Thead said nothing.
Sarah and Steve exchanged glances, each of them knowing what the other was thinking. It couldn’t be a good sign when the guests started murdering each other. This was exactly what they had feared.
There were two bodies in the ship now: the keeper, and the Nefilim, whose name they had never learned, that had been killed in the Antarctic. Anak and Nibat took the bodies and put them in an alcove set into the wall at the back of the ship. A transparent door slid down and sealed the enclosure.
A veil of light descended on the two corpses, and slowly at first and then with gathering speed, they began to dissolve like ice sculptures melting in the sun. When the last trace of them was gone, the light faded.
“What was that? A Nefilim funeral?”
“I suppose so.”
“Where have they gone?”
“Nowhere, that would be my guess.”
Anak turned to face them.
‘Yes, it is a kind of funeral. Layer by layer, their energy bodies have been absorbed into the ship, where they will be utilized. Their personalities have merged with that of the ship, and they will live for as long as the ship survives. When the ship ceases to exist as an entity, they will pass on.’
“Pass on to where?”
The Nefilim shrugged its shoulders.
‘To wherever it is that spirits go. And who knows where that is?’
“Do you think it’s fair?” Sahrin asked, feeling a little closer to death on account of her recent experience. If recent events had gone just a little differently, she would have had a leading role in the ceremony they had just witnessed. “I mean, they haven’t exactly been given a choice, have they?”
Pig thought of what he had experienced in his encounter with the ship’s entity. “I don’t think they’ll be unhappy,” he said. “In some ways, the view from inside the ship has more going for it than life out here. It’s like being connected with everything inside yourself.”
“A crash course in integration?” said Sahrin. “I suppose we’ll have to take your word for that, Pig.”
Before anyone could say anything else, the lights in the ship flickered and the monitors came to life. The ship was with them again.
Nibat went to the controls.
‘It’s done.’
“Then it’s time to go,” said Bark. “As soon as we get organized.” During the few hours of sleep he had been able to snatch after the murder had been discovered, the dream had come again. They needed to go there; he felt that more strongly than ever.
“Then that should be soon. According to the ship, there are fliers approaching this area. Three of them, and they’re not ours,” said Pig.
“Not Nefilim?”
“Nefilim, yes, but not rebels. If they were ours, they would be transmitting a signal we could identify them by.”
“Then we should get out of here,” Bark said. “If there’s going to be any trouble, it shouldn’t happen near this village. These people have no part in our fight.”
Minutes later, the flier rose into the air. They set off northwards again, the ship reveling in the novelty of its new power source.
‘It’s wonderful,’
it told Pig.
‘It’s clear, pure energy. It’s like – no, it is – radiance. I can see now that the Nefilim energy was hard, and forced, and sometimes it burned, if I held it too closely. Now, I feel as though I am connected with the whole Stream, and with it the world. I can feel it reaching around the planet and into the earth. Wonderful!’
“That’s good,” replied Pig, envious.
They were traveling well now, skimming low over the jungle, staying close to the contours of the hills and valleys. They flew on, feeling a new sense of purpose, towards the mountain of Bark’s dreams.
* * *
THE GORE TWINS, ON THE OTHER HAND, were
not
enjoying their journey. Their fliers were finding it hard going. They were lurching, falling and rising in the irregularities of the besieged grid.
Theo was being thrown around in his seat like a rag doll.
“Fuck! How are we supposed to work in these conditions?” he yelled. “We should have been able to take them on the ground, when they were in that freak village,” he complained to the Nefilim pilot sitting next to him. “Now they’ve taken off again, and we won’t catch them at the speed we’re going!” His voice rose to the pitch that he used only when he was thoroughly pissed off. “Can’t you go any freaking faster?!”
‘We’re going as fast as we can,’
thought the pilot.
“Where are they?”
The alien replied, but the unit of measure it used meant nothing to the Vice-Secretary. “Perhaps you might care to answer the question in a form that might just mean something to me, skullface,” Theo hissed.
‘They are a little more than two hundred of your miles away. They are approaching the place you call Mexico City.’
The Nefilim’s thought had a cold edge to it.
Theo sat back in his seat and drummed his fingers impatiently.
“Open me a channel to the other ship. Not the one with my sister on it. The other one.”
In a few seconds the officer on the third flier came on line.
“I want you to go back to that shithole village they were in. Find out whether anything went on there that we should know about. Once you’ve got what you want, you can trash the place.”
“Prisoners, sir?”
“What would we want with prisoners? Kill them all,” the Vice-Secretary snapped, and cut the connection.
Shortly after the flier had headed off towards the village, Theo felt his own ship give one small, final jump, and then it settled down, flying smoothly and picking up speed.
‘The grid is strong from here on,’
the pilot informed him.
‘The way ahead is smooth.’
The Vice-Secretary breathed a long sigh of relief. “Then hit it, bonehead. We’ve got lost time to make up for.”
* * *
Mexico City was in chaos. The city was so covered with smoke from burning suburbs that it seemed as if night was falling. The UN might have been in control in Rio de Janeiro, but the same could not be said here. There was fighting in the streets, and near the city center a new volcano was erupting, spewing clouds of gas into the sky and covering everything around it with flows of spitting lava.
“I always wanted to come here,” said Reina as she watched the flames and the crowds on the streets. It reminded her of a medieval painting of hell she had seen once.
Thead was beside her. “Well, you’ve finally made it then, haven’t you.”
At the controls, Nibat turned to Bark.
‘They’re coming again, only two of them now, and too fast for us to outrun them. The Stream may be more stable, but it can’t give us the speed that the Nefilim grid provides when it is strong. We may be able to lose them lower down. The smoke from the fires might confuse their ships.’
“Then let’s do it,” said Bark, who had no better idea. They swept downwards and disappeared into the black smoke.
The two fliers behind them followed, the Vice-Secretaries howling with joy now that their prey was in their sights. Their soldiers sat ashen-faced behind them, gripping the edges of their seats.
* * *
THE FLIER appeared suddenly over the village.
It should have been easy for them, but the ship on the ground had been warned from somewhere above Mexico City, and it was ready. The instant the UN flier appeared, firing randomly among the houses, it flew into a gaping hole in the grid that had been carved out by the flier on the ground. The UN flier fell like an animal tumbling into a trap, and was only a few feet from the ground when it was met by a barrage of rays.
Before its pilot could do anything, the ship’s hull began to shimmer like a mirage. Its weapons fired haphazardly, into the town, into the jungle, and up into the sky. The glow increased, swallowing the entire ship, and it became incandescent, so bright that it was hard to look at.
By the time it exploded in a shower of white sparks that rained down over the village like a light fall of snow, its occupants had ceased to exist. Their molecules had twisted in on themselves, each one falling into a tiny black hole of its own, winking out of existence like a collapsing star.
The villagers gazed up in wonder at the falling white flakes. Steve and Sarah looked at each other, each knowing what the other was thinking. The alien ship had saved them again. They felt blessed, in a way that their visitors would never have understood. There would be a puja tonight. Some buildings were burning; they hurried to put out the fires.
* * *
“SHIT!” Alexis Gore watched the screen in front of her as the dot of light that represented their third flier winked out. She settled back in her seat, her brow furrowed and her eyes dark. “Never mind. We’ll get back to those pissants later.”
The initial thrill of the chase had worn off. The sky above the city was a mess of smoke and heat and radiation from destroyed nuclear facilities, making it impossible to track either the beacon implanted under Thead’s skin or the ship itself.
“Have you seen them?” The radio was crackling, breaking up from the interference. It was her brother. He was flying around in circles high above, in case the fugitives made a break for it.
“No!” she shouted. “I have not!”
No sooner had she said it than a break appeared in the smoke ahead of her. The troublemakers were flying slowly above a wide plaza littered with bodies and wrecked vehicles.
“We’ve got them!” Alexis called to her brother. “Get down here!”
She took the controls from the pilot and put the flier into a manic descent. It fell like a stone out of the sky towards the other ship.
* * *
By the time Nibat realized what was happening, it was too late. A cloak of glowing mist shot from Alexis’s ship and enveloped them. The ship tried to accelerate, but it was held firmly in the force field. It bucked and strained, and then hovered, motionless, held like a pinned insect.
They started to sink towards the ground.
“Can we shake this thing?” A violet light flickered madly outside the viewports.
‘If we had enough velocity when it was applied, yes, but we were traveling too slowly. It has us.’
“Weapons?”
‘
No. Nothing. This is a stasis field.’
The ship settled noisily onto the gravel surface of a road.
A short distance away, Alexis had already landed. Her soldiers were on the ground in seconds. The Vice-Secretary herself followed, smiling, her mood greatly improved. “Come on, you naughty, naughty people. Let’s have a look at you. You’ve caused so much trouble!”
Inside the ship, Reina and Bark were beginning to regret that they had ever become involved in this war, or whatever it was.
This is what we get for sticking our noses into someone else’s fight,
thought Bark.
“We’re not going down without a fight,” Geoca said. “Let’s arm ourselves.”
“Yes, yes!” Pig shook his head from side to side, his tusks carving the air.
“Oh, but you
are
going down without a fight,” said a voice behind them. Everyone turned.
Thead had picked up one of the Nefilim weapons and was aiming it at them. A dark smile curved his lips.
Reina clenched her fists. “You piece of shit. I should have fragged you ages ago!”
Thead laughed. “Well, you might well think that, and you might well be right, but where you’re going, I don’t think you’ll be getting any more chances.” He pointed the gun at Nibat. “Now open the door, Nefilim, and we’ll go and say hello to my friends.”
Nibat thought something that took the smile off Thead’s face for a few seconds.
Alexis stood waiting outside. She watched as Thead followed the others out, and smirked. He was a good boy. These fools should never have trusted him. She certainly wouldn’t have.
“Stop there,” she said when they were on the ground. “We’ll just wait until my darling brother gets here. On your knees, all of you.”
They knelt down.
“Thead, check them for weapons.” She looked upwards for any sign of her brother while Thead did as he was told.
“Nothing in your pockets, dear?” Thead said as he leaned over Reina.
“Fuck you, jerk,” she hissed as he ran his hands over her breasts. He moved on to Geoca and reached down and snatched up one of the little Geocas from where they had been cowering in his torso.
“You little rats irritate me, did you know that? And do you know what I do to things that irritate me?” He held the squealing creature at arm’s length and put the muzzle of his gun up against its head. “
Frag
, I think is the word they use here.”
“Thead!” barked Alexis. “Stop that! The little prick might be useful! You can do what you want to it later!”
Thead threw the creature onto the ground in front of Geoca. “Later, maggot. I know where to find you.”
Pig was sitting quietly on his haunches, his eyes closed. He tried to contact the ship, casting around for the telltale signs of its consciousness, but there was nothing. The field was still holding it. But there
was
something. He could feel it, faint and in the distance. It was the unmistakable presence of another ship. It was calling, looking for contact. It came to him more as an impression than anything definite, but once he knew it was there and he focused on it, it became a small but clear voice in a silent part of his mind. It was the flier, back at the village.
‘Where are you?
WHERE ARE YOU? I can’t feel your ship any more…’
Pig told it what had happened.
‘Then you are in trouble.’
‘Big, serious trouble,’
thought Pig.
‘I fear that we are about to die.’
There was a pause, then:
‘Death is not that bad.’
‘Whatever. That’s easy for you to say, but it’s not what we need to hear right now. We’re surrounded by soldiers commanded by a mad woman, and there’s more trouble approaching.’
Many miles away in the village, the flier thought and calculated more quickly than it had ever done before. The lights on its control panel went out and the air around it became cold as it pulled all of its energy into a small tight core.