Angel Stations (45 page)

Their objective was clear: they would attempt a clean kill. Katie strapped on her comms helmet and recoil armour, then led them in a quick prayer before hitting a button to open the shuttle door.

The empty forest clearing stared back at them.

Using hand signals, and maintaining radio silence, they fanned out towards the nearest trees, the shuttle entrance a bright rectangle of light behind them.

Elias watched the naive youngsters deploy from behind one of the shuttle’s landing struts. Once they were far enough away, he stepped out from his meagre hiding place and jumped up into the shuttle’s airlock. Sudden yells of protest from outside were cut off as the outer door slammed shut. The only sound now was a faint pinging, as bullets ricocheted off the hull.

Elias strode through to the cockpit, and within seconds had activated a console command blocking external access to the ship’s computer. This would ensure that the previous occupants could not run an override to reopen the airlock from outside.

He was now very hungry, so went looking for the mess, which was tucked into a narrow space between two bulkheads. It was stocked with enough food for several days, so he grabbed himself a sandwich and went back through to the cockpit.

He ignored the figures jumping and yelling outside, and the occasional ping of a missile bouncing off the exterior. The shuttle looked like it had seen much better days, but it was sturdy and well maintained.

He fired up the engines, watching the crew outside scatter for the trees as they built up to a whine and then a roar.

Trencher, here we come
, he thought, as the forest dropped away below him. With a sudden thought, he turned south first.

This shouldn’t take long, he hoped.

Ursu

The whole world was reduced to white, and Ursu reflected that it wouldn’t take long to go crazy out here. The tribe’s thousand and one odd little rituals – so simple and crude compared to the beautiful complexity of Nubalan rituals – now came to make a great deal of sense to Ursu. They grounded the tribesfolk in the real, the here and now, for all that their culture seemed to avoid dealing with issues of space and time. For them, the spirit paths took precedence over everything, even the concept of existence itself.

There were three of them now: Ursu himself, a pathfinder called Telidante, and Telidante’s son, called Desker. Ursu had undertaken an astonishing amount of walking since he had left Nubala, but compared to the pathfinder, he was a mere beginner. Telidante’s fur was streaked with white, his features hardened by a lifetime of scouting.

Desker was close to Ursu’s age, a little younger perhaps, but appeared so effortlessly resourceful that Ursu felt like the hopeless town-dweller he thought he’d left behind.

The rest of the tribe wasn’t going any further. The stone pillar here marked the end of their spirit path – as far as they were concerned, it marked the end of the world. But it was good that Telidante and his son were prepared to help Ursu on towards the mountains. The foothills surrounding the mighty peaks were clearly visible, though the tops of the mountains themselves were wreathed in drifting clouds. As they approached the range, Ursu thought he had never seen anything so impossibly beautiful.

‘Another one,’ said Telidante, while stopping to take a piss in the snow. The spirit pillar had long vanished into the white horizon behind them.

‘What?’ Ursu had been blankly following them, his thoughts lost in the vastness around them. But then he saw what Telidante indicated: a silvery streak gliding between the summits like some great bird. It was no more than a speck reflecting sunlight, but despite that would, close up, be clearly of enormous size.

‘Bad omen,’ muttered Telidante, picking up his pack again. ‘We’ll take you as far as the pass, then you’re on your own. We should be there in a few hours.’ His eyes flicked around the landscape constantly, though Ursu couldn’t see anything out there to draw his attention. He never looked directly at Ursu for more than a fleeting instant, and seemed to prefer just one or two words where most might use a dozen.

Telidante continued, staring off into the far distance as they trudged on. Ursu’s legs constantly ached as he struggled to keep up with the other two.

‘Has anyone ever traversed this pass before?’ he asked eventually. Minutes or hours might have passed since last anyone spoke, but it was hard to tell. They were now passing some great stony outcrops half-hidden under ice and snow. The ground seemed to be rising slightly, as if changing gradually to a newly minted landscape.

Telidante just snorted, so it was Desker who replied. ‘Anyone passing through there dies, or the Shai soon get ’em. Snow and ice blocked the way for a long time now, but things’re changing.’ The boy said this with audible regret. ‘Heard folk might be able to get through now, but we Deshugevvit don’t know if any succeeded. None ever came back, if they did.’

Ursu could elicit no further information from them.

As another silver streak shot across the distant landscape some hours later, Ursu glanced at the other two and noticed their grim expressions and down-turned faces.

They came finally to the foothills and stopped to rest. There was something on the other side of these mountains, thought Ursu. Something that lived only as a legend, a story. He slept fitfully for a while, as the others started building a fire. He woke to see one of the silver bird-things hovering far overhead with an audible roar.

Desker and Telidante seemed to freeze, as they sat warming their hands over flickering flames, this time watching as the
thing
passed overhead. Telidante began to mutter some kind of prayer under his breath, the rapid syllables blending together. His son began to pack up their belongings.

‘You’re on your own now,’ announced Desker, as his father turned back the way they’d come. ‘We can’t go any further, and we don’t want to know what’s happening here.’ Ursu tried to reason with them, but Desker was already running to catch up with his father. They headed off into the snow without another word, even a farewell.

Ursu stood still as the great silver bird circled far above him.
I can’t turn back
, he thought.
And how could I ever escape from such a thing?

Several minutes later the silver bird seemed to drop suddenly, plunging down into the snow covering the foothills. Ursu could hear a strange high-pitched whining sound. He stood transfixed, listening hard and staring into the distance, but a high wind had picked up suddenly, blurring the defining line between sky and horizon, whipping the surface snow into the air in a frenzy. The silver bird had disappeared from sight. He picked his stuff up and continued trudging towards the foothills.

A little while later he felt sure he could see something: a tiny, mobile dot in front of him. But it vanished, obscured by the blizzard howling around him. He concentrated only on putting one foot in front of the other, till eventually the wind subsided, and the sun again shone harsh and bright upon the world.

What he had noticed earlier resolved itself into a figure, but one that stirred up a vague disquiet in Ursu’s soul. As Ursu kept walking, the figure came ever closer.

With stunted ears, and its legs bent the wrong way, it was swaddled up in unfamiliar clothing. Soon Ursu could hear the sound of its feet crunching through the snow, and a short distance behind it was the silver bird, close enough now for him to see it was something manufactured.

Ursu halted, staring at the strange creature approaching him.
Shai
, he thought instantly, though the stories he had been told in the House of Shecumpeh described nothing quite like this.

Yet he recognized it as that thing he had only ever seen hovering at the edge of his vision, or lurking in shadows, though it did not appear as badly mutilated as previously. It stopped right in front of him, casting curious eyes over this last remaining priest of Nubala.

Ursu gazed upon the creature that had guided him here, so far from home.

Roke

Roke heard the whine first, as from some mythical beast, increasing in volume and pitch as it drew closer. He stepped rapidly to the flap of his tent and peered outside. A terrible wind had whipped up from nowhere, and the air was filled with the sound of frightened ice-beasts braying and soldiers running for their weapons.

There appeared to be no enemy, however. Until Roke looked up.

Kim stepped up beside him and carefully laid tiny fingers on his long arm, causing him to look up at the Shai’s bizarrely hairless face. Roke interpreted her action as meaning:
There is nothing to worry about
.

Roke stepped outside and caught the attention of a senior guard who, despite his evident confusion and fright, managed to come to some kind of attention. In the meantime, the enormous flying craft – the second such that Roke had seen within only a few days – dropped onto half-frozen grassland at the edge of the encampment, dwarfing everything around it.

Roke felt his terror dissipate, replaced by deep fascination. He had been aware for some time through his dealings with the Monster that there was much more to his world than he could ever have guessed. But now he felt that realization deep within him, now saw solid and clear evidence somehow more potent than when that first craft had hurtled into the forest, bringing these alien creatures to his attention.

He told the guard to assume command for the moment, to gather men and weapons ready, but not to attack. As light appeared on the side of the craft, the Shai stepped towards it, then stopped, looking back at Roke.

The alien studied her uncertainly. It was so tempting to gather up his followers and order them to return to Tibe.

Kim beckoned him with some meaningless noise. Roke thought hard for a few seconds, then decided to follow the Shai. She walked rapidly ahead of him, climbing into the opening in the side of the craft.

He had considered earlier that this would be his last adventure. It would hardly do, therefore, not to see how it ended. Roke stepped forward to join her.

His own people seemed too dumbfounded to do anything but watch as Kim guided him upwards and inside the machine. He found himself in a world he could never have suspected existed.

Vaughn

Katie had reported back in about their plight. His son Matthew was still untraceable, as was Trencher. The members of a survey team sent out on a regular maintenance mission had also disappeared. It all combined to drive Vaughn insane with anger.

Of course, the gamma wavefront would arrive here within mere hours, slamming its way through the inner Kaspian system at the speed of light. The entire community was in pandemonium as last-moment preparations were being made. Half of the population was down in the Shelters already, and would remain there for several weeks, until the worst of the radiation had dispersed. After that they would emerge, to a New World awaiting them.

Vaughn hurried out of the Centre, walking past the now-abandoned homes of his people. Faces nodded in greeting as he rapidly passed them. Goods, equipment and food supplies were being shifted down the steep earth ramp that led to the Shelters. On the surface it looked like chaos but, as far as such things go, all was proceeding to plan.

Sam was out there somewhere too. Ernst Vaughn realized the mistake he’d made by playing into his brother’s hands.

Somewhere deep inside of him, a tiny thought of defeat struggled to be recognized. He clamped down on it, hard. Failure was not, could never be an option. That would be to deny centuries of planning by himself as well as the Primalists back on Earth; it would also be to deny God, and such a catastrophic crisis of faith could not be countenanced.
I am doing only what is good
, he thought.
Something holy, blessed; a total cleansing
.

Ernst Vaughn glanced down at the rifle in his hands, as if aware of it for the first time. It gleamed in the sunlight, freshly fabricated for him by one of the automated industrial units. It nestled in his grip, quiescent – not truly a killing thing, he thought, until serving for that purpose.

He thought of the pain it would bring him, to kill his son, the one he had believed would stand by him in the world to come. No matter, now. He gazed along the narrow thoroughfare that cut across the plateau, bisecting the community. There had been other wives over the long years . . . and other children, but none had betrayed him like Matthew. He could see his people waiting for him, a few dozen men and women, the sunlight glinting on their freshly minted weapons, waiting by a shuttle.

So it’s come to this
, he realized. But, even without the benefit of precognition, he’d always known it would.

Nineteen

Sam Roy

Sam watched with interest the reaction of the younger men to the alien.

Ursu stood quietly blinking on board the shuttle. These creatures’ faces always appeared expressionless, but Sam had come to realize that they had other ways of showing their emotions, broadcasting them so graphically that they had difficulty hiding them from others of their kind.

A gentle flick of the stubby triangles that were Ursu’s ears telegraphed his fear and anxiety. Sam had guided him into the shuttle’s mess, situated halfway between the cockpit and the rear cabins. Matthew and the others stood around tight-lipped, looking thoroughly uncomfortable with the Kaspian’s presence on board.

Sam had investigated their unease. ‘It’s just an animal.’ Michelle shuddered, looking embarrassed by her own response.

‘An animal maybe, but one which is a member of a civilized species,’ argued Sam. ‘With a long and rich history – rich as our own.’

Michelle and a boy called Jason had exchanged looks. ‘That doesn’t make them properly intelligent,’ said Jason. ‘Look at those things they worship, produced by some alien race. It’s clear that any civilized elements in their society were directed externally.’ Sam knew he was referring to the Kaspian gods; the Facilitators.

‘So what. If they’ve been influenced by the Angels, it’s no more than we were once.’ For all their current rebellion, it seemed to Sam that Ernst Vaughn had brainwashed them from birth. They were like those early Americans who wanted freedom for the slaves, so long as none of them came to live on their street or slept with their daughters.