by Geoff Palmer
* * *
‘Ooo, fireworks!’ Norman sat up dreamily as another volley struck the ship, scattering sparking fragments like a geyser.
‘Get down, you idiot,’ Tim yelled. ‘I think you’re concussed.’
‘I can what?’
‘You’ve had a whack on the head. We’ve got to get out of here. Can you stand? Can you run?’
‘Where to?’
‘Over there. The ditch.’
Norman staggered to his feet, saw Alkemy’s anxious face peering at them and waved. ‘Hey, Althingy!’
A white-hot fragment whizzed between them.
‘Norman, concentrate!’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re shooting at us!’
‘Not doing a very good job. Look. Ha, ha, missed again.’
Tim felt like slapping him which, since he was already concussed, really wouldn’t help.
* * *
The guns started up again. Further down the valley, Ludokrus saw the deflection splashes from his ship’s shields. Its whole outline was now visible, glowing an ominous orange. It wouldn’t hold out much longer. Another minute, tops. He had to get this right.
Basic starship layout always followed certain principles, it didn’t matter who the builders were. Component placement was governed by physics and efficiency — at least in primitive craft like the one in front of him — but he couldn’t remember whether the stabiliser was the domed unit on the side or that boxy thing near the back.
‘Come on,’ he told himself, ‘you know this. You build many model when you are young.’
The mining laser was too heavy to hold, so he balled up his jacket as a support and set it in the mouth of the tunnel. Then he stretched out behind it, studying the target.
The domed unit. It was bigger and an easier shot.
Another portion of his brain counted the seconds between recharging. Slower this time.
Fifteen ... sixteen ...
He aligned the cross-hairs and hit the Lock button. Checked again, made sure his hands were clear of the cooling fins, reached nineteen, then heard the model-builder part of his brain shout, ‘No, it’s the boxy thing!’
He jammed the laser hard left, sighted down its side and released the lock button a fraction of a second before he felt the phmmm.
A puff of blue smoke was the only visible damage on the underside of the Sentinel ship.
Did he get it wrong after all?
Then the boxy unit started glowing as if lit from inside. Oily black smoke vented from the hole.
The Sentinel ship shuddered and swayed, rocking like a boat in a storm. A moment later it swivelled in his direction. They’d evidently been scanning for the source of the incoming fire.
Ludokrus didn’t hesitate. He locked the cutter’s targeting computer once more, vaulted over it, and sprinted down the scree, running diagonally, hoping to draw fire away from the tunnel. With a bit of luck, the laser cutter would get in one more shot.
The slope was steep. He stumbled, slipped, regained his footing and sprinted on as a barrage of shots vaporised the sheer face above, bringing down a thunderous avalanche of rock that roared towards him.
60 : Tremors
Crystal Starbrite watched the narrow strip of coastal land fall away as the helicopter sped south. Below, she could see the Rata turn-off, the police car and the collection of army vehicles. She thought she could even see the stroppy sergeant. She’d have waved if she was sure he could see her.
The pilot suddenly checked the machine’s speed. They stopped moving forward and settled in a hover three hundred metres up.
‘Sorry,’ he tapped the comms switch and his voice sounded in her headphones. ‘Just had a message to say that we’re approaching restricted airspace. This is a far as we can go.’
‘Have you acknowledged it?’ Crystal said.
‘Not yet.’
‘Well you wouldn’t, would you? Not if you’d never heard it.’ She reached over and snapped off the radio.
The pilot stared at her, shocked.
‘We’ll double your fee,’ she said.
He hesitated.
‘Triple it.’
He half grinned, suspecting a joke, then saw she was deadly serious.
‘I mean it.’
He nodded, eased the control stick forward and the helicopter moved on.
‘Jeez Crystal!’ Eric called from the back seat where he’d been readying his camera.
‘What?’ She glared at him.
‘Don’t ... don’t do that, eh?’
‘Do what?’
‘Go turning things off at random. The ground’s a long way down, you know.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘You did. That’s the radio over there!’
* * *
Time slowed. Ludokrus swam against it. For long moments it seemed he was in a race with a mass of tumbling rocks and boulders, sprinting ahead as they came up behind him with the sound of a thousand pounding feet. He even seemed to be winning. Then small stones skittered past on either side and he felt the brush of something huge directly behind. He couldn’t, daren’t, change direction now. The slightest hesitation would see him squashed like a bug under a shoe. He ran and ran for all he was worth.
‘Go!’ Coral screamed, leaping from cover as she watched a tidal wave of debris sweep towards him. He almost reached the valley floor before a rolling cloud of dust obscured her view. From deep in its midst, she saw a single stab of red light followed by an answering explosion near the back of the hovering spaceship. She paid it no attention. She was on her feet, racing towards the spot she’d last seen him. But as she drew closer and the dust began to clear, it became obvious that Ludokrus was gone.
* * *
‘Steady! Hold her steady!’
‘I can’t. The stabiliser’s gone.’
‘Wretched monkey people!’
‘You should have let me shoot them.’
‘Forget shooting. Cease fire and trigger the gully destructors.’
* * *
‘Ooo, pretty!’ Norman said, pointing back towards the gully.
Tim turned to see a line of blue explosive flashes light up along each side, each one corresponding to the mouth of a mineshaft.
‘What the hell ...?’
But something else was happening too. Something more profound. It started as a rumble deep within the earth and he felt it first as a jangling in his bones. A disconcerting shudder. Then the shock wave reached the surface. A tremor that went on and on, rolling across the ground, shaking the earth as if it was a tray of loose sand. Tim could see the surface ripple and dance. Small stones sunk into the loosened earth. His own feet did likewise. It suddenly felt like he was wading through deep mud.
‘Keep moving!’ he yelled at Norman. The pair of them staggered like drunks.
Beside them, some of the concrete piles the hut sat on sank below the surface. The sudden shift tore the rest of it apart as if it had been made of matchsticks. The whole structure collapsed on top of the bikes parked around the side.
‘Oh no!’ Norman cried. The sight of the bikes seemed shake him from his daze. He turned and started back towards them. Tim reached out to try to stop him, but it was all he could do to keep his feet as another shockwave hit.
61 : Bizarre Behaviour
When the edge of the massive boulder grazed the small of his back, Ludokrus did the only thing he could think of. He jumped, leaping high into the air, hoping that instead of grinding him beneath it, it might instead help shove him to one side.
The idea almost worked.
For half a second he found himself balanced on the boulder’s edge, like a circus performer atop a giant ball. Then it stopped, obstructed by smaller stones, its momentum spent. He pitched forward, landing in its lee as a cascade of other debris surged over and around the pair of them.
He fought a wave of panic. Now, instead of being flattened, he was overcome and buried in a deluge of loose rubble.
The
boulder acted like a dam, leaving him a little air space as the roaring rock slide continued past, but the sheer volume of it swamped him, going on and on before stopping with frightful suddenness. In one instant, it flowed around him like water. In the next, it set like concrete. Before it did, he clamped his right arm to his left shoulder, creating a breathing space, but he could already feel the tremendous weight on his back and shoulders.
The sound and movement ceased and he felt the air space in front of his face grow humid with his breathing.
Coral ran and pointed. She knew the drill from boats. If you saw someone go overboard, you kept your eyes on them at all times, pointing to them or the spot you’d last seen them until the boat could put about and throw a lifeline. It was easy to lose sight of a bobbing head in the immensity of the ocean. But when the dust began to clear, she found herself in a barren wasteland, pointing to a spot as anonymous and featureless as the surface of the moon. The upper edge of what must have been a massive boulder was the only thing to distinguish it from the surrounding ground.
She stopped, her arm still outstretched, only now taking in the full horror of what had happened. Ludokrus had been buried alive.
* * *
Alkemy scrambled from the creek bed as the sides that had once sheltered them began caving in. There was nowhere they could take cover now. The world, once solid, had become a shaking, moving mass. Further up the gully, she saw boulders the size of houses bouncing like ping pong balls across the valley floor. A huge portion of one side wall slumped, bursting like water surging from a broken dam.
At least the Sentinels have stopped firing, she thought. For now.
The Eltherian ship was recovering already. The outline of its shield was now barely visible, and as she watched it began lowering its boarding ramp again.
She caught sight of Norman rummaging through the debris of the fallen hut. He was hauling on roof timbers and sheets of corrugated iron. Bizarre behaviour in the middle of an earthquake. Tim apparently thought so too. He appeared to be trying to reason with him, but Norman was acting like a man possessed.
Alkemy raced towards them, shouting, trying to catch their attention, making her way across in a series of short, lurching runs, pointing to the ship as she did so. Tim spotted the direction of her outstretched arm, saw the ramp coming down and grabbed Norman’s ankle. He was about to crawl into the space beside the oil drums where the handlebars of one of the bikes was visible.
‘The ramp’s down on the ship,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s go and take a look.’
Norman paused. If one thing interested him more than the bikes, it was the spaceship.
Then the Sentinels opened fire again.
It was wild, erratic fire. Poorly targeted. Shots went every which way as the Sentinels fought to hold their ship steady. Two glanced off the Eltherian ship’s shield. Three others ploughed craters in the ground nearby.
‘Hurry!’ Tim yelled, pushing Norman ahead of him.
Norman got to his feet and, guided by Alkemy’s outstretched hand, started a loping run towards the ship.
Another jolt brought Tim to his knees. He struggled to his feet and was about to race after them when a stray shot struck one of the abandoned fuel drums a metre behind him. It exploded in a ball of flames, engulfing him completely.
62 : War Games
Frank and Emma Townsend studied the line of wigs propped up on the sofa. The policewoman picked one up. ‘Where did they get these?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Em said. ‘I’ve never seen any of them before.’
‘So they just magicked them out of thin air, did they?’
Em shrugged helplessly. Frank shook his head.
‘You brought drinks in to them,’ the policewoman said to Em.
‘You watched me do it. And saw me out again. Did you see any wigs?’
Frank said, ‘The fact is, a bunch of kids have outwitted you lot and the army. They’ve left you all looking like a bunch of charlies.’
A man in military uniform entered the room behind them and cleared his throat. ‘Mr and Mrs Townsend. I’m Major Upshott. I’m in charge of this operation.’
‘Your first name’s not Charlie by any chance?’ Frank said.
Em elbowed her husband.
‘This is a serious matter, Mr Townsend.’
‘Is it? Well your handling of it has been a joke. Why did you lock them up in the first place?’
‘There are ... circumstances they may be able to help us with.’
‘What sort of circumstances?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘Well the kids are at liberty now. I hear they waltzed past your gate guards. What did you put out there? A couple of garden gnomes?’
Upshott ignored him and turned his gaze to Em. ‘Do you have any idea where they might be heading, Mrs Townsend?’
‘You say they went left? There’s the Robinson’s place about two kilometres up the road, but apart from that I can’t think of anywhere else.’
‘They were talking about a bus.’
‘Not today. It’s a holiday.’
An army truck came barrelling down the drive.
‘Ah!’ Upshott turned and went out to meet it. Em and Frank followed, despite the policewoman’s objections.
Two men got out from the front, along with a squad from the back. But no children.
‘We checked the neighbouring farm, sir,’ the driver reported. ‘And every outbuilding visible from the road for five kilometres from here. No sign of them.’
Upshott glared at Frank and Em, but Frank looked past him, staring into the distance.
‘Are your boys playing war games up there?’ He pointed towards what looked like a firework display in the distant hills. Stabs of light flashed through the evening sky, then a brighter flash was followed seconds later by a muffled crack.
Upshott said nothing, turned away and hurried to the tent.
‘Can we go back inside please?’ the policewoman said. ‘I have some more questions.’
Em took one last look at the distant firework display and said, ‘Well at least the kids went the other way.’
‘Staying out of trouble for once,’ Frank said. ‘That’s a first.’
* * *
Coral cast about the wasteland, her outstretched arm only now falling to her side as she took in the extent of the avalanche. It was twenty metres wide and two metres deep. A broad scar smeared across the valley floor with no sign of Ludokrus anywhere.
A series of blue flashes on the cliffs above distracted her. Something had triggered explosions in the mouths of every mine in the gully. Small explosions, just enough to bring down a few metres of roof, but she was still forced to cower behind the upright edge of the half-buried boulder as a shower of stones and gravel plummeted from the sky.
Then the tremors began. They started slowly but went on and on, as if the whole gully was being shaken by a gigantic hand. She stared at the ground. Several of the larger stones that had fallen around her disappeared and she realised what was happening. The steady oscillations were sifting the loose ground, causing heavy stuff to sink and lighter to stuff rise.
Cracks appeared, earth settled, dust rose into the air. Somewhere further up the valley a tremendous crash announced the collapse of a rock face, but she paid it no attention, entranced by the sight of what the steady shaking was revealing.
The outline of a shoe. Half a metre away, just below the surface. She could see it clearly. She reached for it, muttering his name.
It twitched.
The next half-minute was spent in a frantic scramble of digging, both aided and hindered by the ongoing tremors. The loosened earth was easy to dig with bare hands, but every time she made a decent hole it shook down the sides and half-filled it again.
At first she dug where she guessed his head must be, but found nothing. For one horrid moment she had a vision of him sliced in two. Then she realised he was bent double in the lee of the boulder and dug there instead, tearing he
r nails and bloodying her fingers.
An elbow emerged, then an arm sheltering his face and head, protecting a pocket of air. He reacted to her touch, struggling to help, but his eyes were clenched shut and full of grit and his breathing was laboured.
She realised the problem at once and tore at the earth imprisoning his chest. He took a rasping gasp, let out a painful groan and coughed.
His top half free, he sat up, trying to clear the grit from his eyes.
‘Don’t worry about that. Get your legs out. We’ve got to get out of here!’ she yelled, as further up the gully more rock faces collapsed in crashing tumults.
She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him free. He could barely walk. His left leg had been badly twisted in the fall, perhaps even broken, and he leaned on her heavily as she half-carried, half-dragged him down the slope. Yet suddenly her world seemed brighter. He was free. He was alive!
The tremors began to fade. Dust settled. Silence returned to the gully.
‘This way. Quick as you can.’
‘The ship ...?’ he croaked.
She could see it in the distance. And the others.
‘It’s OK. The ramp’s down. Let’s get you aboard. Oh no!’
Behind them the Sentinel ship started firing again. Wild, erratic fire, but fire that filled the air with sizzling bolts and gouts of vaporising rock.
‘Hurry!’ she cried.
Then up ahead the world exploded as a stray shot hit one of the fuel drums. It went off like a bomb.
The fireball lasted several seconds. Blackened tendrils drifted skyward. Below it, the burning continued, and to her horror she saw a figure staggering around in flames.
* * *
Tim’s world turned white for a moment. The air around him roared. A sudden rush of wind slammed into him and made him stagger, but somehow he kept his feet. Then the orange glow began. Shimmering like a heat haze. There was a smell too. A chemical stink. The air began to boil.
