by Elle Simpson
I took a few deep breaths to quell the rage monster, because even though I’d had it up to my eyeballs by then with random aliens and their random holographic sidekicks rummaging about in my brain, I could admit Colin’s idea hadn’t been a bad one.
In theory.
“It didn’t work though, did it? Not properly, I mean. Because the memories came back in the end, and I totally would’ve blabbed if you hadn’t stopped the compulsion for me.”
Colin shook his eyestalks. “The ineffectiveness of my intervention was entirely due to the unusual strength and abnormal nature of the compulsion B’oab employed. But what you must understand, Hannah, is that I didn’t stop B’oab’s compulsion. Not at the first, nor at the last, nor at any moment in between. That was solely your doing. As it was again, just now, in the control room.”
“Uh…” Complete and total news to me, that was. “I thought…didn’t you do something to my head when you fixed my brain?”
“I did not.”
“Then how—”
“Simply put,” Colin cut in, “you are young yet, an adolescent with developing brain chemistry that is still undergoing a great degree of flux. Inducing the compulsive state in such an unstable neurological environment is often only partially effective, at the very best.”
I booted up the posh alien to not-posh human translator again. “So what you’re saying, basically, is that the only reason Creepy Bob’s creepy mind thing doesn’t work on me is because I’m currently a raging bucket of hormones? Have I got that right?”
“I would perhaps have put it a little more delicately,” Colin said, mandibles clacking together anxiously, “but, well…yes.”
“Wow. I mean, wow.”
Me and my deflated ego had to take a sec to recover from that intergalactic shade session. We turned away from Col, turned towards the curve of the room where the wall curtains were still open, all glass and space beyond.
And Planet Earth. Home.
It was starting to get light out on the west coast of America, already light back in Cheshire – a bright, sunny day, just some wispy little clouds overhead. So far away but at the same time, so close and so clear it was as if I could shoot a dart out the window and land a bullseye on Buckford.
Which…
“This is what I don’t get though,” I said, turning back. “Creepy Bob, she threw that mind-whammy at me – at all of us – in the hospital car park. That was compulsion, Col. That was, like, a hammer of compulsion. And it worked. In the end, I mean, it hella worked. There was no fighting that.”
“No,” Colin agreed grimly, “that compulsion was utterly unassailable. By any and all.”
“That compulsion? You mean…” A thought dawned, horribly, like Monday morning double physics. “Because that compulsion wasn’t Creepy Bob’s compulsion at all, was it?”
“It was not.”
“Then whose?”
“I do not know.” Colin took a fluttery breath, mandibles clacking together like wind chimes. “But what I do know is this: B’oab must have in her possession an Akanarin prisoner imbued with the fearsome power of High Compulsion.”
18
(My brain went to where my brain wanted to go and sorry not sorry.)
“What? Do they smoke up first or something?”
Col deployed a head tilt that would’ve made Deeke proud. “Pardon me?”
“Uh…you know what? Why don’t you just tell me what High Compulsion is?”
Colin touched a pincer to the console and a hologram fizzed into life above it – an actual hologram, not a replicant holomatrix shaped like a freakjob man in black. This hologram was an Akanarin – not Creepy Bob though, the eyes too small, the fivehead too high – and the image barely settled before it pushed forward and zoomed into what had to be an Akanarin brain.
“All Akanarin are able to use compulsion to some degree,” Colin explained as a section of the brain began to pulse with light, growing brighter then dimmer. “But it is a highly variable talent. And when once in custody many galactic-standard years ago – prior to her inevitable escape, of course – B’oab’s compulsive abilities were tested and found to be decidedly average.”
“But there was nothing average about the mind-whammy she threw down in the hospital car park, was there?” I said, catching on.
Colin pointed a pincer at me. “Precisely. In its common form, compulsion can only be induced in a small number of individuals and only when in extremely close proximity to those individuals. High Compulsion, on the other hand, is immensely, undeniably strong and can affect any number of persons over vast distances.”
Judging by the panicky look of Colin’s eyes up on the top of their stalks, I was guessing, “That’s definitely not possible otherwise?”
“It is not.”
“Pretty sought after then? High Compulsion? Like, as an Akanarin job skill?”
“And truly feared. Feared more than not. Feared most.”
“Yikes.” Wasn’t as if that sounded in any way ominous at all. “So how is Creepy Bob doing what she’s doing then, with the mega mind whammy?”
“Simply by compelling an individual already possessing High Compulsion to act as an amplifier for her own compulsion.”
That one took a second to translate. It took lots of seconds, in fact, but when I got there, my skin decided it wanted to crawl off the rest of me in horror. “God, Creepy Bob is the worst, Col. Like, the absolute worst.”
“Oh, would it be that she were,” Colin said, sounding grim. “And the prisoner in question, their compulsive powers – goodness, they must be truly immense if B’oab is able to leave their side and still channel them so freely.”
I understood about a hundredth of what was going on, and I still knew that wasn’t good. I gulped down a sticky breath. “Any idea who the High peep is?”
“None in the slightest,” Colin said. “There is no individual on record as possessing such power. And what compounds the matter even more is that High Compulsion was vanishingly rare before the fall of Akanara, and had been thought extinct since. A myth, even, lost to time and all but lost to memory.”
“The fall of—” Actually, no. Didn’t matter. No time for an evil alien history lesson. “Not so much with the mythical extinctness then?”
“Manifestly not.”
We both just stood there a second, watching the brain pulse, and the silence felt hella bleak.
“God,” I said, “that’s why poor Deeke’s got brains like scrambled eggs. Getting mind-whammied with High Compulsion on the regular.”
“I would imagine so,” Colin agreed. “And given her young age and relative length of exposure, I imagine B’oab’s compulsive grip on her will be great indeed. The poor hatchling.”
Poor hatchling was an understatement. It hurt even to think about Deeke – who had a puddle of lumpy egg for a brain but who’d still flung herself in front of some random human she’d only just met, just to keep her safe.
I made up my mind right there and then. “We have to save her, Col. We have to.” Because if Creepy Bob was the carnivorous sheep-grass to Deeke’s picnic area, then this random human was going to shear Creepy Bob round the corner and back again. Make some shepherd’s pie. Knit a man-eating scarf or two. And to start? “How do you even break a compulsion anyway?”
“If you are not Akanarin yourself?” Colin said. “With extreme difficulty. With much time. And most often unsuccessfully.”
“Wow, Col,” I snapped. “You’re really selling it.”
Colin’s voice gentled. “I am merely trying to present a realistic picture to you. To show that we would be wasting valuable time attempting to break even a single compulsion.”
“But if we were to try, though?” I said pleadingly. “C’mon, just humour me, Col.”
One of Colin’s eyestalks swivelled to check on the extractor. There were some pulsing lights happening now, a few quiet thrums, but still no beeping. And from prior experience, I guessed we were waiting on cranky beeping.
(We were. There’s nothing Col’s tech stuff loves more than some cranky beeping.)
So Colin humoured me. “If we speak in purely the hypothetical sense, then the most effective time to break a compulsion is when the individual who initiated said compulsion is asleep or in some deeper, fuller state of unconsciousness.”
And that seemed like information we could apply in a totally non-hypothetical sense. “That’s easy then. We just wait until Creepy B’oab’s asleep, go get Deeke, break the compulsion. Get us the High Compulsion peep. Break the High Compulsion. Save Planet Earth.” I clapped my hands. “There, job done.”
Colin’s mandibles fluttered in a way that suggested he was still very much humouring me. “In which case, we must take into account that an average fully-grown Akanarin sleeps, at most, one Earthen hour every—”
“Day?”
“Decade.”
“Decade,” I said. Then I blinked, and I moved on.
(Seriously, search for how many times I say ‘I blinked’ in this thing. It’s got to be an epic amount, but I’m not apologising for that, because I was facing epic amounts of epic alien weirdness, so I think excessive blinking was a pretty mild coping strategy as coping strategies go.)
“So why can’t we just do what you did when you fixed my brain? You broke the compulsion then, didn’t you?”
“A matter of incredibly lucky happenstance,” Colin said. “The interplay between Agent Schwarz’s actions, my meddling, and the extraordinary force of B’oab’s amplified compulsion caused you to develop a severe and rapidly progressing subdural haematoma, which very nearly killed you – but yes, did in the process break the compulsion.”
“Oh…” Yikes. “Can’t really go about giving people brain damage then?”
“It is not an ideal solution, no.”
But I wasn’t out of ideas yet. “Then couldn’t you just, like, bop Creepy Bob on the head with one of those?” I pointed to a fluttering pincer. “I mean, that would be one heck of a wallop. Boom. Unconscious. There you go.”
Judging from the increase in fluttering, neither the pincers or the giant alien cockroach-scorpion hybrid from space they were attached to liked that suggestion. “My people are inherently pacifistic. To commit such violence would be to defy my very being. I cannot, Hannah. I could not.”
I regrouped. “Okay – alternative plan? What about, instead of you, if we get Schwarzy to, like, shoot Creepy Bob in the kneecaps? And then we can knock her out with that stuff they give you at the dentist and…”
I trailed off, because Colin was already shaking his eyestalks. “Conventional human weaponry would have no effect. Akanarin skin is impenetrable to ballistics. So too, therefore, hypodermic needles.”
“Oh, well that’s just great.” I threw up my hands. “Perfect. We are so completely and totally fu—”
“The Akanarin do have certain respiratory weaknesses,” Colin cut in, “which could perhaps be exploited, but that would require access to specific chemical compounds that are highly unlikely to occur naturally on—”
“Okay,” I said, interrupting right on back, “so basically what you’re saying is that our entire plan—” I pointed to the extractor, still not beeping, still flickering away “—is that the intergalactic telephone call has to get where it was supposed to go. As a plan, that’s basically all we’ve got. Right?”
“Yes,” Colin said simply. “It is.”
“But that can’t be all.” It couldn’t be. Just some silly message from nobody knew who to god knows where. “Oh my god.” I folded down onto my bum, buried my head in my hands, and started to cry. “It feels like the creepy evil walls are closing in, and there is nothing we can do.”
Colin skittered out, somehow, from through the console. Skittering turned into clacking as he settled down beside me, then a pincer wrapped around my shoulders and pulled me close. “My dear little hatchling, please don’t upset yourself so.”
I hugged him back, my eyes burning with tears. “But I’m scared, Col,” I told him. “I’m so, so scared.”
“Oh, I know that you are afeared.” Colin reached out with another pincer and, ridiculously gently, wiped a tear away. “My dear little hatchling, I know. And I am sorry – so heartsick and sorry – that I have caught you up in this awful business. But you and I, we are a formidable team. Just think of what we have already accomplished. And indeed, if the walls are closing in, then I am certain I can provide us with an escape hatch.”
I couldn’t help the watery eyeroll. “With the message, Col? Seriously, we’re back to that again? What do you think it’s even going to do? I mean, what can it possibly do that’s going to save Earth?”
“What can it do?” Colin echoed mildly, a thoughtful tone to his voice. “Well, I very much hope contained within I will find the encrypted codes required to summon to Earth’s aid the massed forces of the Peacekeeping Fleet of the United Intergalactic Council.”
“The massed…” I snorted up some snot. Scrubbed my face with the cuff of my hoodie. Perked up, just a little, in an eyestalk kinda way. “Maybe you’d like to be a touch more specific about how massed the massed forces are?”
Colin reached up and over and gave the console a wing tap. The holographic brain disappeared in a fizzle of light that swished and swooped and reshaped itself into what had to be a big ’ole alien spaceship. But it didn’t stop there. The hologram zoomed out, and out, and out a whole lot more until filling it from edge to edge was spaceship upon spaceship upon spaceship. Huge things, like aircraft carriers in space.
(Except, you know, if aircraft carriers were a thousand times as big and didn’t look like aircraft carriers and looked like huge alien spaceships instead.)
And that wasn’t all – little spaceships too, thousands of them, silver, pointy like darts, like Cheekbones’ ship, zipping in and around the big ones, so small in comparison they looked like swarms of flying ants.
I took a breath. My heart felt as if it took one too. “The massed forces are massive, Col.”
“Indeed.”
I wiped away some more snot, a flare of hope growing in my chest, like heartburn but the opposite of heartburn because it didn’t hurt and it was a good thing. “So is it at all possible that maybe the massive forces of the Peacekeeping Thingy are not pacifists and will shoot Creepy Bob with their humungous space guns?”
Colin made a weird, wounded noise. “A peaceful outcome is always the Council’s primary aim and will doubtlessly be their first recourse. But should they find B’oab unwilling to surrender, and presenting a clear and present danger to the indigenous peoples of Planet Earth, then yes, I imagine they would then resort to…” Colin stopped to clear a few throats. “Shooting B’oab with their ‘humungous space guns.’ But such aid,” he added, eyestalks quirking towards the console suddenly, “will only be at our disposal if, of course, the message has survived…”
The extractor took its cue and beeped – very much totally crankily.
“Well then,” I said. “Guess it’s time we find out?”
19
Col helped me to my feet, then he used the same pincer to press something on the side of the console. “May the light of the seven moons guide us and guard us,” he murmured.
A trilling noise filled the room, then a series of pings, and then, as if the console just couldn’t help itself, a beep.
“Does that mean it worked?” I asked.
“It means that something has been recovered,” Colin said, “which is more promising than not. Turn your eyes to the display.”
The holographic spaceships disappeared, but there was no fizzle this time. The hologram jumped and shook instead, like it was trying to settle on an image and couldn’t make its mind up.
Colin let out a frustrated noise. “As I feared, the communication module was badly damaged.”
“But is there enough left of, like, whatever it is you’re looking for?”
“I…” Colin leaned closer and the console beeped at him. “�
�yes. It appears the encryption codes are largely intact. Moreover,” he said, voice getting pitchy with excitement. “Moreover, I think…yes, it would appear that at least some of the original message has survived.”
The second he said it, the static above the console shook and settled, and staring back at me from the hologram was a familiar – ridiculously attractive – face.
“Cheekbones,” I whispered, somehow managing to be surprised.
The hologram started to move. Cheekbone’s face stayed still though, even as the rest of the image juddered and shifted around him, a weird, unsettling steady-cam recording. He was in the cockpit of his ship, and he was speaking, saying something to a camera in front of him, but there was no sound.
“Oh, damn it to the mines of Pilori Prime,” Colin muttered, pincers tap-tapping away at the console. “The corruption is extensive, but perhaps if I…” The hologram stuttered and whipped back to the beginning, buffering like a bad wifi connection. And then?
“—encryption channel Nine-Alpha,” Cheekbones said. “Prepare transmission.”
A distant chime sounded on the recording and a calm, computerised voice announced, “Encrypted channel open. Begin communiqué.”
But Cheekbones didn’t speak. Not right away. The hologram was mostly just his face – his head, the helmet, a glimpse of his flight suit covered neck – but you could tell his shoulders were moving, arms too. Maybe as if his hands were swiping across the weird black-glass console I’d trampled all over. And it was clear he was struggling with something, struggling to…
“Wait – oh god, did he record this while he was crashing?”
Cheekbones hauled in a sudden, ragged breath. “Attention: Admiral of the Fleet. This is Junior Helmsman Kal of the First Watchkeepers, assigned to—”
The image shook and Cheekbone’s – Kal’s – voice broke up for a few seconds before it rushed back. But stuttery. Just snippets of what he was saying, flying by too quickly to make proper sense of it.
