by Shane Carrow
“True,” Tobias said. “They have some kind of cloaking technology. But from what we’ve seen in other encounters, down in Victoria, they can’t use that all the time – and they tend not to use it unless they’re in action. We’ve picked up plenty on satellite photos around Ballarat itself that are perfectly visible.
“So, the thinking is, even if it is a vessel from whatever’s set up shop in Ballarat, it’s abandoned. And that was how the different trains of thought on Christmas Island agreed to greenlight a mission. If we can secure an extra-terrestrial ship, if we can study it, reverse engineer its technology – well, that could be pretty bloody useful.”
“The other chopper,” Matt said. “The mission that got sent up before us – you said they crashed. For no reason. With no survivors.”
“There’s always a reason,” Tobias said. “We just don’t know what it was. From satellite analysis it doesn’t look like they were attacked by anything. Foul play, obviously, but not anything like another craft. Not like what happened to us this morning.”
“Great,” Matt said. “Super.”
“Where do we come into all of this?” I said. “We haven’t dreamt shit about Ballarat, we didn’t know anything about that fucking thing until it shot us out of the sky. We’ve been dreaming about the spaceship up here ever since it came down. But why? What do we have to do with it?”
“I don’t know, Aaron,” Tobias said. “Nobody does. That’s why you’re both here. That’s why there’s a lot of people on Christmas Island who have a very special interest in you, now. And not all of them are quite so trusting as me.”
I frowned. “They can’t think we have anything to do with Ballarat?”
“Connect the dots, Aaron,” Matt muttered.
“Personally,” Tobias said, “I’d find it pretty strange that after all these thousands and thousands of years, we have an encounter with not just one form of extra-terrestrial life, but two, in the space of a month. I don’t know how it all links together yet. That’s why we have to get up there and find out. But I can understand why certain people who are a lot higher up the chain than me have expressed alarm about you two.”
“And what do you think?” I said.
“I don’t get paid to think.”
“Bullshit,” Matt said. “You’re an SAS captain on a secret mission, not a private cleaning the latrines.”
A hint of a smile from Tobias. “I don’t get paid to have an opinion, then.”
“You don’t get paid at all!” I said. “Never mind your government top secret bullshit. This is it, in case you haven’t noticed. Civilisation crumbling, aliens landing – can you cut the crap and give us your honest opinion?”
Tobias pursed his lips. “All right. I’ll tell you this: I don’t know what to make of you two. I honestly don’t. Not yet. But I don’t think you’re a threat, or a danger. And I think it might yet prove to be a very lucky thing that we picked you up off that raft when we did.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “We would have died.”
“I meant lucky for everybody else, Aaron,” Tobias said. He stood up and looked out the windows. “That’ll be all for now. I’ve still got two men missing out there, and it’s snowing, and temperatures are going below freezing tonight. I’m going out with the search parties. Right now I need you two to go back down to the sick bay and stay put. Understood?”
I was tempted to argue – I still had a lot of questions – but he wasn’t kidding around. We might have our heads whirling with new information about probes from space and an alien base in Ballarat, but Tobias was thinking about Rahvi and Cutler, out there somewhere in the snow. Looking out the windows at the cold and snowy darkness, it wasn’t a pretty thought.
Matt and I went back down to the makeshift sick bay, talking and thinking and wondering. Jonas and the medical student were gone; maybe he’s off somewhere else, maybe he joined the search parties. I still haven’t seen Simon yet. We’ll have to tell them about this. I assume the rest of the SAS team already knew.
It’s too much to think about. My mind is reeling from all this new information. One thing still stands though, pulling and tugging at me, so strong I can almost feel it. Somewhere to the north, less than thirty kilometres away, lies the derelict spaceship. I can look at a blank part of the wall, at a patch of cracked concrete, and say with absolute confidence that thirty kilometres in that direction is a crashed alien spaceship. It’s like a Muslim facing Mecca and praying. I know that it’s there.
And it’s nothing to do with Ballarat, or with that horrifying thing that came down from the sky this morning. It’s different. It’s friendly. I know that as surely as I know which direction it’s in.
June 27
6.00pm
The search parties found Rahvi and Cutler last night, huddling in a snow shelter they’d made a few kilometres north-west of the dam, hungry and exhausted and suffering from exposure. A few kilometres doesn’t sound like much, but looking at the relief map in the control room drives home how rugged the terrain is out here. We may only be forty odd kilometres from the spaceship valley, but that’s not going to be a stroll in the park.
Once Rahvi and Cutler had been given a once over by the medics, Tobias gathered the rest of the chopper survivors together in one of the dam’s lower rooms. There’s only ten of us now: Tobias, Blake, Arad, Rahvi, Cutler, Professor Llewellyn, Simon, Jonas, and me and Matt. Jonas and Simon had a lot of catching up to do about the alien presence in Ballarat, and I had plenty more thoughts and questions that had arisen while I spent another sleepless night staring at the concrete ceiling and listening to the hum of the turbines.
“I hiked up the ridge this morning and called Christmas Island on the satellite phone,” Tobias said. “We have orders to push on as quickly as possible and secure the crash site. Orders unchanged, in other words. Me, Sergeant Blake and Corporal Arad are borrowing some of the dam’s horses and heading back to the chopper crash today…”
“You’re going back there?” I said in disbelief.
“That thing’s gone, Aaron,” Tobias. “And a lot of our supplies were in there, including weapons.”
It seemed reckless to me, but I didn’t say anything. I guess in the back of my head I was still afraid of that thing, still felt a gut-churning fear that it might be lurking out above those silent snowy valleys, invisible, waiting and watching.
“It’s gone,” Tobias repeated. “It shot us down, it examined us, it took some of our people, and then it would have gone back to Ballarat. They never stray too far for too long – and that’s the furthest I’ve ever known one to come.”
“Sounds like you don’t actually know much about them at all,” Simon said flatly.
Tobias sighed. “We don’t. No. So we have to make the best decisions we can. And we need our supplies. So we’re going back, and you’re staying put. And tomorrow morning, weather permitting, we set out for the target again.”
“Are we taking horses?” Matt asked.
“No. That’d be nearly every animal they have. Besides which, most of you don’t know how to ride. If we go on foot we should be able to make it there in two days.”
“Two days!” Jonas said. “It’s only about forty kays, isn’t it?”
“The chopper crash site is about four or five kays west of here,” Tobias said. “How long did it take you to walk here yesterday?”
“Well, yeah…” Jonas said. “But I wasn’t even going in the right direction, I was lost, the scouts picked me up. And…”
Tobias spoke over him. “Two days. Travel in the mountains is slower than you think. I’m told there’s a private ski lodge north of here with a family holed up that’s friendly to the dam; we can stay there for the night, move out again the next morning. Barring any bad weather, it should be easily manageable.”
After they headed out, Cutler and Rahvi went and busied themselves with other tasks as well, and the five of us civilians were left alone. We ended up pushing Professor Llewellyn about what he kn
ew. He’s not a naturally talkative person and I got the impression he’d been putting up with threats and warnings about top level security clearance much longer than we had – or that he took them more seriously, at least – but we did manage to squeeze a bit of knowledge out of him in the end. One of the most pertinent pieces of information was that there’s more than one alien ground station, not just Ballarat.
“I’ve heard the Americans have one on their territory, too,” Llewellyn said. “Nothing confirmed, nothing I’ve seen anyway. But they say it’s in Dakota, or Montana, or somewhere around there, and that would put it right on top of where they had their own probe land. So, if they’re moving in on top of the probe sites… well, there were at least half a dozen of them. Maybe more that we don’t know about. So there could be that many of these bases of theirs, too. All over the world.”
“This is so fucked up,” Jonas said. “I could just about wrap my head around the zombies. But this is fucking weird.”
“I wouldn’t believe any of this,” Simon said. “Unless we saw that thing yesterday. I wouldn’t have believed it at all, except for that.”
Llewellyn nodded, biting his lip. “It makes it a lot more real, I can tell you that. It’s one thing to be back on the island, or on the Canberra, just looking at all the satellite photos and reading the reports. To actually see it right in front of you… I mean, Jesus, it’s not like I’ve been hiding away this whole time, I was in Sydney when all this started, I’ve seen plenty of horrors. But that was something else.”
“Tobias better be fucking right about that thing being gone,” Matt said. “I don’t know what he was basing that on.”
“Blind hope?” Jonas speculated.
Tobias did turn up safe and sound, anyway, along with Blake and Rahvi and the handful of scouts they’d taken with them, having retrieved a lot of our gear from the chopper crash. So it looks like we’re all set to leave tomorrow morning – not just ten of us, apparently, but eleven, because Andy will be joining us.
“We need a guide,” Tobias explained. “Well, we don’t need one, but it’s probably a good idea to have a local with us. Like I said, forty kays is a lot of mountains to cover.”
“He’s not a local,” I said. “He’s a cowboy, he’s from down near Wagga Wagga or something.”
“Well, he’s been here long enough, and he knows how to handle himself better than the others. Go get some sleep, Aaron – we’re leaving at first light.”
Of course first light in winter at these latitudes is about 7:00am – in fact the winter solstice was only a few days ago, according to Simon, the shortest day of the year. Which is not something I tended to pay attention to in balmy climes of Perth, but which takes on new meaning in the howling windy darkness of the Snowy Mountains in winter.
Still. I could do with some sleep. I’m barely ever sleeping now – thinking too much, brain ticking away too much, lying there in the dark with the tug of the spaceship in my guts.
June 28
9.30am
Another dream. Right on the eve of reaching the ship itself, here in the heart of the mountains, tucked away inside a sleeping bag with the hydroelectric turbines humming through the concrete: I dreamed again of climbing that snowy crest, of standing there and looking down into the valley at that beautiful, impossible object from the stars.
There had been times in the past when the dream had changed. I could never physically see anyone else there, but sometimes I could sense them. Sometimes there were many other people, coming down into the valley with me; sometimes there was just Matt; sometimes, disturbingly, I was alone.
This time I was just with Matt. I could sense him there, having that same dream as me, flickering at the edge of my consciousness. But he wasn’t there in the same real, physical sense that everything else was: the snow, the gum trees, the crippled, broken spaceship.
Sergeant Blake shook me awake just as I was rising out of the dream. “Wakey wakey,” he whispered in the dark. “Time to go.”
I pulled together my gear, laced up my boots, pulled on the bulky blue parka that was a gift from Barton Dam after my military-issue one had been gashed open in the chopper crash. Matt and I went out into the silent corridors, blinking in the harsh light of subterranean electricity, following Blake as he woke the other civilians in their various borrowed rooms. Barton Dam felt like an enormous concrete rabbit warren, hundreds of survivors sleeping peacefully away inside those thick walls.
As we climbed the stairs, I kept thinking about the dream. I’d been alone; or maybe just with Matt. Where were the others? Where were Simon and Jonas? Where was Captain Tobias, Professor Llewellyn, the rest of the SAS? What did it mean?
It meant nothing. Those dreams, I’d decided, were biological urges. They were designed to bring me – and Matt – to this place. They weren’t prophecies. They didn’t mean anything bad was going to happen, that anything was going to kill our friends and leave us alone in this cold, dark snow.
That was what I told myself.
We emerged at the top of the dam into freezing morning air, the early light of the rising sun still hidden beyond the eastern mountains, just lighting up a few ragged clouds high above. It was just past seven o’clock, and the dam’s sentries were changing over, switching up on the towers and the parapet of the stockade, trading cigarettes and warming their hands over fires in steel drums. A waft of woodsmoke and ash blew across the courtyard as Sergeant Blake led us over to the gates, where Captain Tobias and the other SAS troops were speaking with some of Barton Dam’s leaders.
“…understand all that, I understand all that,” one of the leaders was saying, a grey-bearded old man with the fur-lined hood of his parka drawn around his face. “We’re happy to help. But it’s looking like a hard winter. And help doesn’t have to mean… You know, information is help. The more we know about what’s going on in the rest of the country, the better we can plan, you know what I mean?”
“I understand,” Tobias said. “But you have to understand that the government doesn’t have a complete picture either. We’re making decisions based on the best we can figure out, just like everybody else. I can update the database with them, I can make sure they know that you helped us. But at the end of the day you’re still going to be on your own here. We all are. For now.”
The dam leaders didn’t look pleased – they’d expected more of a tangible reward for helping us - but they shook his hand and had a few words with Andy. Before I knew it the palisade gates were being drawn open and we were trudging out into the snow, making our way up one of the trails on the valley’s northern flank.
“What did they want?” I asked, feeling surprisingly light of breath already, shifting my backpack on my shoulders.
“Same as everyone,” Tobias said. “A helicopter full of food and guns to drop down on them.”
“You actually do have helicopters full of food and guns dropping down on people, though,” I pointed out.
“On military bases,” Tobias said. “Not on civilian hideouts. We hand shit out to every civilian who’s managed to keep a few people alive this long, we’re not going to have much left. And these people are better set up than almost anywhere else I’ve heard of. They don’t need help.”
“They saved our asses.”
“Yeah, and like I told them, I’ll do what I can,” Tobias said. “But it’s not my decision anyway.”
“I guess it won’t matter,” I said. “Not once we get to the ship.”
Tobias glanced at me curiously. “I hope you aren’t pinning your hopes on everything changing overnight.” And then he put on a quicker pace, striding up the path, leaving me to fall behind.
I thought about that, as we reached the top of the valley and looked down at Barton Dam from above – looking strangely tiny, more so than last time, now that I’d wandered around inside its corridors and seen how many people it sheltered. A moment later we were over the ridge, and moving down into the next valley.
I don’t expect reaching
the spaceship to solve anything like that. I mean, at the end of the day the dead will still be hunting the living, 99% of the world’s population will still be gone, we’ll still all be wondering whether we’ll live to see New Year’s or not. But I’ve invested so much in this, thought so much about it, that I forget that sometimes.
The last time I did that was when we were hellbent on getting to Albany to find Dad. And you know how that turned out. Everything went to shit, and the next day the sun came up and the world kept ticking, and we still had to find food and make plans and stay one step ahead of the undead.
This isn’t quite the same, though. Fuck. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see when we get there. We’ve stopped for a rest break already, just a couple of hours after leaving the dam. We’ve only covered a few kays, up and down over ridges and mountains. Tobias wasn’t wrong. Walking at a 45-degree angle, or whatever it is, through thick snow… it’s not quite the same as trudging through the bushland of WA in summer.
5.45pm
We pushed on through the day, up and down valleys, through snow gum forests, crossing gurgling creeks and pushing through deep snowfields. I fell into conversation with Andy for a while, who seemed as comfortable on foot as he had been with his horse, still with his rifle over his shoulder and his sword buckled at his side. “What’s with the sword, anyway?” I said. “I thought you said you get hardly any zombies up here.”
“Habit, I guess,” he said. “This thing saved my ass about a hundred times down on the plains. Nothing like it – a machete’s good too, but this was at my Dad’s place down in Gundagai. I think he bought it in Phuket years ago – he used to keep it under his bed in case a burglar broke in. If he could see what I ended up using it for…”
Andy snorted slightly, sort of a laugh, but not quite. I didn’t ask him what had happened to his dad.
“So how come you’re with us?” I said, changing the topic. “Drew the short straw?”
“Nah, mate, I volunteered,” he said. “I want to see what you blokes are up to.”
