The Reckoning (Earth Haven Book 3)

by Sam Kates

* * * * * * *

  Bri’s gaze was torn between watching the final descent of the black ship, peering anxiously at the heaving ocean for glimpses of Tom and Ceri in the yellow dinghy, and looking askance at what she was becoming increasingly certain was the death of Simone.

  Will huddled close, but for comfort, not warmth. Even he had become infected by the spreading sense of despair. A restless Dusty paced in front of them, running to the cliff edge to send puzzled barks out towards Tom before running back to lick her or Will’s hand. On the other side of Will sat Colleen, sobbing quietly, giving out an air of utter defeat.

  The man from the submarine—Irving, she’d heard someone call him—stood nearby. He, too, seemed torn between gazing at the stricken submarine and the knot of people surrounding Simone. Now and then he’d bring an object to his mouth, speak into it and then wait before his shoulders drooped in dejection.

  Her glance stole again to Simone and her mind reeled in horror at the sight. Milandra, Jason and the others, including Peter and Diane, had linked hands and tightened their circle to form a sort of cradle for Simone. Without their linked arms to hold her up, it looked to Bri that she’d have fallen.

  Blood soaked the front of her blouse and had started to stain her jeans. It was running freely not only from her nose but from her eyes and ears, too. Bri couldn’t remember from biology classes how much blood the human body contained, but there couldn’t be a great deal remaining in Simone’s. Yes, she knew that Simone wasn’t technically human, but she certainly was indistinguishable in looks from a young human woman so Bri didn’t feel it unreasonable to assume that her body would hold a similar amount of blood.

  As she tore her gaze away again, from one terrifying sight to another, Milandra’s voice spoke inside her head.

  Brianne. I thought we might do this without you. I was wrong. Please come.

  She stood, but Will grabbed her hand to drag her back down.

  “Let me go. I have to help.”

  “No, you don’t. They’re not even human. They killed our mums.”

  “But now they’re trying to save us.”

  Will stared at her intently.

  I love you, Bri.

  Love you, too. Now let me go, buster!

  He released her hand. Bri strode towards the circle of people.

  She tapped Milandra on the shoulder. Milandra unhooked her left hand from Jason’s, allowing Bri to slide in between them. She grasped Jason and Milandra by their arms, recompleting the circle. A hot, coppery smell wafted from Simone.

  Bri took a deep breath and reached.

  * * * * * * *

  Simone’s psyche was a swirling mass of pain and effort. Her grip on the intellects of the new arrivals had grown tenuous but, with the bolstering effects of the six combined minds who surrounded and supported her, she was holding on.

  If Simone’s grip was weakening, the incoming Keeper’s and his people’s corresponding hold over her will was like the grasp of a titanium vice. The more she struggled to free the sailors from the paralysis under which the combined weight of intellects held them, the tighter the interlopers’ grip became.

  Milandra’s mind flitted like a dragonfly.

  She encouraged Simone to hold on, although the Chosen had little option: endure or perish. She mentally patted Jason Grant, George Wallace and Lavinia Cram on the backs, silently exhorting them to stay strong, though she could sense their determination: Jason because he was made that way; Lavinia because, despite their differences, Simone was the nearest thing she had to a best friend; and George because of his repressed admiration of humans and their art. It was a secret passion of which Milandra had long been aware; some things could not remain hidden indefinitely from a Keeper.

  She gave a virtual squeeze to the arms of Peter Ronstadt and Diane Heidler. They were at their limit, were supporting Simone to the extent of their abilities, but seemed to appreciate the gesture.

  The former London Transport man, Rodney Wilson, was struggling. Unaccustomed to having to make extensive use of his mental powers, he was already spent.

  Hold on for as long as you can, Rod. I’m going to find a way to end this.

  He no longer possessed the strength to reply.

  Since they were under the control of Simone, Milandra could not directly probe the minds of the new Keeper and his people. She could, however, delve into Simone’s psyche and gain a glimpse of her captives (and captors).

  The Chosen’s past was riddled with incidents of cruelty towards humans; she had never moved beyond seeing them purely as drones, simple creatures not much further along the evolutionary scale from amoeba, created for one purpose alone—to serve the will of Simone and her kind. Milandra caught snippets of torture and killings, from ancient times in Alexandria and Rome, when Simone must have been very young, to more recently like the torture and killing of a young woman in the check-in area of JFK Airport.

  Drawing the equivalent of a deep mental breath, Milandra peeked into the trapped psyches of the newcomers from Earth Home.

  It was akin to peering into a pit leading directly to Hell: swirling flames and sooty smoke of rage and hatred, guile and cunning, cruelty and artifice. These were the dominant passions, succoured by their Keeper’s mighty intellect. They were growing more powerful, feeding off Simone’s darker memories and characteristics. And not only hers. Each of the people providing a buttress to the Chosen possessed a darker side, like Lavinia’s lack of empathy towards suffering or Rod’s homophobia. That last was a strange one for an asexual being to possess, fuelled by spending too much time in the company of boors and bigots in the opium and drinking dens of old London; a superficial emotion to be sure, yet nonetheless a negative one upon which the newcomers fed.

  The swirling flames danced faster and redder and brighter and hotter; Simone must prevail, and soon, or fail utterly.

  Milandra knew that she must risk that which she would only endanger at the end of all need. There was no other card left to play.

  She withdrew from the vortex, reached, found and sent. Moments later, she was making room for Bri to join the circle.

  Then she re-entered the maelstrom and watched.

  At first, Bri was hesitant, her psyche showing as little more than a grey shade against the blacks and reds. Then, like the noon sun glinting off a polished surface, the girl’s purity shone out as a dazzling ray of golden whiteness, dimming the flames and blinding eyes greedy with lust for scum and dross and all things foul.

  Milandra probed and sensed their grip on Simone loosen. She knew it would not last long; they would soon recover. Even sixteen-year-old girls as sweet and innocent as Bri had some experience of lewd thoughts and dishonourable intentions; it had not been too long ago that she had held a knife to a man’s throat and nearly, very nearly, sliced it open. Only momentarily confounded, they would soon sense those darker aspects lurking beneath the bright beacon of her mind and would latch on to them, returning more powerful than before. Irresistibly so.

  Simone sensed the loosening, too, and did not hesitate. Summoning the last of her will and courage and strength, she pushed with all her might, shoving against the grip that enveloped her and freeing herself. Her last act, before her brain seized and her heart exploded, was to release the sailors from their immobility.

  Milandra withdrew and whirled around, yelling to Irving, “Now! Do it now!”

  Irving brought the walkie-talkie up to his mouth so quickly that he was in danger of losing some teeth. He barked something into it and released the button. The set crackled in response and Irving shot her a wondering look.

  Milandra was already turning away, reaching in to where the Chosen’s consciousness had been.

  Everyone out! Full protective mode. I don’t want to give them any easy targets if they try to return.

  Simone had slumped to her knees, head drooping to chest. A chest black with arterial blood. White, shocked faces of her Deputies, of Rod and Peter and Diane, of pure-hearted Brianne, gazed at each other and
at Milandra and, most of all, at the fallen Chosen.

  These things were peripheral to the Keeper. Her focus had moved inwards. The knowledge of what was coming could not prevent her drawing a sharp, gasping breath as Simone’s memories and experiences flowed into her. Tears squeezed from her eyes, hot and stinging.

  Mere moments or long minutes later, she could not tell, but it happened just as the influx of the Chosen’s memories began to lessen.

  This time the air left her body in an Oomph! and she sank to her knees in inadvertent mimicry of Simone. As though from a great distance, she was aware of the concerned face of Jason Grant swimming before her vision. In the microseconds that remained, she managed to send: Call it off. She could only trust that he would know what she meant; there was no more time.

  The essences of nearly thirty thousand people washed over and through her, and her vision dimmed.

  * * * * * * *

  The day might have been sunny and warm, but Ceri was chilled to her very core. The dinghy tossed and lurched in the ever-angrier waves, treating them to a fresh soaking with every swell. Ceri’s stomach rose and fell like the sea; Tom had lost his breakfast.

  It was he who noticed the paralysed sailor roll off into the surf; she who suggested they take the dinghy and try to save him. Irving’s man—the alert one, Manning; the other looked as if he was a dozen slices short of a loaf, as her dad used to say—readily agreed to help.

  Ceri was fed up of sitting around waiting for others to make things happen; had started to feel like an extra on a film set, there to make up the numbers. Now, as miserable and cold and nauseated as it was making her, at least she was doing something useful, no matter how ultimately futile it proved to be.

  They were too late to save the submariner who Tom had seen fall in, but so far had rescued three others. Those three lay on their backs in sloshing water in the bottom of the dinghy; fortunately for them, Tom’s breakfast had gone over the side. Not that they were in any condition to notice what they were lying in, even less to complain.

  Each of the three men could move their eyes, but nothing else. Their chests rose and fell as they breathed, but this was evidently an instinctive action. They expressed their gratitude at being pulled from the perishing, foaming sea with their stares. Otherwise, they lay in the boat like dead fish.

  Ceri’s hands were numb from cold. Her arms and back ached with the exertion of hauling the sailors’ dead-weights aboard. Her sodden clothes hung heavy, trying to drag her down to join the sailors in the footwell. A hot pain in her right buttock suggested a pulled muscle that would give her grief later; if there was a later.

  As the dinghy rode each swell, and when there was no overboard sailor to rescue, or when their relative position to the Argute—a surprisingly large and sleek craft viewed at this close range—meant that the sub wasn’t obstructing their view, Ceri watched, mesmerised, the descent of the black object.

  Being a fan of science fiction did not make her gullible and she had struggled to believe the evidence of her eyes as much as Tom, but there could now be no mistaking what had come from the skies. The Argute was black, but it was as bleached driftwood to ebony when compared to the descending object. A suggestion of sublime grace and beauty and unimaginable power, masked by intense darkness that the senses could not compute; it appeared as a shifting, undulating, pulsing blob, a crazily inappropriate but accurate word to describe what Ceri’s brain told her she was seeing. A blob, yet also a magnificent spacecraft.

  The path of its descent was bringing it in to land, or rather, to splashdown, two or three miles out to sea from where the dinghy bobbed. The thrusters ranged along the edge of the ship had slowed its rate of descent to what Ceri judged with her inexperienced eye to be the perfect velocity to allow it to settle onto the ocean’s surface without causing more than minimal damage, no matter how flimsy its outer hull.

  And it was almost down. Even when viewed from the top of an upswell, the lower edge of the craft appeared more elusive and shadowy, as though it had slipped below the horizon.

  Judging from his pinched expression, Tom also realised that the ship had almost landed. Pale as a winter’s afternoon, it was how he’d looked as he prepared to rush into the circle at Stonehenge, when terror had made him almost incapable of rational thought or deed.

  They both heard the groans and looked down together.

  All three sailors were moving, bringing hands to forehead, struggling to get up out of the sloshing water.

  Ceri glanced at the Argute. The men who had stood stationary or lain where they had fallen on its decks for the last thirty minutes or so had sprung into motion, jumping to their feet, scurrying for the open hatch.

  “Tom? What does it mean?”

  Tom tore his gaze away from the sub and turned bright eyes towards her.

  “They’ve released them,” he said, speaking so quickly that she could barely understand him. All traces of his fear of only moments before had been replaced by unrestrained excitement and the bright gleam of hope. “They’ve released the sailors—whatever was holding them has gone—they’re free to–”

  He broke off and swung his head back towards the Argute. With a hiss and a Whump! two lights, like extraordinarily bright and rapid flares, streaked from the submarine. Blinking at the glare, Ceri held her breath as the lights flew away, almost skimming the surface of the sea, in a direct line towards the spacecraft.

  “Yes, my boys! Yes!” Manning shouted behind them.

  Tom joined in. “More!” he yelled. “Chuck everything you’ve got at ’em!”

  Not one normally given to overt displays of passion, Ceri found herself caught up in the moment. “Go, go, go!” she hollered, as though supporting the Welsh rugby team. “Hit them again!”

  The sailors in the footwell, still struggling to sit up in the bucking dinghy, sent up weak cheers.

  As if in answer to their pleas came another dull concussion and two more bright lights took off towards the spaceship.

  A horrible thought struck Ceri. “Oh, Tom, what if they’re ineffective? What if it’s protected by some sort of force field? A magnetic shield or–”

  The sky to the west exploded in a gout of flame as the first two missiles struck home in the base of the spaceship. The sound of the explosion followed, bringing the dinghy to silence. All held their breath, bathed in the orange glow, waiting for the next two missiles to arrive.

  The second pair of Tomahawks flew true and found their target. More flame and explosions, and the black craft completed its descent to the surface of the Atlantic more rapidly than planned. Within a minute, it had slipped completely from sight.

  Ceri leaned across and allowed her sense of relief to lend strength to her hug. Tom hugged her back, eyes shining, but as he pulled back he frowned.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, looking at Manning, who was yanking at the starter cord of the outboard motor. It sputtered to life.

  The men in the boat’s bottom had started scooping water with their hands and flinging it over the sides.

  Without replying, Manning brought the nose of the dinghy around and pointed it at the submarine.

  Ceri looked at the hatch. A man stood next to it, glancing over his shoulder and beckoning at them to hurry.

  Then she understood. At the same time, comprehension must have dawned on Tom because his face once more drained of colour.

  “Tidal wave,” he managed to get out.

  Ceri clung to the side of the dinghy as Manning opened the throttle fully and they smashed headlong through waves in their desperate rush for the sub. It was closer, much closer, than shore. Maybe they would make it in time.

  She gave an involuntary cry as she watched the man on deck disappear from view, bringing the hatch down behind him.

  Then she saw the wave rising in the background. Maybe ‘tidal’, suggesting a wave of apocalyptic proportions, would be a slight exaggeration, but she wasn’t about to argue. From an overcrowded, inflatable dinghy the wave looke
d enormous, dwarfing the Argute as it rushed silently towards them. Ceri had time to reach out and grab Tom before the submarine disappeared into a green wall.

  She wondered about screaming—maybe better not with all that rushing water—then it didn’t matter.

  Ceri’s world became a crashing, tumbling confusion of churning, slanting greens and blues and browns.

  Then just black.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Bri staggered and would have fallen if Jason Grant hadn’t maintained a strong grip on her forearm. In front of her, a blood-soaked Simone Furlong knelt on the ground. Bri reached, but there was nothing to reach for. Simone had ceased to exist.

  The sound of distant explosions could be heard but she didn’t look up. The sight of Simone’s still form transfixed her. It was only at the noise of two more explosions, so close together they nearly sounded as one, that she was able to tear her gaze away.

  Bri gasped as she noticed Milandra. The woman’s skin had turned the colour of putty. Grant had obviously noticed, too. He let go of Bri’s arm and rushed to Milandra’s side.

  He arrived as she slumped heavily to her knees. Her dazed look seemed to focus on him momentarily, before passing on to some unseen horizon.

  Grant crouched by her side, checking that she had settled back fully onto her calves and heels.

  “Don’t want her toppling over,” he said to Bri. “She might be vacant for a while.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s receiving into the group consciousness the memories and experiences of the people on that ship.”

  “Are they all dead?”

  “I guess so.” He stood and glanced around. “George! Lavinia! I need you.”

  He strode away.

  Bri glanced out to sea. In the distance, a plume of smoke rose into the air, shredding in swirling winds. Of the black ship there was no sign, but her attention was diverted by an unusual sight. A dark line seemed to stretch across the ocean, closer than halfway to the horizon and drawing nearer. Her gaze not leaving the line, she walked to where Will sat with Colleen. They, too, looked out to sea.