by Sam Enthoven
Gradually, as if from far away, Tim began to be aware of the Kraken. The ancient creature was a presence in his mind, sharing the vision with him.
‘Is that . . . the Earth?’ Tim asked.
‘Yes, little one,’ the Kraken told him patiently. ‘That is the Earth.’
Tim knew that the Kraken was probably waiting for him to say something else, and yes, Tim was going to say something, he could feel he was, but he wasn’t sure at first exactly what, so for a long while he just watched the Earth as it continued to spin and the cloud currents slid across its atmosphere. He waited, trying to get his thoughts into the order he wanted.
‘But . . . it’s so . . . small,’ said Tim finally.
‘Bigger than you,’ said the Kraken’s voice in his head. ‘Bigger than me, bigger than lots of things. What do you mean, it’s “small”?’
‘I’m not talking about us,’ said Tim, irritated not at the Kraken but at how difficult it was for him to say what he was feeling. ‘I mean . . . the way it’s hanging there like that, in the dark. There’s so much dark all around it – dark and emptiness, for ever. But there it is, a little blue spot, with all the tiny things crawling around on it. It makes me feel . . .’ Tim paused.
‘What?’ asked the Kraken.
‘It makes me feel . . .’ Tim repeated, trying to articulate it, ‘sort of . . . sorry for it, in a way.’
‘Why?’ asked the Kraken.
‘Because it’s on its own like that,’ said Tim. ‘Because there’s nothing else all around it but black.’
‘There are other worlds,’ said the Kraken. ‘Other planets.’
‘Like this one?’
‘A little,’ the Kraken replied. ‘But none nearby carry life in the same way this one does.’
‘Well, there you are!’ said Tim. ‘It is all on its own, this world, or as close to being on its own as makes no difference.’
‘So?’ said the Kraken.
‘Well . . . don’t you see?’ asked Tim. ‘Something could just come along and . . . I don’t know, step on it or something. That little blue dot – it could just vanish one day, and then there’d be nothing but darkness! But . . .’ He paused again, thinking, while the Kraken waited for whatever he was going to say next.
‘Well . . . there it is,’ Tim repeated, ‘the little thing, spinning and spinning. There it is, doing its best. That’s actually, well, kind of . . . brave, really. You know,’ Tim added, embarrassed now, ‘if you think about it.’
The Kraken said nothing.
‘What was that . . . “Defender” business you were telling me about before?’ Tim asked.
‘This is your vision,’ said the Kraken, not answering Tim directly, not at first. ‘From now on it will be with you, inside you, always.’
The little spinning blue planet began to slow: time was returning to its normal speed, and Tim watched – with a mixture of feelings he didn’t really understand – as parts of the Earth began to stain and become dirty-looking as the tiny-people civilizations spread across its surface, leaving their mark.
‘Anytime the world is under threat,’ the Kraken went on, ‘you will know: you will feel it. And that will be your signal. That will mean it is time for you to act.’
‘Poor little thing,’ said Tim, not really listening. ‘It needs someone to look after it.’
‘It does,’ said the Kraken.
‘Someone to stand up for it. Someone to fight for it.’
‘Yes,’ said the Kraken. ‘I’m afraid that’s true.’
‘Hmm,’ said Tim.
Something was waking up inside him. Whether it was to do with the vision that the Kraken had given him or what, he could feel something changing in the way he thought about things. He felt a rush of something in his mind: determination.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All right! I’ll do it! I will be the Defender of the Earth!’
Tim thrashed his tail and felt very pleased with himself.
The Kraken did not reply.
‘So, er, what do I do?’ asked Tim. ‘What’s next? Who do I have to fight?’
The Kraken sighed. ‘You are brave, little one,’ it said. ‘But you sure are stupid. I hope I’m not just sending you out to die.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Tim, instantly defensive.
‘Watch . . .’ said the Kraken.
‘Oh!’ said Tim suddenly. He’d noticed something on the blue planet’s surface. Something was happening.
Tim hadn’t spotted it at first because, to begin with, it had just looked like something to do with the tiny-people civilization. They certainly were messy. But this, Tim realized, this was different. The clouds were beginning to change. A strange orange-brown tinge was creeping outwards across the globe, colouring everything it touched. It was slow at first, but it soon picked up speed: before long, everything was the same colour. Now the haze was spreading across the continents. Now it was spreading across the seas! And now, the blue planet wasn’t blue or sparkling any more: it was a uniform dull orange-brown all over.
‘What happened?’ asked Tim, suddenly frantic. ‘What just happened then?’
‘I’m not sure,’ the Kraken replied.
‘But I didn’t get a chance to do anything!’ Tim yelped. ‘Make it go back! MAKE IT GO BACK HOW IT WAS!’
‘Easy!’ said the Kraken. ‘Easy, little one. Remember how you felt: remember being calm. Calm! The answers are coming.’
Tim didn’t feel calm at all. But he managed to quieten his mind down so that the Kraken could speak to him again. And in due course, the vision seemed to rewind. The awful dun-brown colour swilled back, like it was draining away. The lands and the seas returned to how they’d been a moment before, and the planet became blue once more. All that was visible of the orange-brown haze was a tiny speck, hovering over a spot on the globe that – Tim suddenly realized – was familiar to him.
‘What was that?’ Tim asked.
‘That,’ said the Kraken, ‘was a warning.’
‘A warning of what?’
‘Of what is to come,’ the Kraken replied. ‘One of the tiny people has created something powerful – something he lacks the maturity to control. He has already changed himself: if he is not stopped, he will impose this same change on the whole world. Diversity will become conformity; grown will change to built; nature will change to machine. For ever.’
‘But . . .’ said Tim. ‘How can we stop it?’
‘There’s no “we” in this,’ said the Kraken. ‘You, little one: if you’re the Defender, you must face this thing. Alone.’
MALLAHIDE RISING
HYDE PARK. 10:57 a.m. Standing in the turret of a Challenger tank, under cover of some trees within sight of Park Lane, Field Marshal Clement ‘Clem’ Thompson checked the perimeters of his field of operations one last time, then lowered his binoculars. He and his team were ready – or at least, as ready as they were ever going to be.
Whatever was about to happen, Professor Mallahide had picked a good spot for it. Covering 350 acres, Hyde Park was the single biggest open space in central London. It had been used regularly as a concert venue, most notably in the Live 8 event of 2005, in the course of which an estimated 200,000 people had crammed into its grassy environs.
But if Mallahide really had any hopes about attracting a serious crowd with his publicity stunt of the day before, he was going to be disappointed: today Hyde Park looked almost empty. It was closed to the public. All exits were sealed. Any groups of curious onlookers that formed around the edges of the park were being firmly encouraged to leave the area. Instead, a small but powerful tactical force – put together from the finest men and hardware that the British military had to offer – was currently lying in wait for the professor’s arrival. Field Marshal Thompson had supervised their positioning personally. Professor Mallahide was walking into an ambush.
Thompson felt uneasy. A veteran of many military engagements from all over the world, from Ireland to Afghanistan to Iraq, he had long learned to trust
his instincts in combat, and his instincts were twitching powerfully. The problem was that there were so many unknown factors: Hyde Park was too open. It was impossible to tell where or how the professor was going to make his entrance, let alone what else to expect.
Thompson sighed. In all his long years serving his country, he had never had to deal with anything like what had occurred in the past week. First a rampaging dinosaur, now a man who’d turned himself into a cloud of machines. What on Earth could possibly happen next? He checked his watch: 11 a.m. exactly. The sky had been overcast for some time now, and a thin drizzle began to fall.
There! He saw something, a flicker, but it was enough to make him lift his binoculars again.
Six hundred metres away from where Field Marshal Thompson was waiting, the air over a patch of ordinary grass in the centre of Hyde Park seemed to shimmer for a moment. A column of something bright and sparkling shivered into view, and by the time Field Marshal Thompson’s binoculars had focused on the spot, Professor Mallahide had appeared.
‘This is Unit Six – target acquired,’ murmured a voice in Thompson’s ear.
‘Unit Three – target acquired.’
‘Unit Five – target acquired.’ The other units called in with similar messages from their camouflaged positions all around the park.
‘Hold your fire,’ said Thompson into his throat microphone. ‘All units, wait for my mark.’
In front of him, focused in the field marshal’s binoculars, the professor appeared to be very relaxed. Blissfully unaware, apparently, of the array of large-calibre weapons currently locked onto his position, Mallahide spread his arms wide and stretched luxuriously. He bent down and ran a hand across grass that still had the fresh pale green of early summer growth. He smiled to himself. Then he looked up.
Field Marshal Thompson blinked, surprised, and looked through his binoculars again. The professor was staring right at him – as if he was standing in front of him, in fact. Worse yet, he had started to wave.
‘Hello!’ he shouted, his voice sounding faint and silly in the middle of the empty park. ‘Coooo-eeeee!’
Field Marshal Thompson gritted his teeth but said nothing.
‘I wish you’d let everyone in!’ the professor called out. ‘There’s absolutely nothing for people to be afraid of, you know. I’ve no wish to hurt anybody: quite the reverse, in fact!’
Nobody answered.
Professor Mallahide pursed his lips.
‘I should have guessed you lot would look at this the wrong way,’ he said finally. He shook his head to himself. ‘All these years of people like you funding my research, and do you know? I don’t think even one of you ever really understood its true significance.’ He sighed and looked up again.
‘OK,’ he began, ‘here’s the situation. I know you’ve already decided what you’re going to do.’ Absently he wiped his grass-stained hands on his trousers. ‘Believe me, you’re making a dreadful mistake. But I’m going to give you one more chance.’
Still watching through his binoculars, Field Marshal Thompson touched the microphone at his throat. ‘All units,’ he whispered, ‘prepare for my mark.’
‘Move your men away from the park’s entrances,’ said Mallahide, ‘and allow whoever wishes to meet me to come and do so. I’ll give you ten seconds: I know exactly where all of you are, so the sooner you do what I’m asking, the sooner we can forget all this. Stop this idiocy of yours this instant,’ he added with a flash of anger, ‘or you’re all going to be very sorry. Ten. Nine. Eight—’
Well, thought Thompson, here goes nothing . . . ‘Thompson to all units,’ he said. ‘Fire at will. I repeat: fire at will.’
Instantly the spot where the professor was standing exploded in a flash of light and a gout of smoke. Crisp soil and grass fragments pattered down for hundreds of metres around under the continuing barrage of noise as the bombardment continued. All six Challenger tanks had loosed their main cannons almost simultaneously, vaporizing the target area in a deafening blast of thunder. While they reloaded, more of Thompson’s group laid down a withering hail of suppressing fire from their machine guns, churning up the grass, shattering the peace of the park with an unending-seeming welter of noise. The second wave of shells from the tanks hit home a scant couple of seconds later, sending more clods of black earth high into the air. And as if that wasn’t enough . . .
‘Napalm,’ said Field Marshal Thompson into his throat microphone –
– and a specially trained squadron of men in biohazard suits advanced through the smoke, dispensing searing chemical death across what little remained of the greenery.
‘Hold your fire,’ said Field Marshal Thompson. ‘All units, I repeat: cease fire. Cease fire.’
For a long second the storm of noise echoed around and back across the empty park. The air was thick with smoke. Thompson’s retinas were covered in the blossoming flashes of the explosions, and his ears rang. But he waited, his binoculars glued in place.
‘All units, stand by,’ he said.
The thick cloud parted, revealing the scene.
Thompson’s team had been gratifyingly accurate in their grouping. The damage that the attack had caused was strictly confined within a radius of something close to ten metres. Outside this perimeter, with the exception of a few spots of sputtering flame where the napalm had set the grass alight, the park looked almost normal. Inside the ring of fire, however, was a scene of utter devastation.
Where Professor Mallahide had been standing was nothing more than a large smoking hole in the ground. A great chunk of black London earth had been eaten away, scooped up by exploding ordnance and scattered to the winds. As an exercise in controlled destruction, it was definitely impressive.
‘This is Unit Six: no sign of target.’
‘This is Unit Three: no sign of target. Believe destroyed.’
‘This is Unit Five: target appears to have been destroyed. Awaiting confirmation.’
A ragged cheer broke out over the radio. Clearly the men had enjoyed themselves, and in a sense Field Marshal Thompson couldn’t blame them. Some of the tank crews had been on duty for the tyrannosaur fiasco the other evening: their confidence had been badly knocked, and they needed a victory – however minor – to build their morale back up.
Still: Thompson alone stood silent, searching through his binoculars. His instincts were still prickling. He had to be sure.
‘All units,’ he said, ‘stand b—’
He fell silent.
A dreadful change seemed to have come over the scene in the park. The sky overhead, already overcast, suddenly seemed to turn black. There was a crackle in the air; it felt thick with pressure and something like electricity. Field Marshal Thompson’s ears started popping.
He looked up – and dropped his binoculars.
An enormous storm had brewed up from nowhere, exclusively over Hyde Park. The clouds had sunk down, turning a menacing blue-black, bulging with rage. At the same time, the wind began to pick up in the park – but it was a strange kind of wind. Field Marshal Thompson’s beret lifted and blew off to his left, but across the park (he couldn’t help noticing) the branches of the trees were leaning to the right – the opposite direction.
The scattered clods of blackened earth began to twitch and tremble on the grass in front of Thompson’s tank. The pressure in the air seemed to be dropping, and the massive black bank of cloud overhead flickered and licked with tiny tongues of lightning. Lower the cloud came, and lower still, the base of it extending into a cone and then a corkscrew of inky darkness that, slowly at first but with gathering speed, began to spin. Thompson blinked against the wind with streaming eyes, hardly daring to believe it.
In the last few seconds, for the first time in history, a tornado had formed in Hyde Park.
The wind had picked up savagely by now, rising to a howling banshee shriek as the whirlwind reached its top speed. The eye of the storm seemed centred on the hole Thompson and his team had just made, but the walls of
the tornado were expanding outwards, blotting out everything: in another moment he could see nothing else. Before he really knew he was doing it, Field Marshal Thompson found that he’d ducked down into the turret of his tank and slammed the lid.
In the cramped interior of the Challenger the rest of its crew stared back at him: the air had heated up in there in the last few moments, but Field Marshal Thompson didn’t feel it under the icy prickles that now crawled up his arms and the back of his neck.
‘Sir . . .’ said one of the men quietly, ‘can you please tell us what’s going on out there?’
‘I . . . I don’t know,’ said Field Marshal Thompson honestly.
For a long second nobody spoke inside the tank as, white-faced, all four men stood listening to the rising shriek of the wind battering at the exterior.
Then there was a rocking sensation.
‘What was that?’ someone asked.
The rocking sensation came again.
‘My God!’ said Thompson. ‘This tank weighs over sixty tons! How can the wind possibly be strong enough to—?’
The rest of his words were lost in the sudden rumble as the tank gave a sudden and definite lurch.
‘Everybody out of the tank!’ yelled Thompson. Touching his throat microphone, he added, ‘All crews, abandon their vehicles! Everyone get to cover! Now!’
Nobody needed telling twice. In seconds, he and his men had leaped up the ladder and out into the screaming blackness beyond.
They weren’t a moment too soon. Thompson jumped free, rolling to a stop on the sodden grass just as – with a piteous wail of protesting metal – the Challenger (all sixty tons of it) was dragged away towards the whirling black dervish dominating the centre of the park, and swallowed.
Struck dumb with amazement, Field Marshal Thompson watched as his own tank, the five others, and assorted other heavy equipment from all over his field of operations was plucked neatly into the air. For a second it all seemed to dance around above him like some sort of airborne carousel. He watched, still speechless, as all his finest military hardware was flung up like so much confetti, shrinking, shuddering, and finally vanishing as it was all stripped down to nothing. He felt a simultaneous tugging sensation himself – and grasped the ground. But the sensation seemed to be strangely localized, focusing only on his belt.