Amalfi Echo Page 4

  “So you looked in on them, huh?” Tessa said. “Cruised by. Took a few photos. Did a little shopping.”

  “Something like that,” Digby said. “This ship is pretty much undetectable to them and can cover lots of ground quickly by reinventing itself light years away. They, on the other hand, are probably only a couple of hundred years ahead of the Earth, technologically. Although they have enormous space fleets they can’t do better than about a quarter of the speed of light and they are armed with huge but basic pulse weapons and the like. It takes them many generations to get anywhere but they don’t seem bothered by that. They don’t have anything really sophisticated.”

  “So why can’t this super advanced alien ship take them out?” Tessa said. Marion was also nodding, it being the obvious question.

  “The sad truth is that while, militarily, Earth present no threat to this ship, in the bigger picture, this ship is little more than a lightly armed speed boat. It was designed as a scout ship. Small, fast, get in, gather intelligence and get out quick. The battle fleets of the bugs are clumsy and crude but they overwhelm everything in their path through sheer size and numbers. This ship would be shredded in a stand-up brawl with them but it does flee really well.”

  “What happens when you run out of galaxy to flee in?” Marion said.

  “That thought had occurred to me,” Digby said. For a moment he looked darkly reflective as though he had seen far too much and wished he could forget. “Take the long sleep and find another galaxy, I suppose,” he said.

  Tessa went to say something. Marion stopped her with a hand on her arm.

  After a while, Digby went on as though offering a confidence he hardly ever shared. “As you said, Tessa. A long time ago and far far away. Even this ship takes eons to cover the space between galaxies and what happened to my galaxy is now deep in the past. We had our bugs too. Super bugs. They were unknown and unknowable and the Amalfi were wiped out defending us against them. The remnants of our civilisations that were left began rebuilding. Some of us didn’t have the heart for it and left to cross the enormous reaches of space to somewhere else. And now it’s happening again. Believe me when I say I feel sick at the fate that awaits your people.”

  With that, Digby faded out.

  “Don’t think we’ve finished,” Tessa said. “I’ll ask him to come back.”

  “No. Leave him be.” Marion called the hangar back. “Maybe you’d like to show me over your Starfighter.”

  -oOo-

  A week later, Marion and Tessa had lunch by a waterfall. Schools of fish leapt playfully from the water at the foot of the falls. Large, brightly-coloured butterflies fluttered all about their table which was a masterpiece of ironwork. Tropical rainforest, teeming with wildlife, provided a verdant backdrop. Marion and Tessa hardly noticed.

  The week had been frenetic. Tessa trained intensively with the Amalfi pistol and towards the end of the week announced that the little button was now an icky, greenish, maybe, sort of colour and that meant she had only a few lessons to go before the weapon was armed and she could start blowing holes in stuff.

  “You are absolutely not to blow holes in anything,” Marion said.

  “Give a girl a gun, dude, and she is going to use it,” Tessa said. “We’re only talking live firing on a range which I have done lots of times.”

  “I really wish Digby wouldn’t encourage you.”

  Tessa created a darkly lit desert scene with howling winds and nightmarish creatures. She struck a gunslinger’s pose, hand on her side arm. “When yuh hit dirt on an alien planet all on yuh little lonesome, it doesn’t pay to be a scaredy-cat.”

  The ship still hadn’t done its little trick with time. Apparently that was still on the agenda.

  Now they were having lunch by the waterfall. Marion wasn’t hungry. She picked at her food, her mind elsewhere. Her living quarters now looked exactly like her London apartment in Mill Hill, which she had loved, and contained all of her treasured possessions. On Earth, nothing much had changed. Mostly Marion thought of the library of holograms of the bugs and their activities. Unfortunately, they came across as nothing more than another science-fiction movie and a low budget one at that. Bugs. It’s been done.

  Tessa was also thinking the same. “We need proper Intel,” she thought to Marion through the link.

  “I don’t like that,” Marion snapped. “It gives me the creeps.”

  “Okay, okay. Happy now?” Tessa said. She continued shovelling in slices of pizza, amusing herself by ordering random toppings as the slice entered her mouth. In between mouthfuls, she said, “We have to go there.”

  “Go where?”

  “The bug fleet, of course. We have to see it for ourselves.” The alien fleet was strung out in a giant arc about a half a light year towards Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth, and ploughing steadily closer.

  “What will that prove?” Marion said. “What’s the difference between looking at it on a big screen here and looking at it on a big screen out there in the middle of nowhere?” Despite the solidness of the windows and their oh so real frames, both Marion and Tessa had now fully realised that the ship had no windows. Nothing at all broke the smooth surface of the outer skin. Not hatches. Not anything. Entry and exit was achieved by the ship aligning the atoms of its skin with the atoms of whatever was passing through and doing a neat trick of balancing all the respective forces. It felt like being put through a cheese grater.

  “It’ll be different. It won’t be like looking at video because we’ll know we’re right amongst it,” Tessa said.

  “We won’t even know that for sure. We could be anywhere. We could be still be here and we wouldn’t know.”

  “Maybe we could go outside in spacesuits and see for ourselves.”

  “We could still be looking at a screen on the inside of the helmet, even supposing I agreed to hang about in space and the only thing between me and instant death is a spacesuit that doesn’t really exist so I probably won’t.”

  Tessa gave up. “Okay, you be Ms. Grump. I’m going to talk to the boss.” With that she disappeared, choosing to make her exit outlined in a rainbow of colours and surrounded by ostrich feathers. She returned a few minutes later with Digby.

  “It’ll be dangerous,” he said, slumping into a chair. He looked haggard.

  “That’s wonderfully reassuring,” Marion said.

  “You said that this was a super duper scout ship,” Tessa said. “Undetectable. Doing what it was designed to do. Now when we want to do it, suddenly it’s really dangerous.”

  “It’s always been dangerous and I only do it when absolutely necessary.”

  “It’s absolutely necessary now, otherwise Ms. Grump won’t believe it and the planet dies in case you all hadn’t noticed. What have you been doing anyway? You look like shit.”

  “Yeah, I love you too, Tessa,” Digby said.

  “Okay. That does it. I’m going to check out the big tracked thing with the awesome gun and the silly name and you grouches can kill each other for all I care.” This time she chose to exit through an exploding bomb.

  Marion and Digby sat silently for a while until Marion said, “What have you been doing, anyway?”

  “Same as you, I guess. Trying to figure a way out of all of this.”

  “What’s the problem? Come the time and you’ll flee. What’s so hard about that?”

  “We can’t fight them, Marion. I’ve run every scenario I can think of. They all end the same way. The ship gets hammered. We die. Nothing changes. The bugs do their thing on Earth.”

  “Supposing the world listened and got it all together and co-operated for once. They’ve got a pretty big nuclear arsenal and two years to put in place, I don’t know, an ambush may be?”

  “An awful lot would be riding on them cooperating and their record on that one is not good. Do you really think they’ll take it on board?”

  “Who knows? I do know that I cannot sit here and do nothing. You’ve been keeping
an eye on the bugs without being caught, evidently. How dangerous is it really?”

  “Follow the protocols. Skip in and out. As you say, done it before…”

  “When do we leave?”

  “Soon as we talk to Tessa.”

  -oOo-

  Digby’s sphere ship hung in space beside the colossal bulk of a bug cargo ship, motionless relative to the bug ship giving them shelter. Digby had chosen a featureless part of the ship on the opposite side to the crew’s quarters which helped the sphere ship to blend against its backdrop. Helping too was that the bugs had no experience of sphere ships and their entire defensive perimeter was directed outwards from the fleet.

  Tessa had been right. It did make a difference actually being in the midst of the bug battle fleet. And they had to believe that they really were a half a light year from Earth because you have to believe in something.

  Across a stretch of space, a bug battleship cruised along. About 185 kilometres in length, depending on where you measured from. Pulse cannons the size of small skyscrapers. It bristled with nests of smaller pulse weapons. Lots of other bumps and structures which could simply have been storage for spare hammocks but which their minds translated into lethal high-tech hardware. Anything up to 50,000 of the nasty little critters on board. Although, in reality, they were not so small if you stopped thinking in terms of height and noticed that they were about six metres long measured along the floor, not counting appendages. Being segmented had its uses and they could twist in interesting directions.

  Beyond the battleship, an endless array of ships of various sizes, most incredibly huge, others merely huge, spread out towards the stars.

  “This is the actual view, outside the ship, we can see from here, right?” Tessa said for the tenth time. For some reason the unchanging panoply of ships, rolling along indifferently, was much more impressive than the many detailed holograms they had been watching back at the Moon.

  More than impressive. For the first time, Marion felt real fear, coiling in her stomach. It had been brought home to her, with a stunning brute force, how insignificant they were before this display of unstoppable might.

  Tessa too, had lost her bounce. “We’re toast,” she said. She hadn’t tackled Digby about the spacesuit idea and now there was no way she was even interested. The dark side of the Moon now seemed like home and she began to wonder if it was wise hanging around the fleet so long.

  She was relieved when Digby said, “Time to go.”

  -oOo-

  It was also time to say goodbye to the dark side of the Moon. Marion and Tessa were now committed to warning the world of the impending catastrophe. They had thought that they would do this from the Moon but Digby suggested putting the ship into orbit around Earth. He explained, “The ship’s resources aren’t unlimited and it’ll be a stretch if we have to carry out too many tasks in relation to Earth from here. An alien ship in orbit will wake them up a bit and it’ll give you a certain cachet.”

  It went without saying that it fell to Marion to do the broadcast. Digby had promised a feed directly into every dish and antenna on the planet. Marion and Tessa created a conference room, because it was more business-like, and sat down at the conference table to work out what Marion was going to say.

  “People of Earth,” Marion declaimed, looking at an imaginary camera, and then stopped because Tessa was rolling her eyes and looking embarrassed. “What?” Marion said.

  “Have you ever done this before?” Tessa said.

  “What? Broadcast to the world from an alien spaceship? Oh yeah, I do this all the time.”

  Eventually they settled on a script which they were both more or less satisfied with and which included video footage of the bugs. To help Marion get into the role they created a studio complete with cameras and Marion sat at a curved desk like a newsreader. They recorded the broadcast. Now all they had to do was wait for the ship to get noticed which didn’t take long as Digby had put the ship into orbit over the night side of Earth. When they had the world’s full attention, Digby broadcast the statement.

  They sat back to wait for the reaction.

  The people of Earth reeled under a triple whammy. Not only was there now, most definitely, an eight-kilometre wide alien spaceship in orbit but also a message that they were about to be annihilated had flooded every device on the planet and if that wasn’t enough, the person announcing the end of the world was Marion Bakken, a fugitive wanted by the FBI for the kidnapping of Tessa O’Brien.

  Confusion reigned. Governments around the world said nothing of substance and issued calls for calm although the reality of the sphere ship was hard to deny given it could be seen on any amateur telescope.

  The phone images of the shuttle and the interviews with the passengers were exhumed and intensively rehashed by the media. The answer to the question, ‘are we alone in the universe?’ did not prove to be a game changer. Many people already believed that there probably was other life out there somewhere so it was simply a question of ‘when’ not ‘if.’

  A feeling became widespread throughout the globe that they were dealing with humans, not aliens, as aliens were very much not in evidence. There were not huge ships hovering menacingly over the world’s cities and when it appeared that they were not about to become lunch anytime soon, attention shifted to the possibility that Digby, Marion and Tessa could be invited to lunch which would be the social coup of the century, or at least the year, anyway. The focus became, ‘how do we get our hands on all this new technology?’

  After several weeks with no overtly hostile moves from the ship, and it was only a single ship, not a fleet and which couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, most people shrugged and went about their business. Comedians and sitcoms incorporated the new material, turning it into an endless stream of one-line gags. The world chuckled.

  As Marion had feared, ‘The end is nigh,’ like the bugs, had also been done. Marion said, “I knew it was a bad idea to include the video footage. It came across like ‘Revenge of the Gorgons.’”

  “I loved ‘Revenge of the Gorgons,’” Tessa said, “so to hell with you.” She kicked over a chair which promptly disappeared. “What’s the matter with them? Which part of ‘you’re all going to die’ did they not get?”

  Not everyone laughed. The Chinese launched a nuclear missle at the ship which Digby caught and parked a half a mile away from the Chinese space lab. After that, no one at all laughed.

  Not many in the corridors of power around the world had been laughing anyway and the many emergency meetings that had been taking place in the Pentagon, the White House, the Kremlin, in military and political establishments everywhere, were ratcheted up. Complicating matters for the United States was that their big advantage in two of the main players being Americans and whose loyalty was not in question, was being nullified by the arrest warrants out for them and a vicious fight erupted in the nation’s capital. Questions began to be asked about the death of Tessa’s parents, at first quietly, and then more openly as the fight began to spill over into the public arena. Some of those who knew the real story began to run for cover and so it was that Joanne Fleischer was mugged on a trip to her local grocery store and died on the way to hospital.

  Tessa still cried in Marion’s arms when she heard although she knew she should have been glad.

  -oOo-

  In a highly secure hush room in Washington, D.C., an NSA adviser briefed President Newman. “We have to assume, Mr. President, that they are recording our conversation in here—.”

  “In here?” the President said, thunderstruck. “Why did you bring me here? I want the best!” He thumped his hand on the table.

  “This is the best, Sir,” his chief White House adviser, Bartholomew Johnson, said. “We need to go with this one.” He motioned for the NSA adviser to proceed.

  “He’s not short of a brain cell,” Digby said, referring to Johnson. They were watching the meeting on one of the many screens in a circle around the three of them. On a few of
the screens it appeared that others had reached the same conclusion although there were many top-level meetings in progress where the participants seemed oblivious to the possibility.

  “I’m loving this,” Tessa said.

  “The ship is carrying out the function it was designed for. Reconnaissance. Gathering Intelligence,” Digby said. “Let’s leave this for now.” The screens vanished to be replaced by a view of Arlington Cemetery and beside it, a view of the General Assembly in progress at the United Nations. Tessa was instantly sobered by the image of Arlington Cemetery. Her parents were buried there.

  Digby said, “Sooner or later you will both want to go down to the surface.” He gestured at the ornament that was Tessa’s Amalfi weapon. “That’s coming along well and the sooner it’s armed the better.” He looked at Marion. “It would be good if you also had a side arm.”

  “Forget it.”

  Digby ploughed on, regardless. “Which means I’ll be sending some of these with you.” A swarm of killer jellyfish darted about in the air. “And if it proves necessary, the ship will deploy heavier weapons. The fact is, the people down there won’t know that the jellyfish are running on automatic. If the jellyfish have to kill anyone, the opposition will assume that they’re under your control. You don’t come out of it clean whichever way you look at it so you might as well have the Amalfi weapons.”

  “I’ll know it’s not me using the jellyfish,” Marion said.

  “In the eyes of everyone you will still be responsible for the deaths.”

  “I don’t have any plans to go down to the surface, just now,” Marion said, looking at the image of the General Assembly.

  Digby indicated the screen. “You could try this option since you’re not otherwise getting the message through.” He shrugged. “Unless you’ve given up on that idea.”

  “No, I have not given up on that idea. But I don’t see why that should mean people get killed. I won’t have that.”