“What the fuck is this, Cap? Surely this bugger never went anywhere? There’s no fucking controls.”
Banks hushed the younger man to silence — he’d spotted something else, and as he moved across the saucer floor toward the window, his heart sank to see what was inlaid on the floor. There were more of the golden circles and lines here, two sets of them, twin pentacles set on the floor six feet apart and eight feet from the window, the same ones he’d seen the young blond pilots stand inside in the photographs.
As Banks approached the left side one, the lines took on a dim glow, and the frost melted around the outer circle. Dark shadows swirled around the interior of the craft, and Banks tasted an impossibility: salt water, ice-cold at his lips. He heard a whisper, soft and low, like air escaping from a tire.
“Do you hear that, Cap?” Wiggins whispered.
Banks nodded and put a finger to his lips again, calling for quiet. The sibilant sound echoed around the saucer interior, melding with the rise of distant chanting, a choir singing in a wind. Banks couldn’t pinpoint any source. If it was a recording, there was no obvious mechanism, and no off switch. And whatever it was, it was getting steadily louder.
“Where the fuck is it coming from?” Wiggins whispered, as if suddenly afraid to raise his voice. The chanting got closer, a strange, guttural cacophony that contained no words of any language Banks could recognize. At that point, he wasn’t even sure that human vocal chords were capable of making the sounds he heard, yips and cries, chirps and whistles intermingled with bass drones and harsh glottal stops. The whole effect was exaggerated by a sudden blast of even colder air that swept through the saucer like a gale.
“Somebody opened a window,” Wiggins said.
“I don’t think so,” Banks replied, and pointed at a spot between the two pentacles on the floor.
At first, it was just a darker shadow that sucked the light away, leaving only bitter cold behind. Banks strained to make out detail as the chanting rang in his ears and the floor of the saucer vibrated in sympathy, swaying lazily in time. A shout came from outside, McCally by the sound of it, but he was so very far away, and Banks couldn’t drag his gaze away from the dancing shadow between the pentacles on the floor.
The chanting took on a definite beat that set his whole body shaking, vibrating with the rhythm. Flakes of frosty ice tumbled from the walls, the sound as they hit the floor also, impossibly, in perfect time with the growing beat. Banks’ head swam, an effect not dissimilar to knocking back a large measure of liquor too quickly, and it seemed as if the walls of the saucer melted and ran, as if they too were made of no more than melting frost and ice. The light from the window receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint in a blanket of darkness, and Banks was left alone, in a cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the pounding chant.
He saw stars, in vast swathes of gold and blue and silver, all dancing in great purple and red clouds that spun webs of grandeur across unending vistas. Shapes moved in and among the nebulae; impossibly huge, dark, wispy shadows casting a pallor over whole galaxies at a time, shadows that capered and whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. Banks was buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, and tasted salt water at his lips again, but as the beat grew ever stronger, he cared little. He gave himself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the stars.
He didn’t know how long he wandered in the space between. He forgot himself, forgot Wiggins, dancing in the vastness where only rhythm mattered.
Lost in the dance.
He only came out of it slowly, aware that someone was shouting in his face. The voice sounded alien and strange, and it was a struggle to even recognize the noise as words at first, for they echoed and boomed, coming from a great distance down a long tunnel.
“Cap? John? Come on, man, wake the fuck up.”
Banks finally found something to grab on to. John — that was his name, somewhere that wasn’t out in the dark, somewhere firm, somewhere he had a friend. He mouthed a word, trying it out for size in his throat, then managed a whisper.
“Hynd?”
“Aye, it’s me, man. Come on, Cap. Come back to us.”
The chanting receded as fast as it had come, and Banks’ sight returned between one blink and the next. He looked up to see his sergeant lean over him. Hynd had a concerned look on his face. At the same moment Banks noticed that fact, he also realized that he could see the high glass dome of the hangar roof over the sergeant’s shoulder.
“What the fuck am I doing on the floor?”
Hynd laughed bitterly.
“I was going to ask you the same thing. Cally and I had to drag you and Wiggins out of yon fucking saucer. We found you both lying on the floor, twitching and singing to yourselves. It’s as if you were hypnotized or something.”
“Aye, or something,” Banks said, and tried to stand, only to find that he had gone dizzy and weak at the knees. Hynd had to help him upright. He noticed that he’d been dragged all the way out of the saucer, and all the way out of the glowing golden circles, and was now standing over nearby the gauges and meters.
He turned to look at the saucer, then wondered if he had come all the way out of the dream after all. Where before it had sat flush to the floor, the craft now hovered, six inches clear of the lines of the pentagram. There was no sign of the door again, just a seamless stretch of smooth metal. The craft hung in the air, golden yellow now, and humming softly.
We turned the fucker on.
- 8 -
Banks’ head cleared slowly, enough for him to be aware that the squad was all looking to him for direction. This was beyond their training — beyond Banks’ training too — there was nothing here to fight, nothing to shoot, just the golden hovering craft, six inches off the floor with no sign of any controls or engines to indicate how it was done, its sheer impossibility taunting them.
“It’s a trick; it has to be,” McCally said.
“It’s a fucking great trick though,” Wiggins said. He too was looking groggy, but he pushed McCally away when the corporal offered a helping hand. “Under the floor heating, disappearing dead men, and now the grand finale, the incredible levitating UFO. Fucking Nazi wankers are really taking the piss now.”
Banks saw that he was within seconds of losing the squad’s attention completely.
Get them moving.
“Bollocks to it all,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this buggering about in here. This is obviously a job for the boffins, and I’m guessing the brass will send the real specialists to relieve us. So let’s go back upstairs to the wee hut, shut the door on this thing, and drink tea until they get here.”
“No argument from me, Cap,” Wiggins said. “I just about pished myself in there.”
“To be fair,” Hynd said, “you don’t usually need an excuse.”
The humor wasn’t quite as natural as usual, but Banks appreciated the sarge trying, and the men all laughed, albeit without much joy in it.
But it’s a start. Now, get them out of here.
He saw sweat glisten on some of the men’s faces, not from fear, but from the temperature in the hangar, which appeared to have stabilized somewhere in the 60s Fahrenheit, positively balmy compared to the Antarctic air just beyond the dome.
Hell, they shouldn’t have bothered with the saucer. They could have conquered the world without a fight if they’d given us the secret of this kind of heating.
The hut out on the ice was going to feel frigid after this, but he couldn’t bear the thought of spending any more time this close to the empty saucer. His experience among the stars had left him wrung out and shaken, and all he wanted to do was to breathe fresh air again and feel real salt water spray on his cheeks.