“Freeze,” Ariana hissed, knowing they couldn’t out run it. Mansor needed no further prompting, seeing what was coming.
The two of them stood perfectly still on the top of the plane as the light circle slid down the plane. It reached them and Ariana felt the hairs on her skin energize. Her brain felt as if it were encompassed in a compressing tight band. The pain in her head became unbearable and she bit back a scream, then the circle was past and they were back in darkness, the pain gone as quickly as it had come.
The gold circle was still going down the plane and she followed its progress.
“Oh, man,” Mansor whispered as the circle passed the mid point and they could see that part of the plane. Ariana stared in disbelief. The wings were gone, smoothly cut off less than two feet from the body of the plane. The plane appeared to be resting on a tangle of broken foliage, but Ariana knew that the wings had not been torn off in the crash. There was no sign of them and she knew they were gone long before they came down. She began to understand some of the last words she’d heard from the cockpit.
Ariana watched the circle hit the rotodome and she could see the source of the golden beam that was going up. It came straight out of the top of the rotodome.
“Shit,” Mansor muttered. “Now we know why-”
He paused as they both heard the sound of something massive moving to their left. Ariana squinted but the only image that came to her was of a darker shadow against the black if such a thing were possible. Its indeterminate form towered over them about fifty meters away. She could tell it was coming closer, the trees splintering underneath its weight sounding like shots. Overriding that sound was the same slithering noise they’d heard inside the plane, with a backdrop of hissing, like steam issuing from massive boilers.
Ariana’s heart froze as she began to make out the dark form as it got closer: the forward part of a thick serpent’s body, five meters wide, was raised up off the ground. Thirty meters up the body, it split into seven snakes’ heads, well above their level, hissing issuing forth from each open, jawed mouth as they twisted and turned. Each head was over a meter wide and tall, the dark eyes glinting over a six inches in diameter each on the side of the mouths. Behind, the rest of the length of the body stretched into darkness.
While Ariana remained frozen, Mansor turned and ran back toward the hatch they’d come out of. One of the snake’s heads darted down toward him, foot long fangs bared.
A blue beam flashed out of the dark from the other side of the plane and struck the head a glancing blow. With an angry hiss, the head jerked back, barely five feet from closing on Mansor. The fangs snapped shut in frustration.
With a startling display of accurate fire, the blue beam flashed seven short bursts in less than two seconds, each one catching a different head. While the blue beam fired its last burst at the snake, a golden beam struck Mansor dead on, freezing him in its grip like a deer in bright headlights.
“Ariana!” he mouthed.
She broke out of her amazement and moved for him, but the golden beam picked him up into the air, ten feet above the fuselage.
Ariana looked over her shoulder as she heard the creature moving, but it was heading away, disappearing into the darkness. She turned back to Mansor. The golden beam was starting to draw him in the opposite direction, toward its source. She came to a halt directly below Mansor, helpless. She grabbed hold of the cable that he still had in his hands and that was tied to inside of the plane. She twisted a wrap around her left wrist and braced herself, trying to hold against the force, feeling her own feet begin to leave the top of the plane.
The blue beam came out of the darkness again and struck Mansor. Gold and blue flashed around his body in a panoply of color. Ariana noted that he was no longer being pulled toward the gold, but rather seemed caught in a bizarre tug of war, while she dangled below from her left wrist, her toes scraping the top of the plane.
She looked up and caught Mansor’s eyes as he desperately twisted his head, gazing down at her, his mouth still open in a silent scream.
Ariana’s scream was heard though, as Mansor’s body burst apart in a explosion of blood and viscera that rained down upon her.
Both beams disappeared. Ariana collapsed to top of the fuselage. She was vaguely aware that she was being pulled forward via the satellite co-ax cable, but all she could truly register was the wet feeling on her face of Mansor’s blood.
CHAPTER TEN
Dane sat in the red web seat and checked out the plane. The Canadians were seated halfway up the cargo bay, near Michelet and Freed. The forward third of the bay was filled with a large green metal canister, something Dane had seen before: a five thousand pound bomb designed to be dropped off the back ramp. When it went off, it would clear an area large enough for a helicopter landing zone. He’d seen them dropped and he’d even been on the ground nearby when one of the “daisy-cutters” as they were called, went off. The shock wave had lifted him three feet off the ground and slammed him back down.
Dane focused his mind and stared across the cargo bay at Sin Fen
How we can do this?
Her dark eyes locked onto his and he knew she’d ‘heard’ him. She got up and sat down next to him.
“It will be easier if we spoke,” she said. “The capability is a genetic throwback.”
“Go on,” Dane prompted.
“What do you know of the bicameral mind?” His negative answer was instantly in her head and she continued. “All right, let me start with the basics so you can understand.
“First, you’re left handed, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So am I. The majority of the population, of course, is right-handed. Which means that the left side of their brain is the dominant hemisphere, due to the crossover of our central nervous system at the base of the skull. So already you are part of only three percent of the population, in that the right side of your brain is dominant. But I believe you are even more rare, because I think both sides are, in a way, dominant, in that they work together much more efficiently than a normal person’s.”
She must have sensed his confusion.
“Let me back up a little. The issue is at what point in our evolution did humans become different from the other animals? What makes us different from, say a monkey? An ignorant person would say the ability to think, but that’s not true. All the manifest examples of thinking are present in various degrees in the animal world: learning, the ability to conceptualize. True, they may be very basic, but they are there so any line drawn would have to be arbitrary.”
Dane found himself listening, mesmerized at the two levels to their conversation-the verbal and the other, deeper, level inside their heads where he knew she was picking up more from him than he was from her.
“There are those who think language is the great divider but several species have a rudimentary language. It is widely accepted that dolphins communicate on some level. Some monkeys have approximately eighty signals or commands that they use-communication, in effect.
“There is a theory that we only truly broke away from the animal world when we were able to communicate extensively with a verbal language and act as an individual rather than as part of a group. But what you have to understand is that we humans did not start out with a verbal language or even with verbal communication being our primary mode.
“Wait!” Sin Fen cut off Dane’s interjecting thought. “Listen to me and you will know all I do.
“There is a physiological theory that prior to having an extensive verbal language, early Homo Sapiens communicated on a telepathic level, which in a way-although it made for an effective group defense in a harsh environment-also retarded progress because it required the group to stay close together and also think somewhat alike. Once we developed verbal language, we were able to explore and have more initiative as individuals. This is the point at which man separated himself from the animal world.