"Launch! It works! Mon Dieu!" She stared at the screen as if expecting to see flames leap out at her. They had not been so optimistic about the machinery as they let on but now we had a picture, a moving scene of tree tops flowing past at quite a speed, the ground receding. Marie tapped rapidly at the control board and the scene tilted as the drone altered course. "Now we see." She said.
"Moussac in four minutes." Jules said, glancing at me. The drone was programmed to circle over the co-ordinates we had and use its sensors. The screen showed the forest canopy now reduced to a green carpet in the bright sun, a soft rug that covered all the hills. Soon, a river appeared, a winding line of blue in the green. The drone was now at ten thousand feet, drifting along just above the stall. "Ah." Jules said, as peaks appeared in the sensor lines. "We 'ave movement." The image showed a bunch of dots near the bank.
"Pigs." Melanee supplied to collective astonishment. "They mm drink all together."
"Maybe." I said, making a mental note to think about a primitive girl who could interpret telemetry data from a remote drone without turning a hair. "But that isn't." I pointed to several more dots that were in a rough oval close to the river further up. "Marie, switch on our data box transponder."
If only someone had their box tuned in we could pinpoint just where it was. The picture turned as the drone orbited and a bright yellow star sprang into being on the grid. "Bingo." I muttered. "Suppose we bring it down to the water level and run it up the river? We can see who the hell is sitting on the bank washing their feet."
Marie and Jules consulted by raised eyebrows. "We do that, we tell them someone is looking, eh?" Jules said gently.
It was true, but we let the drone circle until Marie started to fidget. The dots moved and seven more appeared from nowhere arguing that there was a cave close to the river which the enemy was using. In two hours the figures moved a few yards here and there but it was clearly the big city so I sat back and brooded while Marie took the drone up to fifty thousand and let it commence search patterns over Southern France.
There was only one way of arriving at their headquarters without much warning and that was to fly the aircar up river and blast it through the vegetation, guns blazing. I could feed in the identity patterns of the missing crew so it wouldn't fire on friends but it was still a risky plan. Day or night? Light or dark? Dawn, I decided. The car wasn't a high altitude machine and I didn't want to squander fuel by making it climb over hills, not what it was designed to do. Poring over the map, I plotted a path following the low ground up to a place called Ledignan where we take a right turn onto a course of around eighty-five magnetic until we hit the river, turn and follow the stream.
They brought the drone back after hours of staring at the vista of endless woods from ten miles up, landing it with nervous competence and bursts of vertical jets back in the entrance shaft where the magnetic guides brought it to a halt giving off considerable heat from the engines. Jules winched it back in and started to prepare the spare, Marie helping, both of them leaving me and Melanee alone. They knew what I was doing and the next drone flight was to check on our friends.
The night came when they brought the second drone back, by which time I was sitting on the floor surrounded by maps obligingly provided by the all-seeing brain downstairs and machine gun ammunition, Melanee stolidly pushing fresh rounds down a supply of magazines, apparently quite fascinated by the trick of pushing with your thumb to let the shiny brass cylinders click down.
"David." Marie and Jules came over and sat down with us, Marie putting a portable on the floor where we could all see it. "We 'ave found them." She pointed to the small display. "The memory chips, eh?" I nodded. When we had all swanned off to the nearest star, we had all been implanted with tiny chips which would react when interrogated by the right radio frequency, a safety measure. "They all stay in one place." She explained. The drone had seen lots of local movement but five dots, the five dots, hadn't moved more than three feet all day.
"David." Jules put his hand on my arm. "You go tomorrow, eh? Oui. Marie and I, we think about what you do." He hesitated but I didn't respond. "We think we stay 'ere. We can put a drone over you, we tell you if there is other movement, oui?" He stopped and seemed uneasy.
"David," Marie put her hand over Jules where it lay on my arm. "We are not soldiers, we cannot fly an aircar." She glanced at Jules's tense expression. "Someone must stay and watch with the drone, it makes sense, eh? But Jules wants to go with you." She said, shifting herself and looking at Melanee who was listening intently. "I am afraid, I cannot 'elp it. I tell myself it will be all right, that David is a good soldier but if you do not come back, I am alone and I do not think I can face being alone. Please?" She looked so appealing and worried that I patted her hand.
"Will go with Daveed." Melanee said before I could find soothing words for Marie.
"We know that." Jules said, a twisted smile appearing and disappearing. Melanee gazed at me with a challenging air but I was reconciled, I knew she would want to go and she would be useful. She knew the forest, she was physically much stronger than Marie and more than that I knew I wanted her near.
Marie brightened considerably, making me wonder just what was behind her announced fears. After all, she had been quite happy to tramp off with Jules, all by themselves in a vast unknown forest and I didn't really need a drone over me. However, she sobered and tapped at her portable, beckoning for us to see.
"We see the drone survey analysis, non? Trees, mon ami." She smiled at Melanee. "But you know about them except there are mutations. Not too serious but we 'ave tropical trees, palms, jacaranda, others, much bigger, taller than they should be."
"It is ver' peculiar." Jules cut in, his English becoming disjointed as always when he was excited. "It does not make sense but we think we see climate change."
"How come? The polar caps are still there." I peered at the figures as they scrolled up the screen.
"It must be ocean changes, the currents. Tropical water, the Gulf Stream, it moves, it does not stretch beyond Scotland, eh?" Jules screwed up his face in puzzlement. "The British Isles, the tree cover is more pine derivatives than deciduous, we look at the ship scanner records. And the trees, the leaves, they are much larger in France than they should be and 'ere the warm weather is longer, eh?"
"And it is not just the trees. Birds, there are many birds but they do not fit. Mutation again, we think. They are all per'aps descended from sea birds or swallows. No birds of prey, no eagles." She seemed depressed but ran the program through. "And no people."
"None?" I felt stunned. We knew the population was sparse but none?
"There is Melanee's band, or there was." She replied quietly. "And we 'ave the group by the river at Moussac. The drone, it covered thirty thousand square kilometres and we find many pigs and a few bigger things, bears eh? But it does not pick up any people."
"Maybe the scanners don't work." I muttered.
Jules shook his head. "We run the program. People, 'umans, they 'ave distinctive body temperature and we give off the brain radiation, eh?"
The scanners were so sensitive, a military idea, naturally, that individual brain patterns, the minute electrical charges that the body uses for running the human systems could be picked up. Millions of them would show up as a confused blob on the record but small numbers of evilly motivated bodies hiding under a bush with assassination in mind would show up, or at least that was the theory. In this huge, empty forest though, the scanners should have found Tarzan - or Jane, come to that. It seemed too good, or bad to be true.
"We find only one." Marie tapped and showed the map display. "You see? One figure and it goes to Italy, eh?" She bit her lip. "The drone say it moved two kilometres going East."
And what did that mean? One solitary man, probably insane with loneliness, walking towards an empty horizon. "That all?" I enquired.
"Not quite." Jules altered the screen, a fresh area, patterned with grid squares appearing. "This is where we are. L
ook!" He pointed a bony finger. "We set the deep radar and the complex, it is much wider than this." He waved a hand at the untidy area we were all sitting in. "The figures say it is ten levels down and it goes under the town."
"What town?"
"Quissac." Marie said crisply, watching Melanee who was silently taking all this in or looked as if she was. Indeed, the screen displayed an oblong outline meaning artificial construction stretching for more than a mile to where the Quissac cross roads would have been. "Two 'undred metres down. It is all limestone in this part of France." She added.
Melanee looked confused at our continual use of two different kinds of measurement but with Anglo-American perverseness I still clung to feet in my head for this kind of thinking. Two hundred metres was six hundred and fifty feet. Either way it was hell of long way down. "And we can't get at it?" I asked.
They shook their heads in unison. "It was the same in America and in the Russian command complex." She said. "We go there for briefing, you remember? They 'ave a big area off limits to everyone. There was a mm 'ow you say? big secret and only the bio teams were in on it."
"The Yanks and the Russians and our lot? They all got some big biology project cooking and only a few know what the hell goes on? Hm." I felt as if the knowledge should tell us something but beyond a feeling that there was an answer to a question I hadn't asked lurking in there somehow, I couldn't see how it affected us.
"We 'ave told the ship to scan the planet again and again. It will send down the results, we 'ave set up the link."
There wasn't anything else. It all seemed so unreal, so meaningless, like listening to music written by a composer long dead and you didn't like the notes. It was a tune from the past but we didn't know the words.
Melanee put her finger on essentials. "Daveed sleep now. Get Linda when sun come."
Marie smiled, Jules looked uncomfortable but she was right and we slept together, huddled like children. She was becoming so much part of my life, my strange but haunted existence that I accepted her presence as natural, wondering what Linda would say about it. Linda. Images of her filled my memory as sleep came until the cheeping of my watch alarm woke us.
The aircar was a bastard to move and even worse to set on the guide rails, we should have done it the previous night. The result was that light was streaming into the sky when we settled ourselves down, Melanee somewhat wide eyed now that the real trip was starting. I had her strapped in the co-pilots seat with strict orders to touch nothing. Jules flitted around testing the booster motors while I ran through the check list feeling slightly bemused to be sitting in a high-tech machine that no one had used for ten millennia. I hoped that mice had not been chewing the control circuits but everything was green, Marie's dulcet tones in my headset telling me the link was running and they had the drone ready for launch.
We sat back in the silence, waiting for the countdown to finish. Melanee turned her head and gazed at me with that direct look she switched on when she was afraid or feeling sexy, I hadn't worked it out yet.
"Maree." She said. "Mm does not fear. Wants Daveed away. Zhools does not want."
I stared at her. Our eyes met and she nodded, unsmiling. Marie? A biologist, part of Selena's empire, married or attached to Jules who was definitely not a fan of Selena. Had she just come along to be with Jules and did she now regret it? If so, what could she do about it?
Further speculation was cut short by a loud roar and a hefty jolt as the outside boosters fired. I shoved the turbines, which had been idling, up to full thrust and we shot out of that tunnel like a pea out of a peashooter. Blinding sunlight greeted us as I put us in a steep turn and settled down for the short journey to rescue the woman who had taught me that there were better things than guns. I was beginning to wonder if she was wrong.
Chapter 13
LINDA
The car hummed along as if it was brand new, all the systems running perfectly. A thousand twenty millimetre cannon rounds for the mounting in the nose, five thousand rounds for the five millimetre rotary machine gun, fuel for six hours at optimum speed which was not what we were doing now because I was shifting it along to make up for lost time. I had the wings extended to give us extra lift and take the strain off the verticals, saving fuel. We had used these things for patrol vehicles back in the dead past and I still didn't like them. Any aircraft that tried to do more than one thing at once is a compromise and this thing wasn't a plane or an aircar but it had the worst characteristics of both. The only real bonus was the heavy armament and the passenger capacity, enough for ten bodies, more than any fighter aircraft could manage.
The turbines whined and the ground passed under us as a green blur. Melanee sat transfixed, a look of almost religious awe crossing her flushed face. Explaining just what the machine did and how four tons of metal stayed up in the sky was difficult and unsuccessful but she slowly relaxed. She did at least understand that it was not a work of Gods but men and one of them knew how to fly it. I had set the inertial guidance computer to follow the track I had worked out so only minutes after we'd settled down to fast cruise the wings tipped and we banked sharply at Moussac to find the river. If there had been a town there, it was nothing now, just a dense carpet of the normal green but the river was wide and irregular, occasional islands popping up. We went in low, the blue, unruffled surface flashing under us at alarming speed. Soon, tones sounded from the control panel.
"Two minutes." I said. "When we get out of here, you stay behind me." I glared at her, suddenly wishing I had left her behind. "You hear?"
"Yes, Daveed." She replied with unusual meekness.
The ground by the river was reasonably flat, rising in the distance to the hills we had come from, but the tree cover was even more dense. Huge, towering oaks and beeches spread branches over the water, forcing me down further until the proximity warning told me we were inches from the surface. The squawk from the navigation screen was the signal I had been waiting for so I slammed the auto control off and turned us in to the bank where a distinct opening presented itself under the canopy. Several trees had been removed although the top cover was still in place from others close by but the result was a sort of green cave in which a cluster of figures stood, apparently frozen with astonishment at our sudden noisy appearance.
Banging the controls to hover, I ignored protesting sounds from the engines and steadied the nose. Target grids sprang up over the forward screen. All this had taken less than half a minute and the party of local worthies were still rooted to the spot. A small feeling of mercy or maybe just the knowledge of how few of us there were on this world, made me fire the cannon into the ground in front of them. The aircar vibrated, the tracers streaked to their feet and a succession of bright flashes followed by fountains of earth brought them out of their trance. They scattered like demented refugees and ran for their lives into the forest - all except one. This was a man who snarled at us as he threw something which clanged against the forward armour.
"Silly boy." I muttered and let him have fifty rounds from the minigun. The burst threw him off his feet to sprawl in a bloodstained heap yards back. Seconds ticked by while the scanners diligently looked all round, finally telling me that the enemy were all over two hundred yards away and receding at maximum speed. It seemed time to investigate.
The turbines ran down with a descending whistle as I pulled on the assault kit I had assembled. A machine rifle, movement tracker, armoured helmet with the link to the car's CPU, ammunition belts and we were ready, Melanee staring at me as if I was Satan's cousin and perhaps I was. The master screen bleeped, Marie's face staring out at us as I had my finger on the hatch control.
"David, we have a drone over you. We see nine traces going south-east, nothing else."
"Very useful." I told her, palming the hatch lock. "We're going out now."
"We will track them." She said. Melanee gave me sidelong look but said nothing as the hatch hissed and rose, allowing us to step down on soft earth, covered in leaf mould wit
h blood splashed tastefully over it from where the man had thrown what appeared to be a knife. Whisking Melanee behind me, I made for the cave which the scanners had found, a round opening in a moderate bank that rose to maybe fifty feet or so. Switching on the searchlight, I let the rifle chip search for bodies and it soon cheeped at me as we walked into the gloom.
"David!" It was Mike sitting against the wall with his legs tied together.
"I knew that was a Goddamn aircar." Bradley's deep tones rumbled as we scuttled in.
Melanee, disobeying orders, hastily produced a knife and cut them free, to astonished looks, but I was paying no attention because I had found Linda. She was further back, not tied or chained in any way, sitting with Hilary, their backs to the wall, odd looks on their faces.
"Linda, love." I lifted her and gave her the biggest hug she'd ever had but she was limp, unresponsive. Holding her, I found Bradley at my elbow with Hilary in his arms and Mike who had shot further down the cave, came back carrying Mary.
"What goes on?" I enquired hoarsely. "Linda?"
"Go to car?" Melanee tugged my arm. It was good sense so the babble of relieved voices migrated to the car's passenger deck. The women seemed bedraggled, rather dirty but all in one piece albeit dumb. None of them had said a word so far and Bradley's big hand clamped itself on my shoulder, hauling me back to the flight deck where Mike was sitting with his head in his hands, being patted on his arm by Melanee.
It did not take long to tell them how we arrived just like the cavalry and where we came from but despite Bradley and Mike listening with drawn faces, none of the girls showed any interest at all. "What the hell?" I demanded from Bradley.
"Listen, man, it's a heck of a peculiar story."
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