Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [4]
what this thing was that had ‘come down’, but Pa’s silence infected him. They rode without a word passing between them for ten minutes or so, bumping through the darkness, until suddenly Uncle Ake raised an arm and pointed ahead. Joshua sat up in his seat and struggled to see what it was. Away ahead of them, nestled in the dark, was a tiny patch of pale light, huddled down against the ground. He felt Pa move at his side, gripping the stock of his rifle.
‘You stay in the truck, Josh,’ he said as the vehicle came to a halt and Uncle Ake cut the engine. If these were offworlders, why hadn’t they landed at the port? Why had they chosen to land in the middle of nowhere in the dark?
Maybe they’d crashed. Maybe, like Pa had told Ma earlier, it was an invasion.
Visitors to Espero were few and far between – the last ship he remembered coming here had been about three months ago, a shipment of stuff for the Palace, for the Imperator’s birthday celebrations. He knew a couple of kids at school who’d got new edprogs and comps, smuggled in on the ship. But why were Pa and Uncle Ake going out to meet it in the middle of the night with guns? He knew Pa wasn’t keen on offworlders – he still called them ‘aliens’, which always made Joshua and his mother wince – but coming out to meet them with guns seemed to be going a bit far.
He sat quietly as the two men climbed out of the truck, rifles in hands, and set off towards the light. Joshua gave them a minute, then quietly opened the door and slipped out. If they were going to meet offworlders, Joshua wasn’t going to be left out.
He stayed well back, knowing that if Pa saw him this time he’d get a good hiding. But he needn’t have worried: the men seemed too intent on what lay ahead of them. The patch of light grew and grew, gradually resolving itself into a large, luminous, blobby shape, squatting on the ground. He squinted: was it a spaceship? It was nothing like the spaceships he’d seen on his comp or at the port. This one looked like a half-filled sack of savas, spread out on the ground. As Joshua drew closer, he could make out more details: wrinkles and folds in the thing, knobby protuberances. He could see that the soft, bluish light wasn’t coming uniformly from the surface of the thing, but from dozens – maybe hundreds – of irregular mushrooms, scattered at random, over its surface. The sides of it sloped up to a peak, and Joshua smiled to himself, realising that it looked like a mound of radioactive mashed potato.
Maybe it wasn’t a spaceship, but the debris from one. The two grown-ups had stopped and, haloed in blue fire, they split up, going around opposite sides of the thing. It wasn’t as big as Joshua would have expected, but in the dark he had difficulty judging its distance and size. It didn’t look like it was much bigger than the farmhouse. As the pale glow pushed out spindly shadows along the grass behind Pa and Uncle Ake, Joshua was sure he saw something move, away on the other side of the ship. But it moved too quickly and was 6
too distant for him to register anything other than a brief flicker. Pa and Uncle Ake clearly saw it too. Uncle Ake gestured left.
Joshua’s eyes were caught by the flicker of movement again, but this time it was on the spaceship, up near the top. Something looked as if it were coming out of the peak, but perhaps it had climbed up the back of the ship. It looked, illuminated weirdly from below, a little like a man with a ram’s head: a long, narrow snout, pale and dead-looking, swept back up to a broad forehead that continued on to form two huge crests, curving back over the head like bony eyebrows above the black eyes. He froze, and watched as the creature continued to rise until it stood at the top of the spaceship, and he could see that it had the lower half of a horse. Well, thought Joshua, a bit like a horse.
The creature’s upper body was like that of a thin man, grafted on to the four-legged lower body. But unlike the legs of a horse, this creature’s legs splayed slightly outwards,