Day 149 - Babel - Chapter 45 (1495 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 45

The cone of Rangitoto was soft, the weight of the earth, the growth of greenery and rock on top of it all was just stacked on top of itself, waiting for the right tilt or shove to send it askew and lose it's coherence. The top layer was like sand, it took the rockets to itself like it were not more than a thick custard, enough to bear distributed weight but parted easily with a piercing blow. The rocket propelled sea sparrow missiles drove themselves downwards into the earth rapidly drilling through the softened and unstable ground, stabbing at the earth like a knife. When they connected to hard rock, the impact triggered the warheads to detonate. Two missiles with minor explosive power compared to the nuclear warheads suspended in the air above them but these were directed to the compromised ground above a volcanic vent.

The smell of sulphur had given the game away to Victor on one of this trips to the island to scope out the approach to the ship. He had stood in the caldera and felt a tremor, saw the earth ripple at the might and power struggling just beneath the surface to free itself. It had been dead for centuries, it was a cold and lifeless husk but Ti still straddled a weak point in the crust that exploded with immense force some five hundred years ago, before European Settlers had been here. It was a school fact you learned that the City of Auckland sat astride many volcanic cones, and that they had been dormant or extinct for longer than local recorded history. Oral tradition had named it Rangitoto or Bloody Sky from it's most recent eruption. The one that had risen the cone from the harbour alongside Motutapu Island and the other spots on land thrust upwards through the gulf waters.

The explosions, compressed and focussed as they were through the weight of the loosened metres of earth, rock and island above them cracked the ground, already under pressure from underneath as the easing of the earth’s tension allowed the pressure to seek a release. The sulphuric smell wafted out of the caldera and the defunct Lava tubes that littered the island. Victor had been visiting for days, scoping out the best place to align himself with the pressure points that could set off the megatons of energy lying in wait.

He knew it was a good chance that the four tiny missiles they had would not make a dent in the giant spaceships that hung there, and would likely have shield or defences of some kind. It was lunacy to accept that they came all this way, decimated resistance with the Babel and set about invading, but brought no defensive capability? Victor knew that the missiles would not be enough when he went to go and get them, he had already smelled what the island was hiding beneath it's skirts and the way to get at it, to crack it open and let the force of nature deal with the alien usurpers of humanity's rightful place on the planet. He had a germ of a plan from that first day when he felt the tremor and smelled the lingering odour he recognised from other Volcanic areas like White Island and Rotorua, it was a prize waiting to be taken, a chain reaction that would dwarf anything man made he could conceivably level against the Ship.

The plan came together quickly, he used the help of the man to wrestle them free and get them to the island, and he lost the cooperation of him sooner than he anticipated. He knew before they even got to the Naval base that George was losing his nerve, would bottle and run if given the chance. He regretted not seeing it sooner and letting the loose end be untied, but he had not shared with him the real plan, to manually set off the mountain and let the fury of God and Nature loose together. George thought, like Barbara had, that he intended to set the missiles at the ship in some vain attempt to shoot it out of the sky. It would be like throwing a bee a person, if it stung and there was no guarantee that it would, it would be an annoyance at best and make little difference to the domination of the sky that it enjoyed.

If he got this right, and the way the mountain was acting he certainly believed that there was a good chance, then it would crack the earth's crust open and it could be as devastating as Mt St Helens had been when he was younger, a powerful and unavoidable problem for the ship. He had seen how slow it moved, not once did appear manoeuvrable or fleet in it's actions. Potentially it could be as explosion that had created Lake Taupo, the world's largest eruption some twenty six thousand years ago, one that would obliterate the ship, the city, the alien body snatched souls who passed as humanity and everything around the entire country. The big eruption covered the entire country in ash, hundreds of miles in circumference and it would be felt everywhere and visible easily from space.

A warning sign. Don't fuck with Earth. That would be the best case scenario to Victor, a total and undeniable victory and wiping the alien infestation from the face of his country, of what would be left of it when his vengeance was done. This was his plan, this was to be his legacy and the thing that would push back against the things that had taken earth from him. He had suffered under their yoke, immune by chance or destiny he didn't know and it was highly unlikely that anyone would live to tell the tale after the Volcano rose in bloody retribution.

No one would know and no one would be left to tell the tale of the one man who stood up and refused to let them take away his planet. They didn't know the poor bastards, they were already dead and under alien control now, no longer themselves so it was not a mass murder it was mass mercy.

Mass Mercy. Yes that was what it was, it was a shame there was no one to tell and no one to appreciate the sacrifice he was about to make when the missiles were triggered and he face down the behemoth that lorded it over the human race, the species it tried to annihilate with it's insidious disease.

When the rockets dug their way into the earth he had been burned quite badly, he had to be standing between them to set them off and even as he dived away once the ignition was set he was not far enough and the heated seared at him, burning flesh and material together, fusing Victor and the clothes he wore. As burned and in shock as he was he was still alive, though his eyes had been blinded in the heat and flames. Then as he lay there feeling the earth rebelling against the foreign agent daggering inwards through it's skin, he was waiting for the explosion but it didn't come for the longest time and he wondered if it had all been in vain. He could no longer see well at all but a faint light made it through his eyes and he knew that he was looking up at the ship from the tinge of blue he saw through slitted eyes that were milky and clouded like an old man’s, but still burning with painful fire.

Then there was a wallop and the ground he lay on leapt underneath him, throwing him a few feet in the air and the chain reaction was beginning. The explosion, the twin detonations were like a sweet victory and he let go of his earthly existence. He no longer felt any pain, no regret and no sensation except the joy of knowing he had won. This would be it, the rumbling intensified and grew so rapidly it was like a drumbeat getting faster and faster and building in intensity all the time.

He could lie back and wait, but there was no need as the eruption was a white hot conflagration that incinerated him before his body took it's final breath and threw white hot rock and lava sky high like a geyser of nuclear fire-storms concentrated like a pulse from a laser, but so much wider, hotter and deadly than anything ever witnessed. The sides of the mountain blew outwards at the same times as the gap was blow upwards and out into the missiles in the air, crushing them into the skin of the saucer.

The warheads, without the precise detonation sequence did not create a nuclear explosion, but even if they had it would have been dwarfed by the instant Armageddon that spewed out of the damaged earth.