And the World Changes - A M Kirk (books to read fiction txt) 📗

of gold and braid and ribbons above the left breast pocket. He wore thin, black-rimmed glasses, and his hair was grey-black, combed back.
“My name’s Talbot, Andrew Talbot.” His manner was serious, concerned and sincere. “Aaron Miller was bringing Mark to see me and then we were going to arrange for him to visit the Soros leader. Events now seem to have moved out of our control, somewhat. I’m what’s known as the General Officer, Commanding Scotland. I want you to know we are trying to understand exactly what has been going on and precisely what has happened to your son, Mrs Daniels.”
He took command of the situation with cool confidence. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to get a doctor in here, Doctor Sheila Gold, who will give you quick check up to make sure you’re all right. I know, I know - you’re a doctor yourself, but I’d rather one of our people gave you a check-up.”
Janette nodded apathetically. “If you want. What difference does it make?”
“In the meantime, if there’s anything else you need…”
Janette’s expression came to life and she stood up, almost defiantly. “There is. Apart from my son back. A magnetic resonance imaging machine,” said Janette. “Please.”
“A what?”
“A magnetic resonance imaging machine. Stirling Royal will have one you can borrow, or some doctors’ surgeries even have them now. Maybe you’ve even got one here, I don’t know. I used to have one, before the goddamn Soros blew my home to pieces.”
Talbot said he would see what he could do. “It’s important that you understand, Doctor Daniels, that I am not your enemy.”
Janette appraised him carefully. “We’ll see,” she said.

**********


Darkness. No sensation. This must be death, thought Mark. I’ve been killed and my soul is drifting somewhere in space and time, cut off from everything. I have no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, no nose to smell things, no nerves to feel things. I am just thought, drifting, and alone. What have they done to me? What have they done? He was not afraid.

**********

Janette was mildly surprised when General Talbot and Director Roberts willingly submitted to the MRI scan. She set it up in their living quarters.
“Anyone ever told you you should have your head examined?” asked Janette, as she affixed the sensors to Talbot’s head. There was no real humour in her tone.
“What is it you think the test will show?” asked Talbot.
“We’ll see in a minute,” answered Janette. “Hold still now. This won’t hurt a bit.” The device whirred slightly inside itself, some internal cooling fan, and after a moment the result of the scan was printed on specially-coated paper.
“Hold that, Carrie, will you?” Carrie took the image Janette handed her. She looked at it, frowned, but could make nothing of it.
“There appears to be a brain,” Carrie remarked.
“Well, that’s something,” replied Janette. “Now you, Roberts.”
“Please – call me Chris.”
Once the scans were complete, Janette laid the images out on a square plastic table. “This is how it began,” she said. “I scanned my son’s head. He had been feeling a kind of pain – here (she pointed at a location on Talbot’s image) – and we found something that suggested a growth or an implant. He felt it was a growth and it was causing him to feel things. After the scan, his feelings got more intense, and he began to “see” things. It turned out he was hooked into the Soros in some way and the magnetic scan had switched this “thing” on. He could get access to what they were thinking and planning - or at least to some of it. The Soros found out and tried to destroy us. You see Mark also thought the implants were what the Soros used to control some humans – the Human Freedom League, for example.”
“And you want to find out if we have any implants, or whatever, too – is that it?” asked Roberts. “Like we might be secret members of the League?”
“Yes. And judging by these, you are clear, gentlemen. You are all human, and free from Soros control.”
“Go on, please,” said Talbot.
Janette explained the details of their flight across Scotland, their capture in Glasgow, and the events leading to Miller’s death.
“Anyhow,” she concluded, “Mark felt that everything was leading him back to the Soros ship. He had to go there, confront their leader, the one he called Striped Arm – “
Talbot interrupted this time. “Their leader’s space suit was distinguished by a Striped Arm around the lower arm. But no one outside of the Soros circle – and that meant Aaron Miller, myself and few others who were absolutely sworn to secrecy – knew about that. We released as few details as possible and I don’t think that was among them. So for Mark to know that…”
“Confirms he had special powers,” said Janette.
“I think I’m starting to believe you,” remarked the General.
Roberts made a noise almost like derision. “Believe her? I’ve told you, General, I saw with my own eyes what this boy can do. This is for real."
“Mark said, “ continued Janette, “that there was a second ship, a kind of ‘mother ship’ as they used to say in the old sci-fi movies. It was located in the atmosphere above the north pole, ‘hiding in the magnetic field’.”
Talbot raised his eyebrows. “Well… frankly, yes, that’s so,” confirmed Talbot. His face became suddenly even more serious, as he leaned forward and said. “Mrs Daniels – Janette - it will be of no comfort to you now to learn that at 9.18 this morning USAF jets on patrol in that very area detected and made visual contact with a very large extra-terrestrial space ship – very large indeed. A smaller ship, description closely matching the ship from McIntyre’s Field, docked with the larger ship, and was taken inside it. At 0920 the larger ship, with the smaller one still inside it, flew above the atmosphere and left earth orbit.”
He glanced at Roberts as if uncertain how to continue.
“Janette – our satellites tracked the ship for ten minutes. “
“What are you saying to me?”
“We lost it once it passed the orbit of the moon.”
Weakly, Janette said, “What?” She seemed to collapse in on herself. Carrie’s expression was one of sheer horror.
“The Soros have gone,” said Talbot heavily. “We don’t know where, we don’t know why, and we can’t do a damn thing about it. And they’ve taken Mark with them.”
“Mark!” Janette’s grief was terrible to see. She clung to Carrie. “Where have they taken him? What are they doing to him?”
Roberts and Talbot exchanged an uneasy glance. They could find no words to meet the needs of this situation.
It was Carrie who finally spoke: “Wait a minute. We need to have a little faith in him. He’s not exactly helpless. Remember? Remember his power? We both felt it and saw it. Come on. Mark needs us to have faith in him. He’ll come through this. He will. I know it.”
Janette held Carrie at arms length and looked at her through tear-filled eyes. She closed her eyes and held the girl tight, clinging to her, clinging to hope.


30 The Enemy

Darkness…
I am aware I am thinking… therefore I exist. I am alive. At least in some sense of the word.
And then a feeling, an intuition, the old kind, like when Mark could diagnose car faults or predict the sex of an unborn baby or know when a beam weapon satellite was targeting his house. A strong intuition of speed, great speed, unbelievable speed!
Where is my power? Mark wondered.
I have memories. I remember Carrie, and my mother, and what we had for breakfast this morning before we left that safe house and the Honda motorbike that I stole. And when I was six I had an argument at school with Ian Bannerman who stole my coat and stuffed it into a waste bin in the cloakroom, and I have all these memories.
How can you have memories if you’re dead? If your brain is the store of memories, and if your brain is dead then you are dead, then how can I still have memories. I’m still alive. My brain is still alive.
More memories returned: standing watching Carrie flounce in a most attractive manner up her driveway, the first dance with her at the School Dance when they first got together, Alicia Wotherspoon outside the toilets that night saying drunkenly, “Mark, I’ve always fancied you,” and reeling off to dance with someone else, the black and white penguin his mother had placed in his pram when he was two, memory after memory, image after image, then a blue dolphin on a motorcycle and Carrie behind a tungsten wire fence saying in a whisper “I love you”.
And then the power surged within him, driving through the channels and fibres of his being, filling his every particle until he felt that he must explode in dazzling, searing light.
Can I feel my body?
He tried to make a fist. His hand felt like it was thousand miles away.
Contact!
Like a huge door sliding slowly open, or mighty gears grinding to mesh, the awareness of his body gradually, painfully returned.
And now, at last, he had everything, the meaning of it all, totally clear.
He had exerted the merest gram of the tremendous power he knew lay within him and at once, instantly, full awareness – and more – returned.
We’ve just passed the orbit of Pluto. The sun is merely the brightest dot in a canopy of bright dots. We are travelling in the mother ship at light speed. This is a giant ship – five kilometres in diameter, at least. I’m accessing this ship’s controls now, but I’m not sure yet exactly what everything does.
I can see myself as the Soros see me. They see me as… a weapon. I am strapped to a chair, held in one of the ship’s escape pods. Why keep me imprisoned in an escape pod? It is armed – multi-directional beam weapons and some kind of immensely powerful nuclear blaster. Anti-grav pulses cascade up and down and around the hull of the pod, for in that way the Soros think they can harness my magnetic field, my power. But they are wrong.
Now Striped Arm has discovered I am awake. His mind is full of wonder, and guilt, and pleasure that I am awake, and he thinks I’m afraid.
Michael Daniels. You have woken up. Good. His telepathic voice sounded almost glad.
“Now you will tell me what you are hiding from me,” Mark replied.
“The Enemy, in the second ship, is very close. On this ship we number one hundred and twenty-five. On the second ship, about forty of our friends remain, but they are, of course, no longer our friends. They are tools and playthings for the obscene experiments of the Enemy. But, unfortunately,