Day 148 - Babel - Chapter 44 (2033 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 44

Barbara was staring open mouthed at the sky above her standing on the edge of the caldera at the top of Rangitoto, with the suspended missiles hanging the air above her by a few hundred feet at most, dwarfed by the Saucer that covered them all from the sun and bathed them in the same glow that lit Brown's Island at night time.

In the middle of the caldera, the bush covered depression in the extinct volcano that sat in the middle of Auckland Harbour, Victor had brought two of the missiles from the boat that they had brought over. There were four all told where the road stopped being drivable, but they made the decision to only use two of them considering that it had taken them nearly four hours to get a single missile up here using the twisted tracks, through the knobbly rocks and pumice that littered the ground and gnarled the trees and bush that now ruled this cold rock.

“It's no use!” Barbara was screaming down to him as he used a pick to chop away at the ground, softening it up for the missile placement. Victor ignored her and carried on with his tinkering, stopping to chop away at the ground a few more times.

They had seen the missiles, heard the roar from so very close, from the vantage point at the peak they even could see the men on the submarine pointing pathetically at the sky, willing the warheads to detonate, willing them to break through the forcefield or shielding that was holding them and to impact.

She looked back and saw that he was still not moving, and the missiles just hung there perfectly still not affected by any breeze or motion, frozen in time and space. Barbara walked carefully down the side of the crater, tripping over bush roots, stones and greenery. The island had been inactive, labelled dormant and extinct for centuries, and was a lush paradise for plants and animals with little or no human contact. It was not far and soon she stood next to the man who's plan she had followed so carefully and now it seemed so ineffectual and useless given the might of the nuclear missiles she assumed were suspended above her now.

“Victor?” She started kindly.

“Give me a minute, I'm almost done.” Victor was consulting the manual and making some changes to the exposed wiring behind a panel he had prised loose to get at the control mechanism and give it some basic arming and control instructions.

“It's no use, you won't get anywhere near it, just look!” Barbara was pointing up at the sky and trying to look sympathetic when Victor just laughed, long and hard at what she said.

“Darling. I am not trying to get these missiles near them. We are already near them.” He laughed a little more and kicked at the ground, a dusty film rose a little at his feet. Then he made a connection with some wires and two green lights flicked on to a printed circuit board and he rubbed his hands together. “Done.”

Barbara was confused and she sat down, noticing the ground that Victor had been chopping away at was loose and moved under her when she shifted her weight around.

“It's not about what you think it is.” Victor suddenly looked sad and he looked her in the eye and put a hand on her shoulder. “Id' tell you to leave, but honestly you would not get far enough, not in time, you'd be better off being here. At Ground Zero, it'll be quick and you won;t even know. I promise.”

Now she was scared. “Victor? What do you mean.”

Now he looked up at the Saucer and the missiles hanging there and he wagged his finger in the air.

“That's a nice trick. Try holding this motherfucker back you alien bastards!” The finger became a shaking fist and his grimace became a bloody grin.

“Victor? What are you going to do?” Barbara felt a cold chill go over her. She had thought that they would shoot the aliens out of the sky, they'd watch it crash land into the sea, hopefully not on top of them and then they'd be free of the Alien Invaders, the ones who had come and taken away their freedom and the so very human connection for 99.9 percent of the population. She expected to win, to push back the aliens, the ones she had never seen, the cowardly invaders that had sent a virus to soften up the world and then sent ships to zombiefy the humans, body snatching them to do the dirty work and not once show their faces.

She didn't really think about the consequences, not really facing the act that death was a potential outcome of taking on the aliens only a few hundred feet from the biggest structure she had ever seen.

Now though she saw that Victor had a different plan all along and that far from being ineffectual and unlikely to succeed she saw what he really was planning and it was a certain death for himself and for her. Probably for all of the people across the bay below them in the submarine, and maybe the majority of people in the City, alien possessed or not, they would not live through this. The nuclear warheads, they may well have been prevented from reaching their target, if they had made it through there was a distinct possibility that they would have, could have taken the ship out entirely but also laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land and sea all around. The submarine though, they had launched their attack and they lost control of their plan and their weapons due to a superior technology and a ship crewed with the aliens who obviously knew how to defend themselves from these weapons, render them useless lumps of metal and radioactive materials.

She stood back from him and held her mouth over her hands and then turned and ran as fast as she could out of the extinct crater, scrabbling through the scoria, the brush falling away and the stomping of her feet into the ground. Each dig her stride made churned more dirt and increased the salty, sickly smell that she had started to get a whiff of when Victor was digging.

She crested the ridge of the caldera and kept running, all the way back to the track, not looking back once. It took her a few minutes but she got to the car at the end of the road and all fingers and thumbs she started it up after dropping the keys a few times and her trembling hands steadied themselves to take the steering wheel for the bumpy ride back to the better part of the road on the rangers four wheel drive, missiles still intact on the back, adding weight to the tray of the truck and helping her keep her balance as the back end jumped and danced with her frantic driving over very uneven surfaces.

When she got to the boat she could see the submarines crew standing on the foredeck waving to her as she drove to the boat. She had to decide in a split second to either abandon the boat and head for the submarine, hoping to god that they could get away under water, or to take of across the surface banking on the speed of the outboards to get her far enough away.

Victor was right, and neither option would work out to her survival, she could not get far enough fast enough unless they could get in the air and get away five minutes ago. Resigned to her fate she walked along the wharf to the boat and sat on the edge of the jetty, her legs dangling as she waited to die.

Captain Frank headed the team that took a dinghy from the sub to the wharf where they saw the woman drive up so maniacally, so frantically and then come to a sudden halt. He left his first officer in charge and came to talk to her, the plan they had worked out was just hanging mid air completely useless to them and they had lost all comms back to the provisional government of New America, so they were one hundred per cent alone.

“Hello, Ma’am?” Frank extended a hand to her but she just stared at the waves lapping at the boat she knew it was useless to get into to try and escape.

“We're going to die.” She said bluntly.

“Well, that's a pretty negative view.”

“It's not. It's a fact, we are going to die. He has two missiles up there.” She pointed backwards without looking at the peak of the island.

Frank laughed. “I don't know who he is Ma'am, but we have twenty of them and they're just about as useless as tits on a bull if you don't mind the salty language Ma'am.”

Barbara looked at him for the first time and Frank felt her fear and finality in the look she gave him.

“You know what your problem is …? ummm?” She looked for his name.

“Frank, Captain Frank Grundy of the USS...”

She cut him off with a wave and an exaggerated American accent, “Well Howdy, Captain Frank! My name is Barbara. And you know what the problem with your missiles are? Captain Frank?”

“No Ma'am, but I just know you're about to tell me.” He smiled and waited for the inevitable superiority from a civilian who knew nothing about ordinance, missiles or the power they pack inside of them.

“Well, the problem is one that my friend. My friend Victor, he already figured out the problem and he found a solution. I don't suppose that you have anything to drink on you? Like some alcohol, in flask or something, don't you Navy types carry rum or whiskey or something? I could really use a drink.”

Frank did have a hip flask and it contained his favourite single malt whiskey, he fished it out and offered to Barbara who took it and down much more than Frank thought she could have handled, coughing and sputtering as the liquid burned her mouth and tore at her watering eyes. She took another sip when she settled herself and coughed a few times and handed the flask back.

“Now, better? I don't suppose we could get back to the solution to our...” Frank pointed at his missiles just hanging there “... little problem?”

“I didn't realise it at first, but they were just lying down for him to work on.” She shrugged at her words and then looked at Frank with an air of resignation. “They were lying down, they were pointed down.”

“I don't understand Ma'am, what are you saying? Pointed what down?” Frank was beginning to wonder if this woman was mad, but how much madder than seeing his entire arsenal trapped in an alien forcefield unable to be remote detonated.

“The problem with you missiles is that they were pointed up, at the … thing up there. He. Victor. He pointed his down, at the ground. In the middle, where it's beginning to crack, from that … thing.”

Frank scratched his head, removing his cap and looking more confused.

“You're not from around there then?”

“No Ma'am.”

“This? This is Mount Rangitoto, in Maori that means Bloody Sky.”

He looked at his men across the bay, this was getting him nowhere. “I'm afraid I still don't...”

Before he could finish his sentence they heard a echoing roar of rockets firing and then a crump of an explosion, followed by another on it's heels and then silence.

“What the fuck was that? Excuse my language Ma'am.”

She looked Captain Frank and then the rumbling began, violent and thunderously the entire world they could see shook like a bell.

“I forgive you.” She whispered, but it was not meant for him to hear anyway.