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  "Keep all mm things for long time." She said, peering into the darkness of the container. "Peoples like Zhools? They mm think mm big?" She enquired, trying to estimate Jules and Marie's level of intelligence.

  "Too bloody big." I agreed. "Yeah, all this has been waiting for us." I kicked the floor irritably. "Melanee, has anyone in your colony ever had more than three kids?"

  It took some seconds for the sense of the question to penetrate but she wrinkled her brow and shook her head. "Women, they have child as soon mmm grow?"

  Her comment puzzled me until the explanation arrived. "You mean as soon as any girl can have a child she does? That's the rule, the normal practise?"

  It seemed so. And more, there was a well remembered danger, handed down from generation to generation, of children being kidnapped but returned, it was always happening, mostly girl children. I couldn't make sense of the habit. Kidnap girls, yes, plenty of historical precedent for that but not for giving them back before they reach the age of puberty.

  Lights came on allowing me to see the interior of the container which was much bigger than I had thought. The air was icy but bearable as we squeezed in past the bulk of a military air car to view the contents. Guns, rows of them against the wall. Ammunition stacked neatly in boxes marked with (naturally) French army symbols. Power tools, round containers with stencil markings that I couldn't decipher, an airtight box containing a mass of carefully packed computer hard discs, laptop solar powered sets, masses of other stuff.

  "Right." I breathed. "We're in business, come on." I hustled her out and marched over to Jules. "Mon ami." I tapped him on the arm causing him to start with surprise and sit up from the humming equipment he was glowering at. "We've got what we want, only two things we need now."

  "Oui?" He enquired politely.

  "Right. How do we get a bloody air car out of here? And where's the fuel?"

  He gave himself a scratch on the chin while pondering but stopped because the hissing noise he heard was me reaching boiling point. "It is OK!" He held up both hands to ward off the fury that was in danger of escaping. "The fuel, it is being made." That certainly stopped my rage in its tracks. "The hydrocarbons, they are synthetic. We only have to mix hydrogen and carbon and there is no shortage of these, eh?" He chuckled at my surprised expression. "As for the gateway? There is a shaft, it is in the ground, it goes up and at the top there is a charge to blow the entrance clear."

  "A bolt hole." I said. "A bloody bolt hole so that the brass could save their dirty little necks if the kettle downstairs boiled over. Politicians."

  He shrugged. "It did not do them any good. But, my friend, we can use it, eh? And now see what I have found." He dragged me over to another panel covered with instruments and dials. "There is a drone in one of those units." He smiled at me. "We go and find her, eh?"

  Chapter 12

  RESEARCH

  I left them to it, left them to excited exclamations as they found one function after another that would open a door into a world they thought had gone for good. They were biologists, but we all had a basic knowledge of other disciplines so they could set up and understand other peoples' computer programs and equipment - up to a point. Jules found me a hand searchlight that worked, a small miracle that had been preserved in some deep cold cavity with a mass of other anachronistic goodies. The solid-state circuits worked, the charge was held and I made my way steadily back up to the surface, following a bright beam of light that had not been seen in this mausoleum for ten thousand years. At least the French knew how to keep their trinkets preserved for ever. I was moderately certain that any British technology had been immersed in beer with chips thrown in.

  The whole depressing and profoundly catastrophic situation was getting at me. Part of me was still on the ship, the faces and voices of the crew that I had known for so long still echoing in my ears, they were part of collective memories, lingering images of a world that had disappeared as if it had never been. Instead, I found myself standing at the entrance to a hole in a mountain containing relics of a civilisation that had been extinct for longer than the Pyramids I had visited long ago. In front of me was a steep cutting leading to a forest that seemed to stretch forever with only tiny fragments of the human population remaining and they were behaving oddly.

  Why did some long dead scientific madman set up a system that lured what was left of the people into taking pills that altered their ability to breed besides doing something else that Marie couldn't figure out? When the extinction event occurred, there must have been hundreds, maybe thousands left alive in France alone, people in mines, underground vaults, military command centres, you name it. Studies of such unlikely disasters had shown that secondary death rates would be high. Men and women suddenly left almost alone would die from suicide, accident, disease, a score of causes, unless enough numbers gathered together in one area to form a unit. That meant a very small survival percentage indeed, but this was beyond all speculation. If France was any guide, the numbers left on this still verdant planet were minute. How? Why?

  Those pills. The oddity of them caused a headache to start up. Every time some moron pushed the button a tray came out. I pictured the scene in my head. There weren't ten or twenty pills but hundreds and this had been going on for God knows how long? Why so many? What did they do with them?

  The evening was here. Overhead the sun's light was fading, throwing bars of yellow luminance across the tops of the trees. Soft feet made me turn to see Melanee padding up to stand beside me. "Have not see mm white mm pills? Never see any in mm home?" She said, cocking her head at me, bird like.

  "No?" I ruminated. "Not many children in your village?"

  "V-village?" She turned the new word over in her head. "This," she waved at the dark entrance behind us. "Not village. Make by mm Gods? Where are Gods?"

  It was a question that I would like to have answered myself, but she knew I couldn't. "We'd better go back. Have they got that aircar running yet?" I asked but her look of blank incomprehension told me she had long strides to make before she could think about aircars. Cloth did not survive well, so we gathered up masses of branches, ferns and the like, carrying them down for bedding, a primitive arrangement that made Marie raise her elegant eyebrows. She had found water and Jules had discovered how to heat it, a technological triumph that made Melanee exclaim in delight. Jules showed me the aircar, one of two and he was busy testing the systems. It was a military version, armoured, with auxiliary aerofoils and turbine assisted, a clumsy aircraft with the ability to hover although that used fuel at an alarming rate.

  "Five 'undred kilometres range, per'aps more." He said, scratching his chin. "Minigun on the forward mountings, eh?" He smiled.

  I grunted and climbed into the thing, followed by Melanee, now washed in hot water and glowing with clean eagerness. "Ammunition?" I enquired. "There's a rotary cannon under the nose, what about that?"

  "Are you going to kill someone?" Marie stood by Jules and gazed at me with steady dislike.

  "Someone else, you mean?" I replied blandly. She pursed her lips and turned away but Jules didn't like rotary twenty millimetre cannons any more than she did despite finding the ammunition trays for me. I was decidedly skeptical about the guns firing anything at all, the chemistry of the propellant would surely have long gone to hell, but Jules dolefully explained that it was all due to French genius, the rounds having been carefully kept at a temperature that would prevent any chemical reactions occurring at all.

  "They think ahead." He explained.

  "Not far enough." I said sourly. "This'll be ready in the morning? Right, we blow that escape tunnel, I suppose the charges are still usable? So, what about the drones?"

  They were standard survey drones, not stealth artillery fliers, just small, straight winged, turbine powered aircraft. Melanee stared down at their gleaming cylinders with puzzled wonder. She had said nothing for a time, absorbing our technical talk and Marie's growing disenchantment with my methods. The drones, however, wer
e a Godsend. Much longer range than the aircar with a telemetric link back to a portable screen that Marie had been tinkering with.

  "We 'ave to launch them from the tunnel, you see? There is a booster motor but I do not know 'ow to fit it." She glanced up at me with a challenging air.

  "I do." I told her.

  "I thought you would." She said. "You know about many things and not geology, eh?"

  "Rocks are fun." I said. "What about a flight path?"

  She smiled faintly but showed me how she proposed to program the drone's brain. "First we look at the data box trace. I think maybe I get you a picture but we see, eh? David, you decide what to do after we see that, eh? Then I would like to take a survey."

  "What you got? Infra-red?"

  "Of course, and much else. Carbon monoxide tracers, ammonia tracers...."

  "Ammonia?" I queried.

  "Animals, people, they 'ave, what you say? droppings, eh?" She said demurely as Jules chuckled in the background. They had it all worked out and all I had to do was find Linda in the morning. It was astounding that any of this stuff was still working but near absolute zero and vacuum stopped most decay or so Jules informed me. I wished Hilary was here with her physics brain, not that I didn't trust the French axis but they exuded a kind of superiority that always made me suspicious.

  There were no beds down there, all the sleeping quarters were either up twenty floors or down under us where the deep cold was still in force, so I appropriated what must have been someone's office, dumped the pile of greenery and slumped down, my head buzzing with tensions and fears that I had carefully concealed from them. I had hardly laid down for three minutes when Melanee came in, calmly added her own rations of ferns and branches, spread the spare shirts over them as I had and nestled up close, her eyes shut and her face composed. Jules popped his head over the short partition, gave me a Gallic grin of male enthusiasm and departed.

  Sleep came suddenly and then departed just as quickly, leaving me awake in a silent relic of a culture that was dead but seemed unable to lie down. The white glare of the lights and the artificial floor, the hum of air from ducts, a feel of being in a machine. What the hell had happened at a quarter past eleven on that Saturday morning? Did everyone die within minutes except odd and unusual survivors. Did the world slowly decay? Visions of motorways littered with gradually rusting lines of vehicles, their owners inside them floated in my head. Roads that had slowly, over centuries become buried in dust and dead vegetation until nearly all signs that they had ever been were erased under a silent forest?

  Alone and seeing terrible scenes in my head, I drifted in realms of imagination until Melanee opened her eyes, looked at me without any expression and came closer still, pressing herself against me. Her long hair, so dark and rich, spread itself over us, her warmth slowly entered into my soul. I found I was shaking, a small tremor of accumulated fear and shock that I couldn't stop. Gripping her hard, I stared into terror, hearing the cries of billions of dying men and women.

  "Daveed." She whispered softly. "You did not do this. You must not mm go away from me."

  Glancing down at her, I couldn't answer but she knew, she knew what was going through my head. "We didn't deserve this." I muttered, my voice strangled by emotion. "Not the children, oh God." Tears, unwanted, incredible filled my eyes as I cried for a lost world.

  "Perhaps you come to bring us back." She said, so quietly I hardly heard her. Her command of English was now advancing faster than I had thought possible but she had given ample evidence of being someone quite unusual. "I see the dreams." She added. "I dream of fish that fly."

  Silver bodies that crossed the sky. How could she dream of machines that no living soul had seen for thousands of years? What was she? As if in answer she lifted her face and kissed me gently on the lips. It was impossible not to respond so I did, finding myself holding her tight, the feel of her full breasts on my chest awakening a desire that made me feel a betrayal of Linda, Linda that I loved, her bright intelligence and sharp wit ever present in my thoughts. Melanee sat up, took off her shirt, pushed her hair behind her and laid down on top of me, the sensuous feel of her body doing things that I could not control. My hands found her round buttocks, roved up and cupped the roundness of her breasts as she lifted herself up to let me touch the nipples. Kissing them was natural and irresistible, her gasp of excitement leading me on as I took the nipple in my mouth and played with my tongue over the softness. We couldn't stop, her breasts were beautiful and the bush of hair between her legs parted as I felt for her loving spot, the sudden gasp and cry she gave telling me I had found it. Rolling her over, she folded her legs over me as we joined together. She was ready, slippery and panting but she was a virgin and gave a little cry of pain before pulling me harder into her. The explosion was quick for me and the sudden release made me collapse on her, feeling the sweat on her face as mine slid alongside. Her legs unfolded but she held on and we laid there. She smiled, a slow and sensual smile of alarming beauty.

  "Sleep, Daveed." She whispered.

  We did sleep, a sleep for me of almost stunned insensibility that lasted until I found her hand on my cheek and Jules peering over the top of the partition with a shark like grin. The grin and his face disappeared as we scrambled up, dressed and looked at each other. She was unchanged, her usual smile and laconic words as if we had never coupled in the silent night.

  Jules greeted her appearance with aplomb but Marie shot an odd look at me as we prepared for the launch. First we had to see if the escape tunnel still worked. The idea had been a sharply inclined shaft from this level finishing at a concealed but armoured entrance half way up the hill. It seemed to me to be a typically confused notion only to be expected from politicians who wanted total security and obsessive secrecy but got cold feet at the thought of any of their precious skins being risked inside a complex that might go bang so they prejudice everything for a bolt hole that would let terrorists and unwelcome nasties in if they found out about it. Jules simply shrugged his shoulders at such duplicity but Marie was more thoughtful.

  "We do not know just what is in every level." She explained. "In France there were many different security authorities, military, science, you see? There is no access to much of the complex." She led me to a terminal showing bilious green figures on the screen. "I am not a physicist but I think there is much bigger area than we know about before."

  "Fine." I muttered. "Does it matter? Let's get the show on the road." I swung away, aware that she was still frowning at figures that meant nothing to me. The escape shaft, it was a precisely machined circle of rock ending in a flat surface, had to be examined by means of inset steel ladder grips that had corroded into nothing but I climbed painfully up the crumbling surface to find the charge terminals, trailing a long telephone wire behind me, headphones clipped over my ears.

  "The cement is going powdery." I reported, panting heavily. The shaft had buried conduction cables for guidance but we had to blow off the doors. "I can't find any bloody terminals."

  "They are in the door." Marie's musical tones informed me. Murmuring obscenities at obscure designs I felt for and found regular patterns on the cold and now flaking surface. "I am putting out the code." Marie said in my ear. The charge in the door would long ago have been reduced to harmless powder so I had to replace them with new ones which Jules had disinterred from some French store. "Ah!" She added.

  Around the metal a ring of square plates clicked and exposed glass like lenses behind which faint red lights could just be made out. The cavities revealed were where the new charges were supposed to go but first I had to hack out the dry porridge, smelling of something nasty, from each cavity before slotting in the new charges, a tedious and time-consuming task that took me much longer than planned. Marie's impatient tutting in my ear did not help matters but finally, feeling tired and homicidal, I reported all was as ready as I could make it. Reporting this to Jules I was told to retreat which I did to find them huddled around the master terminal
with Melanee watching them as ever. They were clearly undecided or mystified, the reason, on enquiry, turning out to be that they didn't know how to start the thing off.

  Knowing the military mind, I ignored their looks of outrage and simply ran through the numerics by banging the keyboard until it lit up. "Brute force." I told them, but really I had entered the level number and our authority password. This seemed to be acceptable for a picture of the long shaft promptly appeared with a clock face which asked to be set. "Ten seconds." I said, to Marie's profound alarm but the computer ticked away before either of them could deliver a more violent protest.

  We should have closed the lower doors. A powerful concussion accompanied by a bright flash and a considerable blast wave blew down on us. Marie and Melanee clapped their hands over their ears and screamed while Jules staggered back, looking stunned. I found myself sitting on the hard floor but the pressure departed as soon as it came and we peered up to see a small circle of daylight. After that it was easy, well, that's to say after several hours work trying to find out how the damned drone fitted in the tunnel. Then we had to find the booster motors and collect fuel.

  Melanee stuck to me like a leech, watching as I checked on the portable monitor for function error but finally we had the thing ready, inner doors shut, fully fuelled, sensors calibrated. Jules was slowly losing faith in the mechanics of the operation, I could see he would far rather be looking at trees, but Marie ploughed on, translating French command orders for me.

  "Ready?" I dashed sweat from my eyes and glanced up, hand over the start button. Marie had the telemetry run to the master screen and we had an array of smaller screens telling us what the weather was like and how hot the turbine casings were getting. Melanee gazed down at the ominous red button so I grabbed her hand and made her push. Immediately, a loud hum started up followed by a throaty roar. The ground vibrated for seconds before Marie let out a little shriek.