The Serene Invasion (12 page)

B
Y UNSPOKEN CONSENT
they made love on the narrow, squeaking bed in the shadowy room, both of them weeping and murmuring almost incoherently. It was a more desperate and tender coming together than Sally had ever experienced before – the usual animal need of sexual desire and something more, some affirmation of life after so much death.

She switched on the ceiling fan and the downdraft laved their naked bodies, cooling.

She had not meant to tell Geoff everything that had happened to her the day before; had intended to downplay the kidnapping and her subsequent escape. But in his company, when they had shared so much, it seemed pointless to hold back on the experience.

“The attack...?” he began.

“They took me and Ben,” she murmured. She pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m okay now. Don’t worry. They... they didn’t hurt me. They took us to a hut in the bush kilometres north of here.”

Geoff’s expression was set in stone.

“And when we got there...” She took a deep breath, her voice wavery. “Three things. A camera on a tripod, a chopping block, a sword...”

She wept, the tears coming in a heaving wave all of a sudden, unbidden, and she realised that she’d held in all the emotion, all the terror, until now, until she was safe with Geoff and could let it all out in a great cathartic damburst of retrospective fear.

He held her, kissing her sweat-damp hair, as she sobbed against him.

She took a deep shuddering breath, smiled up at him through her tears. “Oh, I was so frightened, Geoff. So disbelieving... that, that someone would do this to us. For ideological reasons. And film it, Geoff. I don’t know where this is rational, but that’s what horrified me more than anything else. Not the evil of their intent to kill us, but the callousness of their desire to film our deaths.”

He kissed her eyes, her mouth. “How the hell did you get away?”

She thought about it, ordering the events. The incidents had an air of unreality, like a film watched a long time ago and imperfectly recalled. All she remembered, with crystal clarity, was how she had felt at the time.

Slowly, hesitantly, she told Geoff about her kidnappers’ inability to kill her and Ben.

He said, “You were so lucky, Sally.”

She shook her head. “No. No, Geoff. It... I know this sounds ridiculous... but it wasn’t luck. Something was stopping the Somali from pulling the trigger.”

Geoff said, “His conscience.”

“No,” she said, “because when I got back to the compound, I found Dr Krasnic...”

And, despite her promise to Krasnic that morning that his secret was safe with her, she told Geoff about the doctor’s multiple suicide attempts. “And just this morning... Mama Oola told me that Papa had tried to beat her again, only he
couldn’t
, and when she tried to hit him... she said she was unable to do it.”

He reached from the bed, found his holdall and pulled out his softscreen. She watched him attempt to access the net, to no avail. “Still dead.”

She stroked his face with her fingertips.

“When I was on the plane,” he began, his eyes narrowing with recollection.

“Yes?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” He laughed. “I just recall thinking how much I love you.”

Something rose in her chest, sadness and joy combined. “Whatever the hell happens, Geoff, whatever happens, we have each other.”

They came together again and, gently this time, made love once more.

T
HEY TOOK A
cold shower together in the communal bathroom at the end of the landing, then descended to the dappled courtyard where Mama Oola served them piled plates of vegetable pilau and ice cold lager. She winked at Sally when she presented the plates with a flourish, as if to say that after such lovemaking a hearty meal was necessary.

Geoff was quiet during the meal, which was unlike him. She had never met a more talkative person; he was usually forever telling her, during their snatched time together, about everything he had done since he’d last seen her. She sensed that his taciturnity now was due to more than just a lack of sleep.

She said, “You okay?”

He forked his pilau, looked up. “I was just thinking, we don’t have to go to the reserve, if you’re not up to it after...”

She reached out and gripped his hand. “I want to get away from here. Anyway,” she smiled, “you have work to do.”

He nodded, and returned to his food.

“Geoff,” she said a little later, “you began to tell me something earlier, about what happened on the plane.”

He stared at her, smiling like a schoolboy caught out. “I didn’t think you’d pick up on it.”

“I can read you like a book,” she said. “What happened?”

He had an expressive face, a way of pantomiming what he was thinking with exaggerated facial gestures. He frowned heavily. “I don’t know. It seemed so real at the time, but now it seems like a hallucination.”

She listened as he told her a fantastic story of reality coming to a halt, and how he had found himself floating in a grey void and being visited by a silver spider...

He stared down at his meal. “The thing was, Sally, it all seemed so damned real. And then what happened with the domes, and...” He looked up. “It occurred to me that it might in some way be connected.”

She pursed her lips, considering. “I’d say... probably not. You’ve been working hard, and it was a late flight, and you hadn’t slept.” She shrugged. “And,” she smiled, “you did once tell me that you’re afraid of spiders.”

He laughed. “Was. When I was a child.”

She tilted her head and looked at him, dubious. “Thought you said tarantulas still gave you the heebie-jeebies?”

He smiled. “Touché,” he said. “I remember when I was in Singapore –”

Jenny appeared in the doorway to the lounge, clutching the frame with both arms and hanging forward. “Sally! Come and watch! Mama! Mama! Come now!”

Mama Oola squeezed from the kitchen. “What now girl?”

Jenny was goggle-eyed. “Amazing! Come and see!”

She vanished inside, and Sally exchanged a look with Geoff and rose from the table. Geoff took his bottle of beer. Sally found his hand as they entered the shadowy lounge.

It was a long, low room, hung with drapes and furnished with multiple ancient sofas, opening onto a balcony at the far end. In the corner of the room, incongruous amid such genteel shabbiness, a vast flatscreen TV pulsed out garish images.

Sally sank into a deep sofa, Geoff beside her. Mama Oola eased herself into her own sofa, almost filling it. Jenny squatted before the TV, staring up at it with a houseboy and the girl who cleaned the rooms.

The TV was tuned to BBC World and a desk-bound reporter was saying, “...hope to be bringing you pictures and reports just as soon as they’re available. To repeat, reports are coming in from around the world confirming what our reporter in London was just saying... In Laos, where the war with Thailand is in its third year, people are speaking of mass desertions from the armies on both sides of the conflict. In Botswana, our reporter on the ground has an eye-witness account of front-line troops being unable to operate their weapons... Now, this tallies with domestic news coming in from London and elsewhere.”

Sally gripped Geoff’s hand, tightened.

The reporter said, “One moment...” He touched his ear-piece, nodded and went on, “I’m told we can now join Rob Hudson in Alice Springs, Australia, where footage of a... vessel has just come through.”

Sally sat forward, battling to free herself from the depths of the sofa. The scene switched to a reporter standing in the desert, staring up in wonder at the sky. The camera swung, showing a dizzy flash of bright blue sky and then, filling the entirety of the screen, a vast convex expanse of silver-blue metal, like a close-up shot of a mystery object the identity of which the audience had to guess.

The shot pulled out, steadied, and established itself.

On the sofa, Mama Oola rocked back and forth, clasping be-ringed hands to her ample bosom, her tearful eyes wide.

Beside Sally, Geoff swore under his breath.

An airborne vessel was moving slowly through the cloudless Australian sky. It was the only thing in the frame, so that its true dimensions were impossible to determine. Bull-nosed, splayed like a manta ray but much thicker, and silver-blue, it resembled some futuristic starship beloved of science fiction book covers.

Geoff whispered, “Foss...”

“What?” Sally asked, glancing at him.

“A cover artist, Chris Foss. It’s just like one of his illustrations.”

She said, half to herself, “But this is real, Geoff.”

Then, sliding into view beneath the vessel, Sally made out the unmistakable shape of Ayers Rock – and the airborne vessel, as it moved over the sacred aboriginal landmark, was fully ten times the size.

“I don’t believe it,” she murmured.

Mama Oola was clapping her hands in delight, or in fright.

An awed voiceover was saying, “It appeared in the skies of Southern Australia just twenty minutes ago, heading north-west at approximately fifty miles an hour. It moved in absolute and eerie silence. I can confirm that jets from the Australia Air Force were scrambled to intercept, but that for some reason they were unable to leave the ground.”

“It’s beautiful,” Sally said, “truly beautiful...”

She had never, she thought, seen anything quite as vast or magnificent in her life.

“And terrifying,” Geoff said.

She looked at him.

He said, “Think about it, Sally. What happened yesterday. The domes, our inability to...”

She shook her head, slowly.

“It makes sense. What would an invading army do, if they had the capability? Somehow inhibit our ability to... to fight back.”

She gestured at the slow, beautiful vessel. “This is a... an invasion?”

Geoff was silent, staring at the screen.

The scene shifted, returned to the studio. “Sorry to cut Rob off there... but we’re getting reports, several reports from around the world. Okay, let’s go over to Amelia Thirkell in Paris...”

“Thank you, Dan.” A trim blonde woman in a stylish raincoat was standing before the Eiffel Tower, clutching a microphone to her chest and staring wide-eyed into the sky. “Just twenty minutes ago, twelve-thirty-one European time, a vessel identical to the ones that have been reported appearing in Australia, China, Argentina and elsewhere, manifested itself in the sky just north of Paris. Eye-witnesses, I’m told, say that it simply appeared as if from thin air. And then moved south slowly, as you see now...” The camera swung, and it was as if they were watching a re-run of the Australian ship’s progress, only this time the backdrop was grey with rainclouds.

The beautiful, colossal ship was identical in every respect.

Jenny and the houseboy were shrieking with delight before the TV.

“I can confirm that, as in Australia, the air force scrambled jets to intercept, but that those jets could not, I repeat,
could not
, take off.”

The shot lingered on the slowly moving vessel, occasionally swooping in for close-ups as if attempting to establish fine detail, decals or some other feature on the silver-blue tegument of the craft.

The superstructure, however, appeared featureless, as seamless as the surface of an egg.

It hovered over the Eiffel Tower, reducing the landmark to the size of a needle.

“...the strange thing is,” Amelia Thirkell was reporting, “that the crowds massed here and on the banks of the Seine don’t seem in the least phased by... by what we have here. And I can report myself that there is no sense of... of threat emanating from the ship.”

“Angela,” the anchorman back in London said, “sorry to have to interrupt there. We’ll be back, but we have interesting developments here in London. With me in the studio are the physicists Dr Ed Danbridge and Dr James Chamberlain. Gentlemen, many thanks for coming here at such short notice. Now, you’ve both been doing calculations based on the vessels’ trajectories...”

“That’s right, Rob,” Chamberlain said. “To remind viewers, the starships –”

The anchorman interrupted. “Now that’s the first time we’ve used the s-word, but you think...?”

“The assumption is, Rob, that only an extraterrestrial intelligence could be behind the various odd phenomena reported over the past twenty-four hours. Anyway, the vessels appeared in the skies of Earth at precisely the same time all around the world, 11.31 Greenwich mean time. Interestingly, each ship is heading on a trajectory that we’ve plotted, Jim and myself, which will meet at some time in the near future, at a point a hundred kilometres north-west of the Malian city of Timbuktu in the Saharan Desert.”

“Can anything be made of that, at this early stage?” the anchorman asked.

“I think it’s too early to say yet. All we can do is watch and wait...”

“And speaking of watching, we can switch to David Runciman in Tanzania with reports of another starship...”

“Thanks, Rob. David Runciman here, in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, where as your studio guests reported, at 11.31 Greenwich mean time a vessel appeared in the sky above the park, heading slowly north-west...”