Alien Disaster (18 page)

‘Can I try again now that you’ve upgraded them?’ Gem asked eagerly. ‘Bran bust his hand. Can we fix it?’

‘We can try,’ Talem said. ‘We should definitely test the limits of your control at least. It could be important if a situation ever came up where the bionoids were receiving conflicting commands. Brandon, hold out your hand.’

Talem gave Brandon the cylinder, and Brandon winced as he closed the fingers of his injured hand around it. He shut his eyes and tried to think random thoughts as Talem and Gem talked over him. He felt the cylinder move under his fingers, almost losing its solidity until he wasn’t sure where his fingers ended and the cylinder began. The bionoids were under his skin, in his veins and bones because—of course—they weren’t
inside
the cylinder; they
were
the cylinder—packed tightly in a solid shape, but ready to break apart and disperse on command.

And now they were inside his body, forcefully trying to repair what would naturally take weeks. The pain was acute, and it travelled up his arm and spread like fire around his body. He gasped; he almost wanted to shout,
Stop
, and say that maybe a broken hand wasn’t too much of an inconvenience to live with for a little while longer …

Talem was talking: ‘No, Gem, it’s not working. The bionoids are not calibrated perfectly to your brainwaves. You’re hurting him. Let me.’

The pain ceased. Then a different sensation took over: a dull pain and a slight numbness. And then in seconds it was over. Brandon opened his eyes and looked down. He was sweating and gripping the cylinder tightly, but found that he could now open his fingers easily. The cylinder rolled out of his grasp and almost fell to the floor before Gem caught it.

‘Okay, so it can make alien freaks like you better,’ she said to Brandon. ‘So let’s go and see how well it can hurt them too. As long as I can control the bionoids enough to hurt people, that’s all I need!’

Talem looked at Brandon and raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

‘She thinks that I’m an alien,’ Brandon explained. ‘It’s just some stupid thing that the alien king said when we were on the saucer, to try and make her stop smashing his brains out.’

Talem sighed softly.

‘What?’ Brandon said. ‘Don’t tell me that it’s true! How can I be an alien? I don’t look or feel like an alien; I’ve lived on Earth my whole life! My mum told me the story of how I was born. She’s not a liar.’

‘Did you have a fling with our mum?’ Gem asked Talem.

Talem turned to reply, but had to pause for a moment as the lab was suddenly filled with the sound of fizzing lasers. Jason was testing out the rifles, blasting away at paper coffee cups that he had placed on a shelf on the far wall.

After a minute, the racket stopped. ‘No,’ Talem said. ‘Nothing like that; I did love her, but not in that way. And, no she’s not a liar. But there’s one final part to the story that even she didn’t know.’

‘Er, hello!’ Kat said from near the monitors. ‘Something just flew past.’

Talem went over and studied the footage. The sky was clear over Stonehenge. He rewound the video and paused it on a frame that showed a black shape crossing the screen. ‘That’s Dravid’s ship,’ he said.

Dravid Karkor!
Brandon had wondered what the mysterious alien was doing aboard the saucer. Now he guessed that Karkor must have joined forces with the balak king to help chase down Talem and the cylinder.
But Karkor had helped Brandon and the others escape.
Whose side, if anyone’s, was he on?

‘Have you seen him since you left your home planet?’ Brandon asked Talem. ‘Are you friends again?’

‘He finally caught up with me recently.’ Talem seemed to shudder at the memory. ‘We most definitely are
not
friends.’

‘Then he’s probably come to get the cylinder for himself before that awful king finds out where we are and bombs this place,’ Gem said.

‘Well, we have a spaceship up top,’ Kat pointed out. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s blast off out of here.’

‘You’re right,’ Talem said. ‘I can only save your planet by taking the bionoids, my enemies and all our conflict far away from here. It’s time to go home.’

The monitor screens around the lab flickered and then suddenly were showing the face of Dravid Karkor, who was sitting at the controls of his spaceship. Everyone froze. ‘Can he see us?’ Brandon asked.

‘Yes I can see you, Brandon,’ Karkor said smoothly. ‘Looks like you made it to the last secret lab. Did you find what you were looking for? A way to control the prototype?’

Talem stepped up before the monitors and put his hand on Brandon’s shoulder. ‘He found me, Dravid,’ he said.

Karkor smiled weakly, but his eyes couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘Talem,’ he said, ‘I thought you were …’

‘You thought that I was dead,’ Talem finished. His voice was cold.
Something awful had happened the last time they met
, Brandon thought.
What was it?

‘Talem, what’s done is done. I don’t expect you to forget or forgive, but right now I’m here to offer my help.’ Karkor looked directly at Brandon. ‘We can stop this invasion and destruction of your planet. You can use the cylinder—’

‘No!’ Talem shouted. He shut down the transmission. The monitors reverted to the views over the surrounding countryside. On one screen, they could see Karkor’s ugly black ship hovering over a nearby field. On another, a new threat had appeared: a troop of armed balak soldiers, led by the tattooed giant, marching across the grass.

‘Come on,’ Talem said. ‘Dravid may not have been able to pinpoint our exact location. If we’re lucky we can slip around the stones and get to
Discord
.’

‘And we can use the bionoids,’ Gem said eagerly. ‘We can take out anyone who gets in our way.’

Talem shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Not one more person is going to be killed by my work.’

Gem looked anxiously at the aliens on the monitors. ‘You just want to try and run past them? They have laser guns!’

Talem looked over to where Jason was readying the collection of rifles. ‘So do we. I said that I wouldn’t use the cylinder as a weapon; I didn’t say that I wasn’t prepared to fight at all.’

Jason had hung one of the rifles over his shoulder by its strap. ‘You all might want to load up,’ he suggested. ‘Looks like we’re going to have to blast our way out of here.’

The lift was cramped. The nozzle of Jason’s gun hit Brandon in the nose. He swatted it away, and in doing so hit Kat in the ribs with the barrel of his own gun. They were all armed with the laser rifles, except for Kat. Jason had promised them an in-the-field shooting lesson.

Brandon was nervous. ‘Can’t you talk your way out of this?’ he asked Talem as the lift rose. ‘Dravid was your friend once.’

‘We really are beyond that now,’ Talem said, sadly. ‘It was only a month ago that he finally caught up with me, on a remote moon that I was hiding on. I tried talking to him then. It didn’t work. He left me for dead once he had found out where I had hidden the prototype.’

‘But you can make it right now,’ Brandon insisted. ‘You can do anything with the cylinder now. You can cure Paran, and your baby. Sure, you can’t ever go back to how it was, when you were all friends, but at least you know that Paran isn’t now going to d—’

He stopped. Saying the name of Talem’s lover—Dravid’s wife—had triggered a memory. Saturday morning; it seemed a lifetime ago. The leafy cemetery. The tomb concealing the secret stairs. The name on the tomb …

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How did it happen?’

‘A few years after I arrived on Earth,’ Talem replied as the lift slowed and the doors slid open.

They stepped back out into the middle of a field. The lift sunk into the earth behind them. Its top was covered with rock, soil and turf; it was concealed perfectly.

They were a kilometre away from where
Discord
was parked. Stonehenge was in between. There was no sign of any balaks just yet, so they all started out across the field.

‘This is where I first came when I arrived on Earth,’ Talem told them as they jogged. ‘Salisbury Plain was isolated and uninhabited. I left Paran here, still in stasis, hidden in the ship, while I made a life for myself first in Oxford and then London. I would come back here often to see her and to work on some of the more complex aspects of the technology. What we did in London was advanced, for sure, but not unrealistic. What I did here was—from everyone else’s point of view at least—positively alien. I’d try anything to heal her wounds and save our child. Anything of course that didn’t risk their lives.’

They reached the ancient stones. Jason and Kat conversed quickly, then Jason boosted Kat up on top of one of the monoliths so that she could get a view of the surrounding area.

‘Three aliens approaching from ten o’clock!’ she reported.

‘That’s between us and the ship,’ Jason said. ‘Better get ready for some action.’ He held up his rifle. ‘Pull this lever to take the safety off. I loaded each gun with three power cells which should be enough. They eject automatically when empty, so don’t be surprised when one pops out. I’ve got a bag full of spares.’

Blue laser fire filled the air around them and scorched the stones. The balaks were close. ‘Don’t shoot to kill,’ Brandon warned. ‘We can shoot their legs out and then heal them later.’

Jason’s expression was one of disbelief. ‘Are you crazy? I think it’s less morally twisted to shoot them through the brain and kill them before they know it.’ He didn’t wait for Brandon to argue, but ran and found a position where he could shoot though one of the stone trilithons.

‘He’s right, Brandon,’ Talem said, readying his own weapon. ‘We can’t heal everyone, and this is war: in a combat situation you are justified in defending yourself with lethal force.’

Brandon reluctantly slid off the safety catch on his gun. Gem was grinning as she did the same.

‘This is the last fight, right Gem?’ Brandon said. ‘We let Talem escape with the cylinder, let him lead the balaks away from here, and then it’s over.’

‘Once I’ve managed to shake them off, and enough time has passed, I’ll come back and see you all if I can,’ Talem promised.

There was the sudden sound of lasers: three loud sizzling zaps.

‘You got ’em!’ Kat shouted down from her perch. ‘Two more coming in from three o’clock though!’

Jason ran across the middle of the stone circle and found a new position.

Gem had more questions to ask of Talem. ‘That’s your plan then? To run away? How does that punish those aliens for what they’ve done to our planet? How does that avenge our parents, and James …’

‘I’m not interested in revenge,’ Talem told her. ‘I just want to use what I have created to help and do good in the galaxy. If I have to spend the rest of my life on the run, then so be it.’

Gem’s expression was bleak. She obviously didn’t agree.

‘Three more at nine o’clock now!’ Kat squealed.

‘Some help would be good!’ Jason called over to the others.

Gem ran over to Jason, and Brandon and Talem took the nine o’clock position. Brandon set up his gun on a grassy slope and peered down the scope.

‘Hold the trigger half-way down and the laser will focus on whatever’s at the centre of your sights,’ Talem instructed.

‘Got it,’ said Brandon. ‘So what happened with Paran? You couldn’t find a way to heal her in time?’

‘She’d still be alive today if I hadn’t brought her out of stasis,’ Talem said, aiming his rifle across the fields and squeezing the trigger. ‘Missed. You try.’

Brandon tried to hold the rifle steady as he brought the sights to bear on one of the advancing balaks. The alien must have been about five hundred metres away, but Brandon could make out the vicious expression on the brute’s face. He centred the crosshair on the balak’s ugly pug nose and started to depress the trigger. The crosshair turned from red to green. Brandon kept the pressure on, and suddenly the balak’s head disappeared as it was scorched clean off its neck by the laser. The headless body fell to the ground.

‘Wow,’ Brandon breathed. ‘I was expecting recoil or something, but the gun didn’t move a millimetre.’

Talem took out the other two enemies with two quick and accurate shots. ‘I made these guns in the years that I was on the run. I had never held one, let alone fired one before then. I have never killed anyone with one until today.’

‘If you want peace, prepare for war,’ Brandon said knowingly.

Talem nodded. ‘You’re well-read, Brandon.’

Brandon kept quiet. He had got the quote from a video game.

Talem was gazing across the fields. ‘Sarah fell ill,’ he said. ‘She was pregnant too, so the illness threatened two lives, not just one. At that time we were making great advances with the prototype, but still, in all aspects of life it’s just so much easier to hurt someone than it is to heal them, and that applied to our work too. We wanted to use the bionoids, but at that point it was still such a risk.’

‘But it worked!’ Brandon said. ‘My mum told me. You tried it and it worked! You saved her!’

Talem gave Brandon a pained look. ‘That’s not quite what happened,’ he said.

‘Multiple targets at eight o’clock! Eleven o’clock! Five o’clock!’ Kat shouted down. ‘Oh hell, they’re coming from everywhere all at once! And they’re getting closer!’

‘Switch to wide beam!’ Jason ordered.

Brandon looked at Talem in confusion. ‘This switch here,’ Talem said. ‘It switches lenses and provides a wide beam for ranges up to twenty metres.’

‘Twenty metres?’ Brandon questioned as he turned the switch. ‘That’s leaving it a bit late.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Talem told him. ‘You won’t miss.’

A group of four balaks were closing on Brandon and Talem’s position, scorching the monoliths with their laser fire. As they came within range though, Brandon felt his hyper-awareness kick in as his adrenaline surged. He rolled out of cover, easily dodging under one incoming laser beam, and tilting away from another. He brought his rifle up and fired instinctively.

It was like turning on a red torch. All four balaks were instantly engulfed in the wide cone of amplified light that emitted from the end of Brandon’s rifle. They burned like bugs under a magnifying glass. Brandon was sickened and exhilarated at the same time.