Alien Disaster

by Rob May

  ‘What about Xander?’ was all Brandon could think of to say.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Okay, yes, come with me then!’ Brandon spluttered. His mind had been emptied of all the events of the last few days: the running, the destruction, the chaos, the fear. All he could think of was grabbing Kat for another kiss.

  Then a bang and a shout from the rear of the ship stopped them both in their tracks.

  Brandon straight away turned his attention to the ship’s computer. ‘We should have left sooner,’ he said. ‘Something or someone might have snuck up on us. Talem said that the sensors were down and he hadn’t managed to fix them.’ Brandon started swiping and jabbing the screen, digging around in the alien operating system.

  ‘I should have been keeping a look out,’ Kat said guiltily. She opened a section of the window on the side of the ship and stuck her head out. ‘Brandon!’ she said, pulling herself back in. ‘Look outside.’

  Brandon abandoned the computer and used his eyes instead. Parked up close to the rear of Discord was Dravid Karkor’s black heavily-armed crab-like fighter. ‘He’s here,’ Brandon said. ‘Come on. At least we can try talking to him.’

  They opened the door to the midsection and came across a deadly standoff. Brandon was right: Karkor had got the jump on them. He was standing aboard their ship with one hand held up in a conciliatory gesture, but with the other gripped around the fingers of Jason, who was kneeling at Karkor’s feet, painfully struggling. How had he managed to get in? Then Brandon remembered that Discord had been given to Talem by Karkor in the first place.

  Gem was holding the cylinder out in front of her like a gun. Brandon could feel it at the back of his own mind, stirring like a nest of angry hornets as Gem’s mind pointed its deadly power at the intruder. ‘Let Jason go,’ Gem ordered.

  ‘Put down the prototype, Gem, please,’ Dravid said politely. Then he winced as the bionoids entered his flesh and stung his nervous system. Jason moaned between gritted teeth as Karkor’s grip on his hand tightened.

  ‘It’s not a prototype anymore,’ Brandon said, causing them to notice him for the first time.

  ‘Brandon,’ Dravid said in friendly tones. ‘Good to see you again. Tell your sister to dial down the pain just a little, if you would.’

  ‘Gem,’ Brandon said. ‘Lay off.’

  ‘No,’ Gem insisted. ‘I’ll tear him apart. I’ll kill him before he can hurt Jason too badly … and anyway, you can fix Jason’s hand after.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jason grunted sarcastically, ‘don’t worry about me.’

  But Dravid pushed Jason away first. ‘I didn’t come here to fight,’ he said. Then he fell to his knees in agony as Gem applied pressure.

  As Kat ran to Jason, Brandon reached out with his mind to the bionoids. He could almost visualise them crawling around Dravid’s insides, attacking his body’s defences. He tried to send them a message mentally: return to the cylinder.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dravid breathed in relief. It had worked; the bionoids had coalesced back into the end of the cylinder in Gem’s hand. Dravid took a step forward, but stopped when he realised that both Gem and Jason now had guns trained on him.

  ‘Before you shoot me to pieces,’ he said, ‘know this: I came here to offer you all my help in exchange for yours. With your weapon we can take the fight to the real enemy, the aliens laying waste to your planet. You weren’t fighting any allies of mine out there among the stones; the balaks were after me. I escaped the mothership and they pursued me here. It’s the truth.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Brandon said. ‘You joined up with the balak king and chased Talem around the galaxy for years. I know why you hated him so much. He stole your wife as well as all your dreams of power. I bet you’re glad he’s dead: it’s saved you the trouble and guilt of killing him yourself. I bet you wouldn’t have had the guts to kill him if he was here right in front of you now. Part of me doesn’t blame you for the way you feel, but I’m not going to let Talem’s legacy be a weapon of war.’

  Dravid seemed impressed by Brandon’s speech. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I did want to kill him. At first. But my hatred ran its course. I found myself stuck with the crazy king and his army, as good as exiled from my own planet. I hated myself more than I ever hated Talem; I hated the king and his brutal balaks; I even hated my own people who are just as warlike as the balaks, if a little more civilised. All I thought about, all I wanted—’

  ‘—was to find Talem and the cylinder and then go back and rule over your planet your way instead,’ Brandon finished.

  ‘Yes,’ Dravid admitted as he was hit by the truth. ‘But my way would be fair. Hard but fair. Talem’s amazing technology can be used for good as a weapon and as a cure. It doesn’t need to be just one or the other. Come back to Corroza with me, Brandon, and with it we can shape exactly the kind of civilisation that we want to see.’

  Brandon shuddered at the thought of so much power in the hands of so few individuals. He thought of the death and destruction on Earth that Karkor was complicit in, thanks to his obsession with obtaining that power.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Go back to your king. Tell him that we’re leaving Earth, and that if he still wants to destroy the cylinder then he had better get after us before we get too much of a head start.’

  ‘Brandon—’ Karkor began.

  ‘Did you know that I’m Talem and Paran’s son?’ Brandon asked him.

  Karkor nodded.

  ‘Then you know that I can never forgive you for killing my mother, even if you think you can escape blame for my father’s death. Now go; get out of here!’

  Dravid Karkor slumped in defeat, his attempt at parlay brutally discredited and dismissed. He left Discord with an anguished look of disappointment on his face. Brandon followed him to the exit ramp, blocking the aim of Gem, whose finger was twitching on her trigger.

  Karkor paused at the bottom of the ramp. The sun had disappeared behind a cloud and a cool summer rain was spitting down. He turned one last time to Brandon, holding something up in his hand.

  ‘I think about her every day,’ he said. ‘Your mother. It was nobody’s fault that she got caught up in all this. It was nobody’s fault that she died. I kept this to remember her.’

  He tossed a silvery bangle in Brandon’s direction, but Brandon stood still and the bangle hit the ramp and slid back down to the wet grass.

  ‘Don’t give me any of that sentimental crap,’ Brandon said, and turned back into the ship.

  Brandon shut the hatch and shook his head to clear his mind. The sooner he could take off and leave Earth behind, the better: before the aliens destroyed it completely; before Dravid Karkor tried another trick.

  Gem was sitting on her own, glowering at Brandon from across the ship. Brandon went over to her, walking past Kat and Jason who were talking quietly. Gem looked frustrated and anxious; she looked away from Brandon as he approached and acted like she was checking her watch instead.

  ‘I couldn’t let you kill him, Gem,’ he said.

  ‘Is this how it’s going to be now?’ she said. ‘Your special alien power over this thing trumps anyone else who might want to use it.’

  ‘No one has the right to say who lives and dies.’

  ‘You obviously do!’ she shot back at him. ‘Are you going to deny people a powerful weapon that they could use in self-defence? What if an army needs help defeating a despotic regime, either here on Earth or somewhere out there in space? You can’t go round championing love and peace when all over the galaxy people are fighting and killing each other. Hell, these aliens might decide to destroy Earth just out of spite if they can’t get their hands on you and the cylinder.’

  She was right. Brandon had to think hard on the spot to talk her down. ‘I’ll lead them away from here, then I’ll destroy the cylinder—or at least pretend to—then we’ll make sure the aliens are caught … or trapped somewhere. We’ll beat them somehow, Gem, but not with the bionoids!’

  Gem see
med to ignore him. She looked stressed. She was idly click-clicking the metal bezel on her Time Tracker round and round, as if hoping that James might still use it to contact her.

  Brandon went to the cockpit.

  ‘Brandon,’ Jason called before he got there. Brandon turned to face the twins.

  ‘You can drop us off before you leave the planet, but not in France.’ Jason said. ‘What about that RAF base that Hewson mentioned, the one here on Salisbury plain where they are going to be launching a strike from. We’ll be as safe as anywhere there, and we can even help them plan their attack. We’ve actually been inside the alien mothership, after all.’

  ‘Good plan,’ Brandon agreed. He imagined that any attempt to board the alien saucer would be a horrible failure, but he hoped to lead the aliens away before that happened. ‘See if you can convince Gem to go with you.’

  Jason nodded. ‘Good luck out there getting lost in space, or wherever you end up. I hope you never come back.’ He sighed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that, but …’

  ‘I know what you meant,’ Brandon assured him. ‘When I’m gone they’ll make up a story that explains how everything that has happened this weekend was either a natural disaster or a military training exercise, or both. You won’t hear from us alien freaks again.’

  Brandon wasn’t familiar with piloting spaceships, but he was familiar with computers, and Talem had at least configured Discord’s computer to display in English. Brandon tested all the pre-flight settings, his quick mind drawing inferences about how they all related to each other: launch procedure, thermal controls, propulsion; some were automatic, others would require manual input. In some of Talem’s logs he discovered that the boosters that would carry the ship out of Earth’s atmosphere were fuelled by unleaded gasoline.

  ‘At least I know that I can fill up if I need to,’ he said out loud.

  A log entry called Karkor caught his eye. It was a video log, so Brandon touched the icon on the screen to play it.

  Talem appeared on screen in close-up. He looked sick. ‘He caught me,’ he said to camera. ‘Almost fourteen years on the run and finally my luck ran out. I’m still alive though. He left me for dead—he must have thought I was dead, or maybe he didn’t have the balls to finish me off. I must have lain comatose for days, but my brain seems to have found some small spark to re-ignite it. Maybe I’m luckier than I feel. I certainly wish I were dead …’

  The scene changed to an earlier recording. Talem was tied to a chair in the med-bay. Two armed balaks guarded him, and Dravid Karkor stood in front of him, clearly gloating over his captive prey.

  Brandon quickly paused the video as Jason entered the cockpit and slumped down in the co-pilot’s seat. ‘Hey,’ he said.

  ‘Alright,’ Brandon responded. He wasn’t really too comfortable being alone with Jason.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Jason said. ‘I keep thinking we’re going to see the mothership appearing over the horizon any second.’

  Brandon activated the underside thrusters and, going on instinct more than anything else, worked the joystick to raise the ship three metres off the ground. To get a feel for the controls, he spun the ship in a three-sixty circle. Every horizon was clear; Dravid Karkor’s ship had gone; so had Talem’s body. Let Karkor waste time dealing with grief and regret, Brandon thought bitterly. He himself had no time for it.

  Rain was soaking the battlefield and obscuring the horizon. ‘Which way?’ Brandon asked. They had already passed an airfield on the walk to Stonehenge, but there had been nothing going on there.

  Jason was stumped. ‘What, do you want the grid reference or something? Just fly out over the plain. I’m sure that they’ll spot us before we spot them.’

  Brandon started slowly cruising along, still using only the ship’s secondary thrusters, picking up speed as he skimmed across the empty plain. He restarted Talem’s video log as he flew and half-watched that as they went along. Multi-tasking was no problem to Brandon; he even started checking some of the ship’s other features at the same time.

  In the video, Talem looked defiant as Karkor paced in front of him. Brandon realised that Karkor was holding the silver bangle. Of course—it must have been Paran’s wedding band with the concealed tracking device inside. So Karkor had been following it around the galaxy? Why hadn’t Talem destroyed it?

  ‘We found this,’ the recording of Karkor explained, ‘in an empty escape pod travelling through the Outer Rim. A clever diversion, my friend, but knowing how smart you are, I had already figured that you wouldn’t be with it.’

  Karkor leaned in closer to Talem. ‘But I guessed that you’d be tracking it too, in order to keep tabs on me if I found it. You didn’t realise that the device also has a feature that reverse traces a signal, a feature that allowed me to keep an eye on who might be following my wife.’

  Jason was watching the video too now. ‘That guy is a creep,’ he commented.

  Karkor was almost shouting now, his face right up close to Talem’s. ‘So where is she? Tell me, you bastard! Where is my wife?’

  Talem raised his head. His bruised face has obviously been beaten. ‘Safe … from … you,’ he spat.

  Karkor stepped back and made a visible attempt to control himself. ‘Alright then. Let’s try another way.’ He disappeared from shot momentarily, returning with a delicate-looking curved piece of equipment.

  ‘No,’ Talem gasped.

  ‘Don’t make me do this, Talem,’ Karkor said. ‘Just tell me where she is. And where the prototype is too, of course.’

  ‘Dravid, please,’ Talem begged. ‘For your own sake, don’t do this. You will never forgive yourself. There’s no worse transgression that one person can inflict on another.’

  Karkor seemed surprised by Talem’s reaction. ‘Worse than if I just threatened to shoot you if you don’t tell me where it is?’

  ‘I’d rather die than suffer the mindslice,’ Talem said.

  Brandon felt sick. He turned off the video. He could guess the rest. Karkor had violated Talem’s mind and memories and found out everything: Earth, Sarah Walker, Paran’s death, the locations of the first two labs … This must have happened right before Karkor and the balaks came to Earth.

  Jason whistled. ‘If I was you, I think I would have snapped by now and be screaming for that dude Karkor’s guts.’

  ‘Every minute brings me closer,’ Brandon admitted.

  They flew in silence for the next five minutes: Jason was trying to match up the view from the windscreen with the map. He directed Brandon in the direction of a couple of airstrips to the north-west. Brandon’s mind was elsewhere: he was thinking about what he had just seen, how there was clearly no limit to the lengths that Karkor would go to in order to get what he wanted. Mindslice! Getting the information out of Talem’s head must have left his father in a coma.

  ‘Fighter jets over there,’ Jason noted. ‘They’ve spotted us: let’s hope they don’t think we’re aliens and blow us out of the sky!’

  Two Typhoon jets fell into position either side of Discord. Jason started waving out of the window to catch the attention of the pilots. Brandon sped up and climbed in order to keep pace with them.

  ‘Let’s hope that they take us to their base,’ Jason said, ‘and that they’ve got a secure bunker or something. Kat and Gem will be as safe as anywhere there.’

  ‘They will be,’ Brandon agreed. He looked across at Jason, who was also looking back at him, a challenging look in his eyes.

  ‘You?’ Brandon said. ‘You of all people want to come with me?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ Jason said. ‘You’ll need someone with you who isn’t afraid to kick some butt when the time comes. As long as Kat’s safe, then I’m up for a little adventure! Fighting space monsters and rescuing cute alien chicks. I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere with your sister anyway—she’s starting to scare me a little now. And I can’t wait around forever for her to get over her dead ex-boyfriend. So … it’s you and me now, mate!’

>   Brandon sighed. He hoped that Jason wasn’t about to try to kiss him. The only person who he really would have liked to bring round to his point of view was Gem. Maybe he needed to work a bit harder on her … or maybe attempt what Karkor had tried with him, and appeal to her sentimental side with some meaningful trinket …

  Brandon sat bolt upright. ‘The watch!’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Jason asked.

  Brandon got up out of the pilot’s seat. ‘Take the joystick, Jason,’ he said. ‘It’s easy, don’t worry. If you’re coming with me then you’d better learn to do your share of the flying.’

  The midsection of the ship was deserted. Brandon stood still and tried to hear over the noise of the thrusters and the background hum of all the other systems. He could hear the girls’ voices somewhere below him.

  The watch! Gem had been toying with her Time Tracker, the MI Zero gadget that she and James had used to communicate with. But it wasn’t the same one that Brandon had briefly worn as he had searched for her aboard the mothership. The watch that he had just seen Gem with was a larger full-size version: James’ watch!

  Karkor must have returned it to her. Had he also promised her the revenge that she wanted so badly? Gem still had the cylinder. Brandon should have taken it off her earlier, but who could he trust if he couldn’t even trust his own sister?

  At the back of the ship, in the engineering section, Brandon found a hatch and a ladder that led down into the hold. He had to duck when he got down there; it was a cramped, low space, cluttered with noisy equipment and cables. Tiny spotlights barely allowed Brandon to see, but he could hear okay, so he followed the voices.

  He found Gem and Kat huddled together. When he got closer he saw that Kat was tied up; tightly bound by cabling to a support strut. Gem was opening another hatch beneath her.

  ‘Brandon!’ Kat shouted when she saw him.

  Gem reacted instantly. She held a laser pistol hard against Kat’s temple. Brandon noticed that the bionoid cylinder was stuck alongside the barrel of the gun, secured with duct tape.