The Reckoning (Earth Haven Book 3)

  The

  Reckoning

  Earth Haven: Book Three

  Sam Kates

  Copyright © 2015 by Sam Kates. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover image © 2015 by Julian Kates, GhastlyOfferings.com

  Printed in the United States of America. First edition, December 2015.

  Kindle ISBN 978-1-62927-022-7

  Smithcraft Press

  473 Lisa Road NE

  Palm Bay FL 32907

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  To Katie and Samantha

  for making me as proud

  as any dad has ever been.

  Acknowledgements

  During the two years or so that I’ve been working on this trilogy, many people have freely given advice, suggestions and plain encouragement, the importance of which should never be underestimated. A big thank you to:

  my first readers: Linda Crowhurst, Kerry Byrne, Paul Adams, Sebastian Pentecost, and Delyth Rabone;

  all the Js: my wife Joanne, parents John and Jocelyn, and brother Julian;

  the good folk at Smithcraft Press: Adam, Craig, and Jeannette;

  wonderfully supportive friends and colleagues;

  last, but by no means least, every reader who has given up their cash and valuable time to read one or more of the Earth Haven books. You make the hard work worthwhile.

  Part 1:

  Ar Hyd y Nos

  (All Through the Night)

  Chapter One

  The salty tang of the English Channel hung in the fine mist that rose from the sea. It stung the woman’s throat, raw from bouts of copious vomiting. The heavy seas that had tossed the boat about like a rodeo novice throughout the night calmed with the coming of dawn and the ominous creaking of the boat’s timbers ceased. Aletta could tell from the translucent lightness of the vapour that the sun had risen. Soon the mist would be burned away, but she dreaded what she would then see. That it would be the Thames estuary, for which they had been aiming, she seriously doubted.

  A pack of bottled water had been flung under one of the benches which ran around the inside of the boat. Aletta stooped and tore open the plastic wrapping to extract a bottle. She sipped cautiously, wary about keeping the water down. Her stomach muscles felt torn from the amount of retching she had performed throughout the long night.

  They had put out from Ostend the previous morning into the southern reaches of the North Sea. The Pole—she could not recall his name—had appeared confident that provided they maintained a heading of west-north-west, they would strike the Thames at its mouth. Once there, he reckoned they could navigate the river into the heart of London. It was why he had insisted on choosing this small boat, which had smelled worse than Stockholm Fish Market when they set out, but was now hellish with the sour odour of vomit. Aletta and the other woman had wanted to take a luxury cruiser, or large trawler, but the men had overruled them on the basis that the draughts might be too low. At least, that is what she thought was the objection. Difficult to be sure when none of them spoke English as their first language.

  A swell smacked the prow with sufficient force to send up a plume of spray. Her stomach lurched. For a moment, she feared she would cough up the few sips of water she had managed to swallow and turned her head to face over the side. The sea slid past like a gently rolling meadow. The occasional ripple or clump of weed were all that marred the smooth surface. Her stomach calmed and she turned back.

  The Pole was curled into a ball beneath the prow. The spray did not appear to have disturbed him, but the other men were stirring. The second woman was out of sight in the wheelhouse at the stern; it was too small to hold more than one person. As far as they could tell—the woman had the least English of them all—she was from a village in the Italian Alps. Short and stocky, a face like weathered bark, the woman would let out streams of Italian, apparently not caring that she spoke too fast for anyone else, with only a smattering of the language between them, to keep up. She had been the last of the five to arrive in Ostend. It was evident that she hadn’t understood the words of the message, but their import had nevertheless made themselves known, had grown into a compulsion, until the woman could not resist any longer.

  Like Aletta. The message had come to her in the dark hours before dawn as she lay sleeping in a luxury hotel on the shore of the Baltic Sea. Her English was better than the Italian woman’s, but she had not been able to fully translate the words; they had been delivered too quickly. Maybe because it had arrived while she slept, the message had imprinted itself in her subconscious and the occasional word or phrase kept popping to the forefront of her mind. United Kingdom she understood. Förenade Kungariket or Storbritannien in her native Swedish. She had never been, but a feeling had started to develop that a visit was overdue. Reckoning also nagged at her. At first, she had not known what it meant, but gradually a sense of the word came to her: räkenskapens dag. Day of reckoning.

  Aletta’s stomach gave a low grumble as the boat began to bob in a heavier swell. The two men lying near the Pole sat up, blinking in the daylight. The younger, dark-haired and dark-eyed, was from Croatia. She could not remember his name either. The older, in his mid-thirties, was from Hungary. His name was Levente. He had been the first of her companions Aletta had met on arriving in Ostend. Once their initial suspicion of each other had been overcome, they discovered that the only language which they had in common was English and that they each knew enough to make themselves understood. So it was that, falteringly, they told each other a similar tale. How they had fallen ill when many of their loved ones had already perished; had awoken to find that they might be the only person still living in the entire world; had received a message—the first message—that they had not fully understood but had gleaned more meaning from the compulsion that had come over them not to wander and to dispose of decomposing bodies.

  Slowly but surely, the compulsion had worn off and they began to search for other survivors. Aletta had set out from her home town of Uppsala, north of Stockholm, travelling the coast south towards Malmo. She was glad to leave. Wolves, normally so wary of man, had become emboldened by his absence and were starting to roam outside the central forests. Aletta had passed beyond the dark period of survivor’s guilt and had no wish to provide a fresh meal for creatures whose howling she could hear approaching nearer with every passing night.

  Before she reached Malmo, the second message came while she slept. It came also to the Hungarian. A new urge had taken them over: to travel to the United Kingdom to witness some sort of face-off. Between whom, or why, neither of them had any idea.

  As the compulsion grew stronger, they made for the western coastline. They had both been struck by the same idea: Ostend was a ferry port, easier to reach for them than Calais, yet close enough to England to make the voyage manageable. Or so they’d thought.

  Now Levente nodded at Aletta and she offered a forced smile in return. She pointed towards the plastic bottles in their packaging where she had left them beneath the bench.

  “Water,” she said.

  The Hungarian rose unsteadily and stepped to the bench. He tossed a bottle to the Croatian who caught it deftly, but did not speak.

  Levente sipped warily from his bottle. Not one of the five on board was a sailor. Each had suffered during the endless night. Aletta’s stomach grumbled again; the bobbing motion was increasing.

  The man gestured at the m
ist with the bottle.

  “Where we?”

  Aletta shook her head and glanced down at the compass that dangled from her neck.

  “West. We are going west.”

  The Hungarian raised his bushy eyebrows. “Good. Igen?”

  Aletta shrugged.

  The voyage from Ostend had begun well. The sun warmed their heads as they manoeuvred the vessel out of the marina and into a calm sea. Although it became blustery within the hour and a strong cross current wanted to carry them south-west towards the English Channel, the boat’s engine worked manfully to keep them on a west-north-west course. Until, with a bang and puff of blue smoke, it stopped.

  While the Pole and Levente fiddled with the engine and the air became filled with frustrated curses in Polish and Hungarian, the boat drifted. It had still been drifting, at the mercy of the currents and with no sight of land, when darkness fell and the breeze stiffened.

  Aletta blinked as sunlight struck her eyes. The mist was lifting. At the same time, she realised that she could hear a sound: the hiss of breaking waves, growing louder.

  She stared over the prow, waiting for the last of the mist to burn away in the strengthening sunlight, and gasped.

  “Land,” she muttered. Louder: “Land!”

  Immediately ahead rose white cliffs of chalk, gleaming like freshly washed sheets. Waves broke onto a narrow strand of dark shingle at the base of the cliffs. The boat rode the waves, dipping and bucking as it had during the night. Aletta clutched the gunwale tightly and let out a sour belch, but relief at seeing land quelled any further sickness.

  Levente shouted something in Hungarian. The Croatian joined him on the bench and Levente thumped him joyfully on the back.

  Aletta looked behind her as she heard an exclamation. The Italian had emerged from the wheelhouse. Looking pale and wretched, she pointed at the cliffs and let out a stream of gibberish. Aletta ignored her.

  In the prow, the Pole rose to his knees. He glanced back and grinned.

  “Dover,” he said.

  * * * * * * *

  Milandra closed her eyes and, with practised ease, allowed her psyche to slip free. She did not send it reaching out, but inwards, delving the fathoms of the collective memory that she held within her like some unimaginably vast library.

  She had found a promising region, an area that would, if it were truly a physical library, be a hard-to-find corner thickly layered in dust and cobwebs, where her footsteps would not echo in the deep gloom because the air seemed dead from inactivity.

  The tightly-bound ‘books’ of memories and experiences appeared nondescript and uninteresting. Their very blandness made them attractive to Milandra; she was beginning to suspect that what she sought had been deliberately disguised to discourage any Keeper (for only a Keeper could access the memory banks) from glancing inside.

  Milandra found the section and randomly picked a memory. She opened it, and inhaled sharply as the ship filled her vision…

  Blacker than jet, smoother than glass, vaster than a mountain range, it moved through space like an obsidian meteor. A large sun growled and flared like a blacksmith’s furnace at the blast of the bellows. The ship had already passed the fourth and final planet of the solar system, was accelerating into the furthest reaches of the system’s gravitational field, when the smaller craft appeared.

  Eight vessels, little more than a scouting party, but still capable of inflicting severe damage with their antimatter-seeking missiles. Travelling at close to light speed when they came into view, the craft were already slowing as they entered the embrace of gravity.

  The black ship was built for speed, not battle.

  Trying to evade the smaller craft by vertical or horizontal thrusts would merely expend huge reserves of energy in an exercise in futility that would also slow its rate of acceleration. The smaller vessels were capable of changing direction within moments through deployment of on-board gyroscopes and would be able to train their missiles on the larger ship regardless of what manoeuvres it attempted.

  No. Its best chance—likely its only chance—of escaping ruin lay in speed.

  The black ship did not deviate from its full-ahead course. It continued towards the small craft, ever accelerating as the gravitational clutch grew weaker.

  Flares of light indicated that missiles had been loosed and were streaking towards the antimatter-coated hull of the black ship.

  More flares as the missiles changed direction in an effort to match the increase in velocity of their target.

  Too late, their own speed hampered as they advanced by increasing gravitational pull, the scout vessels adjusted course to try to intercept the black ship when it passed high above, or beneath, or to the side of them, depending on their relative orientation.

  One vessel dropped back. Light flashed as it let loose another missile, but at a steep angle that appeared to stand little chance of intercepting the fast-approaching target. A series of flashes was followed by a steady flicker as the projectile drained its energy cells in first achieving and then maintaining a trajectory which, upon further consideration, seemed it might be well-judged.

  The missile was not designed to detonate—an explosion in space is of limited effect—but to penetrate. It clipped an edge of the ship’s hull, shearing off a chunk of panelling that would have little impact on the ship’s ability to move through deep space. More significantly, the missile’s brief passage through the rim of the hull also damaged beyond repair the high-gravity thrusters concealed beneath the panelling, thrusters that would be essential for manoeuvring safely when the ship arrived at its destination five or six months hence.

  Unhindered—for now—the ship broke clear of the final tug of the solar system’s gravity and entered deep space. Accelerating to close to light speed, the dark matter coating its hull found and clung like a limpet to the unseen current of dark energy that drives the universe’s expansion. The ship winked out of sight.

  The pursuing missiles attempted to follow the ship until their energy cells became depleted, then they drifted into the void.

  The scout vessels headed deeper into the solar system.

  Milandra opened her eyes.

  “Interesting,” she murmured.

  * * * * * * *

  The Celtic Manor Resort stands in acres of grass and woodland alongside the M4 motorway near Newport in South Wales. Before the Millennium Bug put paid to such events, the Resort had played host to a Ryder Cup and a NATO summit. But never before had it been the venue for a funeral.

  On top of a rise near the main hotel entrance, a clutch of people stood around a hole that had been dug in the fifteenth green of the Roman Road golf course. The spring had so far been mild and the grass on the hitherto immaculate green and fairways had taken on a feathery, shaggy appearance. By summer’s end, the greens and fairways would be indistinguishable from the rough.

  The hole was deep but not particularly wide. Child-sized. A mound of earth stood next to it, a brown stain on all the greenery. Next to the mound stood two men. Between them they held a short length of rope from which dangled a bundle wrapped in a cotton sheet. Not a large bundle, for the body it contained was only ten years old and emaciated.

  A teenage girl, her forehead wrapped liberally in white bandage, looked on. She gazed at the couple standing across from her. The man was in his mid-twenties, hair greying prematurely. By his side, glancing up at the man from time to time as if to say, ‘I don’t mind doing nothing, but when are we going to do something?’ sat a black dog. Mouth set in a thin line, the man stared at the hole with an expression of helplessness.

  No thought the girl. Not helplessness. Horror. Tom looks totally horrified. Like… like this reminds him of something dreadful.

  Next to Tom stood a woman, perhaps ten years his senior, fighting to remain composed. She noticed the girl’s gaze and attempted a smile. Not very successfully. Her face crumpled as tears breached her fragile defences.

  Poor Ceri thought the girl. The Bug too
k her son and now she’s watching another child buried.

  Near Tom and Ceri stood the Irish girl with the ready smile and whiskey-fumed breath: Colleen. No sign of the smile now. Next to her stood the doctor, Howard. He gazed into the distance, his face grim.

  The girl with the bandaged head—her name was Brianne Penrose, but everyone called her Bri, like the cheese but without the e—owed Howard her life. She pushed the thought away; the moment was sombre enough already. Instead, she thought of Will. These memories she could not so readily dismiss.

  That loving, infuriating boy had shoved her out of the way at Stonehenge and taken the bullet that was intended for her high in his left shoulder. Bri had thought he was dead there and then. When Tom had come staggering to the Range Rover, carrying Will in his arms, she had assumed it was so they could afford him a proper burial. When Tom ordered everyone out of the car so he could lay Will on the back seat, she had complied numbly, her mind a jumble of sorrow and bewilderment. It was only when Tom began whispering frantically to the doctor, who rushed forward to start working on the boy, that realisation hit home.

  “He’s still alive?”

  Tom nodded brusquely. “Come with me,” he said. “You too, Ceri. Oh, and you’d better come as well, Joe.”

  Bri hadn’t even noticed the new person who accompanied Tom. A boy not much older than her. She barely gave him a second glance.

  The next few hours had passed in a blur. A faltering walk through the bitter cold of a January dawn to the nearby village where Tom and Ceri had left their car. A mad dash behind the Range Rover to a hospital in Salisbury. Peter dragging her to the basement and stumbling about in the dark trying to find the emergency generators when she didn’t even know what they looked like. Helping Tom lug plastic containers of diesel to the basement.