The Day of the Nefilim (27 page)

‘I like this light!’
The ship was happy.
‘I can see everything inside myself the way it really is; look, Pig, here’s where my pilots are when they talk to me!’

Pig saw two empty spaces, recesses in a featureless black surface that seemed to be nothing more than the absence of the all the other things that surrounded them. It reflected no light, and seemed to mark the border of the ship’s internal world. It didn’t feel hard, or soft, or anything. It just seemed to be behind everything, in the same way that the ground is below everything. Around the depressions the ship was talking about, columns of light stood arranged in groups, waves of some kind of energy pulsing through them. A low noise grumbled in the background, as though somewhere far away gears were grinding together, their teeth wearing down slowly and inexorably.

Pig looked into the closest of the columns and saw shapes shifting, moving in and out of focus. It was impossible to tell what they were; perhaps it was some landscape, but there was no way of telling whether it was an internal one or an external one, or whether it was just some part of the ship’s functioning which was incapable of having any meaning for him. He was on the verge of turning away when the image shifted, as though it was adjusting itself to him, and suddenly the scene was suspended in space before him as clearly as if he was there.

He was looking at the landscape around the ship. In the distance, the wrecks of the two Nefilim ships were visible. Closer, the remains of Bark’s ship lay, still burning. The ground in front of the wrecked ships was pockmarked with craters from the small war that had just been fought. Snow was falling. Something was moving through the floating drifts; he couldn’t tell what.

When he looked more carefully, he could see nothing, and thought that he must be imagining things, or that the movement of the snow was playing tricks on him. It was just the ambiguous shapes that the snow was creating, swirling as though they were being disturbed by the passage of something through them. A mirage of light and shadow, he told himself.

And yet… he wished that he could see more detail, and as if his thoughts were being read, the scene flickered again, dissolving momentarily into a blizzard of static and snow, before presenting him with another, magnified view.

He had been right. There was something there. The realization came to him suddenly out of a chance combination of snow, wind, light and a group of the invisible objects. The snow was being caught against them, attaching itself for an instant before being swept away.

They were people, or at least humanoid. Their shapes were almost disguised by the fact that he couldn’t see them, but was instead looking at the holes they made in the falling snow. But it was clear enough. They were carrying objects that could only be weapons, and they were heading this way.

‘Ship, look at this! Can you see? Can you see what I see? People in the snow?’

‘Yes. They must be using some sort of cloaking device. Wait, while I scan through the frequencies. I doubt that they would be cloaking anything but the visible spectrum.’

The image flickered again, and the colors changed swiftly, racing up and down a rainbow of hues, causing the scene to contort wildly as energy fields appeared and then as quickly fell back into oblivion. Pig was wondering what it would feel like if he were to get a headache while he was inside someone else’s head, when the ship found what it was looking for, and the image suddenly settled down.

‘
Found it. They were more thorough than I thought…’
Almost in negative, the picture was hard to decipher at first, but after a few seconds Pig’s mind stumbled on the key, and the flickering mosaic of heavy purples and yellows suddenly made sense. They were soldiers, and they were wearing the same symbol as the one he had seen on the coats that Sahrin and Thead had returned in. And they were definitely coming this way.

‘I’ll tell my crew,’
said the ship, and it alerted the pilots, letting them know that it wanted to talk with them. One of them would go to a console and activate the link that allowed the ship to communicate with them.

Within a few seconds a circle of color appeared in one of the depressions. It grew, like liquid rising, until it resembled a shining translucent lens set into the floor. It trembled slightly, resonating in sympathy with the low sound that rumbled through the distance. The ship told what it had seen, and passed the image of the soldiers in the snow to the pilots. The pilots asked a few questions, which the ship answered, but they were technical, and Pig couldn’t follow what was being said.

When the conversation had finished, and the substance that appeared to be more liquid than anything else had retreated back to wherever it had come from, the ship’s intelligence moved away, down a passageway. Pig followed. He imagined them both to be blood cells traveling down an artery, and that at any moment they might meet some other blood cells coming the other way.

Pig could see the damaged areas ahead of them. The black surface was twisted and torn, thrown up in folds and convolutions so misshapen that it looked as though a volcanic eruption had taken place, or some fungus had taken hold. Some of the torn edges glowed sullenly, while others appeared to be covered with gray ashes, as though they had gone cold. Sparks flashed across the gaps, as though struggling to maintain a connection, but mostly they failed, falling away to become dwindling threads, sucked into the dark vacuum of the outer world.
Whatever or wherever that is,
Pig thought.

‘
Here is where my power is going, leaking away,’
said the ship.
‘But it’s not as bad as I feared.’
Without saying anything further, the ship wrapped itself around one of the wounds and worked its way into the torn edges, making itself thinner so that it spread out.

‘It looks bad enough to me. Can you fix it?’

There was no reply. The ship was busy. Where it was moving over them, the broken edges were reaching out, straightening themselves and joining together. The angry colors of the wounds faded, and when everything was as it should be, the ship moved on, selecting a new section and setting to work on it. There was nothing he could do here. Pig had time to have a look around.

A short distance down the passageway, he came to a large opening in a wall. He entered and found himself in a large room, the center of which was taken up by a huge whirlpool of blue and white light. It moved lazily as it spiraled towards its center, where it disappeared into the depths, its mass draining away somewhere. A narrow ledge ran along the outer wall to a point on the other side of the room. There, another exit led to another passageway.

Pig stood on the edge of the whirlpool, wondering what it was. He looked up. Suspended high above him was another whirlpool. It was a mirror image of the lower one, moving in the opposite direction. It was, Pig decided, very impressive, an awesome spectacle. But he still didn’t know what it was.

He was still wondering when the ship appeared beside him.

‘Fixed?’

‘Yes, all done,’
the ship replied.
‘Everything should be fine now.’

‘What is this?’

‘You like it? When the currents are running, I sometimes come here just to watch. This is the vortex. My power source. This is my point of contact with the grid. In fact, what you are looking at now is the energy of the grid itself. It is calm now, because we are stationary, and my need for power is not as great as when we are in flight. But you should see it when the vortex is operating at its maximum. I never tire of watching the display. It is like looking into the heart of the universe.’

Pig realized now that the vortex was the source of the sound he had heard. The low, mechanical growl was coming from the depths in front of him. And it would be that sound, he surmised, that would rise in pitch and intensity as the vortex sped up to provide the ship with power.

‘Well,’
said Pig, tearing his attention away from the psychedelia in front of him.
‘If you’re done, I should be getting back, I suppose.’

‘But you will come again, won’t you? You are the first visitor I’ve ever had. Come again, and I’ll show you some things that will amaze you…’

Pig felt some affection for the ship. It seemed young and enthusiastic.
‘Of course, I’d like that.’
He was beginning to feel disorientated by the physical impossibility of his situation.
‘But right now, you’ve got things to do.’

‘I have. I’ll take you back to yourself.’

Seconds later, Pig shook himself back into the real world and opened his eyes. The blue woman was still sitting beside him, and the keeper was lying unconscious nearby.

Apart from that, the ship was empty.

* * *

Outside, the snow wasn’t helping. It was clouding Reina’s sights, obscuring her view. It was difficult, searching out the fleeting hints of corporeality that wove through the snow before her, but occasionally one of the advancing soldiers stopped to fire, or paused to negotiate some obstacle, and in those few seconds, Reina was able to take aim.

They fell easily enough. They were physical, despite their invisibility. When she delivered a well-aimed burst from the Nefilim weapon that had been thrust into her hands, the unreal, indefinable forms – that she knew were soldiers only because the pilots had told Bark and Bark had told her – lurched backwards and fell over. They didn’t get up again, but there were plenty more to replace them.

It took some machine gun bullets kicking up the snow in front of her for her to realize that they were using old-fashioned guns. She wondered how they’d managed that. Guns weren’t supposed to work any more.

“Hey, Geoca,” she called. The mutant was lying belly down in the snow a few feet away from her, using a weapon identical to hers, but not with the same effect. He was no marksman. In fact, he was a lousy shot, something that had never bothered him until now.

“Keep firing, it doesn’t matter,” said Reina. “Just give them something to worry about.”

Even that was asking a lot, Geoca thought as he pressed the firing stud and watched as a few rocks disintegrated harmlessly in the distance. He had never been good at this sort of thing. During his childhood, he had felt no attraction to the various cruelties that amuse children of all races. His two miniature selves had been responsible for that. He had learned early on that it was easier to do without their silent, brooding disapproval as they slipped away into their distant meditations, removing themselves from his mind and leaving it feeling as lifeless as an empty street. Geoca grew up loathing violence of any kind, and the situation here didn’t sit well with him at all. Geoboy and Geogirl were hiding somewhere near his feet, chattering their panic and their disapproval to one another.

There was a sound behind Reina. A loud…
whump…
followed by the sound of air being exhaled quickly. She whirled around, thinking that some of their enemy must have come around behind them, but it was one of the Nefilim. It had been hit. Pale blood gushed from a neat hole in its chest. It looked at her, shock registering on its face as clearly as if it was human. Something that was almost words appeared in her mind, and then the Nefilim pitched forward into the snow, limbs twitching.

Another bullet plowed into the snow, uncomfortably close to her. She saw one of them heading for some rocks. It ran down a shallow slope, giving her a clear view of the line of footprints as they formed in the snow.
Unlucky,
she thought, then fired.

Bark was proving to be almost as adept as Reina at this shooting business. Their new weapons were easy enough to use, but they were made for Nefilim-sized hands, and felt large and unwieldy. It was easy to overcompensate for the unaccustomed weight, but Bark was quick to adapt. He had to be. They were running out of time. The ghostly shapes kept coming, pouring out of holes in the snow. The Nasties, or whatever they were called, must want them real bad, he thought. Or the ship. They were probably after the flier.

If only the Nefilim ship could help them; but it was busy, repairing itself. And doing it quickly, Bark hoped, as he heard some commotion on the other side of the ship. It sounded as though they were surrounded.

Anak came up to Bark and grabbed him by the arm.
‘Ready,’
the Nefilim thought, and pointed towards the ship.
‘Go.’
He moved on to the others.

Bark edged up the steps, firing as he went. Reina and Geoca came after, doing the same. Anak followed, carrying the body of his dead companion slung over his shoulder. The last one in was Nibat. He was carrying Sahrin. He lowered her onto a bunk beside the keeper.

The ship’s defense field was working again. The metallic clamor of bullets striking the hull suddenly stopped. Pig, now thoroughly recovered from his experience, felt a wave of elation and gratitude as the ship flexed its mind.

‘
Lovely
,’ the ship said.
‘Let’s fly.’

The soldiers on the ground, cursing whatever had given away their existence, turned off their camouflage fields and watched helplessly as the ship rose into the sky above them. They watched as a pair of missiles was launched from a silo that had escaped destruction. The missiles were only halfway to the ship when they were met by something that incinerated them in an instant, turning them into showers of sparks and burning fragments that fell back to earth.

Colonel Kalstend’s heart sank. His superiors would
love
this. He didn’t know what they had lost, or who they had lost to, but he knew they had lost. He and his surviving men were surrounded by bodies, a pall of gray dust, and smoke and fire.

The flier kept rising and moved away to the north, diminishing in size until it had become a tiny speck.

* * *

IT WAS QUIET INSIDE THE SHIP. They were cold, wet and exhausted, and no one had any idea what they should do now. Reina stood beside Sahrin, stroking her hair and wiping blood from her face. This made no difference to Sahrin, who was unconscious. Pig stood with his front hooves up on the edge of the cot. He leaned over her, his snout quivering.