“Yes,” he said. “And the Chief of the Defence Force. I trust both of them. The question is how much they were involved in this. And whether we can trust everybody else involved in it. And whether or not the people on Christmas Island will stand for it.”
“The people?”
“About ten thousand of them. Only eight hundred are military. If push comes to shove, things could get nasty.”
“But the military has all the warships. Couldn’t they, I don’t know, bombard the island?”
Tobias glanced up at me. “And then what? Who would they be saving it for?”
I went outside for a walk in the snow. It was a strange feeling, the Christmas Island situation. Matt and I had retrieved foggy, confused information that the Prime Minister had ordered Ira Cole’s attack on Jagungal; and as uneasy as I was about the concept of an elected government being overthrown, what did an elected government even mean, when most of the electorate was dead? It’s a symbol, I guess, and I worry that it could be a slippery slope leading to military dictatorship – or, in other words, feudal chiefdom. But then, half the MPs and senators in Canberra never made it to Christmas Island. Even surviving Australians have a crap shoot chance of being “represented.” And it’s not like they’re passing legislation or anything.
I suppose it was the Prime Minister, more than the Parliament. The concept of a single leader. But then how is that any better than the Governor-General or the Chief of the Defence Force being in charge? Or Captain Tobias? Or Jonas? Or me?
Defeating the machines. That’s what matters. We can worry about rebuilding society later. We need to eliminate the undead, which means we need to destroy the machine bases, which means we need to recover the nuclear warhead. For which we’re still waiting on RAAF Base Wagga’s recon flights. In the meantime, we clean up the mess.
Simon came up to me while I was walking back down to my tent. He was still wearing work gloves; corpse handling, I presumed. “What’s the count up to now?” I asked.
“141,” he said wearily. Both of us had known many of the dead. The children had been the worst.
“I hear you’ve moved out of home,” he said.
“Yeah. I’m not talking to the Endeavour.”
“Moral disputes,” he said. “I heard.”
I stopped walking. “You think it’s OK to torture people? After what happened to Matt? You think it’s fine to tie them to a chair and fucking torture them?”
He shrugged, genuinely exhausted after a morning’s work, not seeming to care either way. “Go do a stint in the corpse pits and see if you’re still worked up about it.”
“I can’t believe you people,” I said. “All of you. It’s about revenge. That’s all it is for you.”
I left him in the camp and went to lie in my tent. Unbelievable that the alien spaceship has more common ground on this with my friends than I do.
November 11
The Endeavour spoke to me this morning, without precisely saying sorry. The death toll now stands at 156, it said. Do you understand how I feel?
“No,” I said. “It could be a fucking 1,000 for all I care. They could have killed all of us and raped the kids. They could do anything, and I still wouldn’t be OK with tying one of them to a chair and torturing him. It makes us as bad as them. It makes me sick.”
Can you not appreciate that...
“Can we stop talking about this?” I asked. “Please? I disagree, OK? We’re never going to reach common ground on this. So let’s just move on.”
I wish you would move back inside me.
“That’s... a weird thing to say,” I said. “And no, I’m not going to.”
You’ve lost respect for me.
“Yes. And for Tobias. And for everyone else. If you don’t like it, maybe re-examine your beliefs. Now what’s going on with Christmas Island and Canberra?”
We still have no direct contact.
“That’s not good,” I said. “Let me know if they come through.”
Of course.
That didn’t happen for the rest of the day. I went and gave some blood in the medical bay, and then helped Simon and Jonas and some of the others out on body detail. The clean-up was mostly finished now, but we practically filled up all the trenches we’d dug, and needed some more. We dug them alongside each other in the next valley over, the smoke from the corpse fires still wafting out of the open graves, fragments of ash settling in my hair and on my shoulders as I shovelled. Over the course of the afternoon we made a long, new trench. A lot bigger than we needed it to be – I think everybody wanted to work themselves to the point of exhaustion. There’s a lot of anger and anguish in the camp. Tobias has Forster under armed guard 24/7. I stopped up to see him at the comms tent before heading back to my own, but he still hasn’t managed to re-establish contact with Christmas Island. We’re just getting garbled Chinese whispers from ships dotted all over the coast, or army bases in WA and the Northern Territory. Loyal or rogue, it doesn’t matter – they’re all talking about it, but it’s all rumour and hearsay.
The last patches of snow melted off today. Nothing left but alpine grass and the first hints of wildflowers.
November 12
We’ve re-established radio contact with Christmas Island. Tobias has spoken directly with the Governor-General, who believes the Prime Minister was the instigator of the attack on us, along with the rest of his cabinet and a few other MPs and senators. As such they’ve been “stood down.” That was the phrase they used.
We learned all this at one of Tobias’ beloved early morning strategy meetings. “The Governor-General has assured me that we have the full support of the new government, and that destroying the machine base in Ballarat is the highest priority,” he said.
“So, where’s the nuke?” I asked. “Canberra?”
“Canberra,” Tobias confirmed. “We’ve shown Matt a few photos, and the building he saw in Forster’s head is the ASIO headquarters. We can assume that the group led here by Cole is a mix of ASIO, ASIS and whatever other intelligence assets the government still had holed up in Canberra after the fall.”
“We’re going to get it back, right?” Matt asked.
“Yes,” Tobias said, and pulled up a map of Canberra on the screen, “but it’s not going to be easy. We have no idea what the government itself intended with the nuke – sorry, former government, I mean – but we can assume that with their superiors under arrest, Cole and his men are going to sit on it at the headquarters. I’ve had RAAF Base Wagga send a couple of recon flights overhead, and they’ve confirmed a Black Hawk chopper and some human activity on the roof of the building.”
“Any zombies around there?” Matt asked. He was remembering, I thought, the dilemma we had getting the nuke out of the observatory up north.
“Not too many,” Tobias said. “But that’s all relative. Canberra was evacuated pretty thoroughly compared to the other cities, but there’s still tens of thousands of them, and we can assume that if this group stays in one building it will pick up a crowd before long.”
“So what’s the plan?” Simon asked.
“Well,” Tobias said. “They had forty-seven men here. Twelve were killed, and we have one prisoner. So they have at least thirty-four left, plus however many they left in Canberra, with a completely unknown arsenal up their sleeve. I’ll put it to you this way – we definitely can’t go in guns blazing.”
“We have no chopper, for a start,” I pointed out.
“Obviously. We’ll be going in by land. Canberra’s about 100 kilometres away. We’ll take a convoy and, barring any obstructions, be there in a couple of hours.”
“How many people?” Jonas asked.
Tobias frowned. “Not sure yet. This is a recon mission more than anything else. If I find we need firepower, we can always call more down, and call on air support from Wagga. Maybe a few dozen men to start with.”
“And who’s going?” I asked.
“Me,” Tobias said. “Captain Sanders remains here as a
cting CO. I’ll take about twenty troops, plus three civilians originally from Canberra. And you, Aaron.”
“Me?” I was as surprised as anyone else in the room.
“Yes,” Tobias said. “Cole and his men know our radio frequencies. They know all our codes. We can change them, but, well, it’s possible he still has spies remaining here.”
“So, what, we’re doing the Brisbane trick again?” I said. “And hang on. If he has spies...”
Tobias stared at me.
“I was going to ask why, if he has spies here, the Endeavour doesn’t do a sweep of everyone,” I said. “But it won’t, will it?”
“No.”
“OK. So you want to use the mental link. Same deal as Brisbane. Why me instead of Matt?”
“Matt,” Tobias said, “is unreliable.”
Matt was, of course, in the room. SAS captains don’t exactly give a shit about awkward social situations. “Whatever,” Matt said.
“You’ll come with us,” Tobias said, looking straight at me, “and Matt will remain here as the second link. Guaranteed comms secrecy.”
“And what exactly is it you’re going to be doing?” Jonas asked.
“Surveillance, mostly,” Tobias said. “They took the nuke on the Prime Minister’s orders. The Prime Minister is no longer the Prime Minister. So with any luck we can defuse the situation, negotiate, and bring it back.”
Matt barked out a laugh. “Since when have we had any luck?”
“Seriously,” I said. “These people murdered us and stole from us. You think we can negotiate with them? You think we should negotiate with them?”
Tobias frowned. “Right now, these guys are sitting in a fortified building. They’re slowly picking up zombies around the walls, and they’re smart enough and experienced enough to know that a few zombies will turn into a horde. They have a chopper, but nowhere to fly it to. They have a nuke, but nothing to do with it. They didn’t expect the government to get overthrown. They were acting on orders. And I’ll say this now, to everyone – whatever personal feelings you have about them, for what they did that night? However you might feel about that, however many friends you might have lost? Put them aside. We’re here for one reason, and that’s to destroy the machine base in Ballarat. If getting the nuke back means forgiving these men for what they did – if it means letting them go – then that happens. Understood?”
It was like a teacher lecturing a classroom about bullying the most unpopular kid. It wasn’t going to happen, despite the illusions of the teacher. Cole, of course, wasn’t the bullied kid. He was the bully – more powerful, for the time being, than we were. But nobody was going to contradict Tobias to his face. There were vague murmurs of assent.
Tobias pulled up a map of the terrain between Jagungal and Canberra. No major population centres – no towns at all, in fact, mostly just forested mountains and national park. It would be dirt tracks and firebreaks all the way. He started talking about vehicles and weapons and air support from Wagga, and all the intelligence we had from survivors about what we might encounter along the way. My mind was elsewhere.
Eventually Tobias dismissed the meeting, asking only Matt and I to remain behind. “These Canberra civilians you want to bring along,” I said. “You realise they might be exactly the people Cole left behind?”
“I’m not an idiot, Aaron,” he said. “But half the survivors here are from Canberra. I’ve picked three people I know and trust the most. Besides, I used to live there myself, when I was at Duntroon. We know the city, we’re not going in blind here.”
I frowned. “You really think Cole left spies behind, though?”
“It’s what I’d do.” He paused. “The Endeavour won’t do it – but can you? Scan everyone here?”
It was Matt who answered. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, scratching at the stubble flowering around the scar tissue on his cheeks. “No,” he said. “Not all at once, and not without them knowing. Individually, yes, like we did with Forster. But that would be too obvious. They’d know. And it would take forever.”
“All right,” Tobias said. “Put pressure on the Endeavour for me, then.”
I can hear you, the Endeavour said. I will not do it.
“Helpful as always,” Tobias said. “You know, one day, I hope...”
“Cut me out of this conversation, will you?” I asked. “I’m done with it.”
I stood up and left the command tent. As I pushed the flap of canvas open the wind struck me hard, sweeping in over the western ridges. The snow may have melted, but it’s still cold in the mornings and the evenings. The sun was rising well above the eastern ridge, burning through thin clouds.
Matt was close behind me. “Are you actually cool with that?” I asked. “Him taking me instead of you?”
“Are you?” he retorted.
I hadn’t thought about that. I thought, for a moment, about how it had felt when I stepped out of the chopper in that field where Matt was slumped unconscious with his rifle and his bottle of whiskey, hundreds of kilometres away. Jagungal is a safe little bubble. Every night when I go to sleep I’m surrounded by hundreds of armed soldiers, with a telepathic spaceship that never sleeps and knows everything that happens within a two-kilometre radius. There’s no safer place in the country – Cole’s attack notwithstanding.
Tobias is asking me to leave that. To thrust myself back into the action. Apart from that terrible night when Cole and his men turned on us, apart from a quick jaunt to that flowery field to rescue Matt, when was the last time I did that?
Here, in the Snowies. Not at Puckapunyal, when those soldiers attacked us. Not when the chopper was shot down and we scattered into the forest in terror at that machine. It was when those zombies attacked us in the pass. When I ended up in the hiker’s cabin with a half-dead Simon.
I spent six months struggling to stay alive. Now I’ve spent three months in safety. Sure, I have to go on patrol and help bury dead bodies and I only get two rationed sheets of toilet paper to wipe my ass with and I’m sick of having tinned beans and tomatoes for dinner every night. But I’m safe. Nobody’s trying to shoot me or stab me or eat me. Compared to what I was living like before, this is luxury.
Part of me is terrified to go back out there. Part of me is excited. That’s the part that I clamp down on, more than anything else. But that’s the part that’s most like Matt.
“So?” Matt demanded. “Are you?”
“Fuck you,” I said. “You think I’m a pussy just ‘cause I’ve been up here while you were off saving the world? I’ve still got it.”
The rarest of things from Matt, these days – a grin. “Sure you do.”
“How do you feel about it, anyway? Staying up here?”
That grin vanished, replaced by the wounded, surly Matt I’d come to know over the past few months. “It’s fine,” he said. “You think I want to go to Canberra with that asshole?”
I stopped walking. We were halfway down the valley towards the camp, the Endeavour laid out before us like an enormous broken zeppelin. “I know you don’t want to stay here.”
Matt kept on walking. I called after him, and got no reply. I’m getting a little sick of that.
“You know he’s just going to try to run off again,” I said. I was speaking to the open air, but half-speaking to the Endeavour. We’re technically not on speaking terms, but when it’s sitting there in the valley in my full field of vision I can’t help but feel that it’s listening in, in a way that doesn’t seem quite so apparent even when I’m standing inside it.
Maybe, the Endeavour said, in the half-interested way it has when it’s talking intently to someone else. It’s always talking to someone, of course – there are nearly a thousand people living in and around it, and it acts as a friend and adviser and scout and lookout and attentive ear to all of them. But I could tell from the tone that it was still engaged in a heated debate with Tobias.
“It’s what he wants to do.”
Personally
I was in favour of letting him go, the Endeavour said. He would have come back. In any case, Tobias has people watching him. He will not be permitted to leave the valley.
“He’d come back?” I muttered. “Fuck off.”
The Endeavour didn’t answer. I sighed, and went back down to my tent.
November 13
Tobias wants to leave the day after tomorrow. One APC, a few Land Cruisers, four off-road motorcycles. The convoy itself will stop short of Canberra and move in more quietly. He has a forward post in mind. I wasn’t quite paying attention to the details. The man’s an SAS captain, he knows what he’s doing.
Alright, fine. It’s because I’m nervous. It’s because as much as I want to think that I can still go out there shoot zombies and move under gunfire, I’m frightened that I can’t. I’m frightened that I’ve grown complacent. I’m not frightened of danger at all – that’s the crazy part. I’m frightened that I’ll clam up and let everyone down, if or when something goes wrong.
I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s not like I really have a choice about going.
The Endeavour, incidentally, finally agreed to do a sweep of everyone in the valley. I don’t know how Tobias convinced it. Three remaining civilians were found to be plants left by Cole. Tobias had them cuffed and confined in rooms inside the Endeavour alongside Forster. Matt and I spent most of today going through their heads, picking out what they know. It gets easier the more you do it. None of them knew anything particularly valuable, apart from the fact that they were all operating under strict secrecy orders out of the ASIO headquarters, from a coalesced intelligence agency formed from the necessity of the apocalypse. It doesn’t even have a proper name – it’s just bunch of intelligence agents, survivors, loyal to the (former) Prime Minister and operating out of Canberra. It blows my fucking mind that people are still even playing this geopolitical game at a time like this, but then, we all operate under different mindsets, don’t we? I remember sitting in Eucla thinking that we were the last human beings left in the country, with no idea that there was still a government on Christmas Island and rogue generals up north and a new country in New England and naval ships left, right and centre. There are probably still survivors all over Australia – all over the world – who don’t have a radio, who haven’t seen anybody else in months, who think they’re the last people left alive on the planet.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 160
