by Rob May
‘I thought this was a spaceship because since I arrived on this god-forsaken planet, I’ve been following the trace of your superluminal drive.’
Brandon smiled, dug deep into his jeans pocket and brought out the thousand Euro casino chip. ‘You’ve been following this,’ he said. ‘It’s all that’s left of our spaceship … but what about yours? How did you get here?’
Saoirse flopped down on the leather-effect seat, on the other side of Brandon to Kat. ‘Crashed about seventy clicks south of here,’ she said. ‘When I arrived in your solar system, I thought I had got the wrong place at first—my starmap was still telling me you had a moon. My navcom couldn’t make any sense of your new orbit; I got lost in the dust cloud then got hit by a chunk of moon rock. I ejected over a town called Rouen eight days ago. Fighting my way out of there was a whole lot of fun! Looks like your planet has been overrun with thanamorphs.’
Brandon was looking at Saoirse like there were a million questions that he wanted to ask. Kat was more worried about getting trapped in the marina: the aliens—or thanamorphs—were leaping from the quayside and onto the hulls of the other sunken boats. There was a whole network of masts and rigging that they could climb around on. Gem was trying to navigate the bullet-shaped yacht around all the obstacles, but only ended up scraping alongside another yacht.
Jason was trying to help Gem at the Superhawk’s controls. ‘Let me sail it. I’ve had MI Zero vehicle training too, you know.’
‘Go away,’ Gem said. ‘They let you drive the trailer cart around back at the airfield. Big deal. Anyway, you don’t sail a yacht with an engine, you drive it. We’re almost clear anyway. There should be a channel out to sea just around ahead … oh dear!’
There was a clear channel ahead of them now, a hundred metres long and twenty wide, leading straight out to sea. The only problem was that the end of it was jammed by another boat: a large cruiser that had somehow got wedged in sideways. A number of smaller boats and debris had piled up around it, creating an impassable barricade. Aliens ran back and forth on both sides of the channel, and even lay in wait on top of the jumble of boats.
And just to underline their bad luck, the earth trembled again, and the old brick buildings around them trembled visibly. Terracotta tiles slid off the roof of a nearby cafe and smashed on the pavement outside. Windows could be heard breaking all around the edge of the marina.
‘We have to get past that pile of junk,’ Kat said, ‘or else we’re going down with this town!’
Jason had climbed up onto the long, flat bow in front of the cockpit. He turned around to face the back of the yacht. ‘Get up here, Brandon,’ he urged. ‘Can’t you use the bionoids to blast all that crap out of the way?’
Brandon shook his head, but got up off the seat anyway. ‘I can try,’ he said, clambering up beside Jason.
Saoirse stood up too. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘You can do that? I heard the bionoids were for intricate, biological work at a molecular level.’
Jason answered: ‘Yeah, well just as Brandon can use them as both a weapon and a cure, he can also use them as either tweezers … or as a sledgehammer.’
‘I guess it’s hammer time then,’ Brandon said. He closed his eyes and flung the bionoids at the wall of wreckage. There was a sound of grinding metal, and the pile-up of boats shifted slightly. Brandon flung his arms backwards over his shoulders and the boats crunched and groaned again as the bionoids returned to him.
Brandon was sweating ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘The bionoids can do physical jobs, but they are better at reacting than acting: creating shields that deflect and block, or supporting or slowing something that’s already got momentum. They’re nanoscopic, remember—they just haven’t got the power to do this kind of work.’ He lay on his back, defeated. ‘It’s just too bad: I could see via the bionoids that that the harbour’s clear to the sea on the other side.’
Jason thumped the fibreglass bow in frustration. Gem spun the wheel and put the boat in a tight spin to keep them circling on the spot. Kat could see aliens watching them from all around. Beside her on the back seat, Saoirse was watching them too, but with a look of mild interest, not panic.
‘You don’t look worried,’ Kat said.
‘Should I be?’ the newcomer said. ‘You heard what your friend said: Brandon has one of the most powerful biological weapons in existence at his command. He could kill all the thanamorphs in this whole town with just a single thought.’
Kat remembered the promise that Brandon had made to his father. ‘The bionoids don’t affect the thanathings,’ she said. ‘And anyway, even if he could, he won’t use the bionoids as a weapon,’
‘He’ll find a way,’ Saoirse said. ‘I heard he killed the balak King. A few thanamorphs shouldn’t be a problem.’
‘He won’t kill them.’
‘He will,’ Saoirse repeated. ‘It’s either that, or turn this thing into a spaceship somehow and fly us out of here.’
Kat was forced to consider their options. ‘I’ll go and tell him,’ she said eventually.
She joined Brandon and Jason up on top. Brandon listened to what she had to say and nodded slowly. Jason went down to pass the info on to Gem. Kat looked back down to the blonde pointy-eared girl and gave her the thumbs up. Saoirse flashed her a wide smile back.
And then Gem shoved the throttle completely open; the nine-hundred-horsepower engines roared into life, and they were suddenly speeding towards the barricade at fifty knots.
‘Hold on to something!’ Kat yelled cheerfully.
Saoirse’s smile turned to a thin line, but she wrapped her arms around the aft rail.
The aliens were running up and down the quay, hooting and squealing. Kat could feel wind and spray in her face. Beside her, clamped to the bow, Brandon was concentrating, sending the bionoids out in front of them, spreading them out and creating …
… a ramp.
The Superhawk lifted out of the water. Brandon howled at the effort of holding up the weight, but all he had to do was support it for just a fraction of a second as the momentum carried the yacht up and over the barricade. They seemed to hang in the air for an age afterwards, and Kat had time to lift her head and look around at the clear water and open sea beyond them. She caught Jason’s eye as they flew through the air. He was able to mouth two gleeful obscenities at her before they splashed back down.
As they motored on out to sea, the port of Dieppe shook again behind them. They saw several dockside buildings crumble, and all over town the streetlights blinked out, plunging the coastline into darkness. Earth tremors, caused by the unstable orbit of the moonless Earth, were tearing civilisation apart. Well, bonne nuit, France, Kat thought. Au revoir, civilisation. We needed a fresh start anyway.
She just hoped that her parents had managed to get to safety too.
They all gathered below deck in the small saloon of the yacht. Gem let Jason pilot them out to sea, since there was nothing for him to crash into between here and the flotilla of boats they were heading for. Apart from the ripples caused by the earth tremors, the sea was calm.
‘Well, you guys aren’t what I was expecting at all,’ Saoirse said.
Brandon laughed. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you were expecting,’ he said to her.
So Saoirse began her story.
———
‘I was expecting you to be older, for a start, Brandon! It was twenty-two years ago that your parents fled Corroza. People still talk about that today: how your father unleashed that terrible weapon that killed millions of the jungle-dwelling balaks; how he not only escaped the high-security prison in the Tower of the Moons, but he stole a spaceship and kidnapped his best friend’s pregnant wife to boot. Talem Tarsus is still public enemy number one in the city of Perazim!
‘That all happened before I was born though,’ Saoirse continued. ‘I’m sixteen, so I’ve grown up in a world where, in the wake of the disaster, zelfs and balaks have tried to live side-by-side. Balaks were allowed into the Perazim
, and our people have been out into the jungle to visit their underground cities. I went on a school trip once; it was amazing seeing how they live. They are primitive, yet so cultured and noble.
‘Our ruler, the Arch Predicant, and the King of the balaks never got on though, and things were always tense between them. So when the King left Corroza to join in the hunt for your parents and the bionoids, something terrible happened back at home that has changed our world forever.
‘The Arch Predicant, in the name of the great god, Zaal, has enslaved the balak race.’
07—THANAMORPH
‘Zaal …’ Kat mused. ‘He’s a pretty big deal in alien world, right?’
Gem looked peeved. ‘That awful fat alien king loved Zaal so much that he sacrificed my boyfriend to him. How many people can say that the ‘ex’ in ‘ex-boyfriend’ stands for ‘executed’?’
Kat noticed Brandon’s face had clouded over too; he was probably remembering his own father’s story about how the Arch Predicant and the balak king had planned to sacrifice Brandon’s father to the bloodthirsty god.
In the dimly-lit, cramped confines of the yacht’s saloon, the threat of a distant alien god seemed somehow more real than the aliens they had just escaped.
‘In Perazim, they begin our indoctrination into the cult of Zaal when we start school,’ Saoirse said. ‘Zaal expects hard work and punishes tardiness. He can be quite a motivator when it came to getting homework in on time. My parents didn’t agree with the constant threats of a god breathing down students’ necks, and they tried to remove me from the system so that they could home-school me.
‘So, of course, my parents were arrested and spent all of one summer term locked away in the Tower of the Moons.
‘Enlisting for a year’s stint in the army is now compulsory for all school leavers. Some of my friends happily took postings out in the jungle, where they could learn to harass and beat up balaks. I managed to wangle a defensive gig, guarding a research facility in the city. Luckily, for most of the time I was there, I never had to shoot anyone. I spent my time standing outside a door, trying to look tough. The director of the facility was some top scientist from the university. He always said hi on his way in and out. Sometimes he even got me a sandwich on his lunch break. The other positive thing that came out of it all was the training: I specialised in long-range firearms, robotics and survival.’
‘We’re lucky that you did,’ Kat said, ‘Otherwise we’d never have made it out of town alive. But why did you come to Earth? Who sent you?’
‘I was just getting to that!’ Saoirse said. ‘My sharp-shooting skills came in handy one day when there was an unexpected attack on the scientists I was supposed to be protecting. The thing was though, that the attack didn’t come from outside, it came from inside the facility. Some of the … biological experiments … had gotten loose and had turned on their creators.’
Brandon was the first to make the connection: ‘Thanamorphs?’ he said.
‘Bang on. After Talem Tarsus—your father—escaped with the bionoids, the Arch Predicant had kept Talem’s successor busy developing a brand new biological weapon—something to keep the balaks in line, I guess. Your father’s friend, Dravid Karkor, must have brought some samples with him when he came to Earth.
‘Anyway, they were crawling all over the research facility that day. I didn’t have chance to panic or get scared—I found out there and then that I was pretty good at keeping cool while shooting down freaky super-strength monsters. However, the worst part came after the other soldiers and I had cleared the lab of all thanamorphs. I found the facility director holed up in his office, standing over the body of a thanamorph that he had shot down.
‘He looked sick, like he had the worst case of jungle flu. He was waving a laser pistol around wildly.
‘You’re safe now, I assured him.
‘No, he said. It’s too late for me. But I don’t care. The Arch Predicant forced me to create these monstrosities. He looked at me in desperation. You have to stop him, he said.
‘Take down the Arch Predicant? Only in my wildest dreams! How? I asked him.
‘Go to Earth, he said. Find Talem Tarsus … we know that he finally finished work on his bionoid project. Tell him it’s time to bring it home!
‘Then he put his pistol to his head and blew his brains out.’
———
‘Wait,’ Kat said. ‘Jason, stop the boat.’
Up on deck, Jason hadn’t heard her. Kat ran out to him. The lights of the flotilla were getting closer. ‘Jason!’ she shouted. ‘Stop the boat!’
Jason pulled back on the throttle. The others joined Kat and her brother on deck. ‘What is it?’ Gem asked.
Kat turned to Saoirse. ‘This director dude? he killed himself because he was infected right? He would have ended up a host for one of those creatures?’
The alien girl nodded. ‘The thanamorphs eject their seed through their fangs. One bite and you’re done for.’
‘We wondered how the animals were being infected,’ Brandon said. ‘And of course, we wondered if humans were at risk too.’
‘Well, I’ve got bad news for you,’ Saoirse said. ‘Every single living creature in the universe is susceptible. The thanamorphs were engineered to be unable to mate among themselves—they can only reproduce by using another lifeform as a host for their DNA. If they are let loose on a planet, they will eventually work their way through every living creature on it—on land, air and sea. And only then will they die off themselves. They’re the ultimate biological weapon. The thanamorph is, quite literally, the shape of death.’
Kat shuddered. Suddenly the lights of the flotilla didn’t look quite as inviting as they had from the shore.
‘Oh, man!’ Jason exhaled. ‘If you’re leaving the planet with this chick, Brandon, then don’t leave without me. I’m coming with you!’
———
With the yacht floating on the calm sea, they took a few moments to stop and think through their situation. While the others talked below deck, Kat and Brandon lay up on the bow, leaning against the yacht’s angled windscreen. It had turned chilly; Kat snuggled up against Brandon’s shoulder, and they both stared up at the grey clouds that blocked out the stars.
‘No tide,’ Kat said. ‘I take it that’s because there’s no moon now?’
‘Yep,’ Brandon said. ‘Well, there might still be a faint pull from the Sun, but not enough for me to realise my dream of teaching you how to surf! It’s not just the tides that we’ll miss though—the Moon’s gravitational field used to deflect passing asteroids. Earth is going to get pummelled a lot more in future. And also, we’re getting all these earthquakes because having no Moon means that there’s nothing to counterbalance to the Earth’s natural spin.’
‘And also,’ Kat said, ‘there’s now one less thing to rhyme with spoon.’
Brandon laughed.
‘But on the plus side,’ Kat went on, ‘werewolves will now have an easier time of it!’
‘You’re funny,’ Brandon said. They snogged for a while. ‘I can feel your heartbeat,’ he said when they took a breather.
Kat felt a thrill. ‘I can hear yours,’ she said. It was true: Brandon’s heartbeat was almost sending vibrations through the bow of the boat.
‘I mean, I can feel it like I’m inside your heart,’ Brandon said. ‘With the bionoids! It’s like I’m travelling with the blood around your body; I can feel every nerve ending; every time you feel something, I feel it too.’
That sounded weird! Kat pushed Brandon away. ‘That’s enough, Bran,’ she said. ‘It feels a bit too … too close for comfort.’
Brandon put his hands behind his head and lay back. ‘Sorry,’ he sighed.
They shared a few minutes of awkward silence. Kat stared at the lights of the other boats in the distance. ‘Can you feel any human life out there?’ she asked.
He closed his eyes and sent the bionoids to investigate. ‘It’s harder the further out I send them,’ he said. ‘Ther
e are definitely people—humans—on board those boats, but I can’t tell how many.’
‘Any thanawotsits?’
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can only detect human, zelf and balak DNA. I’d need to get hold of a copy of the thanamorph reference genome if I wanted to be able to affect them physically.’
Kat didn’t really know what Brandon was talking about. All she cared about was whether the people on the boats could help her find her parents. Apocalypse, aliens, and the fate of Brandon’s home planet didn’t seem that important to her right now.
‘You’ll help me and Jason find our mum and dad, won’t you?’ she asked him. ‘Before you fly off with her to your homeworld?’
Brandon closed his eyes again and turned his head to one side. Kat was having to get used to this. It was almost as bad as trying to talk to a friend whose phone constantly demanded their attention.
‘Bran?’ she said.
Brandon’s eyes flicked open. ‘How are you doing that?!’ he gasped.
Kat was confused. ‘Doing what? I’m not doing anything!’
But Brandon wasn’t talking to her. Saoirse stuck her head out from down below. ‘Hey there, nosey!’ she said.
Kat looked from Saoirse to Brandon and back again. Brandon was gaping at the alien girl. ‘You deflected me,’ he said to her. ‘I mean, you deflected the bionoids!’
Kat was furious. He was trying to scan the other girl’s body!
Saoirse slapped her leather-clad shoulder. ‘Nano-proof suit,’ she said with a grin. ‘It’s standard military issue back on Corroza, where nano-warfare is a potentially big threat. The suit generates a small electric field that your bionoid friends can’t penetrate. You could say that, as far as nano-communication goes, I’ve got my privacy settings on maximum!’