Casey, surprised, stared at the alien as she writhed on the table and the interlocking sections that made up her mouth revealed rows of vicious-looking teeth. The alien groaned and covered her eyes with her talon-like hands. The light was hurting her.
Wilson examined the interior of the suit. It was coated in a black gloop that clung to the metal casing. Electrodes ran from Scratch’s head and spine into the suit’s circuitry. Scratch struggled as Wilson poked around.
“You’re hurting her,” Casey said. Without her power armour Scratch looked helpless and defenceless.
Dreyfus leaned over Scratch until his Perspex visor was right in her face. If it wasn’t for the plastic between them, their foreheads would have touched. Casey could feel his burning desire for revenge. It prickled in the air around him like an invisible aura. She wondered what exactly had happened to him out in Iraq all those years ago.
“I’ve waited for this moment a long time,” he whispered to the alien as it lay on its back. “What do you have to say to me?”
“Icht hafu ran gestar. Wecht na rechtu?” the laptop said, translating Dreyfus’s words into the strange guttural language that the Red Eyes used.
Scratch stared at the laptop suspiciously, surprised to hear her native tongue. “Icht tenlach hef hominide,” she hissed, returning her steely gaze to Dreyfus. Her eyelids blinked sideways like a lizard’s. The effect was unnerving. There was a second or two of lag as the computer turned her words into English.
“I see you, human,” the laptop said in a jerky, digital voice that lacked intonation. It made Casey shudder.
“And I see you, as you really are, without your armour,” Dreyfus said, with a hint of mockery. He spoke slowly to let the software catch every word. “Tell me why you’re here. What do you want from us?” He waited for the translation.
“Mecht granthan quesh hefna loa, imbeci,” Scratch replied.
“Our goals are beyond your understanding, pathetic creature,” the computer translated. The Ghost Reapers watched the alien in frozen horror, unable to avert their eyes. The way Scratch’s strange mouth moved, each section flapping as she spoke, was chilling.
“How are you planning to invade us?” Dreyfus asked. The laptop translated. Scratch didn’t answer.
Casey pushed forwards. She’d had enough of waiting around. If the lieutenant couldn’t ask the right questions, she would.
“Why are you taking the gamers?” she demanded. “Why did you take my brother? Are you using them as soldiers? On Hosin?”
Scratch turned and looked at Casey as the app translated Casey’s questions. Her eyes were so black, and so large, Casey could see herself reflected in them. She glanced down at the plasma rifle – her plasma rifle – in Casey’s hands and her strange mouth twitched into an ugly sneer as she hissed her reply.
“You’re the one who did this to me,” came the translation. “On my planet, we would salute you for your bravery. If your brother is half as skilled as you, he will serve us well.”
“No!!” Casey shouted, overcome with panic. “You can’t take him!”
Dreyfus leaned over Scratch again. “We won’t let you invade us,” he said firmly. “We have troops and tanks and helicopters waiting outside the building to stop you.”
The alien’s eyes fell on the purple scar on Dreyfus’s neck. “What kind of a planet is it where your children fight better than you do?” she asked with a sneer. “When the time comes, Arcturia will crush you just like we have crushed all those who stand in our way.”
“Over my dead body,” Dreyfus spat.
“Yes,” Scratch agreed, “it most certainly will be.”
A chill fell over the room.
Casey could see that Dreyfus was rattled.
“I’ve heard enough,” he said. “Put this thing in the quarantine tent. We’ll see what more it wants to say when we get it back to base.”
Wilson pulled Scratch out of the armour, yanking the electrodes off her head and spine. The alien’s body contorted and she made a noise like a strangled shriek. Everyone winced.
It was like being stabbed in the ears with a kitchen knife.
Wilson and Tucker lifted Scratch onto the gurney. They pulled a quarantine cover over the alien and zipped it shut. The alien stopped writhing but the shriek continued beneath the plastic. It was getting louder and louder.
“What’s it doing?” Tucker asked, pale. “Is it trying to attack us?”
“No,” Casey said, realizing the truth. “She’s calling.”
“Calling? Calling for what?” Dreyfus demanded.
“Help.”
21
TARANTULAS
Scratch’s piercing screech stopped as quickly as it had begun, and the alien slumped back onto the gurney.
“Is it dead?” Tucker asked.
“No, she’s still breathing,” said Wilson. “But if we want to keep her alive for questioning, we need to get her to the containment facility.”
Dreyfus nodded. “Tell everyone to—”
There was a sudden screech of static on the soldiers’ radios.
“Pull back! Pull back! We’re being overrun!” a panicked voice yelled. At the same moment, there was a sudden burst of gunfire upstairs and then what sounded like an explosion.
“What’s going on?” Dreyfus snapped, speaking into his radio.
“They’re all over us, sir!” shouted a female voice. It was hard to make out her words over the sound of plasma rifles blasting in the background. “We’re on the top floor of the building. We can’t—”
There was another burst of plasma fire and then a scream and then silence.
“Sergeant?” Dreyfus barked into the radio. “Can you hear me…?”
The Ghost Reapers watched the monitors in horror as the Red Eyes overwhelmed the soldiers. The aliens showed no mercy, firing left and right at the advancing humans and blasting them with plasma fire. The soldiers, outgunned and outnumbered, retreated downstairs, dragging their wounded comrades with them.
“They’re wiping your guys out!” Fish shouted, shocked. “You have to do something.”
Dreyfus stiffened and his eyes flitted to the chunky yellow box that he’d placed on the table when he first came into the control room.
“We have an insurance policy,” he said.
“What kind of insurance policy?” Casey demanded.
“I bet they’re going to blow the building,” Brain said. It was just a hunch but, judging by the expression on Dreyfus’s face, it was close to the truth.
“You can’t!” Casey cried, her heart thumping against her chest. “What about my brother? And the gamers?” Her hopes of rescuing Pete seemed to be slipping away right in front of her eyes.
“I won’t let those things launch an attack on London,” Dreyfus told her. His voice was horribly flat and final. “God knows how many of your Red Eyes are on that dropship on the roof. My orders are to protect the city.”
Casey shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “My dad was a soldier,” she said. “He told me that being in charge means looking after people. Those gamers upstairs are your responsibility.”
“Sometimes soldiers have to make difficult choices,” Dreyfus said. “If your father was here, he’d understand.”
Dreyfus moved to pick up the yellow box. Casey blocked his way. She hefted the plasma rifle onto her shoulder and pointed it at the lieutenant’s chest.
“My dad’s dead,” she said, furious. “He got blown up by a car bomb outside a school in Afghanistan because a bunch of terrorists didn’t think girls should be allowed to get an education. He died trying to save lives, not take them. He wouldn’t have understood you at all.”
Dreyfus raised one eyebrow at the alien weapon pointing at him. “You don’t have it in you,” he said.
Casey knew he was right. She couldn’t pull the trigger. Not like this. But if she didn’t, how could she save Pete?
The lieutenant took a step towards her. A trickle of salty sweat ran down the bridge of Casey�
�s nose. She wanted to wipe it away, but she didn’t dare take her hands off the rifle.
There was a soft click-clack.
So quiet at first that it was barely noticeable.
Then another. And another.
It sounded like metal tapping metal. Casey looked up at the ceiling. The noise seemed to be getting faster and louder with each passing second, like a pair of castanets clicking.
“Something’s coming,” Casey whispered.
Dreyfus and the soldiers didn’t look convinced, but the boys held their breath as they listened. They were getting used to trusting Casey’s instincts.
“Up there,” Brain said, looking at the air vent they’d climbed through earlier. Dreyfus drew a pistol from a pocket on his suit. The weapon looked strange in his rubber-gloved hand.
Casey pushed a chair against the wall under the vent and climbed onto it. She stuck her head through the opening and peered inside. The tapping was definitely coming from further along the vent, echoing down its metal walls.
“What is it?” Dreyfus asked behind her. “What’s in there?”
Casey saw their shadows first. The black silhouettes flickered against the metal walls of the vent as they approached the final bend before the control room. She recognized the outline of their sleek bodies and their spindly metal legs.
“Tarantulas!!” she yelled, toppling backwards off her chair in panic as a dozen of the spider bots clattered along the vent towards her. Each robot was falling over the others in its haste to attack.
These were the reinforcements Scratch had called for – hunter killer robots designed to clear out small confined spaces. They swarmed into the room, scuttling across the walls, floor and ceiling as they advanced.
The soldiers, ignorant of SkyWake’s weaponry, stared in surprise as the metallic tarantulas leaped towards them, their bodies reflecting the glare of the CCTV monitors. Two spiders landed on the back of Tucker’s biohazard suit and there was a hiss of escaping air as their sharp legs punctured the plastic. He flailed, trying to knock them off.
Wilson ran to help him, but a third tarantula crawled across the floor and jumped onto her leg. It ripped through her biohazard suit, burrowing under the plastic folds. She screamed and flapped around helplessly as it crawled over her skin inside the suit. When it reached her neck, it bit into her flesh with its paralysing fangs and she slumped to the floor. Tucker collapsed next to her a moment later.
Dreyfus, seeing how close they were to being overrun, tried to grab the detonator box from the table. But Fish was too quick for him. He snatched it from the soldier’s grasp and dived under the security desk with it.
Cursing, Dreyfus tried to pull him out but had to stop as the rest of the spider bots swarmed the room. He opened fire with his pistol. All his bullets went wide of their targets. The tarantulas’ bodies were no bigger than pebbles you might find on a beach, and their long, thin legs enabled them to leap from floor to wall to ceiling faster than he could shoot.
Across the room, Casey and her friends were fighting their own battle. A spider bot landed on Cheeze’s lap and jabbed at him with its pincers. Brain grabbed the bot from behind and threw it hard against the wall, smashing it to pieces.
Three more dropped from the ceiling and encircled Casey. She dodged left and right, trying to get past them, but they were too quick for her. They closed in, clicking menacingly, their pincers dripping with neurotoxin venom.
Instinctively, she jumped on the table and brought her plasma rifle up to her shoulder. She felt her perception of time slowing, as if she was caught in a slipstream where the seconds turned into minutes and the minutes became hours. It was happening again, the same feeling she’d had back in the coffee shop. Her mind tuned out, like a radio shifting from a station to white noise.
The rifle in her hands shot three times. She knew it was her finger on the trigger but she didn’t even remember making the decision to fire. She hit her targets with deadly accuracy, blasting all three spiders as they jumped.
The boys looked on in awe. Standing there with her blue hair and the gun in her hand, she looked like some kind of ferocious battle angel from a manga comic.
More tarantulas burst through the vent. A couple landed on the gurney and scurried over the plastic tent, checking Scratch was still alive. Meanwhile, there was a series of heavy thumps on the door to the room as someone tried to break through. On the monitors, four alien grunts could be seen in the corridor outside, shoulders charging the door.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Casey shouted to her teammates.
“But there’s only one exit,” Cheeze warned, his voice panicked. The Red Eyes would burst through the doors at any moment, the lock was too flimsy to hold them.
“We’ll have to make another one then,” Casey said. She jumped off the table and lifted her rifle to her shoulder. A blast of green plasma cut through the wall behind the boys, creating a makeshift exit through the bricks. Fish was the first to run towards it, holding the yellow box tight under his arm as he escaped between the seared and smoking brickwork.
“No!” Dreyfus yelled. “I need that detonator.”
He raised his pistol. But he was swarmed by tarantulas before he could pull the trigger. He fell to the floor, the air inside his biohazard suit rippling around him as he tried to push off the bots. At the same moment the Red Eyes burst through the doors, plasma rifles blazing.
Casey ducked into the hole she’d created in the wall, using the smoking bricks as cover. She turned and laid down fire as the boys ran towards her to safety. Cheeze was the last to flee, frantically pumping the tyres of his wheelchair. He was halfway across the room when a tarantula pounced. It locked onto one of his wheels, toppling the chair over. He fell face first onto the floor.
More tarantulas swarmed over his wheelchair in a pack, tearing at it with their metal pincers as if they thought it was some kind of threat. Cheeze pulled himself free and clambered along the floor on his belly, dragging his legs behind him, desperate to escape.
“Cheeze!” Casey yelled, peering back into the room and firing over him at the Red Eyes across the room. Two blasts of return fire seared into the wall beside her. She ducked, cursing. When she looked back around the broken wall, she saw that the tarantulas had now completely destroyed the wheelchair and were in pursuit of Cheeze.
Casey raised her rifle to fire again. But the Red Eyes saw her and opened up on her position. She ducked back into cover, suppressed by enemy fire, as plasma bursts chewed through the wall.
She felt a hand pulling at her shoulder.
“Casey, we’ve got to move.” It was Brain.
“But, Cheeze…!”
They both looked back around the broken brickwork. The Red Eyes had taken possession of the control room and were disarming Dreyfus. The remaining tarantulas were moving towards the hole in the wall, moving in a pack. They’d be on them in seconds.
“We have to go,” Brain warned her again, trying to pull her away.
Casey shook him off, unwilling to give up. As she raised her rifle to fire, she locked eyes with Cheeze. There was no way she could save him. She could see the fear and despair in his face. He nodded, as if to tell her it wasn’t her fault.
“Run!” he shouted. “Keep the others safe. I—”
His final words strangled in his throat as the tarantulas pounced onto his back. One nipped at his paralysed legs. It seemed surprised by his lack of reaction.
Another scurried up his spine towards his head, preparing to bite his neck.
Before Casey saw what happened next, Elite locked his arms around her waist and pulled her away, surprising her with his wiry strength. He bundled her along the corridor behind Brain and Fish.
Hot tears streaked her cheeks as she ran.
22
ENTER YOUR INITIALS
On the afternoon they buried Casey’s dad, the house was full of mourners. There was the vicar from the church, several members of her dad’s regiment, and various friends an
d family. Her mum wore a simple black dress. Casey thought she looked beautiful in a sad kind of way.
The news of her father’s death had come ten days before. When Casey saw the two stony-faced casualty notification officers walk up the driveway, she had known her life was about to change for ever.
The soldiers said that Lieutenant Michael Henderson had been killed trying to defuse an improvised explosive device outside a school in Kabul in Afghanistan. Device was the word the soldiers used. It was as if they thought bomb was too ugly.
The guests came to the wake directly after the service. They chatted and drank coffee and ate food from the buffet that Casey’s aunts had laid out in the kitchen. Casey wanted to scream. She couldn’t bear all these people being in her house. It felt so fake and wrong. Why was everyone chatting politely when all she wanted to do was yell and break things? How could the rest of the world keep on turning as if nothing had happened?
When no one was looking, she snuck out and headed into the garage. The arcade machine was waiting for her between the tool racks. She wiped away her tears and hung her dad’s dog tags, the spare ones he kept in his bedside drawer, over the corner of the cabinet. No one had found the ones he’d worn when he was killed. She had expected to see him wearing them, lying in his coffin in his formal dress uniform just like in the movies. But, because of the power of the bomb, the coffin had been closed.
The arcade machine beeped at her as it booted up. She hadn’t played it for weeks, not since the night her dad announced he was being deployed. The screen flashed, enticing her to begin. She placed her hands on the controls.
“What are you doing?” Pete asked angrily. He’d followed her into the garage and now stood behind her, his figure reflected in the cabinet’s screen.
“Nothing.”
“Mum told me to come and get you. She says you have to stay until all the guests are gone. It’s rude.”
Casey didn’t turn around. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Pete waited a moment, staring at her back as she stood in front of the machine. “I don’t know why you like that stupid game.”
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