by Rob May
‘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.
<
br /> ‘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.
‘Where to?’ he barked.
‘What?’
Hewson sighed. ‘Where do you want to go? I’ve lost all of my team; HQ have gone dark; I figure that I may as well start taking orders from a fourteen year-old kid.’
Brandon was delighted. ‘We need to get to Salisbury plain, maybe Stonehenge,’ he said, jumping aboard. The others bundled in the back and Hewson set off across the fields again. He was a better driver off-road than Jason ever was on.
‘Salisbury Plain?’ Hewson muttered. ‘That’s where I was heading … until I saw that huge spaceship chasing you in your little rocket. Well, I guessed that it was probably you, running rings around the aliens just as you did with me.’
‘Why were you heading that way?’ Brandon asked. He was concerned. Did Hewson and MI Zero know about the third secret lab?
‘The RAF has a temporary base there. Northwood Headquarters outside London got taken out by a meteor yesterday; Army Strategic Command in Hampshire was attacked by flying saucers this morning. Every jet, tank, pilot and soldier left in the country is regrouping in Wiltshire to plan some last ditch assault on the space invaders. I heard that The Chief of Joint Operations is there. I hope that’s true, because otherwise the chain of command is going to break down completely.’
Jason was navigating, flicking through the pages of Hewson’s road map. He hadn’t managed to connect to the internet. ‘You need to find the A272 and follow it to Winchester.’
‘Got it,’ Hewson confirmed. ‘Looks like the UFO is closing in,’ he said, checking his rear view mirror. ‘So, is there something at Stonehenge that will defeat these things?’
‘Something like that,’ Brandon said evasively. He sounded like Dravid Karkor, but right now he needed Hewson’s help. So what if he believed that there was an alien super weapon hidden somewhere? ‘Haven’t the army tried nuking the big saucer?’ he asked.
‘Tried,’ Hewson admitted. ‘And failed. They’re protected by some kind of energy field that misdirects incoming missiles and throws them off course. I think the next plan is to try boarding the thing instead.’
They left the fields and dirt tracks and joined the road. The Land Rover seemed to still be shaking though. Was the suspension damaged? Then Brandon realised; it wasn’t the vehicle that was shaking; it was the road.
The saucer was deploying its seismic beam, this time on land.
Brandon could see trees shifting at the side of the road, and the ground started to buckle beneath them. Cracks were appearing in the tarmac. Hewson had to pull off a dramatic swerve as a long split opened up in front of them.
They’re going all out to stop us this time, Brandon thought. The alien king must have regretted not destroying the cylinder when he had the chance. Brandon wondered if Dravid Karkor would be held accountable for suggesting that the king keep it. Maybe he had already been incinerated in the star reactor.
Kat leaned in between the two front seats. ‘They must have been dragging that earthquake beam up and down all over the countryside behind us to block off our escape. They’ll ruin the whole country!’
Hewson grimaced as he concentrated on the road. ‘When you got pulled aboard that saucer … did those creatures take that device off you?’
‘No,’ Brandon said. ‘They wanted it. They didn’t get it.’
‘So what made you decide,’ Hewson asked, ‘not to just give them what they wanted and hope that they go away? More people are going to die so long as that saucer continues ripping this country apart!’
‘What?’ Brandon was shocked. ‘Are you saying that it’s my fault? You’re talking like it was me who dropped a giant asteroid on London, and not some genocidal aliens! And besides: this technology that they’re after could kill millions more people if it fell into the wrong hands, so who are you to say if I should or shouldn’t have given it to them?’
Hewson turned to Brandon, caught his eye and nodded, as if to say, correct answer. Brandon realised that he was being tested.
Hewson looked back at the road, then swerved and drove up a grassy bank as a chasm opened up in front of the Land Rover. Everyone on the back seat screamed. There was a thud as Jason’s head hit the side window. As Hewson fought to bring the vehicle back under control, Brandon stared at the scene ahead.
The straight flat road that they were following into Winchester was suddenly rising behind them and falling ahead. What was once an empty horizon was now a vista filling their field of view: the city before them was sinking into the ground.
As they watched, the ground split in hundreds of places along the length of the river that flowed through the centre of the small city. Almost every building, road and tree was shifted to a new angle. The city hung in its new arrangement for a few seconds, and then the buildings started to collapse. The white stone cathedral, having stood for a thousand years, fell apart as easily as if it was made of wet sand. A terrific cloud of dust was thrown up by the destruction and started to fill the newly created pit.
As the dust enveloped the Land Rover and blocked the world from view, Hewson spun the vehicle around and started to drive back uphill. The road was still rising though; the Land Rover’s wheels began to lose traction and they felt themselves moving backwards and down towards the sunken city.
Brandon estimated that the angle of the slope was over forty-five degrees and still getting steeper. Hewson seemed determined though, working the revs and the clutch with focused intensity. Everyone else waited in terrified silence.
‘Would it help,’ Kat asked after a while, ‘if we got out and pushed?’
Then the wheels bit into the tarmac and the Defender was inching its way back up the road. At the top of the slope, they found
themselves back at a motorway junction that they had passed coming into the city. Seeing the alien mothership wrecking havoc to the north, Hewson headed south.
‘You’re not going to make it to Stonehenge,’ he told them.
Brandon agreed. ‘Even if we do, they’ll destroy the lab. We can’t get there in secret with that thing hovering over us.’
‘So what are we going to do?’ Jason asked. ‘We’re driving aimlessly down one of the only roads in England that’s still in one piece, with a mile-wide flying saucer hot on our tail.’
‘How are they following us?’ Gem cut in.
‘They’re right above us!’ Jason shouted. ‘They can see us!’
But Brandon knew what his sister meant. He’d seen first-hand the high-tech gadgetry and weapons that the saucer had at its disposal and guessed that they could easily scan and track his DNA, if not tag them with some kind of impossible-to-detect bug. But the only person on board who would have the brains to do that was Dravid Karkor, and Karkor wanted them to escape.
‘They must have just been following the rocket, and now the Land Rover, by sight,’ he said.
‘Look in the back,’ Hewson interrupted them.
Behind her seat, Gem pulled out some hold-alls and cases.
‘There’s dried food, medical supplies, tents, thermal blankets and tools,’ Hewson said. ‘Take what you need.’
‘We’ll take it all,’ Jason said, checking out a pair of night-vision goggles. ‘Can’t you give us any guns?’
‘What are you going to do?’ Kat asked Hewson.
‘I’m going to do my job,’ he replied, ‘and get you civilians out of the warzone.’
Hewson left the motorway at the next junction and headed south along a tree-lined B-road. He kept checking on the mothership as it passed in and out of view behind the trees. He turned to Brandon. ‘MI Zero has special executive powers, and since I’m probably the last operative alive then it’s my decision what to do with you.’
Brandon nodded.
‘So I’m letting you go. Get to Stonehenge, do what you have to do to stop or get rid of these invaders. Find me at the RAF base if you need help. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll see you back in London for the clean up.’
