by A M Kirk
“The Soros,” sighed his mother, sitting down beside Mark. “Yes. I wondered if…”
Mark stood abruptly, his hands holding his temples. His mother watched his blue eyes lose all focus, like they were staring into a different universe. Mark groaned and when he looked up his expression chilled her. “Mum - that bad feeling just got worse,” he said. “We have to leave here. Get out of this house. Right now!”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure yet. Something bad’s about to happen. Here. Very soon.”
Without further debate they left the examining room and quickly crossed the reception area. Mark paused long enough to hand his mother her wallet that contained not just her money and credit cards, but also her car and door keys. She had left it on the reception desk earlier. Puzzled by his action, she slipped the wallet into a pocket and they moved outside.
All was quiet.
Mr Jarvis down the road was wheeling his electric lawnmower out of his garage. He gave them a cheery wave. Somewhere else a dog was barking. Little Lucy Greenwood was dangling a dolly from an upstairs window across the road. A calm, bright summer day.
“Into the car, mum,” said Mark. “We have to get away from here. Something terrible is about to happen. We’ve only got a few minutes.”
Real fear, the kind that dries your mouth and makes mush of your insides, now meant that Janette was not disposed to argue or question. Their four year-old silver Hyundai estate was still parked at the kerb. They ran now towards it. Quickly they got in. Janette hurriedly keyed the ignition.
Janette, never a slow driver, pushed up to thirty in second gear, swung round the corner towards the dual carriageway, accelerated through the turn, then into third, holding it there until fifty registered on the speedo and then a more relaxed fourth gear to cruise down Stirling Boulevard at sixty.
Scotland’s Central Belt, that largely flat plain that cuts the country in two, spread out around them. They headed east along the Boulevard that would eventually take them to Stirling itself. Stirling Castle rose up out of its volcanic rock to dominate the landscape ahead of them.
**********
The beam generated from Nordik IV could be widened to scorch an area the size of a county or narrowed to focus an intense beam of light onto a space a couple of centimetres square. In this mode it could punch a hole in the ground up to fifty metres deep. The iris narrowed.
**********
The car sped along Stirling Boulevard at seventy. Only three minutes had passed. Already Janette was starting to listen to doubts in her mind.
“What sort of danger? Are we - “ Janette started to say, but her words were cut off.
An eruption of light flashed in car’s rear-view mirror and seconds later a loud explosion blasted the landscape behind them.
Janette braked the car to a screeching halt and the car swerved over the centre line, trailing black skid marks. It stalled and all the dashboard warning lights flashed furiously. In the rear view mirror, and then through the back window when she turned round, she saw a column of smoke rising from the village they had just left. She could hardly breathe as she asked, “Is that what I think it is?”
Mark nodded. His eyes were wide with fear. “It’s not Mr Jarvis’s lawnmower, that’s for sure.” But no irony could hide the deep shock he felt. Both mother and son felt sick. “God, I hope he’s all right. I hope they’re all all right.”
“Our house!” Janette whispered.
“You need to drive now, mum.” Mark emphasised the word drive. “We’ve got to get out of here. Keep driving. But stay on the country roads. Not the motorway.”
“Why?” Janette asked, as she forced her trembling limbs to get the car going again.
“I don’t know why,” Mark replied. “I just know they’re better.”
The car headed east again. The thin column of smoke dwindled in the distance behind them.
“Ten minutes ago our lives were ordinary,” said Janette. “Now – what’s happening to us? What the hell’s going on?“
Mark’s eyes were glassy and there was a tremor in his voice as he said, “Our lives have never been ordinary.”
He wondered how he could let Carrie know about what was happening to them.
Janette’s hands tightened on the wheel, knuckles showing white.
7Logan#1
He runs his fingers over the interface. The pathways, routes and avenues of the Supernet open before his impassive, unblinking gaze. He is a master here, in this cyber-world. He has bonded with this world spiritually, he has become it and it has defined him.
He finds the particular site.
The familiar imagery welcomes him. He keys in the complex passwords.
Welcome, Logan.
The words appear on the screen, and the computer’s synthvox sounds in his ears, but the voice has a deeper, third dimension quality: it sounds like a gentle reverb inside his head; almost a direct, telepathic communication. Logan vaguely wonders if the other League members who have visited this site feel the same effect. Or maybe this heightened perception – for that is undoubtedly what it is – arises out of the qualities that have made him the chosen leader for this sector.
Andrew Logan (31), Supernet banking clerk for the RBS Conglomerate, orphaned since early youth (his parents died in a car crash), single and unattached. All his life he has felt rootless, restless, impelled by a need to matter, to belong, to be embraced by something bigger than himself. Andrew Logan, in the lonely hours of his cyberspace searching finally came upon a site that offered him salvation from his own pointlessness. He has, over the last couple of years, found the cause that he can devote himself to, a mission worthy of his dedication. He is a Commander in the League in Britain. It is not an honour he can, as yet, openly show pride in, and his promotion through the organization was not marked by public ceremony. The League and its activities must remain secret. If his colleagues at the RBS heard of his out-of-hours commitment, he would be the target of sly jokes and sideways, suspicious, ironic glances. The League is not yet viewed by many as seriously as it deserves. No, no, the time is not yet ripe. But soon, very soon.
As if his thoughts are translated from mind to screen, similar ideas appear in the text:
The time we have been working for is soon to be upon us.
At last!
These years of secrecy, training and preparation… they have not been for nothing.
The Human Freedom League is about to strike such a blow against the accursed aliens…
Logan exults. His pulse quickens and the hollowness in his stomach returns. He keys in his questions and receives replies from a source he has never seen, but which identifies itself as the Chairman. Certain turns of phrase from the Chairman over the years have led Logan to believe the Chairman is from a military background, perhaps someone high up in the Army. Someone like Logan, who has no reason to like the alien intruders, and every reason to be suspicious.
Logan is no doubt that the aliens intend great evil. They are the advance party of an invasion force - of that he is sure. That is one of the primary beliefs of the League. But now the time is at hand…
Logan’s full concentration is bent upon the screen and the interface. Around him the shadows of the July day slowly shift, lengthen and deepen. The cappuccino in the cup to his left grows cold. Papers, junk mail, advertising flyers for shopping savers occupy much of his desk space. Some millimetres of dust have settled a gossamer blanket over the untidy bookshelves that spill their contents on the linoleum floor. On the wall opposite the window where he sits, behind Logan’s black slicked-back hair, some dark-background posters of metal rock bands ( Frog’s Head Easy) brood and curl away from the weakening blu-tac that holds them up. The single bed is cold and unmade. A thin cobweb stretches from lightshade to ceiling.
Unseen by Logan, the light from his window traverses the wall behind him as the day grows older. His window, high up in a Stirling tenement building offers a stirring
view over Central Scotland. With the aid of binoculars Logan has, often, been able to scrutinise the alien ship in McIntyre’s field. And from this window, though he does not know it, Logan could glimpse the smoke still rising from the mysterious explosion in the respectable little town of Touch .
Beside the bed with its rumpled sheets stands a couple of B&Q workbenches surmounted by a variety of drills, sanders, a small lathe, moulds, plastic boxes containing a wide variety of tools. Next to this workshop area is a built-in wardrobe. The brown-painted, unobtrusive wardrobe door is closed. Its padlock is stout. What it contains, assembled under the instructions of the Chairman, is very dangerous.
Very dangerous indeed. Four men would struggle to lift that wardrobe now, and what it contains.
8Flight
The Hyundai pulled in to park on the grassy verge of a little-used country road that crossed the Ochil Hills. The view to the Campsie Hills in the south-west, and the wilder Perthshire Hills in the north was dramatic. Stirling lay in the valley behind them, out of sight. But the scenery held no interest for Janette and Mark.
“What the hell is going on?” cried Janette. She banged the wheel as fear gave way to anger. “What the hell is going on, Mark? Do you have any idea?”
“I only know this has something to do with the Soros. I really don’t know what or why or how, but… somehow it all comes down to the aliens.”
“Right. Then let’s talk about the Soros,” Janette began. “Recap time. Let’s think - the Soros - what do we know about them? Their ship, now called the Museum, landed on Earth, in an ordinary field in Central Scotland, five years ago, in July 2013. People thought the world had either ended or was about to start afresh. They went wild. It was incredible. You were ten then, and you were very excited about it. Aliens! Wow!”
“I remember,” said Mark.
“But nothing happened for a whole year. The ship just sat there, an extra-terrestrial anti-climax, in McIntyre’s field, the most famous field in the world. Nothing came out, nothing went in. The Army cordoned it off. The scientists and experts had their say, but the ship stayed silent.
“Then, after a year, communication began. The aliens said they were called the Soros. They gave reasons why they had stayed silent for a year. They’d been analysing our atmosphere, our cultures, our languages. Anyway, they said they were trying to establish a means of communication, because their vocal structures were so different from ours that we would never be able to speak each other’s languages. And that year had also given the human race a chance to adjust to the fact that we were no longer alone in the universe. That really took some getting used to.
“You know, it’s funny, Mark. Your dad and I used to watch a lot of science fiction films. Towards the end of the last century there were a whole lot of them – Star Trek, Star Wars, the horrible Aliens series of films, Contact, the X-Files - a whole lot of them to do with alien contact with humans. We used to wonder if it meant some kind of conspiracy to get us ready for real contact. Lots of people thought the Millenium would herald in real aliens, you know.”
“I know.”
“All the cranks, the so-called abductees, they all had the time of their lives.” Janette smiled, but not a happy smile.
Mark saw behind the smile. “You’re thinking about dad,” said Mark. “Tell me.”
Janette regarded her son. “You’re so like him. Your eyes, they way you smile, the way you sometimes read my mind…”
Suddenly Mark sat upright in his seat. Images, impressions, insights had merged for one moment into another razor sharp realisation. “He was an abductee!” he breathed. “My dad was one of those who had been abducted. I never knew.”
Janette sat back in her seat, her hands limp in her lap. “Yes.” She sighed. “He was.”
“But no one believed him!” Mark seemed to be reading words on a page, figuring out their meaning with increasing skill. “You didn’t believe him.”
“No. That’s true. At first, I didn’t. Try to understand, Mark. The way John was… I loved him very much, but the things he said sometimes just didn’t make sense and there was no proof… No, I didn’t believe him.”
Fresh images were rapidly forming in Mark’s mind. Like disjointed scenes from a badly edited film, they flickered across the screen of his mind’s eye: his father walking rapidly across a hillside, coat flapping behind him, his mother calling to him to come back; in a car, rain falling, windscreen wipers making noise; his father’s face smiling tenderly; his blue, troubled eyes in close up, as Janette had seen them; snowfall on a dazzling blue day, and snowball fights with hands that tingled and later stung when their warmth returned… dozens, hundreds of images cascaded across his consciousness as he felt himself tap into a record of his parents’ life together. He wondered if he were reading his mother’s memories. Then rose the image of a needle, a syringe, coming closer, and Mark felt fear rise inside him and he thrust that image away. Mark felt instinctively that this was not one his mother’s memories. This one came from some inexplicable source. Mark had never liked needles and he suspected this fearful image might help to tell him why, but he was not ready for this. Not yet. He held that image of the approaching needle firmly at bay.
“I see a little of how it all fits… but I can’t see it whole,” he said. “Mum, it’s like I’m getting some kind of weird telepathy and there’s all this stuff being processed in here.” His left hand touched his left temple. “But there’s something missing. Dad believed aliens abducted him and took him up in their space ship… But he could not have known about the Soros because his abduction took place years before. No, that’s not it, that’s not it… I can kind of see… Wait! They took him to their mother ship, which was … which was… hiding somewhere. I can’t quite see where. Hiding in the sky? ”
“Whoah!” Mark’s mother gripped his shoulder as if to keep him in this world. “Those are the same words your father used when he talked about it. ‘Hiding in the sky’ he said. How can you possibly know that? No one ever mentioned that to you. I’ve never mentioned any of this to you! Where are you getting it all from?”
“I don’t know, mum! It’s like I’m tuned in to something, some creepy broken database, and I can understand stuff, but bits of it are all garbled.”
“Tuned into something? Tuned into what for God’s sake? Tuned into what?”
Eyes blue and blank turned to Janette. “The Soros,” Mark replied. “Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t, but I can hear the Soros again. This is what happened to me before – at the Soros ship, like I told you before.”
**********
After a moment Mark grew anxious and Janette drove on. They headed north, keeping to quiet B-roads where possible.
After a few minutes Mark went on: “They’re using satellites to track us. In the cities and main roads they can use CCTV and traffic control systems. The Soros are wired in to just about everything electronic. Don’t switch on our SatNav system in the car or they’ll find us straight away. They used some kind of new American beam weapon satellite to destroy our house. The beam ignited the gas main and that was what caused the explosion. They did it on purpose. They were trying to kill me. They still are.”
“This is just incredible. I can hardly believe this, Mark.” After a moment in which Janette considered what Mark had said, she had to ask, “Why would the aliens be concerned about a fifteen year old boy living in a village in the middle of Scotland? I love you more than anything, Mark, but you are just a fifteen-year-old boy! Jesus!”
Mark thought for a while. He tapped his head with a finger. “Because of this. Whatever is growing inside my head.”
Mark looked out of the car window as Perthshire trees and fields sped by, and they sat in thoughtful silence until Janette slowed for a tractor in front.
She said, suddenly, “Okay. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about John. I met your father in 1998. We were both students at Glasgow University. He was studying biology and went on to
teach it in schools for a while. Anyway, we met, and fell in love… He was clever, witty, and utterly charming. I remember my knees used to just go weak the first couple of times we started meeting. Funny. He was a bit taller than you are now. You’ll grow yet; you’ll be about his height soon, I think. Anyway, in 2001, a few months after we got married, something happened that changed everything for us.”
“What was it? The abduction?”
“Yes,” sighed Janette. “John was working in a school in the east end of Glasgow, teaching biology and maths. He left the school one Thursday afternoon and started to drive home. His colleagues saw him get into his car – it was a beat-up old Ford Sierra, I remember – and he was all right, there was nothing untoward or odd about his behaviour. Well, that was it. He got as far as a set of traffic lights in Springburn and he just vanished off the face of the planet. And he stayed vanished for three weeks.”
“Three weeks!”
“Yep. I just about went off my head. The police investigated very thoroughly. I believe they did. You see, John had briefly been a member of a stupid organization called the ‘Tartan Liberation Army’, when he was a first-year student. It was nothing serious, of course, and he thought they were a bunch of dope-heads eventually. But they’d had this scheme to blow up the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh – its costs were going through the roof, and this group thought that doing a fifth of November would be a just way of saving taxpayers’ money. But the point is the police classed them as a terrorist outfit, and because of John’s weak connection with them, the police had a file on him as a potential terrorist, and that explained why they were so anxious to locate him. Anyway, to get back to the disappearance: John stayed missing for three weeks and there was absolutely no trace of him anywhere. I was just going to pieces. I was on tranquillisers, everything. Then one day, about three weeks later, I opened the door to the flat, just heading off to work in the morning, and there’s John, naked as a new-born, asleep on the door-mat.”