There weren’t. I knew that. If there were any there I would have felt them – might even have been able to speak to them, to urge them to flee north, to escape what was coming. But there were none, not this close to Ballarat. The machines had purged the landscape, plucking any stragglers into their horrible city for God knows what.
The planes approached Ballarat, joined by squadrons from Maryborough and Ararat, and now their target came into view, slinking up from beneath the horizon like a foul black mass of garbage. A cancerous mole, subsuming half the city, expanding in all directions from its growth in a field just beyond the metro limits. Almost perfectly circular in diameter, sprouting forth hundreds of spires and towers, all of them jet black and yet transparent – with a glistening beneath them, a sense of movement. Buttresses and piping and extensions, loops and nodes. Just as when Tobias had first shown me the satellite photos on the HMAS Canberra, just as when the CSIRO had shown us molecular closeups of the nanomachines on Christmas Island, just as when I’d seen it in the flesh when I woke on that hot, empty street in Ballarat: it made my head hurt and my eyes recoil. It looked wrong. It looked like it couldn’t possibly join together properly. It looked like it broke the laws of physics.
I wasn’t the only one overwhelmed by it. A sense of revulsion spread through the approaching pilots, even though they knew what they’d see, even though they’d all been briefed and prepped and seen more or less the same things I had. Most of them swallowed their fear and disgust, kept to the course, only an imperceptible wobble in their planes’ wings showing they’d been bothered by it. But some of them broke and fled. About a dozen of them, deserters, civilian conscripts who’s been pissing themselves even back at the airfield, who weren’t prepared to fly into the maw of hell. Their Cessnas and Beechcraft peeled away from the fleet, went east or west or north, ignoring radio orders from ground control to return to course.
The fighter pilots, cruising a few kilometres higher up, ignored them. It wasn’t their job to sheepdog deserters. They were steeling themselves for what was to come. And even now, as they closed the gap, as the fleet came within the last twenty kilometres of the machine base, it began to stir.
It was like a disturbed beehive or an ant’s nest. There was a shift of movement across the towers – a sense of opening up, like a flower in sunlight. And then the air around the base burst to life.
These were not the slater-like utility vessels that had shot down our chopper in the Snowy Mountains, or shot down my plane over the desert on the way back from Christmas Island; machines that had been dispatched to rendition captives. These were sleek, crystalline structures, all sharp angles and jet black shards. They burst out of the machine base like bats out of hell, and suddenly the battle had begun.
The civilians who had pushed down their fear could do so no more. Their planes broke ranks immediately. What had been a tight, controlled fleet became a chaotic scrum of pitching, diving, rolling terror. The machines tore through it like sharks into a pod of seals, and the radio waves came alive with the sound of wretched screaming and pleading. More of them were trying to flee now, or perhaps even all of them, but it was too late. They’d served their purpose, they were flooding the skies, drawing the attention of the machines who couldn’t tell a combat aircraft from a harmless one, at least for now. Alien missiles and flechettes tore through the air and ripped apart riveted steel, sending fragments of burning metal spiralling to the ground. The hot, forlorn paddocks outside Ballarat were soon littered with burning hulks and chunks of wreckage, even as parachutes drifted to the ground, the sky above them alive with the tracery of an enormous, chaotic dogfight.
The fighter squadron above the fray, a dozen Super Hornets led by an RAAF wing commander, dropped down upon the machines like birds of prey.
The Endeavour had been right. The machines had good technology, better technology, but this was our planet and our airspace and our fucking battleground, and the human race had been building and refining and perfecting air fighter technology for a hundred years. The fighter jets had the advantage of surprise, and inflicted great initial damage on the machines, Sidewinder missiles streaking through the carnage and rotary cannons tearing them apart. It was a chaotic three-dimensional battlefield, a carnival ride of fighter jets and panicked civilian aircraft and sudden, monstrous glimpses of machine fighters.
In the sick bay at Castlemaine I twitched and murmured. Somebody watching me, standing over me in that quiet room, might have thought I was having a bad dream. Visions of fiery death played across the inside of my eyelids; lives in full flight were suddenly cut short as I rode shotgun in their spirits, leaving me abruptly stranded, switching quickly to another. Death after death after death. Like the power cutting out on a TV.
The element of surprise waned, and the battle turned against the Super Hornets. The machines understood now who the real threats were, and suddenly the civilian aircraft were left alone. But their ruse had been successful – no more fighters issued forth from Ballarat, no more reinforcements. We’d already lured out their entire air fleet. I surfed from fighter pilot to fighter pilot, feeling the adrenaline and the intensity and the screaming, the shouting of call-signs as they were whittled down to five and then four and then three...
The remaining fighter pilots inbound from Castlemaine hit the afterburners, bearing down on Ballarat. Thirty-five Hornets and Super Hornets and Sukhois, gleaming in the evening sunset, the combined scream of their engines tearing a wake across the bushland.
They arrived in a chaotic maelstrom. The last few Hornets from the first attack squad were engaged in desperate evasive manoeuvres, some of them climbing all the way up to the limit of their flight ceilings, some of them dropping down towards ground level in the hope of shaking their attackers off. There was one flight lieutenant – I got just a glimpse of his name, Danny or Donny, from Tasmania once upon a time, wife and son safe on Christmas Island – tearing down into the hills near Creswick, only a few feet above the treetops, staying as low as he could, cutting through the valleys, luring some of the machines away to the north-east before pushing his luck too far and grazing an electricity pylon and all of a sudden the world was a split-second jumble of horizon and forest and glass before everything crumpled up and he was gone. Another pilot had spent all his Sidewinders and was now being pursued by a machine fighter, right on his tail, slanting down over the abandoned city – and then suddenly a civilian plane, one of the tiny Cessnas or Beechcraft, came hurtling up right past his canopy and slammed into the machine, a huge explosion of aviation fuel and some dark mechanical substance, fragments raining down upon the ruins of Ballarat. The fighter pilot had only a second to wonder whether it had been a brave and deliberate kamikaze or a sheer accident before another pair of machines flanked him and tore his plane apart with those dark, jagged flechettes.
The last survivor of the advance squadron, the wing commander, had turned tail and was burning back towards the cavalry. He hoped they could take a missile lock and kill off his immediate pursuers. He was right. Somewhere above the forests of Hepburn Springs the back-up fleet appeared on his radar, and a volley of missiles streaked above his canopy to tear his pursuer apart. He dived, rolled, turned and came up behind them, rejoining the new fleet for the final engagement.
Circling high above Castlemaine, Tobias turned his nose to the south.
There were fewer machine fighters now, but they were still strong in the air as the secondary squadron approached the city, still buzzing and roiling like angry wasps. The civilian decoys were mostly fled or dead, but there were still a brave few provoking them, flying amongst their number, trying to drawn them out. A Qantas passenger plane and a Pilatus trainer and, it gladdened my heart to see, the old Supermarine Spitfire. There were even a few helicopters left – they’d come in late and come in low, swooping across the plains, and though the machines had made quick work of them, they’d taken more than a few of them down in turn with Gatling guns and Hellfire missiles.
But
now the bulk of the fighter jets descended and the battle began again in earnest.
How to describe that, how to set that down for history? You can’t begin to understand it unless you’ve sat there in the cockpit in flight suit and helmet, felt the g-force on your muscles and the hiss of the respirator and the sounds and cues of the targeting system – that beautiful, symbiotic relationship between man and machine, the pinnacle of human evolution, turning a creature of flesh and blood into a high-tech killing machine that can scream through the sky at over a thousand kilometres an hour and rain death down on something over the horizon. You just can’t grasp it. Even I can’t – all I did was ride among their minds for one glorious hour, look through their eyes, take in their memories.
Suffice to say the skies above Ballarat, with the last light of the day sinking towards the western horizon, became a tumultuous three-dimensional battlefield that has no comparison. The radio waves were alive with the screams of the dying, the shouted orders of the squadron commanders, the cries for help and the warnings to fellow warriors. The air was alive with human voices only. The machines were silent – remorseless killers, darting through the battle, blackening the sky with their presence.
Tobias came in from the north, eight or nine kilometres above the ground – commercial cruising height, Everest height. I saw the battle down below from his own eyes: a vague and distant series of missile explosions, muzzle flashes, the glinting of sunlight on shifting, rolling cockpit canopies. Sudden explosions marking the death of a human or the end of a machine.
He began to dive.
The surviving fighter pilots – only two dozen of them, now – knew he was coming and shifted their combat tactics accordingly. Some tried to lure the machines away, some focused their attacks on those that would come directly into his path. Shifting, swirling patterns of air corridors were at play, like the lines of power across a chessboard. It made my mind wrinkle in confusion, but these men had been training for this their whole lives. All I could do was watch.
“Incoming,” Tobias said on the open channel. “ETA 180 seconds.”
An Indonesian Sukhoi exploded directly above the city, caught by simultaneous machine missiles.
“150 seconds.”
A Super Hornet had dropped down low, tearing above the fields and farmhouses east of Ballarat, pursued by a pair of machine fighters. Another fighter dropped in behind the chase and tore them apart with its nose cannon.
“100 seconds!”
The curving, nightmarish battle in the sky. The ground was just another colour, twisting and turning in some irrelevant part of the cockpit glass. Everything was about the battle computer, the vectors and the speeds and the targeting. Something tore the back of a Hornet apart, and the pilot hit the eject button instinctively, suddenly finding himself a mere witness to the battle, dangling from a parachute kilometres above the freakish architecture of the alien city, machines moving around him at supersonic speeds in the light of the setting sun...
“30 seconds to impact!” Tobias yelled over the radio. “If you’re getting out, get out now! Go, go, go!”
The Bombardier dropped towards Ballarat. A few of the fighter jets on the outside edge of the battle rolled out of combat, hit their afterburners, punched it low and fast across the fields. North, south, east and west, any direction they could take, praying to put as much distance between themselves and the city before the nuke went off.
I watched through Tobias’ eyes, shared his last moments. I saw the jet black alien city looming up through the cockpit glass. The machines realised too late that something important was coming, diving down out of the heavens like the hand of God. The last few machine fighters turned their guns on the Bombardier, and Tobias felt the tail and the rear rip away, felt shrapnel tear through his legs and stomach, felt his plane begin to fall as much as dive, but it was too late, too late for them to stop it, the momentum had built up and he and the nuke were plummeting down towards the city and...
Apocalypse. Armageddon. End Times.
I found myself hurled back into my own body, waking up, rolling out of the bed in sheer shock, banging my elbow and legs on the tile floor. The sheets were coiled and slick with sweat, drenched with it. I stumbled to my feet, nauseous and disoriented, wondering if I’d really just seen everything that had happened or if it had all been a bad dream.
A horrible harsh glare was coming into the room from the high, narrow window. I lurched for the door, stumbled outside. An eerie orange and red glow suffused the corridor, leaking in through the windows, a summer sunset mixed with something far more intense. I headed for the exit door.
A howling wind scattered dead eucalyptus leaves across the tarmac, the branches of the trees shaking furiously outside the airfield fence. Others emerged from the buildings – ATC techs, officers, ground troops who’d had no role to play in this final air battle. All of us turned our heads to the south, across the diabolical red sky, where beyond the tin roofs of the hangars and air terminals we could make out a distant mushroom cloud, far to the south.
The wind howled for a moment more, sharp and angry and apocalyptic, before suddenly vanishing, leaving everything still. The mushroom cloud rose higher into the sky, drifting, swelling, lingering.
A murmur went through the assembled crowd – people pointing, talking, attention drawn away from the mesmerising cloud. Like any large human outpost the airfield at Castlemaine had attracted its share of undead. They’d kept the numbers down and it had been nowhere near as bad as RAAF Base Wagga, but there had always been at least a few dozen scattered loosely along the chain-link fencing. Now, as we turned to look at the closest fence, we saw the perimeter still and silent. The undead that had been gathered there for so long, howling and screaming day and night, rattling the metal in their rotting hands, had suddenly collapsed. The base was surrounded by nothing more than motionless corpses. In the stillness of their second death, they no longer seemed like zombies at all. Just... bodies. Just dead people.
Only one surviving fighter jet from the battle flew overhead. It performed a victory roll as it screamed through the air. Down below – slowly at first, then gathering in pace, an uncontrollable outburst – the crowd began to cheer and laugh and cry and hug each other.
I stood with a hand against the wall, feeling like vomiting from the rollercoaster of minds I’d careened across. People who were dead now, almost a hundred people, who’d been living and breathing not thirty minutes ago. I didn’t feel like cheering.
December 27
That first night after the battle, I don’t think anybody slept. I spent it standing in the control tower, watching as the reports came in from around the world. The mushroom cloud far to the south had dissipated and drifted away in the prevailing south-easterly wind, which was also dispersing the fallout towards the dead city of Melbourne, not north towards us; we were in no danger from that.
But it was a tense atmosphere, waiting in that room with a nervous and sweating crowd of techs and officers, all of us peering over other people’s shoulders at the screens and monitors. We’d taken out our ground station. We’d done our part. But what about the rest of the world?
The results came in slowly through the night, filtering in across the world’s patchy remaining communication links. Thailand: success. Argentina: success. The United States: success. It was almost dawn by the time we heard of the very last one, a successful attack in Siberia. Nine nuclear kamikaze strikes, nine destroyed ground stations. The room breathed a collective sigh of relief.
And yet – what now?
In the morning they flew me back to Wagga in a little Qantas turboprop along with a few pilots and officers, the great mechanism of the military shuffling its pieces around in the aftermath of a successful operation. I don’t know who’s giving the orders now that Tobias is gone – the Governor-General and General McLeod on Christmas Island, I guess. Tobias was the human face of the military for me, but there’s still hundreds of officers with obscure titles and jurisdiction
al areas. The ADF is humming along as always.
I slept fitfully during the flight, which was only an hour, constantly nodding off and then jerking awake. As we approached Wagga I could see enormous plumes of black, oily smoke rising into the air, and for a moment I panicked. I thought there’d been some terrible disaster. But as the plane banked and came in to land, I could see what it was.
They were burning the bodies. The thousands upon thousands of undead who’d spent so long clawing at the fences of RAAF Base Wagga, rendering it an island in a sea of zombies, the only way in or out by air. Their long siege was over. They were digging trenches in the fields, dragging the bodies in, and setting them alight. Men and women wearing goggles and t-shirts wrapped around their mouths, pouring jerry cans of fuel into the mass grave, shifting and stoking the burnt bodies with long-handled poles. A grim and ugly job.
I remembered clearing out corpses after the attack on Eucla. I remembered how nerve-wracking it had been, because of the pretenders – the type that would be lying motionless like any other corpse, but would then grab your wrist and open their eyes and mouths as you leant in to haul them away. That couldn’t happen now, but I doubted that knowledge made the job any less anxious. We’ve been conditioned to fear dead bodies. It’s going to take a long time to break that conditioning. Maybe some of us never will.
The mood at Wagga – inside the fences, away from clean-up detail – was almost jubilant. I suppose the remaindered staff here hadn’t just witnessed the long and ugly battle that saw hundreds of pilots killed; and I’m sure it must have been an enormous relief to no longer be trapped by thousands of undead. I was met by a young flight lieutenant who’d been left in charge of Wagga as most of the brass gathered at the forward posts, and he shook my hand excitedly. “We did it!” he said. “I can’t believe it, but we really did it! You should have seen it – they all just dropped, just like that, like flicking a switch! It’s over!”
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 185
