"Melanee, no one is going to kill you, I guarantee it. As long as I am alive, no one."
She lifted her head to gaze into my eyes, her own running with tears. "David, if I have mm special genes then they will be passed on to child, yes?" Her face was tense but it took me a good two seconds to cotton on.
"Are you?" My hands tightened on her waist. "Melanee, we will teach the child to live in peace."
For a moment she was still but then she burst into a torrent of tears, clinging on like a drowning sailor. It came to me that she had been dreading telling me, thinking I would cast her off. Instead we clung together on that sun-drenched shore while she sobbed tears of joy, such joy as I had not thought she had in her. As for me, a strange feeling of combined pride and love began to seep over my military conscience. We had a war to fight but now there more than revenge to fight for. With her hair in my mouth I told her I wanted her news kept secret from the others, told her not to pass on our deep speculations about genetic origins. She wanted to shout the news but her intelligence, brighter than mine, understood. We had to play the hand carefully because someone else had all the trumps and I didn't know who.
Chapter 17
THE NEW ENGLAND
We waited for another day, recharging batteries but always searching the sky for some silver dot that might send down a final message. All of us washed away the strain and dirt of despair by splashing in the cold sea, careful that no one got out of their depth because no matter how good a swimmer they were, there were no lifeguards any more. Marie nodded dumbly at my homily on the subject, despite her being a champion swimmer from way back. She seemed sunk in deep depression in spite of Jules’s continual bracing whispers. He kept close to her, always muttering things I couldn't hear, but she didn't respond. Mary and Mike took themselves off along the sandy shore until they were specks in the distance while Melanee and I just lay down in the shade of the sparse trees close to the dunes where we could hear the hiss of the waves on the beach. Away from the sea breeze the sun was hot, insects dancing in the air, the sky a deep blue of high summer. Melanee thought the idea of displaying oneself in ultra violet light to turn a different colour both original and stupid, but then she had a healthy tan anyway and hadn't been locked up on a giant tin can for years. Explaining lazily about melanin only stimulated her endless curiosity so I drowsed and let odd and unhappy thoughts swill around in my head while she provided distraction by removing most of her clothes and chewing grass stalks beside me.
Linda kept coming to me in dreams. We had promised each other so much and the loss was eating away at my subconscious. Thinking about her, I compared her to Melanee, seeing how much alike they were. Melanee was darker, her hair near black and glossy but it fell over her shoulders in waves just as Linda's had. Her features were different but similar, the fine eyebrows and intent eyes that could skewer you with a look, her sensuous mouth with its soft lips. Physically she was fuller than Linda, not by much but her muscle tone was higher due to much exercise. But it was the mental comparison that was striking, her enquiring mind and sharp observation, her instant grasp of conclusions that took me time to latch on to, it all brought Linda back to life. How she would have liked to talk to this girl now that Melanee could speak the language, or would she? Would they have scratched each other's eyes out?
As if she could hear the words in my head, Melanee lazily turned over, regarding me with a smile that made me reach out an arm and gather her in, thanking whatever Deity looked after my future that this girl, this woman seemed to have inherited Linda's beauty and brains. More than that, she was becoming the other half of me in a way that neither of us seemed to understand. She rubbed herself against me in a dreamy way, placing my hand on her breast and her lips close. In around eight months our futures would be joined forever when her child was born but now she wanted to take out insurance. The slight feeling of guilt and betrayal because of Linda's memory faded away as we lost ourselves in each other that sunny morning.
As the day faded, voices floated over our small bower, so Melanee put her shirt on, giving me a steamy glance. The voices came closer and became yells of irritation. Standing up to see over the long grass, we found Mike with a small pig and a big grin. The pig was dead, but the grin was growing nicely as Melanee squealed with delight and scampered to examine the dinner. Mary, with Marie in tow, came up and the three women set to work to prepare the corpse for our evening meal, shooing the men away with menacing gestures and bad language. Marie gave me a look from her dark eyes, glanced at Jules and announced that she would be insulted at the thought that anyone but her and the girls plus Jules management expertise could cook a special meal on the sacred ground of France, certainly not two Englishmen. Mike and I, not inclined to argue, retreated tactfully and started to talk about the journey, a subject that threatened to dim the sunlight. Regrettably, he had been thinking and had caught on to the snag I hadn't pointed out to him before. I listened to his trenchant remarks while thinking about Marie, bringing me to a conclusion I didn't like too much but our choices were getting less and less until sooner or later they would be reduced to only one. That would mean trouble, more even than we had at present, which was quite enough for anyone, even me.
"Fuel." He said and stopped. It wasn't necessary to say any more.
"Yeah." I agreed. "We got enough to go back to Quissac or go up to Inverness and maybe get ourselves back here."
"I don't know why they didn't cotton on." He muttered, giving me a worried look. "Jules and Marie, there's something odd going on there and Mary, well, she's too stressed out to think. That bloody pill, you know. Every time she goes to sleep she wonders if she'll wake up again." He seemed to retreat into himself for seconds before halting and facing me. "If we go up there, we might get back to this place but what then? We're six hundred miles from Quissac."
It was a subject that had kept me awake for most of last night despite Melanee's efforts. Scuffing sand with my boot, I walked slowly on with Mike brooding alongside. "I ran the fuel state over the car computer last night." I said. "If we don't get unfavourable winds we should have enough to get to Iceland."
"Iceland!" He stopped again and stared at me. "Why go to Iceland for Christ's sake?"
"There was an American satellite control station there, remember?"
"So what? It's probably under two hundred feet of lava by now."
I shook my head. "Nowhere near the volcanic spots. They buried most of it and they had a hell of lot of jet fuel there. They ran the Atlantic surveillance from there, it's got a big airfield attached, they had a lot of aircraft stationed there."
He gazed at me for long moments as if I was insane but then lines appeared on his forehead. "Buried? We'd be taking a hell of a chance that the stuff hasn't evaporated or turned into treacle centuries ago. And if it has? We're stuck on bloody Iceland!" He bit his lip. "No food, no trees, nothing!"
I took a deep breath. "Suppose we go back to Quissac? What do we do then? Wait for more of Max's presents to arrive? It's a dead end."
"A dead end? Jesus, what about Iceland?" He yelled. "Wait a minute, wait a Goddamned minute, you want to go to the States? That's it, isn't it? You're gambling with our lives to get at Selena and Max, to get revenge."
"Think about it." I said calmly. "If we can get fuel we can get to Newfoundland maybe. We can carry enough as cargo to get us most of the way across to the Great Lakes."
"Then what? We walk?"
"Maybe." I agreed, receiving a powerful negative from Mike without him saying a word. Indeed, the idea of walking across over a thousand miles of America, meeting God knows what on the way, was just another way of committing slow suicide. It would have to be done in summer, we wouldn't last one of those fierce Mid-West winters and the summers weren't much better, ferocious heat and dry throats, I could see it all. It was a no no, but if we could get fuel?
"Oil." Mike said, frowning, having calmed down. "When they drill for the stuff, it's been there for a million years, more, so it do
esn't disappear from old age if it's kept in the correct environment." He sat himself down and started to draw random patterns in the sand. "Those beacons, worldwide." He muttered. "And someone knew this was going to happen." He glanced up at me. "You're supposed to be the geologist, didn't the Yanks store masses of the stuff in old mine shafts?"
"They did and if it's still there it's no good to us, you need special equipment to get it out, but I see the bright idea. If it's kept under pressure at the right temperature, it will last forever."
"Hold on a minute, what about the fuel I dumped near Bourges? It was a clearing, you saw it on the ship's survey report. If the natives get there and light fires it'll send them into orbit."
"Hm. Two tons wasn't it?" I picked up a handful of sand, finding it a great help to deep thinking. "That's enough for a thousand miles."
We stared down at the patterns I was making on the sand while we juggled with inexorable arithmetic. Two tons three hundred miles off would get us back to Quissac easily enough and we had enough on board to fly us up to the icy north and come back to Bourges, maybe. What we wanted was the two tons to be up near Loch Ness. Running the cargo capacity of the aircar through my mental check list, I totted up the problems.
"We might be able to cram three tons into the car. It's above the loading specs but those things are always pessimistic." I said moodily.
"Three tons? Plus the full tanks? That'll give...hm." Mike retreated into a personal computer mode. "Still air, two thousand four hundred miles." He lifted his chin and eyed me with a blank face. "It's not enough."
"Across the sea we keep a straight line, steady height, I reckon we can squeeze another two or three hundred out of that."
"Still leaves us drowning five hundred miles off New York."
It was impossible. He knew it and I knew it, so we had to go to plan 'B'. "OK." I agreed, "But the bastards want us dead and they're trying hard to stop us from going up north. If we go there, we find out why and we still have options."
Mary was coming towards us, looking fetching in a skirt and flimsy bra, causing Mike to lose his train of thought for seconds before he nodded. "Right." He stood up. "But, we don't tell Jules or Marie." He stared down at me squatting on the sand. "There's something you haven't told them or us anyway, isn't there? Mary thinks so." He finished and walked off to meet Mary, leaving me staring after him. So Mary had been watching Melanee, had she? Was it getting obvious? Presumably it was to a discerning female gaze and did it matter?
The pig was delicious, cooked in herbs that Marie had conjured out of the surrounding forest, wild salad and fruit making the meal complete. Despite showering praise on the cooks, mostly Marie, she still seemed subdued. Jules kept giving her glances and juicy smiles while Melanee watched the by-play with interest. Marie came out of her depression enough to listen to the proposed journey to Bourges next day to load up with as much fuel as this ungainly tub would carry, our present stores having disappeared in a fireball last night. Melanee and Mary showed signs of mutiny at being left behind so we had to let them come but I was watching Jules during this excited argument and wondered why he and Marie didn't demand to come as well. They didn't, they just sat there and accepted things without dissent.
In the cool dawn light we left them in charge of the camp, such as it was, standing together, silent. Mary seemed brighter as each new day dawned and she hadn't dropped dead, while Melanee, alarmingly, looked more stunning than ever, her colour and eyes glowing, her hair shinier. It was a black-haired beauty with a severe army shirt and skirt that sat behind me when we started up, a girl turned into a woman who could and did turn every man's head, I saw Mike eyeing her with appreciation. She had come an astoundingly long way in a hell of a short time.
Jules and Marie stood on the sandy shore as the car rose and made its noisy way South. They didn't wave or smile, they just kept shoulder to shoulder and didn't move as we receded into the distance, two dots on a yellow stretch of sand with the deep blue of the sea behind them. With this bastardised aircar design, half aircraft, half hovercraft, there was a delicate balancing act to be done which Mike couldn't manage. Even with computer assistance it was difficult to hit the right speed, attitude and height to optimise the fuel flow. The idea behind the design had been to allow a much higher speed for assault purposes with wings extended and damn the fuel consumption. Fast enough and we got support from the wings but lost it from the verticals, slow and we had plenty of verticals but the wings stalled. Mentally, I consigned the designer to Hades but he had only been obeying some anonymous planner who had thought up this misbegotten machine. The result was a switchback motion at moderate height with the nose up. I would like to have brought us lower to get the benefit of the ground effect but the infernal everlasting forest prevented that.
The morning passed slowly, the engines throttled down as far as I dared, the sun showing our shadow flicking across the tree cover at one fifty knots. Flying up from Quissac, we had done the same but now we had to save every drop. We had around two hundred and fifty miles as the crows flew, if there were any left, but we had to follow the river valleys and that added a lot.
Mike was watching the map display while Mary and Melanee were exchanging low voiced confidences in the back which I thought I ought not to know about. "Twenty miles." Mike said suddenly. "Come left ten degrees, steer one six five." He peered out of the windscreen. "There!"
"OK, I see it." I told him. Ahead the valley of the River Cher narrowed down, thick deciduous forest towering over the water's edge, but a clearing hove into sight, a hummocky glade perhaps half a mile wide close to the bank, in the middle of which was our sausage shaped fuel dump. Setting us down carefully close by, we let the scanners search the forest all round for nasty surprises but there was nothing, not even a pig.
Mike and the girls leapt out and started energetically coupling up fuel pumps and hoses while I tapped away at the engine management panel. It was good, much better than I hoped. We had used less than half our tankage getting here and a plan was forming in my head.
"We load everything it'll take." I told Mike. "Every drop." He watched me silently as I stared out of the forward screens. "We ferry the stuff up to Calais. According to this thing, we use about half the load getting there, right? OK, we do it again and we have enough stashed away at Calais to get us back down to Quissac when we get back from Inverness."
"If we get back." He muttered. "What about Iceland?"
"We go up to Inverness over the sea, cut across Kent and curve round over the North Sea."
He frowned and tapped away at the navigation screen. "Yeah, optimum speed and height." He agreed, sitting back and ignoring the chatter from the women outside who were doing all the work and wondering when we were going to stop swinging the lead. "We might, just have enough to get us back to Scotland." He looked up suddenly. "But it's a hell of a risk. If the winds are wrong or we have to go off track for twenty miles, we end up in the Arctic bloody Ocean."
Putting my face in my hands, I told him the latest deep thoughts. "Quissac is a dead end if we don't know how to get inside that underground complex and Selena has the place dialled in. Sooner or later they'll get us if we go back there. No, they want to stop us going North so the answer has to be up there."
"The answer? What's the question?" He stared at me, blank faced but I heaved myself out of the pilot's seat and went to help the women. It took us hours to get it right and I was having doubts about the huge load of fuel we had on board. With a cargo that heavy we needed lift from the wings to help out or the engines would go pop. Only Mike with his physics brain fully understood the chance we were taking but he grinned uneasily at me as we strapped ourselves in and the engines started up.
Wallowing sluggishly, the aircar slowly built up forward speed as we laboriously followed the river valleys, the sun beginning to sink in the Western sky. Watching the engine instruments anxiously, I let my reasoning flow through the cortex. Go back to Quissac? Dead end in more ways than one, I felt i
t in my bones. But cross the Atlantic? Have to do it small hops. Scotland to Iceland. Iceland to...well, where? Greenland? If we could get fuel. Sudden depression settled on me. Max and Selena had all the cards and we couldn't get at them, it was insane to think of driving this thing all across North America even if we could get the fuel, but on the other hand they certainly didn't want us to leave France and we didn't know why. The worldwide nexus which had been set up as part of that secret plan to co-ordinate nurseries of mutated slaves suspended before they were born, it had been superimposed on the space program installations, it was obvious. And no one blew the whistle so it was big, but we knew that. But was it still big? They could track us but not through the ship if Marie was to be believed, so they were doing it with reconnaissance drones, all very high tech but how much fuel did they have to play with? They couldn't keep the things over us all the time, far too expensive, surely. And that place in Scotland, it had done something it wasn't supposed to, that was what the missile attack was all about, I was sure of it, they didn't want us to go and find out and they knew we had a mutant survivor with us. Melanee! It hit me like an axe. How did they know? Only if they had been told and who could have told them?
"Thirty miles." Mike muttered in my ear. The night was nearly on us as we approached our beach rendezvous, the verticals howling furiously, blasting out sand in huge yellow sprays. "Hope they aren't watching all this traffic." Mike added, glancing up at the sky as we stood upon the sand with the sea breeze wafting across our faces.
I nodded but didn't answer, casting around with my rifle night sights to see where the French Axis had got to. Melanee came up after two or three minutes and put her hand gently on my shoulder. Mike ceased his own scanning and looked at her, Mary by his side. Suddenly, we all knew.
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