Her father nodded urgently. ‘Find out whatever you can about these . . . creatures you’ve been seeing – the biting thing at the zoo, and this monster that carried away your brother . . .’
Well, that was worthwhile, perhaps. ‘I’ll look them up, find out where they live, where it might have flown to with Jamie, that kind of thing.’
‘Alfie can help you when we get back, Janey,’ said Mrs Halliday kindly. ‘You’ll still be feeling a bit muzzy-headed after your blackout.’
‘Yeah! She’s muzzy. And fuzzy. She’s feeling pretty skuzzy,’ rapped G-Mamma instantly. ‘OK, OK, I’m going,’ she finished with a sigh as several people glared at her in unison. Like a dog with a tail between its legs, she slipped downstairs.
One by one they all disappeared after her, until Janey was the only one in the Spylab. As Spylabs seemed to be the target of choice at the moment, she felt a little nervous at being there on her own. ‘Trouble,’ she called, ‘you here? At least if you’re here after spying with your freaky collar, I know the place is safe.’
To her relief, the cat strolled out from under the bed, purring madly and rubbing against her legs. All four eyes on his revolting collar pointed towards her at once, the middle two looking distinctly cross-eyed. Janey shuddered. It looked half alive – it was truly the most hideous creation that G-Mamma had ever come up with. Spinning the collar round so that most of the eyes were out of sight under Trouble’s chin, she picked him up and went over to the computer.
First, she typed in ‘velociraptor’. Dozens of images of snapping dinosaurs, just like the one she and Alfie had fought, jumped up on to the page before her. ‘Dinosaur of the Cretaceous period,’ she read aloud. How could a dinosaur be wandering around Solfari Lands? One article in particular caught her eye:
Scientists say they have evidence that the velociraptor, a dinosaur that lived over 80 million years ago, had a skeleton structure just like modern birds. They found knobs on a fossilized spine that might have been the base of its feathers, which were probably for show, to protect their nests or to keep warm, as the creature didn’t fly.
‘That’s weird,’ muttered Janey to Trouble, who cast a sleepy eye in her direction. ‘That thing at the zoo was nothing like a bird.’
As for the creature that had carried away James, there was a very simple way to identify it. ‘Photo,’ she said aloud.
Almost as soon as the word left her mouth, the image of the strange creature popped up on her right lens. Janey took off her Ultra-gogs and downloaded the image to the computer. ‘MATCH’, she wrote. The computer whirred its way through several million pictures for a few moments. While it was still loading there was a noise downstairs
She tensed, ready for action. Trouble had stiffened too. Janey put a hand on his back to calm him down, but found that his body was vibrating as if an engine was running inside him. ‘Trouble, you’re purring!’ She picked him up.
When a plaintive bleat floated up from the SPIV on her chest, Janey understood. She ran to the top of the stairs; moments later there was a loud hiss and the SPIral staircase capsule slid into place. Out popped G-Mamma and Bert, and scampering ahead of them was Trouble’s best friend – a rather moth-eaten sheep with a bald back and great flaps of matted wool hanging around her body like old curtains.
‘Maddy!’ Janey raced to pet her as Trouble leaped out of her arms and on to the sheep’s back, rubbing his head between Maddy’s ears. The sheep called ‘Paaaaaaaa,’ in a tone of utter joy and skittered round the Spylab on her little black hooves, scattering pellets of poo in her wake.
‘Stop that, smelly girl,’ shouted G-Mamma, narrowly avoiding one as she stepped into the lab.
‘G’day, Blonde,’ said Bert in his easy drawl. He touched the front of his hat as his leathery face broke into a grin.
Janey gave him a hug. ‘It’s so lovely to see you! Thanks for coming, Bert. We are totally going to need your help.’
‘And where’s my huggy-wuggy?’ G-Mamma pursed her glittery lips, offended. ‘I go right round the world and you don’t even say hello? Nobody appreciates me these days.’
Janey giggled and threw her arms as far as they would go around her SPI:KE’s waist. ‘I do, G-Mamma. But you have only been gone about an hour.’
‘And what have you been doing while I was away? Not missing me, obviously,’ said G-Mamma with a little sniff.
Janey pointed to the computer screen. ‘It’s searching for a match for the thing that carried Jamie off. Do you think you’ll be able to track it, Bert?’
‘I can track any animal known to man,’ said Bert with a solemn nod.
But Janey could suddenly see what the match appeared to be. She gulped. This was madness. ‘What if,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t known to man?’
They grouped around the computer to see what it was they were dealing with. G-Mamma’s mouth fell open, dropping a sticky pineapple cube on to the counter. ‘No way, Blonday!’
They all looked again at the word on the screen.
Bert gave a low whistle. ‘Well, blow me down,’ he said. ‘Think I’m gonna need some new tricks for that one.’
‘Look,’ said Bert the morning after James first disappeared, at the spot where he’d been picked up and carried away. ‘A few clues, but not enough. First, we know this is where the ptera landed for a moment and picked James up.’ Janey had told him this anyway, but he pointed to two roughened patches of earth. ‘Pressure release points: these are where James tried to turn to get out of the way of the beak. And this,’ he said, indicating a deep ridge in the ground with a couple of small scars on its top edge, ‘is where it dug its feet in for a moment while it picked him up. Didn’t land for long.’
‘I saw it,’ said Janey with a nod. ‘It just dropped out of the sky and grabbed him, then flew off in that direction, beyond the reservoir.’
Bert squinted at the skyline. ‘We could go and check over there for more signs – some sort of trail, or damage, or evidence that it landed. Or . . .’ He paused, rubbing his chin.
‘Or what?’ Alfie stood behind Bert, squinting after him and trying to look rugged.
Bert went on. ‘Or we could look for scat.’
‘I’ll go! What’s scat?’ Alfie was eager for a job to do.
‘Droppings.’
‘Oh.’ Suddenly he didn’t seem quite so keen.
Bert laughed. ‘Thing is, I’m not sure I’d recognize pterodactyl droppings even if I fell over them. Not like this,’ he said, handing Alfie a tiny hard pellet. ‘Squirrel poo.’
‘So you’d recognize any other sort of droppings?’ said Janey, pocketing the pellet. ‘Then all we need to find is some you’ve never seen before.’
Bert looked at her for a moment, then nodded admiringly. ‘Pretty sharp, eh, Blonde?’
‘Just another puzzle,’ smiled Janey. She’d always been good at working out clues and dingbats, and this really wasn’t so different. ‘So shall we go?’
‘Sure. What’s beyond the reservoir?’ said Bert. ‘Forest?’
‘I think so,’ said Janey.
But Alfie pulled off his hat and checked his PERSPIRE. ‘Not any more,’ he said a trifle smugly. ‘It’s where they’re building that new shopping centre.’
Bert shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. Our friend may be long gone anyway by the time we get there. Let’s get going, shall we?’
Fleet-footing slowly so as not to miss any potential clues, the three of them made their way across the fields and around the reservoir.
‘Here,’ said Bert softly. Janey and Alfie crouched down beside him, then followed his pointing finger up through the sparse trees ahead. ‘Can you see?’
Janey stared, seeing nothing. Then suddenly she squeaked, ‘Yes! I can see where it went!’
She zoomed in with her Ultra-gogs. Several of the trees were crooked at the top, or had broken branches along one side, as if a low-flying aeroplane had brushed along them. ‘If we look from broken tree to broken tree,’ she said, turning Alfie’s head so that
he was looking in the right direction, ‘we should be able to find the pterodactyl.’
‘Or we might at least get a bit of a clue where it’s gone,’ said Bert, tipping his hat back to wipe his forehead. ‘That’s what tracking is about – you imagine that there’s a rope attached to that ptera, and we’re pulling on the end, gathering it in, getting closer and closer.’ His voice had dropped to a whisper and the Spylets leaned in, entranced. ‘And then, when you get really close, you have to think like that ptera, act like that ptera. You and that creature have to become one. You are a ptera.’
‘I am a ptera,’ echoed Alfie, round-eyed.
A shiver ran down Janey’s spine as she remembered the empty, glassy stare of the creature, and its vicious beak as it picked up her little brother and carried him away.
Their mood sombre, the three spies set off around the far side of the reservoir. From memory she knew that Sunny Jim’s Swims – a former Spylab belonging to Copernicus – lay ahead off to one side and the motorway ran alongside; from the sound of the traffic, it wasn’t far away. And on the other side, in what had been rough squares of ploughed earth, the new Winton Mega-Centre was coming to life.
Bert motioned for them to stop. ‘See how the ground’s getting a bit boggy? We must be getting near one of the feeds for the reservoir.’
‘We’ve got SPIders with us if we want to breathe underwater,’ said Janey, not wanting anything to stop them now that they were on James’s trail. Suddenly she spotted something.
‘Bert!’ she hissed. ‘Over there on the other side of the motorway – up in that crane.’
‘Zoom,’ said Alfie and Bert at the same time, staring where Janey was pointing.
‘Crikey, you’re right, Blonde.’
As quickly as she could, Janey focused her gaze up the neck of the shortest of several cranes to the cage at the top, high above the vast crater in the ground that was due to be a mall in a few years’ time. In the corner of the cage was a small patch of maroon and grey. ‘It’s a Winton United football shirt – James!’ Janey could hardly breathe, she was so excited and relieved and worried all at once. ‘If we get across the motorway, we can be there in quarter of an hour.’
Even before she’d finished she could see Bert shaking his head. ‘No good, Blonde. That big bird is bound to be territorial. If the ptera’s in there and we make a heap of noise getting to it, which we’d have to without any equipment and in broad daylight, then he’ll just take James somewhere else. And even if he doesn’t, then James will be in more danger – that thing won’t leave him alive if he thinks we’re going to try to nab him.’
‘But then what are we going to do? How are we supposed to get to him silently? Even Maddy beats her wings and makes a noise . . .’
But then Bert’s words raced through her mind and she stood still, thinking: you must become the pterodactyl, you are the pterodactyl.
Well, perhaps she couldn’t be the pterodactyl, but she was pretty sure she could be something like the creatures she’d seen flying above her head, sailing through the trees, avoiding its grasp . . .
And suddenly she was off, Fleet-footing at speed around the reservoir in the direction of the town, Alfie and Bert huffing as they struggled to keep up with her. ‘I don’t understand,’ said Alfie as they crested the hill. ‘Have you just given up?’
‘No way,’ said Janey, taking the slope down at a run. ‘I’m going to see G-Mamma. She needs to make me something. Pronto!’
‘I don’t know how,’ said Janey to the back of G-Mamma’s head as the SPI:KE did press-ups on the garage floor, ‘but whatever you did to combine those eyes with Trouble’s collar, and those birds with arrows to make the SParrows, you can do the same with this squirrel dropping, can’t you?’
G-Mamma collapsed in a heap in her straining Lycra gym gear, panting heavily. ‘Birds and arrows? What are you on about?’
‘Those vampire sparrows that were chasing you and Trouble down the street.’
‘Nothing to do with me,’ said G-Mamma, heaving herself into a sitting position, roly-poly and floppy as a Cabbage Patch doll. Hmm, thought Janey – doubtful! ‘But here’s something I did make!’ she added brightly, handing Janey a pair of furry earphones, one black and one white. ‘You gave me the idea at the zoo. These are Tape-Ears. Like an old-fashioned cassette tape – press the black one and it records your conversations.’
Janey put them on hesitantly, then found the knobble on the earpiece to press. Sure enough, a slight whirring sound in her left ear suggested that whatever she and G-Mamma said next would be recorded. ‘Very useful,’ she said tactfully, although she wasn’t sure anything so big and obvious would be much use in the world of Solomon’s Polificational Investigations. ‘What does this one do – AAARGH!’
She yanked the headphones off, clutching her head in pain. G-Mamma’s rapping in her right ear had been astonishingly loud, even though the words were . . . well, more like a love song. Janey could still hear it now, echoing in a tinny fashion off the metallic floor of the garage. I was all you were needing; now my heart, it’s all bleeding . . . Dripping on to the floor; just can’t take any more . . .
G-Mamma leaped across the room and grabbed the Tape-Ears in a sliding tackle. ‘Don’t . . . that’s . . . the right ear’s just a docking station for my MP3.’
‘So who was that?’ asked Janey suspiciously.
‘Oh, that new band, you know, with Gwen Wotsername, and . . . um . . . OK, fine, girl-spy. Just shine a light in my eyes and have done with it, why don’t you?’ huffed G-Mamma. ‘I admit it. It’s me. I’ve done a demo tape, if you must know.’ She slid aside the mirrored door to the left of the fridge to reveal a whole bank of music equipment. ‘And all those press-ups were to get fit for my music video. Bert’s going to shoot it for me.’
Janey could not think of a single thing to say that would be the right response. ‘Great!’ was all she could manage. Nodding blankly, she picked up the squirrel dropping again. ‘And speaking of Bert reminds me. Can you use this to make me fly like a squirrel?’
‘I’ll give it a go,’ said G-Mamma, looking very pink and rather glad to change the subject. ‘It’s an advanced programme on the Wower that I’ve been experimenting with.’
Opening the door to the Wower, the SPI:KE ushered Janey inside and then lobbed the squirrel pellet in after her. Janey caught it just as the door shut and G-Mamma yelled, ‘Wow and WELD.’
‘G-Mamma, why do I . . .’
It was too late. Janey glanced around nervously as a metal hand reached for the back of her head. Not for a moment had she imagined that she would have to be transformed herself, just for a new outfit to be created. She thought about the horrible eyes on Trouble’s collar and shuddered. It was quite possible she would step out of the Wower like some kind of mutant squirrel, maybe with huge front teeth, or a great bushy tail . . .
Meanwhile, rather to her disgust, a thin probe snaked out of the Wower wall and grabbed the poo pellet from her hand; as her head was massaged and her Ultra-gogs slid into place, the probe rubbed the pellet up and down her arms and legs. ‘Euw! Don’t! What are you doing?’
As quickly as it had appeared, the probe shot back into the wall, taking what was left of the squirrel dropping with it. She could feel her body being encased in her Lycra SPIsuit, just as normal.
A moment later the lights flashed around the Wower. ‘Wow and Weld complete,’ said a smooth female voice. ‘Jane Blonde, you may exit the cubicle and begin your next mission.’
‘Thank you,’ said Janey, although why she was thanking a machine she wasn’t quite sure. There was something about that voice though . . .
‘Jane Blonde.’ Suddenly it started up again. ‘You’ve mixed it. Now exit. It’s really . . . your time. Aha: you’ve mixed it. Now max it, you Spylet . . . divine.’
So G-Mamma had reprogrammed lots of things about the Wower. Janey smiled.
‘Looking good,’ said G-Mamma, now wrapped in a white dressing gown and kick-boxing a punchbag
that hung over the old tyre in the corner. ‘How is that for you, Secret Squirrel?’
Janey looked down, then gasped. Turning around slowly, she stared at her reflection in the Wower door. ‘I am a ptera,’ she said.
‘You are a terror?’ said G-Mamma.
‘No, I mean – I’m like a pterodactyl.’
Her SPIsuit was as silver and tight-fitting as ever, and her feet were encased in familiar aerodynamic Fleet-feet. Between her arm and leg on each side, however, there was now a flap of dark grey, shimmering material forming a triangle along either side; if she’d had claws on her elbows, Janey could have done a very good imitation of the crouching pterodactyl. A similar piece of fabric joined her legs together, wide enough at the bottom that she could still stretch her feet far apart. Janey did a star-jump and laughed. She looked like a kite. And it occurred to her that that was just the point. She was going to be able to free-fall silently in this suit, not disturbing the ptera, as she flew in to rescue James.
G-Mamma came up behind her and tapped the large lump between her shoulder blades. ‘This is a parachute for when you’ve been free-falling for long enough and you’re nearer the ground. Your helmet is shaped to cut through the wind like a racing cyclist,’ she said, rapping the top of Janey’s head sharply. The helmet jutted out front and back into a sharp point, rather like the pterodactyl’s head, but with a small microphone attached near the chin strap. Beneath the back of the helmet sat her bushier-than-usual ponytail, curving to a sleek platinum curl at the end. ‘Like a squirrel’s tail,’ said Janey, flicking it this way and that.
‘It should help you steer,’ said G-Mamma. ‘Their pretty, fluffy tails aren’t just for show, you know.’
Janey peeked through the window. ‘Well, it’s dark now. I’m ready to go.’
As she spoke there was a ferocious mewling from inside the Wower.
‘Trouble! How did you get in there?’ Janey threw open the door and grabbed her cat, holding him up above her head as she studied what the Wower and pellet had done to him. His back legs were webbed, and his golden tail was bigger and bushier than ever. Trouble miaowed happily, revealing two long front teeth. ‘You’ve turned into a fat tabby squirrel! I suppose you’d better come with me then.’
Jane Blonde: Spy in the Sky Page 7