by Steve Cole
She ran out of the room, leaving the rest of us in a stunned silence.
“Bad Katzbonker,” Big G concluded.
“I told you she smelled funny!” Herbert squeaked. “The GETs must’ve rescued her scrambled body and put her back together to use against us!”
“Nice going, Tim.” Elodie rounded on me. “You gave that bogus Katzburger the contract!”
“Actually, I didn’t,” I shot back. “I gave her an equally bogus blank bit of paper to expose her as a fake.”
Kimmy considered. “Better than exposing our pants.”
“That was quick thinking, Tim,” said Ray kindly. “But how long before she realises she hasn’t got the contract and—”
Suddenly the door burst open again. It was Katzburger – only this time she was holding a gun.
“OK, human-thing scumballs,” she said brightly. “Hand over the REAL contract. Or I start shooting.” Elodie and I both spoke at the same time: “Do that, and you’ll never find out where we hid it.” We looked at each other in surprise, but this hardly seemed the right moment to link little fingers and say “Jinx”.
“I know it’s in this base somewhere,” Katzburger warned us. “So tell me or, BOOM!” She pointed the pistol at Big G. “Gimme the contract. Now! Or ugly here gets it!”
Big G quickly opened his mouth and unrolled his tongue – practically pushing Herbert down the barrel of Katzburger’s gun!
I gasped. “No!”
Herbert looked at Katzburger with the cutest, sweetest expression you could ever imagine.
“Please,” he begged the burly soldier. “Can you really bring yourself to hurt an innocent pet like me?”
“Yes,” said Katzburger.
“No!” wailed Herbert. “Remember how many lovely pets that you cared for died as the GETs flew overhead in search of subjects to study . . . Fate made you aware of their evil schemes . . . and now the GETs have abducted YOU . . . They are trying to make YOU kill a poor, helpless, teeny-weeny goldfish . . .”
Katzburger swallowed hard. She was sweating. “Con . . . tract . . . in pants . . .” she slurred. “They told . . . me in . . . my head . . .”
“Think of who you really are!” Herbert was staring into her eyes like a master goldfish hypnotist. “Sergeant Katzburger, who joined the army to fight nasty aliens . . . who pledged her life to defend Earth’s pets. Every moment you delay us may lead to the death of a gorgeous fish, a lovely hamster, an innocent, fluffy little rabbit . . .” His voice became unexpectedly deep and spooky; Big G was talking in time with him. “Think of who you really are, Sergeant! Fight the GETs’ mental hold! THINK! THIIIIIIIIIIIIIINK!”
Katzburger groaned, dropped the gun, closed her eyes and collapsed with an almighty THUMP.
For a long moment, no one moved. Then we all released breaths we didn’t know we were even holding.
“Is she dead?” I whispered.
Ray checked. “She’s asleep,” he said. “And . . . she’s got a really miserable look on her face. That’s got to be a good sign, right?”
“Wow,” I said softly. “My goldfish ROCKS!”
“OK! OK!” Big G did a little wiggly dance, while Herbert did a weird attempt at a Mexican wave on his tongue.
“Uh-huh!” he squeaked. “I’m yo daddy!”
“Um, I hate to point out the obvious,” said Elodie. “But if the Katzburger trick didn’t work, the GETs are gonna try something else.”
“What’s next?” Ray muttered.
“I think I know,” said Kimmy. “Almost certainly . . . legal action.”
“Will you shut up about suing people all the time!” I cried. “Never mind what the GETs are going to do. What are WE going to do about THEM? Somehow, we’ve got to find a way to scare them off. To show those aliens that this is our planet – and while we haven’t exactly treated it nice, we’re not gonna let them treat it worse.”
“Nice speech,” said Elodie. “But do you have even the foggiest idea of how we do that?”
“Er, yes!” I said defensively. “I . . . I’m going to ask Big G.” I turned to him. “G, you can sense what might happen in the future, right? You told the guys to increase the intangibility field on the suit – what does that really mean?”
Ray took a portentous puff on his inhaler. “It’s a matter of boosting the batteries so that not only is the suit and anything touching it intangible, but also part of the surrounding area.”
I nodded, understanding. “So, Big G – why did you say to do that?”
The next moment, a horde of chittersnipes burst into the Crèche! Their eyes flashed, their teeth clacked together and their legs were a blur as they rushed towards us.
“OK!” Big G grabbed Ray and the unconscious Katzburger and hurled them towards the suit.
“Switch on, Kimmy!” Elodie shouted, and Kimmy swiftly stabbed a button inside the TAMASSISS . . .
I screamed as the chittersnipes pounced towards us – but my shriek died out into embarrassed coughing as the air turned speckled gold, and the hideous things passed through us as harmlessly as bullets through smoke.
“That is why I said to do that.” Big G smiled and shrugged. “OK! I sensed this might happen. That’s why!”
With the suit’s powers boosted, we had ALL turned transparent. Even the furniture around us seemed no more solid than a hologram. Again and again, the chittersnipes tried to bite and swipe and snatch at us in the golden light. But there was nothing they could do.
“How long can we stay this way?” I asked.
“For about two hours,” said Kimmy, “if the battery’s fully charged.”
I nodded hopefully. “And is it fully charged?”
“Nope. In fact, it’s just about empty.” Ray sighed. “I guess Big G’s been using it quite a bit, and the intangibility engine eats up power, and—”
“Shhhh!” Elodie hissed, as the chittersnipes kept leaping and scuttling through and around us. “We don’t know if those things can understand us!”
“What about Katzburger’s gun?” said Kimmy. “When we turn solid again, we could shoot them!”
“There’s too many of them,” I said. “Anyway, what if they’re bulletproof?”
“Perhaps we should run away?” Ray suggested.
“They’ll just follow us,” said Elodie and I together.
I turned to Big G hopefully. “Any more hints from peeking into the future?”
The alien shook his head and sighed. “I was child then, OK? Grown up now and can’t see. Being grown up sucks! No fun.”
“I heard that!” came an indistinct squeak from Herbert.
“Being a kid’s not exactly a piece of cake right now, either,” said Elodie. “Even super-smart kids like us.”
“Wait! Wait a sec . . .” I frowned. “Gangsters!”
“Huh?” said Kimmy.
“Kimmy, you said you guys were like gangsters . . .” I cast my mind back. “Science was your gun, and intelligence was your other gun, right? You blackmailed the bosses here into letting you work, right? With antigravity pads and—”
“A bomb!” Ray punched the air. “That bomb I made, in case we had to blow up our work here to stop the military stealing it. It’s in the cupboard under the sink!”
Elodie frowned. “Great! We can blow ourselves to bits. Cool!”
“Here it is!” Kimmy cried. We turned to find her pulling what looked like a random bundle of grey plasticine and wires from a cupboard. She gave her best nine-year-old snarl at the chittersnipes, who still bit and scratched the air around us. “You want a piece of this, huh? You want to taste Ray’s bomb? Huh? HUH?”
“Watch out!” Elodie begged her. “It’s caught up in our intangibility field. The blast won’t touch them – but it’ll probably kill us!”
The golden light was starting to flicker.
“Oh, no. The battery’s almost out.” I closed my eyes. “In a few moments we’ll be solid again with two messy
choices – blow ourselves to bits, or let the chittersnipes tear us apart!”
Suddenly I felt a hand slip down the back of my trousers. Whoa! I thought, as the contract was whipped from out of my pants’ waistband . . . By Sergeant Katzburger!
“I got it!” she yelled, running away, out of the intangibility field, through the door and into the corridor outside, away from sight. “I got it, I got it, come on!”
The chittersnipes started after her at once. Big G had been right – all they wanted was the contract.
“She got the bomb, too!” Kimmy gasped, staring at her empty hands. “She snatched it from me as she ran past! She got the flippin’ bomb—!”
Ker-BLAMMM!
The whole place shook and evil black smoke billowed past the doorway.
“Hey, the bomb worked!” said Ray with some surprise.
“But . . . what did it do?” Elodie led the way over to the door. The smoke outside was clearing. Black chittersnipe gunge was scattered everywhere. Ray puffed on his inhaler, and kept the end in his mouth like it was a snorkel.
There was no sign of Katzburger . . . Until suddenly a panel in the ceiling fell to the ground, and a stocky figure dropped from the vent above.
“Katzbonker alive!” cried Big G.
“HA! FOOLED YOU!” Katzburger raged at the remains on the floor and walls. “The old ‘throw-the-bomb-and-hide-in-a-vent-shaft’ trick – ALIEN SCUM.” She glared at Big G. “Um, no offence, weirdo.”
Big G nodded and smiled, then waddled off back into the Crèche.
I approached her warily. “Sergeant, are you back to normal?”
“Normal, kid? What’s normal?” She shook her head bitterly. “Can any of us pretend we’re normal, caught up in this crazy, senseless world of pain?”
“I think she’s back to normal,” Elodie confirmed.
I patted Katzburger’s arm (I considered a hug, but she had bits of dead chittersnipe on her clothes and that put me off a bit). “Well, I guess we’ve started fighting back . . . But what can we do now?”
“This, for a start.” Ray had ducked back inside the Crèche, and came out holding the sergeant’s gun. “Here you go!”
“I feel better now we have our own one-woman army!” Kimmy held up a hand to Katzburger. “Respect, girlfriend!”
“Respect?” Katzburger curled her lip. “I don’t want no respect. After what those GET things did to me, I want REVENGE.”
“They rescued you from space and saved your life,” Elodie pointed out. “Maybe they’re not all bad. Maybe they really need the money they’ll get for selling Earth – for an operation or something.”
“Gee, you think we should maybe hold a collection for them?” Katzburger scowled. “I say we launch every nuke on Earth down their giant extraterrestrial throats!”
Elodie shook her head. “For all we know, the GETs eat nuclear missiles for breakfast. Besides, everyone else on Earth is asleep – including all the people in charge of nuclear weapons.”
Katzburger was too busy frowning at Elodie to hear. “So what’s YOUR plan, Miss Perfect Uptight-Buns?”
“Use our intelligence,” said Elodie. “The GETs are our neighbours in space and crazily advanced. Words could be better than weapons! We need to convince them that we’re more than just ants. That we matter! We need to make a noise about being human.”
“Make a noise about being human,” I repeated, a light bulb glimmering above my head. “That’s it! Maybe words could BECOME weapons . . .”
My head was suddenly crowding with thoughts – the nasty neighbours who’d hated us and the Rubbish House, the complaints when I worked Dad’s weirdo-scope in the garden all through the night . . .
Through the crowd of thoughts, a handsome, well-dressed idea was just beginning to stride with unexpectedly confident steps . . .
“Big G!” I ran back to the Crèche to find him standing quietly in the middle of the room. He looked a bit peaky, I thought, and his head was cocked to one side as if listening.
I burbled on regardless. “Remember when you saved me up on the GET ship? Remember how the GETs were hissing ‘Silence them!’—” I broke off. “How come you’re so quiet now?”
“Vibrations,” Big G said queasily. “Not OK! NOT OK.”
Herbert sprang out on Big G’s tongue like a fishy jack-in-the-box. “I can hear it coming – the GET that installed the stink machines, the one whose footprints you saw in the snow . . .”
I probably turned snowy white myself. “There’s a GET coming HERE? NOW?!”
There are no words to summon the impossible, mind-maddening sound of rock and metal actually tearing as the GET began removing the roof of our underground secret base. I pictured how far Dad and I had descended into the frozen earth when we’d first arrived, hundreds of metres, surely . . .
And now suddenly those layers of ice, stone and steel were being peeled away as easily as a chimp could open a banana.
I heard Elodie’s scream from the corridor outside. “Katzburger and the chittersnipes didn’t work out . . . So now the GETs are gonna sort us out themselves!”
“Run for it!” Katzburger bellowed over the terrible, terrifying noise.
“This way!” Kimmy cried.
As for me, I barely had time to hide beneath a desk with Big G and Herbert as the ceiling above was snatched away and blinding, Arctic whiteness flooded in. Peering up I could see the ghostly, shimmering blur of the GET and what looked like a half a mountaintop being tossed into the distance.
“It’s angry,” Herbert squeaked. “Very, very angry! And impatient! Very, very impatient!”
I thought of Dad, and Mum (MUM!), and then every person scattered around this base, asleep and now exposed to the twin dangers of extreme cold and extremely mad giant invisible alien invader.
And knew it was all my fault.
“Ooooh!” Herbert was looking up at me, alarm in his dark little eyes. “Look out, Timothy! It knows you’re here!”
“Then . . .” I swallowed down the lump of raw fear in my throat, felt it scratch my insides all the way down, “. . . I guess . . . there’s no point hiding.” I scrambled out from beneath the desk and looked up.
“It’s me you want!” I yelled. “I’m the President, remember! I’ll sign anything you want, only . . .” I shivered violently. “Only put the roof back on, we’re freezing!”
There was an awful, frigid silence broken only by the horrible, snow-choked howling of the wind. I caught a shimmer of light – the GET was up there somewhere.
“It can’t hear you!” Herbert squeaked.
“But . . . it must be able to hear me!” I yelled. “Its mates were telling me to shush at the tiniest thing before.”
“It’s saying . . . it can’t hear you over the others,” Herbert went on. “It’s grumbling about the awful noise human things make.”
“What?” I didn’t understand what the GET was on about – I couldn’t hear the others at all. Had it gone after them instead of me? A firework of fear exploded in my stomach.
“Whoa!” Herbert gasped. “Ooh, NOW the GET knows where you are . . . !”
A deep, sinister whisper hurt my ears. “It is time this foolery was ended.”
I sensed rather than saw the impossible, giant hand sweeping down through the white sky towards me.
I stared up, too dazed and horrified even to comprehend how close to death I must be . . .
Suddenly an enormous jet aircraft rose swiftly and silently from the exposed base and slammed into the blur of air above me! It was quickly followed by dozens of spiky satellites, then a couple of Chinook helicopters, and finally a humungous Stratolaunch carrier that came whooshing up from the base and smashed against the GET’s body. I caught only the scariest glimpse of his sprawling, many-limbed form, wearing the high-tech hardware like so many badges.
Then their rise into the air continued, lifting the GET as they went.
“Oho!” squeaked Herbe
rt. “Ooh, it’s mad now! But it can’t stop itself rising up into the air! Ooooh, it’ll go up, up, up and into space!”
“But how . . . ?” I broke off and answered my own question. “Kimmy’s antigravity discs! YES! She said they’d wired them underneath the planes and stuff to—”
“—blackmail the Big Suits into giving us proper resources,” said Elodie, running up behind me. “And aren’t you glad they couldn’t take them off again, eh?”
“You’re OK!” I grabbed her by the elbows as the wind chilled through me – then let go, self-consciously. “Um, is everyone OK? Apart from freezing to death, that is.”
“No one’s allowed the luxury of death until we beat those alien slimeballs,” growled Sergeant Katzburger, striding into the room with a big pile of spacesuits. “C’mon kids. Get these on.”
“The latest super-thermal design!” said Ray breathlessly behind her, his movements jerky with nervous excitement.
“But we can’t put them on everybody in the base,” said Kimmy, following on and already wearing her own oversized spacesuit minus the helmet. “The roof came off cleanly but now there will be casualties from the cold.”
“Big Blanket . . .” said Big G from beneath the table. He looked poorlier now.
“You OK?” I asked him. “Did the GETs do something to you?”
“OK,” Big G insisted.
“It’s probably just the cold, eh?” said Elodie.
Big G smiled bravely. “Use antigravs . . . Lift it over base . . .”
“An artificial roof!” Ray nodded as he climbed into a spacesuit. “Sergeant Katzburger, can you let us into the Experimental Wing? The Big Blanket’s been cut into smaller sections for study there – we can set more antigravity discs to support them at low level . . . Shouldn’t take long.”
“It’ll keep the warmth in and it’s pretty well impregnable!” Elodie grinned. “Best of all, it’s using the aliens’ own technology against them. I love it.”
“And MY technology,” Kimmy reminded her, waving an antigrav disc. “Don’t forget whose flippin’ technology it is!”
“Yeah, well, don’t get too excited about it,” said Katzburger, brushing snow from her uniform. “Something will probably go wrong in any case . . .”