Amalfi Echo (5 page)

“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?’