Aquila 2

by Andrew Norriss

  ‘They didn’t have to be.’ Tom winced slightly as Geoff brought them down over the rooftops, missing a chimney pot by millimetres. ‘I could tell as soon as I saw him.’

  For as long as he could remember, Tom and his mother had lived alone in their house in Gilmore Road. His father had left when Tom was three, and there had never been anyone else. Mrs Baxter had suffered for some years from an illness called agoraphobia, which meant she was frightened of going outdoors. So she had never met anyone new and only rarely invited anyone into the house.

  Recently, however, things had changed. Tom’s mother had got better, she had started going out and now she had met a man. Tom could already imagine what would happen next. In a few months, she and Alan would probably get married, soon after that he would start telling Tom what he could and couldn’t do, there would be arguments and quarrelling, and the quiet, peaceful life he had known for so long would be gone forever.

  ‘You’re doing it again!’ said Geoff.

  He raced over the grass and brought Aquila to a dead halt just behind the domestic-science block. It was the sort of stop that should have sent both boys straight out over the bonnet, but for some reason that never happened in Aquila. However fast you accelerated or decelerated, inside the lifepod you didn’t feel the change of speed at all.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Worrying.’ Geoff floated them down to just above the tarmac. ‘When there’s no reason.’ He picked up his bag, climbed out of Aquila then began rummaging through his pocket for the dog whistle.

  ‘But there is a reason.’ Tom climbed out of the other side. ‘I told you. As soon as I saw him, I knew …’

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ said Geoff firmly.

  He found the whistle and blew four short blasts. It was the signal that would send Aquila thirty feet up into the air, where it would wait for them until they called it back down. They could have used an ordinary whistle, or simply told Aquila where to go, but the dog whistle had the advantage that nobody – apart from dogs – could hear it. It helped not to draw attention to where they were and what they were doing.

  ‘Look.’ Geoff slung his bag over his shoulder. ‘Your mum had tea with someone she knew from school, that’s all. It’s not something you have to panic about. It’s what normal people do all the time.’

  Tom had to admit that Geoff could be right. He did tend to worry about things that might happen and often never did. And if Geoff was right, and his mother had simply been having tea with a friend …

  It was a consoling thought, and he found, as he followed Geoff into school, that he was feeling a lot better.

  At lunchtime, the boys went to see Miss Taylor. The Deputy Head saw them in her office every Monday at one o’clock so that she could talk about any problems they might be having with their work. For most of their school careers, Tom and Geoff had carefully avoided doing any work, let alone talking about it to anyone, but that was something else that had changed in the weeks since they had found Aquila.

  ‘Mr Urquart tells me you wanted him to explain about lines of longitude and latitude last week,’ said Miss Taylor, looking up from her notebook at the boys on the other side of her desk. ‘And that you wanted to know how people navigated using geographical co-ordinates.’ She peered over the top of her glasses. ‘Planning a trip abroad, are we?’

  ‘We’re just … interested in geography,’ said Tom.

  ‘Very interested,’ added Geoff.

  Miss Taylor leaned back in her chair. ‘And this morning,’ she went on, ‘Miss Poulson says you were asking her about how you change pounds into dollars, and where to find out about exchange rates …’

  ‘We’re interested in those too,’ said Geoff.

  ‘Very interested,’ added Tom.

  ‘You’ve also been asking Mr Bampford –’ Miss Taylor consulted her notebook again – ‘about satellite phones.’ She held up a hand before either of the boys could answer. ‘Yes, I know. Don’t tell me. You were interested …’

  Unfortunately, this was what happened when you had a machine like Aquila. There were so many things you needed to find out and, when you asked people, they thought it meant you were interested, and wanted to learn. Miss Taylor had been so impressed by the number of things the boys wanted to find out about that she had organized a whole timetable of extra lessons for them. She said that anyone that hungry for knowledge deserved all the help they could get and, after years spent sitting at the back of the class doing their best not to be noticed, it had all come as something of a shock.

  The extra lessons might not have been what the boys wanted, but the results had not been as disastrous as they had feared. Geoff, for instance, after eight years of school, was actually learning to read, while Tom was making the sort of progress that might one day allow him to pass the exams that would let him fulfil his dream of becoming a geologist.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘I’m not complaining. Quite the reverse. And I have some good reports here from the staff about your work.’ She tapped at a file on her desk. ‘Miss Stevenson says your reading progress, Geoff, is excellent and Mr Duncan –’ Miss Taylor shifted her gaze to Tom – ‘says that your maths is little short of astonishing. He tells me you mastered multiplying numbers in brackets after just one lesson!’ She smiled approvingly.

  ‘Well done! That’s all I can say, really. Both of you. Very well done!’

  Monday was always a long school day. There was double maths in the morning, double English in the afternoon and then, while everyone else went home, Geoff had an extra reading lesson with Miss Stevenson and Tom had extra science with Mr Bampford. So it was quite a relief, at four thirty, to walk round to the domestic-science block, blow three short blasts and two long on the whistle to bring down Aquila, climb inside and fly back to the Eyrie for what was undoubtedly the best part of the day.

  In the first two weeks after they had brought Aquila back from the cave where they had found it, they had kept it in the garage at Tom’s house. They had had to move it, though, when Tom’s mother recovered from her agoraphobia, and the search for somewhere safe to keep it – somewhere no one ever went or would ever find it – had not been easy. When Geoff discovered the water tower, however, both boys had known at once it was the perfect solution.

  The tower had been built more than a century before on a hill in the woods to the east of Stavely, to provide water for the new houses being put up on that side of the town. It had been abandoned for more than thirty years now but, instead of pulling it down, the council had simply boarded up the door at the bottom, surrounded the base with barbed wire and left it there.

  When the boys first flew through the empty window space at the top, they had found a room, about five metres square, where they could leave Aquila in perfect safety. When they had finished with it for the day, they blew a signal on a dog whistle of two long blasts and two short, and Aquila would fly itself fifty metres into the air and park inside. When they wanted it to come down again, they blew three short blasts and two long and Aquila would arrive invisibly to the right of whoever had blown the whistle.

  They called it the Eyrie because Aquila – the name painted in gold on the front of the lifepod – was the Latin word for an eagle and an eyrie is an eagle’s nest. Eagles build their eyries high up on a cliff face or at the top of a tree, where no one else can reach them – and it described the room at the top of the tower rather well.

  Over the weeks, it had become a very comfortable place to hang out. Mrs Murphy, the old lady who lived next door to Tom, had let them have odd bits of furniture from her attic, so there was a table and chairs, an old sofa and a square of carpet on the floor. There were shelves alon
g the back walls where the boys kept mementos of their trips abroad and a board where Geoff pinned his photos. They had found a fridge and a television at the Stavely Recycling Centre, Aquila provided the power that ran them and, best of all, the place was completely private.

  No one ever disturbed them in the Eyrie because, quite apart from the fact they were fifty metres up in the air, nobody knew they were there. Tom’s mother thought he was round with Geoff – which in a way he was – and Geoff’s parents presumed that he was with Tom.

  So, at the end of a school day, the boys would fly back to the water tower and grab a cold drink from the fridge. Tom would produce the slices of cake that his mother always gave him in case he got hungry during the day, and they would sit on the sofa, the looming bulk of Aquila floating silently beside them, and stare contentedly out at the town.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Geoff, ‘about how we could use Aquila to get enough money to buy a mobile.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I can’t think of anything. Well, nothing we could use.’

  It was distinctly frustrating. There were a million ways you could use Aquila to make money – like offering to fly people to New York for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time for a start – but doing anything like that meant telling people about Aquila, and that was the problem. Because telling anyone about Aquila was the one thing they had to avoid. It was Rule Number One. If they wanted to keep it, no one else must know about it. Ever.

  Geoff had briefly considered the idea of using Aquila to steal the money they wanted – when you have an invisible machine, with a laser that can cut through steel and stone like butter, robbing a bank would be simple enough – but somehow that solution seemed a little extreme. Quite apart from what his parents would say if they found out.

  ‘Is a phone going to be very expensive?’ he asked.

  ‘The sort we need would cost about a hundred pounds,’ Tom told him. He had quizzed Mr Bampford very carefully on the subject. ‘And we’d need two of them.’ He added that the science teacher had also said he thought you needed to be over eighteen before you could sign a contract to buy one, so it looked like the phones were going to be one of those nice ideas that would never actually happen. The conversation turned instead to what they might do at the weekend.

  The weekend was when the boys had time to go on proper flights to somewhere interesting and they took it in turns to decide where they might go. Tom’s hobby was geology, so he usually wanted to visit somewhere he could collect rocks. At the moment, he was particularly keen on adding to his collection of mountain peaks. On the shelves at the back of the Eyrie, he already had small sections sliced with Aquila’s laser from the top of the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc and the four highest peaks in Britain. The Pico del Aneto, the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, was next on his list.

  Geoff wanted to go back to New York, particularly now they knew how easy it was to get there, but he was also keen on a trip to the beach. Not in England, where the weather had been grey and damp for weeks, but somewhere warm and sunny – the south of France perhaps – and they were still discussing the possibilities when it was time to go home.

  Later that evening, up in his bedroom, Tom was writing up the events of the weekend in an exercise book. He kept a careful note of most of the things they did in Aquila – particularly when they discovered anything new that it could do, like being able to retrace its steps and go back to where it had been. And he was busily writing when his mother came in with a mug of hot chocolate and clean clothes for school the following day.

  ‘I’ve just had a phone call from Alan,’ she said, placing the mug of chocolate on Tom’s desk. ‘He’s offered to take us out to lunch next Sunday.’

  ‘I’m going round to Geoff’s on Sunday,’ said Tom.

  ‘Tell him you’re busy,’ said his mother. ‘I’m sure he won’t mind.’ She placed the clothes on the chair by Tom’s bed, careful not to disturb the creases she had ironed into his trousers. ‘Alan wants to take us to the Royal Oak! That’ll be a treat, eh?’ She ruffled her son’s hair and looked briefly at the exercise book open in front of him. ‘Still writing your stories, are you? Don’t stay up too late!’

  As she left the room, Tom sighed. If Geoff were here, he would probably say that his mother going out for lunch with Alan didn’t mean anything – it was just something that normal people did all the time – but Tom found it difficult to believe that was true.

  Life had been a lot simpler in the days when his mother stayed home all day and never met anyone, he thought, and a tiny part of him couldn’t help wishing she still had agoraphobia.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Tom and Geoff first found Aquila, they had very quickly discovered what it could do. Or thought they had. Geoff had pressed one of the purple lights on the control column to see what happened, and they had suddenly found themselves two thousand feet up in the air. Aquila could fly. It was only slowly that they had come to realize that it could do a lot of other things as well and, even now, Tom reckoned, they had barely scratched the surface of its capabilities.

  They had found out some things though. They knew – because Aquila had told them – that it was the lifepod from a Denebian battlecruiser that had come through a portal some six thousand years before and been ambushed by a flotilla of Yrrillian warships. Tom had read Aquila’s account of the battle – and seen pictures of how the cruiser had been sliced open and the crew had scrambled to the lifepods in their efforts to escape. Aquila was one of the lifepods and had made its way to Earth. But knowing all of that left you, if anything, with even more questions than when you started.

  Like who were the Denebians? Why had their ship been ambushed? And what was a portal? The trouble was that there were so many questions you could ask, and each time you got the answer to one of them, it led you to several more.

  That was why Geoff had suggested that, in the short term at least, they concentrate on finding out what Aquila could do, rather than investigating where it came from or what had happened to it in the past. Gesturing to the row of coloured lights along the dash on that first day in the Eyrie, he had suggested that, for a start, they should find out what happened when you pressed each one of them.

  It sounded like a sensible plan, and the boys had sat in Aquila while Geoff pointed to each of the lights and asked what it did. The reply would flash up in the air in front of them and Tom would read it out so that Geoff, whose reading was still a little uncertain, would know what it said as well. The answers, however, were not always as simple as the question.

  A few buttons were easy enough. There was the large yellow button that made Aquila invisible – no complications there. There was the button that fired the laser – which started eleven fires the first time they tried it, but which they now used mostly to heat up beans or make toast. And there was the button which, when you pressed it, flew Aquila to the outskirts of a town in Bulgaria.

  But with many of the lights, when you asked Aquila what they did, the answer was so complicated you could spend hours trying to work out what it meant. When Aquila said that pressing the little purple light on the left activated the temporal stasis generator, you could sit and read through thousands of words – as Tom did – and still not have much idea what it was really for. He knew it froze people into a sort of bubble outside time because they had accidentally used it on old Mrs Murphy next door, but why you would want to do it was still a mystery.

  And then they had discovered that the lights were only the start of what Aquila could do. They were, Tom discovered one afternoon, simply the controls for the things you wanted Aquila to do the most often. They were like the short cuts you could put on a co
mputer, so that instead of having to give it detailed instructions every time, you simply pressed one key.

  Each of the lights that ran along the dash in front of the seat in Aquila could in fact be set to do something quite different. Tom had reset the button that took you to Bulgaria, for instance, so that it now flew Aquila back to the water tower – something that had been very useful on the odd occasion when they had got lost. You could set any of the lights for any of the things that Aquila could do – and Aquila could do a lot of things.

  A lot of things.

  The lifepod had been designed to keep a Denebian alive in the deep reaches of space, carry it to the nearest habitable planet and then keep it safe until it was rescued. It was crammed with everything the makers could think of that might be useful in doing that. When Tom had once asked it to list all its functions, he had spent the next half an hour watching titles scrolling up through the air in front of him. That was when he paused the process and asked how long it was going to take, and Aquila told him that viewing a complete list of things it could do would take approximately three and a half days.

  Just to look at the titles.

  Since they were never going to be able to work their way through the whole list, Geoff had suggested that maybe they should work things the other way round. Instead of trying to find out what Aquila could do, they should carry on using it the way they had and only ask it something when they needed help.

  That was how Tom had worked out how to navigate to New York, that was how they had worked out how to carry a sofa to the top of the Eyrie and that was why Tom decided to ask Aquila if it could set up an early warning system so that taxis didn’t run into the back of him.

  The incident in New York was not the first time the boys had narrowly avoided an accident. They usually flew high enough to miss cars crashing into them, but they had once been hit by a particularly tall lorry, birds regularly knocked themselves out on the hull and, most worrying of all, they had had two near collisions in the air – one with a Harrier GR7 and one with a passenger jet on a descent path near Luton.