The Day of the Nefilim (17 page)

“Not quite. The pig can talk.”

Reina didn’t reply. She was putting her boots on.

“Let’s go see what’s happening.”

They went up onto the deck. The ship was approaching a range of cliffs that was broken up into a labyrinth of dead ends and fjords that seemed to disappear in every direction. “Here,” Geoca said as they approached the rocks that he had pointed out from across the water.

Following his directions, Bark steered the ship under an overhang and was about to take it up into the blackness behind it when the Senator, who had been standing at the bow looking back towards the island, called out. Five helicopters were speeding towards them across the water.

“This isn’t good,” said Pig, standing upright with his front legs on the rail.

“They’re onto us,” said Reina, forgetting that a pig shouldn’t be speaking.

“Quickly,” said Sahrin, remembering what had happened on the island. “Whatever we’re going to do, we need do it right now.”

They floated upwards into the darkness, and were instantly caught up in the difference chimney’s anti-gravity. Swirls of light spiraled upwards and around them, heading for the surface like a giant corkscrew.

“Are they below us?” Bark had given up trying to control the vessel. There was no choice but to surrender it to the current. They traveled smoothly upwards, circling around the axis of the vortex as they went.

Bryce and Reina leaned over the side and looked down. The helicopters had entered the shaft and were visible below them. They were rising, accelerating as they came.

“They’re chasing us, all right,” said Bryce.

“You are so bright it scares me. And they’re gaining on us,” said Reina. “They’ve got props. We don’t.”

But their advantage wasn’t doing the helicopters much good. The power of their rotors was interfering with the force of the current, making it unbalanced and unpredictable. They were gaining on the ship, it was true, but they were reeling from side to side, tumbling erratically.

One of the helicopters went too close to the edge of the shaft. Its blades clipped the rock and it spun around and smashed against the surface, exploding in a ball of fire. Pieces of debris flew in all directions. One of them struck one of the other helicopters. It lurched violently, flying straight into the helicopter beside it, sending pieces of glass and metal flying everywhere.

The two machines were tangled together like mating insects rotating around a common center. Fire broke out in one of them. Flames began to spread, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. Soldiers began jumping from the helicopters. Some of them were on fire, and they floated in the current like fairy lights, bobbing up and down as though they were suspended on springs.

“Don’t waste any sympathy on them,” said Geoca, as one of the soldiers drifted into the spinning blades of one of the remaining helicopters and was turned into goulash. “They’ve got plenty to atone for. Their abuse of my people has gone on forever.”

The burning helicopters were closing on them. Something on one of them exploded, tearing a hole in the side of the fuselage. More soldiers jumped ship and abandoned themselves to the mercies of the vortex.

The two remaining helicopters, one black and one red, hung back, wary of getting too close to the confetti shower of flesh and metal.

The two tangled helicopters passed harmlessly upwards through the hull of the ship, and appeared through the deck. Even though there was no danger to them, it was still disconcerting to have a burning hulk pass so close.

As the helicopters drifted through the deck, a Nefilim, splattered in both human blood and the paler pink blood of its own species, appeared in the twisted door. It clung to the door frame, injured and deciding what to do. From the way it was looking around, it was obvious that it could see them.

Events took the decision out the Nefilim’s hands. The helicopter was about ten feet above the deck and still rising when it lurched suddenly, tipping the Nefilim and the bodies of some dead soldiers out. The soldiers floated away towards the outer edges of the vortex. The Nefilim landed gracefully on the deck like a huge ugly swan.

“Oh well, this is very interesting, isn’t it,” said Geoca.

Before anyone could do anything, the Nefilim reached out and took hold of Bryce. It lifted him off the deck and held him to its chest.

The ship lurched, caught in an eddy in the difference current. Everyone stumbled, holding on to anything that they could. Bryce tried to escape from the Nefilim’s grasp, but the creature’s grip was too strong and its reflexes too fast. It slashed his throat with a single talon.

The sight galvanized the others. As the Nefilim threw Bryce’s twitching body overboard, Pig charged, throwing his mass against the alien’s knees. There was a cracking sound as they shattered under the force. Pig dug his tusks in and tore with all his strength. The creature fell, screaming and flailing, but its arms were held by the rest of the crew who had rushed to join in. Pig jumped onto its throat, and sliced it open with his tusks. The Nefilim made a sound like nothing any of them had ever heard before, then it was dead.

Reina hadn’t joined in the attack. She was standing still, in shock. “Bryce…” Her friend was dead. She tilted her head back, unwilling to see what was before her. She saw something appearing in the shaft above them, and the sight of it brought her back. She would have to wait until later to think about Bryce.

“Look!” she called to the others. The vortex was splitting like a hydra into smaller paths that branched off the main shaft. From where she stood, it looked like a Mandelbrot set, the pattern repeating itself as it flowed away into ever smaller versions of itself, upwards and away into the darkness. It was though they were traveling up the stem of a huge transparent plant. (Actually, they were, but that is another whole story.)

Geoca gave Bark directions, pointing towards one of the smaller branches. Bark maneuvered the ship towards it, taking care because the rock walls were closer now, crowding in on them.

Behind them, the helicopters, which had been relying on the Nefilim for directions in their pursuit of the ship, now had no idea which direction to take. They disappeared up another of the passages. They’d lost them.

“That’s the first good thing that’s happened,” grumbled Bark.

“It’s been a bitch of a day so far,” said Sahrin. “I feel as though I’ve been walking around in a slaughterhouse.”

“Let me tell you about it sometime,” said the pig.

“Sure thing, Pig. But maybe when we have more time. What do we do now?” she asked Geoca, who alone among them seemed to have any idea of what was happening.

“We are about to… what do you call it with a vessel like this… dock? land?”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever. We are near our destination.”

“You mean where we have to drop the crystal thing?”

“Yes. I know exactly where to go. It shouldn’t present any problems at all.”

“That comes as something of a relief. I hope you’re right.”

The channel had opened up like the head of a giant mush-room. They entered a cavern with a huge domed roof. The trails of the vortex dissipated, leaving them floating calmly in a fine sparkling mist.

“This is one of the terminal points of the difference chimney,” said Geoca, “and just over there is our landing place.”

They set down on a wide ledge set into the wall. It had obviously seen much use over the ages, and the rock was worn smooth. The area was littered with artifacts and rubbish.

“But this doesn’t exactly get us back to the surface, does it,” said the Senator, who was becoming less and less keen on this underground stuff.

“Don’t worry, we’re almost there,” replied Geoca. “We’re underneath one of their cities. Believe me, this is the safest place for the ship at the moment. Once our mission here is done, you can take to the skies again.”

There was a stairwell leading away from the landing area. They climbed upwards, and after a few minutes came to a small, very ordinary looking door set into a brick wall. “We use this route frequently,” said Geoca, producing a key. “It’s perfectly safe.”

On the other side of the door, which Geoca carefully relocked after they had gone through, was a small room. It was empty, apart from another door, and lit by a small grate high in one wall. A barely adequate amount of sunlight filtered through the cobwebs that covered it. Geoca used another key to open the second door, and led them into a much larger room that looked as though it was a storehouse of some kind. It was lit by large, dust-encrusted arched windows. Crates and boxes were stacked in untidy piles everywhere. At the edges of the room, racks of clothes and other props covered in drop sheets hulked in the gloom like ghosts.

“Our dressing rooms,” said Geoca. “This is where we disguise ourselves for the surface world. Most of you are all right, of course. But you’ll understand if I take a moment to attend to my appearance. My little friends would not be as readily accepted up here as they would like.”

He went to a rack and chose a long overcoat and a hat. The coat covered Geoboy and Geogirl, but from the murmuring sounds that came from beneath it, they weren’t too happy about it. Looking at Geoca’s face, which settled quite comfortably under the hat’s wide brim, Sahrin realized that he was good looking, in a quiet sort of way. He had an air of competence about him.

“Pig,” Geoca said. “What are we going to do with you?”

“There’s no advantage in me coming along with you,” the boar replied. “I’d stand out like dog’s balls.”

“True enough. It would be better if you were to wait here. We’ll be as quick as we can.”

Shortly afterwards, they emerged from a door in the side of an old theater in the downtown part of New York.

* * *

LIEUTENANT SIDER was approaching two points of completion.

The first was the end of his shift, which would be welcome enough, and the second would occur in one Earth week, when his tour of duty would end.

He would be going back on the next shuttle, to blue skies, real warmth, and real air, not out of a bottle, and fresh food. Of course he knew that, as always, after a few weeks he would get impatient with the people down there, with their trivial preoccupations and their circuses, and that would be the beginning of his yearning for the stark, unambiguous beauty of the empty lunar landscape. And then he would apply to return to where he felt most comfortable, to his friends in this sealed microcosm on the moon. To the United Nations forward observation base.

The center of a network of satellites and unmanned observation posts, they were the Earth’s eyes. They kept watch, waiting and observing. They kept their superiors on Earth informed about what they saw, and kept the data feeds operating.

They had seen only fleeting glimpses on their banks of monitors and scanners, but it was enough to tell them that there was something going on. Whatever was coming from the new planet was somehow shifting through frequencies as they came out of space and headed towards the Earth.

Sider had tried to think it through, but lacking any hard facts, he had only come up with conjecture. That was all that anyone on the station had done. It had begun about a year ago, when one of them had seen it coming, heading inwards, past the orbit of Pluto and heading their way. It was too big to be a comet, or an asteroid.

They contacted Earth, and were asked whether it was a planet. It probably is a planet, they said, and you’ll find it’s coming to life, unless we’re very much mistaken. Keep a careful eye on it, Earth said.

Of course
they were going to keep a careful eye on it.

The new planet was about the size of Earth, and it had an atmosphere that was heating up as it approached the sun. They started picking up EM waves and what seemed to be communications or broadcasts. They made recordings, and sent them down to Earth, and never heard anything, except when they were told to keep sending information.

It was going to pass close to Earth. The authorities told the population that it was a comet, and most people never heard any suggestion that it was anything else. Someone leaked something into the newsgroups, but that leak was quickly found and stopped, and Aussie Bloke disappeared so quickly that no one missed him.

But the crew on the station knew that it was no comet. As it came as close to Earth as it was going to get, the EM activity became more intense, and then during one rest period, as Sider slept, dreaming of the plains and mountains that surrounded the base, whoever was on duty at the screens hit the alarm. Bleary-eyed, Sider went down to the control center and joined the others who were gathering there.

A fleet of objects had left the planet and was heading for Earth. During the next twenty four hours they watched as the objects drew closer. There were hundreds of them, arranged in an armada. Like a swarm of locusts, someone described them in a dispatch to Earth.

The authorities on Earth wanted to know everything, and kept a channel permanently open, taking all the images and data the base could send. In return, they told the base nothing.

In no time at all the fleet was upon them, and they could see in their telescopes the light glinting on the flanks of ships. Some of them where as big as the largest UN aircraft carriers that patrolled the seas on Earth. Some of them were bigger.

They tried to communicate with the ships, but there was no reply, or if there was, they didn’t know how to receive it.

It was almost a beautiful sight.

Sider and a few of the others were standing in one of the viewing domes, a small transparent hemisphere joined to the rest of the complex by a narrow passageway. They were looking at the fleet, wondering, when they saw three pinpricks of light leave one of the ships.

It was soon obvious that they were heading their way, and they kept coming and coming, and one of the others said we’re going to get some visitors, we’re going to make contact, and Sider said maybe, but they’re not slowing down, and they’re getting pretty close.

They stood and watched, spellbound, as the three points of light traced achingly beautiful arcs down towards them, unerringly targeting the complex.