The Mothership (14 page)

Hooper gave Beckman a meaningful look.
“Native guides would give us an advantage.”

God help me, another civilian!
Beckman thought, knowing Hooper was right.
In any event, he’d already decided he couldn’t leave her out here alone,
unarmed and short on supplies.

“She can’t stealth,” Markus said. “And
she’s not cleared for our technology.”

“She’s already seen the specials.” Beckman
turned to Laura. “If you’re coming with us, you’ll have to keep up. We can’t
slow down for you.”

Laura smiled. “I’ve hiked from one end of
Arnhem Land to the other, in monsoons and in hundred degree heat. You’ll be
lucky to keep up with me.”

Muted laughter rippled around the clearing.

Beckman suppressed a smile at her bravado.
“All right. Stick with Xeno. Do what she says. OK?”

“That’s me,” Xeno said, giving Laura a
welcoming smile.

Beckman turned to Hooper. “Let’s move. I
want to put distance between us and this clearing before we camp for the
night.”

Bandaka reached
camp as the moon climbed high into the night sky. He squatted by the fire
beside Liyakindirr, balancing his spear on the ground before him. Liyakindirr
glanced at his friend, but continued playing his
yirdaki
. Known in the
south as a
didgeridoo
, the instrument was only ever played by men and
was as important to Yolngu culture as their ancient songs and ritual dances.
The Yolngu had inhabited northeast Arnhem Land since the time of the
Wangarr
,
the powerful ancestral beings who had divided the lands among the various clans
and delivered to each their tribal laws and dialects. It was an ageless union
little understood by the
balanda
, the non aboriginal peoples who flooded
into the lands of the south.

Bandaka’s wife, Djapilawuy, poked a stick
into the burning embers, testing the progress of the kangaroo roasting beneath
the fire, while their young daughter, Mapuruma, sat beside her awaiting the
feast with growing anticipation.

After a while, Liyakindirr sensed the
brooding seriousness in his friend. He ceased playing, letting the haunting sounds
of night replace the thrum of the
yirdaki
. “Is it the falling star that
troubles you?”

“It fell close,” Bandaka replied with
dread. In their culture, to sight a falling star meant death approached. The
closer the star, the nearer would be the person who died.

“We should take the women away from here,”
Liyakindirr said. “Tell the white men.”

Bandaka looked thoughtful. “They know.”

Liyakindirr looked surprised. “How?”

“One of their fighter planes crashed.”
Bandaka pointed his spear at Mount Fleming. “Over there.”

“The smoke we saw?”

Bandaka nodded.

Liyakindirr’s had seen fighters screaming
across the skies before. He knew they came from Tindal Air Base far to the
west. “It crashed after the falling star?”

“Yes.”

“Was the pilot alive?”

Bandaka shook his head solemnly.

“Could that be the death that comes?”
Liyakindirr asked hopefully.

“We didn’t know him,” Bandaka said with
certainty. “He’s not close enough to us.”

Liyakindirr sighed, knowing his friend was
correct.

“Where is the old man?” Bandaka asked.

Liyakindirr motioned beyond the fire, to
the shadows beneath a large rock at the edge of camp. “He dreams.”

Bandaka stood, smiled at his wife, then
walked past the fire towards where the old man sat. Liyakindirr hesitated, then
set his
yirdaki
down and followed. They found Mulmulpa squatting beyond
the rock, staring into the darkness. He was wrinkled by time with skin cracked
like old leather. He wore a hide loin cloth but had long ago ceased to carry
the traditional weapons. Quietly, they squatted before him waiting to be
acknowledged, listening to the crackle of the stringybark in the fire.

“The strangeness in the land disturbs the
spirits of our ancestors “ Mulmulpa said from his dreaming state, his words
barely above a whisper.

“What is this strangeness?” Bandaka asked
in a hushed tone.

“The great spirits do not know. It should
not be.”

Bandaka felt his stomach knot. He was a
simple hunter. He didn’t understand the ways of the spirits, but he knew
Mulmulpa did. He found the old man’s confusion disturbing.
How could the
spirits not know?
“Where are the white men, Mulmulpa? Why haven’t they
come?”

“Soldiers come, from the morning sun.”

“Should we find them?”

Mulmulpa shook his head slowly. “They
cannot protect us, my son. They do not understand the danger.” Mulmulpa’s face
showed sadness. “They cannot escape their fate.”

“What should we do?” Liyakindirr asked with
a twinge of fear.

 “Hide.” Mulmulpa’s eyes scanned the
shadows of the forest. Slowly his face turned to the trees beyond the campfire.
“An evil spirit comes.”

Bandaka followed the old man’s gaze, then
he turned urgently back to Mulmulpa. “It’s coming here? Now?”

Mulmulpa’s turned to the young hunter. “We
must go, Bandaka. It is near.”

Bandaka jumped up and ran back toward the
fire, calling in a low, urgent voice, “
Go marrtjina! Go marrtjina
!” Come
here! Come here!

Mapuruma stood and stared at her father,
confused.

Bandaka scooped up his daughter with one
hand, then point to the south with his spear. “That way! Run and hide!”

The urgency in his voice sent Djapilawuy
darting for the trees. Liyakindirr grabbed his weapons and the
yirdaki
,
then jogged after her, while Mulmulpa vanished into the night. None gave a
second thought to abandoning their camp, which they could easily replace.

Bandaka sprinted silently through the
forest until he was far beyond the glow of the campfire, then he set Mapuruma
down and motioned for her to follow her mother. Djapilawuy glanced back,
alarmed that he’d stopped, but he nodded reassuringly to her. His wife took
Mapuruma’s hand, then mother and daughter melted into the night with a skill
learned across tens of thousands of years. When Bandaka saw that his companions
had got safely away, he hid, determined to understand what the spirits could
not.

Bandaka watched the campsite, illuminated
by the flickering firelight, and listened intently to every sound in the
forest. When nothing unusual appeared, he began to wonder if the old man had
made a mistake, then he saw a faint glow gliding between the trees far beyond
the camp. It grew steadily in brightness as it approached, although Bandaka
heard no footsteps. The silence of the night was shattered by the crack of a
branch as the approaching form smashed through a low hanging limb, and by the
rustle of leaves as densely packed undergrowth was crushed. When the glow
neared the camp, Bandaka saw there was not a single light, but several spinning
rapidly around a dark central mass.

Bandaka suppressed a gasp as it moved into
the fire light. It was a machine, jet black in color and taller than a man,
shaped like a spinning top. Two small spheres orbited the sharp bottom end,
their lower halves glowing a brilliant white. The two spheres raced in a circle
around the downward pointing base of the machine so fast they blurred. Most
confusing of all, there was no physical connection between the machine’s body
and the spheres or between the machine and the ground. It just floated silently
in the air. Above the spheres, extending from the upper curve of the spinning top
were four snaking arms, each ending in three double jointed digits. Above the
arms, a column rose from the machine’s flat upper surface, passing through a
glassy black metal sensor disk to a sphere. Extending horizontally from the
sphere was a short tubular shape, which Bandaka’s refined survival instincts
told him was a weapon.

The machine halted beside the fire, then
thousands of points of light shone from the edge of its sensor disk,
simultaneously scanning its surrounds in every direction. One of the snaking
arms speared into the campfire sending embers and burning pieces of wood
flying. It lifted the half cooked kangaroo out of the fire and brought it up to
the sensor disk for analysis. When it was finished, it flicked the half burned
carcass away. No blood or flesh remained on its arm, which was composed of an
alloy no particle could adhere to without molecular bonding.

Bandaka shuddered when he saw the ease with
which the floating machine had discarded the heavy kangaroo carcass. An
instinctive chill ran down his spine as he sensed the danger, reassured only by
the knowledge that his family had fled into the safety of the forest. Fear was
rapidly overwhelming his curiosity, so he began to crawl on his belly down the
slope, away from the camp, careful to keep rock outcrops and trees between
himself and the black menace.

Bandaka didn’t know the machine was
equipped with a dazzling array of tracking technologies that could sense heat,
motion, metallurgical composition, and emissions from more than a dozen energy
sources not yet in use on Earth. What it lacked was the ability to track a near
naked native armed with a wooden spear.

Earlier in the day, the
tracker
had
examined the crash site where the RAAF fighter had come down. It had detected
Bandaka’s tracks, a single hair follicle and several microscopic skin
fragments. From those few clues, it had mapped his DNA and constructed an
anatomically perfect, three dimensional representation of him. What it had
failed to do was match his species with any of the tens of thousands it had on
record. The tracker had determined from the limited size of Bandaka’s human
brain that it was tracking a creature that existed on the threshold between
animal instinct and sentient intellect. It was clearly of the same species as
the pilot of the crashed aircraft, a flimsy vehicle that relied on air pressure
rather than propulsion fields to remain airborne. The tracker suspected that
the air pressure vehicle, and the low level primate piloting it, were part of a
feeble deception which required investigation.

The tracker balanced the sensitivity of
thousands of receptors in its sensor disk, magnifying star and moon light until
the depths of the forest became visible, while scaling down the receptivity of
those receptors affected by the campfire’s glow. It was the campfire that saved
Bandaka. It stood between him and the tracker, blinding it to his presence. All
around the campsite, the tracker sensed motion and heat signatures from
thousands of insects and many small and large creatures. The tracker knew it
was mapping an environment so teeming with life, that this world belonged to
the very rarest category of habitable worlds, one super abundant with life. The
difficulty it faced was in separating the biometric clutter created by the
myriad unknown life forms inhabiting the forest from its target. It was rapidly
cataloguing the forest’s millions of species, from the most innocuous microbe,
through every type of insect and animal, up to and including the primitive
mammalian bipeds it was tracking. A complete mapping of the biosphere was
essential, and would be achieved, but it would take time.

The tracker’s long snaking arms collected
more DNA samples from the campsite, while its sensor disk mapped the
environment at the speed of light. Its capacity to identify every cellular
trace meant no clue went undiscovered. It used the genetic information to build
profiles of Bandaka’s group, quickly coming to realize five primates had been
gathered around the fire only minutes before. From their tracks, and the
distinctive DNA residue patterns it detected, the tracker determined they’d all
moved off to the south. Based on its understanding of their genetic codes, it
calculated their various physical speeds and computed it could catch them in a matter
of minutes. Its thermal sensors searched for them, but boulders that had soaked
up hot sun all day now radiated a heat that, when mixed with the thousands of
creatures slithering, hopping and flying through the forest, created a signal
clutter that camouflaged the group’s distant thermal signatures. It tried to
compensate, but it was a tracker, not a planetary exploration drone. It wasn’t
designed to survey new worlds, and was only doing so now out of a desperate
need.

The tracker decided to flush out any of the
primates that might be hiding nearby. The barrel of its energy cannon swiveled
toward the south and fired five low intensity blasts, striking tree trunks in a
fifty meter wide arc. Each shot flashed brilliant orange light through the
forest. The energy pulses vaporized half meter high segments of the tree
trunks, sending shattered branches crashing to the forest floor.

Bandaka lay flat on his stomach, shielding
his head with his hands as burning branches crashed down around him. He
suppressed his urge to run, forcing himself to lie very still, fearing if the
machine saw him it would fire again. He remembered an old lesson he’d been
taught long ago, a lesson he’d drilled into his daughter until it was second
nature to her.

Courage hides, fear runs.

Up the slope, the tracker watched patiently
as terrified birds took to the air, startled creatures hopped for their lives
and snakes slithered away into the darkness, but none of the primitive bipeds
it sought appeared. The tracker concluded the creatures were out of range, and
was about to start after them when it received a new mission from the Command
Nexus. It changed direction instantly and without question, turning east
towards its new target.

From his hiding place, Bandaka watched the
glow of the tracker’s anti-g pods move away to the right. He knew the black
monster was connected to the crashed plane, and to the soldiers who were coming
up the valley. He remembered old Mulmulpa’s warning that the soldiers didn’t
understand the danger they faced. Of that, Bandaka now had no doubt, as forty
thousand years of tradition screamed in his ears.

An evil spirit had indeed entered the land.

* * * *

Bill McKenna
flipped the steaks on the portable barbeque, then took a swig of beer. His
three mates idly watched the sizzling beef with growing hunger as they lounged
in camp chairs in front of their tents. Slab sat with his feet up on the ice
and beer filled esky while Wal angled a small satellite dish in different
directions in search of a signal for his radio.