‘Stop!’ she screamed. ‘Take me instead. It’s me – Jane Blonde.’ And as the creature looked up at her from beneath its hairy, furrowed forehead, she ripped off her hat to show him her ponytail.
For a fraction of a second, she faltered. Surely gorillas didn’t have blue eyes? And blue eyes that looked particularly pained and hurt to see her, even as its fur-covered hand closed around her brother’s throat . . .
Wishing for her Girl-gauntlet, for any sort of protection, she raced across the lab. James was crying, great tears rolling down his cheeks as the creature strode backwards, dragging the boy by the collar. It was staring at her now, its strange blue eyes anguished, terrified . . . And now the hairy figure was opening its mouth and she accelerated, in case it was planning on biting James, but instead a bitter roar was echoing around the lab . . . a cry of ‘Owwwwwwww!’ . . . or . . . wait, it sounded more like . . . ‘Ouuuuuuut!’
She paused for a moment, surprised. But she didn’t have time to wonder for long as the gorilla man thrust the body of her brother under the Spylab entry tubes. Again she stopped, confused by the action as James was immediately sucked up out of the Spylab to safety and the monster again screamed, ‘Ouuuuuuut,’ lunging towards her.
And it was then that she heard it.
Tick. Not the clock, because she could see that across the lab, the red figures telling her that it was 11.10. Ten past eleven.
Tick. There it was again, resonating around the black emptiness of the laboratory.
Tick. She should know that sound. Think, Blonde, she told herself, backing up against the bench as the gorilla reached out a hand . . .
Tick. She only remembered when she saw the wire trailing across the floor from what looked like a plastic bag of flour on the workbench. It was a bomb. A large watch was counting down the seconds. A watch she recognized. Her father’s watch.
The gorilla was nearly upon her. She had about forty seconds to get out, if she had guessed correctly. The only exit was past the gorilla, and as she slid under the bench to escape its reaching, grabbing, leathery fingers Janey realized that she had just put even more distance between herself and the escape route.
She looked round in desperation. Above her was an odd circular skylight – obviously where one of the smaller pools had been at one time. The gorilla, its eyes glistening with . . . fury . . . or something Janey could not work out, was now running around the benches towards her.
Tick.
She had to go UP. That was the only way out. But there was not enough bounce in her Fleet-feet, and she’d used her SuSPInder and SPInamite. There wasn’t even a chair nearby, just a small stepladder.
Tick. Muddy at the base. Tick.
A stepladder that Janey had seen before. That had been lying in a flower bed next to G-Mamma after the SPI:KE had miraculously appeared at her bedroom window on the night of Trouble’s ‘ceremony’.
Tick.
A stepladder that could well have been standing on boggy forest floor, causing four rectangular indentations in the mud.
Tick. Tick.
A stepladder that, now she thought about it, probably had special powers.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The ticks were speeding up. There was nothing else for it.
Hoping desperately that she was right, Jane Blonde dragged the stepladder to below the skylight, tugged her hat back on, and then leaped on to the first rung, just as the ticks blended into one monotonous beeeeeep and she blasted up . . . up . . . and out of the Spylab.
Head first, Janey rocketed through the skylight. Luckily her hat was no ordinary baseball cap; the PERSPIRE protected her skull and her face from the shattering glass, while the SPIsuit beneath her clothes repelled the towering tongues of flame that reached after her, burning her jeans straight off but leaving her body untouched. Janey went straight up in the air for several metres, then as the ladder began to drop back towards the ground she angled the far legs and hoped for the best.
Boing! The ladder hit the concrete next to the Sunny Jim’s Swim’s sign and took off again, bouncing Janey across the landscape as if she was on a giant pogo stick. All thoughts of what she had just left behind vacated her brain, and even though she could hear the rubble settling and moving behind her she wanted to laugh. This had to be another of G-Mamma’s Wow and Weld creations. Her . . . Bladder?
Fun though it was, however, once again she didn’t know how to stop, and as she bounced across the motorway, to the stunned amazement of several truck drivers and a stream of cars, she realized that she didn’t know how to turn it around either. And behind her, still cowering somewhere in the stark sunlight of Sunny Jim’s Swims, was James. And G-Mamma, Trouble and Bert too, if, as she suspected, they’d been kidnapped.
As she thwacked into the ground again and the Bladder took off in yet another direction, Janey fumbled for her SPIV, yelling, ‘G-Mamma . . .’ as she bounced over a park bench looking out on to the reservoir. She couldn’t keep hold of the SPIV and the stepladder; G-Mamma’s face appeared at intervals in front of her as the visualator flew up and down as she leapfrogged the playground in the reservoir grounds, the boating lake, the ice-cream kiosk . . .
‘Bouncing Blondes, what are you doing?’ screeched G-Mamma.
‘I’m on your stepladder thing,’ said Janey. ‘The Bladder. How do I stop it?’
‘You’re on the Blast-Off Ladder? How come?’
Janey screamed as she came very near to slicing her head off with a telephone wire. ‘I found it at Sunny Jim’s – were you there? – and now I need to get back to Jamie, but I can’t . . . ow . . . turn it around or . . . ugh . . . stop it.’
‘Jumping jimminies, I haven’t worked out all the fine details yet.’
‘Fine details? How to stop it?’
‘It’s something to do weight distribution, and I’m a teensy bit heavier than you. You’ll never do it with your puny poundage!’ G-Mamma’s purple face loomed into view and then disappeared again. ‘You’ll have to jump, Blondette.’
The Bladder vaulted the park’s boundary hedge, and Janey screamed again. ‘We’re heading for the high street. There are old ladies shopping . . . sorry, sorry,’ she shouted to the pair of elderly women with shopping trolleys and a chihuahua on a lead whose heads she narrowly missed, ‘. . . and everyone can see me.’
‘Get off that thing now, Blonde, and that’s an order!’ hollered G-Mamma.
Janey had no choice. The Bladder was about to bounce over a low-roofed church, where more old ladies were gathered in the courtyard, sipping tea. ‘Map!’ she said to her Ultra-gogs as two dozen sets of stunned eyes followed her pogo-ing progress over the toilet block. One more bounce and she’d be the main attraction in Winton town centre.
The flat church roof was just below her. Not at all sure what she was doing, Janey pushed the top of the stepladder forward, and to her joy the Bladder pointed down. As the front legs made contact with the rough surface of the roof and prepared to bounce off again, Janey threw herself backwards into a somersault and landed on both feet, feeling sick as the pain in her weakened ankle flared up again. Without any weight upon it, the Bladder fell forward, teetered over the edge of the roof, then slid down and planted itself upside down in a rose bush. That must be how G-Mamma had got off it too, Janey realized, remembering the SPI:KE languishing in the flower bed.
‘I’ve stopped,’ she said into her SPIV. Blue-haired ladies and the vicar were charging over to the upturned stepladder.
‘Back to base,’ barked G-Mamma. ‘We were in the vicinity. Berty Bert’s collected James – he’ll be with you in four minutes.’
The crowd below was muttering threats about calling the police. The vicar called up to her, ‘You are going to pay for this rose bush, I presume?’
Janey peeked over the edge of the roof. ‘Oh, sorry about that. I’ll . . . replace it for you.’
‘I should think so.’ One of the ladies elbowed her friend. ‘Must be one of those circus kids. You never can trust them.’
James turned to look at her from the front seat next to Bert as the van pulled away. Her brother was even paler than usual, the white of his skin contrasting starkly with his inky eyes.
‘Are you OK?’ Janey asked. ‘You didn’t get hurt by the explosion?’
James shook his head, but not before Janey spotted a large tear rolling down his cheek. He’d obviously been very shaken up.
‘And what about you, Blonde?’ said Bert gruffly. ‘Nothing damaged?’
‘No, I’m fine, thanks to G-Mamma’s creation.’ Janey wiped mud off the bottom of the ladder. ‘Why were you there, Bert? I saw that you were at Sunny Jim’s Swims too. I thought you’d all been kidnapped!’
Bert flushed a little and pulled his hat down over his eyes. ‘We were sorting out Trouble, and . . . yeah, sorting out Trouble.’
‘He’s OK?’
‘More than OK, JB. He’s fine.’ Bert started to whistle through his teeth, a sorrowful little tune that sounded oddly familiar. What weren’t they telling her?
It was evidently the end of the conversation, and they rode the rest of the way home in silence. The atmosphere felt impossibly gloomy, and it only got worse when Janey entered the Spylab at home to find a bevy of SPIs gathered round on collapsible chairs. Alfie and his mother were there, as were Tish and Magenta, and Rook and Blackbird with parents Eagle and Peregrine. G-Mamma was near the fridge buttering slices of bread, and Janey’s mum was loading them up with ham and tomatoes. There was a small mountain of sandwiches at the end of the bench; quite who was meant to eat them, Janey wasn’t sure.
She went over to her mum. ‘What’s going on?’
Jean waved a piece of ham at her. ‘Your father’s organized a group briefing for two o’clock. He was quite insistent that everyone should be here.’
‘Where is he then?’ said Janey, looking around. Everyone was there, except for him.
‘He’ll turn up in a minute, I’m sure,’ said Jean, although the smile she gave Janey seemed rather small and forced. ‘Are you all right, sweetheart? I hear you had a bit of a scare.’
‘That’s right, Blonde the Bombshell,’ cried G-Mamma, before Janey could so much as nod. ‘Having to FLEET-FOOT your way out of that Spylab, and RUN all the way to Winton WITH JAMES. You must be exhausted.’
Janey held back a smile. G-Mamma didn’t want anyone knowing about her strange Bladder invention, and she could quite understand why. ‘We’re OK.’
She wasn’t actually convinced that James was all right. He’d positioned his chair near the window and was gazing soulfully through the gaps in the blinds, apart from the others. Thankfully Alfie had noticed too and was heading over to him with a soccer magazine under his arm.
By now it was 2.40 p.m., and people were starting to check their watches and shift uneasily in their chairs. Jean put the top on the last sandwich and sliced it in two. ‘Hand the plates round, Janey. We might as well have these while we’re waiting for your father.’
So they ate ham sandwiches and passed the next two hours giving each other updates on the summer holidays. By far the biggest excitement had been the rescue of James and the appearance of the prehistoric creatures.
‘And this thing was really a velociraptor?’ asked Tish sceptically. ‘How do you know?’
‘Well, I didn’t exactly ask it,’ said Alfie, bristling, ‘but it looked just like that thing in Jurassic Park.’
Janey backed him up. ‘And the pterodactyl too. That’s chained up at the zoo now – Dad might let us see it if we ask him.’
Meanwhile Alfie had marched over to the computer and started bringing up information. ‘That’s what it looked like, isn’t it, Blonde?’ he said, pointing to the screen.
‘It did.’ Tish and Janey joined him at the computer.
‘ “The prehistoric creature of the Cretaceous period is believed to belong to the family from which birds are descended”,’ read Tish. ‘Did it, like, fly?’
‘No, it didn’t, like, fly; it just, like, tried to kill us with its slasher claws and its big ugly teeth,’ said Alfie crossly. ‘But these other things flew – like those sparrows with teeth. And the pterodactyl.’
Tish leaned across him and typed something into the computer. ‘OK . . . sparrows with teeth. That would be an . . . an ibero . . . iberomesornis from the Cretaceous period. And the pterodactyl is . . . hang on . . . a flying reptile from the Jurassic through to the Cretaceous period.’ She shook her head. ‘That cannot be real. Your dad is playing some trick on you,’ she said to Janey.
‘Or,’ hissed Alfie, his eyes round, ‘it is like Jurassic Park. He’s turning Solfari Lands into some prehistoric zoo called, um, Cretaceous Creatures or something. Far out!’
But Janey shook her head. ‘I’m pretty sure that G-Mamma had something to do with the sparrows,’ she said under her breath as the SPI:KE’s head whipped suspiciously in her direction. ‘And it’s not Dad. It’s something to do with Copernicus. There was a gorilla at Sunny Jim’s.’
Tish rolled her eyes. ‘Right. So was it an ordinary gorilla, or one from the Cretaceous period?’
‘I don’t know,’ was all Janey would say, getting irritated by Tish’s lack of faith. ‘I just know it was a gorilla-man, like the ones Copernicus made before. Or a man-gorilla. Or . . . or something like that.’
Now she thought about it, she wasn’t really sure it was 100 per cent gorilla. It was hairy and humpbacked, for sure, but it had those strange eyes, and seemed to have some ability to speak. And . . . well, she couldn’t really remember much beyond that. Before she could think any more about it, however, her mum clapped her hands at the front of the room.
‘Erm, it’s getting on for half past four,’ she said, a little nervously. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to Boz, but we can’t keep you here for nothing. So . . . well, I know a bit about what he was going to brief you on, so I’ll fill you in now, and then we can all just get on with it.’
‘But he’s the boss! Bozzy the Bossy. Shouldn’t we wait another hour at least?’ G-Mamma looked quite affronted, but Bert stood up slowly.
‘Seems to me that the boss man would hardly choose to miss his own meeting. I reckon we should hear what his missus has to say.’
There were various murmurs around the room, and G-Mamma wriggled her shoulders and gave up. ‘Go on then, Gina Bellarina.’
Janey’s mum flicked a switch and projected a map on to the fridge. ‘Well, here goes. But first, James, you’ve had a shock – I’d like you to go and have a lie-down.’
James shook his head violently and Janey’s mum looked as if she was about to start getting firm with him, but Alfie gave him a little shove. ‘Go on, mate. Take my soccer mag.’
His black eyes glittering with tears, James left the room. Jean waited a few moments and then cleared her throat. ‘You may be aware that there have been explosions in Spylabs around and about.’ She pointed to the locations of the Sol’s Lols HQ, Solfari Lands, the Hallidays’ house and Sunny Jim’s Swims, then over to Florida. ‘Someone is after something in the Spylabs.’
Janey put up her hand. ‘Copernicus is still in his case at NASA,’ she said, ‘but I saw a gorilla like one of his henchmen over at Sunny Jim’s . . . I think.’ Actually the black Spylab now seemed like a dream, seen through a thick fog. ‘Did you see it, G-Mamma?’
‘At Sunny Jim’s Swims? No, no,’ said G-Mamma, sinking her teeth into a Dunking Dough Ball. ‘I oggnt gere.’
‘But I thought you went . . .’ Just as Janey was about to argue, G-Mamma frantically crossed her eyes at her above the doughnut
. Keep quiet, the message clearly said. ‘Sorry,’ said Janey. ‘I made a mistake. I’m sure there was a gorilla there though.’
Again there was a rumble of discussion, and then her mother continued. ‘The trouble is, Boz doesn’t know what they’re after, or whether it’s already been taken in one of these raids that have already happened. So there’s really only one thing for it.’ She looked down at her hands for a moment, as if she could hardly believe what she was going to have to say. ‘We’re going to have to destroy all the Spylabs to keep Boz’s secrets safe.’
‘All of them? The Copernicus black labs as well?’ said Eagle, jumping off his seat.
‘All of them.’
There was a stunned silence as the scale of the operation sank in. All the Spylabs. Throughout the world.
‘Obviously we have to get rid of the labs with minimum damage,’ explained Janey’s mum. ‘Boz has developed a special explosive based on SPInamite, which can be completely enclosed and not affect anything outside it. We are trying to get rid of equipment only,’ she added seriously, ‘not humans.’
Mrs Halliday stood up. ‘When do we start?’ she asked, ever practical. ‘Only the children are back at school next week, and I’d like to make sure the old lab at Winton Primary is dealt with before then.’
Gina Bellarina looked around. ‘We start tonight.’
And Janey watched the backs of the excited SPIs as they gathered around the globe that Gina placed on the table, choosing their targets. It was a terribly sad mission, destroying all her father’s work. And why wasn’t he there to tell them himself? This just wasn’t making sense.
Janey sat with Trouble on her knee as the calls came in from around the world. He shifted around uncomfortably and occasionally twitched the stump where his tail had been, as if it was still there. G-Mamma had whisked him off for repairs as soon as she had found him in his sorry state, but his golden plumage couldn’t be restored.
Jane Blonde: Spy in the Sky Page 10