Luke gazed at her for a very long time.
‘Because I was lonely,’ he said simply.
Connie held his gaze as, unnoticed by both of them, the little pebble on his lap began to pulse-pulse-pulse even as, close by, there came the flip-flip-flip of a helicopter.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The great crackling filled the room again as the air turned heavy and static, and everyone stopped bickering as if someone had flicked a switch. There was a cacophonous noise, which Pol turned down. Everyone glanced around the room, and Nigel wondered if they were all thinking the same thing: does the fate of the world really rest on this bunch?
‘I can’t believe the fate of the world rests on you bunch,’ said Arnold.
‘Can’t we get him out?’ said Anyali.
‘Yes, I’ll totally just walk out,’ said Arnold. ‘Will you shoot me in the back or just a quick head shot?’
‘SHUT UP!’ said Pol.
Again, the filtering process worked on the translation and many, many noises became just a few.
‘E a r t h,’ came the oddly gentle voice.
Connie jumped up. ‘It’s glowing!’
Luke hurriedly got to his feet and held it in his hand. They all listened in.
‘E a r t h.’
Connie moved over to Luke and squeezed his hand.
‘Yay,’ she whispered. ‘They’re coming to take us back to England. Then you just Hulk-smash your way out of whatever horrible facility they put you in and we’ll be free! You and me! For ever. Or however long you live for. If it’s thousands of years, then probably not.’
Luke squeezed her back and gently kissed the top of her head.
The voice became clear.
‘We have discussed the status of the escapee. It was an act of heroism and good for our world.’
Connie was nearly punching the air.
‘But we cannot encourage sabotage on behalf of all those who have a grudge of some kind. We shall keep to what we have promised you, and leave your world alone. But you must fulfil what you have promised us. You will give him up to us. Where you are. We will come for him when it grows dark again where you are.’
There was a pause.
In England, the PM leaned over, clearing his throat to buy time, and coughed.
‘Well now, are you absolutely sure that’s quite reasonable? I mean, I think there’s quite a lot we could discuss on extradition treaties and everything we could manage, but we are, on the whole, very much… I mean, it appears you’re going to kill him from everything we know down here, and… I mean, if we were America we wouldn’t have a problem but…’
There was no response.
He leaned forward again.
‘I suppose what I’m asking is… what happens if we won’t give him up?’
Nobody spoke for what seemed like a long time. The room held its breath. Then the speaker crackled back to life.
‘F u r t h u r… c o n s e q u e n c e s,’ came the gentle voice. There was a hiss from the speakers, then the jumble of noise started again, rose, became an unbearable jumble of terrible industrial screaming and noise. Then it cut out.
Silence: complete and utter silence. The aliens had gone. And it didn’t matter how much Pol or the Prime Minister or anyone shouted down the microphone, or how they communicated on the frequency. It was as if nobody had ever been there.
Ranjit burst into tears. Even Nigel shook his head in disbelief. Then Arnold did something his cardiologist would have been very, very surprised to see him do: in a moment of extraordinary strength and agility, he jumped up off the floor, pushing the huge security man over, who fell like a stack of rocks, jumped over to the microphone, pushed over the Prime Minister and screamed into the mike
‘LUKE! KEEP RUNNING! THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU! KEEP RUNNING! NEVER STOP! GO!’
It took them longer to subdue him this time.
Galina was still staring into the fire, sipping the vodka bottle. But Connie and Luke were up, staring at each other.
‘No way!’ Connie was saying. ‘No way! Patch in. Tell them they’re wrong!’
Luke shook his head.
‘It was always going to go this way,’ he said. ‘It was, I think, a diplomatic nicety to pretend to think about it. Gives them the aura of mercy. Without the mercy.’
‘You thought that and you sat here?’
‘With you by my side I would sit anywhere.’
Connie turned back to his ship. It was hard to spot, even as dawn was coming up over the fields.
‘You said you can fix it,’ she said. ‘Fix it. FIX IT. We’ll just go and find the next planet. Run away again. It’ll be fine. We’ve run away once, we can do it again.’
Luke shook his head. ‘Oh, my love.’
‘Forget about it. I’m sick of Earth anyway. Come on. Let’s go explore the universe! It’ll be great!’
She ran up to the huge sphere, then turned back to see Luke’s stricken face.
‘My love,’ he said. ‘It can’t… it can’t take you.’
She froze. She knew this on some level. She knew they were not the same. They advanced towards each other.
‘Because I don’t have those bloody gills,’ she said, hiccupping with tears she couldn’t hold back.
Luke nodded.
‘Stupid bloody gills.’
Connie turned and put her hands on the sphere. She felt it for a long time. The helicopter noise was getting louder. They must be searching the area. It wasn’t going to take them long: they hadn’t even put the fire out. She bit her lip, then turned back.
‘You go,’ she said. ‘You can get away. Just you. You take this, and you get away now. Do it. Now.’
Luke stared at her.
‘And leave you here to suffer the wrath of my people? Are you completely insane?’
Connie looked at him.
‘We’ll figure something out. Say you got lost. Kill a scarecrow or something and dress it up as you. Who would know? We’ll just have it do some equations and complain about animal rights.’
Her voice was choked.
‘No, darahi.’
He tilted her chin up to hers.
‘As if I would ever go anywhere without you. It’s both of us or nothing.’
They had to shout now. The helicopter – a huge Chinook, with two sets of rotating blades – was hovering over their heads.
‘DO IT!’ said Connie. ‘I’D RATHER YOU WERE AWAY AND ALIVE THAN HERE WITH ME AND BEING KILLED.’
‘WOULD YOU?’
‘NO!’
Their hair was blown up in the downdraft of the huge craft as it came in to land.
‘Down! Down! Down! Hands behind your head!’ was being shouted from above. Galina glanced up at the huge craft, barely interested, still gazing into the fire, lost in her memories.
‘USE YOUR GIANT BRAIN TO THINK OF A PLAN!’ screamed Connie. ‘DO IT! DO IT NOW!’
But just as the helicopter touched down, with half a dozen fully black-clad men with guns trained on them both, Luke suddenly made a bolt for Galina. He took her hands in his and held them to his mouth. She gazed up at him, her hollow eyes huge in her thin face, and came back to life.
‘Ci ŭbaču ciabie znoŭ?’
Luke buried his face in her shoulder. ‘Ja nie viedaju.’
‘DOWN! DOWN! HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD!’
Galina’s shaking hands reached out to caress him one more time.
‘Bratka,’ she husked.
‘Zaŭsiody,’ Luke bowed his head as they shot him in the back of the neck, and Connie screamed the length of the field and beyond.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
All the boyishness had drained from the Prime Minister’s face. There seemed no point in going back to COBRA in London when all the main players were there, and they were only waiting to hear from the Belarusian forces telling them that they’d entered UK air space. Tea was made and brought in, and the staff was left behind manning the comms with strict instructions to contact the commandi
ng force if anything at all came up.
Arnold was unconscious, and Sé not actually that much better, so the two of them were being hauled back to their rooms by security.
‘Put them in the main room and leave me with them,’ said Evelyn. ‘Someone needs to keep an eye on them. You may think you can behave with impunity wherever the hell you want, but there’ll be consequences if anything happens.’
‘You can write me a letter of complaint from Holloway,’ said Nigel. ‘Or do you want to go back to DRC? I hear in their prisons, if you pay enough to the warder, you can buy a space to lie down in.’
Evelyn eyed him levelly.
‘I want you not to kill my colleagues through a duty of care issue,’ she said stiffly. ‘Up to you, obviously. You never know, we might end up in the neighbouring cells.’
Nigel heaved a sigh.
‘We don’t need you any more,’ he said.
‘So we’re all going to die in mystery car accidents?’
‘What?’ Nigel was very tired. ‘No. No. No, all I meant was, I don’t think it matters if you share a room any more. So. Fine. Fine. Whatever.’
He waved his hand at them to go away. ‘Just go… And keep that fat one out of my way, please.’
‘What about the one you tortured?’ said Evelyn. ‘You want him swept under the carpet too?’
Nigel looked at her.
‘We had NO idea what was up there. NONE. So they want to kill one guy. They could kill a thousand guys. A million guys! They still might!’
‘We wanted to give Luke a chance,’ said Evelyn.
‘Yeah, you protected your friend and you risked absolutely everybody else’s friends,’ said Nigel, his face red with anger. ‘And for what? For nothing. We have him now, and we’re bringing him in and we are going to do what the big aliens with the moon-blowing-up gun want us to do, and if you think I feel the least bit good about that you are fucking wrong, and if you think my job is to protect as many people as I possibly can from getting blown to fucking bits, then that would be more like it, no thanks to people like you who think because you can do some fucking sums you are somehow better than the rest of us.’
He calmed down.
‘But yes, you may share a room. And you may also say thank you.’
Evelyn looked at him.
‘I don’t consider myself better than non-mathematicians,’ she said. ‘But I consider myself better than you.’
She took Sé from the guard, and motioned the other guards, who heaved the large bulk of Arnold into the room and draped him ungracefully across three chairs. She supported Sé, who could walk but still a little unsteadily.
‘Do I have to come?’ said Ranjit. ‘Because actually I’d really like to go home and just watch the rest of this on television.’
‘This isn’t television, Ranj,’ said Evelyn wearily.
‘No,’ said Ranjit, following her, shoulders drooping. ‘I wish it were television. Although I would probably change channels to Strictly Come Dancing.’ He perked up. ‘Hey, do you think when this is all over they might want me on Strictly Come Dancing?’
‘That,’ said Evelyn heavily, ‘is a world I don’t even want to think about.’
Luke jerked awake, immediately alert two to three hours before he ought to have done given the dosage, to find himself strapped to the wall in the belly of a large helicopter with space for twenty to thirty people. The racketing noise level was unbelievable: he found it soothing. At first he couldn’t focus on anything, but looking around, more and more in a panic, he finally recognised Connie sitting opposite him, strapped in too and staring at him intensely.
‘Thank God,’ she said. She reached out for him, but she couldn’t get past the straps holding her in. They were both in handcuffs.
Luke glanced around.
‘2.3508.’ He frowned.
Immediately a soldier trained his gun on them.
‘No talking,’ he said.
Luke glanced down at his handcuffs, then pulled at them experimentally.
‘DON’T,’ hissed Connie. ‘Leave them on. Or I don’t know what they’ll do.’
‘NO TALKING.’
‘Find a way,’ said Connie. ‘Work it out. You know you can.’
‘Well…’ said Luke. He pulled again at the restraints, and one loosened from the wall.
‘What are you doing?’ said the soldier, but before he could respond, someone else shot Luke again.
Back in a room off SCIF control, as the technicians desperately tried to re-establish the connection, a solemn meeting was taking place.
‘What does he look like?’ said the rear admiral.
‘He’s just a bloke,’ said Nigel. ‘That’s what’s been diverting us all along. Just a tall, skinny bloke.’
‘How did he get so far then?’ said the general.
‘Because he just looks like a bloke,’ said Nigel. ‘I think if he’d had the giant tentacles we’d have probably nabbed him a little faster.’
‘Well, all of that doesn’t matter now,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘All that matters is what we do.’
The room fell silent.
‘If we have hard decisions to make, we must make them,’ he went on.
He looked up.
‘Is anyone seriously opposed to doing what we are asked and handing him over?’
‘How do we know they won’t just blow us up anyway, regardless of what we do?’ said the general.
‘We don’t,’ said Nigel. ‘We have no idea if they are lying to us. Or even if they know what lying is. All we have to go on is what they’ve said. And…’
He sounded reluctant.
‘What?’ said Anyali.
Nigel sighed.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But it seems that those who have met and worked with the alien… God knows why, but they appear to find him trustworthy.’
‘Quite right,’ said the PM. ‘I think we have to take it at face value. That said, are we prepared? Are we prepared to lose the first living alien creature ever to reach our planet and, moreover, almost certainly to send it to its death?’
Nobody spoke for quite a long time.
Anyali leaned over, staring at her phone.
‘Another ferry grounded in Indonesia, sir.’
‘Oh God,’ said the PM. ‘Casualties?’
‘None as yet,’ said Anyali. ‘But that’s the fourth… surely it’s only a matter of time…’
‘Is that definitely from the moon thing?’ said the admiral. ‘Accidents happen at sea.’
‘I think that was the problem,’ said Anyali quietly. ‘I don’t think the sea was where it was supposed to be. The ship ran aground off an atoll in Riau.’
The general was shaking his head, saying, ‘We need to take this to the UN. We can’t this decision on our own when it has consequences for the entire world.’
A tall woman had been standing quietly at the back – she had arrived on the military helicopter. Nobody had questioned her credentials. Nigel was reasonably sure she was his boss, but not a hundred per cent certain. Personal meetings were not encouraged in his line of work.
Now she stepped forward and put her hands lightly on the table.
‘What do you think, Kathy?’ The PM had aged overnight. His crumpled suit looked fit for the bin, and bags hung under his eyes. ‘The most amazing thing that’s ever happened to Earth and they want us to give it up.’
Kathy had flat, grey eyes and very dark hair.
‘It is a calculated risk,’ she said in a low voice. She looked at Anyali.
‘We have moved into damage limitation now,’ she said. ‘We don’t know the facts of what this man – or creature – has done. I think we can be reasonably sure he killed one of our agents.’
There was nodding around the table.
‘If we do nothing, the moon will be destroyed, or worse. If we protect him, the same. If we do what they ask and deliver, they say they will leave us alone. They may or may not. I simply do not understand what other choice
we have.’
The room was silent. The military men were nodding. The PM let out a heavy sigh. Nigel did too, but for different reasons: he wanted this to be over. He wanted to go home, to sink into Annabel’s arms and not think about any of them again.
Resistance is Futile Page 28