Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

Ateis breaks off to run towards the lone figure standing watching the sea before I even recognise it as Lotan. “Ateis, wait!” I call after her, but I’m ignored.

I try not to worry. Children here are for the most part left to run free and explore by themselves or with each other. I remember a place where children are taught never to speak to strangers and kept in to get fat watching television and playing on a Playstation because their parents are scared to let them go outside on their own. The habits and fears of that place aren’t so easily set aside.

Still, as I see Ateis talking to Lotan and looking up at him, and he lowers himself into an relaxed squat to bring his eyes almost down to her level so he can reply, I feel uneasy and I hurry up to them.

“Not talking about me, I hope?” I ask nonchalantly, getting a protective hand on Ateis’s shoulder. Lotan doesn’t miss the gesture, unfortunately, and stands straight.

“What did you think I was going to do?” he asks.

I hadn’t wanted to say, but called out on it I do. Maybe I still shouldn’t have. “You don’t believe she exists,” I say. “You could do anything.”

There’s a distant rumble of thunder.

“I wouldn’t hurt a child,” he says. “Not even in a game.”

Still, I keep hold of Ateis. There’s another far-off rumble.

“What is that?” Lotan asks suddenly. “Is that thunder?”

“How can it be thunder?” I retort. “There isn’t a cloud in…” I trail off. It happens a third time. Behind me I can hear people running.

“Get the small craft further up the beach!” a man’s voice yells. I turn to look; it looks like Deregan, second mate from Master Retican’s ship, and the father of Beni’s child. He shouts past me at Lotan. “You! Get the children into the trees!”

I look back out to sea. There’s a smudge of smoke over the sea in the distance. This close to sea level the horizon isn’t far away. “Oh you are kidding me,” I say softly. The air suddenly drops in temperature. There’s a wind swirling around us from nowhere.

“It must be the sentry ships,” Lotan says. “They’re firing on someone…” He grins at me, suddenly excited. “Fantastic!” he exclaims.

“What’s happening? Tani, what’s happening?” Ateis asks, sounding afraid.

“I don’t—” I’m interrupted by a sudden pain in my ears. “Ah!” I cry out, clamping my hands to my ears. Ateis is doing likewise. I realise what it is immediately. There’s a strong wind picking up and the air pressure is dropping very very fast. “Ateis, suck your thumb!” I say. She’s just screaming, her hands pressed against her ears. My ears are hurting enough, and feel clogged. Hers are probably worse. So I demonstrate with one hand and point at hers with the other. She gets the idea immediately, just as Lotan gasps and puts his hands to his own ears. Mine pop once but immediately the pressure builds again. The air pressure is still dropping. The palm leaves are swishing and thrashing further up the beach. Most of the adults and teenagers are leaving in boats for the ships in the lagoon. The wind is still building and suddenly we’re in shadow. I look up and there’s a thunderhead cloud forming right above us as I look and spreading out to sea.

Are we under attack? I think, sluggishly.

Out in the lagoon all the sails on the Satthei’s ship unfurl at once, like petals bursting forth in a timelapse movie of an opening flower. The ship almost seems to bolt forwards, before tacking so hard the starboard hull completely clears the water. She’s heading for the open ocean, out of the trap of the lagoon.

“Satthei’s leaving us!” Ateis yells suddenly; the fear in her voice directly echoes what I’m feeling.

“She’s just going to see what’s up,” I say, to try to calm her. My words are torn away by the hot buffetting wind. The Satthei’s making this wind, to give herself speed. The whole surface of the sea is starting to chop and churn. “Come on!” I yell to her. “We’ve got to get into the trees!” I realise instantly she’s going to be too slow, running, so I pick her up. “Lotan!”

He looks back at me. Rain is starting to fall. Big, heavy drops cratering the sand. We’re quickly getting drenched.

“We need to guard the children!” I yell. “Whoever they are might come around!”

Everyone seems to be heading out to the ships, to join the battle, and just assuming the atoll is going to be a safe haven until they return. No-one seems to be thinking what I’m thinking. The whole ‘battle’ might be a diversion and the target isn’t the Satthei at all.

It’s an instinct, I realise. Rally to the Satthei; she will know where the most danger is and go there, so leaving the children somewhere safe makes sense, because if the children were in danger that’s where she’d be. If you have more faith in the Satthei’s infallibility than I do.

“Lotan!” I yell. “LOTAN! We have to defend the children!”

“I guess.” The words are almost lost in the rain and the still-building wind.

“That’s not good enough!” I shout. I hitch Ateis up so she’s properly astride my left hip, supporting her with my arm. “Is she real?” I shout at him in English. He just stares, as if uncomprehending. I bend and grab his hand with my free hand and place it on Ateis’s shoulder and cover it with my own. “Is she real, Lotan?” I shout. “You’re no use to us if she’s not real!”

Ateis doesn’t understand what’s going on. She puts her arms around my neck and pulls tight, her hair up against my face. That close I can hear her sobbing with fear. I have to let go of Lotan’s hand. He raises it a little, to touch the top of Ateis’s head.

I look at him. His bearded face, his eyes showing confusion, a need he can’t trust. He doubts. He hesitates. That could kill us. I back away, shaking my head.

“Ateis, get onto my back. Quickly!”

She obeys, bless her, clambering around with my help until she’s astride my back. I turn and start running back along the beach the way we came. It’s hard work, carrying Ateis, but as long as I can keep doing it, it’s quicker than she can run on her own little legs. I think how much easier it would have been for Lotan to carry her, and how much faster we could have gone. But what if he decides to do something mad, thinking he’d mess with the game or something? The sand is turning to wet sludge underfoot, and I turn up to the treeline and keep running, where the ground is made firm by the roots of the trees and the sparse grass.

There’s a flickering light all around, and a moment later, a loud drumroll of thunder resonating in my bones. Real thunder this time. The rain starts falling even more heavily, with even larger thudding droplets stinging sideways in the wind.

I’m tired, and I almost trip over the pink petal-boat before I see it. It’s been dragged up, with the larger moth-leaf boat, almost under the tree canopy. They’ve been upturned, their masts and yardarms removed and lying alongside.

“Tani! Here!” I hear Sam’s voice. I turn, trying to track onto it.

Flickering light. Even out of my direct view it seems to leave a pink afterimage on my retina.

“No, that way!” Ateis, says, pointing past my head. Thunder. Loud; I’m feeling it through my bones. I don’t think, I just run in the direction Ateis is pointing under the tree canopy until suddenly I’m surrounded by people and Ateis is wriggling to get down. I stop and someone lifts her from my back. Sam’s there, and a bunch of kids, two looking about Ateis’s age, and an older girl and boy, and Beni, carrying her baby, and two other women I recognise as mothers of some of the children. They’re all bustling around Ateis and me suddenly. Protecting us, I realise suddenly. Protecting the Neri, like it’s a born instinct.

“Did you see anything?” Sam’s almost yelling in my face. “Did you see what happened?”

I shake my head. “No.” I look around again. “Something engaged the sentry group and the whole fucking fleet took off in pursuit. Didn’t they leave anyone to guard us?”

She looks at me again, sharper. She gets it suddenly. “Just us,” she says, and pulls me through the small crowd to where someone quick-witted has already set up a bivouac with a hammock, instead of a groundsheet, fashioned out of a sail out of one of the small dinghies that have been dragged up the beach. They must have worked very quickly. The hammock is dry. Sam reaches in and pulls out our bows and quivers.

“Wonderful,” I comment.

“Where’s Lotan? Did he go with the others?”

I shake my head. “Deciding not to be useful,” I say curtly. “We should get onto higher ground.”

“It’s an atoll,” Sam points out.

Of course it is. I turn to the other women. “Get the children under shelter,” I order, getting the quiver on over my head. “Get them dry. And yourselves.” Amazingly they start to obey me, all except Ateis, who comes back to my side. “No, stay with the others,” I say.

“I don’t want—”

I squat down to her level. “Ateis, I need you to help keep the little children from getting too scared. They’ll feel less scared if you’re with them. Maybe you can tell them one of the stories we told you, how’s that?”

She stares at me, but then she nods. She understands how this works, the centuries of conditioning that makes the humans turn to a Neri for leadership at a time like this. Even if all that’s available is a couple of kids.

“Go on, get under the shelter,” I say, and give her a little shove to get her on her way.

Sam and I look at each other, and without having to say anything, we move off to the edge of the tree canopy, still in sight of the bivouac, where we can look out over the lagoon and the direction the ships have taken. “They’ve all gone,” I say. All the big ships. There’s just the smaller sailboats bobbing in the choppy water, including our own sloop, I see, and the tiny boats that could be dragged up onto the beach. “Are there any other groups left behind?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “Probably hiding in the trees like us. Can’t you use infravision and see them?”

I give her an ‘oh please’ look, and see she was joking anyway. I have good low-light vision: large irises that open far wider than a human’s; and a reflective layer behind the receptors to maximise the light that comes in, exactly like a cat’s eye. Not the same thing as being able to see in infra-red. It would be hard to evolve an eye that did that without its vision getting fogged out by the heat of the head it’s in.

Strobing light, off over the ocean, leaving a pink glare on my retinas. The clouds are thick and dark, where only a few minutes ago, it seemed, there was only clear blue skies and sunshine. I see in the light the silhouette of our ships, still heading out, the distinctive shape of the Satthei’s ship in the lead.

Thunder, and the rain intensifies even more. At least we’re protected from the wind, and most of the rain, except what drips from the leaves above us.

“They’re not thinking tactically,” Sam observes. “Assumed superiority. They see a threat, they go for it, and the Satthei leads the charge, calling down fire from the heavens as she goes.” She grins at me as another strobe of lightning plays across our vision. “Gotta say it’s bloody impressive. If I was an attacker I’d be shitting my pants right now.”

Thunder.

“Look,” Sam says. There are other ships out there. “Is that the sentry group?”

“I don’t think so.”

A part of the darkening cloud swirls and dips over the more distant ships. It’s too far to see really clearly, particularly through the rain, but it’s as if a long tentacle is stretching down to those ships, searching them out even as they’re thrown and rolled by the wind-whipped sea.

“It’s a waterspout,” I breathe, so quietly I doubt Sam can hear it. More are starting to form. “Jesus.”

“Who is it thinks they can go up against a Satthei?” Sam asks.

The waterspout finds its target. The ship twists and splinters and snaps in half, pieces of debris getting sucked up into the spout. I hear Sam swearing quietly.

Other ships turn suddenly, somehow keeping control amidst the wind and rain and the violent sea. Broadside, I recognise, just before the guns on all the attacking ships fire at once. One of the ships is hit by another waterspout and, already at the edge of its tolerances, just disintegrates. Smoke starts to obscure the scene, then the rain falls thicker and thicker, providing its own curtain across the events.

More lightning strobes across the sky, but the shapes are indistinct now. I become aware of events closer to home. The open ocean has washed right into the lagoon, making the boats anchored offshore buck and dive amidst the waves. Water surges up the beach where only a couple of hours ago Sam was teaching the older kids how to play football. Where are they? I wonder. Did they all go back with the adults out to the ships to fight?

I look back towards the bivouac. Everything there looks secure, although the way between it and us is strewn with fallen palm leaves and branches.

More lightning, more thunder, and another invisible broadside of guns. How can they keep firing under the weather Fareis is throwing at them? It’s violent here and we’re not even the target. We can’t see anything now. Except there, not a skyburst, but forked lightning, its image burning through the rain, striking down directly at a ship we can’t see at all. And again. Three times before the sky-ripping sound of the first reaches us. And a loud explosion.

“That was explosives going up,” Sam says.

“You’re right,” I say. “No tactics. They weren’t prepared for this. It’s insane to go up against a Satthei at the peak of her powers. It’s suicide.”

“Someone’s found a way,” Sam says. “At least they think they have.” It’s not the first time either, is it?”

My own memory plays it out. Fire and chaos on a familyship. My Satthei. My mother, Encelion. Being shoved into a hiding-place by my father. Boarders.

And captivity, and the end of Taniel’s memories, that I’ve been able to access.

“Is it the Reki?” Sam asks, her thoughts obviously following my own. “Are they building fleets now? Taking on the Neri at sea?”

I look back at the bivouac again. Someone’s made a small fire. There’s Ateis in the middle of all the other kids, holding forth while they listen, her cloud-grey hair darkened by water and plastered to her head. She glances up at me. In this half-light her eyes shine like bright silver coins.

“It’s not going to happen to her,” I say, too quietly for Sam to hear.