Alien Velocity (10 page)

He held his breath as the tug on the boat increased. Its speed soon trebled. Crouching carefully in the centre to mitigate the chance of capsizing, he discovered he liked the sensation of magnetic acceleration. It was warm, smooth, and he heard a kind of tuneful hum tonguing the boat along from beneath. He had no idea what caused the phenomenon, or how the field could remain stable. It propelled him at an impressive clip, keeping him ever in the centre of the channel, until the M-field stopped abruptly and the river began to course downhill, through a series of frothy rapids.

Charlie paddled strongly. The banks rose to imperious canyon walls. It cooled considerably in what he imagined as an alien fjord, the acoustical torrent of rushing water crashing about his ears, piercing the sky as ricocheted rifle shots.

Then he saw it, directly ahead through a light mist, an enormous grey dome, as smooth as anything he’d ever seen. His knees and shoulders ached while he knelt. He began to shiver for the first time. The desert seemed a lifetime behind. How could he have possibly agreed to this? Had any of it ever made sense? The dome was so big, so utterly impenetrable, it dwarfed even his worst-case scenario. What had he been expecting anyway? A doorbell? Turnstiles?

“Christ.”

He paddled hard but couldn’t manoeuvre the boat out of the strong current. One-way traffic, deeper and deeper into the canyon. A strip of terracotta sunlight now yawned high above him. Another sunset? How long had he been on the river?

He sprang up. A horrid, shapeless fear jabbed at him. He shivered hotly. He’d encountered the feeling before, usually when he’d forgotten something important. But what? He was here, at the city. He’d made it. So what could be so—

“Crap, the capsule!”

The oar clanged when he threw it down. Almost tearing the pocket of his shorts, he rummaged inside with pruned fingers. “There. Gotcha!” He shoved the wet capsule into his mouth and downed it in one. No need for a chaser. Hell, he hadn’t needed a drop from the soup or water canteens attached to his new belt, not one during the entire trip. It couldn’t have been that long then.

He went to pick up the oar. Strangely, his outstretched hand couldn’t reach it. He tried again. Even farther away this time.

“What the hell?”

Was his eyesight on the blink? He rubbed his eyes. As he did, a slight pins-and-needles feeling in his lower legs told him he was lighter. When he next looked down, the boat was drifting away, six feet beneath him. So where was he? He felt about his shoulders but there was nothing hoisting him. The river roared, whisking the boat from him, while he was no place. Held in midair? By what? How?

He felt as though he’d lost his anchor to the world until he hurtled through the air so fast he couldn’t breathe, up and toward the dome like a bullet. Before blacking out, he remembered the sensation of being drawn into the wormhole, and how pleasant that had felt compared to this.

“Huh?” He woke with a start, completely naked on a picnic blanket, outdoors. It seemed a fine Earth day, with blue sky, the odd wisp of static white cloud, and rolling grassland as far as he could see. He yawned. Where was Sorcha, and why had she left him naked in the middle of the countryside?

What a nightmare he’d had! It would linger for a while, like a hair on the tongue that his fingertips couldn’t quite pinpoint. But there’d been real horror in this one. It felt good, if a little mundane, to be back on terra firma, with only one sun calling the shots. Pricks of déjà vu offset his gradual reorientation, from the contours of nearby hillocks to the clumps of thistles around him, to the wicker picnic basket at his feet. He’d been here before…in this exact spot.

Yeah—you fell asleep here, idiot.

He tried convincing himself this was natural discomfort after such a striking nightmare, but a part of him couldn’t buy it. Too much time had passed since he’d last seen this place, wherever it was. Sorcha chose the picnic spots. He thought it might be somewhere near Scourie in Northwest Scotland. They’d spent a few days of the summer there. The thistles seemed to fit. But when the hell was this? Whatever else he’d dreamt, he hadn’t imagined running in the Tonne. He’d endured too many gruelling fitness sessions for that to be a whim of the mind.

He got up and shouted, “Sorcha! Sorcha!”

No reply.

The air remained completely still, the clouds not moving an inch—unusual for Scotland. Already fed up, he made sure there was no sign of a hiker or a paparazzo watching with a long lens before rummaging in the picnic basket. Christ, he was famished.

Sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil appeared to be bacon and egg—eight triangular halves.

Two pork pies, from Benyon’s—no smell—not sure how fresh.

Sorcha’s silver soup flask, with her name scratched into the base, offered a slight chicken smell. The soup appeared to be brown, like oxtail. Hot.

Party Susan sausages on sticks were wrapped in tinfoil. Again, no smell. There were more than a dozen.

One green apple, probably Golden Delicious, certainly looked delicious.

One flawless banana, uncanny.

Sorcha’s tartan scarf had been his present to her, proof that they were in Scotland, but five months ago?

Charlie inhaled through his nostrils a few times. There was no scent at all. Maybe he had a cold or something. Then why had he gone naked? It wasn’t like him. Any way he looked at it, it made no sense for him to be here, in Scotland, on his own, and without clothes. He tried to remember if he’d made love to Sorcha that day they’d picnicked near the coast. Very likely, but where were his clothes now?

What was with the food? Sure, it looked great, but there was no smell to any of it, and the fruit seemed more like those fake plastic imitations you could buy in a bowl for your mum on Mother’s Day. The air was too still, the grass all a bit too picture-postcard. Since when was blue sky this blue, the clouds so stationary? And, come to think of it, where the hell were the sky trains, the space shuttle trails webbing the heavens, the horses and riders, the goddamn flies swarming about his cuisine?

He frowned. The simplest explanation tended to be the right one—he’d always believed that—a confident way to ward off superstitions and paranormal claims. What made more sense here—waking alone, naked, on a perfect day in Scotland with no sense of time or smell, or being on a strange planet billions of light-years away in a place that just happened to look like Scotland on a perfect day?

“What the freaking hell is happening?”

He picked up the apple and hurled it as far as he could.
Thud.
The noise made him duck and shield his face. About a hundred feet away, a smudge appeared in the grass, but the apple now lay at his feet. It had bounced off something, but what? So quickly? How?

Some kind of scraping, grinding began underfoot. An earth tremor?

He started toward the smudge. After about eight strides, his forehead cracked against a solid wall. He kicked out in anger. His toe stubbed on the same wall.
Shit, that hurt!
He sucked air in with a hiss through clenched teeth. What the hell was it? Invisible? Both palms now flat against the solid surface, he explored the nature of this bizarre phenomenon.

It all rushed in at once.

“Clever…bastards.”

There was no distance, no rolling grassland, no sky and no clouds. He ran his fingers over the most impeccable mural he’d ever seen, perfect in every conceivable detail. Feeling across the wall, he soon came to a corner. The underground scrape ceased. He continued around the perimeter, finally concluding he was in a twenty-by-twenty-foot cell, and that the overlords of Baccarat had imprisoned him.

His stomach churned at the thought but he went on examining the ingenious design. Idle hands made idle minds. After all, what could he do sitting still except brood, panic? He tossed the apple up and noted how high the ceiling was—about fifteen feet. The sun was a brilliant liquid lamp in one of the corners. The grass at his feet? Exact in colour and texture to the grass of Earth.

They had to have gotten all this from his memories, just like Marley. They’d re-created the grass and the blanket and the picnic stuff as closely as his memories allowed. Which explained why everything was flawless. Memory rose-tints. So they’d managed a pretty accurate facsimile of one of his last good days this year. It had to be a recent day so that the memory was relatively fresh, still vivid. The food had no smell because there was no physical example for them to interpret—smell was an abstract.

So what the hell was all this for? Why go to all this trouble? He thought about how they might perceive him. A primitive creature, most likely. Hmm, maybe to them, this was as crude as decorating a fish tank or a hamster cage. To make him feel at home. The only thing missing was the goddamn exercise wheel.

Someone walked over his grave. He recalled the black capsule he’d swallowed, and his promise to Blake and Hippolyta. Oh, shite! If the overlords had read his mind, they’d probably be aware of his ruse to destroy them. Why hadn’t Blake thought of that? They almost certainly had the capsule, as well as the precise whereabouts of his biomechanical friends and the indigenous fairy folk in the forest. The whole shebang. What a stupid goddamn plan. Of all the—and he’d volunteered like a little lost Boy Scout at the slightest whiff of home cooking. Trusting. Square. Boneheaded.

The grinding resumed underfoot and he bent, pressed his ear to the grass to investigate. What now? It seemed as though something scraped the ceiling of a cell beneath. Another prisoner? Who the hell did they think he was? Edmond Dantès? It stopped. He sat cross-legged on the picnic blanket. He wiped the green pigment from his knees. Not really grass. What then? Why should he care? Would it help him get out? No.
Shut up then.

Whoosh!

The wall to his right flew open and the sun in his cell blinked out. Bright silver light flooded in, dazzling him. Pale yellow sand covered the ground outside. He heard and felt a rollicking
thump, thump
from high up, as if the real sky held an audience of riotous angels all flapping their wings in unison, twice a second. Deafening. It was still too bright to see that high.

A feeling of enormity unlike anything he’d ever experienced flushed through him. Out there was vastness, anticipation, a great big dome filled to the rafters with…something he should not be a part of.

The thuds accelerated, vibrated his bones. Charlie stepped back into the cell, his heart a thumping Kong in his chest. He’d never felt as terrified in his life. He’d been caged. The cage had just opened. To a vast open space. There was an audience outside. Waiting. For him. Shit, shit, shit.
Thump, thump, thump.

“Think, damn it, think—”

The wall behind him pressed forward, forcing him out of the cell. He pushed back but the thing was adamantine. It flattened the grass, ate the picnic blanket and shoved the basket out alongside him. As soon as he turned, his ears popped.

The glaring light from above bathed the enormous arena in a kind of silver dawn. A spectral haze kept the distance vague and ominous. The arena appeared to be many miles long. On either side of him, a number of strange new creatures were lined up in front of identical cubic cells running on grooved tracks in the sand. Across this wall of the arena, Charlie eyed hundreds of embedded cubes still waiting to be wheeled forward. Only about a quarter had extended onto the sand and been emptied.

He tried not to imagine Christians herded out to the lions in the Colosseum of ancient Rome. Surely these onlookers had something more benign than that in store. They were, after all, brilliant technologically. The dimensions of this arena were utterly incredible. The scale took his breath away.

“Please walk to your right.” The voice in his ear surprised him. “Do not be afraid. Triumph awaits. Please make your way to the right.”

He scrubbed his face with trembling hands, then glanced to either side. The creatures to his right were already moving in that direction, carefully. The one immediately to his left, a slinky-looking red quadruped with three arms and a neck about eleven feet long, seemed to be waiting for Charlie to make a move. He did, if only to keep his distance from this giraffe-cum-brontosaur.

After he’d passed by twenty empty cells, the voice said, “Stop on the next available lane.”

“What for?”

No reply. The first silver line in the sand gave him pause, but the second seemed awfully familiar. The third confirmed his suspicion.
Stop on the next available lane?
This was some kind of track. And these were the contestants lining up to join him, to compete against him? In what sport? For what result? They were physically so different from one another, no possible contest would be fair.

“Stop on the next available lane. Do not stray from your lane under any circumstance.”

The voice was monotonous, identical to that of his biomechanical friends. It occurred to him that each creature in the arena, upon capture, would probably have been fitted with a similar audio implant. Download its language, attach the bug and communicate at will, a thousand different creatures given the same commands in a thousand different languages. Could they talk back? Would the overlords even hear? Perhaps all this was automatic protocol, perfected over millennia of subjugating alien species, and they were simply being herded like cattle to the Pamplona Run.

He stopped next to a bulky brown brute with three strong-looking legs, a long alligator tail and no head. Instead, a large eye, resembling a cut diamond, dominated its front. Its two arms almost scraped the floor as it hunched. Charlie avoided eye contact—no mean feat. He kept to the middle of his lane. When the long-necked creature slinked to a halt beside him, he felt an overpowering urge to bolt…anywhere.

“Do not move until all lanes are filled and the darkness blinks.”

Crap. This was some sort of intergalactic sport. There was even to be a starting flag. An odd surge of pride overwhelmed him while he began limbering up, touching his toes, jogging on the spot. Nostalgia glowed through the surreal haze, warming him. He shivered, but there was perhaps a bit of pre-race adrenaline mixed in with the dread, and it made him feel that much more lithe and alive, in with a chance. If Charlie Thorpe-Campbell had been born for anything, it was to run, to compete, to win. He’d already run rings around Earth. What else could he do? Jogging reminded him of the lower gravity on Baccarat, his possible advantage.

The overhead thumps dissipated. He ghosted for a moment. It all suddenly made perfect, sick sense. Marley had told him the overlords had obliterated most of the planet’s indigenous species. Was this how they had done it? In this dome? For sport? The idea was so appalling he couldn’t quite swallow it. For them to reprogram the wormhole system in order to forcibly snatch unwary interstellar travellers and bring them here…for this…to perpetuate some ritualistic blood sport…was unconscionable. All that intellect, that technological prowess.

No, it had to be something else. Marley and the others had got it wrong somehow. This was a test of some description, pure and simple. The whole thing seemed far too elaborate for a bunch of sports junkies with nothing better to do than pit rare life-forms against each other. It had to have some higher purpose.

Five or six lanes across, a stick-thin creature cartwheeled forward, out of rank. All eyes followed its progress. The thing moved quite fast. Charlie held his breath. The long-necked creature next to him ducked low to ground, perhaps cowering in anticipation. Then, in the blink of an eye, the stick-thin creature shot up toward the silver light, though not by any line or cable that Charlie could see.

“Wow!” He jumped back. Groans and piercing shrieks erupted from the many lanes. He remembered being lifted from his canoe then bulleting through midair, blacking out. That same technology was clearly being used inside the arena.

Before he had a chance to compose himself again, the entire dome fell pitch black. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Awful wails sounded behind him, louder and louder. Hundreds of them. He braced himself, ready to flee, his knees foremost, spilling adrenaline onto the track.

Light!

Horrors!

Action! He was away before he realised exactly what chased him—a horde of vicious, beaked monstrosities with God-knows-how-many legs scurrying over the sand. They were white, frenzied. Their teeth, shaped like Persian daggers, were bared. That was enough for Charlie.

Like running a cross-country course for the first time, he had no idea how long the track was, what twists were in store, where the twists were, how slowly to pace himself or how many laps he would be forced to run. That metronomic timing he’d been famous for in the Tonne proved elusive. He kept checking to see how far behind the brutes were—thankfully a fair way.

Dreadful squeals and different-coloured geysers of blood, with a thunderous stampede, turned the track into a surging tide of death. Survival of the fittest—Charlie was not the fastest runner in the field, but he didn’t need to be. Unless they had extraordinary stamina, the leaders had flown off at a reckless pace. If the race had been designed as an endurance test rather than a sprint, they’d probably flag before the end and be torn apart. Experience was his best weapon here, that and his lordship over the low gravity.