Jane Blonde: Twice the Spylet

by Jill Marshall

  Her eyes were instantly drawn to the wheeled cabinets along the back wall of the laboratory. Somewhere behind them were four sources of body heat. Janey sprinted over and pulled one of the cabinets out. It was the one Maddy had been trapped in before she was suctioned against the SPI-clone; Janey could still see little tufts of her long, curly wool wafting around the bottom like furry mice. Hurriedly she yanked the next one out from the line. Empty. So was the next one, and the next. It was hopeless. She ran right along the wall, frantically pulling out cabinets, but not a trace of a spy did she find.

  ‘Detect!’ she shouted again at the Ultra-gogs. There they were again – four distinct body shapes, although she couldn’t work out who anybody was or why there were four. She could see them a little more clearly now, and the truth suddenly dawned on her. Dropping down on all fours, she shuffled under the workbench to the storage cabinets, and to her delight the images in her Ultra-gogs glowed more brightly. ‘Thank goodness they’re still alive,’ she said under her breath.

  She reached the wall behind the cabinets. It looked smooth and solid at first, but on closer inspection Janey discovered a tiny button – a Dubbo Seven logo – right under the back edge of the worktop, so small that it could easily be mistaken for a tiny rivet. Without the Ultra-gogs she would probably never have seen it. She held her breath and touched a finger to it. ‘Hey, presto!’

  The wall slid away, right and left, like the fireplace tunnel back in G-Mamma’s Spylab, only horizontally. The first thing Janey saw was a bright red roller skate poking out from a shimmering lilac SPIsuit. ‘G-Mamma!’ Janey wobbled the foot anxiously, and to her relief her godmother’s head appeared over the mound of her body like the sun rising in the east.

  ‘Sugar,’ mumbled G-Mamma through cracked, un-glossed lips. ‘Sugar now, Blonde, and that’s an order!’

  ‘Well, you’re obviously all right,’ said Janey with relief. ‘You haven’t been de-spied. I need to help the others now.’

  G-Mamma fixed Janey briefly with her wide, slightly glazed blue eyes, then collapsed back on to the concrete floor.

  ‘Janey, never mind the sweetie monster – get us out!’ It was Alfie, lying on a slender mattress and pillow but with his wrists and ankles tightly bound. The Abe-clone must have expected him to be more trouble than G-Mamma; he certainly looked a lot angrier. ‘You took your time. How long have we been in here? I met myself just after we first arrived, I think. They kept sedating us so we didn’t know where we were or what day it was, but nobody’s been in for ages.’

  ‘They’ve been too busy trying to de-spy me – and they brought my mum here. Ach!’ Janey fumbled with the knots for a few moments, then stood back and directed the laser finger of her Girl-gauntlet at the ropes. Seconds later Alfie was free, scrambling along behind her.

  Mrs Halliday was curled neatly in a corner. ‘Janey! That is you, isn’t it? I’ve been visited by several versions of you, some of Alfie and even one of myself. I decided to conserve my energy and not try to resist.’

  ‘It’s definitely me this time.’ Janey pulled her upright and stood back to laser through her restraints. Mrs Halliday smiled wearily. ‘Come on, let’s grab G-Mamma and get out of here before they catch up with us.’

  Janey shuffled backwards to allow them out. ‘We’d better get Mum too. She’s gone all Gina Bellarina at the moment – don’t ask,’ she added when Alfie looked at her, amazed. The Hallidays reached for G-Mamma and waited while Alfie fed her a fruit chew from the pocket she directed him to. The SPI:KE brightened immediately and got on to her hands and knees. ‘Well, I’ve had enough of that little hidey-hole, I can tell you. Yes, sirree.’

  Suddenly Janey stopped. ‘Hang on, I forgot. There’s another body, er, person here. There were definitely four shapes in the display.’

  The spies weren’t able to help. ‘We’ve all been out of it, pretty much,’ explained Alfie. ‘We’ve been kept asleep except for when someone – something – brought us some food.’

  Mrs Halliday nodded. ‘It was always you to begin with, Janey, or so we thought, but we realized after a few visits that it wasn’t a brain-wiped Blonde, but a copy of some kind.’

  ‘Clones.’ Janey felt sick just saying it. ‘Fake-Abe is an agent of Copernicus – sorry, Alfie.’ Alfie had bitten his lip at the mere mention of his father. ‘And he’s been using that pointy thing in the middle of the lab – the SPI-clone – to make identical copies of sheep and then of us, using our DNA.’

  Just at that moment they heard a low groan from further along the row of cupboards. The door had not slid quite far enough along, so Janey braced her feet against it and pushed. It flew back to reveal a cage in a final dank cupboard, only half the size of the cubbyholes the others had been imprisoned in. A hand, pale and missing a thumb tip, trailed through the bars on to the concrete, and Janey’s throat closed as she reached out her own hand to touch it.

  ‘It’s the real Abe,’ she said, her chin wobbling furiously. ‘My dad.’

  Clustering around the cage, the spies all looked in at Abe Rownigan. He was deathly white, his unshaven cheeks sunken and barely moving in and out with his shallow breathing. There was very little room for his long body in the cage: he was curled around with his head on his arm. His other hand clutched something to his body so that it was mostly concealed beneath the knotty bones of his skeletal fingers.

  ‘Dad,’ Janey whispered, reaching a hand through the bars to shake his shoulder. He groaned once and shifted, but didn’t awaken.

  ‘They’ve put him out well and truly,’ said G-Mamma, now sufficiently restored to get to her feet. ‘Let’s get him out of there. Stand well back.’

  Janey was glad to let someone else take control. Her arms and legs were feeling peculiarly wobbly, as if all the strength – all the Blonde – had drained out of them. She watched gratefully as G-Mamma removed the linked gold belt (actually a retractable-rope device called a suSPInder) from her SPIsuit, fed it around the bars of the cage and then let it trail to several feet away. Next she removed the chewed sweet from her mouth and stuck it to the top of the nearest bar, under the last link of the SuSPInder. ‘Laser, Blonde,’ she said to Janey, pointing to the tapered end of the belt, which lay at their feet.

  Confused, but willing to do anything that would save her father, Janey directed her Girl-gauntlet at the narrow buckle and pressed. The beam of light illuminated the belt briefly, and then suddenly a tiny flame sparked up from the buckle. They all watched, fascinated and hopeful, as the flame licked along the length of the belt, and then as it reached the chewed gummy sweet and G-Mamma covered her ears delicately, there was a dull thwump as it detonated. The bars sheared cleanly out of their anchorage and were ejected across the floor under the workbench.

  ‘What is that stuff?’ said Alfie with more than a touch of envy in his voice. ‘I thought it was a toffee!’

  ‘Not for Spylets.’ G-Mamma removed the sticky sweet from the top of the bars, chewed it once more for good luck and then shoved it back in her pocket. ‘It’s SPInamite.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Alfie, but Janey was already fighting her way through the smoke as a rasping cough erupted from the cell.

  ‘Dad, are you OK?’

  He still wasn’t able to speak, but at least he was still alive. His cough was weak, and his eyes opened only once, but she took hold of his hand and felt the faint pulse in his wrist become stronger. ‘It’s me, Dad. Janey. Don’t worry – I won’t leave you.’

  ‘What have they done to him?’ G-Mamma hooked her hands under Abe’s armpits and hauled him out of the cage. As he moved, the object he’d been holding came loose and clattered to the floor.

  Janey picked it up. ‘I think it might be what he’s done to himself,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s the remote control for the Satispy.’

  ‘Told you it wasn’t ready yet,’ said Alfie, not terribly helpfully.

  It wasn’t ready – Alfie knew it, Janey knew it, and of course her father knew it. The Satispy had been tested only on reaso
nably short journeys, never on a voyage halfway around the world. Janey could barely imagine how far into space her father must have gone to get high enough to be able to zap down in Australia. The ordeal had clearly taken everything out of him – which signified one thing to Janey, and one thing only: he had been scared. Scared for Janey. Willing to risk his own life to get to her as quickly as he could. Once again her father had come to her rescue as she’d failed in her mission, and once again there was a horrible chance that it would cost him his life.

  And it was not until she heard Alfie shouting, ‘What the heck’s that?’ that Janey became aware of a great roaring gale, and she finally poked her head out from under the workbench and realized the dreadful truth.

  It wasn’t just going to cost her father his life.

  Every single one of them was going to pay the same terrible, ultimate price. She had led them all to their deaths.

  barmy army

  The wind died to an eerie hush as Janey, Alfie, G-Mamma and Mrs Halliday let Abe Rownigan fall gently to the floor behind them. None of them was able to stand, partly because they were still stooped under the counter, but mainly because they were so horribly appalled at the sight that met their eyes across the floor of the Spylab that their knees buckled with fear.

  The Abe-clone had been demonically busy while they had been releasing the real Abe. The lab was no longer empty. In fact, it was so full of people that Janey could no longer see the wall in any direction, as the view was obscured by bobbing heads – many of them her own. And along with the Chloes were Alfies, G-Mammas, Mrs Hallidays and, to Janey’s dismay, Gina Bellarinas, and a huge number of Jane Blondes in pale silver SPIsuits with white-blonde hair – white, she assumed, because her own blonde hair was a mix of her natural brown and Wower-created white blonde, and the hair they’d used had been a pure version of the latter. Pure Blonde. A wedge-shaped batallion of each of the spy clones – forty to fifty of each, with rather more cloned Blondes – radiated out from a central point under the sinister tip of the SPI-clone, all waiting silently for the command to attack to come from their leader.

  He stood at their centre, his fake film-star grin almost splitting his face in two, and how Janey wished it would. She wondered, for one mad moment, whether clones had all the same insides as real people. Of one thing she felt certain: inside the chest cavity there might be an organ that beat like a heart, but there was no emotion to drive it and make it real.

  ‘You promised to let my mum go,’ said Janey eventually, her voice cutting through the silence so that she sounded rather shrill. It was impossible to know which of the Jeans, if any, was her real mother, and she very much doubted whether the Abe-clone ever intended to keep any of his promises.

  The evil Abe shrugged. ‘I told you she was useless to me, other than her genes. She’s going to be useless to you too, now that I’ve de-spied her again. Bring her out, and the man too!’ he shouted suddenly to a small troop of Jane Blondes standing immediately to his left.

  Six Blonde-clones broke away from the main body and trotted over to the Spylab doorway. They disappeared into the sun’s glare for a moment, then reappeared in the lab pulling a trailer. In it, tied hand and foot and placed back to back like human bookends, were Jean Brown and Bert. Bert’s face was set in an expression of grim terror mingled with complete disbelief, while Jean just looked mightily fed up, shaking her head from time to time as if she was trying to wake herself up.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this dream now!’ she said to the pair of Jane Blondes on either side of her. ‘This jet lag is terrible. Pretty soon I’m going to wake up, aren’t I? Aren’t I, whoever you are?’

  Bert sighed. ‘I don’t know about a dream, lady,’ he said shakily. ‘More like some kind of nightmare. I’ve known all along that something wasn’t right with those sheep, but this . . . this is beyond insane. I was just an ordinary farmer, you know? I didn’t ask for any of this mumbo-jumbo. I wish I’d never laid eyes on ya, Rownigan! You, your people copies and your genetically modified sheep.’

  Janey took a step forward. ‘What are you going to do with us?’ she asked as the trailer was pushed over towards them. With Mrs Halliday’s help, she reached out for it and pulled the trailer to them, and G-Mamma and Alfie helped her weak, rasping father in beside Janey’s mother. Janey hugged her mum quickly, noticing something angular caught between the spines of Jean and Bert. ‘You’ve got our DNA, haven’t you? Let us go!’

  ‘You know already what I’m planning, Blonde. Don’t try stalling for time. This –’ and he cast his arm around the roomful of spy-clones like a conductor presenting his orchestra – ‘is just the beginning. You can stay shut up back there forever. Nobody will ever miss you – any of you. Let’s face it, nobody will ever realize you’re actually missing.” At the snap of his fingers the door at the top of the metal stairs banged back against the wall, and half a dozen figures stepped through the door from the SPIral staircase on to the high platform above the Spylab.

  ‘Holy granoly, that’s me.’ Bert whistled. He was looking directly at his own image, tall, rugged and weather-beaten, pulling his leather hat down over his eyes. Next to him was G-Mamma, dancing away to her own strange internal rhythm, and slightly behind was the Halliday family, ready for school and very unspylike.

  The last to step through the door was the unremarkable Brown family: Abe, in a pinstripe suit, ready for the office, Jean, in head-to-foot beige with an apron around her waist and a bucket and mop in one hand, and finally Janey. Janey Brown, with skinned, knobbly knees protruding out from under her school uniform. Janey Brown, lank hair tickling her collar and covering her serious grey eyes. Janey Brown. Brown by name and brown by nature. It was the cruellest trick of all, to send her back out into the world with no trace of her alter ego, of the person she had become. This clone was Brown only. She was completely devoid of Jane Blonde.

  And as Janey looked around, she understood that it was hopeless. ‘Lock them up!’ commanded the Abe-clone, and two hundred pairs of damp-skinned arms rose up in the air, pointed towards them and started to advance. They were trapped, backed up against the counter at the back of the barn, surrounded on all sides by clones separating into horrible look-a-like lines to attack the spy who had provided them with their own DNA, had given them life.

  Alfie stepped back as dozens of Alfie-clones headed straight towards him, brandishing their Boy-battlers and sneering at him with his trademark curl of the lip. It didn’t look even the tiniest bit amusing, as Alfie’s often did; repeated so many times and fixed in a constant supercilious expression, it was downright sinister. Nasty. Certainly the way they were all about to pummel him with the Boy-battler gloves – and a few were doubling the gloves up in size so the acid sacs would kick into operation – looked distinctly unpleasant.

  ‘Mum, er, Mum,’ said Alfie quietly, but Mrs Halliday could do nothing to help him. A troop of Agent Halos was advancing in a smart march, clapping their hands in rhythm so it sounded like a volley of gunshots, and baring and gnashing their spiked teeth like automata about to devour her.

  G-Mamma faced her group of clones. ‘Get your father out of here, Blonde,’ she cried, using her SuSPInder as a lasso. Unfortunately her carbon copies were all doing the same. Any moment now G-Mamma would be decapitated by a flying spy belt from the chanting, wiggling G-Mamma clones, who stopped every so often to form a cheerleader pyramid and toss one of their number back to the floor in a spinning ball of fuchsia, chanting:

  ‘Don’t ya wish that you had fled?

  Or had just stayed in your bed?

  Cos you’re gonna lose your head,

  And you’ll really be so dead!’

  ‘That’s rubbish!’ yelled G-Mamma, body-rolling to the left to avoid a flying clone. ‘My raps are way better than that! Blondette, do something!’

  ‘I can’t!’ Janey was powerless to help, overwhelmed by the bunch of Janey Browns and the huge battalion of Jane Blondes advancing upon her, the first with their head on one side and thei
r hair in their eyes in a wave of wimpiness that threatened to drown them all, the second forming their white-blonde ponytails into forward-facing daggers, ready to stab, stab, stab as they dropped their heads towards Janey.

  ‘We’re trapped,’ whispered Janey in horror. They were all pinned against the trailer containing Bert, Jean and Abe.

  Bert was still shaking, but now it seemed to be with hysterical laughter. ‘Look at us,’ he said, unable to wipe his eyes, which were pouring with mirth. ‘We’re like one of those crime teams. The Dubbo Seven! Apart from we aren’t any flaming use.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Sheep Dude,’ snapped G-Mamma. ‘We’re lots of use. Just . . . just not against this many of them. Of us. Of those . . . things.’

  The creeping fingers were just reaching out to close around their throats. Janey gagged as her Janey Brown mirror image, a Chloe, cocked her head on one side as she pressed a finger into her neck just below her ear. ‘Sorry, Janey. Really sorry.’

  ‘Stop saying sorry!’ she tried to scream, but the air was being squeezed out of her, and as she struggled, writhing this way and that, she could see that every one of her friends was in the same boat, powerless against the multitudes of clones. They were done for. Nothing short of a miracle was going to save them now.

  And maybe that’s what it was, she thought, as her eyes stared up at the unbroken blue of the sky above the SPI-clone, and something white – glowing and white – swept across her vision.

  An angel, she thought. My angel.