Which meant that something else was very wrong indeed. For as long as she had known Copernicus, even with his sun mask on, she had been aware of the terrible injury to the back of his neck caused by a poor attempt at Crystal Clarification, almost as if someone had torn a second grotesquely disfigured mouth into the top of his spine. But now the skin was unbroken, the flesh neat and normal. Perhaps he’s had surgery, thought Janey. But if he had, why would he not have corrected his face at the same time? And where was the scar?
‘Focus!’ barked Copernicus.
In her confusion, Janey reached for the mouse, but he was still in the way. She would have to touch him, couldn’t help but touch him as she nudged his arm out of the way to do as he instructed. To her disgust and horror, however, she didn’t need to move his arm. Her hand simply passed straight through it.
Janey couldn’t help a tiny gasp escaping through her lips. He wasn’t real. ‘You’re a SPIRIT!’ she blurted.
His head whipped round suspiciously. ‘A Retro-spectre,’ he corrected. ‘I can’t appear to you in my current form, so I’ve chosen this image from the past to recreate myself, just for you.’
She was still looking shocked, she realized, so she tried to pull herself together. So that was why there was a laser image buzzing in the room behind the photo! That was how Copernicus was presenting himself, to his son at least, which meant that the real Copernicus could be anywhere, looking like anything or anyone.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ she said in the most Alfie-ish way she could think of.
But Copernicus’s eyes had suddenly narrowed. ‘All at once you’ve remembered something from your Spylet past, my son? Even after being brain-wiped.’
Janey faltered – she’d forgotten that Alfie was struggling to recall his own name at the moment. ‘Just . . . just came back to me.’
‘And you brought to mind the password to get in here and use the computer when you’ve never been able to remember it before.’
He was becoming suspicious. Janey waved her arms about, raising one side of her lip in Alfie’s lopsided grin. ‘Nah, I’m the clone, aren’t I?’ she said.
For a long moment Copernicus stared at her, the steel of his eyes boring into her own. Then he said quietly, ‘Fine. Just go into Department, Rooms, A1.’
Inwardly sighing, Janey turned back to the keyboard, found the drop-down menu for Department, then selected Rooms, and A1. As soon as she hit the button though, she wished she hadn’t. There, clearly outlined by the ultraviolet light, was the inside of Alfie’s bedroom and, more worryingly, the sleeping form and face of Alfie Halliday, Copernicus’s son.
Janey hit Escape quickly, then said, ‘Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to do that . . .’
But Copernicus was already on to her. ‘The clone dissolved two hours ago. Still haven’t sorted out that Cinderella gene. And my son is tucked up in bed. So who are you exactly?’ he hissed. ‘Blonde . . . or her confounded father? Well, you’ve just made my job very easy.’
He reached out a sinewy hand to grab her wrist. Janey recoiled, then shouted with relief as his fingers passed straight through her arm. ‘You’re a Retro-spectre!’ she cried. ‘Just a ghost. You don’t have a body!’
‘We’ll see about that,’ screamed Copernicus. ‘Spylab lockdown!’
The doors were voice-activated; the second the last letter had left his ghostly severed lips the doors snapped shut. From what he’d said, his actual body was close enough to do Janey some real damage. She had to get out.
She ran for the door as the muddy water in the vast glass tank began to bubble and boil. ‘Sun King!’ she yelled in Alfie’s voice, desperately holding up her finger to the keypad. It was useless, and the hologram of a Copernicus memory laughed his horrid metallic laugh as a thunderous swish and boom echoed out from the tank. The glass was creaking, bowing under the enormous pressure of the thrashing activity behind it. Janey glanced behind her as Copernicus laughed maniacally; any second now the glass would shatter, and whatever was behind there would flood out into the lab, grabbing her, reaching for her, completing one of the hits on that assassination list . . .
She spun back to the door. Which finger was the acid spray? Janey had no way of remembering – hadn’t Alfie been rather vague about it himself? – so she stood well back and squeezed her left hand tight around all the fingers of her Boy-battler at once.
All the functions were activated together. A fine mist of putrid yellow acid spurted from her index finger, evaporating the lower half of the door, the floor below it and the toecap of the guard who had appeared behind it. Janey watched the bare toe zoom away down the corridor as the rocket launcher caught the enemy spy full in the stomach and propelled him backwards towards the exterior door at great speed. The rocket detonated at the back door and cold air rushed back in along the corridor. Janey started to run but found herself tangled in the web of the dragnet which had also been released from the Boy-battler. There was a sound of ice cracking, and she thought it must be the packed ground outside, split apart by the rocket, but then realized it was coming from behind her. The glass in the tank was shattering. Janey fumbled, terrified, for the only SPI-buy still remaining in Alfie’s Boy-battler – a titanium blade just like her own. In seconds, even as she heard the tank splintering and gallons of icy water – and heaven knew what else – crashing to the floor, she sliced through the clinging strands of net, chucked the whole thing behind her and sprinted down the corridor.
She was almost at the back door, almost free, when she remembered something. ‘Alfie!’ She couldn’t leave him here. Spinning on her heels she Fleet-footed back down the corridor, sloshing through ankle-high water, then held up Alfie’s finger to his door keypad and hurled herself into the room, hauling the door closed behind her as she body-rolled towards Alfie’s bed.
‘Huh?’ he said blearily. ‘Hello, er, me.’
‘I’m not me, I mean, you.’ Janey grabbed his arm. ‘Alfie, there’s no time to explain. Just trust me. We have to get out of here.’
She hauled him to his feet, aware that they must look like twins, and headed for the door, but even as she opened it she realized there would be guards, perhaps even Copernicus himself, gathering outside.
‘This way,’ she puffed, dragging Alfie to the wall beside his bed. Her own Boy-battler acid had all been used up, so she lifted Alfie’s right hand and pressed hard.
‘Ow, you hurt me. Or . . . I hurt me . . .’ he said pitifully, but Janey didn’t give him any time to complain. Instead she bent him almost in two and pushed him through the hole in the wall before following him and pointing and squeezing his hand to fill the hole with the dragnet from his glove, where it clung like a spider’s web to the ice.
But it was only when she turned around, and found herself in a frozen cave confronting an enormous body like a deep pink marshmallow, that Janey understood what she had done.
‘Oh no,’ she said.
They were in a worse mess than ever. Right next to Alfie’s room, it turned out, was where the ice-worms were stabled.
melting monsters
There was no way back. Already there were shouts and muffled thuds behind them in Alfie’s room. And yet there was no way forward either – every inch of the vast chamber before them was taken up with the pulsating, revolting, blood-coloured body of the ice-worm.
‘Oh!’ Alfie reached out a hand. ‘A bouncy castle.’
‘Don’t touch it!’ Janey snatched his fingers back. ‘It has stuff on it that melts ice – it might just melt us too.’
‘Can I go back to bed then? Please,’ said Alfie plaintively.
Janey shook her head. She had to think. There must be some way out, but short of blasting the thing apart with the rocket launcher, which might well leave them dead too, the only way seemed to be to go back and confront whoever or whatever was in Alfie’s room, blundering about in the dark and trying to poke its way through the dragnet.
The ice-worm, although it couldn’t see, could clearly sense their presence. To
Janey’s surprise it seemed to be trying to back away from them, but the space in the cavern was so tight that it couldn’t move. In fact, by struggling it was actually getting closer to them. ‘Why doesn’t it want us close to it?’ she wondered.
And then, with a brilliant flash of light in her brain, something occurred to her, something her father had said. It was impossible to do tests on ice-worms because . . . because what? ‘They dissolve with the heat – human body heat! Yes!’
The next second she was ripping off her Boy-battler and struggling to release Alfie’s hands too. ‘You can touch it, Alfie. You should. That’s it. Touch the bouncy castle!’ And she stretched her own hands out to show him what she meant, hoping against hope that her theory would prove correct, and she wouldn’t find herself dissolving instead of the creature.
Her fingers made contact with the slimy flesh of the worm; immediately they sank into the body, leaving a steaming trail shaped like two hands. ‘It works! Do it, Alfie!’ It was completely disgusting, sick-making even, but within a few moments the heat from four hands and, as far as she could bear it, two flushed Alfie faces, quickly reduced the enormous body to a pool of maroon slime.
At last they could see the door at the other end. ‘Come on,’ she yelled to Alfie, just as a blade glistened through the dragnet. She grabbed his arm with her sticky hand and pulled him through the viscous quagmire of melted ice-worm. Instantly she was reminded of being knee-deep in the bog at SPIcamp, so she unwound Alfie’s SuSPInder, threw it so it connected with the door frame and activated the winding mechanism. ‘Hang on, Alfie.’ He grabbed her around the waist, and they water-skied through worm gloop until they smashed against the door. One quick fingerprint scan, and they were out.
‘Won’t my dad be looking for me? I mean, you.’ said Alfie, bewildered.
‘I’ve got some things to tell you,’ shouted Janey as they battled through the buffeting wind. ‘You’re a Spylet, Alfie. A SPI in training.’
‘Yeah, right!’
Janey smiled. Alfie was still definitely himself, even if he didn’t remember his Spylet past. ‘It’s true. That’s why you’ve got this gear on. And your dad is . . . well, let’s just say he’s not very nice.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because . . .’ Janey wondered what to say to persuade Alfie to come with her and not turn round to find his father. Behind them, spies, robot seals, probably divers in Navy Seals too, were organizing themselves into ranks ready to seek and destroy. Janey and Alfie were making little headway in the roaring torrent of wind, stopping as they were to have chats about their secret spy lives, and the gap between them and the enemy was dangerously small. Janey pulled Alfie’s arm and looked into his eyes. ‘We’ve got to go on.’
‘Go on where?’ yelled Alfie. ‘We’re on an iceberg!’
He had a point. SPUD Nik had disappeared back to base; they had no choice but to throw themselves into the freezing water and hope they made it to safe land – or ice – before the bitter temperatures or the Navy Seals got to them. Janey was just wondering how to tell Alfie, when they reached the edge of the iceberg and a dark voice boomed in her ear.
‘Stay still and turn around, or we shoot.’
It was the bearded spy, grinning menacingly into his whiskers. Janey and Alfie slowly turned back to face their enemies. There were many, many of them, robotic seals and snowsuited spies, and in the distance behind them a vast dark shape slipping into the water. Suddenly the Retro-spectre of Copernicus strode to the front of the battalion, straight through several of the spies, who shuddered visibly.
‘Kill Blonde!’ he roared, pointing towards them.
Janey squinted so she couldn’t see the bullet coming, then opened her eyes again when nothing happened. The bearded spy was staring uncertainly at Copernicus, at Alfie, and then back to her. ‘Which one, sir?’ he said eventually.
‘The one who isn’t my son, imbecile!’ Copernicus flew across the ice towards them, then stopped. His eyes bored into hers, and Janey did her best to look as docile and dull as Alfie was as the moment. He switched his gaze to Alfie, who smiled blearily, despite the cold eating at his face. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . . I don’t know!’ Copernicus stomped back to his cohorts. ‘Capture them both,’ he spat. ‘We’ll find out which it is under torture. It won’t take long before the little girl folds like a house of cards.’
‘He’s really not nice, is he?’ said Alfie, watching his father retreat.
The bearded spy stepped forward with another man, between them holding out the dragnet that Janey had stuffed into the hole. They were about to be captured like fish. Which gave Janey an idea.
‘Alfie, you have this thing strapped to your leg. It’s called an ISPIC.’
Alfie stared down at his thigh, bewildered. ‘An ice pick? Where?’
‘No, ISPIC. Oh, never mind. That board there will get us across the ocean,’ she muttered out of the corner of her mouth. ‘When I give the word, take it off, jump on it and head out across the water.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Not if you don’t want to die,’ said Janey bluntly.
Alfie considered this for a moment, then nodded. The spies were nearly upon them, so Janey hissed, real seals jumping for fish, and the first line of spies on the shore was blown off their feet and sent slithering across the ice. Janey looked back, motioning to Alfie to do the same, and then squatted low on her ISPIC.
The Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica had never seen such a wave. Clinging on gamely to their ISPICS, and thanking SPI a million times over for the gravitational pull of the Fleet-feet, which made it almost impossible to come off them, Janey and Alfie slid up the slope as it rose ten . . . twenty . . . thirty metres into the sky. ‘It’s OK! I’ve done this before!’ bellowed Janey as Alfie started to panic. She called just in time; at that instant the wave peaked, hovered as if frozen for a fraction of a second, then crested and broke. One minute the Spylet pair were hanging in mid-air over a jet-black mountain of water, the next they were flying along on a white-foam express train, swaying left and right over the bubbling crest of the wave, surfing like Hawaiians in the pitch dark, on a crashing crescendo of water that shot them across the sea as if they’d been fired from a cannon.
‘This is the wickedest thing I’ve ever done!’ hollered Alfie. ‘Not that I can really remember what I’ve done . . . ooops,’ as he traversed the slope to avoid a catastrophe, ‘but I bet it is!’
And Janey laughed once, then again with surprise as Alfie’s deep voice boomed out of her chest. ‘I bet it is too!’
In mere moments they were cruising to a standstill, almost at the edge of the plate of ice housing Abe’s Spylab. With their ISPICs hovering obediently a couple of inches above the water, they slid across to dry land and skidded to a halt in perfectly timed sweeping J-turns.
‘Definitely wicked,’ said Alfie, watching Janey and then strapping his ISPIC back to his leg.
There was just a hint of the old Spylet Alfie shining through his de-spied personality. Janey knew what they had to do to get the whole of it back again – put him through the DeSpies-U machine that removed all traces of spydom. Using it on the de-spied Alfie would reverse the process. ‘Come on.’ She pointed to the open doorway beyond the baying seals and penguins, who were in so much uproar they were almost stampeding.
Together they Fleet-footed along the corridors, with Alfie saying, ‘Cool!’ and ‘This is really fast!’ every so often, until they reached the Spylab. There was nobody there, so Janey ran around the room, looking for something that might be a DeSpies-U. ‘Mirror,’ she muttered. ‘I’m looking for a mirror.’ Eventually she discovered it. ‘Of course!’ It was the ice-plasma screen. With no images on it she could clearly see her reflection, and there was a conveniently placed chair just nearby. ‘Alfie, come and sit over here.’
But just as Alfie walked over, shrugging his shoulders but doing whatever his strange double commanded, someone appeared in the doorway.
; ‘Blonde, stop that right now.’ Rook held out his Boy-battler, rocket-launcher finger poised ready to fire. ‘I know it’s you. I watched you Crystal-Clarify.’
So that was it. Copernicus had actually formed himself into Rook, had infiltrated the very heart of Solomon’s Polificational Investigations, stolen Alfie away, and had now worked out which of the Alfies before him was his son and which was Jane Blonde, his nemesis. It explained the black marks, the assassinations, everything.
Janey stared right back at him. ‘How could you do this to your own son?’ she said bitterly.
Rook’s face screwed up. ‘What? I’m a kid, you idiot. How could you do this to your best mate? And betray your own father into the bargain?’
‘What?’ said Janey, confused.
‘Yeah, I know what you’re up to,’ said Rook, his cocky strut bringing him closer to her so she could see the inky blackness of his SPIsuit clearly. ‘You’re about to de-spy Al Halo, you evil . . . What’s the matter, can’t you take the competition? Can’t stand anyone else being as good a Spylet as you? This is all because Daddy didn’t choose you at SPIcamp, isn’t it?’
What was he talking about? Janey ploughed on. ‘What have you done with my dad?’
Rook shook his head, looking at her as though she was mad. ‘Nothing. I was just coming back to find him when I saw what you were about to do to Halo. De-spying him so he forgets everything in his spying past, that’s just plain mean. I can’t let you do that. I’m going to make sure your dad knows, and then you’ll be de-spied yourself.’
And suddenly Janey realized the truth – Rook was completely genuine. He thought she’d got the Spylet Al Halo and was about to de-spy him. He was protecting Alfie, not harming him. She couldn’t explain the SPIsuit marks all over the place – unless it was Blackbird – but Rook was actually trying to help.
‘Rook,’ she said urgently, ‘that’s really you, isn’t it? Look, we have to be quick. Alfie’s already been de-spied by Copernicus, who I thought you were. We have to get the Spylet Alfie back. Prove it, Alfie.’
Jane Blonde: Spylet on Ice Page 14