Flight Lieutenant Jamie Cameron glanced at the fuel display. ‘Ten more minutes of this, Steve, then we’ll turn this old bird around.’
‘Good.’ His co-pilot nodded. ‘I’m getting squint-eyes.’
Jamie tapped his throat mic. ‘Ten more minutes, lads.’
The rest of the crew acknowledged him.
Flying low at a thousand metres, beneath the top-heavy cumulus clouds, was tiring on the eyes, but the ‘floaters’ had so far tended to hang at this altitude, pushed along more quickly by the lower and thicker air currents.
Ever since the outbreak they’d been tasked with the same thankless job, flying endless languid loops around New Zealand airspace looking for floaters.
The Surviving World had learned about the resistant effects of analgesics. The Surviving World had learned about salt – how to use it as a barrier, how to use it as a testing agent.
The virus, however, was also learning to take better advantage of the world’s high and low pressure fronts and prevailing winds. It had begun to produce more ambitious airborne structures: membranous sacks given lighter-than-air buoyancy by the methane and helium contained within. These sacks, some of them larger than weather balloons – swiftly becoming known as ‘poppers’ or ‘floaters’ – contained thousands of infectious spores. It wasn’t enough to shoot these things down; they had to be shot down out at sea so that the fluffy snowflake-like spores that erupted and descended from them hit seawater and died.
During the first year after the outbreak, there’d only been a couple of dozen floater sightings, and those had been heading south-westward, having drifted a long way across the Pacific, presumably from the North and South American continents.
In the second year, the number increased radically, most of them drifting eastward from mainland Australia. There had been nearly two thousand logged sightings. Every single one of them easily ‘popped’ with a burst of incendiary rounds, the flammable methane/hydrogen mix inside the sacks erupting with a satisfying bluish flash and the thousands of tiny spores sparkling like stars as they burned. In the last six months the floaters had reduced to a steady flow averaging about a hundred per month. They were easy to see and quickly spotted on the radar. They drifted slowly enough to be less-than-challenging targets for the boys in the back of the plane.
‘Sir, I’m picking up a signal, zero-four-seven.’
That wasn’t for Jamie, that was a message for the electronics officer, Lieutenant Talbot. The channels were all kept wide open – unless Carling and Jessop way at the back of the plane started bitching about one thing or another.
‘Got it on my screen now. Surface level signa— . . . That’s . . . Whoa! OK. That’s big. Really big!’
Jamie tapped his mic on. ‘Talbot, what’ve you got back there, mate?’
‘We’re picking up a signal on the radar. Something big on the surface.’
Jamie hoped to God it wasn’t another rogue oil tanker. There’d been one discovered over a year ago drifting listlessly on the ocean’s meandering currents. A team in biohazard suits had gone aboard and found the ship’s holds filled, not with oil but with tens of thousands of bodies, a last desperate bid to escape the outbreak. There’d been no sign of infection among them. But in a way that seemed worse. They’d died of thirst. They would have all been dead within a week of setting sail.
‘Freighter?’
‘Bigger.’
‘Tanker?’
‘No, mate. This is way, way bigger.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Talbot, stop pissing around and give me something more precise than “bigger”!’
‘What’s on my screen is about five kilometres across, sir. How’s that for precise?’
‘Five kilometres?’ He exchanged a glance with the co-pilot sitting beside him. ‘How far away is it?’
‘Two-forty klicks, at heading zero-four-seven.’
About twenty minutes away from them . . . and judging by the heading, it was something that must have come in from the Pacific.
‘You sure it’s not weather noise?’
‘It’s not weather.’ Talbot sounded irritated, like he’d been asked if he knew port from starboard. ‘It’s solid and it’s sea level.’
For a cold-sweat second, Jamie wondered if he’d screwed up spectacularly on navigation. Sat-nav systems had ceased to function a long time ago. It was ‘old school’ navigation now, mark one, eyeballs and time and speed calculations made on a paper chart.
His co-pilot anticipated his question. ‘Relax. We’re right where we should be, sir, although . . . Talbot’s picked up something that shouldn’t be there.’
‘Right.’ Jamie checked the fuel display again. The detour was well within their range. ‘We’d better go and take a closer look at this bloody thing.’
A quarter of an hour later his co-pilot made a sighting. ‘Jamie, you see it?’
He nodded. With a flat, uniform, deep blue sea it was easy to spot – a block of faint grey on the horizon, ‘land’, which shouldn’t be there.
‘Looks like a volcanic island.’
Jamie adjusted the course slightly and reduced their altitude so that their first approach and fly-by would be a relatively close one. The sea rushed beneath them, a glistening blur as they closed the last twenty klicks’ distance.
After a couple of minutes Jamie could pick out a lot more detail. The structure was shaped very much like a volcanic island – a central steep column-like volcanic spout surrounded by an apron of ejected detritus that would comprise the ‘lowlands’.
Except . . . it wasn’t coloured the faint greys and greens he would have expected to see at this distance. Its overall hue seemed to be a deep red, the colour of roasted beetroot.
‘Could be it’s a new volcanic island?’ said one of the guys in the back.
‘We’d have picked up the seismic activity,’ replied Talbot.
‘Yeah, right . . . like someone’s still listening out for that kind of stuff.’
‘Pipe down,’ said Jamie. He checked their altitude and brought them a little lower to a thousand metres. Low enough to get good detail as they made one large loop around the thing. ‘Cameras on, let’s get everything we can for the lab boys back home.’
He studied the object as the plane dipped lower and their distance from the sea dwindled to less than two kilometres.
No way that’s something geological.
And it didn’t look man-made. Which left . . . ?
Viral.
He could see textures emerging from the side of the tall central cone: bumps and ridges that looked like thick tendons, circular ribs that ran round it like tide markers of growth. He could see motion on the far side of the cone, something large, flickering every now and then.
As the plane began to bank to starboard, beginning a large clockwise loop around the ‘island’, the flickering object gradually emerged from profile.
‘Jesus Christ!’
He realized he was looking at a sheet of membrane, a vast triangular sheet of membrane, perhaps a kilometre on each side, fluttering like an impossibly large spinnaker sail. As the morning sun shone through it, it glowed a brilliant bloody red, silhouettes of dark branching veins spreading out across it, converging in a central knot of thicker, darker, material. The gigantic ‘sail’ was a crimson nightmare and with the knot of flesh in the middle, it looked like an enormous bloodshot eye staring directly at the approaching plane.
‘Looks like Sauron’s Evil Eye,’ breathed Talbot.
Jamie nodded. Staring malevolently at their foolish approach.
Above the tall central cone, he could see hundreds of ‘floaters’ all tethered to the structure, bumping and jostling together like the gathered party balloons of a fairground vendor.
The plane turned behind the island. Jamie could see a faint trail of white suds in its path, a line in the deep blue sea winding more or less in a straight line back towards the eastern horizon and the rest of the Pacific.
A wake, a telltale indication that this so-called ‘island’ was actually in motion.
‘It’s not an island,’ he muttered. ‘It’s a bloody vessel!’