Traveller Manifesto

Israel – Today.

“Do you think I went too far?” asked Professor Taylor. He looked drawn and haggard with puffy bags under his eyes. They sat in a reception room in the base and, though there had been every courtesy given, they had been waiting for over an hour.

“No,” replied Valeria with a gentle shake of her head. “This is their way of taking a little pleasure in their revenge. They’ll let us in. They must make a show of strength, especially when they don’t like us.

“But when, do you think?” asked the academic.

“They will soon,” confirmed Osborne with a worried smile. The Professor certainly did not look well. “You alright?” he asked. “Have a bad night’s sleep? You wouldn’t be the only one.”

“I slept very badly,” admitted Professor Taylor wearily. “I might seem like an angry old goat, but conflict does wear me down, I’m afraid.”

Osborne gave a chuckle. “That reminds me of a story from when I was a kid on the farm.”

“Here we go,” interrupted Morris with a chuckle.

“Now, now. You love my stories,” replied Osborne with a grin. “Or at least you used to. It’s about a goat we had, like I said, when I was a kid.”

“Pardon the pun,” interrupted Morris.

Hurley screwed up his face. “When are you going home?” he asked.

Morris only laughed. It was great to see him getting back to his jovial self.

Osborne continued, undeterred. “This old goat was the stroppiest old bastard anyone had ever seen. He charged at anyone he could, used to fight the young bucks for the females and, despite his age, was always rooting them.”

“You’re right, we do miss your stories,” agreed Leishman, to which Valeria had a belly laugh.

“Anyway,” continued Osborne unperturbed, “one day we had to move the old goat to across the dam, but he just wouldn’t budge. It would have been impossible to get him through the gates, so I tied a rope to his horns and my sister and I walked with the other end across the dam, that’s what we called our small lake by the way, and we decided we’d make the bastard swim for it. So we tugged on his horns and he eventually had to give up and stagger to us, fighting and tossing his head every step of the way. When he got to the edge of the water he refused to swim, but sank like a rock. We thought, ‘Shit! We’re going to drown him’, and if he drowned, Dad would give us a bloody hiding. So we pulled as hard as we could and we felt him come along okay. We pulled and pulled and, in the end, the old bastard goat emerged, nostrils snorting out water and weed hanging off his horns. He’d walked across the bottom of the dam, just to have his way. Be buggered if he was going to swim.”

There were chuckles and some barks of laughter.

“You are like the goat, Professor,” continued Osborne with a smile as he good naturedly pointed to the academic.

“Thanks, I think,” conceded Professor Taylor with a frown and a smile. Their comradery developed through the Byzantium Traveller mission obvious.

“You are you know. You can be a stubborn old bastard at times, but one of the best parts about you is that you never give up,” continued Osborne. “You created the Traveller concept, ran Saxon Traveller when nobody would help you and made it through Byzantium Traveller with buggering Basil the Bulgar-slayer, so you can do anything. These pricks don’t know who they have by the horns. They’ll soon cave in.”

“Jesus!” replied Hurley with a shake of his head. “Colonel bloody Aesop!”

Professor Taylor gave a lopsided smile and nodded, but his mood improved and was soon back to his normal self.

The quake took everyone by surprise.

Israel was not known to be an overly active Earthquake area. Osborne knew there had been significant quakes in the area some still described as the Levant, but it had been quite some time since any earthquake had given the people of Israel serious concern. After all, this wasn’t Japan or Indonesia.

The fact that the quake hit with the arrival of the Transporter Inspection Team was not without suspicion.

The earthquake seemed to roll in, as if they were riding on a giant conveyor belt. “Is that a form of cavitation?” asked Professor Taylor in rising panic. They stood carefully as the reception area rattled and shook. The quake came in pulse with a rising tide of wump, wump, WUMP, that could be like a normal earthquake, but in Osborne’s limited experience sounded odd. As the rumbling waves of force increased their crescendo, the windows rattled and shook. He had once experienced a small earthquake in Turkey and thought it was a heavy chopper hovering overhead. Only as the locals fled outside did he realise what it was.

This was different.

When fluorescent light fittings began to shake loose and dangle from the ceiling, the Israelis soon ran for the exits.

“Time to leave!” yelled Hurley.

Osborne and the other soldiers circled Professor Taylor and Valeria and guided them to the exits. They soon ended up in a carpark, where mystified Israeli military personnel and contractors stood, some still cradling weapons.

Waves of force rippled across the carpark as vehicles rocked and lifted. Windows in the nearby offices cracked and then popped with a tinkle of shattering glass, while the sound of crashing indicated the collapse of buildings or fall of equipment. Sirens began to wail and as more personnel fled from the buildings, some appeared injured and held bleeding heads or limbs.

As suddenly as the quake started, it stopped.

“What the bloody hell?” exclaimed Morris. “I’ve experienced a lot of quakes and that was really weird.”

“Is everyone okay?” yelled Hurley.

All checked the members of their team were uninjured before Hurley and Leishman ran to help a young woman who had only just emerged from one of the partially collapsed buildings. She was covered in dust and bled copiously down her face from a nasty scalp wound. With one of the Israeli soldiers, they bound a folded scarf onto her wound and wiped the blood from her neck and eyes.

“There you go love,” murmured Hurley quietly. “We’ll get some medics to check you.”

She panted in her near panic. “The Transporter! I ran as soon as it started, but it all came from the Transporter!”

Hurley looked to Leishman in alarm, but the American only nodded. On the nearby runways a couple of F-15s roared and briskly took off. Even from where they stood it was apparent that some aircraft had fallen due to buckled nose gear. One C-130 Hercules lay slightly off to one side, the wingtip touching the tarmac. Troops ran for Blackhawks that were powering up with a roar. A nearby Israeli soldier cursed and told her to be silent, but Hurley, who spoke Hebrew, asked her. “What do you mean love? Do you think the Transporter was the source of the quake?”

She sobbed into her hands as she nodded. “The teams were being evacuated. As soon as the vibrations started, one of the technicians, who was on his way back to the Transporter building, ran back and told me to run for it. He said it was the Transporter. Because we were using them all at once, something happened.”

“Shut up girl!” swore the soldier angrily. He looked to be one of the contractors allocated to the project. Though covered in dust, but he still held his weapon close.

“You bloody idiots!” exclaimed Hurley angrily at the soldier. “What the hell have you done?”

The young Israeli looked tough and capable and opened his mouth to retort when a second surge of cavitation hit them.

This wave hit with much greater force. The carpark rippled like the surface of a lake into which a pebble had been thrown. There were cries of panic from the crowd of over a hundred who stood in the parking area. All were badly shaken and some were distraught and even injured. They fell to their knees as the waves made standing impossible.

“Hit the deck!” Hurley cried as he dropped to his stomach and lay as if on a surfboard while Professor Taylor fell beside him. They watched, wide-eyed, as the tarmac crumbled beneath them. The injured Israeli sergeant wailed as she covered her face and the waves increased in frequency, the deep wump, wump, WUMP, gaining ever more power. The cavitation pulsed through his chest and stomach and he soon felt queasy. With the rocking of the ground, he felt he could even be sick.

There were more screams. Buildings noisily fell and then there was the unmistakable, gut-wrenching scream overhead as supersonic jets flew in attack formation.

In Hurley’s befuddled state he barely wondered why or what the jets would be attacking, but his experience and extensive training had him cover his head. Beside him, Leishman did the same.

The awful, deafening roar of the jets was followed by a series of gut wrenching, concussive explosions. Even though they must have been about 500 metres away, the blast wave rolled across them. Dust and fragments of concrete and glass sprinkled across the tarmac as greater and greater pulses bore down upon them, as if the very earth was to tear itself asunder.

And then, everything stopped.