The Mothership (15 page)

“Give it a rest, mate,” Cracker said. “It’s
buggered.”

“No way! This thing’s as tough as nails,”
he said, puzzled that he couldn’t find a signal.

“Batteries could be flat,” Cracker
suggested.

“I checked them before we left.” Wal looked
perplexed. “I should be picking up something.”

Cracker leaned back and stretched, staring
up at the night sky. It was filled with many more stars than could ever be seen
from the polluted, urban light filled skies of the big cities. “We could be the
last men on Earth out here.”

The battery powered mozzie zapper popped
again, signaling the sudden end of another mosquito for the umpteenth time
since sunset.

Cracker glanced at the glowing blue light
beside Slab with disgust. “What the hell did you bring that for? We’re supposed
to be roughing it!”

Slab yawned, eyeing the electrified insect
trap with satisfaction. “I hate bugs.” He knew the camp lights would be a
beacon summoning every insect in sight, so he’d brought the battery powered
trap along for protection. “I don’t want the little bastards landing on me.
They eat me alive.”

“What do you think we brought you along
for?” Wal demanded. “You’re the bug bait! If they land on you, they don’t land
on us!”

Slab stretched muscles sore from a day of
hiking. “You’re just jealous of my tasty blood.”

“It’s not the taste that attracts them,”
Cracker said, wincing as if he’d bitten into a lemon, “It’s the smell!”

Laughter rippled around the camp.

Slab shrugged carelessly. “I’ll wash … next
month.”

“At least the smell keeps the crocs away,”
Bill added.

Slab glanced toward the river a couple of
hundred meters away, where Bill’s fishing boat was pulled up onto the bank and
tied to a tree. It would have been convenient to camp close to the boat, but
that would have been too close to the giant reptilian rulers of the river.
“I’ll remember that when the crocs come up here tonight and eat you! Just keep
your screaming down, I need my beauty sleep.”

Bill shook his head sadly, “Sleep won’t fix
your ugly mug, mate. Try surgery.”

Cracker pulled a stick of dynamite from his
pocket and waved it at the big ex-footballer. “Any croc comes near me, and I’ll
blow its bloody head off!”

Wal’s eyes bulged. “You’re not keeping that
stuff in our tent!”

The old miner laughed, holding the dynamite
with practiced familiarity. “Don’t worry, Wal, it’s been at least . . . two
years since I blew anyone up!”

Bill’s eyes narrowed in dismay. “Why’d you
bring that?”

Cracker smiled wickedly. “In case we get
hungry. A few sticks of this in the river, we’ll have fish for a month.”

“A few sticks?” Bill exclaimed. “How many
did you bring?”

“A dozen.” Cracker waved away his friend’s
concerns. “It’s perfectly safe.” He pulled a small timer out of his pocket.
“Needs a detonator to go off.”

Bill shook his head. “You can’t set that
stuff off out here. The aborigines will go nuts!”

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

“There’s nothing out here they don’t know
about.” Bill sighed. “We’ve got a permit to shoot buffalo, not blow the bloody
river up!”

Cracker relented. “OK mate, no fishing. But
if a croc comes up here, I’ll be sticking this in its gob, permit or not.”

“In that case, I’m moving my tent way over
there,” Bill said as he pushed onions around the hot plate.

Slab watched Wal tweaking his radio. “Why
are you so keen on getting the radio working?”

Wal made one last attempt to find a
channel, then put the satellite receiver down, defeated. “I wanted to see if
there was any news about that machine we shot today.”

Bill looked dubious. “If someone’s poking
around out here without permission, it won’t be on the radio.”

“I bet it was looking for uranium,” Slab
said, looking at the ground through drooping eyes. “Doing it sneaky, so the
aborigines don’t know what’s going on.”

Cracker looked doubtful. “Nah, the mining
companies wouldn’t take a crap out here without approval from the locals. It
was something else.”

“It was digging for something,” Wal said.

“I’m telling you, . . . they want . . .
radi-a-shun,” Slab slurred as his head lolled forward as he fell into a drunken
stupor.

Bill scratched his head. “Do you think he’s
going to want his steak?”

“He’ll be out ’till morning,” Wal said.
“We’ll split it, and tell him he ate it. He’s so drunk, he won’t have a clue!”

Cracker lifted his beer to take a sip. As
the can approached his lips he caught a flash of movement out of the side of
his eye, then the can was ripped from his hand. For a moment he looked at his
empty hand, confused, then glanced at his friends thinking they’d played a
trick on him. “What the hell?”

Bill’s eyes widened incredulously, as he
stared at something behind Cracker. Wal jumped to his feet and backed away,
eyes locked in the same direction.

Cracker looked at his friends as if they’d
gone mad. “What?”

He turned to see the black, spinning top
shaped tracker floating a meter behind his chair. It towered over him while his
skin prickled at the proximity of an invisible electromagnetic force. Cracker
stumbled out of his chair, almost tripping as he turned to face the machine.
One of the tracker’s four semi-snaking arms held the yellow beer can in front
of its sensor disk. It turned the can slowly, recognizing the lettering as a
language of sorts, although one it had no record of. It tested the strength of
the can by squeezing it with its metal fingers causing it to collapse easily.
Amber liquid shot out through bursting seams and poured onto the ground, then
the tracker flicked the can away.

“What the hell is it?” Bill asked.

“Stuffed if I know,” Cracker declared,
backing away.

The tracker floated silently into the camp
on its two contra rotating anti-g pods. When it neared Cracker’s vacated camp
chair, an invisible force knocked the chair sideways. Two meters away, Slab
remained in a drunken coma, oblivious to the tracker’s presence. Thousands of
laser-thin blue beams flicked out from its glassy black sensor disk,
illuminating an invisible bubble that surrounded the tracker. The vertically
flickering beams scanned and analyzed every object in the campsite while the
men shielded their eyes with their hands.

Bill motioned to the metal box on the other
side of the camp, where the hunting rifles were stored. “Get the guns, Wal!”

Wal glanced at the locker uncomfortably,
certain he’d draw attention to himself if he tried to reach it. “You get the
guns.”

“You’re closest, mate.”

Wal cursed silently, then edged toward the
gun locker, trying to peek through his fingers at the machine, but finding the
blue beams too bright to bear. He reached down to release the gun locker’s
catches, but one of the tracker’s arms shot out and speared the metal case. The
finger-like digits spread apart inside the metal locker like a grapple, then
the arm whipped it away from Wal. A second metal arm punctured the locker while
it was in mid air, holding it steady in front of the sensor disk for close
analysis. A third arm deftly released the two metal catches and opened the box
while its fourth arm pulled Bill’s hunting rifle out.

“Got any other bright ideas?” Wal muttered
as he backed away.

The tracker took only seconds to evaluate
the weapon’s primitive design and complete a metallurgical analysis. It
concluded the crude device was a variation of the primitive kinetic weapon a
seeker had discovered earlier. Its lack of a power source led it to conclude
the weapon fired chemically propelled projectiles of limited accuracy and
range. The tracker turned the gun locker upside down, letting the other rifles
clatter to the ground, scanning them as they fell. When it had exhausted its
investigation, it tossed the locker and Bill’s gun away.

The light beams streaming from the
tracker’s sensor disk vanished, as did the ghostly bubble enveloping it. Having
detected a significant thermal irregularity, one of its arms speared the esky
beneath Slab’s feet. Suspecting the rectangular container may store cryogenic
weapons, it ripped the esky away. Too drunk to wake, Slab snorted when his feet
hit the ground, and continued snoring, while a second of the tracker’s arms
caught the esky in mid air.

“I knew that bastard could sleep through a
train wreck when he was drunk!” Cracker declared.

“Stuff him,” Wal growled desperately, “That
bloody thing’s got our beers!”

The tracker tore open the sealed lid to
discover several dozen cans floating in ice and water. A sea of blue sensor
beams scanned the contents of the esky, increasing the tracker’s confusion. It
could not understand why these primitive bipeds would go to the trouble of
storing metal cylinders containing a liquid of negligible nutritional value in
a near freezing environment. After several fruitless seconds, unable to resolve
the mystery, it decided to log the data for later analysis. It dropped the
esky, spilling beer cans and precious ice onto the ground, then turned its
attention to the barbecue, still sizzling in front of Bill. It floated past
Slab, across the camp toward the three legged gas cooker. Spectroscopic
analysis told it the flames resulted from combusting a carbon based gas, a
process which inefficiently generated heat and released a range of toxic
byproducts into the atmosphere. One of its semi-snaking arms picked up the
barbecue and raised it for closer inspection. Bill backed away as he saw
another arm touch the gas cylinder. The tracker studied the burnt pieces of
animal flesh on the hotplate, and cross referenced the data with the burnt kangaroo
it had discovered earlier at the aboriginal camp. It noticed the onions
sizzling on the hot plate, and correctly identified them as charred vegetable
matter. Its massive artificial intelligence immediately reclassified the biped
species from carnivore to omnivore, while it squeezed the gas cylinder
experimentally, testing its tensile strength.

“Look out!” Bill yelled, diving for cover
as the cylinder buckled.

Gas jetted through the rupture, catching
the cooker’s naked flame, causing the gas bottle to explode. A wall of fire
blasted against the invisible bubble protecting the tracker, then when the
flames dissipated, its metal arms and torso appeared undamaged.

“Let’s get out of here,” Bill said,
starting for the trees.

The tracker’s single cannon mounted above
its sensor disk immediately rotated on its axis toward Bill. It fired a single
low power shot into the ground a meter ahead of him. He froze, raising his
hands, then turned to face the floating machine.

“Nervous bugger,” Cracker muttered as he
slid his hands unobtrusively into his pockets.

“How smart you reckon that thing is?” Bill
asked.

“Pretty bloody stupid,” Wal snapped, “It
buggered the esky.”

Cracker removed his hands from his pockets
holding a detonator and a stick of dynamite, then slowly brought them together.

“Cracker!” Wal whispered urgently. “You mad
bastard, you’ll get us all killed!”

Cracker wound the timer without looking at
it. He’d been setting timers for twenty years, and knew them by touch. “Fifteen
seconds ought to do it.”

“Do what?” Bill demanded, edging away from
Cracker.

“I think it’s too bloody curious for its
own good,” Cracker said.

“If the gas didn’t hurt it, what makes you
think dynamite will?” Bill asked.

Cracker ignored him, waving the dynamite in
the air. “Here boy!”

The tracker drifted toward him, then as
Cracker expected, one of its arms shot forward to grab the dynamite. Just
before it reached the explosive, Cracker pulled the dynamite away, and turned
his back to the machine, holding the explosive close to his chest.

“What the hell are you doing!” Wal demanded
nervously.

On the other side of the tracker, Slab
snorted. His head rolled sideways causing his mouth to fall open, but his
snoring continued unabated.

The tracker moved closer to Cracker,
intrigued by his strange actions. One of its arms shot out and grabbed the
miner’s leg, and lifted him off the ground. Cracker groaned as the machine held
him in a vice like grip, blood rushing to his head. He realized it could easily
snap his leg like a twig, but he kept the dynamite pressed close to his chest
anyway and activated the timer. The tracker brought him in close, turning him
to see what he was hiding. Another of its arms caught Cracker’s left wrist and
pulled it clear of his chest, leaving only his right hand holding the dynamite.

It’s taking too long,
Cracker realized as he counted down.

Suspended by two of the tracker’s arms, he
swung in toward the machine. His face prickled with static electricity as he
hit the protective shield surrounding the machine. It exerted a smooth but
malleable pressure that pushed harder against him the harder he pushed against
it.