Alien Velocity (8 page)

“You’re coming with me,” he said to Christina. He gathered his breath and lifted her onto his shoulders. “You can thank me later.”

In the corner of his eye, he spotted a narrow passage in the rock opposite. It appeared to be the bottom of a crevasse in the mountain, potentially a much easier route through. If he hadn’t ventured so far off course to rescue Christina, he would not have seen it. He managed half a smile. There was still a long way to go, and what else would they come across?

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, not quite believing what he’d just done, “Saint Christopher never had to go through that!”

“Thanks for the advice,” he said to Marley. “I missed with the dropkick but what made you tell me to do that?”

“I heard the creature’s voice. What you would take for wheezing, Charlie, is in fact a form of communication. I heard what you heard, but I understood it. The creature wanted you to fear it.”

“It did a good job.”

“If your dropkick had hit its head, you would probably have broken its neck,” she said.

“How do you know that? You didn’t even see it.”

“I have seen them before.”

“Here? On Baccarat?”

“Yes. Charlie, did you not recognize its features? The arms, the head, the eyes, the feet?”

He pouted, pensive. “Yeah, it kinda looked like you but it was about seven feet tall and brown.”

“I am not fully grown.”

“So—that thing was one of you? I thought you said there was just you and your parents.”

Marley stared at him with still, dull green eyes. She seemed to be waiting for him to catch up. “What about—”

“Ah, now I remember,” Charlie interrupted her, the lighthouse forging a link in his mind. “You said these evil bastards were once like you, from your home planet. Then they left and while your world went downhill, they must have prospered here, lording it over every Tom, Dick and Harry that made the wormhole trip.”

“Exactly.”

“You guys turn brown when you get older?”

“No. They have lived here for millennia. The pigment of their skin has been transformed by the suns’ rays. Sunlight on our world was much less concentrated, and they have survived without the need for bionic enhancements. They are physically superior.”

“Not to me, they’re not. That son of a bitch won’t mess with me again. I kicked his arse!” Charlie shouted over the valley plateau. Rising to continue the trek, he patted Christina’s metal legs and delighted at the ping.

The descent was straightforward. Charlie avoided the steeper stones and, whenever possible, led Marley through the gaps between rocks. They were almost across the plateau when she said, “We think that loner was exiled from the city. That he made so vociferously for Christina suggests desperation. Perhaps the only way they will accept him back is if he does something that greatly pleases them. Capturing one of us—their ancient kin—would no doubt rank highly. They have not seen us for millennia. We, therefore, expect him to tell them of our existence here. For his sake, it may or may not assuage them, but for ours, it is a dangerous turn of events. Sooner or later they will come for us.”

“You’re basing all this on supposition. The bastard might have been given a death sentence. He knows that if he goes back, they’ll kill him on sight.”

“Perhaps. But in any event, he left in that direction. The odds are not in our favour, Charlie.”

“Tell me the good news.” He groaned.

“The good news is you kicked his arse. You can kick all their arses.”

Charlie shook his head. “Strange time for sarcasm, Marley, but nice try.”

“Sorry. Your sense of humour is…nuanced.”

“There’s a euphemism.” He told her to head directly for three o’clock, into the passageway through the mountains. Ten feet wide at most, and more undulating than he’d hoped, it snaked all the way through to the far side.

They rarely paused for rest. It took a sunset and a half for them to reach an enormous stretch of orange-yellow flatland through which a network of purple veins and arteries flowed. Behind the procession, precipitous rock walls, hundreds of feet high, seemed ready to topple onto them while Charlie led Marley out. He collapsed to his knees, exhausted, parched and famished. Running his tongue over his lips felt like licking sandpaper. He massaged his neck to alleviate the stiffness of his sore throat.

“What can you see?” she asked, her legs now grinding and stuttering.

“Dry desert for miles, and lots of narrow rivers.”

“No more mountains?”

“None.”

She knelt and began to feel around in the dirt with her fingers. After finding a relatively soft spot, she made a mechanical fist and, rotating it like a drill, burrowed into the ground. First orange dust flew up, then dark yellow sand. Before long, damp mud spat out of the hole. She quadrupled its diameter. The whole operation lasted only a few minutes.

“There you go, Charlie. Fresh water. Just as I promised.”

He licked his flaky lips and leaned in to cup the water with both hands. Hmm, not a hint of salt. None of that sickly metallic stuff he’d tasted after crashing, either. His head pulsing with delight and stabs of delirium, he managed about two pints of heaven. There was no other word for it. Lucozade? Forget it. Baccarat water had the right stuff. It had no taste and yet every taste, all at once, in this very moment, the stuff life was made of.

“Ah.” He lay back, folded his arms under his head. “Now if you could dig me up a side of roast beef, mashed potatoes, piping-hot veg and thick, smooth gravy, I’d gladly adopt the whole lot of you.”

“It won’t be long now. As soon as we reach our ship, there will be something for you to eat.”

Fantasizing about that traditional English Sunday roast dinner, he licked his lips and let his head sink onto his arms. The sky was about to go dark, the coronas of three suns all ready to vanish behind the giant, sky-reaching trees. Realising he hadn’t slept since starting the mountain trek, he managed a warm chuckle and, with a long sigh tickling from his shoulders to his toes, drifted into a wholesome, earthbound dream.

“Sartoris B.” Marley finally named her home system, approximating her own syntax into something resembling English. “In the Crystal Hydra Nineteen galaxy.”

“Okay, I’m not much of an astronomer,” he said while crossing the third natural bridge over a purple river on their way to the family’s crash site.

She nodded, another human trait she’d started using. “Actually, neither am I. There is a difference between knowing a thing and having a passion for it. Instead of school, our complete knowledge was uploaded over several weeks to our artificial cerebella—the sum total of everything our species had ever learned. We therefore missed out on that experience you gained from interacting with school friends, from learning through trial and error, from assimilating information by choice or primary interest. You see, our formative years were spent programming our ship’s computer, outfitting her with sufficient spare parts to last us for centuries, until we could find a comparable planet to call home.”

“I was meaning to ask you about that. You guys are still growing.” He tapped Christina’s metal shins with his knuckle. “But if you’re hardwired to all this technology, these bionic implants, don’t you outgrow them on a constant basis? Kinda like human babies needing a bigger nappy size every few months.”

A rapier of light sliced through the heat haze a few miles ahead. Shortly after, he discerned a grey wedge jutting up from the yellow desert. Charlie guessed it was the crash site.

“You are correct, Charlie. Our organic growth requires constant attention. The nerve conduits linking our real and artificial cerebella are nanotech—miniature, self-regenerating artifices—and there are other instances of this throughout our bodies. Our immune system, for instance, is a triumvirate of nano-cells, organic corpuscles and super-induced localized chemotherapy. We managed to eradicate almost every harmful disease on our planet but our bionic components do need refitting periodically, roughly once every forty years until we reach maturity, then whenever wear and tear demands.”

“Once every forty years? How long do you live?”

“Many centuries, if all goes well.”

“So you’re what—a hundred?”

“A hundred and seventy-one.”

He shook his head and tried to imagine what a human woman would look like at that age. Not a pretty sight. There was something inevitable about this species, though, in terms of the ultimate application of science in biology, which human scientists, even now, seemed irrevocably bound for. There were parallels with Earth and the aliens’ home planet, he realised, in terms of an increasing inhospitableness.

“So you were responsible for making your planet unliveable?” he asked. “Not you personally, but your species? That’s what it sounded like earlier. You mentioned toxins in the air. On Earth, we’re still having a hard time redressing the damage we’ve done to our atmosphere.”

“It was a combination. Like you, we upset our ecosystems and eventually, through rampant overpopulation, the entire biosphere, until only genetic modifications allowed us to restore sufficient plant life to sustain us. It’s a sad story in the end. The damage we’d already inflicted wiped out most of the natural animal species on our eleven continents. Our nine oceans stagnated due to chemical waste pollution choking and blocking their cyclic conveyers. The knock-on effect brought the entire biosphere to a halt. In no small way, this technological supremacy you see before you was demanded of us. We created it, yes, but it was also thrust upon us by necessity. We had to combine several sciences in an explosion of research. We were, quite literally, a few years from oblivion. Tiny pockets of us managed to stay alive in bio-domes. This threadbare existence lasted for centuries, and though we were simply prolonging extinction, the most extraordinary scientific breakthroughs occurred in that darkest hour of our history. Deep-space flight, nanotechnology, the brain-computer interface, the creation of life itself—these were the death throes of our species, and though there may be others of us still out there, roaming the cosmos, we hundred and fifteen are the last known custodians of all the knowledge ever gained by life on that dead planet. It frightens me, Charlie. If anything happens to us, it will be like the whole struggle never occurred. There will be no memory of it.”

“Well, we’ll make sure nothing happens to you,” he replied with a touch of patriarchal grit.

No reply.

He added, “And next time, I’ll tell you the story of my life…even if you have heard it before.”

“I would like that, Charlie. My parents would like it, too.”

“Your par—” He looked up into the eyes of two tall, stooping figures a short distance ahead. Their arms and tentacles were much longer, almost touching the ground, while their wrinkled skin and drooping mouths gave the appearance of deep, age-old sorrow. He expected them to dodder but they sprang toward him instead, inasmuch as their stubby, biomechanical legs allowed. Around six foot three, the parents were difficult to tell apart. The only physical difference he could discern was that one’s skin was almost lilac while the other’s was mauve like that of the infants.

Charlie hesitated at the greeting. It might have been the sudden upscale in size of the creatures, or the fact that the parents would be that much more advanced on every conceivable level. It may have been that he knew so little about them, while they knew everything about him.

“How do you do?” He extended his hand to the mauve parent.

“Pleased to meet you, Charles Thorpe-Campbell,” the voice in his ear greeted. “I am the second, the father. Once upon a time, I was an artist and poet. You can call me Blake.”

“Okay, Blake.” He turned to the lilac mother. “And you are?”

“The first. You may call me Hippolyta.”

“Interesting choice. You were some kind of queen?”

“No, but Blake needs a strong-willed woman to put up with him. The queen of the Amazons will do nicely.”

Charlie couldn’t help but smile. Either she was approximating feminism for his sake—to make him feel more at ease by reminding him of Earth’s women—or she really did have a suffragette streak running through her lilac. Either way, he loved the effect.

“All right, where do we go from here?” He set Christina down in front of her mother. One hundred and fifteen alien mouths opened wide, but there was no physical interaction apart from a fleeting touch of tentacles as each youngster passed by its mother.

“Follow us, Charlie,” the monotone voice in his ear said.

Given its number of occupants, the crashed ship was smaller than he’d expected—a slender cigar shape, twenty feet in diameter, about half the length of a football field. Its exterior was pale grey, almost white, and rifled. Its landing had gouged a sizeable crater in the yellow desert, deep enough to breach the underground waterline. Filthy-looking liquid flooded the devastation, forming a kind of reservoir behind the ship.

From this rose approximately a hundred thick brown stalks with bizarre sagging fruit curling around them from top to bottom. Charlie imagined them as rancid bananas, but he was so hungry even that idea juiced his mouth.

“You’ve done a great thing, Charlie.” Blake draped a moist mauve tentacle over his new friend’s shoulder. “We can never repay you.”

“How about something to eat?”

Hippolyta appeared a few seconds later with a metal horn full of odourless brown soup.

Charlie peered inside and gulped. “What’s in it? Or am I better off not knowing?” He took it nonetheless.

“Based on our knowledge of human biology, it is the best we could do,” Hippolyta replied. “There are extracts from a variety of organic foods, as well as two synthesised nutrients—what you would call ‘vitamins’ on your planet. It should sustain you for some time.”

He took a tentative sip. The slight marzipan flavour was not unpleasant, and it lined his throat. Whatever the hell it was, it hit the spot. “Any more where that came from?” he asked, after gulping it all down. “For later, I mean—on my secret mission. I could do with some for the journey.”

“As much as you like.”

“Cheers.” He belched and pardoned himself, quickly realising how ridiculous manners and etiquette were a billion light-years from Earth.

“Our pleasure, Charlie. Now, the children will need to rest and repair themselves inside. Let us sit awhile by the water. We will tell you everything we know about the overlords of Baccarat and you can decide for yourself whether our plan to destroy them is a fecund one.”

“Um, whatever. Do I really have any choice in the matter? If I want to get home, I mean?”

“Yes. You can wait here with us and hope that another creature with your agility happens along and is willing to infiltrate the great city. Yes, you could choose to do that. But as Marley told you, we have been here for over three years, and not one visitor has offered to help us.”

“Why not?”

“Most ships made straight for the beacon. A handful saw us from above and asked for our help.”

“They asked for your help? When you’ve clearly crash-landed? What a bunch of arseholes.”

“In a desperate situation, Charlie, most life-forms look to their own. Survival is primarily a selfish instinct, and seeing as our only way to communicate with alien creatures is to download their languages from their memories and attach an audio implant, you can understand why so few of them stayed to pick up the cheque.”

Charlie nodded. Both Blake and Hippolyta did the same.

“Just one thing.” He fingered his ear lobes. “You mentioned my agility, as if it’s some God-given power, but you must know that on Earth, humans are physically among the weakest animals. I’m the fastest RAM-runner, yeah, but any number of canines and cats and other mammals could outrun or outjump me. Without our brains, we’d be way down the food chain.”

The couple crouched together on the edge of the murky lagoon. Charlie’s sides ached while he sat cross-legged beside them.

“Sorry, was that a question?” the voice asked.

“Yeah. What makes me so special? What do I have that other alien visitors don’t? I mean, if I manage to get inside this city, you must think that I’ll be able to last long enough to do whatever it is you want me to do, and then make it out again.”

“There is a simple, almost inevitable irony in technologically advanced species, Charlie. Think of it this way—anyone who makes it to this planet’s surface has at least some working knowledge of spaceflight. That capability in itself demands a certain intellectual brio. Now, the more a species advances technologically, the more reliant it becomes on that technology, and the less it requires physical strength. Agility, muscularity and adaptability to one’s natural environment are no longer prerequisites for survival. The brain becomes the only necessary survival tool. There are exceptions, of course, but in our experience, the vast majority of cosmic travellers are physical weaklings. For them, technology has become the extension, the externalization, of the survival vessel. They are gods in their machines, and without them, they regress millions of years in an instant.”

Blake
clanked
his legs together to illustrate his point. “That is the secret of the overlords’ power on Baccarat. The instant you enter their city, all technology becomes obsolete save their own. No one knows how they do it, but the protective shield around the city is impervious to any force known in the universe. So once inside, even your modest physical attributes will become great assets, and it is not only that, Charlie. You have both a capacity for improvisation and a strong determination. They will think you backward and weak, whereas you are in fact a hungry survivor. They will certainly have captured faster, more powerful, more intelligent, hardier creatures, but rarely one with all those attributes under the yoke of such a mercurial mind. If anyone on Baccarat can succeed, you can.”

He really did feel a surge of pride for humanity at those words, something he’d not expected. With it came the butterflies in his stomach and the hairs standing to attention on the back of his neck, both very human quirks. Suddenly, Charlie Thorpe-Campbell was Earth’s ambassador to the centre of a distant galaxy. He was, without hubris, the sum total of billions of years of Darwinian evolution, of instinct, of religious or otherwise conditioned superstition, and of his own thirty-three years spent rising to the top of the world, to become the undisputed best at something, anything—first out of fifteen billion. It took his breath away. Earth’s infinitesimal trials and errors had, in the end, settled for him, the Charlie Thorpe-Campbell equation. He’d never been any good at mathematics, but the idea fit so perfectly, so inevitably, it was like adding one atom of oxygen to two of hydrogen and then swigging the whole thing down.

Life. So this was what it felt like.

His eyes widened and he looked around in complete awe. Everything seeming off kilter, hazily luminous, or otherwise oppressive and grainy. Baccarat was magical for a moment, but only for a moment. Now he felt cold. Small. The weight of the world was citrus orange. It poured down upon him with the sun’s fading light…

* * *

“Take my hand.” Sorcha’s delicate pink fingers reaching from the sleeve of her silk kimono were so feminine, so inviting, they melted away his frustration, reminded him there were better places to be than in the limelight 24/7. All around the sloping grassland behind his Cusco mansion, the chirrups and caws of exotic birds suddenly sounded less like a prying crowd of spectators and more like Nature’s sentries keeping vigil, protecting him. Sorcha had that ability to make the world feel safe when he was with her.

That early summer morning, a spy camera mounted on a toy flying saucer had sneaked under their EMP security net and hovered over Sorcha while she sunbathed. Paparazzi madness. Without blinking, she’d got up and swung her parasol at it, knocked it into the pool.

She was by natural inclination the calm within any storm, and he’d needed her that day more than ever. Holo-messages and courier deliveries had besieged their home after a tabloid had leaked a false rumour about him announcing his retirement from RAM-running. Any other time, any other rumour and he’d have laughed it off without comment, but the past few days had been difficult—the anniversary of his father’s crash had wedged sharply in his thoughts, and he really had been contemplating retirement for the first time.