I told him everything. Tobias didn’t seem to care any more. I hadn’t expected Andy to believe me, but he did. Sort of. “But why?” he said. “Why would you have dreams, just you two?”
“I guess that’s what we’re here to find out,” I said.
“There must be other people dreaming about it, too,” Andy said. “All over the world. You must be more psychically attuned to it than everyone else.”
That was a bit too dreamcatchers-and-incense for me. Can’t blame him; people will force it through whatever prism they have to deal with it. How can you really prepare yourself for human and alien contact? You can’t. You can’t even really believe it. The dead rising was enough of a mindfuck, but at the end of the day they were just human bodies – behaving in a way they never should, bringing a nightmare to life, but still just the same old carbon in the same old shape. An alien spaceship – well, you have to go see that for yourself.
Or wait for it to come see you. As we’d learned. As so many others, apparently, in Victoria had learned.
That was different. Ballarat was different. I knew that still, as we trekked on through the Snowy Mountains, as the tug in my stomach grew ever more agitated. I knew that we were about to find something different.
It was afternoon when Matt and I lost the others.
We were passing through a broad, shallow valley – another glacial valley, according to Llewellyn, minus the remnant boulders. “I don’t feel good about this,” Jonas said suddenly, right behind us, as we were trudging along through ankle-deep snow.
I’d been lost in thought, trying to adjust the strap on my backpack, but I stopped and turned. Jonas had stopped dead in his tracks, and Matt was looking at him curiously. “You okay?”
“I don’t feel good about this,” Jonas repeated. “It feels… I don’t know, it feels like a bad idea.”
Tobias was a little way ahead of us, on point, still moving ahead – but Andy and Llewellyn were coming up behind Jonas. “I’m glad you said it,” Llewellyn panted, as they caught up to us. “You’re right. It feels wrong.”
“It’s fine,” Andy said, huffing away under his load – but he looked nervous. “Come on.” He surged on through Captain Tobias’ footprints.
Jonas and Llewellyn followed reluctantly. We made it maybe another ten or twenty metres before all three of them stopped again. “It doesn’t feel good,” Jonas said – and he was actually looking ill.
Matt and I glanced at each other. To us, it felt the same as any other valley. “I just want to sit down a minute,” Andy said, unslinging some of the tents and backpacks down into the snow.
I looked ahead, to Captain Tobias. A moment ago he’d been pacing on as always, but now he’d stopped in his tracks like the others, albeit fifty metres further on. He was staring straight ahead, fists clenching and unclenching. “Guys,” I said, turning back to the others. “What the fuck are you on about?”
“I feel a bit sick,” Professor Llewellyn said, crouching down in the snow next to Andy.
“Are we sick?” Andy said, rubbing his temples and staring at the ground. “Did we catch something?”
There was a sudden shout. Matt and I whipped our heads around. Captain Tobias had struggled on maybe another ten metres, and then dropped to the ground on all fours and cried out in pain. We ran up the valley to him, oblivious to the discomfort the others apparently felt so keenly, and helped him up. “Back,” I yelled. “Take him back to the others!”
Tobias staggered to his feet, still wincing in pain, and we helped him go back down the way we’d come. By this point Jonas, Andy and Llewellyn had retreated down the valley all the way to the crest where we’d first come in, before that horrible feeling had come over them. “I’m fine,” Tobias grunted, as we passed the point where Jonas had first stopped. “I feel fine.”
We regrouped on the ridge with the others, who were all looking shaken. “What the hell’s going on?” Matt said. “What happened to you?”
“I feel okay now,” Jonas said. “Back here. I just started feeling weird. Then… it got worse. Started to actually feel sick.”
Tobias nodded. “Me too. Just uncomfortable at first, then halfway through the valley it started to hurt. I tried to go on but it was too much.” He looked at me and Matt. “You didn’t feel it?”
Matt and I glanced at each other. “Not a thing,” I said.
Tobias was inclined to experiment. He went off and tried the ridge to the west of us; then the one to the east. At both of them, after he crossed a certain point, he said he felt that same unpleasant sensation. And if he pushed it, it became painful. “It’s just discomfort at first,” he said. “Psychologically. You feel like you shouldn’t be here, like you should go back. Then you feel sick. Then it hurts.” He looked back down the valley, at our muddle of footprints in the snow that made it halfway across and then retreated back. “So this is it. The border.”
Somewhere to the north, just a few kilometres away, was the spaceship. And this was – what, some kind of defence mechanism?
“Shit,” Andy said. “I think I’ve been this far, a couple of times. When I was with Trish. When we were looking for David. But… we never went all the way across the valley. We just got the wrong feeling about it. Just thought maybe it was better to go a different way. I never thought about it again.”
“I wouldn’t have tried to push on,” Jonas said. “If we weren’t going this way, if I were you and I was just scouting or something… I would have turned away without really thinking about it. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. That was how it felt at first. Then later, it started to feel really wrong.”
“It gives you a warning,” Tobias said thoughtfully. “You have a chance to turn back, and if you keep going it turns the dial up.”
“Oh, God,” Llewellyn said. “This must be what happened to the first team that came in. On a chopper, flying straight through that at speed… they wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“So what now?” Matt said. “Do we try to go around it?”
Tobias shook his head. “The chopper was coming in from the north-east. We’re coming in from the south. It must be a radius. A few kilometres in every direction. No way through, no way around, no way over the top.”
“For you guys, anyway,” I said.
“Hang on a minute…” Matt said.
“No. He’s right.” Tobias turned to look at us. “If you’re here for a reason, this is it. You can pass through. We can’t. You’ll have to go on.”
I’d half expected him to say we all had to fall back to the lodge until we could figure something else out – in fact, I’d been standing distant from him for that very reason, ready to bolt north into the forbidden zone where he couldn’t follow if he tried to stop us. But it was Jonas who kicked up a stink. “On their own!” he cried. “You can’t send them on their own!”
“What choice do we have?” Tobias said. “We can’t get past it. They can. They’ve been dreaming about it. That means something.” He’d pulled his snow visor down, dangling from its strap below his beard. His eyes looked weary, demoralised, but not quite beaten. “I’m not a religious man. But maybe this was supposed to happen. We found you by chance. Now here we are. I’ve lost most of my men on this mission. I’ve had everything go wrong. But now, maybe…” He shrugged. “If you’d told me back on the Canberra if it would come to this, I would have aborted the mission. But we’ve got this far. We must go on. We have to go on.”
“Give them the rifles,” Jonas said. “At least give them the bloody rifles.”
Matt took Jonas’ rifle, lately Corporal Rahvi’s; Tobias unslung his own and handed it to me. Two shiny black M4s and three extra magazines each. “Don’t try to be heroes,” Tobias said. “If you see anything that seems dangerous, if you get into trouble, then come back here. We’ll stay in this last valley and set up camp. We’ll be right here. You go see what you can, and you come back to us. Okay?”
“I promise,” I said. I felt exhilarated. We
were all on the same page now. We all knew we were on the verge of something unprecedented; that we were about to make history.
After Tobias handed me his rifle I shook his hand. Shook Andy’s hand, and Professor Llewellyn’s. So did Matt. Jonas surprised us both with a bear hug, each of us under one of his arms. “You take care of each other, all right?” he said gruffly. “Whatever happens, you take care of each other. I didn’t come this far to see you boys get hurt.”
We crested the north ridge, passing through that invisible barrier like it was nothing – to us, it really was nothing. We paused on the northern slope, looking back at the southern edge of the valley, at those four suddenly distant figures waving farewell. Then we went over the ridge and into a whole new world.
The landscape was the same as ever: a rumpled snowscape of black and white, valleys with creeks filtering down the centre, wispy forests of wind-gnarled snow gums whispering in the wind. A perfect blue sky overhead, the sun sinking down in the west, a pale half moon rising in the north-east. At the same time it was different. It felt bereft. We were inside the circle, past the ship’s defensive barrier, and I knew for a fact that no other living human being was inside that circle too.
We trudged on through the mountains, cold and tired, neither of us speaking. It was maybe half an hour after we’d crossed the barrier and left the others that I recognised it. I stopped dead in my tracks; Matt stopped a moment later, to look curiously back at me.
“This is it,” I said.
He looked around us, and it twigged. “Oh, shit – it is.”
We were in the valley we’d dreamed about so many times – the first valley, the one where we started. Flat and broad, coated in a pristine covering of snow. A few scattered snow gums along the western flank. A clear blue sky overhead. Just a few degrees above zero, breath misting, every footstep crunching through a thin layer of frost atop the snow.
The valley sloped up ahead of us to a broad, blank ridge. And on the other side of that…
“This is it,” I said. I almost could have laughed. “This is really it, it really is! Come on, man, come on!”
I was hurrying through the snow now, Matt coming along behind me and calling after me, charging up through the thick snow to the crest before us. I felt delirious, delighted. All of it had meant something. None of it had been for nothing. Everything had been leading up to now – Albany, Kalgoorlie, Eucla, the HMAS Canberra, everything. All of it had converged on this moment, when I could crest that snowy peak and see…
I’d had a horrible feeling, just before we topped the ridge, that it wouldn’t be there. That we’d done all that, crossed storms and blizzards, oceans and mountains, for nothing. That there’d just be an empty valley.
But then I reached the top of the ridge. And there it was.
Funnily enough, it didn’t look shocking. Not even seeing it in real life with my own eyes. It was just the same as all the dreams: a scar of broken trees through the woods where it had come down, the worst damage now mostly covered by winter snow. A thick, long lump in the cradle of the valley itself, banked with snowdrifts, but still recognisable as something out of place, peering out from underneath its blanket of snow: flukes and structures, the curve of a bow, a few fragments of debris poking from the snow in the trail it had left across the valley.
Matt arrived at the crest alongside me, huffing and puffing, rifle in his hands. “Jesus,” he said, looking down at the valley. “Fucking hell.”
“Come on,” I said. We left the ridge, started making our way down the slope through thick snow. The sun was dipping low, just about brushing the western peaks. There was a cold wind on this side, coming up from the far end of the valley and cutting through my jacket, but my heart was beating up my throat in excitement and the cold was the last thing I cared about.
We reached the ship. It was long and tubular, maybe half a kilometre long, several storeys tall. The exterior hull, where it wasn’t covered by snow, was a sort of bluish metal with a dull sheen to it. I reached out and placed one gloved hand against it.
Matt had gone further up, climbing up a snowbank that had built up against the hull through the winter. “Look, you can see inside,” he said, pulling a flashlight from his backpack. It was no artificial hatch or window, but rather a rent in the hull that must have been caused by the crash. We peered through the crack – too small to fit inside – and saw nothing but angular shapes, tubes, shifting shadows.
We made our way around the ship. On the other side we found a larger crack in the hull, wide enough for both of us to comfortably walk through together. It was cramped on the inside – we had to duck slightly – but it followed recognisable form: corridors, rooms. Everything was circular. The rooms were empty. There was nothing in them – no loose objects, no features or furniture. Just empty. Empty halls, empty rooms.
Outside, the sun had dipped beyond the mountains, their long shadows reaching to cover the ship. The cones of our flashlights bobbed about in the interior darkness, our breath misting through them, ranging across incomprehensible glyphs etched into that blue-green metal, across the walls and the floors. But nothing else. Nothing here.
“There must be something else,” I said. “There must be… a control room, or something.”
“What did you expect?” Matt said.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I’d never thought that far ahead. I’d thought once we got here it would just… well, I didn’t know what might happen next.
“There’s not even any bodies,” Matt said. “Corpses. Of the crew.”
I had an unpleasant thought of alien zombies – whatever they might look like – lurching up out of the darkness in these narrow corridors. “Maybe they didn’t die,” I said. “Maybe they’re alive, and they left.”
“Or maybe there was no crew.”
We kept exploring in the darkness. The rooms differed from each other in some ways – one was enormous, with a series of thick transparent canisters arranged around each other, containing what looked like clear liquid. Another had a raised sphere in the centre of the room, made of the same metal as the rest of the ship, the floor etched with odd patterns around it. A slanting tube near the rear of the ship, with a bit of boosting and scrambling, led us up to the second level – but it was the same as the first level, full of silent rooms and corridors.
Peering out through rents in the hull, we could see that night had fallen. The sky was still clear, the glittering band of the Milky Way stretching up above the dark mountains. Nothing outside or inside the ship was moving. There was only us, and this derelict, abandoned spacecraft that we couldn’t understand.
Disappointment slowly turned to despair. We picked one of the smaller rooms, for warmth, and I sat dejectedly in the corner staring at the wall while Matt unfurled our sleeping bags and heated up some beans on the Coleman burner. For so long, this ship had been all I could think of. I’d bet everything towards it. Everything had worked just right: we’d met Tobias and the SAS, we’d learned we weren’t the only ones who knew about it, and we’d finally, unbelievably, managed to cross half the country and reach it.
And what was there to show for it? Nothing. The dead walked the earth, some malign alien presence was squatting down in Ballarat, and up here in the mountains we had a dead and empty spaceship. All those dreams, all that time I’d felt the psychic tug in my stomach beckoning me up here. For nothing.
We ate in silence. Eventually Matt packed the gear away and got in his sleeping bag. I lay in the darkness listening to him tossing and turning, listening to the wind blowing against the hull outside, feeling angry and upset and betrayed.
Eventually we both fell asleep. And in the depths of our dreams, the ship spoke to us.
Volume IV: Destroyer of Worlds
JULY
“You are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens.”
Ephesians 2:19
July 1
I was floating in a void. Drifting, dreamless and shapeless, happy and warm.
The darkness enveloped my body like a blanket.
No - it was a blanket. It was my sleeping bag. I could feel the fabric against my skin, the teeth of the zip against my neck, the pressure of the floor beneath my body. I could feel the saliva in my mouth, the chilly air on my cheeks. I still existed physically. I still had an anchor to the real world. But the rest of me... my senses, my thoughts, my mind... rested in another place entirely.
Yet I wasn’t panicking. I didn’t even feel slightly worried. I was perfectly comfortable. It was a dreamy state, similar to a heavy dose of painkillers or the feeling you have when you wake up first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure why I felt like that. And I knew I should be worrying about it. But, catch-22, I couldn’t.
I could feel something moving at the edge of my mind, like a dull shadow that flickers at the corner of your eyes. It didn’t scare me. It felt... benevolent. Friendly, like a parent, almost. An aura of light. A sense that it was watching over me.
And then, startlingly, the presence melted into my own mind. It’s hard to describe what it was really like - two clouds, maybe, drifting together until they occupied the same place. Still, despite the sense of closeness, I didn’t feel afraid. Couldn’t feel afraid.
And then it spoke to me. Not in words. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it themselves, but telepathy doesn’t work in words. It’s just thoughts, ideas and feelings, transferring directly between minds. It’s kind of like when you have an idea yourself: you don’t actually say it in your mind in words. It just pops into your head, fully-formed. Telepathy works the same way. Although you can tell it’s not your own thought.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 74
