The Day of the Nefilim (26 page)

“If we can. Nibat tells me that the first ship that crashed here did so because it ran into a break in their grid. Which suggests that we might have problems of our own. Our flight will be erratic, to say the least. They can scan ahead, they say, to check that the grid is there and intact, but that won’t provide protection against any irregularities that develop suddenly.”

“Thin ice, then,” said Pig, who had found a spot of spare mattress near Reina’s feet.

“I don’t know what you mean by that, but it’s got the right tone to it.” Bark was already wondering where they would go now. He was no longer in charge, or even almost in charge, as he had been when they still had their ship; now that they were cast into an alliance with the Nefilim on this ship, nothing was certain. Not that anything had been certain before.

Without warning, the flier lurched suddenly to one side and then rose into the air. The pilots were scanning the energy fields around the ship. Above the smoking grave of the first Nefilim flier, the tear in the grid was still visible. One of the monitors showed a piece of the grid’s energy field flapping like a broken wing, buffeted by the currents of the Stream that were eating into it.

The pilots said something to each other in their own language, then realizing that Bark was behind them, one of them turned towards him.

Bark nodded. “Let’s do it, then.”

The pilots were about to slide onto the grid when an explosion beside the ship knocked it to one side, sending them sprawling.

“What…?” Sahrin picked herself up off the floor.

The Nefilim said much the same thing, but in their own language. The three of them bent over their consoles, scanning the ground below them and the sky around them, while their passengers rushed to the view ports.

The base had seen them. Or more correctly, someone in charge of its weaponry had seen them. Almost directly below them, the cover of a silo was sliding back into place. As it closed, another opened and there was a flash of light as a second missile streaked towards them. Almost too late, the pilot activated the ship’s defenses. The missile was already too close for comfort when its circuitry was scrambled by a massive pulse of energy that drained the ship’s power, dimming the lights on the control panels. The missile veered to one side and exploded further away from them than the first had.

Whoever was in charge on the ground realized that they were wasting hardware. There was a pause of a few seconds, then a beam shot upwards from an outcrop of rock. The ship’s defenses blocked it, setting up a field in its path so that its energy was absorbed. Its owners, shocked that one of their latest inventions could be so easily brushed aside by the alien technology, indignantly fired twice more, then stopped.

“Can we go?” Bark asked.

‘
We cannot move onto the grid while our defenses are engaged,’
one of the Nefilim replied.
‘And if we let them down, we will be vulnerable to further attack.’

‘We’ll wait to see what they do next. Perhaps they’re just encouraging us to leave. Or perhaps they want a fight.’

There wasn’t long to wait. Another beam sliced up towards them, followed quickly by another of a different color, then a third, the same as the first. It worked. Unable to identify the frequencies and react to them quickly enough, the ship’s system struggled to keep up, and the second beam almost made it through before it was blocked. The third got through. It was a glancing hit to the side of the flier, melting a searing hole in the hull. Tiny pieces of superheated metal floated down to the ground like glowing pollen.

‘
The damage is tolerable. But unfortunately, it appears that we must fight,’
Anak thought to Bark.

A second later the missile silos and the rocks from which the beams had been fired disappeared, their molecules disrupted by a Nefilim ray. There was no noise or fireworks, just sudden eruptions of fine dust being showered through the air like so much fungus spore.

Whoever was giving the orders below didn’t know when to stop. More silos opened their black eyes to the sky, and missiles poured out of them like a pack of hounds eager for a hunt.

The missiles were easy enough to deal with, but the distraction they created was almost too much. More heat beams surged upwards from the ground. Most of them were intercepted as the ship’s defenses learned from what was happening and its reactions grew faster, but a few of them got through, tearing pieces from its hide as though it was an animal being flayed.

‘
It hurts!!’
The words tore through Pig’s mind.
‘It hurts! The fire! Make it stop! Please!’

Pig jumped to his feet. For some reason, he knew what he was hearing. It was the ship; he was hearing the ship. The ship had consciousness…

“It’s speaking to me! The ship… this ship!” he said to Reina.

Reina was well past being surprised by anything. “What’s it saying?” she asked.

‘Let me, let me… Give me control of the weapons! I can do it! My defense array is young and inexperienced, it is struggling. I can do it! Please!!’

Pig told her.

“Then I hope it succeeds. If it fails, we’ll all be dead very soon,” she said. An explosion rocked the ship. Another missile had come too close.

“I don’t think the ship is talking to me, though,” Pig said. “I can just hear it, that’s all. I think it’s talking to the pilots. It wouldn’t be asking anyone else for control of the weapons.” Pig was right. The ship was indeed talking to the pilots. It screamed as another beam cut like a scalpel into its skin.

‘Yes, yes, time to try anything,’
the pilots replied, and took the defense system offline.
‘Do what you can, ship, and quickly.’

The ship’s intelligence leaped into the spaces left by the younger entity of the defense system. The alleviation of its agony was the only thought in its mind as it wrapped itself around the terminals of the weapons and without pausing lashed out, firing first and then taking control of the rays as they randomly traced powdery paths of dissolution across the landscape.

It was as though the surface below had been put into a blender. Clouds of snow flew into the air as the ship searched out the sources of its pain and turned them into dust. Bit by bit the surface weapons disappeared into the chaos of the rays, and the attack on the ship grew less, until suddenly it stopped as the last of their weapons disappeared, and the gray dust drifted slowly away in the wind.

The ship contemplated its wounds.
‘I’m hurt,’
it said to the pilots, who knew what had to be done.

The ship released its control of the defense systems and allowed itself to be moved, slowly and painfully, a few hundred meters away from the enemy base. It sank onto the ice and sighed deeply to itself.

‘How long?’
asked Nibat.

The ship replied, and the pilots swore softly to each other. They would rather be away from here, but if the ship needed time to repair itself, there was nothing they could do about it.

“Can we help?” Bark asked. “Is there anything we can do?”

‘No. The ship can do it by itself. We will help when we are asked. Apart from that, we just wait.’

“The ship hurts, doesn’t it,” said Pig. “It feels pain, just as we do.”

One of the pilots looked at Pig.
‘Yes, it does. The intelligence is distributed throughout the ship. It feels everything that happens to it; it is sensitive to any change in itself or its environment. How do you know this, animal?’

Pig wondered about being called an animal, but replied without commenting on it. He told the Nefilim how he had heard the ship talking.

‘I see. We communicate with it in the same way. You’re a mutant, yes? Otherwise you wouldn’t be speaking.’

Pig agreed. He was going to say he was as mutant as you could get, but then he remembered Geoca and thought better of it.

‘You could help us, animal,’
thought another pilot.
‘We can only converse with the ship while we are at the controls. We need to be connected with it. For us it is not a natural ability, as it seems to be with you. We need to look at the damage, though. Would you be our…’
The Nefilim paused.
‘…medium? Ears…? Would you tell us what the ship says?’
The pilot paused, searching for the word, rubbing the gray dome of its head.

‘Say yes!’
It was the ship.
‘You can talk to me!’

‘I can?’
Pig thought.
‘Oh, I can…’

‘Yes, you can…’

“Of course,” Pig said to the pilots.
‘Are you badly hurt?’
he asked the ship.

‘No worse than has happened in the past.’
The ship had regained its composure.
‘I can repair some of the damage, but there are some parts of me I can’t see. I have a darkness inside me, as though it is something living and has grown out of the corners into which light cannot reach. I’ll do what I can. Most strange… it must be the damage.’
The ship sounded calm now, almost philosophical, as though the matter was merely of intellectual interest.

‘Oh.’
Pig was thinking about light, and the blue woman. The others had told how she had provided light for them during the darkness, and how she had given Bark and Reina the ability to see when they had gone out to get provisions. Since then, there had been several occasions on which he had watched her sitting quietly, the strange hues on her skin rising and falling in tides of color flowing across her. Pig’s thoughts spiraled in a decreasing orbit around the problem that confronted them, and it wasn’t long before his snout was twitching in the way it did whenever he had an idea.

He went to where she was sitting motionless, her eyes closed. This was something she did a lot. She had never offered any explanation, no one had pressed her for one, and she was allowed to sit in silence, communing with whatever it was that she communed with. He was just opening his mouth to speak when she opened her eyes and turned to him.

Her eyes were white orbs. The pupils and irises had disappeared, as Pig had occasionally seen them do when she came out of one her trances. If she had been an ordinary person, there could have been no question that she was blind, but then, Pig knew as they all did that she was no ordinary person, and she was most certainly not blind.

“I’ve been following your conversation with the ship’s mind, Pig. You have a special gift.”

“Well, so do you then, if you heard it as well.”

“Not so special, for me. But something new for you, I think.”

She was right, of course, but Pig couldn’t see anything to be gained by dwelling on the fact. “You heard the ship, then, when it said that it has darkness inside it. Places that it can’t see. It has been hurt.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“Can you help? Could you give it some light so it can see to do its work, just as you did to Bark and Reina?”

For a few seconds the blue woman sat in silence, so that Pig began to suspect that she was going to ignore him. Then she stirred.

“I see no reason why it wouldn’t work, but I can’t communicate with the ship myself. Although I can hear it, I can’t talk to it. That seems to be an ability that you alone possess. I would need to have direct contact with the ship in order to give it light. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“It might be possible for you to be the intermediary, the channel between the ship and myself. A bridge, if you like.”

“Then I’ll ask the ship?”

“Yes. Ask the ship.”

Pig closed his eyes and sought out the ship with his question.

‘
Yes,’
said the ship, its voice again rippling with urgency.
‘It is impossible for me to tell how damaged some parts of me are unless I can see them. Let’s try. What’s your name?’

‘Pig.’

‘Pig… tell your strange friend I’m ready. She must be unusual, if she can give me light to see by, mustn’t she?’

‘Oh, yes,’
thought Pig. He told the blue woman.

“Close your eyes, then, Pig,” she said, and just as she had done in New York with Bark and Reina, she reached out and placed her fingers over his eyes. In an instant the darkness behind Pig’s eyelids fled, replaced by a flood of pure light that poured into the most remote corners of his mind. Just as Bark and Reina had been able to see everything in the external world with absolute clarity, so Pig was able to do, except that his vision was directed inside himself.

He could see the pathways and meeting places where his thoughts gathered and conversed with one another, where they combined and created his mind. Hidden, forgotten places were illuminated as the light swept through them. Pig was clearly visible to himself, down to the smallest detail, as though he was made of the hardest and purest crystal, shot through with rays of light that might have come from the stars. He felt a calm detachment from the processes of his own mind. He had become an observer, fascinated with this overview of his own mental processes.

The ship’s intelligence was swimming beside him, humming with anticipation.

“It sees the light,” Pig told the blue woman.

“Good. Now I need to enter your mind, so that I can pass from you to the ship.”

‘There’s no need,’
said the ship, entering Pig, playing in the light it found there, wrapping itself in it like a cat amusing itself with sheets of paper.

The ship led Pig over the space that had once divided them. The light followed them, flowing in their wake like a river. In contrast to his own mind, which had no strict order and which was built out of structures he had created himself and which had no reason for existing other than that he had made them, the ship’s mind was a vast and ordered labyrinth of paths and connections and nexus points that possessed none of the comfortable chaos and disorder that Pig had seen inside himself. This mind was like an irrigation system that kept branching off again and again, decreasing in size, until the pathways became impossibly fine threads that wove through the physical body of the ship like a nervous system.