Alien Disaster (13 page)

‘Stop!’ the king pleaded. ‘You’ll kill everyone here!’

‘I know! Everyone from your stupid alien planet!’ Gem grunted between strikes. ‘I don’t care! You killed James!’

‘
You’ll
kill Brandon Walker!’

Gem paused, her hand held high ready to land another blow.

‘What? Why?’

The king spat blood and laughed. ‘Why do you think I even bothered talking to him at all? I could tell the minute I looked into his eyes: he’s from our world. He’s from our
stupid alien planet
!’

Gem’s hand, gripping the cylinder, remained paused mid-strike. ‘What are you talking about?’

Brandon rushed up behind her and took the cylinder. ‘Who cares? It’s nonsense, Gem! He’s raving mad. Come on, it’s time to leave.’

The king gave them a bloody grin. ‘Leave? Where are you going to run? Guards! Kill them!’

An explosion shook the mothership again, just at the right moment. The armed guards all fell to the floor as the ship tilted at a dangerous angle. Gem and Brandon went sliding across the floor to the foot of the steps where Jason and Kat were. Brandon clambered up the steps and when he reached the big painting on the wall he didn’t hesitate: he jumped straight at it and ripped through the canvas.

The king howled in fury. He obviously didn’t know that there was a secret passage beyond. Gem, Jason and Kat bundled through too and they all half-ran, half-fell down a sloping tunnel. When they entered a small room at the end, Jason found a door control and locked them safely in.

‘That Dravid guy wasn’t joking after all!’ Jason exclaimed, looking around the room. ‘I was almost certain that you were going to smash your head against that picture.’

The room was cramped, with a low ceiling. Sunk into a grooved pit in the floor was a small rocket with a transparent hatch on the topside. Even as they looked at it, the hatch slowly opened.

‘That’s our ride,’ Brandon said, ‘Get in!’

‘Bran,’ Gem said, ‘what did the king mean when he said that you—’

‘Not now, Gem!’ Brandon said. He had no idea what had just happened either, but all he could think about was getting everyone safely back to Earth. The awful danger of their situation was at the forefront of his mind.

‘There’s no way we’re all going to fit in there,’ Jason said. ‘It’s a one-man escape pod.’

‘We’ll fit,’ Brandon insisted. ‘Even if we have to all lie down on top of each other!’

Thirty seconds later, the door from the tunnel crashed open and the two guards with laser guns charged in. The giant tattooed balak was right behind them, urging them on to attack. But the aliens immediately had to back up as the boosters of the escape rocket ignited and blasted in their faces. The rocket then accelerated down a narrow tube, and shot out into the blue summer sky.

Lying on his stomach, with the others jammed in around him, Brandon wrestled with the rocket’s joystick. It wouldn’t budge.

He could feel Kat’s body pressed close to his. Jason was on top of him, crushing most of the breath out of his lungs. Gem was on his other side. ‘Are you actually flying this thing?’ she asked urgently.

‘No! It must be on autopilot; the controls are locked.’

‘We’re going to crash,’ Kat said, as the ground got closer and closer.

‘What did your mate Dravid say to do once we were in the escape rocket?’ Jason asked.

‘He didn’t,’ Brandon admitted.

‘Oh well,’ Jason said. ‘At least this is a better way to go than getting sacrificed to some bloodthirsty alien god like that poor idiot James.’

There was a nasty silence. ‘Sorry Gem,’ he said.

‘Forget it,’ she snapped. ‘Just get your arm out from around my waist.’

Brandon saw the ground approaching at a frightening rate. His eyes and brain focused on every last detail of what might be his last few seconds alive: the green field below them; the sheep going about their business chewing the grass; the blinking and flashing lights in the rocket’s cockpit, with their meaningless labels in an alien language; one of which was flashing faster and faster as they neared the ground …

When Brandon felt the sudden pull of the parachute opening behind the rocket, he knew that they were safe. But on instinct he reached forward and hit the flashing button. The joystick loosened in his other hand—he now had manual control—so he pulled back on it hard.

The rocket went from vertical to horizontal in an instant, jettisoning the parachute, and suddenly they were accelerating again, racing across the fields just metres from the ground. Brandon whooped in triumph.

‘What the hell?’ Jason screamed. ‘We were just about to land safely.’

‘Yeah,’ Brandon agreed. ‘And then we would have got safely scooped up by the aliens again. We need some distance!’

Jason didn’t reply. Brandon turned his attention back to piloting the rocket: it was controlled completely by the joystick and its triggers. As they skimmed along the top of a range of hills, he practiced a few swoops and dives and was even thinking about trying a roll when Gem spoke up, reminding him that he wasn’t alone in the cabin.

‘Bran,’ she said. ‘Are you pointing this thing anywhere in particular?’

‘The final lab!’ he told her. ‘Mum said that there’s another secret lab, where we can find what we need to activate the alien cylinder. We need to follow the South Downs to get there.’

‘Where?’ Gem persisted.

‘Stonehenge!’

Brandon flew the rocket in a west-northwest direction above the dry chalk valleys of the South Downs. He wondered how much fuel an emergency escape rocket carried.

The cabin was getting hotter and the windows were steaming up. Kat squirmed closer to speak with him.

‘So, Mr. Alien. Why Stonehenge?’

Bandon didn’t know which issue to tackle first. He went with the subject that he knew.

‘My mum spread her research over three labs: the hardware was in London; the software in Brighton; but the control mechanism—whatever it is that gets the device fully operational—is in a third lab that I don’t think anyone else knew about but her.’

‘But you know?’

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Mum said that the lab was about two hundred kilometres east of my favourite place …’

Kat screwed her face up in thought. ‘How far’s that in miles? I give up! Where’s your favourite place?’

‘Bude.’

‘Huh?’

‘Bude. It’s a surfing town in Devon.’

‘You’re a surfer dude? Wow! You don’t look like one!’

‘Thanks. It’s a cool place though; maybe when this is all over, I’ll take you there.’ Brandon coughed. ‘But anyway, that’s not important. What’s important is that the secret lab is between here and there: somewhere in the middle of Salisbury plain. Then I remembered that my mum had a picture of Stonehenge up in her office … it has to be there!’

Jason and Gem were arguing about something.

‘I’ll turn around and we can top-and-tail if you like!’ Jason offered.

‘What I would like is if you went out and sat on the roof!’ Gem fumed.

Brandon remembered what Jason had said in the saucer, about wanting to leave the whole adventure while he still could and get Kat to safety. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe Jason could even look after both Kat
and
Gem. Brandon didn’t need anyone’s help now … all he had to do was get to the last lab.

The rocket started to lose speed.

‘We’re being followed,’ Jason said. He was now lying on top of Brandon, looking backwards out of the hatch. ‘The giant UFO is miles away, but it’s not getting any smaller. It’s keeping its distance and watching us.’

Brandon guessed that they were about halfway to Stonehenge. The rocket wasn’t going to make it. He shook his head with frustration: he still might need Jason’s help to steal another car.

Brandon brought the rocket down in a large field, cutting a wide semi-circular scar in the earth as he landed. Everyone got out of the cramped cockpit as fast as they could: Gem collapsed on the grass, Kat started stretching and jiggling about anxiously, and Jason decided to take out his pent-up energy in a series of furious press-ups.

Brandon sat quietly on the hull of the rocket, thinking. He felt like Frodo Baggins in
The Lord of the Rings
, planning on slipping away from his companions and bearing his burden alone. He could evade the aliens easier on his own, he thought, without having the worry of looking after the others too.

Then Gem surprised him by taking charge. ‘Okay, listen up,’ she commanded. ‘We’ve got to think and act fast if we’re going to get out of here, get to the lab, and get this alien weapon working properly so that we can take the fight back to those aliens! Brandon: you’re the brains of the operation, obviously. Jason: you’re the brawn! Maybe you can bully someone into getting us to Stonehenge.’

She looked at Kat. ‘Kat: you’re small and fast, so you’re our eyes and ears. Watch our backs. We don’t want anyone—alien or otherwise—creeping up and surprising us.’

Kat gave an eager salute. Jason was looking at Gem with undisguised admiration and respect. Brandon wasn’t sure that he liked the way this was going—the alien cylinder wasn’t supposed to be a weapon!—but before he could speak up, Gem was pushing forward and asserting her control.

‘Jason, check your phone. Now that we’re off that ship and far from London, maybe we can get online again. Find out what’s going on. And pull up a local map so we can plan our route. Kat—keep an eye on that flying saucer.’

Suddenly Gem stopped giving orders, turned pale and ran into some nearby bushes.

The mothership was still hanging on the horizon, but it didn’t seem to be coming any closer. Brandon wondered if it was watching them to see where they went next. They would have to think of a way to lose it somehow. There was a dull rumble in the distance. A summer storm?

Gem emerged from the bushes wiping her mouth. She came over and joined Brandon by the rocket.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked her.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I feel sick and angry and shocked and confused. They killed James! We have to do something … something to get back at them.’

‘He meant a lot to you, huh?’

Gem rolled her eyes. ‘He was the only boyfriend I had. If you ever get a girlfriend, Bran, then maybe you’ll understand.’

Brandon kept quiet. He didn’t think that now was the time to voice his suspicions that James had been using Gem to get close to their family on behalf of MI Zero. She must have wondered about that by now though.

‘Here’s your watch,’ he said, handing her back the Time Tracker.

She took it and stared at it blankly. The lights around the face were dim. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You can keep my phone, by the way. Who am I going to call now anyway?’

‘Oh, okay. I forgot I still had it.’

‘So what did that alien mean when he said that
you
were an alien too, Bran?’ Gem asked him again. She jumped up and sat beside him on top of the rocket.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Seriously, Brandon! Think! You’re the brains of this gang, remember.’

‘Honestly, Gem, I don’t know. I mean, do I look like an alien? You’d think that I would suspect if I was! The alien king probably just said it to confuse you, to stop you smashing his brains out.’

Gem didn’t look convinced. ‘If you’re an alien, does that make me one too? Maybe our parents were aliens like that Dravid Karkor guy.
He
looked almost human.’

Brandon remembered something. He pulled the trainer off his left foot and tipped out the memory card that he had found in his mum’s safe yesterday morning.

He slotted the card into Gem’s phone, and looked at the files that held the results of the tests that his mother had run on his eyes.

Most of them were technical gibberish, but he found a scan of some handwritten notes that she had made:

Brandon’s eyes are much more densely packed with photoreceptor cells than is normal. His vision must be at least 20/10—a random mutation that means that his eyesight is better than almost all other people. Combined with the high temporal resolution in the nuclei of his brain, this means that Brandon can take in lots more information than most people—and in stressful situations, process that information faster.

He sat deep in thought, watching the mothership drift slowly round to the north, still keeping the same distance. His mother’s notes weren’t conclusive proof that he was alien, but as he had thought earlier when they were exploring the mothership: what
was
alien anyway, but just a different configuration of the same elements that were common everywhere in the universe?

The thunder rumbled on.

‘There’s a car coming!’ Kat shouted.

Brandon stood up to look. A big black off-road four-by-four was speeding down a grassy slope towards them. The windows were blacked out, and there appeared to be a lot of communications equipment on top. It certainly wasn’t a farmer on the way to his fields.

‘Hewson,’ Brandon muttered.
How did he get here so fast?

‘Land Rover Defender,’ Jason added. ‘Cool!’

The Defender skidded to halt next to the fallen rocket. The passenger door swung open. Brandon walked over to look inside. Sure enough, Lieutenant Hewson was at the wheel. His face was cut and bruised and his uniform was scorched and tattered.