time to gut this bastard open and tear that smirk from his face. But he could not have both his revenge and save Lara. It came down to a choice.
Psycho leant close and whispered through blood-stained teeth, ‘You’re out of time, mate.’
Ned made his choice. He looked down. He looked back to Psycho. Then he swung his leg, locked it behind Psycho’s knee, and pulled him backwards over the edge.
They both fell.
14
SHADOWS
Lara had decided it was time to depart from her cabin on the cliff.
After spending two weeks watching the colony grow from the ashes of Darwin, and after encountering the strange girl at the orange farm, she felt an accumulating sense of imprisonment on the isolated beach and knew she would have to embark for safer territory if she was to survive out here alone. She widened her search for houses to raid for food, finding non-perishables in small quantities, and also came across a working vehicle, much to her surprise: a white ute sat parked in an unused shed seventeen kilometres west of the cabin, its back tray laid with rolls of carpet. She saw it as a mobile home, and drove it back to the cliff to begin packing her things.
‘Come on, Moonboy.’
The hybrid dog leapt up onto the trailer and lounged on the soft shag, wagging his tail. She stroked his head and then continued to gather her remaining supplies. She had acquired a map of the Northern Territory and it’s roads and had planned to follow a highway to Kakadu, where she knew there was shade, water, and a town, but there was no way of knowing what was out there and whether or not they were friendly. Even humans, or things that looked like humans, could not be entirely trusted.
Once packed, she looked back at the cabin and felt a hollow sadness; the beach house itself was not particularly close to her heart, but abandoning it meant she was also abandoning any hopes in finding Ned. He never returned from the sky, never washed up on the shore, and no postcards of his ever appeared in her mailbox, even though she had written him numerous times. As a last salute, she wrote him a brief note saying she was off to Kakadu and pinned it with a magnet to the fridge. She shut the doors but left them unlocked, in case he ever came back. She said goodbye.
As she sat in the driver’s seat, the sky erupted with a blazing pink light. Moonboy started howling in dramatic hysterics. Lara leapt from her seat and stared up. There was no storm, but there was a beam, a huge beam, that shot over her head from south to north, crossing the ocean and disappearing over the horizon. Moonboy continued to bark, sitting upright, ears alert. Lara didn’t know what to make of it. She had never seen a horizontal beam, not like that. She followed the beam’s direction and measured its position of origin with a compass: due south.
For some reason, she thought of Ned.
She revved the engine and drove off.
They freefell for a moment, but then they were floating. Consumed within the heavenly power of the beams, Ned and Psycho both felt their bodies being lowered gently to the ground amidst a pink tornado. Neither could push nor swim against the flow; they had no control where they were going or the speed which they fell. They felt the cold air rush by them, the clouds, then a second layer of clouds, and suddenly a great, big slab of earth appeared beneath them.
Looking up, all Ned could see was a machine, occupying the space where the sky should have been. It too was falling. Then it began to burn, and the whole sky turned red.
At the tipping point, the uncontrollable pressure building inside the cloud resulted in a nuclear meltdown. The epicentre erupted. A circular fireball of red and white flames formed a sphere, expanding outwards and consuming everyone and everything. The vaporising power of nuclear energy disintegrated and burnt through the ship as though it was made of loosely-held particles of sand. The walls caved inwards. A second Sun lit up the daylight with blinding, white heat. Everything within the cloud was devoured instantaneously. Those locked within merely saw a flash of red before being reduced to ashes.
Ned was on his back, motionless. It took him a few moments to realise he was lying in a field of long grass, on Earth. He felt paralysed. He lay on his back with all four limbs pinned down, fingers gripping the soil. He stayed there for a moment, panting, and watched the sky melt.
The fireball in the sky grew outwards, as if in slow motion, expanding from a central core, melting away the mechanical storm and engulfing everything. It quickly became too bright to look at. He shielded his eyes with a hand and felt the heat on his palm. The explosion seemed silent as it devoured the alien ship, but Ned’s ears were still buzzing from the fall; all of his senses were yet to catch up. He blinked once or twice and saw spots. He sat up in the grass and saw a blur of silver which was Psycho. He was standing on his feet, limping through the field. He was screaming at the sky as it burned. He, like the blast, made no sound as he screamed. He fell to h
is knees in anguish as he watched his dreams, his future, all fall apart.
An invisible force blew them both away, a wave of air and sound. Ned and Psycho were plucked from the earth and tossed back. They fell and rolled in the grass. They lifted their heads together and stared at the towering inferno. The ship had tilted sideways, and like the breaking segments of a sinking vessel, they witnessed where sections as large as skyscrapers began to tear and fall uncontrollably to the ground. When the first corner hit, several kilometres away, it was like watching an asteroid strike the Earth: an explosion of dust, a deafening boom, and fire erupting afterwards. The rest of the ship began to break apart: continuous eruptions of fire tore colossal holes through the ship, and the lesser pieces crumbled, tilted, and fell majestically to the Earth. Each connection with the ground caused an earthquake. Geysers of dust and rock flew hundreds of metres into the air. The sound was incredible.
They both had to run. The bulk of the ship was coming down directly over them. A hurricane of metal. An endless shadow, expanding as it neared.
When Ned’s hearing and other senses finally returned, his body was bombarded with the sights and sounds of a battleground. His heart beat with the full force of adrenaline, forcing him to pick up his feet and run. He and Psycho were together, sprinting through the fields as around them the sky fell. The explosions were now directly overhead, shooting comets of steel at them from above, crashing into the sand and forming craters large enough to flatten houses. But no matter how fast they moved, the ship continued to loom closer. It became more and more difficult to outrun the shadows. Ned simply kept his legs moving, his heart pumping, his eyes focussed directly ahead. Psycho kept looking over his shoulder.
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