ARIA (45 page)

“Manuel, stop there,” Ryder said into his phone. “You need to wait until we tell you to bring the case to us.”

“Oops, sorry, Ryder.”

“We’ve every reason to believe you’ll remember better from now on, but I’d head back to your cabin for your own safety.”

“We intend to, thanks a bunch. Julia says, first, we’re going to load the pickup with shopping so it’ll hardly move. We’ll keep in touch, don’t you worry. Have a good flight.”

“Cheers, Manuel. Our doors are shut now, so bring the case here. Leave it on the tarmac and go off to do your shopping.”

A few minutes later, they were ready to take off.

“Ryder, you know how we took the case to start a recovery diffusion in the UK?” Abdul said.

“Are you suggesting we hang around here to do the same?”

“Well, Manuel and Julia are going to drive back to their cabin without contacting anyone. They are going out of their way to avoid people—and I don’t blame them. A shame not to let others have a whiff of the second case.”

“Like dangling it out of the door while we fly over Calgary, for instance?” Jena said.

“That would be too tricky, wouldn’t it?” said Ryder. “We would be accelerating and climbing. We could lose it. And it’d be too high up for the contents to be any use. It would make more sense to grab someone around here—”

“I was floating the idea, Ryder,” said Abdul. “But you could ask Manuel to breathe on at least one friendly or sleeping person during the next few days.”

Saturday 10 October 2015:

In the air over the Rockies.

F
ORTY
MINUTES
LATER
, Ryder admired the snowy peaks of the Rockies beneath him. They had the look of the immutable for millions of years, give or take glacial erosion and the occasional earth movement. ARIA took Man away and allowed Mother Nature to start recovering.

“We’ve been in touch with Rarotonga,” Jena said. “They’ve set up a ground signal our navigation computer will pick up once in range. It will guide and land our plane on automatic.”

“Thank God. No more kangaroo impressions.”

“That was my fault,” Abdul said. “I’ve re-calibrated the near-ground altimeter.”

“Abdul, you’re a loyal and well-trained co-pilot, taking all the blame for all that seatbelt testing and rivet popping.”

Jena said, “You’re a stirrer, and isn’t that your NoteCom beeping?”

Ryder, worried that Manuel had run into trouble, glanced at the clock and realized they had yet to load the pickup to axle-breaking point from the airport shop.

“Hi, Manuel, okay?”

“No, problems, Ryder, but you could have said you were leaving us with one of your passengers. And what an individual!”

“What? Just hang on, Manuel, I need to check on something in a hurry.” A shiver ran up his spine. He turned and opened the door between the cockpit and passenger area.

“Where’s Megan?”

Bronwyn, sucking a pencil, looked up from a word puzzle and shook her head.

Teresa and Gustav had their heads together at a laptop.

Gustav looked up. “She is a teenager. As such, she likes her privacy and there are a surprisingly large number of hiding places on this plane.”

“She got off at Calgary,” Ryder said, expecting them all to be shocked.

Teresa hadn’t looked up from her screen. “Once she heard there was a shop, she wanted to raid the DVDs, cosmetics, and magazines. It obviously hasn’t sunk in, Megan is a teenager with her own specific needs.”

Ryder looked as if he was holding a set of invisible books with his hands as bookends. Then shook them up and down to emphasise the urgency of his concern. “Listen up. I think Megan might have got off in Calgary and didn’t come back on the plane. She’s still there!”

“Oh, Lordy,” Bronwyn said.

Finally, with worry lines, Teresa said, “We’ll have to go back.”

Gustav raised his eyebrows. “How do you know?”

“Manuel just phoned.”

Teresa said, “You have to hand it to that girl. She has guts. Not only does she disobey our fine leader’s orders but—”

“Hang on, Teresa, I told her not to leave the plane.”

“One word from you and she does as she likes.”

Ryder dropped his hands. “I suppose I’d better tell Jena to about turn.”

“Why, did you forget to pay the bill?” said Megan, having just come through the door from the cargo store. The others looked accusations at Ryder, who, reddened, went back into the cockpit and back on the phone.

“Manuel, what are you on about? Megan is here.”

“Oh, you’re back, are you? Before I could thank you properly.”

“I assumed you meant our Megan had got off the plane and joined you in Calgary. I know it’s laughable, now.”

“Yeah, but your friend, Antonio, is a real card.”

“He was, but I didn’t realize you’d remember him.”

“You are amusing, Ryder. He’s sitting right here, having a warm Coke. He’s been reminding us about ourselves. He knew both of us quite well, you know.”

Ryder’s neck hairs bristled. “Just a minute, Manuel, there must be some mistake. Maybe to do with your second-case exposure. You can’t possibly be talking to Dr Antonio Menzies.” Looking at the screen, Ryder saw Manuel smiling then the image rotated, bringing in Julia, who winked. The image continued to an old magazine with a photograph of Saturn. The magazine dropped.

“
Ciao
, Ryder,” Antonio said. “My wounds are healing nicely, thank you. Give my regards to Rarotonga, won’t you?”

Ryder couldn’t speak. His left hand lashed out, hurting it on a wall strut.

“He’s come back to life?” Abdul said.

“Is that Abdul I can hear?” Antonio said. “Was it you or Jena I have to thank for the bumps-a-daisy landing?”

“If I’d known you were a stowaway,” Jena said, “I would have banged it down a lot harder. You must have been in the back of the pickup when we left Anafon. Not bad for a corpse.”

“You always jump to the wrong conclusions, Jena.”

Ryder tasted bile. He’d been responsible for putting a psychopath together with his old friend Manuel and another innocent. Not just any plain psychopathic killer, but one infected with an alien virus giving him God-knows-what extra powers.

“I know what you are thinking,” Antonio said. “But don’t worry, the bloodletting has steadied me. I’ll look after your friends. After all, I’m a doctor, right?”

“I’m glad to hear it.” He perspired trying hard to think of mollifying arguments. “An example of physician, heal thyself?”

“Very apt, but I had a little help.”

“You said I could go with you,” Megan said from the doorway. She stood with her arms folded.

“You are with me in spirit, young Megan. You helped me more than you know. Hey, you others, don’t blame her. You could say I had her under my spell. Hah!”

“Do you have my friends under your spell?”

“He sure does,” Manuel said. “A charming man. He’s coming with us to the cabin to recuperate from his accident injuries.”

“That’s good,” Ryder said. His real terror was shown to the others by his perspiration, and waving them back in case they said something inflammatory.

“We’d better be on our way now, Ryder,” Manuel said. “Just in case people hearing the plane come to investigate, and I want to reach the cabin before it gets dark. Have a good journey and keep in touch.”

“Will do, Manuel. Take care, all of you,” Ryder said, shaking as he signed off.

Apart from Megan, who grumbled until her headphones turned her to humming and swaying, everyone took five minutes to settle their mental contortions.

Teresa said, “I’ll send Julia a message via her NoteCom. It’s not switched on at the moment, but I expect it will be when they reach the cabin.”

“You’d have to be careful what you say,” Ryder said.

“Naturally, I can’t just say what we know. I have to assume Antonio might get it first. And I can’t use technospeak because he’s a doctor.”

“He’s not a virologist though,” Gustav said. “I’m sure we could come up with something that sounds harmless but which indicates there is a serious problem with Antonio’s particular pathology.”

“Go for that,” Ryder said.

“There is another angle,” Jena said. “Antonio might be right. He could be going through metabolic changes, and the crazed part might have been a one-off.”

“That’s wishful thinking coming from the Queen of the Hard Nuts,” Teresa said.

“He didn’t harm Megan,” Abdul said. “Maybe he considered us a threat while his brain was changing. While there’s life, there’s hope.”

“You’re right, Abdul,” Ryder said. “Your glass is always half full, even when it’s really empty.” They all laughed at the accurate observation. “We still don’t know the aliens’ intentions. For all we know, they’ve gone for good, thinking they’ve done us some kind of favour.”

“Or they might be back thinking there’s just a few special humans left to either greet as fellow beings or as slaves for the taking,” Jena said.

Gustav leaned back in his chair. “You are such a source of comfort.”

“That is so true,” Ryder said, making Jena laugh softly in agreement.

B
RONWYN
STAGGERED
INTO
THE
COCKPIT
. She held out an airline plastic tray with plastic cups filled with twenty-year-old whiskey.

“It is good to see you on your feet again, Bronwyn,” Abdul said.

“I would like us all to toast your thought of a minute ago. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

They all repeated “Hope” and allowed the warming amber liquid to give them a well-deserved glow.

T
HE
WARMTH
TRAVELLED
THROUGH
R
YDER
, settling fears and building optimism. Through him, his fellow travellers, through the aircraft, and out through its jet exhausts as it left the American continent. There, at five miles high above the Pacific Ocean, the plane carrying a miracle case and seven bold optimists flew with expectation to tomorrow.

The euphoria lasted twenty minutes. After that, Ryder’s attempts to snooze were snagged by stabs, flashes of Antonio’s flashing teeth and taunts. What was the egomaniac going to do in Canada, and to Manuel and Julia? Who and what were the aliens up to? Hopefully, they’d leave Ryder’s group alone on a tiny South Pacific island, but he somehow knew this was only the beginning of the endgame.

Read

ARIA: Returning Left Luggage

Never has Earth faced such problems. Survivors are either in hiding or slaves to aliens. How does Ryder’s group prevent ARIA-infected boat people invading their island? Something alien stirs in France where free students live off their wits. A sliver of hope in America but the mad doctor could ruin everything. Is a girl in Australia, Earth’s salvation? Never a dull moment as ARIA and Zadokians change Earth forever.

Geoff Nelder
has a wife, two grown-up kids, an increasing number of grandkids, and lives in rural England within an easy cycle ride of the Welsh mountains. He taught Geography and Information Technology for years until writing took over his life. Geoff’s an occasional competition short-fiction judge, and is a freelance editor.