What on earth – or on Planet Copernicus – could have caused such carnage?
Then she saw it: a laser beam firing from around the corner ahead of her, attached to a fat-handled gun like the super-soaker water pistols Alfie and Leaf had played with at the pool in Florida. And more shocking still, the zapper that was now firing at her was clasped firmly in a slender hand that poked from a green cuff edged with gold.
As the gun fired again, Janey dodged the laser beam and it glanced off her side.
‘Leaf!’ cried Janey, outraged. ‘What are you doing?’
His answer was to lunge back into the corridor and shoot a couple more yellow lasers at her. She was hit in the shoulder, and then the hip, but other than a slight warmth and the need to yawn, Janey felt fine. Why were the others affected so badly when she was not?
Jane Blonde did not need to know the answer, however, to realize that she had just discovered a huge advantage. Leaf’s weapon couldn’t hurt her. As soon as he appeared around the corner again, Janey banged her Four-Fs against the floor and leaped at him. In less than half a second she had flown across to him, taking the full impact of a dozen BLAM-BLAMs from the laser gun, yet not slowing at all. Before Leaf knew what had hit him, she had ripped the gun from his hands, drop-kicked him to the floor and sat on his legs.
‘You!’ Janey could hardly bear to look at him. ‘You’re the double agent. You were the one passing the R-Evolution secrets to Copernicus.’
Staring from Janey to the laser gun she was now brandishing, Leaf gave a tiny nod.
‘That’s how Mum ended up here! You’d already keyed in the coordinates when I grabbed the control from you.’
‘Guilty,’ said Leaf, wincing as Janey squashed his knees.
‘How did you get into Solfari Lands?’
Leaf swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his pale, slender throat. ‘Satispy,’ he said quietly, his eyes slightly watery as he looked up at the angry Spylet on his chest. ‘I opened a hatch in the grass next to the Spylab. Nobody saw me because of the green suit.’
‘And that’s why you were never quite there whenever we were captured or in danger.’ Janey poked him in the chest with the syringe end of the gun. ‘Copernicus has been protecting you.’
Again that barely perceptible nod.
Janey felt sick. Here was yet another person she had trusted – that her father had trusted – who had turned out to be a double-crossing fake. She could not imagine what it would take to persuade someone to give up on their friends like that. ‘Why, Leaf? Why would you do that? Your father has been a colleague of my dad’s for decades.’
At the mention of his father, Leaf squirmed and bucked angrily, and suddenly Janey tumbled to the floor. The laser gun skidded out of her hands across the floor; she watched it skitter away, not worried about whether Leaf managed to get hold of it. It didn’t seem to affect her. But when she looked around she saw that Leaf had found his feet again. He was towering over her, pale, ghost-like, with a rather large sword clasped in two hands held above his head, the tip pointing at her heart, ready to plunge right through her.
‘My father was never strong enough to claim what is rightfully ours,’ he spat. ‘He would rather be your father’s . . . employee.’
Janey stared up at the sword, trying to work out whether she had time to roll away if Leaf brought it down. There were strange symbols etched into the silver, and suddenly Janey recognized it. It was a Viking sword. Leaf was getting back to his ancestral roots.
He spoke again. ‘But I shall not be enslaved to your father. I am a leader. Copernicus has promised me . . .’
Even as he said it, Janey saw a glimmer of doubt flit across his eyes, and she remembered him questioning how Copernicus could abandon his son. If he could do that to his own flesh and blood, what exactly were his promises worth? But Leaf shook his head as if to clear his thoughts and moved the sword even closer to Janey’s ribs.
‘He promised you what?’ said Janey, not daring to take her eyes off the steely point that was only centi-metres away from her heart.
And Leaf laughed. ‘What is rightfully mine: America.’
Now Janey was convinced that Leaf, like Ariel and so many others before him – particularly Copernicus – had gone mad.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘That’s exactly it, Blonde,’ said Leaf, removing a hand from the sword to brush his fair hair from his eyes. The sword swung dangerously and Janey tried to suck in her stomach to avoid being skewered. ‘Earth is going to be taken over by Copernicus very soon, and when that happens I will rule over America. You see,’ he said gently, as if to a small child, getting a firm grip on the hilt of the Viking sword again, ‘Christopher Columbus was not the first European to discover America. It was my ancestor, Leif Erikssen, who first landed on those shores. It is we Vikings who should have been the founders of the whole nation, and run the government, and ruled the world.’
There was a wild light in his eyes as he imagined the glories that should have belonged to his race.
‘He tricked you, Leaf,’ Janey said gently. ‘Copernicus was just using you to get at my father’s secrets. He’s not a man of his word. You’ll end up stuck on this planet. You might get to be in charge of a couple of monkeys, if you’re lucky.’
Doubt flickered across Leaf’s face once more, but he shook his head firmly. ‘No. He has protected me. My suit . . .’ and he shook his cuff so that Janey could see the golden lining slide down beneath the green outer layer, ‘and the spacesuit, the place in the rocket – all this he has done to protect me.’
But Janey shook her head. ‘No, Leaf. He was just protecting himself. As long as you are alive, you could pass on the secrets of R-Evolution.’
‘No . . .’ hissed Leaf, shaking his head to block out her words.
‘It’s true,’ said Janey, hoping he would do something stupid as he became more emotional.
He did.
‘No!’ he roared, and he thrust his hands up high above his head, ready to split Jane Blonde down the middle. She had only a fraction of time, less than a second, to slither out of the way of the plunging blade, but he’d catch her, surely, if not in the heart then in a shoulder or an arm or a thigh . . . there was nowhere to go . . . no way to escape.
Knowing it was hopeless, Janey flipped on to her front, and at the very same moment she heard a familiar voice say, ‘I’ll take that, thank you, Leaf,’ followed by a few muffled thumps and grunts and the clang of a Viking sword as it clattered to the floor.
She looked up to find Leaf bound and gagged, trussed up with a torn sheet. Someone was standing over him, the sword now pointing perilously at his throat.
‘Janey,’ said Jean Brown, nodding down at her daughter, ‘if we’re ever going to get out of here, I think I’d better start believing you. In fact, I was never sure I trusted this one,’ she said. ‘I was trying to tell you when you found me here, and you asked him to mind the door.’
‘Mum,’ said Janey in disbelief, ‘you saved me! And you’re all right . . . and you fought off Leaf!’
‘Well, he’s just a boy really, and I am a super-SPI, darling,’ said Jean Brown, looking down at her neat T-shirt and trousers as if she still couldn’t believe it. ‘Apparently,’ she added.
It was harder still for Janey to believe. She’d hoped beyond all hope that her mum could believe what she’d told her, but somehow she’d never been terribly convinced that her mother would accept the truth. ‘What changed your mind?’
‘Ah, well, yes,’ said Jean. ‘I got left behind down the corridor so I was wandering around, trying to find you, and I went past this room with big windows. Squid Man was inside, and there was a great big screen with a huge one of these just showing on it.’ She nudged the laser gun with her toe. ‘Anyway, as I was watching, the picture sort of zoomed in and I realized we were looking at Florida, at that Space Center place. And then it zoomed in even closer and there on the floor was . . . your father.’
&nb
sp; Janey gasped. Her mum knew!
‘And the funny thing was, when I saw him there on the floor, knocked out, surrounded by all these other people dressed in peculiar spy-type gear, my insides went all funny and I shouted out . . . well, I shouted, “Boz!”. Rather loudly.’
Janey had never felt happier. Her mum believed her! She knew everything! ‘Oh, Mum,’ she said with a sob, ‘we can be a family again.’
Jean dropped the sword and crouched down. ‘Not if we don’t stop old Squid Man,’ she whispered. ‘He’s up to something terrible, I know it.’
Janey knew it too. The end of the Earth. The beginning of a new regime. Copernicus ruling from Planet Copernicus.
‘Mum, wake the others up. There’s a weird disc of wind near a “Copernicus” tube stop just outside the entrance – I know it sounds crazy, but jump in it, all of you, and get off at the moon. There’s another Spylab there.’
Her mother looked at her, opened her mouth to say something, then shrugged. ‘Landing on the moon is really no more outrageous than anything else I’ve been through in the last few days. I’ll make sure we’ve all got our spacesuits on. But what will you do, Janey? I mean . . . Blonde?’
Janey didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but there was no time for either.
‘I’m going to save the Earth,’ she said. And throwing her super-SPI mum a kiss, she sprinted away down the corridor, to the centre of all problems.
Mission Control.
Copernicus.
laser beam
The foul and disfigured Copernicus stood at the heart of Mission Control. Janey groaned as she saw who was standing next to him: Twelve.
She turned on her SPI-Pod. ‘I don’t have the manpower to round up all those escaped gibbering animals,’ lisped Copernicus to the little boy, ‘but I still have my SPI-clone machine. If they all escape, I’ll make clone copies of you, Twelve. I’d better warn you though,’ he added as if he actually cared for the boy, ‘that the master version doesn’t fare very well. You’ll get all used up. Very quickly.’ The great shoulders of the hideous creature jiggled up and down. He was laughing.
Janey looked directly at the screen – and her stomach heaved. There was her father, lying unconscious on a floor somewhere. The image on the screen zoomed out and Janey could now see that her dad was lying next to the Bird SPI family and Leaf’s father, Ivan Erikssen. When the image zoomed out even further Janey could see the whole of Cape Canaveral. Then the Florida coastline and the entire east coast of America. And all the time the rocket-length tip of the giant laser beam pointed accusingly down at the Earth. She instructed her Ultra-gogs to zoom in on the laser and she noticed for the first time that there was writing along the side of it. Next to an embossed sun were the words LAY-Z BEAM.
Laser beam. She knew that already. Why was he directing it at the Earth? Would it actually kill?
Jane Blonde looked left and right. There was nobody around to stop her, but no obvious way into Mission Control either. Then it came to her. There was a very obvious way to enter Mission Control. After turning her SPI-Pod to ‘MIC’ for microphone, she lifted her bare left hand and hammered on the glass.
Copernicus spun around, a grotesque maypole of whirling limbs and flapping black cloth, his severed jaw hanging looser still at the sight of his nemesis. ‘B-Blonde!’ He could barely stand to utter her name, so outraged was he at the sight of her standing there, leaning on the window frame and shouting out to the boy: ‘Twelve, get away from him! Run!’
It went just as she had planned. Infuriated, Copernicus stumbled towards the glass and lashed out with one of his enormous, grime-encrusted tentacles. Amplified by Janey’s SPI-Pod microphone, the sound of the glass shattering made Janey drop to her knees, grasping at her ears. In that moment Copernicus struck, and the next thing she knew, Janey had been gripped around the middle by a pulsating tentacle and was whistling through the air, straight down into Mission Control.
She slammed on to the floor with a bone-crunching smack. ‘Watch them, then!’ Copernicus was screaming hysterically. ‘Watch them all lose the will to live! Everyone you’ve ever known, Blonde! Everyone you’ve ever loved! They’re all down there, all sucking up to your ridiculous father and his do-gooding types, when they should be listening to me! Me! Well, now they will. Now they will have no choice. No voice of their own. Now they will have . . . NO WILL!’
His hideous limbs thrashed like some insane conductor as he pointed at the screen and flung Janey from his grasp. His shrieking filled her entire head so that it felt like it would explode. Eyes scrunched up against the pain, Janey ripped off her SPI-Pod and threw it to one side. Relief came instantly. She could now hear that Twelve was sobbing gently, shuffling back as far as he could under a bench, while a python-like tentacle reached out for her. It grabbed her by the ankle, and Janey suddenly found herself hanging upside down, facing the screen.
‘Rotate one-eighty degrees!’ she yelled at her Ultra-gogs, and at once she could see the screen properly. The image had shifted once more. No longer was it showing the coast of America; now the whole of that continent lay before her, and then there was the whole Earth, tilted below them like the globe in her classroom. Her lovely, ordinary classroom, in lovely, ordinary Winton School. Red figures were illuminated in the right-hand corner. 60. 59. 58.
The one-minute countdown was on.
‘Twelve!’ she screamed. ‘Jump! Get up to the window; get out and go to the tube station. Find the others. Go! Go!’
With a frantic and fearful glance at Janey’s upside-down face, Twelve took his chance and leaped on to the workbench. He then flung himself, monkey-like, up to a dangling light shade and swung across to the shattered window. After a last glance in her direction, he was gone.
Pulling herself up as far as she could, Janey sank her teeth into the hideous tentacle that was holding her captive, and Copernicus threw her to one side and drew in his tentacle limb in the same movement.
‘Nasty girl. Anyway. Thirty seconds,’ he gloated. ‘Ah, look.’
Staring over at the screen, Janey saw that the Lay-Z Beam was pointed at the North Pole. The top of the world. She said the words ‘Lay-Z Beam’ out loud. And immediately she understood what Copernicus was doing.
It wasn’t a laser beam as such. It was a lazy beam. He’d been directing it at Florida for weeks. That was why everyone was falling asleep. Losing the will to do anything. That’s what had been affecting her team. And now he was going to cover the Earth with apathy and laziness and the complete loss of will to do anything to resist him.
A Lay-Z Beam. It was almost brilliant, thought Janey. Copernicus didn’t actually have to kill anyone. They’d just all be too sleepy and forgetful to bother to live any more.
Twenty seconds showed on the screen, the tip of the Lay-Z Beam starting to glow bright amber. The colour reminded Janey of something. Her suit.
And in the very instant that she recalled how the Lay-Z Beam had never affected her, she climbed on the workbench, slammed her feet on to it, powered out through the window and Four-F’d towards the entry tube.
Copernicus threw back his monstrosity of a head and laughed.
But Janey knew she had a tiny chance. With fifteen seconds to go, she could just save the world.
a ray of light
It had to work.
As she shot up the entry tube, Janey pulled off one of her Four-Fs and roughly shoved her SPIder into her mouth. The front legs snaked out between her lips, clamping around her nose, as the other six legs anchored themselves over her gums and pumped oxygen down her throat. Her head hit the surface and she was flung out on to the sandy surface of Planet Copernicus. There could only be a few seconds left. The whole of the planet vibrated beneath her feet. Janey looked around frantically and spotted the great, glowing amber orb, attached to the end of the Lay-Z Beam like the venom at the tip of a bee sting. She skidded towards it and could just make out a shining blue-and-white globe coming into view below her.
The golden orb was
pulsating. It was gathering strength. Janey suddenly had the impression of a giant drawing its breath, ready to snuff out an enormous candle. Only this time, she thought, the candle was the Earth.
Planet Copernicus shuddered beneath her as it prepared to launch its attack of sleeping sickness upon the world.
Hardly realizing what she was doing but knowing that it was the world’s only chance, Jane Blonde bent down, ripped off her remaining Four-F spy shoe and thrust herself up and out, straight into the atmosphere, floating free in just a golden SPIsuit and a peaked PERSPIRE hat.
In outer space.
I’m completely mad, she thought.
The end of the Lay-Z Beam was right below her. With a powerful breaststroke action Janey pulled herself through space – now she knew she was mad. She was actually swimming through space. The golden beam, quivering with scorpion evil, was next to her . . . above her . . . pointing right at her.
She could see the Earth. Janey couldn’t help drawing in a breath at the beauty of the world below her, a tiny bead of decoration on the soft quilt of the universe.
But then a sensation of immense pressure made her turn over, away from the planet she was trying to save, looking back at the planet she had just launched herself from. The golden orb of light appeared before her, bright as the sun, and then suddenly it was streaming towards her. Closing her eyes, she wriggled slightly to the right and waited for the impact.
The full power of the Lay-Z Beam hit her directly in the stomach, enveloping her in a burning cloud of acid-yellow light. The pain was immense. It was like being swallowed alive by the sun . . . heat – unbearable heat – and blinding, agonizing light that seemed to cut through to the back of her brain, severing it in two, splitting her head apart . . .
And suddenly Janey realized the sensation of movement was not just limited to her stomach or her head. She was hurtling, free-falling through space, eyes closed against the awful brilliance of the Lay-Z Beam that had seemed somehow to become part of her. The SPIder was slipping from her mouth . . . she couldn’t breathe . . . couldn’t see . . . couldn’t survive . . .
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