Come Back

by George Erlynne

  "Marie, Zhools, they go." Melanee said softly.

  The silent beach with distant swishing as the calm sea splashed tiny wavelets up the sand all told me she was right. They had decamped, departed, absconded but where to? And why? Mike's hand on my shoulder was hard and angry, I felt the tension.

  "Listen, hard man, you tell us what the hell is going on now because you know, don't you?" His voice was steady but controlled, just. Swinging round, I saw Mary standing behind him with apprehension and fear chasing themselves across her features.

  "She's pregnant." She said, pointing her chin at Melanee who was keeping close to me. Mike's rifle was in his right hand and he took a pace away from me the barrel edging towards my middle. Stress lines appeared on his normally smooth countenance, the eyes narrowing.

  "You tell us or..."

  "Or what?" I enquired evenly.

  "No!" Melanee cried, putting out a hand as if she could stop bullets in mid-flight. "David, tell them!"

  "Or what?" I repeated, staring at Mike. I don't like guns being pointed at me and was aware of the weight of my side arm, hanging from my belt. "Don't play games when you don't know the rules." I told him quietly. "You'd be dead before you could flick an eyelid, fella."

  For an instant we stared at each other, unmoving. The tension rose like invisible electricity flowing over us and I thought for a tiny moment he was going to try, but he was no killer, I know the signs. Soon, it became obvious that so did he, he saw a killer and he knew. Slowly, ever so slowly, he lowered the rifle until it was pointing at the sand. Sweat poured from his face as Mary gripped his arm, her own features showing dread and revulsion.

  "You would have done it." She whispered. "What are you?"

  "He is good man." Melanee said decisively. "He will put right."

  They both stared at her as if she was an alien. "My God, she's something else." Mary muttered. "But you stop treating us like tin soldiers or we go, we take our chances like Jules and Marie."

  "Why did they run?" Mike demanded, his hands shaking, making the rifle tremble in sympathy.

  "Take the magazine out and settle down." I told him. "We'll eat and talk."

  It was not unexpected. The stress had been building up in them like steam pressure and Jules and Marie's sudden exit had triggered paranoia. Building the fire, I ruminated over tactics and options. We didn't know enough, putting it mildly and all I knew, they knew, well most of it. I needed Mike, the physics/biology brain but Mary was reaching the end of her mental resources, I could see that. Every time she slept she wondered if she would wake up again and what would they do if they swanned off to live like Hansel and Gretel in the forest and she did drop dead? Mike would go insane on the spot and it was a waste.

  "All right." I said, after a silence filled with munching the meal. "Melanee is special and yes she is pregnant, but I don't think that's what makes her special except to me." I saw out of the corner of my eye her brilliant and knee shaking smile. Mary saw it too and couldn't help her own grin of empathy. "How she got away or grew up she doesn't know but she isn't one of the local population, she's one of the special people they were growing downstairs and Marie figured it out and told Selena."

  Mike shifted his frown from me to Melanee as Mary wrinkled her brow. "Christ." He muttered. "It's not just Scotland is it? It's her they want to stop." He gazed at her like seeing a statue move, a look of scales falling from eyes. "I should have guessed."

  "But what for?" Mary wailed. "A whole planet wiped out and they still want to carry on an experiment? It's obscene!"

  "That's the bit we don't know." Mike said. "You guessed that Marie told them, right?" He watched my face with an intense look of mingled fear and enlightenment. "That's why they did a flit! Christ, she must have been walking on thin ice for days, waiting for you to work it out. What were you going to do?"

  Leaning back in the comforting flicker of light from our fire, I considered the question. "Don't know." I said honestly. "But a better question is why she did it, eh? She's the one that told us about the battalions of slaves waiting to be sent to another star, remember? So she finds out that Melanee here is one of them although I don't see how because she sure as hell is no robot, but..."

  "She took a blood sample." Mary interjected, staring down at her hands. "Remember when we all took the shots for prophylactic protection? She wanted blood groups and we knew ours but she didn't know Melanee's, so she checked, that's how she knew."

  "It comes back to Scotland." Mike said gloomily. He was more relaxed, but the sudden eruption of hidden despair and hatreds was lurking just under the surface, I knew the signs because I had the same turmoil in my own head. Melanee was the reason I didn't put a gun to my own head or kill every living thing I met, she was keeping me sane and Mary was doing the same thing to Mike. A crooked smile appeared and spread slowly across his face.

  "OK, David, sorry for the brainstorm. Let's go see the frozen North. What else have we got to do?"

  Chapter 18

  THE NEW NORTH

  We left at dawn, a calm dawn with the glittering rays of the rising sun just striking the eastern sea, golden light reflecting from the surface. Not a breath of air stirred the empty beach and not a single cloud marred the solid blue overhead. Jules and Marie had not been mentioned again although passing thoughts of how they were going to walk all the way back to Quissac flitted through my head. To hell with them, they had brought trouble down on us and they could die of old age counting trees for all I cared.

  The sea was flat as a billiard table, gradually growing a deeper blue as the sun rose. Only thirty feet up, the ground effect helping the lift, we threw up an arrow straight wake as we roared over the Channel, the first ferry for ten thousand years. Clouds of birds rose like white confetti in the distance but the white chalk cliffs that I knew so well rose over the horizon and came closer before veering off to our left as the course took us round the Isle of Thanet and out into the North Sea.

  "Looks the same, you wouldn't know..." Mike was leaning forward, peering out of the forward screen, the enhanced field glasses glued to his eyes. "I think the Dover breakwaters are still there." The glasses came down to reveal a face that was trying to hide deep distress. I said nothing, remembering that Mike had roots in Kent, family history that was now dust blowing in the trees.

  "The ship says high pressure all over the UK." Mary muttered from the back. "If it holds we'll have no wind or not much."

  Mike grunted but Melanee smiled at her from the co-pilot's seat. Dressed in uniform shirt and skirt, she looked both demure and sexy but with an undertone of difference about her. The aircar hummed on, the engines throttled down to economic cruise, the miles clocking up. Slowly the coast of Kent passed by, the downs covered in growth. It gave me an odd feeling, travelling across this empty sea where once the heaviest freight traffic in the world had steamed up and down, cargoes for Holland, London, Scandinavia. We sat back and watched the coast slide by before the track took us out of sight of land, heading for the Norfolk shore where Great Yarmouth was. I recalled taking a girl there for a day out in a past life. What happened to her?

  "This where you come from?" Melanee jerked me out of unhealthy brooding by tugging my shirt and pointing to the far-off land, seen as a dark line against the sky.

  "That's me." I agreed. "Came from back there, what we called Kent. Where the white cliffs are."

  Mike stared at me. "Didn't know you were one of us." He said, a faint grin crinkling the stressed expression he wore all the time.

  "Born there." I told him. "No place like it." I gazed at the instruments, trying to forget.

  "No." He agreed, a whisper that said a lot. "Pappy Zelenov was a third generation Russian immigrant but mother's roots go back there for five hundred years."

  "California." Mary said from behind me. Melanee and I screwed round in our seats to see her face. "The Golden State, eh?" She said, watching Mike's face. "San Diego, but we travelled, spent most of my growing up in a damned foggy and co
ld Island."

  Mike looked blank but I grinned at her. "You were at Oxford, a Rhodes Scholar and you stayed on, took the maths and your parents..."

  "They split, I stayed with mom, she married an Englishman and they turned me into one of you, just like him." She gave Mike a wry glance. "All things are funny, huh? Everything a laugh? That's all you Limeys ever say. Right, but no jokes any more. Christ," she stopped, the tears running down her face but there was nothing I could say or do.

  "Mm, this say three hundred fifty mm miles? Yes? We go." Melanee tactfully changed the subject, telling me what a clever girl she was and how she wanted so much to be like us. I didn't tell her she was much better off as she was without the stain of inheritance that we dragged round with us.

  "Question is, do we follow the track and go round the coast by Aberdeen or cut across country? If we go by the Firth of Tay we could follow the valleys, save a lot of fuel." Mike leaned over my shoulder and tapped the navigation computer keyboard.

  "We'll stick to the plan." I growled. "This damned place is miles from Inverness, right out in the sticks up a bloody mountain. We need a good fix."

  Mike grunted agreement and the morning passed away as the miles clocked up. We were going at a steady hundred and seventy-five knots and that meant we should be there well before dark, not that it got dark up there until nearly midnight at this time of year. Every forty minutes Mary checked with the ship as the orbit went over us, but it didn't tell us anything we didn't know. Mike made fuel calculations and smiled faintly so I presumed we were going to get there. Melanee slumped into a kind of half dreamy fascination with the never-ending vista of blue sea and bright sky.

  "Coming up." Mike snapped to attention and pointed to the screen. We were nearly at Rattray Head, coming close into the shore. Away in the far distance the mountains of Scotland reared over the horizon, a wavy blue outline. The track brought us in close to the shore where endless ranks of trees came down to the water's edge, seemingly. Soon, in minutes, the Moray Firth hove into sight, so we had to take notice and start being intrepid explorers. The track took us up what had been the roadway out of Inverness going South, the old A9. Of Inverness there seemed nothing left, a view of some regular outlines by the shoreline might have been ruins but we were gone before any shapes made sense. They had picked the top of a respectable mountain with a name unpronounceable unless you were a Scotsman, but it was two thousand five hundred feet and mostly covered in dense fir growth.

  "Why put the thing up there?" Mike muttered. "Must have been hell to service."

  Crawling painfully up a steep slope was eating away at our fuel reserves; this thing didn't like it at all, we were very close the operational ceiling. However, there was no alternative but to put the car down right next to the somewhat battered beacon edifice, although the ground there was sharply angled. Seen close up, the circular construction certainly looked out of place, anachronistic, but the jets howled and we landed bumpily, settling down at a considerable angle. Mike looked at me nervously as the landing gear groaned but seconds passed, turned into minutes and the car didn't start to slide down the hill so I shut down the engines.

  "Well, people, let's go see if the wizard's at home."

  Melanee wrinkled her brow, looking puzzled but followed us out of the hatch to stand gazing over the vista in front of us. All round were the mountains receding into a blue haze, still, with trees folding round them like green cloaks, leaving the summits clear. It's not often you see the hills like this before the mist comes down but standing there I felt a calmness creep over me. Celtic blood on my mother's side, maybe, but the vibrations of Scotland were getting at me.

  "It is beautiful." Melanee said softly. It was a word she had learned from me describing her, but she had filed it away like all the other words and used it now with a sense of wonder.

  "Good fuel curve." Mike told me. "Damned good. We got enough to get back to Calais or..." He shrugged.

  "Wait! Just a Goddamned minute!" Mary came to life after drinking in the scene around her. "Why haven't they bombed this?"

  The question made us all stand rigid with apprehension. Why indeed? They knew where we were or near enough or they could find out, so why no action?

  "Let's see what the hell is in this thing." I snapped and led off around the nose of the car. The beacon was contained in a circular concrete wall that looked as if it had been gnawed by a giant shark. Dark vertical stripes showed on the surface at regular intervals. I thought that by jumping, I could just get my hands on the upper edge, but Mike was sniffing around at ground level and drew my attention to interesting details.

  "Look, you see? This sinks into the ground, these marks must be magnetic guides. Here's a control box."

  Recessed into the stonework was a small panel with coloured squares. Pushing each square produced no result so there was nothing for it but to climb into the thing. Scrambling up I gave Melanee a hand while Mike did the same for Mary. The wall was a good foot thick and the roof must have been thicker but recently by the look of the tattered edges some force of nature had blown off half the structure. We could see from up there that debris was scattered down the far slope.

  "Lightning, storm, a big storm." Mary muttered.

  "Right." Mike said, light dawning on him. "The strike must have energised the lift mechanism." He stared round him. "Chance in a million."

  "Maybe." I agreed and lowered myself down on to what I perceived as a flat floor covered in an assortment of dust and vegetation, wet vegetation at that, but I was staring at what stood clear of the opposite wall.

  "A terminal." Mike breathed. "Let's ask it some bloody good questions."

  It was encased in the ever present artificial crystal, a solid block through which gleamed faintly an array of dim lights. Over the top was a screen seemingly built into the wall. Mike looked round him and scuffed away at the floor, scraping away the leaves and accumulated detritus of God knows how long. Mary stood in front of the keyboard and studied the symbols with Melanee peering over her shoulder. The place struck me as odd, just that single terminal standing on a stone floor and nothing else.

  "Must be something underneath." Mike muttered, showing he had been thinking along similar lines. "What are those things?" He pointed to black squares the size of paving stones on each side of the terminal standing proud from the wall. They looked like stereo mikes covered in dust. "Mary!" He spoke sharply. "Don't touch the keyboard!"

  The women turned and stared at him but he had his nose up against one of the squares. "The booster." I muttered.

  "Got it in one." He growled. "I think this thing projects a tight beam that starts up whatever that damned neural enhancer did, the pill, right?"

  "How could it?" Mary stared at the black square with slowly growing horror. What would it trigger in her own head if she stood between the terminals?

  "Magnetics? Radiation?" Mike mused, scratching the surface of one of the things with his fingernails. "Marie couldn't quite figure out just what it did but she reckoned it needed something else."

  "If she was telling us the truth." I reminded him.

  "Whatever, this has got to be part of the system. You see? Take the pill, wait for two days say, stand between these things and hey presto! You got a genetically altered slave and any children she has will inherit the message. It's quite an idea."

  "But what for?" Mary cried. "Everyone's dead! Why do it?"

  "Mm there is part we do not know." Melanee observed, gazing at the terminal and the enigmatic black projections with a slight frown. "This not used for many years. It is because all women have the mm g-genetic message, yes? No new children to treat. Everywhere like this except when new women appear." She glanced at Mary who was staring at her as if she was Einstein's daughter.

  "Yeah." Mike breathed. "The nexus, it knew we were new, but I thought you had memories of children, girl children taken and returned with their brains scrambled?" He looked enquiringly at Melanee.

  "Yes," she nodded. "But only
in telling, in... mm..." She struggled so I provided the answer.

  "Folk memory, something told from father to son." I glowered at the damned black squares and brooded. "And we come along so the all-seeing nexus sees women not treated and tells the boys to collect them and see they're properly programmed and the boys have to obey, what a perfect system! And Linda died because we took her away, there must be a terminal like this in that bloody cave but we didn't look."

  The silence after my bitter remark was broken by Melanee who touched my arm and gave me a tiny smile. "Linda, she would not have been your Linda. She would have been a machine, yes? Like all the women in my settlement."

  "But not you!" Mary snapped. "Why didn't they scoop you up and feed you the damned pills?"

  Melanee didn't know and neither did anyone else but we had to do something besides standing here arguing the point so I took out my sidearm and before Mike could do more than open his mouth in protest I put two deliberate shots in each of the black squares. Inside the confines of that circular pillbox, the noise was deafening and the smoke bitter, but bits flew out of the walls and puffs of smoke emerged to rise in the cool air.

  "You bloody vandal!" Mary yelled. "Now we can't find out anything!"

  "Possibly." I replied mildly and tapped our ship code into the terminal which still had lights glowing. The screen came to life and a curious pattern formed as if you were looking at three dimensional cubes always rotating and changing shape. The others crowded round, Mike edging me away from the keyboard, excitement in his face.

  "It's atomic lattice patterns. What have we got here, eh?" He said. "David, you lucky guy."

  I agreed and retreated from the tight scrum round the terminal. I didn't like us all standing around inside a concrete drum without being able to see outside. Anyone with evil intent could blast the lot of us and we would never know so I heaved myself up to sit on the top of the wall where I could see the surrounding countryside. Loud argument floated up from below so I presumed they were finding out the secrets of the universe, but I was watching the approach of several hefty looking gentlemen who were climbing steadily towards us carrying what looked like spears and bad tempers. Their clothing was a mixture of cloth and skins, but their hair was not the traditional wild draggle of ancient Scots, it was controlled and looked tidy and they were all clean shaven. They got to within a couple of hundred yards and then they all saw me sitting on the wall up above them and they stopped in a bunch. There were eight of them led by a big guy with greying hair. How did they know we were here? Of course, the aircar! It had made a noise like a screaming banshee when we landed.