by Elle Simpson
Then I slammed the door shut and locked it tight.
Straight back out into the hall, straight to the front door, heading straight out the door at full-speed-Hannah – when something caught my eye.
Plastic box, red lid, white handle, big ’ole snail.
“Lottie!” It was Carlotta, sitting in her plastic travel case on the sideboard, the one Toni put her in when he wanted company behind the bar. “Oh my god, Lottie!”
No way was I leaving Carlotta to the mercies of a ding-donged evil alien. So I grabbed the case and yanked the front door shut hard enough behind me to make the bolt fall into place.
“There,” I muttered, “that’ll hold you up a little more, you evil freakjob.”
I hugged the edge of the building all the way round to the back, checked left, check right, saw no aliens – then bolted. But clutching Lottie’s case in one hand made vaulting dramatically over the boundary hedge not a great idea – or even a feasible one. So I scooted along until I found a sparse patch and hustled through.
And then I ran. Went tearing – still a touch limpily – across the fields, made it ten metres from the man-eating sheep’s favourite picnic area, then five, two, one…
The second I became aware of someone behind me was a second too late. The Akanarin grabbed my ankle and brought me crashing to the ground with him.
“Oh my god, give it up, you absolute freak!”
I twisted around before his grip could tighten more. Took Carlotta’s case and swung it down at his oversized head with a totally red-cardable overhead swing. The Akanarin’s head didn’t crack – but the case did. Carlotta went flying. She smacked to the grass and rolled to a stop between my knees, tucked up tight in her shell.
“Let me go, you evil whackjob!” I screamed at the Akanarin.
I kneed him in the head a few times. Tried to kick him in the head too, but his grip on my other leg was just too strong. I couldn’t get the leverage. I couldn’t get free. I couldn’t—
Carlotta peeked her head out of her shell, and the Akanarin went very still, very suddenly. Carlotta eyeballed him from the top of her glistening eyestalks, and the Akanarin’s grip on my ankle went lax, equally suddenly. Carlotta pulled herself up to her full slimy height, and the Akanarin—
“Argh!”
—screamed. Actually full-on screamed, and kept on screaming as he scrambled to his big, creepy feet and straight-up ran away.
I blinked. “Wh…what just happened?”
But Carlotta had no answer. And I had no answer. So we tabled the Q&A by mutual agreement and got a move on.
Carlotta’s case was broken to bits, completely useless. So I scooped her up and tucked her safely into the pocket of my hoodie instead. Then? I ran straight for the Big Dish.
Like I’d told Colin, I had an idea. It wasn’t much of one, but this was it: take the lift up to the actual, like, dish part of the Big Dish, then climb all the way up the focus tower. That’d get me a nice, clean one hundred meters above ground, which was as high as high got in Little Buckford – external stimulants not withstanding.
I just had to hope that was high enough.
I looked up as I ran and saw I’d lucked out. The Big Dish was still parked for whatever maintenance Mum had been doing, the bowl of the dish at horizontal, the focus tower in the middle sticking straight up into the Cheshire sky.
I’d been up that tower a few times with Mum, when she’d been fiddling with the receivers and I’d been bored enough to pretend to be interested. So in a very theoretical kind of way I knew where I was going and I knew how to get there. The question was, could I?
“Guess it’s time to find out,” I muttered.
I jumped the low fence in front of the control room, and made straight for the Big Dish’s nearest support tower. Smacked through the door there, hoping against hope that the service lift was waiting at the bottom.
“Oh, thank god.”
It was – this big, rickety freight lift, powerful but so slow. I scrambled in, pulled the grate into place, and slapped my hand to the power button.
The lift began to rise.
No windows. If Creepy Bob’s evil minion had gotten over his snail freak out and was coming back for me, I had no way to know. All I could do was stare at the peeling paint on the walls and count every ridiculously slow second that passed.
Then—
The lift clanged and bounced to a stop. I wrenched open the grate and flew out along the upper gangway, clanged up the steps until I was right under the dish, then hauled bum up the ladder there, straight out onto the dish itself.
“Ow!”
Oh my god, so bright. I had to stop for a second, squinting against the whiteness of the dish, then squinting against the glare of the rising sun as I looked up – and up and up – at the focus tower.
“Okay yup, that’s pretty high,” I said faintly.
The tower wasn’t really made for climbing – not without hard hats and safety harnesses and all sorts of health and safety certificates. But there was a ladder, a really thin one with even thinner rungs, painted black so you could pick them out against the glare.
Which I did, as I climbed. And made it to the top. Slammed open the access hatch. Clambered out onto the platform beside the receiver box, then up onto the box itself, and stood there with the aircraft warning light flashing away between my feet.
“Colin!” I shouted. “I’m as high as Cheshire gets! If you’ve got a plan, now’s the time.”
Nothing – at first. Then a white blob swooping down out of the wispy clouds.
“Colin!” I shouted. “I’m here!”
It was the first time I’d ever seen Colin’s ship from the outside, and his ship was a legit flying saucer, like something straight out of every dodgy UFO sighting there’s ever been. A big white-glass flying saucer. And behind it, flying straight at me?
“Oh my god.”
Was Creepy Bob’s ship.
Swinging down out of the sky, getting faster as it arced closer, like a boulder running down hill. Then a sudden crackle, a snap of static electricity, and the terraformer shot out a pulse of fiery light. It missed Colin’s ship by a breath – and blew a hole straight through the Big Dish instead.
The impact sent the whole tower rocking and me flying. I crashed down onto the platform below and smacked my side against the guard rail on the way, hard enough to wind myself.
“Ugh,” I groaned. I tried to move. But – nope, not yet. I had to struggle to gulp down a breath instead. Another breath. Another. Then, “Bunch of freaking alien nutjobs,” I ground out, and put my guns of steel to use to haul myself back up onto the receiver box.
“Hannah!”
Colin’s ship stopped so suddenly and so sharply beside the focus tower that the terraformer overshot. It swung wildly off into the distance, miles away before I’d even blinked. But already the tone of the engines was picking up as the ship changed direction, heading back our way.
A hatch appeared in the side of Colin’s UFO, and Colin appeared out of the hatch. “Hannah,” he shouted, reaching out across the gap between us with a huge pincer. “Quickly! You must jump!”
I looked down and then wished very much so that I hadn’t. “It’s too far, Col! I’ll never make it!”
“You will! I shall catch you!”
“I don’t think—”
But then, no time to think. The shrill crackle of the energy cannon. A blast of blindingly bright light thundering towards me. The blown-to-bits bowl of the dish so far below me.
“Oh god!”
I leapt off the platform and out into the empty air.
33
Colin caught me.
One tiny flinch and he would absolutely, totally have snapped me in half. But he didn’t flinch. He caught me and tossed me up into the safety of the ship.
“Engage shields!” he shouted, hauling himself back in too, and in the same instant the hatch zipped closed.
The console beeped. And the ship rocked – but
only a little. Far less than you would’ve expected after getting clobbered by a huge ball of evil alien raygun-type stuff.
“Oh, Hannah!” Colin said desperately, reaching for me. “Oh, I am so glad to—”
“Col!” I threw myself into the middle of the pincer explosion and hugged him hardcore. “You’re okay! Oh my god, you’re okay.”
A mandible smoothed through my hair. “My dear little hatchling.”
But no time for emotional reunions. Something beeped. Then whirred. Then beeped again.
Colin disengaged with one last pat of a pincer. To the console, he said, “Engage the cloaking field, please. Then take an evasive outer atmospheric orbit. And open the observation port, if you would be so kind.”
The console bleeped at him, and the far side of the room started to carve open again. We were powering up into the sky, going completely vertically. I could see the terraformer scooting about below us, obviously still searching for Colin’s ship, but growing smaller and smaller as we whizzed upwards.
And when we stopped – couldn’t have been more than five seconds later – the view of Earth through the window was awesome but a little hazy. We’d parked just short of being properly out in space.
I heaved in a breath. It felt like the first proper one I’d taken in hours. “Col, what are we going to do about—”
But the console interrupted. More beeping, frantic this time.
Colin’s eyes went wide on the top of their stalks. “Oh, the seven moons! There is another lifeform on board with us!”
“Oh my god!” I spun around, looking over to where the hatch had disappeared. “Where?” Had Creepy Bob’s evil minion followed me? Had he climbed in too? “Where, Col? Oh my god, where?”
Colin didn’t reply. I wheeled back around – and found his eyes fixed straight on my belly.
“Oh my god!” I yelped.
I patted frantically at my stomach. And it felt completely fine, no surprise alien babies in residence. But I did feel something…
“Oh no, wait. God.” I flopped a little with relief. “Col, I think you mean Carlotta.”
I scooped her out of my pocket. Carlotta was still tucked away inside her shell – which looked fine, thank god – but she peeked her head out when I settled her in my palm, then came squelching out completely when she saw it was me.
I gave her a very gentle finger pat between her twitching eyestalks. “Hiya, Lottie. Thanks for saving my life back there. I owe you, like, a year’s supply of bananas.”
“Hannah?” Colin said, sounding totes confused, and for once I couldn’t blame him.
“This is Carlotta. She’s Toni’s pet snail.” I held Carlotta out for Colin to see. “Too cute, isn’t she?”
“Oh, by the seven moons!” Col reared up and startled backwards. He smacked into the console so hard that something cracked. “Oh, may the light of the seven moons protect us!”
I blinked at him in disbelief. “Oh my god, what is so scary to all you huge freaking aliens about one little snail?”
“Hardly little!”
“Hardly scary!”
“Perhaps…” A clear box moulded itself out of the floor at my feet. “Perhaps you could place your…friend in here for the duration? She may be more comfortable.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s you who’d be more comfortable,” I muttered, but I did what Colin wanted.
The box sealed itself up and zipped away to the farthest curve of the wall behind me. Only then did Colin scuttle closer again.
“I’m not even gonna ask,” I told him.
“A wise decision,” Col agreed, still looking over at Lottie like she was a Welsh vampire doctor and he’d misplaced his crucifix and holy water.
“But what I am gonna ask?” Because, like, majorly important point: “Where are the massive forces, Col? Because I’m thinking they’re not here.”
“They are not,” Colin said. “The communication array was sabotaged beyond my ability to repair. I could not transmit Helmsman Kal’s message. Nor, indeed, one of my own.”
But that meant, “They’re not coming then, right? We’re on our own? No massive massed forces to the rescue? No intergalactic pan of paella to go bang, wham, wallop?”
“Paella…” Colin echoed absently, totally lost in thought. Until – “Oh my!” – his eyestalks swivelled inwards suddenly, eyes going wide at the sight of each other, then equally wide as they swung back to me. “Hannah!” Colin exclaimed. “You must tell me, what are the primary ingredients of the grain dish you call paella?”
I was still getting my breath back – and my wits too, turns out. Because all I could do for a second was pant desperately and blink disbelievingly.
“What?”
“Hannah, please,” Colin said, sounding weirdly urgent. He started to clack out a crazy fast rhythm on the console. “This is of great importance. The ingredients! Quickly!”
“Oh my god, keep your nonexistent hair on.” I had to think for a sec. “I mean, rice, mostly? Water, olive oil. I think it was chicken paella, but I didn’t look properly, so maybe rabbit too. Maybe snails. Green beans. Salt. Rosemary. Tomatoes. Paprika. Uh…yeah, that’s it.”
Our friendly neighbourhood hologram fizzed into life and conjured up what looked like some fancy molecular diagrams.
“No, no, no,” Colin muttered as each flicked past. “No, none of these. Something else. There has to be something else.”
“There isn’t, Col. That’s it.”
“Hannah, there has to be,” Colin insisted.
“Uh…” I must’ve watched Toni make his paella a thousand times, helped him make it just as many. I knew the recipe off by heart. I’d told Colin everything. There was nothing else to tell.
Except – wait.
An image flashed in my mind: the Akanarin lying on the kitchen floor, covered head to toe in rice and broth, and the broth that weird, rich goldeny-yellowy colour you just couldn’t get from anything else but—
“Saffron,” I said.
“Saffron?”
I stepped closer to the console. “Yeah. It’s, like, little strands? Little red strands that smell kinda like hay and stuff. They give the colour to the rice. They’re from a flower, I think. Toni always moans about how much the good stuff costs. Saffron.”
The hologram changed. A different molecular diagram appeared, zoomed in, and then just chilled there, spinning slowly in midair.
“This is it,” Colin said. He was very still, pincer poised above the console. “This is how we stop her. This is how we stop B’oab.”
I blinked at him. “With paella?”
34
Turns out those ‘certain respiratory weaknesses’ Colin mentioned a bajillion chapters ago? Turns out they’re pretty important after all.
Because if you can exploit those weaknesses, you can make an Akanarin go sleepy-bye-bye for a bumtonne of time. Hours, days—
“Months even,” Colin said.
“Months?” I echoed. “Months?”
“Indeed. Exposure to the compound in question induces a particularly acute state of systemic dormancy.”
“Like yeah, I’ll say.”
Col explained in more detail. Apparently it was all because of, like…some sort of chemical compound found in saffron? That’s pretty much impossible to find in the known universe? I think? Something like that…
(I glazed over, to be honest. My chemistry abilities are up there with my physics talents. And by up there, I mean, down there, a couple hundred metres below sea level in a flooded, abandoned tin mine.)
“But, Col – the creeper from the loos, he didn’t stay knocked out for long. That was five minutes max, if it even was. The only thing that actually got rid of him in the end was Carlotta.”
“What you must understand, Hannah,” Colin said, “is that the presence of the compound in the original dish was minuscule, and already extremely diluted when the Akanarin came into contact with it.”
“So you’re saying that, like, if one gram kn
ocked him out for five minutes, what could a kilo of the stuff do? What could ten do?”
A pincer clacked the affirmative. “Exactly. Thus, where would I find saffron in large quantities? Exceedingly large quantities?”
What was I all of a sudden, the saffron expert? “Uh…Toni always buys the Spanish stuff. So Spain? I think. Morocco too? Maybe…is it Iran? India? Begins with an ‘I’ anyway.”
“Yes,” Colin said, pincers tapping frantic on the console. “Yes. All of these.”
A transport beam whooshed in and out, and in the next second, the opposite turn of the room was entirely full of saffron, heaped high from white-glass floor to curvy white-glass ceiling. The weird, soapy hospital smell of it was strong enough to make my eyes water.
“Col.” My mouth dropped open. “Did you just steal…oh my god, that’s, like, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth.”
“A small price to pay, one would think, for the potential salvation of the human race.”
“Valid point.”
(Totally was. But my point was valid too. And just fyi – turns out it was millions of pounds worth. Sorry, saffron farmers. I hope someone reimbursed you.)
“Now I shall just…” Colin began, and in a blink the saffron was hovering, caught up in a big blob of gel, like a huge drop of rusty water floating in zero-g. Then just as quickly the drop became a flat crystal that levitated gently to the floor at my feet. “If you would?” Colin said, gesturing.
I picked the crystal up. Tonnes and tonnes of saffron all smushed up and smooshed down inside a white-glass crystal the size of a dinner plate – and somehow the weight of one too.
“Now what?” I asked, just about managing to stow my boggle.
“Now?” Colin said. “We simply insert this device into the workings of the environmental controls of B’oab’s ship. It will then act to disperse the microdust into the atmosphere in such high quantities as to render all Akanarin on board unconscious. That, in turn, will give us enough time to make contact with the Council by other means.”
“Wait.” I was still stuck on the first part of Colin’s hella optimistic equation. “It’ll knock them all out? All the Akanarin? Including Deeke?”
