Jane Blonde: Spylet on Ice

by Jill Marshall

  At that Alfie spun around in his chair. ‘Hello, me. Hello, weird bird boy. Are we going to a fancy-dress party?’ he said to Janey.

  Rook’s jaw sagged at the same time as his pointing middle finger. ‘Jeepers, you’d better get on with it.’

  So Janey pushed Alfie back in the chair, rolled it closer to the screen and said, ‘Just relax and listen.’ As soon as she heard the dark whisper of ‘Halo, De-Spies-U’ she backed away. There was no way she wanted to be de-spied herself, although, she thought suddenly, it would be nice to be Blonde again, not Halo.

  ‘Rook, if you watched the Crystal Clarification,’ she said quickly, ‘do you think you could reverse it?’

  ‘Piece of cake,’ said Rook.

  He certainly did seem to know what he was doing, Janey decided, as her eyes began to droop and the 3-D laser cast of Jane Blonde spinning above her got closer and closer and closer. Minutes later, she was awoken by an urgent tapping at the door.

  ‘Alfie!’ She leaped off the table and ran outside.

  ‘Blonde, what are you doing hanging about in there?’ demanded Alfie. ‘There are baddies to beat and evils to eliminate.’

  Janey grinned. ‘Thanks, Rook,’ she said. ‘Seems like we’re all back to normal.’

  But even as the words were leaving her lips, there was a blood-curdling, gurgling scream from one of the outlying rooms. All three Spylets took to their heels and followed the noise.

  ‘Oh no,’ whispered Janey.

  It was one of the scientists, slumped in the angle of the corridor wall. Just near his hand was a small revolver, as if he’d been trying to protect himself, but had failed. His sightless eyes stared across the corridor, his chin a mess of blood.

  Janey felt sick to the core, and when she looked around, both Rook and Alfie had turned as white as the ice-walls of the corridor.

  ‘Crushed. That only just happened,’ said Alfie. ‘Careful, everyone.’

  Rook cocked his ear towards the door. ‘Sounds like more trouble. Listen to those animals.’

  He was right. The two brave seals who had stayed behind at the SPI Spylab were barking and howling like marine werewolves, while the penguins were screeching and hooting as if their lives depended on it. Or someone else’s. In the midst of it all was a terrific yowling that cut straight to Janey’s heart.

  Without a moment’s thought, she sprinted for the exterior enclosure, Rook and Alfie close on her heels. The animals were going completely berserk, throwing themselves at each other, leaping into the sea and being tossed back out again by whatever stirred in the depths. Trouble was the worst of all, pelting headlong into the water, slashing madly with his sabre claw, and getting nowhere as some invisible force hurled him back, again and again, on to the pack ice.

  ‘Trouble!’ screamed Janey, running to gather him up, but then stopping short, frozen, completely unable to move when she saw what he had been trying to do.

  ‘Oh my life,’ said Alfie, screeching up behind her. ‘Sick . . . squid,’ he said faintly.

  Rook chased after them as Janey and Alfie ran for the shoreline, but it was too late to do anything as the long legs of Abraham Rownigan disappeared under the water, dragged under by a gigantic monstrous tentacle. An evil yellow eye the size of a dustbin lid glinted balefully at them before the two sank below the surface.

  ‘Oh! A colossal squid!’ yelled Rook.

  ‘It’s a colossal monster,’ said Alfie. ‘Come on.’

  And Janey knew the truth at last as she ran helplessly to the water’s edge. The black marks had been squid ink, spilled out by the monster she had created when she had Satispied an evil overlord with a thousand other bodies – a giant squid. A colossal squid, as Rook had pointed out. It had been at Sol’s Lols. It lived in a tank in the Spylab. It – he – had killed several innocent scientists by clamping a vast muscular tentacle around their chests and squeezing until their organs burst.

  And now it had the one person she had vowed to save.

  Alfie’s dad, Copernicus the squid monster, was drowning her father.

  sick squid

  ‘I’m going after him!’ Alfie sprinted for the edge of the pack ice. Whether it was Abe or his own father he was going after wasn’t clear, but at least his shouting roused Janey from her nightmare state, rooted to the spot and incapable of action.

  ‘You can’t – you’ll freeze to death,’ she yelled after him. ‘This way!’

  Her heart almost in her throat, she ran, sobbing, towards the frenzied penguins. Only one of them was still, apart from the others, staring calmly out across the water, so Janey went straight to him, wrenched his head open and keyed in ‘Abe’ as quickly as her numbed fingers would allow her. Then she pushed the penguin over and shoved him like a toboggan so he slid gracefully along the ice and off the edge. ‘Follow him, SPUD Nik! Send the messages back to my SPIV!’

  Rook ran up behind her. ‘Abe has Navy Seals behind the penguins. Do you know how we can use them, Blonde?’

  Without waiting to answer, Janey immediately sprinted for them. It was just like a nightmare; her legs felt like they were made of sponge, she seemed to be getting nowhere . . . and all the time her father was being pulled into the depths of the ocean by that monster, or having the last gasp of air squeezed out of him by a vicious gargantuan tentacle. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she stammered, sliding on the ice but righting herself just as the three spylets arrived at the robotic-looking seals lying dormant beyond the penguins.

  ‘Like this!’ Janey wrenched the tail to the left and the stopper clattered out on to the ice. She threw herself headlong into the Navy Seal, screaming, ‘Close me in and push me into the water!’

  Alfie tightened the stopper again and she felt the mini-sub slither into the icy depths. To her left, Rook was doing the same, and it looked as though Alfie would get left behind, until one of the scientists stumbled across to them and launched her friend into the water.

  In formation, the three tiny submarines sped through the impenetrable darkness, the Spylet pilots unable to see more than a few centimetres beyond their seal’s nose even with their Ultra-gogs. It was possible to work out where the others were only from the radar beeps being emitted at intervals and the two tiny red dots on the GPS screen in front of her.

  Instinctively Janey tried to turn round, but she was trapped inside the Navy Seal in a very fixed position, a sardine in a one-sardine can. She scanned the GPS. Just as Rook had warned, a long shadow like a giant’s arm was sweeping towards her. It was too close; she had no time to avoid it, and any second now she would find herself rocketing sideways through the water as Rook had done.

  But there was no great swipe from the tentacle. Janey looked at the GPS. The shadow was all around her. What was happening? Was Copernicus just toying with her? She braced herself for the blow, checking the GPS in confusion, but then she saw the shadow around her closing in and Janey realized, too late, what was going to happen.

  ‘He’s . . . crushing me!’ she yelled, appalled, wriggling left and right as the sides of the min-sub buckled and bulged towards her, hemming her in, trapping her inside a mangled metal carcass that would surely split at any second. And then she’d be able to feel that slime-ridden, stinking tentacle smothering her face, squeezing the life out of her. ‘No way,’ she said, filled with revulsion for the monstrous man, and with something a lot more powerful.

  Anger.

  Just before her hand became completely trapped, Janey grabbed her SPIV and in the same movement spread Zinc or Zwim cream around the front of the mini-sub. It wasn’t strong enough to melt through completely, but it weakened the structure so that Janey was then able to slice through the metal with her titanium blade. As she hacked her way out of her prison she felt the blade make contact with flesh, and the tentacle recoiled, only for a second or two, but just long enough for Janey to brace her hand against the little windscreen at the front of the Navy Seal, chewing her SPIder furiously as she activated her Fleet-Feet jump against the tail-end of the submarine. She rock
eted out of the front of the Seal like a missile, a trail of bubbles splitting a cloud of squid ink in her wake. They were very deep in the water, far too deep for Janey to survive for long in the Antarctic temperatures, even in her extreme SPIsuit. She had simply swapped one unpleasant death for another, and she spun around helplessly as an enormous entity rushed by her.

  Something brushed against her leg and she batted it away, convinced that it was a Copernicus tentacle. There it was again. She whipped around. And again! Only this time it was a definite nudge right behind her knees from something firm and snubby, not at all like the sharp point of a tentacle. Willing herself to stay calm, Janey trod water and tried to peer into the blackness. Suddenly a yellow eye loomed up in her face, and she screamed, only just stopping in time to prevent the SPIder from dropping out of her mouth. Another eye swivelled at her; to Janey’s amazement, the two eyes were both smaller than her own, while the eye of the squid had been bigger than a dinner plate, and suddenly she understood. This was someone – something – trying to help her.

  So she grabbed hold of the cylindrical body, lying full-length along the top of it, and allowed SPUD Nik to ferry her to the edge of the Copernicus camp iceberg. It took only moments with the SPUD powering through the ocean, so that Janey barely had time to register the intensity of the cold. The moment they hit the ice and saw the black shining trails leading across it, Janey hauled the penguin robot on to the ledge and then gave him an almighty push. A penguin would be able to pass by relatively unnoticed, while Jane Blonde most definitely would not. ‘Go find Abe!’ she hissed, and the SPUD scooted along on his belly, out of sight.

  There was a gurgling noise from behind her; Janey dropped to the floor. Two Navy Seals popped up side by side, and Janey dared to lift her head to see if they were friend or foe. ‘Penetrate!’ she barked at her Ultra-gogs. To her relief Alfie’s face, which would have been suffused with delight at finding such an amazing new form of transport were he not so worried about his friend, was peeking out from behind the one-way glass. She leaped to her feet and dragged both Seals from the water, opening the tail stoppers and extracting first Alfie and then Rook by the feet.

  ‘Blonde! I thought you’d been squished,’ said Rook, rubbing his cramped arms.

  ‘It takes more than a bit of seafood to squish her,’ said Alfie, trying to look cool, but thumping her on the arm to prove he was very glad to see her. ‘Ah, I see my handsome old dad came this way.’

  Janey’s eyes smarted painfully. If Copernicus had passed by this way, then it was likely that her father had too, unless he’d been left at the bottom of the ocean. She didn’t even know if he was still alive. Her chin quivered as she fought back tears, but she was distracted by a sudden beep from her SPIV.

  ‘SPUD Nik! He must have seen something.’

  Janey flicked through the images on the tiny screen: the grotesque caricature of Copernicus, three-quarters squid and only the tiniest part still human, sliding and lurching across the ice on his unearthly combination of limbs and tentacles; Copernicus looking back, his disgusting baggy squid head raw and open at the back of the neck and his eyes revoltingly mis-matched, with one huge circle of acid yellow and one bloodshot human eyeball; and then the one Janey most hoped to see – the end of one of Copernicus’s tentacle-like arms (or were they arm-like tentacles? It was impossible to tell) looped around something long that was being pulled along the floor. Her father. As far as she could tell from the blurry image he was doing his best to uncoil the tentacle from around his waist. Janey’s heart leaped. He was still alive!

  And then her spirits plummeted once more as she scrolled through the next few photos that Nik had sent over. The first showed a phalanx of robot seals lined up around an icy precipice. On the next was a deep pink mass, hunching its way along behind them. An ice-worm. The third was the most disturbing, showing four enormously powerful cranes positioned around the edge of the precipice at which the seals sat, which Janey could now see was a gigantic hole in the ice. Each crane was pointed towards the centre of the hole, and suspended from their hooks was something Janey could not understand – it looked like a long metal tube, long enough to swallow a skyscraper, almost as tall as the rocket she had seen. And there, strapped helplessly to the bottom of it and looking barely bigger than an insect, was her father.

  ‘He’s at the tunnel,’ she said, barely able to force the words out. ‘The tunnel Copernicus has been digging towards the centre of the earth. He’s going to drop him down it. Come on!’

  The trio of Spylets forged forward, heaving seals out of the way, drop-kicking and Boy-battling any enemy spies that noticed them, and following at all times the bitter black trail left by Copernicus. The going was so strenuous that the blood started to pound in Janey’s ears, and it almost felt as though it was getting darker. ‘Floodlight!’ she commanded her Ultra-gogs, and in seconds the miner’s light had formed on her forehead so she could just about see the next few metres of Copernicus slime. The next moment, the harsh metal outline of a crane loomed into view, and Janey put her hand out to stop Rook and Alfie, whispering ‘Floodlight off!’ to her glasses. An element of surprise was what they needed now, and Janey gulped when she recalled that she had been taught that by G-Mamma as her very first rule of spying. ‘Surprise, surprise, surprise,’ she had said. Hopefully, whatever they did next would come as a nasty shock to Copernicus.

  They crept forward, shielded by the darkness as they turned up their SPI-Pods to hear what was going on.

  Copernicus’s voice, bubbling and wet, was an atrocity, but what he actually said was even worse. ‘It would have been fun to drown you, of course, but this has far more poetic justice. You will die at the exact moment I fulfill my dream.’

  ‘Your dream is to destroy the planet? You’re sicker than I ever imagined,’ said Abe.

  ‘Destroying the planet is just an unfortunate side effect.’ Copernicus swivelled his enormous yellow eye towards his enemy. ‘No, my plan is actually more along the lines of creation. And it was your darling daughter who helped me discover how to do it.’

  Abe struggled against his bonds, shaking his head. ‘Janey would never tell you anything, any more than your own son would if you didn’t brain-wipe him.’

  ‘Ah, but she did,’ gurgled Copernicus in his foul, frothing voice. ‘She told me exactly what’s at the centre of the Earth, being the only human ever to have passed through it. We thought there’d be evidence at your headquarters, but no matter. It was all over her girly little drilling shoes anyway. A little bird brought them to me.’

  Janey looked down at her SPILL-Drills, puzzled. The eSPIdrills? How had her shoes affected his plans? And how had he got hold of them? Just then a chilling noise boomed all around them.

  ‘The cranes are starting up, Boz “Brilliance” Brown,’ Copernicus cackled, his squid head snapping back and forth on the gnarled neck. ‘I’m going to penetrate the centre of the Earth just at the moment you disintegrate into millions of atoms. Your tracer cells will be no use to you this time. Goodbye forever.’

  Abe thrashed furiously, screaming, ‘You’ll kill your own son! The whole world! What’s become of you?’

  But Copernicus simply reached out with a tentacle and pushed a button on one of the cranes. A great rumbling arose, and then the cylinder started to descend into the bowels of the Earth.

  Janey could barely see. Terror clouded her eyes. Blindly she stumbled forward, racing for the edge of the tunnel, heading for her father. She’d saved him before, and she’d do it again. Only this time it sounded as though she’d be saving the rest of the world as well. Teardrops fell on her face and a roaring in her ears threatened to topple her off balance, but she drove on, forcing seals out of the way, burning sections of ice-worm to get through, and suddenly there was a clear path between her and the tunnel opening. With a good enough run-up she could leap on to the cylinder and shimmy down to her dad.

  But as she sped up, the teardrops spattered more thickly against her face and the roar
ing in her ears rose in a crescendo – only they weren’t tears, they were snowflakes, falling thick and fast, so thick it was like being suspended in milkshake. Chips of ice flew all around and the world started to spin around Janey, as if she was trapped inside a giant spinning tube, a tube of white walls, with no beginning and no end . . .

  Janey staggered, falling to her knees, disorientated, unable to work out where she was going or to stop a tide of nausea from engulfing her. As her surroundings went black, Janey realized that her knees had not made contact with the ground. She was free-falling. Tumbling. Straight down the tunnel.

  tunnel of terror

  ‘Janeeeeeeeeey!’

  Abe’s anguished scream penetrated the dense black soup of her mind. Where was she? In a mineshaft – wasn’t it something like that? That’s what the red-haired girl had said. Something about a mineshaft. And where exactly had Titian Ambition disappeared to?

  Janey opened her eyes to have a look, and it all came back to her, all at once, as she somersaulted through space. She was in the tunnel that Copernicus the Squid had created, and right behind her, being lowered towards the hard metal core of the Earth, was a giant cylinder with her father stuck on the outside of it like a bug. At the moment they were still bypassing ice and tight-packed snow, with occasional gushes of water where the pressure was starting to affect the sides of the structure, with the lake below the glacier spurting through the cracks. Pretty soon they would start to pass through warmer sections, the magma, and then eventually past the scrabbling volcanic shrimps.

  At which point Janey and her father would dissolve in the centre of the Earth.

  And in that moment she finally understood what Copernicus was doing. It was a mineshaft. He was mining. He was plucking out the metallic core of the Earth – or at least some of it – and stealing it, without any regard for the devastation it would cause to the whole of the rest of the world. It was what he’d been telling Alfie: the earth needed that metal for gravity. And who had told him it was there? Janey. Janey and her eSPIdrills had given him the exact information that he needed to destroy the planet – the planet that had refused to give him the power he wanted. It was her fault.