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

watching a silent movie. There is no sound in space. There is nothing to carry sound waves. No noise, no screams, just white hot-shrapnel bouncing off the force-field he had created.
He threw out his mental net again. The Enemy presences were like stunned fish drifting in a sunless ocean. Group by group he obliterated them all - they could not touch him now - and he scattered their sub-atomic particles between the stars.
Mark ran two hands through his hair. He slumped forward and rested his hands on the command chair. He looked at Striped Arm’s body, the three-fingered claw and the motionless reptilian face. He felt horribly alone. Throughout the ship it seemed that nothing moved. He scanned the controls and wondered what on earth he should do next.

**********


31 Tuesday Night - Logan #4

Logan is confused.
He lies on one arm on the thick quilt and his unblinking gaze is directed outside the Travel Inn motel’s small bedroom window at the restricted view of the pale blue late-afternoon sky. Here in England, in this suburb of the unremarkable town of Uttoxeter, the weather is noticeably warmer but the air-conditioning shields him from the persistent mugginess.
The window faces north. That way lies the sprawling amusement park of Alton Towers with its Soros Galaxy Ride, advertised in the motel foyer as the most terrifying ride in Europe. And beyond that, the rolling hills and fields and massive urban sprawls and motorways of England. And beyond that – Scotland, but a Scotland without a mushroom cloud; and that is the first reason for Logan’s confusion.
Yet on the four o clock news he has clearly seen footage of the Daniels woman and the boy’s girlfriend, under armed escort by soldiers heading towards the HQ in McIntyre’s Field. How could that be? How could they have been released from his flat without setting off the bomb? What had gone wrong? Was the bomb wrongly constructed? Had he made mistakes?
But the boy has been taken by the aliens and the aliens have taken off. So, in a way, the main objective has been achieved: the aliens have gone. Maybe they had got wind of the bomb and been scared off. Its blast certainly would have blown them to kingdom come, that’s for sure. But Logan is not entirely convinced by the logic of that argument. Area of confusion number two.
Area of confusion number three: the source of that lay on the dressing table – the Supernet interface that is standard equipment in two-star motel rooms. He has checked it out earlier but could not access the familiar site. His incomprehension at that is profound. He feels like an addict without a fix, and he shies away from that thought – it does not square with the image he holds of himself. But what he cannot shy away from is the incontrovertible fact that he can no longer contact the Chairman. That more than puzzles him – it makes him feel cut loose, adrift.
The threads of his purpose are beginning to unravel. He puts that thought away too.
Of course, he has already contacted other members of the League including the Commander in this area, so he is not alone. No problem with that. In fact the resources of the League are totally available to him. Tomorrow he will pick up new identity cards from a drop point in Kettering: ID, passport, credit cards, employment history, references, everything necessary to disappear as Logan and start afresh. A spell abroad is called for. The League Commander has suggested a few months abroad – and offered him the use of his apartment in a village near Rimini in eastern Italy. Logan is very much inclined to take up the offer.
But why had the bomb not detonated?
Why had the aliens really gone? Are they gone for good or is this just a ruse? A preamble to invasion?
Why have they taken the boy with them?
Where is the Chairman and why has his site disappeared from the Supernet?
So many questions.
Logan pushes himself off the bed and stumbles over his Scarpa boots to the dressing table. He switches on the kettle, tears open one of the cappuccino sachets and pours the granules into a small cup. When the kettle has boiled he pours some water into the cup and stirs it with a spoon, adding a sachet of sugar.
He takes his coffee to the window and, standing, looks out, sipping from time to time. The view of the hectically busy motorway not two hundred metres away is not comforting. He touches a hand to his temple. Logan can sense the onset of a headache. He is not as a rule, prone to headaches, but just lately he has been noticing dull pains, more and more, at the back of his throat. Strange. He ponders gargling with some antiseptic solution.
He puts the coffee down on the white plastic window ledge. What he really feels like is a bloody drink. But wait a minute! He has not had an alcoholic drink since that time at eighteen when he had gone mad at a student party and woken up days later in some goddam soaking meadow in the early hours of a chill May morning. He flushes to remember it. But that experience has put him off alcohol for life – or so he has thought until now. He never has found out the truth of that drunken escapade; he never has found out what had happened to his clothes or who had taken them. The whole embarrassing episode had eventually been thrust from his mind, kept aside, suppressed. Strange he has not thought of it at all for many years. Very strange.
The headache is getting worse. This is perhaps the onset of a cold. Logan feels the urge to blow his nose. He steps into the bathroom, tears off some toilet paper and blows his nose into it. When he pulls the tissue away he notices the blood. Quite a lot of blood.
His headache is definitely getting worse.

**********


Tuesday Night - Mark

You have no idea how powerful you can be…

The giant ship drifted in space. The slight background hum of its mighty drives and gravity fields followed Mark wherever he went. If the ship on earth, that in reality had been no more than a landing craft, had been full of wonders then it had been a village museum compared to this Louvre. Down smooth-walled ochre corridors Mark walked, through vast chambers of truly alien life-form specimens that the Soros had collected during their odyssey amongst the stars. Strange plants, simple animal species like nothing on earth, creatures that resembled fish in the sense that they seemed to be swimming in water, others that resembled desert insects in that they boasted numbers of legs, lived in enclosed sandpits and looked more than a little frightening… all manner of bizarre species were preserved in protected environments, each one apparently monitored and serviced by the ship’s “computer system”. And there were dozens, hundreds of such enclosures. Mark understood that one of the reasons this great ship has remained in space while only the smaller craft landed had been to avoid the risk of any of these life-forms getting free and running loose on the home planet. Who knew what the consequences of such a thing might be?
Mark walked kilometre after kilometre. From time to time he passed machines of various shapes and sizes that appeared to be robots. Some were carrying out maintenance tasks. Others appeared to be simply waiting, out of the way at the side of the corridors, for fresh instructions. Some enormous intelligence must be controlling all this. Mark found upon experiment that he too could cause the robots to move simply by stretching out his mind and issuing an order: Move to the right. Go to the end of the corridor and stop. But, unable to think of any task more constructive or imaginative, he carried on his way.
He felt no tiredness and he was engrossed in his exploration of this stupendous ship. In this way he put aside the memory of what he had just endured and the horrors that threatened to haunt his mind were held at bay – at least for a while. His travels took him further and further away from the scenes of carnage.
Games rooms, recreation rooms, bedrooms, rooms that looked like sports halls and had incomprehensible markings on the floor, all of these Mark wandered into, no doors locked. In one section of the ship he found many rooms lined with curious finger-sized cylinders. The equivalent of our CD storage systems. This must be a kind of library. He took some out and turned them over. Impressions came. This is a story, a Soros story, a love story. A love story! And this is a drama about family conflicts, and this one about a brilliant scientific mind destroyed by a genetic condition but saved in the end by manipulating DNA on a sub-atomic level… Story after story after story.
In other rooms he found cylinders containing the history of Soros mechanical principles, engineering techniques, vessel schematics, diagrams, blueprints. Mentally he was able to access them in part, enough to identify what they contained, but he did not know how they could be displayed fully.
One room made Mark pause and feel slightly sick. It contained a collection of about ten large robots, humanoid in shape, very powerful looking, bristling with what had to be weapons systems. What should have been their heads were hollow shells, left open. These cavities were lined with some kind of organic substance and Mark had no trouble guessing their purpose. These had been destined to contain human brains: perhaps some had already fulfilled that intention, but the experiment had failed or could not continue. Mark knew that if one of the Soros had prevailed in his argument, his own brain would have found its final resting place in the headpieces of one of these war machines. Striped Arm had prevented that.
Another room held the history of all life on earth; but it stopped with the Soros, of course. They had been at the top of the tree of life in their time. Like the histories humans write. Evolution, for the moment, appears to stop with us. But who, in the future, will read our histories?
Another area of the ship was given over to a huge parkland. He had to negotiate his way through a complicated series of air-locks to enter this section and, once in, Mark found the place disorientating. It appeared to have a blue sky, a gentle breeze was created by some completely silent mechanical means and stirred the branches of huge smooth-barked trees. Unlike in the rest of the ship he had explored, the background hum here gave way to sounds of a more alarming nature. The first noises he noticed, as soon as he stepped inside, were the birds’ cries – sharp-toned, shrill grating screams and caws, like demented sea-gulls; and then after a