Those were the just some of the souls that I drifted across, disembodied, on Christmas Night. I saw more that I’ve forgotten, or couldn’t parse properly, or didn’t think fit to reproduce here. I saw so many thoughts and memories: a knife dripping with blood, apartment buildings emerging like islands from an ocean of zombies, a campsite at night flickering with muzzle flares and children screaming. I saw my own face, many times, because so many people were thinking about me, the rumours about my recovery impossible to contain. Aaron King had emerged alive from inside the alien citadel in Ballarat, had come slouching towards Castlemaine like an omen, and people were frightened.
Boxing Day dawned bright and hot, a handful of puffy clouds slinking across the eastern horizon. I was curled up in a tangle of sweaty sheets in the sick bay, a narrow window casting a golden ray of sunrise across the far wall. At the edge of my brain I could sense a thousand other people stirring and waking, guts clenched solid at the thought of the big day to come. A turning point in human history.
The doctor came in later in the morning to see how I was doing. His name was Fergus O’Donohue. He’d been born in Perth – he grew up Ferndale, only a few suburbs away from me – but he’d gone to study medicine at the University of Melbourne and lived there ever since. He’d always been keen on the military and had been in the cadets from age fifteen, eventually joining the Medical Corps while still at uni. He’d been evacuated out to Darwin and even Christmas Island, but since the post-Jagungal reshuffling he’d been dispatched back to Wagga Wagga and then down here to Castlemaine. His only child had drowned in a backyard swimming pool at a friend’s place, only a few months before the rise of the undead. His wife had been devoured alive by zombies in front of his eyes when the fences were breached at the Oakleigh Barracks in Melbourne in January. On Christmas Island, in a toilet cubicle at the base hospital, he’d slit his wrists and had only been saved when another doctor had seen the blood spatters on the white tile floor and had dragged him out for an emergency blood transfusion. That had been in the dark days not long after losing his wife – he’d recovered after that, had an epiphany about the Hippocratic Oath, rededicated himself to saving as many people as he could. He was a valued and trusted member of the Medical Corps, which was why he’d been sent to Castlemaine.
He didn’t tell me any of that. He barely spoke to me at all. I learned all that, in the space of a heartbeat, because of what I am. What I can do now. I didn’t even mean to know it. I just reached inside his head and took it.
I understand now why the Endeavour never wanted to do that, why it always compared the act to rape. It feels deeply, shamefully wrong. I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident. But I had no right to see that man’s deepest and darkest memories, and it made me feel sick to know them.
O’Donohue took my blood pressure, asked me how I was feeling, and he left. He doesn’t trust me, I know that. None of them do. Not after I spent a week inside Ballarat.
It was in the afternoon that Tobias came to speak to me. He didn’t lock the door behind him this time. I supposed he’d figured that if I posed a threat it was mental, not physical.
“7.00pm local time,” I said. “OK? I can tell when it is, so don’t try to hide it from me.”
Tobias looked weary. “I trust you, Aaron. If they’d done something to you, we’d be fucked by now. Just... we can’t be too careful.”
“What happens after the attack?” I asked. “If it’s successful, I mean? You still think I’m a fifth columnist, or am I free to go?”
“A chopper will take you back to Jagungal,” Tobias said.
“So where are you going? Back to Christmas Island?”
Tobias looked at me for a moment, then looked out the window. “I’m flying the nuke into Ballarat.”
I froze. I’d been trying to teach myself to limit my mind, to restrain myself, to do what the Endeavour would want me to do – but that was abandoned in a moment. Every part of my mind plunged into Tobias’ head. It was a sensory overload, a cavalcade of thoughts and sights and memories. The dusty deserts of western Iraq, the inscrutable eyes of Afghan civilians in Oruzgan province, the gore and bloodshed and panic during the evacuation of Darwin. His youngest daughter playing in a sandpit, his wife’s face when he’d proposed to her on holiday at sunset at Uluru. Me and Matt and Simon and Jonas, plucked half-dead from a life raft in the ocean. The back of my own head, charging away from the helicopter in that field of purple flowers up north, desperate to find my brother.
In amongst all that I could see his present thought patterns, running through his brain like a cognitive spinal cord. He was going to fly the nuke into Ballarat. Even as I parsed his thoughts he was opening his mouth to explain it to me – talking about how they needed him, how they had so many more planes than pilots, how every fighter pilot was needed for the diversionary attempt. There were Orions and Cessnas and Beechcraft too, all of them going up defenceless into the air, all of them probably suicide missions. For the nuke itself, prepped and loaded into the bay of a civilian aircraft, they needed a skilled pilot – but not so skilled that they could use him elsewhere.
I could see all of that and hear all of that. It wasn’t untrue. But there was another part of it. Tobias had never wanted to be a leader. He’d become a captain through the strength of his career record, and that was fine, that was good. But then all this happened. Undead uprisings and evacuation missions and alien invasions and the charge of more than a thousand survivors in a lonely, isolated camp in the Snowy Mountains. Not just a military base, but a place packed full of civilians and children and conflicting issues, a place that would only grow stronger and larger with every passing year. A de facto mayorship.
He’d never wanted that. He’d wanted to be a soldier, not a leader. He’d wanted to serve his country while providing for his family. But his family was gone now, and with nothing left but the service? It was too much. They asked too much. He wanted to leave, and he wanted to do it the only honourable way he had left.
“I’m fucked,” I said. “I’m fucked in the head. I already know what you’re trying to say, before you’re even saying it.”
Tobias looked uneasy; a rare sight. “You need to get back to the Endeavour. You can go, as soon as it’s over. Stay close to it, Aaron. You understand that? I know you have family on Reeve Island, I know they want you to go back there. But you should stay close to the Endeavour. You’ll be safer there.”
“Safe from what?”
Tobias looked at me with tired eyes. “You know this isn’t over,” he said. “I won’t be around to see what happens next. But it’s not going to be easy.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “It doesn’t have to happen like this. You don’t have to do it.”
“Somebody does,” Tobias said. “I wouldn’t ask anybody under my command to do something I wouldn’t do myself.” That was a practiced line – I didn’t just suspect, I knew.
“It doesn’t have to be you,” I said.
“It will be, though.”
I knew I couldn’t dissuade him. I was trying, I was saying these things by rote expectation, even though I could already tell how firmly he’d made up his mind. It was all true, that was the hell of it. Somebody had to fly that nuke in, and Tobias’ flight hours more or less fit the bill. They couldn’t spare a single fighter pilot, but it was still too important to entrust to the civilian amateurs who’d be taking up the fleet of diversionary light aircraft.
“Your family might still be alive,” I said. And oh, how I regretted those words as soon as they were out of my mouth. I saw Tobias tense, saw his lip curl, felt the flare of restrained anger in his mind.
“They’re not alive,” Tobias said. “They were in Sydney. Sydney went to hell. Jagungal has been drawing in survivors for months now, from places further away than Sydney. My name has been in the broadcast. If they were alive, they would have tried to get there by now.”
“Maybe they couldn’t,” I said. “Maybe they’re holed up in
an apartment somewhere. Maybe they can’t get out, maybe they...”
“Aaron!” Tobias said. “Stop it. I don’t need to be fucking telepathic to figure that one out. Let it go. I’m flying this mission, and I came here to say goodbye. Don’t try to stop me, because it’s not going to happen.”
He sat down on the chair opposite the bed. “I’m sorry to do this to you. But you still have Simon, you still have Jonas, you still have Jess. You still have your family on Reeve. I know how hard it was for you to lose Matt...”
“I’m not so sure I did,” I said.
Tobias wasn’t sure what to make of that, so he pressed on. “You don’t need me, Aaron,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.”
I felt hollow and miserable. “So who’d going to be in charge at Jagungal?”
Tobias gave me a wry smile. “I don’t know. Everything’s going to change after today. Maybe it will be you.”
He didn’t hug me (not for a military man) or shake my hand (because that wouldn’t be enough). I could sense him hesitating in his head. In the end he just stood up, took his olive-coloured SAS beret off, left it on the chair where he’d been sitting. He paused in the doorway.
“You’re going to live a long, long life, Aaron,” he said. “Don’t let this year define it.”
And then he left.
It’s six o’clock. One hour left.
9.00pm
The sun was dropping towards the western horizon. A few puffy clouds were tinged with orange. The temperature had gone past forty degrees at noon, and even this late in the day the heat was shimmering off the tarmac, blending and roiling with the blur from the engines of the fighter jets.
We had more than forty RAAF F/A-18 Hornets. A handful of Eurocopter attack choppers and Black Hawks from the Army, equipped for combat with Hydra rockets and Hellfire missiles. A few Seahawks from the Navy. There were five Sukhois down from the Indonesian Air Force, and six more Hornets from the USS Carl Vinson, which had been dispatched down to Norfolk Island a month ago – after the events of the year it was by far the most depleted of the still-floating American aircraft carriers, in terms of both planes and personnel, which was perhaps why they’d spared it. Overall we had a rag-tag, disparate group of fifty fighter jets, with limited support from the choppers and from artillery ground forces.
Then there were the diversionary craft. Almost a hundred civilian aircraft and unarmed military transport and surveillance planes, flown by men and women of varying skills and training who knew full well that they were going out there to be distractions: to confuse the sky, to muddy the waters, to make our assault look bigger than it was, to draw fire away from the combat jets. A hope and a prayer. But that was all we had, because we were about to attack an enemy we knew nothing about, and we knew nothing about how much they knew about us.
I was still lying in bed in the sick bay, but my mind had all but forgotten it was tethered to a body. I was mentally wandering across the airfield, as the technicians finished their final clearances and the pilots prayed to their gods. I’m an atheist, but there was something humbling about seeing all these men and women casting their prayers up to their deity of choice – the Catholics, the Anglicans, the Jews, the Indonesian Muslims. Flying south to take on inscrutable alien machines which had no gods at all.
They were frightened, to a man. There were no gung-ho young men here, no adrenaline jockeys, no bullshit Top Gun stuntmen. You don’t become a combat pilot in any of the world’s air forces without being a professional. They were old, they were mature, and they were smart enough to be scared. They knew that even if they weren’t shot down they might be caught in the nuclear blast. They knew that they were almost certainly going to die. But they were professionals, and they would do their duty.
The civilian pilots were a different story. There were a few dozen military planes – Orions, Hercules, a bunch of training aircraft, and these were all piloted by men and women showing the same fortitude as the fighter pilots. But then there were sixty or seventy civilian aircraft: Cessnas and Beechcraft and full-scale commercial planes that had been salvaged from airports across Australia, bearing the logos of Qantas and British Airways and ANA and FedEx and dozens of others. There was even a vintage World War II Spitfire somebody must have salvaged from an aviation museum. The pilots for these had been drawn from all over the place, from Jagungal and Carnarvon and Christmas Island, many of them unwilling conscripts. We needed each and every one we could get, because we had more planes than pilots. And these weren’t trained professionals but frightened survivors, many of them with families, who had seen terrible things over the past twelve months before finding sanctuary. Before being plucked out again by military recruiters, flown down here to Victoria, ordered into a cockpit. Some of them were dedicated, some of them were proud to be doing it. Many more were terrified and sweating and pissing their pants. Could you blame them? We were asking them to be rabbits to the greyhounds. We were asking them to die so the hot-shot heroes in the fighter jets had a better chance of staying alive for longer.
And then there was Tobias. He was alone in the strike plane, as they’d come to call it. A Bombardier Challenger, of No. 34 Squadron, which used to ferry the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers around – maybe even the same plane we’d flown to Christmas Island on. They needed something large enough to fit the fridge-sized nuclear package in, but still something relatively quick and manoeuvrable. The seats had been pulled out and the nuke strapped down onto the floor behind him. There were a few scientists from CSIRO and an officer from the Carl Vinson, prepping it for the final assault. The PAL codebook that so many people had fought and died over was splayed open in the palm of a technician as he armed the warhead on a keypad with his other hand, a jury-rigged tangle of cables spooling out of the innards of the bomb. And then that was it – beep, click, armed – and it was good to go.
“Timer’s set,” the technician said, and Tobias nodded. He knew the drill. It was more or less universal to each of the simultaneous assaults about to take place, drawn up over the past few months by military officers collaborating all over the world, give or take the resources available in each location. The fighter squadrons were going ahead first, to try to take out the machines’ defences; Tobias would follow behind, but it was a safe bet he might still be engaged. He had to try to get as close as possible. The nuke would detonate when he impacted something or when the timer ran out – whichever came first.
The technician duct-taped a stopwatch to the instrument panel in front of him. It read 30:00:00, and then began counting down.
“Good luck,” he said. And then he left, and slammed the plane’s door shut, and Tobias was alone.
He had two photos taped to the instrument panel on either side of the stopwatch, as he prepared for the battle. One was a family photograph, his wife and his daughters, in one of those professional studios with a wavy blue background, the kids wearing their best clothes with their hair combed neatly. The other was the same photo I have at the back of this journal, of everybody grouped out the front of the Endeavour: me, and Matt, and Jonas and Simon and Andy, and Tobias with the last two surviving members of his squad, Sergeant Blake and Corporal Rahvi.
Tobias’ watch was ticking away on his wrist. It was old, a family heirloom, an Omega RAF his grandfather had worn while flying for the RAF during the Battle of Britain. He’d given it to Tobias as a gift – not when he graduated Duntroon, but when he passed his pilot’s exam, in a civilian capacity, flying a Cessna out of Bankstown.
His watch ticked over to 7:00. Zero hour. Time to go.
A firing of engines across the tarmac – not just here, but in Ararat and Maryborough too, not to mention South Dakota and Thailand and Austria and the Congo. The sunlight glinting off the bubbles of the cockpits, the roar and whine of the engines, the sense of power and lethality as these multi-billion dollar killing machines were roused from sleep.
The diversionary planes went first, a hodgepodge fleet of aircraft taking off one afte
r the other, banking and circling, assembling in the sky high above to join forces and move south. They were accompanied by a dozen fighter jets; the other fighters took off shortly after, going even higher, up towards their ceiling, ready to swoop down on Ballarat once the state of play was clear to mission control. Dozens of air traffic controllers and military commanders were assembled in the air tower, in the hangars, in command modules and trailers dozens of kilometres away. Failsafe plans and fallbacks, down along the chain of command, in case anything should happen. The military prepares for everything, and an operation like this was a gigantic flowchart of unimaginable complexity, dotted with ranks and codenames and radio signals I couldn’t even begin to understand. All I could do was flit amongst their minds like a dragonfly, from Hornet pilot to Cessna conscript to American flight lieutenant to nuclear technician to ATC director to control officer. A jigsaw puzzle of thoughts and knowledge and emotion. A front-row seat to a defining moment in human history.
The landscape between Castlemaine and Ballarat was nondescript to a tee. The plains and hills and forests of central Victoria, quintessential bushland, classic Australiana. The sun was westering and the light was growing orange, the long shadows of eucalyptus trees cast across paddocks of dust and dead grass. Were there any human survivors down there, who’d missed or mistrusted the broadcasts urging people to leave the area, to come up to Castlemaine or Jagungal? Was there anybody down there to crane their necks, raise their eyes to the sky, and watch a fleet of over a hundred aircraft pass over their land – an air fleet the likes of which Australia had never seen before and might never see again?
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 184
