Through Glass Darkly Episode 1 (2 page)

‘Well, you’re looking much better, when the doctors first saw you they thought you’d be out of it for a few days.’ The elder of the two informed me with just a hint of humour in his voice that didn’t quite make it to his eyes. ‘But I suppose we should start with the usual formalities. I’m Special Agent Jenkins with the FBI, this is Special Agent Fraser. And you my mysterious friend appear to be someone by the name of Hall, one Mr Ashton Philip Hall, of Manchester in England?’

‘Yes, yes that’s right,’ I replied, Slightly taken aback by them being from the FBI. ‘But I’d hardly describe myself as mysterious Agent Jenkins, in fact if anything far from it.’

‘You wouldn’t describe yourself as mysterious!’ His assistant piped up with a tone of genuine astonishment in his voice. ‘An impossibly large and obviously heavily armed zeppelin suddenly appears over our city in the middle of a thunderstorm, closely followed by a dozen people in uniforms nobody has ever seen before, and some creatures nobody has ever even imagined all falling from the sky to smash into our streets. And you wouldn’t describe yourself as mysterious?’

Jenkins the senior agent, held out a hand to quiet his colleague without even looking at him. ‘What my colleague is trying to explain here Mr Hall, is that we’d like some answers, and we’d like them quickly, before that ship of yours does any more damage to our city.’

The surprise must’ve shown on my face at the younger man’s outburst, as of all the things I was expecting hostility was definitely not it.

‘Mr Jenkins, I’m more than happy to answer any and all questions you might have, especially if it’s going to help my ship mates, or their families now that we’re back, I must’ve just got the wrong end of the stick here. Please let’s just start again and I’ll do my best to tell you everything you want to know.’

‘Ok,’ he began, with a sigh. ‘So from the top then Mr Hall, we know your name from the wallet you had on you, how about we move on and talk about where you’re from, and how your ship appeared over our heads last night.’

I knew I had to be missing something, but thinking my head may still be a bit mixed up I decided to play along until things worked themselves out. Starting with the basics so we were all on the same page, and hoping that the confusion would reveal itself when I got to the bit that they didn’t understand or didn’t agree with.

‘Well, alright from the top then.’ I began, determined to be thorough. ’You’ve had a look through my wallet, so you know the first bit, I’m English, from Manchester to be specific. Prior to joining Mr Hughes’ fleet, I tried my hand at a handful of different things in different parts of the world, including a couple of years right here in New York. But that all changed four years ago obviously with his famous broadcast and the overnight appearance of his first fifty airships. Like a lot. . . ‘

‘Are you telling us there are another fifty of these ships hanging around out there?’ Fraser broke in again, a look of horror on his face.

I was expecting them to interrupt me, I just didn’t think it was possible that it could’ve been so soon. It was impossible for anyone not to know about the first fifty airships which Hughes had revealed overnight above the world’s major cities, so I just presumed Fraser mustn’t have heard me properly.

‘No, I’m talking about the first fifty ships,‘ I explained, to their blank faces. ‘The ones which the Captain revealed with his famous television address. . . Obviously there’s still only one Golden Goose, sorry Kubla Khan, though I don’t know what state she’s in now, or what it’ll take to make her airworthy again. . .’

I was tempted to just plough on, but could see none of it was registering with them, so broke off. And then they dropped the bombshell.

‘What broadcast are you talking about?’ Jenkins asked me, a genuine look of confusion on his face. ‘What first fifty airships? Mr Hall, this is New York City, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

I felt like I’d lost my balance for a second, and had to close my eyes just to try and get my wits back, before I continued.

‘Neither of you have ever seen or heard the Howard Hughes global broadcast?’ I asked very slowly and very deliberately. ‘The one which was played over every television and radio channel in almost every country in the world on the same day four years ago.

‘The one in which he launched a fleet of fifty armed airships to help protect the world from the increasing number of miasmic incursions which had been happening.

‘Which he’d developed and built in secret, and which he then gave to the world to crew and use in any way they saw fit. The same ships which have since become our only line of defence against everything that tries to get through from the Expanse.’

I could see it on their faces then. They had no idea what I was talking about. And if it hadn’t been for the giant bronze ship hanging above their city they’d have thought me a lunatic. The older one of the two got it first. Perhaps he saw something in my own expression which made him realise.

This wasn’t our home, we’d come out of the Expanse somewhere else entirely.

Things became a blur for a while after that. They had no idea what I was talking about, but they’d recognised that something was badly wrong, and with Hughes’s name amongst it all, they realised there wasn’t going to be an easy explanation for any of this.

Things began to move after that. They’d gone through my belongings including my wallet because I was in a better state than everybody else, and therefore their best bet for questioning. But they just hadn’t had time to process the hundreds of other crew men and women they’d retrieved from the ship, so hadn’t spotted Hughes amongst the rest.

I think I could’ve walked, but the nurse was very insistent that if I must leave my bed then it would be in a wheelchair. Then as we toured the different wards, with me very literally filling in the blanks for the crew members whose names I knew, they started to give a bit more detail about the world as they knew it. They called things by different names, but we each slowly managed to figure out what the other was talking about.

It appeared the incursions from the Expanse, or the Dead Zone, as they called it, were far less common here than they were in our own world, and were still thought by some, to be the result of some strange natural mutation or phenomena, and even though hundreds of examples of the creatures had been captured or killed and brought back for study, their origin or root cause was still just being guessed at.

On the plus side, the incursions were also still entirely restricted to the remote, scarcely populated, wild places of the earth, so the casualty rate had also fortunately so far been very low.

They’d both seen some of the specimens which had been brought back for study, and were aware that in the back rooms of government the threat was now beginning to be taken more seriously.

We’d toured all the main wards by this time, and there was still no sign of Hughes, so with a heavy heart I agreed to work my way through the bodies in their morgue It hadn’t been possible to bring all the crew to this one hospital, so there was still a chance, but I could feel a cold dread creeping up my spine as we descended into the basement.

I tried to prepare myself for the fact that there would be some amongst the dead that I would recognise, but I just hadn’t anticipated the sheer numbers of the crew that I’d find down there. This wasn’t even the only morgue which held our dead, but the place was full. Every drawer was doubled up with the dead, as was every table top and gurney, and on top of that there were more just fastened up in body bags lying in rows across the floor of the room.

The two FBI agents and the nurse who’d accompanied us, were just silent as the medical examiner revealed the faces of my fallen comrades to me one after the other. When I could I gave him the name and rank of those I knew, but after two solid hours I felt ashamed to have only been able to put a name to about a sixty of those there.

Hughes was not amongst them, which meant he must’ve been at one of the other hospitals, so I tried to think of any other details that might help them to find him.

‘I know the majority of the people you recovered from the ship will have been wearing or carrying a breather mask,’ I said, picking one up from a pile of crewmen’s belongings, ‘but the one he had was different to everyone else’s, and he very rarely took it off. His was more elaborate and had its own Aetheric power source, like that on the ship, which matched several other devices he wore.’

I was about to go on, and describe the various other devices which were unique to Hughes, but something I said must have struck a chord with the nurse.

‘There is another patient who you may not have seen yet.’ She began, carefully. ‘One of the surgical teams was examining him this morning while you were visiting the wards, I think he must’ve been burned or something, I’ve only seen him briefly myself, but I was told we couldn’t remove his mask or any of the other devices, as they seemed to have fused onto his skin in some way.’

She didn’t have any other details, other than that he was very weak and where he’d be after being examined, but something told me this would be him.

I don’t know what the two agents Jenkins and Fraser had imagined when they first came to question me, but I could tell from the growing apprehension in their expressions that they’d started to realise just how wrong their assumptions had been. But it was only when we entered Hughes’ room and they recognised the man in the bed that it really hit them. He was in one of the rooms where the doctors had placed the very seriously or fatally injured crewmen, slightly apart from the rest of the crew. We’d visited most of these rooms earlier, but this one had been empty, so we’d just moved on. And now there he lay, still larger than life, his tall and broad frame perfectly motionless in the bed.

There’d been speculation about Hughes’s mask and the other devices he carried with him since his famous world broadcast when he first appeared with them, but he’d steadfastly refused to comment on their purpose or workings other than to say that they were to alleviate a medical condition from which he suffered.

Now as he lay there I could see it wasn’t just the sculpted bronze breather mask that had bonded to his skin. Through deliberately cut holes in his hospital gown I could also see another device over his heart, a third along his left forearm, and the edge of a fourth which was just visible on his side and back over the area of his kidneys.

On board ship, I think we’d all become accustomed to them, and had more pressing things to worry about, but here they looked utterly incongruous against his bare flesh and clinical hospital gown.

One of the surgeons who’d earlier examined him in order to try and remove the various devices attached to his skin had joined us, to explain his condition.

‘I’m afraid there’s very little we can do for him.’ He began, apologetically. ‘It’s not just the presence of the devices which we’ve been unable to remove, there’s also a problem with his blood. As far as we can tell he’s experiencing an extreme form of Leukopenia, which is when a patients white blood cell count is very low. Now I describe it as extreme, because in the samples of his blood we’ve examined we can’t find any healthy living white blood cells, all that remains are damaged, dead and mutated white blood cells, which his body can’t use.

‘Without wishing to alarm you, I’ve seen patients with very low white blood cell counts before, but I’ve never seen anything this extreme.’ He continued, earnestly. ‘Even if we could identify a process which could selectively damage the white blood cells in his blood stream while leaving both the platelets and red blood cells untouched, we’d expect to see at least some new cells of all types being produced by his bone marrow.

‘In simple terms, even if this man does wake up, his body is completely defenceless against the bacterial, viral, fungal and parasitic infections which a healthy persons system could fight off without even showing a trace of illness.

‘Can’t you give him some kind of medication,’ Fraser, the younger of the two agents asked.

‘Yes, we can, but it will only delay the inevitable,’ replied the doctor patiently. ‘Most of our modern medicines are designed to work with the body’s own immune system, to either strengthen the immune response, or to weaken the infection so that the body’s own immune system can deal with it. When the system is so weak, or non-existent, the best we can hope for is to slow things down and hope for some kind of change.’

‘What about a transfusion of white blood cells from a donor,’ I asked.

‘For someone in such a weakened state, it would be very dangerous,’ the doctor explained. ‘We can only transfer white blood cells within whole blood, and to have any real chance of benefit we’d need the transfer to be a large volume of blood. Far more than someone could donate without needing a transfusion themselves.

‘And then of course there’s the risk that whatever has damaged his own cells will damage the transfused cells.’

After we’d asked all the questions we could think of, and the doctor had asked me if I knew anything about the devices attached to his body. We moved back outside the room.

The two agents had clearly seen enough to make them feel out of their depth, and as we left the room, they moved to one side to discuss something they didn’t want me to overhear. Fraser then excused himself, leaving just me and the older man.

After the exertions of the last few hours I was beginning to feel tired again, so returned to my room, where I fell straight asleep.

CHAPTER 3 - BEGINNINGS

The world is on the edge of chaos. The once strange and wonderful new frontier of science and exploration has crept slowly and steadily toward the common place, the increasing proximity transforming the unusual into the unsettling, until before we knew it the world was besieged. It was only then that we turned back to the doom-sayers and alarmists who’d tried to warn us, who for their troubles had been repaid only with our ridicule.