by Elle Simpson
We hunkered down behind a cluster of dull, powered-off consoles. Kal wrenched open another squelchy wall panel, yanked out a handful of crystals, and unhooked the saffron dinner plate from his flight suit.
“You gotta do it,” he said, pointing to an empty divot in the panel. “It’s coded to your biometrics.”
“Just, like, click it in?” I asked, taking the crystal from him.
“Yeah, the device knows what to do. But the second you activate it, you gotta close your eyes. And hold your breath. The system will only let the microdust pass through for a few milliseconds before it cleans up atmo. But we don’t wanna breathe it in if we don’t have to. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said, sounding far more decisive than I felt. “Ready?”
“Ready. On my count. Three, two—”
I took a deep breath.
“—one.”
And clicked the crystal into place. Saw the tiniest glimpse of the world turning red as I screwed my eyes shut. Heard a heavy thump. Another. More.
Then the drone of some kind of fan-type thinygmajig powering on and off again.
“You can open your eyes now,” Kal said.
So I did – and I saw a bumtonne of Akanarin lying sprawled out on the ground like Schwarzy after a collision with a lamp.
All of them. Every single one. The full metric bumtonne of Akanarin.
“Oh my god!” I threw myself at Kal and hugged him hardcore. “Oh my god, Cheekbones, we did it! We did it! We saved Planet Earth!”
So of course – of freaking course – that was when Creepy Bob came stalking through the door.
39
Kal shot her. Again and again and again.
But the pulse of energy from his barcode scanner never reached Creepy Bob. Just fizzled up and shimmered in the air around her, like something was blocking it, like something was…
“Oh god, it’s the brooch.” The one from the gala. Creepy Bob was still wearing it, and now the white glass was glowing faintly.
“Clever, don’t you think?” Creepy Bob said, tapping the brooch with a creepy four-knuckled finger. “Creates a bubble of perfectly breathable, uncontaminated atmosphere.” She directed a creepy eye-smile Kal’s way. “Atmosphere contained within a shield which is entirely impenetrable to meddling Watchkeepers and their useless little weapons.”
Kal roared. Like, straight up roared. He leapt over the cluster of consoles and threw himself at Creepy Bob – then thudded off the shield just as quickly.
And in the second it took him to do that, Creepy Bob moved too. She grabbed me. Hauled me back into the shield with her, clamped her arm around my chest, clamped my arms flat to my side, and pressed a barcode scanner gun to my temple. A scanner I knew without a single shadow of a doubt wasn’t set to stun.
I tried to shift my arms. Kinda worked but kinda didn’t. Because there was a little more give to Creepy Bob’s grip than to Kal’s concrete fingers – but there was also a space gun aimed straight at my brains, that only pressed harder as I struggled.
“Oh my god,” I whispered, and very much, totally stopped struggling.
“Let her go,” Kal said, barcode scanner pointed straight at Creepy Bob, not wavering even a millimetre. “Baakatarin, you need to let her go.”
“Or what?” Creepy Bob laughed then, and it sounded especially unhinged – as if she’d really, truly found the deep end and dived straight in. “Will you shoot me again, Watchkeeper?”
“That’s the plan,” Kal said. “Shield’s gotta give out at some point, huh?”
“Before or after your pistol does?”
“Wanna find out?”
“But will I let you watch the little human die first, I wonder?” Creepy Bob ground her gun harder into my temple. “I think that would entertain me. A Watchkeeper who can do nothing but watch. Imagine it. The dramatic irony of it all.”
During Creepy Bob’s creepy soliloquy, Kal had been busy circling around us, putting himself firmly between Creepy Bob and the door. I guessed there must’ve been some kind of supersoldiery, tactical point to it.
But whatever – it was the only reason that I was the first one to notice when a familiar, wobbly figure appeared over his shoulder.
“Oh my god! Deeke!”
Kal turned. Shot instantly. Would’ve hit Deeke clean between the eyeballs – if Deeke hadn’t been wearing a shield brooch too.
“I ordered you to stay on the bridge, child,” Creepy Bob snapped.
But Deeke ignored her. Or didn’t hear her, see her, even know she was there. It was hard to tell. Deeke’s eyes were misty, all milky-white blobs on black, and so far away.
But—
Her cottage-cheese eyes stuttered past mine, tripped back, and caught. “Hans,” she said. “Hans, you are here.”
“Deeke,” I shouted again, desperately. “You’ve got to make her stop! She’s using you. She’s stealing your compulsion!”
“You waste your breath as you reveal yet another of your lies,” Creepy Bob whispered in my head. “The child is loyal only to me, and she is under my compulsion. She cannot disobey.”
But she had.
Creepy Bob had told Deeke to stay on the bridge but here Deeke was; Colin had resisted a High Compulsion, and there’s no way that wasn’t Deeke’s doing either.
And that was the thing: I wasn’t the only raging bucket of hormones in the room. Deeke was a teenager too. Col had told me that. So Deeke could disobey, and she had, just a little, here and there.
But I needed her to disobey a lot, all over the fricking place, and right freaking then and there.
“Deeke, you can break her compulsion!” I yelled, heard my voice cracking and snapping like Toni’s fancy spun sugar. “I know you can! You have before! Make her let you go!” I struggled against Creepy Bob’s grip, gone a little crazy with adrenaline and fear. “Help us! People are going to die, Deeke. Please!”
“Enough of this,” Creepy Bob snarled – and snarled it with a huge smack of compulsion.
My forehead burned as Deeke’s protection caught up a second later, but even that second was enough to shock me into stillness.
And in the stillness – in front of my ear, against my temple – the hum of the space gun started to thrum.
I closed my eyes.
Thoughts flashed through my brain like a strobe light: Kal, he was a one-man army and Creepy Bob couldn’t compel him again. He’d find a way to free Colin. And Colin would find a way to disable the terraformer. Together, they’d find a way to stop Creepy Bob.
They’d save Earth. They’d save Mum and Toni and Deeke. That was enough. If this was it, then that was enough.
And this was it.
I felt – actually, literally felt – the heat of the barcode scanner powering up against my skin. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter. Braced for the inevitable.
And then—
An agonised sound, a screaming roar. In my head. Everywhere.
Deeke. “B’oab Baakatarin, you will let her go!
The crash of Deeke’s compulsion was a physical thing, a wave that tore over my skin as it smashed around me and smacked straight into Creepy Bob. She wobbled, arms going lax. I pushed away from her with all my strength – scrambled desperately away, fell over my own feet and landed with a thump.
“No more,” Deeke said, and her voice was so low I could feel it inside my bones, in the pulp of my teeth, all over my skin and giving me goosebumps. “Enough. You will stop, B’oab Baakatarin. You will stop. Now.”
And Creepy Bob did. Completely.
Her huge teardrop eyes rolled up in her head, leaving nothing but white behind. Her head snapped back, and she followed, crashing to the ground, landing in a crumpled heap. The brooch flickered once, twice, then toppled to the ground too, light gone out.
Stunned silence. Then me, panting like a startled, asthmatic rabbit. Then, “Is she still…?”
Kal pointed his barcode scanner, put his boot to Creepy Bob’s shoulder, and poked. “Alive, yeah. Out cold
, though. You okay?”
I was about to be. “Give me your barcode scanner. Right now.”
“Huh?”
“Give it.” And when Kal wasn’t quick enough about it, I clambered to my feet and snagged the gun out of his hand. “This is still set to stun, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just making sure.” Then I took aim and shot Creepy Bob straight between the creepy eyeballs. Once. Twice. Thrice. “Wow,” I said, “that was somehow even more satisfying than I thought it was going to be.” I handed Kal his spacegun. “I might need to borrow it again. Just so you know. Like, if Creepy Bob wakes up, I’m totally calling shotgun on shooting her in the head with the barcode scanner.”
“And I will absolutely help you do that,” Kal said, “if you can deal with—” he pointed with his chin “—this situation.”
And the situation? Deeke, staring numbly down at her own shield brooch. She held it cupped in her hand, but then made a fist, and the brooch crumpled into dust.
And it was as if doing that crumpled the rest of her too. Deeke’s knees went out from under her and she folded to the floor.
“Oh god, Deeke!” I threw myself down next her. “Oh my god, are you okay?” I reached out for her hand. “Deeke—”
“Do not touch me!” Deeke’s voice exploded in my head again. No compulsion this time. Just scared. Just sad. “You should not touch me. I am dangerous.”
“Oh, Deeke, no…” I tried again, pressed my fingertips to the back of her wrist, and when she let me do that, I took the rest of her dusty hand in mine and squeezed.
But, “I am dangerous,” Deeke repeated, her voice gone even flatter. Shock – had to be. “I am very dangerous. You should not comfort me. You should shackle me instead. You…” Her eyes had cleared enough to make out when she glanced over at Kal. “You should kill me.”
“No one is killing anyone,” I told her firmly. “Least of all you.”
“But I am evil,” Deeke insisted. “I am wrong.”
“You have High Compulsion, that’s all. It doesn’t make you wrong or evil or bad. It just makes you you, Deeke.”
“But I am wrong,” Deeke said. “I was born under the accursed moons. I am dangerous to all. I am wrong. Wrong.” And she just kept repeating that over and over again, like it was something she’d been taught – times table or Avogadro’s constant or something from physics that I’m supposed to remember and so totally don’t. “Wrong, wrong, wrong—”
“Deeke.” I squeezed her hand tighter. Squeezed until she stopped with the traumatised chanting and looked at me. “What Creepy Bob did was wrong. And what she did to you was wrong. But you’re are not wrong, Deeke. There is nothing wrong about you. C’mon, you just saved my life. You just saved a whole planet! How is that wrong?”
But Deeke wasn’t convinced. Like, at all. “I could have stopped our leader long ago,” she said. “I should have stopped her long ago.”
“Yeah? And how was that gonna work? She’s had you under this weird feedback compulsion loop for, what? Months? Years? And you’re just supposed to shrug that off? Easy as anything? Of course not,” I said, disbelieving. “C’mon, Deeke, it’s not weird that it took you a long time to break out of it. Of course it isn’t.”
And somewhere, somehow – finally – some of that seemed to register. Deeke blinked, slo-mo and then a little less slow-mo. Quietly, she said, “I didn’t want our leader to hurt anyone else. I didn’t want her to hurt you, Hans. She has hurt so many. I thought…I thought this is enough. There will be no more. I would not let there be more. And my mind cleared enough to make it so.”
“And you did make it so,” I told her, “because you are brave and you are awesome.”
“I am none of these things,” Deeke said, as wet tracks of what had to be tears began tracing shiny lines down the weird, odd angles of her huge alien face. “But it is kind of you to say.”
“Oh, Deeke.” I had to do something to stop this. I couldn’t deal with the alien puppy dog eyes when they were teary too. “Do Akanarin do hugs? Are hugs a thing you do?”
“Hugs?” Deeke cocked her head. “What is…hugs?”
“This,” I said, and stretched my arms as wide as they could go around Deeke’s middle, tucked my head under her chin, and held on tight, tight, tight.
“No, we do not do hugs,” Deeke said, eventually, quietly. “But…I find now that I begin to wish we did.”
“Then we’re starting a new trend,” I told her. “You and me. Human-Akanarin intergalactic hugging. Actually, you too, Cheekbones.” I glanced over my shoulder and clicked some fingers. “Intergalactic interspecies group hug time. Bring it in.”
“Oh, by the light of the seven moons,” Kal muttered, but a heavy arm slid around my waist and squeezed. So me thinks the intergalactic supermodel slash supersoldier doth protested too muchly, like majorly.
Skrit. Clack. Click. A weird, sudden skittering noise out in the corridor.
“What the—?” I began.
Kal, still hugging me with one arm, aimed his barcode scanner at the doorway with the other. No evil Akanarin appeared – but Colin did.
“Oh dear,” he said. “I see I have arrived a touch too late to enact a dramatic rescue.”
“It’s the thought that counts,” I told him. “We’re group-hugging. Want to join?”
“Very much so,” Colin said, skittering forward. Then he caught sight of Kal, stopped short, and wilted like only a giant alien cockroach-scorpion hybrid from space could wilt. “Ah,” he said.
“Yeah,” Kal said, glaring. “Ah.”
40
So here’s the thing: Col wasn’t lying. He’s really not the president of the universe. He is, however, the president of the universe’s fiancé.
“Betrothed,” Colin said. “We are betrothed, and we have been so for any number of years. So I fail to see why threats to the president’s life are so suddenly equated now with threats to my own.”
“Because I told you why,” Kal said, then added, totes belatedly, “Your Excellency.”
“No, you offered an opinion as to why, which I profoundly disagreed with. Really, if I were to desist from my duties each and every time the president received a death threat, then I would never work, would I?”
“But these threats were too detailed,” Kal said. “Whoever wrote them knew too much – about you, about your department, about your operational schedule. The threat was to you specifically, not to the president.”
“I would argue that a matter of interpretation,” Colin countered. “In fact—”
“Oh my god, boys, get a room,” I muttered, left them to their obviously really familiar argument, and sat down next to Deeke again.
She looked kind of wrung out still, but her eyes were already much clearer, the curdled milkiness fading fast. “I am maintaining the compulsion for now,” she told me. “His Excellency thinks the Humans of Earth would panic greatly if I were to suddenly release their minds from all manner of compulsion. So I have instructed them to keep themselves safe and to help others remain safe, but to do nothing more.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “We can switch off the compulsion bit by bit when you’re ready and Col’s ready and, like, when we’ve worked out some sort of plan that’s not going to cause total and complete global pandaemonium.” If that was even at all possible, oh my god. “So don’t worry, okay? It’s all good, Deeke. We’re all good.”
“Are we?” Deeke asked, and I couldn’t really blame her for not sounding convinced.
“Maybe not right now, not right at this exact second, but we will be.” I took her hand in mine again and gave it a squeeze. “You will be, Deeke.”
“I hope so,” Deeke said.
“I know so.” I gave her hand another squeeze and got a big, watery eye-smile for the effort.
“—without even logging your departure with Xantari Gate Command. That’s just basic operational procedure.”
When I tuned back in, Chalk and Cheese were
still sniping away.
“Because I simply wanted,” Colin said, “to check upon the progress of Planet Earth for one last time before the ceremonies and the rigmarole of it all began. Was that so wrong?”
“All you had to do was ask,” Kal fired back. “I woulda got you clearance.”
“Clearance,” Colin said, “and goodness knows what circus of a security detail dragging along at my tarsi.”
Kal made an expansive gesture that somehow totally, entirely managed to convey, ‘wouldn’t be in this mess then, would we?’
And Colin understood too. “A salient point,” he allowed grumpily, “though somewhat contemptuously—”
Wreeeeeeep! Wreeeeeeep! A horrible noise filled the room – a screeching, possessed beeping.
“What’s Creepy Bob done now?” I yelped, halfway to my feet and fullway to my freakout. “Are we totally sure we switched off the evil compost bin?”
“Totally sure,” Kal said. “Just like the five other times you asked that exact same question.” He squelched a finger to a wall panel and the screeching stopped. “It’s just…huh.” Kal cocked his head. “It’s a hail,” he said. Then, “It’s a hail from…” He squelched some more. “Huh.”
“Helmsman?” Colin prompted.
“It’s the flagship.”
That nugget made Col’s eyes go wide up on their stalks. “The flagship of the fleet?”
“Yeah,” Kal said, doing some more nonplussed squelching. “That one.”
“But how could the flagship possibly be hailing us? We’re well out of range, the relay station is non-operational, and when last I knew of her location, she was in deployment at the Takamosta Cascade.”
“Was in deployment,” Kal corrected. “Not anymore.”
Colin chuffed a disbelieving little laugh. “And how can you know that, Helmsman?”
Kal pointed to the panel. “Mostly? Because she’s taking up orbit alongside us right now.”
“Wait.” I did a little ‘aliens are weird’ blinking but mixed in a touch of ‘confused and so done with this shizz,’ just for good measure. “You mean the flagship of the people you work for is here?”
