THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE

It was faster going down the ladders, but there were still a lot of rungs. The staircases, too, were faster; they bounded down them in the dim light of the emergency lamps, two, three, even four steps at a time.

But it still seemed to take them a long time to get down to the main observation deck.

Tane found the entrance to the many flights of stairs leading down the main shaft of the Skytower, but Fatboy said, “Wait.”

He checked himself and backed up to where Fatboy was staring out of the huge toughened glass windows of the observation deck.

His heart began to pound and blood rushed to his ears with a thrumming sound. His legs felt unsteady and he leaned against a handrail for support. The world around them had turned to white.

Auckland was awash in a sea of mist. The entire city had disappeared. All they could see in the cold glow of moonlight was the top of a cotton wool cloud. Way below them, the fog flashed on and off, a dim red color, and Tane remembered the fire engine parked in the middle of the road.

“Did we give them enough time?” he asked, looking to the south.

“I think we did,” Fatboy said.

“What about us?” Tane asked in a small, quivering voice.

“We’re too late,” Fatboy said steadily. “There’s no way out. It’s over for us now.” He turned and looked at Tane. “But not for Rebecca. If she made it to the submarine, then she can still make it to the underwater cave. She can still send the messages.”

“Not for Rebecca.” Tane’s voice was a distant echo. Rebecca alone would endure life in the submarine as the rest of the world disappeared above her. Rebecca alone would send the messages back to the past.

The messages!

“The messages were signed ‘TR,’” Tane protested feebly. “‘Tane and Rebecca.’ Not just ‘R’!”

Fatboy was quiet for a moment, staring out at the cloud. “If you were Rebecca, alone in a submarine, sending messages to the past, to herself and to you,” he said slowly, “how would you sign them off?”

Tane realized with a cold heart that he was right. He looked at his brother and said nothing. He just looked, and Fatboy looked back at him without awkwardness. How wrong he had been, Tane thought, not to trust him from the beginning.

Fatboy said, “You and Rebecca—”

“Good mates,” Tane said quickly.

Fatboy laughed. “She likes you, Tane. She really likes you. More than just good mates.”

“No, really. We’re just…what did she say?”

“Nothing,” Fatboy said. “I doubt she would. But I could tell.”

“You’re wrong,” Tane said.

“No, I’m right.” Fatboy shook his head. “But it would have been wrong for me not to tell you now. Now that…” His voice trailed off, and his eyes drifted back to the rising fog around them.

“You always looked out for me,” Tane said. “I should have—”

“You shouldn’t have done anything different,” Fatboy said. “I knew where you were coming from.”

But this time Fatboy wouldn’t be able to look out for him. Nor would he be able to look out for Fatboy. There was nothing anyone could do.

Tane looked at his brother and held out his hand. It was strange, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Fatboy took it and shook it, but then pulled him closer and pressed his nose and forehead to Tane’s. Three times he pressed in the traditional hongi. Once for the person, once for the ancestors, and once for life in the world.

The hongi was a greeting, but this, they knew, was a goodbye.

They descended into the stairwell, into the shaft of the tower.

         

“Get out of the way!” Rebecca screamed, and jammed the Jeep into gear.

It smashed into the barrier pole with a crunch and the sound of broken glass.

“Stop!” the first guard shouted, but he seemed uncertain, and his pistol wavered between Rebecca and the oncoming fog.

The barrier pole didn’t break; it was metal and just bent a little.

Rebecca thrust the car into reverse and backed off a few yards.

“Stop!” the other guard shouted now, raising his weapon.

She ignored him and stomped on the accelerator. The Jeep rammed forward and the metal bar bent a little more. She kept her foot down hard and the tires began to smoke, the end of the Jeep sliding around as the bar prevented her progress.

There was a crack of a gun, and the windshield shattered. Xena and Rebecca screamed in unison.

She dived across the seat of the Jeep, catching the door handle on her first try and falling out of the door of the vehicle. She grabbed Xena by the hand and slung her up around her neck, running toward the edge of the breakwater, instinctively putting the Jeep in between herself and the guards to give herself time to get some distance before they could fire again.

It helped for only a few seconds. There was another crack then and a whistle past her ear. Xena squealed again.

Rebecca raced down the road leading into the small cluster of buildings that was the naval base. Old, weather-boarded buildings with tin roofs, dating from the 1940s or earlier.

There were no more shots, and when she glanced back, she saw why. The guard hut and the Jeep were shrouded in mist, and where the second guard had been, the white shape of a macrophage stood silently, motionless.

The first guard was lying on the ground, screaming noiselessly, with a dozen antibodies covering his arms, legs, and face.

The fog was rolling in over the dark buildings to her right, but she had no option except to follow the road.

And there it was. Moored to the side of a long jetty. The familiar, bulbous, warm-yellow shape of the Möbius. It was barely a hundred yards away, out along the jetty.

The fog clouded around her and she stumbled, tripped and fell, Xena rolling away from her across the tar-seal with a squawk.

Rebecca tried to get back up, but her leg didn’t seem to be working properly. Confused, she looked down to see a glutinous shape, with short fibrous tentacles, latched onto her thigh.

She screamed in fear, and then screamed again in pain as the sting of the needlelike fibers reached her shocked brain.

Somehow she hauled herself to her feet and hopped forward, dragging the useless leg behind her.

“Come on, Xena!” she called, but the little chimpanzee just sat there, quivering with fright, and looked at her.

There was a stinging in her left arm now as two of the antibodies attached themselves to it; then her arm, too, went numb and useless.

“You come if you want to,” she yelled at the chimp. “I ain’t waiting for you!”

She had no chance of making the submarine—she knew that now—but if she could just make the edge of the jetty and the waters of the harbor…

She collapsed again, just a yard or so from the edge, from safety, and looked down at another antibody digging its way into the shin of her good leg.

“Get off me!” she screamed, and crawled forward as best as she could with one good arm and only a little movement in her right leg.

The fog swirled around her, and a shape moved in front of her. She raised her head to see a macrophage, tall and white in the early light before the dawn, standing between her and the ocean. Waiting for her.

“Leave me alone!” she screamed, and crawled forward another few inches.

The shadow of the creature approached, and Rebecca screamed one last time, except the scream wasn’t hers. It wasn’t her voice; it wasn’t even a human voice. There was a blur of brown hair and the sensation of small feet on her back, and Xena leaped up from her shoulders straight at the macrophage, clutching around its neck, bending it backward, overbalancing, and then there was no macrophage in front of her, only a rising spout of seawater, and it seemed to be minutes later that she heard the splash.

“Xena!” she cried as the fog continued to make ghastly, ghostly patterns all around her.

         

The voice of his flight controller sounded in his headset, and Ramirez pulled his jet around in a tight bank. As far as he could see, there was only fog.

“Roger that,” Ramirez replied. They wanted one last low-level pass to visually confirm the status of the ground troops.

He circled around once again and descended. Beginning his run from the north. Toward the tall spire of the Skytower, jutting up through the clouds in the distance in front of him.

He dropped down out of the sky and skimmed across the top of the mist like a stone skipping across water. He tried to peer down through the fog, but it had thickened and was now impenetrable.

He shook his head and keyed his radio to call base, but the words never left his mouth. The fog itself seemed to rear up in front of his aircraft.

The world went white, and there were banging noises against the cockpit and the body of the plane.

He hauled back on the stick and lifted the jet out of the rising mist, but it was already too late. There was a cough from his right wing and the jet flamed out. Something had been sucked through the engine. The left engine went two seconds later.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” Flight Lieutenant Ramirez said urgently, but with professional calm, into his radio, “I have a double flameout. I am about to eject.”

He kept the stick back, gaining as much height as he could, and then punched out of the cockpit with the two-handled ejection lever. The ejector seat kicked like a horse, and the jet hurtled onward in the sky, pilotless, toward the dark tower in the distance.

Ramirez’s parachute opened with a grab on the back of his spine that wrenched at his insides. He felt sure he had broken something. But it didn’t matter. By the time the parachute had floated gently to the earth, the harness and the flight suit were empty.