Tabitha (54 page)

41

The hologram globe tracked her ship’s
progress north into the Arctic. The cold sea was almost black, rippling away
beneath her under a clear pale sky. After hours of watching and dozing as the
ship followed its path, an icy coast loomed large beneath her. Tabitha sat up,
stared. She dipped further into the ship’s vision for a better look. She’d
never seen anything so beautiful. They passed over shining white cliffs,
through warped bridges of ice. Towering natural shapes, jagged and bizarre. She
saw hulking icebergs so vast and white that the sea glowed blue around their
sunken masses. They flew past mountains of snow that didn’t have names; too
shifting and impermanent for humans to claim ownership. Thinking about it, she
couldn’t really blame the aliens for wanting to take this planet. She’d want to
take it too.

Tabitha watched cracked ice sprawling
for miles, like one vast broken window floating on the black ocean. She dozed a
while longer, trying to take her mind off her appetite. When she blinked her
eyes back open at the cockpit around her, she sat up suddenly and took control.
The hologram globe showed that she was coming right up to the North Pole. She
wanted to get out and see it.

The ship lowered
her down on its wing, and Tabitha stepped off onto crunching snow. Looking
down, her black feet were a stark contrast. She didn’t feel the snow between
her toes. Tabitha zipped up her coat against the biting cold, and left a trail
of footprints from where the ship rested. It was such a lonely place; a flat
white infinity. The wind rushed past her ears in a fresh stinging chill,
despite her parka hood pulled down over her face. There wasn’t a marker pole
around here anywhere; she must have been slightly off dead-centre. But the
North Pole was the North Pole, after all. She was near enough to say she’d been
here, if there was anyone left to tell. Tabitha turned stiffly in the cold,
paranoid that the ship was going to leave her here. Or remember its hostility
at some point and reach over and eat her when she wasn’t looking. But it just
sat there like a grey statue of a dragon, white eyes staring. Tabitha eyed it
cautiously, a slave to her paranoid thoughts, and turned her back on it again.
The wind whipped. Tabitha blinked against a sudden flurry of powdery snow,
blowing up off the alien landscape in a fine glittering dust. The sunlight
caught the snow at her feet, and made it shine like white grains of sand. It
was so silent here, like another world almost. Part of her couldn’t really
believe she was here, freezing her arse off at the North Pole. Another part of
her couldn’t get past the fact that she was just freezing her arse off. Tucking
her hood tighter around her face, Tabitha strode back stiffly through the
crunching snow to the ship.

‘
Er
… wing. Please,’ she said awkwardly. The ship turned its
head to glance down at her, disinterested, and lowered a wing to raise her up.

‘…Thanks,’ she
muttered to it, climbing back onto the saddle and sinking down into the hatch.
She still felt weird about interacting with it; on edge. Like trying to work
around an ex once they’d both cleared the air and knew where they stood. After
all, the thing had been trying to kill her. She should have fought it to the
death on principle, or at least escaped from it. But now she knew that the
monster wasn’t a monster at all, but a ship, things were different. And the
thought of flying off anywhere in the world was just too exciting for her to
pass up.

Tabitha set off
and watched the vast white world rolling away beneath her from the cockpit. She
kind of wished she’d brought a book. She felt terrible for the thought, but the
appeal of the Arctic had only lasted so long. She pulled her hood down close,
tucked her hands into her armpits, and settled down for a nap. It was always a
good time for a bit more sleep.

When she woke
up, Tabitha studied the hologram globe for a little while. The sphere glowed a
gentle electric blue, and the white guide line still traced a path over the top
of the world right down into the Pacific. At the moment they were over Alaska,
moving slow on the map. Tabitha knew they were flying as fast as a jet in
reality; but their crawling pace on the hologram globe seemed to tell a
different story.

‘That’s Russia,’
she mumbled, plucking the globe off the console and turning it gentle and
weightless in her hands. Funny, she’d never really thought of Russia and Alaska
being quite so close to each other on the world map. She’d always assumed there
was some vast stretch of ocean between them, but in reality they were
practically touching. How did she not know that, seriously? The revelation
shattered her faith in her own geography skills. Tabitha studied the globe and
zoomed in on the white line that traced her progress into Alaska. She watched
it closely; there was no change in it. Normally the white dot that showed their
position would be crawling onwards, snail-slow. Watching it now though, it
looked like they weren’t moving at all. Come to think of it, it didn’t feel like
they were moving either. Usually the ship would tilt a little against the wind
now and then; that hadn’t happened for a while. Tabitha pushed the white button
on her seat and rose up through the hatch, and looked around at pitch-black
night all around her. The freezing wind cut right through her coat, making her
shiver. They were perched on a mountain.

‘Hey!’ she
called to the ship’s head. Her voice echoed across a dark lonely wilderness.
Silhouettes of endless pine forest sprawled out under the cold starlight. ‘Why
have we stopped?’ she demanded. The ship’s head was looking up at the night
sky. ‘Oh.’ Up above them, the Northern Lights shone vast like a ghost-green
river. There weren’t any movies to compare with this. This was real. Or at
least she thought it was real. It felt more like a dream.

‘Wow,’ she told
the ship quietly, watching the shifting green rift in a reverent hypnosis.
Sometimes she’d heard Jen talk vaguely about a life force in the world;
something that she’d picked up from books on healing and mysticism. Tabitha had
never believed in that stuff. But when she stared up in awe at the twisting
eerie lights above her, the life force idea seemed pretty damn close to it.
Watching the dead Nordic light painting the starry sky, Tabitha stopped thinking
about the why and the how. Suddenly the science of it fell away, disregarded,
leaving only silent revelation in its place.

Later Tabitha started up the ship’s jet
scales with a white glow and launched into the dawn sky. She had to wonder – why
had the ship stopped there on the mountain? Was it a warning that it was
running low on fuel? Or did it see what she saw when it had watched the Lights?
The thought occupied Tabitha’s mind as they flew on in the growing dawn,
searching the cockpit console for any kind of fuel gauge. Whatever creature
normally flew this thing, how was it
supposed to know how much fuel the
ship had left? Did it just know, with some deep mental connection? There was so
much that she didn’t understand. For all her changes, Tabitha began to feel
decidedly inadequate.

The ship flew on
south over warmer oceans without any sign of slowing down, but still the
thought of fuel nagged at Tabitha’s mind. Almost as much as her hunger, in
fact. Eventually she took herself out of the ship’s vision, and looked around
at the fake dawn glow of the cockpit. She had to know.

‘Are you going
to have enough fuel?’ she asked the walls. She felt stupid for asking the
question. It was a
ship
. She’d be waiting a long time for an answer. She
waved her hands over the white seeds on the console. Nothing. She reached her
arms out at her sides, and could just about touch the walls with her
fingertips. The ceiling was just out of reach, but it felt good to stretch her
arms out. She searched everywhere. There were no buttons, no dials, no screens
or little glowing
whatevers
. Nothing to show her how
the ship worked. Tabitha stretched her arms a little more, then stood up and
shook her stiff legs out too, and peered around the back of the ribbed console.
A gentle glow caught her eye. There was a dim white light down there, hidden
away beneath twisting pipes like tree roots. She could feel the power there,
tingling in her fingers, as she leaned around the console and reached closer.
She stretched out her fingers, and placed them gently into the glow between the
roots. Gasped. She knew that feeling. It was electricity; a colossal current
hidden away beneath the floor. She had to take her hand away, the tingling pull
felt so intense. And she wasn’t even touching the surface of the glowing core
itself, nestled away down there in the metal roots. She put a hand on the
closest root to push herself back up again, and felt the voltage there beneath
the dull grey rubbery metal. She glided her rough hand over the root with a
rasping sound, and followed the feel of the voltage right along the pipe until
it merged into the cockpit wall. The power wasn’t coming from the glowing light
behind the console; it was coming in from somewhere else on board. Tabitha
pressed the white circle on her seat and rose up in the saddle onto the ship’s
back. Straight away she faced a biting wind, chilling her face and rushing in
her ears. She strained against her saddle harness and reached her hand down
over the ship’s huge scaly side. Sure enough she felt the same electrical
current coursing beneath its skin, right where the pipe would be inside the
cockpit. She slid her palm along the ship’s thick scales, following the feel of
the current as far as she could reach. Until she realised that she could feel
the current all over its grey skin. Then it dawned on her. The current wasn’t
coming from somewhere inside the ship; it was coming into the ship from its
skin. Solar power, huge and intense. Collected down there in the cockpit core,
in the glowing heart of the ship. It was a flying power station; probably the
key to the ship’s jet scales down its sides, and that terrifying breath that
seemed equal parts fire and energy. Tabitha sat back in awe, marvelling at it.
Not just the technical side of it; she could
feel
it. She felt the
voltage running through its skin. She could feel the ship’s power inside,
strange and colossal. The cold wind was unbearable out here though. She was
glad to sink back down into the cockpit away from it, and slipped back into the
ship’s vision to steer it. She made the ship tilt this way and that, keeping
the dim white line of the compass dead ahead. She took the ship higher into the
air, then corkscrewed back down towards the sea. She pulled it up at the last
second, and felt a rollercoaster dip in her stomach as she climbed back into
the air and levelled out. Tabitha headed high, dived straight down again, and
laughed as she felt her stomach rise and fall. She couldn’t pull again up
though, as hard as she tried. Suddenly they were plummeting towards the sea.

‘Pull up!’ she
yelled at the ship, poking the console frantically. They were still
nosediving
. The jets droned higher and higher as the ship
fell. Panicking, Tabitha shook herself out of the ship’s vision and braced for
impact. The sea loomed massive below, getting closer and closer. Tabitha
covered her eyes with her hands as they hit the water. The impact moved her
back a little in her seat, but it wasn’t really that much of an impact. They
were still moving. There weren’t any alarms, or any water pouring in. Tabitha
looked into the ship’s vision and saw the deep blue water all around her. A
silvery shoal of fish glided past in the distance. Down below was the big dark
deep, and they were fine.
An amphibious solar-powered dragon ship
, she
told herself sarcastically. Of course it was. Obvious, really.

‘You could have
told me,’ she said grumpily, crossing her arms and glancing around the cockpit.
Her
heartcore
was still racing. The ship swam when
she willed it forward. She could feel its wings tucked in against its body, and
its feet and tail steering it this way and that. She felt the jets in its sides
too, leaving a vast trail of bubbles behind them. They passed the terrified
shoal of fish, scattering at the sight of the ship’s big white eyes in the
water. Its huge grey shape cut through the blue, twirling and spinning
playfully as it went.

‘You wanted to
come down here,’ Tabitha said to the ship. ‘That’s why you wouldn’t pull up.’
Ships didn’t have wants. They were ships. She looked around at the glowing
white walls; at the pilot seat and the console. At the white seed things set
out in front of her, pulsing with light. ‘What the hell are you?’ she asked it.
‘Are you alive? Or a robot? What are you?’ getting no kind of response, Tabitha
pulled the ship up towards the sunlight rippling bright through the surface.
They burst out into the daylight and shot into the sky, leaving a showering
trail of water sparkling and crashing in their wake.

The rushing sea below them grew lighter
and lighter by the hour as they flew. The water rippled hypnotic in reflected
sunlight, creeping slowly from dark dead blue to bright turquoise. Tabitha woke
up to the sound of a gentle squelching beep in the cockpit; a round organic
sound she’d never heard before. She felt weak, starving for blood. Headache,
clammy skin. Sweating for a fix.

‘Are we there?’
she croaked dozily to the cockpit. The globe popped up in front of her then,
and zoomed itself in on the middle of the Pacific. The white dot she’d first
pressed into the globe had a ring of light pulsing from it. They’d arrived.
Rushing in her excitement, Tabitha pressed her palm into the circle on her seat
and rose up through the opening hatch. She felt a heavy rush of hot air above
her, like she was stepping off a plane. She unclipped her harness before the
seat could even morph into a saddle and looked around her, speechless. The ship
had come to rest on a blinding white beach. Wispy palm trees rustled above her
in a sea-salt breeze. The ocean was electric blue; impossibly turquoise in the
shallows and clear as glass where it lapped and tumbled on the shore. It was
the kind of place she’d only seen in movies and travel magazines. The ship
raised a wing up to help her down, and Tabitha looked around at the island like
she was dreaming. She shrugged off her blue-grey coat and dropped it down on
the white sand, warmer than she’d ever felt in her life. She closed her eyes
for a moment, just to take it all in. She could hear the clear tide rumbling
and rushing on the soft sand, and the wind rattling gently through palm leaves
behind her. The sight of it all gave her a fresh thrill when she opened her
eyes again, squinting at the warm sunlight in an ink-blue sky. Tabitha wandered
over to a palm tree and put her hand on it, struggling to believe she was
really here. The trunk felt rough against her wrist; scaled and solid and
fibrous.
There were birds chirping in the tropical forest beyond, and a lone
mountain towering over the small island. She’d never seen anywhere so
beautiful. It was the kind of place she’d seen online and always assumed to be
a fake image, touched up to look surreal. But here it was all around her,
filling her senses. Even her red curls and the blue-grey of her parka looked
more bright and vivid in the strong sun. She breathed deep, sat down in the
sand for a while, and smiled. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled.