He reached for his terminal and called the Admiral. There would be time to handle everything else later, he told himself, firmly. His children – and Gayle, who might well have lost her family too – needed him.
***
Henry opened his eyes.
For a long moment, he thought he was still trapped in a nightmare. The air felt hot and moist, while the lighting was low, low enough that he could barely make out anything beyond disconcerting shadows in the distance. He sat upright and discovered that he had been lying on a surface that felt oddly soft, yet eerie to the touch. It felt almost like touching a piece of human skin.
He swung his legs over the side and stood, then looked down at himself and recoiled in shock as he realised he was naked. His flight suit was gone, as was his watch, terminal, pistol and everything else he’d carried. Someone had stripped him completely naked ... he shuddered as memories returned, reminding him that he’d ejected from his starfighter and then ...
... And then what?
For a long moment, he thought he was in hell, but the coldly rational part of his mind dismissed it as unlikely. Logic suggested that he'd been picked up by a SAR team – and not a human SAR team. They’d have taken him to a sickbay or placed him in a stasis tube, not moved him to a strange compartment ... he flinched as a shadow ran through the room, then looked upwards. Something that resembled a giant stingray was gliding through the air over his head.
Understanding clicked. The aliens had rescued him and transferred him to one of their underwater cities. He was a prisoner!
Five minutes of exploration revealed the limits of his prison cell. There was a small dispenser of water and food bars in one corner, a toilet in another ... and a tiny hatch at the other end of the chamber, leading down into the water below. It looked as though he could just dive into the water and make his escape, but he had a feeling that he was too deep for escape before he ran out of breath. The aliens had created a devilishly simple prison cell that was utterly inescapable.
He sat back on the bed and waited, watching the fishes swim by overhead. There was nothing else to do.
It was nearly an hour before he heard splashing from the direction of the hatch and looked towards it. An alien was climbing out of the water with practiced ease, its bright green skin almost ludicrous in the dim surroundings. Were the aliens literally colour-blind? Or didn't they care? Maybe that made them better than humans ...
Up close, the alien was very alien. He'd seen their dead bodies, and the POWs taken to the base on the moon, but this alien was alive. It was roughly human, yet its body quivered constantly as if it were made of jelly. Its hands were oddly sinuous, thoroughly creepy. No wonder, he noted, that the aliens were happier underwater. They simply weren’t adapted to living on dry land.
He held himself still. There was nowhere to go.
The alien stopped, barely a metre from the bed, and bowed. And then it produced something metallic from a flap within its skin. Henry stared, wondering just where the alien had concealed the device. Its skin, up close, looked far too large for its body, as if it had once been very fat and then slimmed down tremendously. How much could it conceal there?
Henry winced as he heard a very faint sound, so faint he could barely hear it but it could still hurt his ears. And then there was a voice.
“We ... greet ... you,” it said. It came from the device in the alien’s hand. Its voice, Henry realised suddenly, had to be too high-pitched for human ears. Given that the aliens lived underwater, that made a certain kind of sense. “We ... must ... talk.”
End of Book II
A question for my readers.
I do have a planned Book III, but I also have a planned book covering the events on Earth during The Nelson Touch. Which one would you like to see first?
And now for something rather different … as fantasy and alternate history collide in Schooled In Magic.
Emily is a teenage girl pulled from our world into a world of magic and mystery by a necromancer who intends to sacrifice her to the dark gods. Rescued in the nick of time by an enigmatic sorcerer, she discovers that she possesses magical powers and must go to Whitehall School to learn how to master them. There, she learns the locals believe that she is a "Child of Destiny," someone whose choices might save or damn their world ... a title that earns her both friends and enemies. A stranger in a very strange land, she may never fit into her new world ...
...and the necromancer is still hunting her. If Emily can't stop him, he might bring about the end of days.
Chapter One
“It's time to close, my dear.”
Emily Sanderson nodded reluctantly as the librarian stepped past her seat and headed to the handful of other occupied chairs. This late at night, only a handful of people remained in the library, either intent on reading or simply because they had nowhere else to go. The library was small and rarely more than half-full even at the best of times. Emily loved it because it was her refuge. She too had nowhere else to go.
She stood and gathered her books, returning them to the trolley for re-shelving. The librarian was a kindly old man – he’d certainly not asked any questions when the younger Emily had started to read well above her grade level – but he got grumpy when visitors tried to return books to the shelves themselves. Not that she could really blame him. Readers had a habit of returning the books to the wrong places, causing mistakes that tended to snowball until the entire shelf was out of order. And Emily hated to see poor Rupert grumpy. He was one of the few people she felt she could rely on.
Most teenage girls her age would never crack open a history book, unless they were looking for the answers to some test. Emily had fallen in love with history from a very early age, taking refuge in it from the trials and tribulations of her life. Reading about the lives of famous people – their struggles to change the world – made her feel her universe had a past, even if it didn't have a future. Perhaps she would have made a good historian one day, if she'd known where to start working towards a history degree. But she already knew she would never find a proper life. She knew what happened to most graduates these days. They graduated from college, they celebrated, and then they couldn't find a job.
Her stepfather had certainly made it clear to her, after an endless series of arguments about what she wanted to do with her life, that she would never do anything worthwhile with her life.
“You’ll never amount to anything,” he’d told Emily, one drunken night. “You won’t even be able to flip burgers at McDonald’s!”
Her mother should never have married again – but she’d been lonely after Emily’s father had vanished from their lives, so long ago that Emily barely remembered him. Emily’s stepfather – she refused to call him father – had never laid a finger on her, yet he hadn't hesitated to tear down her confidence every chance he could, or to verbally rip her to shreds. He resented Emily and Emily had no idea why. She didn't even know why he stayed with a woman he clearly didn't love.
Emily caught sight of her own reflection in one of the windows and winced inwardly. She didn't really recognize the girl looking back at her. Long brown hair framed a face too narrow to be classically pretty, with pale skin and dark eyes that looked somehow mournful against her skin. Her clothes were shapeless, hiding her figure; she rarely bothered with makeup, or indeed any other form of cosmetics, not when there was no point. They wouldn't improve her life.
Nothing would.
And they might attract unwanted attention too.
The librarian waved to her as she took one last look at the bookshelves and headed for the counter. “No books today?”
“No, sorry,” Emily said. She had a library ticket – it said a great deal about her life that it was her most treasured possession – but she’d filled it over the week. There would be no more books until she returned some old ones. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The familiar sense of despondency and hopelessness fell back over her as she stepped out and walked down the str
eet. There was no future for her, not even if she went to college; her life would become consumed by a boring job, or an unsatisfactory relationship. No, the very thought was laughable. She was neither pretty nor outgoing; indeed, she spent most of her life isolated from her peers. Even when there were groups that might have attracted her – she did occasionally take part in role-playing games – part of her never wanted to stay with them for very long. She wanted friendship and companionship and yet she knew she wouldn't know what to do with them if she had either.
In fact, she’d been to a game earlier, before coming to the library. And she’d left early.
But now she didn't want to go home. Her stepfather might be there, or he might be out drinking with his buddies, swapping lies about their days. The former was preferable to the latter, she knew; when he was out drinking, he tended to come home drunk, demanding service from Emily’s mother. And then he shouted at Emily, or threatened her.
Or looked at her. That was the worst of all.
She wished to go somewhere – anywhere – other than home. But there was nowhere else she could go.
Her stomach rumbled, unpleasantly. She would have to prepare a TV dinner for herself, or perhaps beans on toast. It was a given that her mother wouldn't cook. She’d barely bothered to cook for her daughter since Emily had mastered the microwave. If she hadn't been fed at school, Emily suspected that she would have starved to death by now.
As she trudged home, she realized something with a crystalline clarity that shocked her; she wanted out. She wanted out of her life, wanted out so badly that she would have left without a backward glance, if only someone made her an offer.
And then she shook herself into sense. No one had made her an offer and no one would. Her life was over. No matter what it looked like on the outside, she knew her life was over. She was sixteen years old and her life was over. And yet it felt as if it would never end.
A fatal disease would have been preferable, she thought, morbidly.
The wave of dizziness struck without warning. Emily screwed her eyes tightly shut as the world spun around her, wondering if she’d drunk something she shouldn't have during the role-playing session with the nerds and geeks. She had thought that they were too shy to ever spike her drink, but perhaps one of them had brought in alcohol and she’d drunk it by mistake. The sound of giggling – faint, but unmistakable – echoed in the air as her senses swam. And then she fell ... or at least it felt like falling, but from where and to what?
And then the strange sensation simply faded away.
When she opened her eyes, she was standing in a very different place.
Emily recoiled in shock. She was standing in the middle of a stone-walled cell, staring at a door that seemed to be made of solid iron. Half-convinced she was hallucinating – perhaps it had been something worse than alcohol that she’d drunk, after all – she stumbled forward until her fingers were pressed against the door. It felt cold and alarmingly real to her senses. There was no handle in the door, no place for her to try to force the door open and escape. The room felt depressingly like a prison cell.
Swallowing hard, Emily ran her fingers over the stonework, feeling faint tingles as her fingertips touched the mortar binding the wall together. It felt like the castles she’d read about, the buildings that had been constructed long before concrete or other modern building materials had enabled the artists to use their imagination properly. There was a faint sense of age pervading through the stone, as if it was hundreds of years old. It certainly felt hundreds of years old.
Where was she?
Desperately, Emily looked from wall to wall, seeking a way out of the cell. But there was nothing, not even a window; the only source of light was a tiny lantern hanging from the ceiling. There was no bed, no place for her to lay her head; not even a pallet of straw like she’d seen in the historical recreations she’d attended with her drama group. And how had she come to be here? Had she been arrested? Impatiently, she dismissed the thought as silly. The police wouldn't have put her in a stone cell and they wouldn't have had to spike her drink to arrest her.
A hundred scenarios her mother had warned her about ran though her mind; her captor could be a rapist, a serial killer, or a kidnapper intent on using her to extort money from her parents. Emily would have laughed at the thought a day ago – her stepfather wouldn't have paid anything to recover her from a kidnapper – but it wasn't so funny now. What would a kidnapper do when he discovered that he’d kidnapped a worthless girl?
A clatter that came from outside the iron door rang through the cell and Emily looked up sharply. She would have sworn that the iron door was solid, but all of a sudden a tiny hatch appeared in the metal and a pair of bright red eyes peered in at her. There was something so utterly inhuman about them that Emily recoiled, convinced that they belonged to a monster. Or a devil. There was a second rattle at the door, which then blurred into a set of iron bars, revealing a hooded figure standing outside the cell. His eyes, half-hidden under his hood, weren’t just red; they were glowing. The rest of his face was obscured in darkness.
Behind him, there were more stone walls. A pair of skeletons stood against the wall as if they’d been left there to rot. Something about them caught Emily’s attention before she saw the first skeleton begin to move, walking forward as if it were still flesh and blood. The second skeleton turned its head until it was looking directly at Emily, the sightless eye-sockets seeming to peer deeply into her soul. Emily felt her blood running cold, suddenly convinced, right to the very core of her being, that this was no ordinary kidnapping. She must be a very long way from home.
“Welcome,” the hooded figure said. There was something cracked and broken about his voice, almost as if he hadn't spoken for a very long time and had lost the knack. “You may call me Shadye.”
He spoke his name as if Emily should know it, but it meant nothing to her. She tried to speak, but discovered that her mouth was so dry that speaking was impossible.
Shadye stepped forward, up against the bars, and studied her thoughtfully. His red eyes flickered over her body, before meeting her eyes and holding them for a long chilling moment.
Emily forced herself to speak. All the novels she’d read about kidnapped heroines suggested that she should try to get the kidnapper to see her as a human being – although she was far from convinced that Shadye himself was a human being. The fantasy books she’d devoured in an attempt to ignore her father’s departure and her mother’s desperate search for a second husband seemed to be mocking her inside her skull. All of this could be a trick, perhaps a reality TV show, but something in her mind was convinced that what she saw and sensed was real. But what? She couldn't have put it into words.
Besides, she couldn't see any TV cameras anywhere.
“How...?” She broke into coughs and had to swallow, again. “How did you bring me here?”
Shadye seemed oddly pleased by the question. “They said that there would be a Child of Destiny who would lead the forces of light against the Harrowing,” he said. Emily realized suddenly that he wanted to gloat, to show off his own cleverness. “But I knew that every prophecy has a loophole. I knew that if I could catch that Child of Destiny before it was her time, I could use her against the cursed Alliance and defeat them utterly.”
Emily felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. “But I am not that person...”
“No Child of Destiny knows who she is until her time has come,” Shadye informed her. “But the Faerie know, oh yes they know. And I called for them to bring me the Child of Destiny and they have brought me you.” He rubbed his hands together in glee. “And now I have you in my hands. The Harrowing will be pleased.”
“Right,” Emily said. Her, a Child of Destiny? Only in the literal sense...and she doubted that Shadye would believe her if she tried to explain it. What did her mother’s name have to do with anything? She fought desperately for something to say that might distract him. “And I guess I’m not in Kansas any longer?”
/>
“You are in the Blighted Lands of the Dead, on the southern face of the Craggy Mountains,” Shadye said. Her words seemed to mean nothing to him, which was more disconcerting than anything else. “Wherever this Kansas place is, I assure you that it is far away.”
Emily started to answer, and then stopped herself. “If you don’t know where Kansas is,” she said, trying to keep her growing fear under control, “I really am no longer in Kansas.”
Shadye shrugged, the motion stirring his robe. Emily frowned as she saw the way the cloth moved over his body, disturbed in a manner she found almost impossible to describe. She couldn’t see what lay beneath his robe, but there was something about the way he moved that suggested he was no longer entirely human. A very faint shimmer of light seemed to surround him, half-seen forms flickering in and out of existence ...
Somehow, that was all the more disturbing to her imagination.
This is real, Emily told herself. It was no longer possible to believe that she was standing in the middle of a TV studio, with hidden cameras recording everything she said and did. There was something so real about the scene that it terrified her. Shadye believed that she was the person he’d been searching for and nothing she could say, or do, could convince him otherwise. She thought of all the fictional heroes she’d known and loved, asking herself what they would do. But they had the writer on their side. She had nothing but her own wits.
Shadye snapped his fingers. The iron bars melted away into dust.
Ark Royal 2: The Nelson Touch Page 41
