Here to ruin everyone’s day. The aliens in Aaron Lamb’s new novel, Cults Coffee and Close Encounters aren’t your normal type of sci-fi alien.
Here’s the scene when Logan discovers that Aliens have landed:
Fury’s eyes darted about for information. He caught the giant flight information board changing colour. Every flight red. Cancelled.
He peered over the shoulder of a barrel-shaped man in a green and white hooped jumper and caught a glimpse of a video. Drone footage of a colossal Teacup-shaped object flying low over outback Australia. Fury frowned and scoffed about its ridiculousness. The barrel man flicked his feed to a far-right news site, then a far-left news site. Same story. Same video. Fury stopped frowning. He froze like everyone else.
His mind didn’t believe it—he couldn’t believe it. The giant Teacup slowly passed over a small town in the outback, leaving a trail of dust in its wake. The scale of this thing was clearer now—larger than the town of Broken Hill. This thing was kilometres wide.
His eyes followed a movement to his right. Café workers, cleaners in high vis, and anyone who didn’t have a phone gingerly picked their way through the thousand statues to the big screen TV. The news rolled the same footage. A giant Teacup spaceship cruising slowly across the red dirt and colourful low shrubs of unseeded lands that have seen over 100,000 years of continuous aboriginal culture. A connection between people and country so rich it formed a bond that had seen the rise and fall of a hundred empires, and today, it was the firsthand witness to aliens from another planet. The ‘handle’ of the Teacup seemed to be the engine, though no fire or exhaust could be seen. An autumn-leaf brown Teacup-shaped cylinder with a few pockmarks formed most of the ship. A map popped up on the feed, tracking its progress with a red line across the globe. It had entered the atmosphere above Cambodia at considerable speed and had initiated a breaking manoeuvre around The Northern Territory. As it crossed the vast red lands of the Anangu, the Teacup slowed to the speed of a military jet. Finally, it slowed to a crawl and descended in western New South Wales near the tiny town of Silverton. A town with a population of fifty and a few donkeys. The ship stopped on a vast plateau outside of town, and as it touched down, it sent out a shockwave of dust like a stone in a still pond. The drone footage blurred as the shockwave hit.
Aaron Lamb 