‘LIQUI-NUMS ARE AVAILABLE,’ BEAST insisted.
‘Fine. I’ll have some.’
The drinking straw reappeared. Axel made a face and took a slurp. It was still revolting, but it was better than nothing. Next time, he thought, I won’t rush blindly into things.
If there even was a next time. BEAST was awake again, but they were still trapped under ice at the bottom of a ravine.
Axel tried to move BEAST’s arms and legs, but he could do barely more than wiggle them a few inches. Shifting to OGRE form might have helped - OGRE was strong enough to lift trucks - but they didn’t have that app loaded.
Once again, Axel wished he had one of his mother’s hot meals inside him right now.
‘Heat,’ he whispered. ‘Maybe that’s the answer.’ He checked the list of loaded apps, and one stood out. ‘BEAST, can you shift to HECKFIRE form?’
‘YES.’
‘Do it. It’s time to find out what it does.’
BEAST’s body shifted shape a little. Axel heard armour plates grind and lock into place. Claws extended from BEAST’s fingers. His head extended, growing out until it looked like a robotic crocodile, or maybe a dinosaur.
It was suddenly a lot warmer inside BEAST. Some new weapons options lit up:
claw strike
tail strike
fire armour
flame blast
Axel stared at flame blast and all at once he understood.
He fired the flame blast. Two scorching jets of fire billowed out from HECKFIRE’s nostrils. They seared right through the ice, melting it away in seconds. Water hissed and boiled away as steam.
HECKFIRE wasn’t a crocodile, and he wasn’t a dinosaur.
HECKFIRE was a dragon!
Axel hit fire armour. He pulled one of BEAST’s now-clawed hands free and saw it was glowing red.
HECKFIRE’s whole body was becoming scorching hot. The ice shrank and melted away at its touch like butter.
Axel swiped and raked the ice, clambering out of the widening crater. They looked like some mythical monster from a forgotten era of history, trapped for untold centuries under the frozen crust, now breaking free at long last.
Soon HECKFIRE stood fully revealed, glowing bright red in the darkness. There was still a chasm stretching above them, but they were free. They could move again. There was still hope.
Just as Axel was thinking their luck had finally changed, he heard something that sent his spirits crashing again. Voices were yelling to one another from the top of the crevasse:
‘This is where they fell, I’d swear to it!’
‘What’s that light? Is it them?’
‘Something’s on fire down there. You think the robot wrecked itself?’
‘Nah, it’s too tough. Keep watching. We’re going to be the ones to claim that reward, boys.’
Axel cursed. Grabbem agents – dozens of them, by the sound of it. Alpha One and Alpha Gold must have alerted the base, and now a whole detachment of Grabbem agents was out here to take them prisoner. There was a fat reward for bringing BEAST back to the corporation that had built him.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Axel told BEAST.
‘AGREED,’ said BEAST.
‘Can we climb out?’
‘YES, BUT THERE ARE NOW MANY GRABBEM AGENTS WAITING FOR US UP THERE. OUR CHANCES OF ESCAPE ARE ZERO POINT ZERO ZERO TWO PER CENT.’
‘Oh, fantastic!’ This whole mission was going from bad to worse. He angrily thrust HECKFIRE’s glowing fist into the icy wall, and watched in grim satisfaction as the ice-water seethed and bubbled around it.
Then, more thoughtfully, he drew the fist out. There was a smooth, wide hollow left behind.
He grinned. ‘You know, BEAST, maybe we don’t need to get out after all …’
HECKFIRE’s red-hot armour had probably been meant for combat, Axel guessed. An enemy would think twice about grabbing a robot that was hot enough to cause serious damage.
Melting escape tunnels through solid ice – like they were doing now – was just a bonus.
‘How long until the Devastator is due to appear?’ Axel asked.
‘TWENTY MINUTES.’
Axel gritted his teeth. They were almost out of time already. SNOWDOG would have made it to the base far more quickly.
HECKFIRE took stride after stride, blasting ahead with its fiery breath and using its glowing hands and feet to melt the ice in its path. BEAST’s reserve cell was steadily running out of power. Axel hoped they’d reach the base soon.
He thought of the Grabbem agents who were waiting in the cold at the edge of the crevasse, still thinking that he and BEAST were bound to come climbing out sooner or later. They’d be waiting a long, long time …
‘I AM DETECTING LARGE AMOUNTS OF METAL UP AHEAD,’ announced BEAST suddenly.
‘That’s got to be the base!’
Sure enough, a grey metallic surface soon showed through the ice. Axel cleared away a large enough patch to enter through and gave the metal an experimental tap.
‘Sounds solid. Let’s look for a way in.’
But there was no door, not in that spot nor anywhere nearby. The wall seemed to be made of great steel plates like the hull of a battleship.
‘Okay, so we make a way in!’ Axel scraped HECKFIRE’s claws across the metal, but the only result was a ghastly screeching sound and a few faint scratches.
‘I RECOMMEND LAZBOLT,’ said BEAST.
Axel had tried LAZBOLT only once before, and that had been after dark in the back garden at home. Shortly after their first adventure together, Agent Omega had sent them some experimental apps to test out, including LAZBOLT.
When he discovered that LAZBOLT was an incredibly powerful laser-beam cannon, Axel had gotten it into his head that it might be possible to carve his initials on the moon and BEAST did not think to warn him that this was not a good idea. Their first attempt at laser-assisted planetoid vandalism lasted only a millisecond, lit up the countryside for miles around with shocking green light, and resulted in Axel being banned from video games for a week as punishment. Nedra had blamed the strange light on ‘fireworks’, which had seemed to satisfy the neighbours.
BEAST now understood that the moon was part of the natural world, as much so as the trees and flowers he loved, and refused to allow Axel to fire energy beams at it for any reason.
‘Have you got enough power left?’
‘ENOUGH FOR ONE SIXTY-SECOND BLAST.’
BEAST shifted form. HECKFIRE’s claws and snout vanished away. BEAST’s legs retracted, and a trundling platform took their place. From his back emerged a thick needle-tipped prong on the end of an angled strut. A delicate-looking bloom of silvery metal fanned out around it, like a satellite dish. This was LAZBOLT’s beam projector.
Axel fired. A streak of light too bright to look at erupted from the projector and hit the wall. The metal instantly began to sizzle and melt.
Carefully, Axel moved the beam in an oval, slicing through the wall. I hope this isn’t a gas or oil pipe, he thought. We’d be blown to bits.
Fifty-three seconds later, LAZBOLT’s energy beam finished cutting and switched off. The cut-out piece of wall fell inwards with a heavy CLANG.
Axel waited for a moment, in case any guards appeared. But there was only silence.
Axel shifted BEAST back into his regular form. Cautiously, they stepped inside and entered the Grabbem base.
The base was made from a hollowed-out iceberg. From outside, it would look just like part of the Antarctic landscape. Inside, it was a very different story. The first thing you noticed was the enormous pit in the middle of the base. It gave Axel a creepy feeling as he peered at it. He felt sure there was something down there, something sinister.
Round and round the inside of the base, winding in a corkscrew spiral from bottom to top like a helter-skelter, was a metal tube with windows in it. This was where Axel and Beast were standing now. Orange lights lit the tube with a sickly glow.
Around the cen
tral pit was a cluster of metal platforms and catwalks, like scaffolding on a building site. Power cables dangled from the struts like spaghetti. Little bug-eyed robots patrolled back and forth, tapping on computer terminals and working on pieces of machinery. Axel guessed they were there to look after whatever was down in that pit.
He had to know what was in there. To do that he had to get a better view, and that meant climbing higher up.
He drove BEAST up several levels of the tubular corridor until he could look down into the pit. ‘BEAST, zoom in,’ he said.
He caught his breath as he saw what was lurking in the icy shadows. ‘Oh, man,’ he said. ‘So that’s what they’re up to!’
The thing lurking in the central pit was, in fact, several things: a group of fat metallic tentacles as wide around as express trains. They squirmed and stretched upwards hungrily.
Their pointed tips held saw-like clusters of teeth. In the middle of the teeth were gaping holes like puckered mouths. It was like looking at a hideous animatronic monster octopus.
The tentacles moved as if they were alive, reaching up towards the light and wavering from side to side as if they smelt something. One of them had black, gooey stuff all over its mouth. The way they moved made Axel feel queasy. They reminded him of leeches hungry for blood.
That’s exactly what they are, he thought. Only it’s the blood of the Earth they want to suck up.
‘They want oil,’ said Axel. ‘Those things are oil pipes. With teeth!’
Was this the Devastator, he wondered? No, it couldn’t be. Agent Omega had said the Devastator was a vehicle. These things must be waiting for the Devastator to blast holes through the ice sheet. Then they could feast on the rich oil underneath.
‘FIVE MINUTES REMAINING,’ said BEAST …
‘We’ve got to find the Devastator and shut it down,’ Axel said. ‘And I don’t even know what it looks like!’
The little robots on the walkways around the pit hadn’t noticed him peering in. Axel looked around, but he couldn’t see a single human being anywhere. Maybe the humans were holed up somewhere safe and warm while the robots did all the work.
Most of the robots were busy on the walkways. There didn’t seem to be any inside the tubular corridor at all. With any luck, Axel could explore a little way and not get caught. But he couldn’t stomp around inside BEAST without being noticed. He’d have to go alone.
He popped open BEAST’s hatch and climbed out. ‘I’m going to go look for the Devastator,’ he said, his teeth chattering from cold.
‘WAIT,’ said BEAST. The robot opened a hatch in his own leg and pulled out a heavy parka. ‘BEAST CAN TOLERATE THE COLD. AXEL CANNOT.’
Axel gratefully fastened the fur-lined coat around himself. ‘It’s perfect! Where did you find this?’
‘BEAST PACKED IT FOR YOU.’
‘Thanks! Hey, isn’t that a power socket? Why don’t you plug in and recharge your energy cells? I’ll scout ahead.’
BEAST unspooled a cable from his finger, plugged himself in and gave a contented sigh. His dim eyes began to shine brightly again.
Axel ran up the metal corridor. He passed heavy bulkhead doors and wall-mounted gun turrets that rotated to follow him. A sign in blue and yellow pointed the way upwards to the Command Deck. That sounded promising.
It turned out to be at the very top of the base, and Axel was out of breath by the time he reached it. He grimaced as he noticed an open-sided elevator nearby. If I’d known that was there, I wouldn’t have needed to run all the way up here!
The Command Deck was a room full of computer screens and huge windows that looked out over the snowy wasteland. White metal shutters had previously hidden the windows from outside view, but now they had been rolled back.
On one of the screens was a countdown: D MINUS 10. Axel didn’t have to guess what the D stood for. He desperately looked for some way to shut it down.
‘What are you doing in here, human?’ said a twangy electronic voice.
Axel spun around. One of the little robots was standing in the doorway, looking at him with big, round, accusing eyes.
‘Um, maintenance?’
‘Maintenance?’ said the robot, as if Axel had said he was here to do some ballet dancing. ‘You’re supposed to be out with the rest of the human agents! Didn’t you hear the full alert?’
‘Must have, ah, missed it,’ Axel said and grabbed the sides of his hood. ‘These furry hoods sure do muffle sounds, yes they do.’
The computer flashed up D MINUS 9.
Axel began tapping keys at random, trying to find some way to stop it. ‘Do you mind?’ he told the robot. ‘Got lots of work to do.’
The robot didn’t have eyebrows, but if it had it would have furrowed them. ‘What’s your Grabbem ID number?’ it said menacingly.
‘It’s classified,’ Axel said. He was beginning to wish he’d picked a room with more than one exit. ‘Can’t tell you.’
The robot hummed towards him. ‘Classified? Are you trying to tell me you’re with Special Ops?’
‘Yes! Special Ops, that’s me. We’re doing something very secret.’
‘More secret than this entire secret base, I suppose?’
Axel hadn’t known a robot could sound sarcastic. Meanwhile, the computer screen flicked over to D MINUS 8.
Something large and green loomed behind the robot. It was BEAST, all finished with recharging. He bent down and stared in through the door. His shining eyes went big with alarm as he saw Axel’s panicked face.
The little robot hadn’t noticed BEAST.
‘I don’t think you’re Special Ops at all,’ it said. ‘Your story doesn’t add up. Wait. I know what’s going on!’ It jiggled excitedly. ‘There’s a renegade Grabbem droid here somewhere, and it can change its shape.’
‘Wow. Imagine that,’ said Axel, looking right at BEAST.
‘I think maybe the renegade droid is right here, and I’m looking at him!’ declared the robot triumphantly.
Axel stared in amazement. Did the robot really think … that he was …
‘You’re going to have to come with me,’ said the robot. It lifted two tiny arms. Axel was about to burst out laughing, because they looked about as menacing as egg whisks, but then a blue arc of electricity crackled between them.
He began to back away.
‘Don’t worry,’ the robot said. ‘It’s just an electron pulse. To disable your circuits.’
Fizz, crackle went the energy current.
Axel knew perfectly well that he didn’t have any circuits, but an electric jolt wouldn’t do him any good either. He backed away further and almost tripped over a steel waste bin.
‘It was clever to disguise yourself as a human, but you could never fool a top-of-the-line Grabbem office robot!’
Axel pointed. ‘Watch out, it’s a giant robot penguin!’
The robot spun its head around without moving the rest of its body. It saw BEAST filling the doorway. It made a terrified buzzing noise that sounded like a frog farting through aluminium foil.
‘QUACK,’ said BEAST.
Axel quickly grabbed the waste bin and slammed it down over the robot’s head.
Blinded, the robot careered around the Command Deck knocking things over.
‘Alert! Alert!’ it shouted. ‘Renegade droid! Base invasion! Alert –’
BEAST bashed his fist down on top of the metal bin, crumpling it. The robot grabbed the bin with its flimsy arms, which were still sizzling with the stored-up pulse.
There was a flash and a BANG.
The robot stood perfectly still. Smoke began to curl out of its arm sockets and from under the squashed bin.
‘I think he just fried his own brain,’ Axel said.
The computer flashed up: D MINUS 1. DEPLOYMENT COMPLETE.
‘TIME IS UP,’ said BEAST.
‘What?’
‘THE DEVASTATOR IS LAUNCHING.’
Suddenly a booming voice rang out from hidden loudspeakers echoing all across t
he base.
‘Attention, all loyal Grabbem employees! This is your beloved CEO’s son, Gus Grabbem Junior, speaking. It gives me great pleasure to declare this Antarctic oil drilling operation OPEN!’
Down below them in the base, the robots stopped what they were doing, raised their little arms and cheered. And at that moment, the Devastator appeared.
It strode out from a side tunnel that Axel hadn’t even noticed, and walked past the gaping pit where the tentacles writhed and chomped.
In the front of the hollow iceberg, a gigantic hidden door opened. The Devastator stomped through it and out into the Antarctic wilderness.
‘Now it’s time to punch the first hole of many to come,’ said Gus Grabbem Junior. ‘Hold onto your butts, people!’
‘We’re too late,’ Axel said. ‘The penguins, the seals, the fish … we can’t save them. Grabbem are going to trash the whole ecosystem now!’
The Devastator went stomping out of the base. Axel and BEAST could see it clearly through the Command Deck windows. It stalked across the snow on its three spindly legs, then stopped suddenly.
‘First drill point reached. Time to unleash hell!’ roared Gus, and punched a button.
A searing beam shot down from the middle of the Devastator. It speared through the ice, sending up huge clouds of steam. The light from the beam shone through the billowing clouds. It made the Devastator look like a horrifying demon, perched on a throne of smoke and fire.
Gus laughed in delight. ‘Oh, yeah. Feel the burn.’
Axel had a sick, wrong feeling in his stomach. Gus was just a boy, not much older than he was. The power of that beam was … well, devastating. He shouldn’t have been entrusted with it. It was like giving a submachine gun to a baby.
The Devastator stepped backwards, away from the steaming hole it had left in the ice.
Next moment, inside the base, the biggest of the tentacles lunged upwards out of the pit. It charged through the open door of the base and kept on going.
Antarctic Attack Page 4