9
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
It looked like the hotel was under siege. The clockwork machine warned Jenny and Maddie and showed them views of the massively overcrowded streets of Surfers Paradise. Other views revealed that the roads towards the place were clogged with traffic, everyone trying to get closer. “What’s bringing them here?” Jenny asked, confused.
“Yeah, about that,” Maddie said, sounding guilty. “Might be my fault.”
“What did you do?”
“I think word had already got out that there was something weird happening here, ’cause there were already crowds in town the night you got arrested.”
“What did you do, Maddie?” Jenny asked again.
“That forcefield or orb or whatever it was I used to get you out of trouble…”
“Go on.”
“It struck me it might be useful, so I left it around the top of the hotel.”
“Great. Might as well have put a sign on the street, god-tech this way. Did you not think?”
“To be honest, a crowd is the very least of our concerns right now.”
Maddie adjusted the view projected by the clockwork room so that they could track the movements of the Bleed. It was accelerating. They could see its increased speed as clear as day as they watched from overhead. Mile after mile after mile of ocean was turned blood red as death devoured the world.
But what was left of the human race continued to resist.
Far below the point from which they watched, a warship from the Japanese Maritime Self-defense Force ploughed through the unspoiled waters on a collision course with the approaching ungodly menace. The ship was a destroyer, one of the largest in the Japanese fleet, certainly the largest left afloat. The way it cut through the waves, racing towards the enemy with a fearless arrogance, gave it a misplaced air of invincibility. More than ten thousand tons of war machine and weaponry sailed at maximum speed towards the demonic evil which had long since devoured the proud country from which the ship had set sail on its final mission.
From their remote vantage point, both Maddie and Jenny thought the warship already looked lost long before it engaged the enemy. The ocean churned, almost appearing to boil, and the ship bobbed like a kid’s toy in a bathtub. Its captain brought it to a sudden full-stop several miles from the furthest advanced tendrils of the Bleed, then ordered his crew to unleash hell. Every missile was fired, every torpedo released. Naval guns and Phalanx CIWS fired repeatedly into the red until every last munition was spent.
And none of it had any impact whatsoever.
If anything, the Bleed appeared to feed on the countless detonations, absorbing the energy of each individual blast, feasting on fire. For the briefest of moments, it looked like the Bleed had temporarily been slowed, but the illusion was fleeting, and what happened next was yet another sobering reminder of the unnatural power of the enemy they were facing.
A blood-red tsunami reared up miles high, drowning the warship in shadow. The wave climbed higher and higher, tipped with a swirling crimson froth which appeared perpetually about to break.
Then it stopped.
Its unnatural coloration apart, until that moment, the water had generally behaved as water should, but the laws of physics had been abruptly abandoned. The liquid began to shape itself into an enormous hand which reached down, plucked up the warship midway down its hull, then squeezed so hard that the vessel snapped in half. Countless tiny pinprick figures dropped down towards the surf—some jumping, most falling—and though it was hard to see from such a distance, Jenny was aware of lightning fast, blood-red spiderwebs shooting up from the polluted waters and infecting every last one of them before they’d reached the waves below.
Maddie moved her palms in an arc above the main console and their viewpoint shifted upwards, panning out as they climbed away from the massacre on the Pacific. She recalibrated, centering the image on their physical location on Australia’s south-eastern coast. The rest of the earth was almost completely blood-colored now, with only a ragged, roughly circular patch of unspoiled land and ocean remaining clear.
“We’ll never stop it,” Jenny said.
“Work that out on your own did you? I think we can slow it down, buy us a little time so we can figure out how to get out of this dimension and back home.”
“This is home,” Jenny reminded her.
“It was for you, maybe, but there’s gonna be nothing left of this place before long. Drop me back to my moon then you knock yourself out and come back here if you like.”
Jenny ignored her last comment. “Okay, so how do we do this, mechanic? What kind of weapons does this thing have?”
“No weapons as such, but the forcefield or whatever it is I have around this place is pretty easy to control. From here I can adjust the radius and the focus. Working on the basis that what’s gone is gone, we need to make it as wide and as strong as we can and centre it on the hotel. Make sense?”
“Makes sense.”
The two women set to work, both moving in perfect, unspoken unison, almost entranced, as they focused their minds on their intended outcome and subconsciously manipulated the god-tech. Time lost all shape and form; they could have been at the controls for seconds, minutes or hours by the time they were finished. Jenny staggered back until she reached the wall, then slid down it into a heap on the floor. She was exhausted. Dripping with sweat. It had taken an unnatural amount of energy.
“Did we do it?” she asked, breathless.
Maddie was leaning over the console, trying to catch her breath. “Not sure yet.”
“Why did that take so much effort?”
“Because we made the orb so huge, I think. It’s almost like we have to fuel
