by Rob May
Paran was gravely wounded, lying in the stasis chamber in the medical bay, the movement of all the atoms in her body, her child’s body—and also of those in her treacherous wedding band—slowed down to a permanent halt. It was beyond Talem’s skills to help her with the equipment on board the ship.
In his hand he weighed the prototype technology that could either be a weapon or a cure. But right now, both options were out of his reach. He needed time, help and resources.
He returned to the cockpit to make one more journey, this time with no one on his tail. He set the co-ordinates for the star system known as Sol.
‘So then you wound up in Oxford and started working with my mum?’ Brandon said, picking up the story at the point where his mother had begun hers. They were all sitting around on comfy leather chairs, under the low roof of a small underground vault, listening to Talem talk.
‘Yes,’ Talem said. ‘Sarah is—was—a remarkable scientist: creative and daring, yet diligent and responsible. What we achieved could change both our worlds …’ He tailed off. Talem had only landed on Earth hours before Brandon and the others had arrived at Stonehenge. He was still getting his head around the fact that Sarah Walker was dead.
Talem Tarsus was nothing like Dravid Karkor. He was slightly heavier and more careworn, and his ears were not as pointed. Perhaps he had reshaped them himself to blend in better when he lived on Earth. But Brandon could still see that there was something alien about him, in the way he moved, and the look in his eyes.
‘So you got our mum mixed up in all of this, and then only a few years later you ran away and left her,’ Gem pointed out.
Talem smiled sadly. ‘It feels like I’ve spent a lifetime on the run,’ he said. ‘I’ve been all over the galaxy, trying to keep one step ahead of my enemies and keep them away from Earth. It was far too dangerous to stay here, and it was all I could do to keep Dravid away for as long as I have done. But now he’s here, with the balak king and his army in tow. I hope it’s not too late to do something.’
Brandon thought of London smoking in ruins, Brighton washed away by the sea, and the countryside broken and buckled by earthquakes. Was it already too late? He reached into his pack and produced the metal cylinder. ‘Maybe this will help,’ he said, offering it up to Talem.
Talem’s eyes lit up. ‘Bring it over to the science bay,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you how it works.’
They gathered in another quadrant of the vault. This lab, the last of the three, was open plan, with low partition walls forming spokes from the central lift shaft that had brought them all down. The entrance had been ingeniously hidden in the middle of a field on the other side of Stonehenge from where Talem’s ship had landed. It was the first time any of them had been inside: even Talem had only been told about it by Brandon’s mother just before he had returned to Earth. He had wondered how anyone had managed to construct a secret lab so close to Stonehenge, but then he had noticed obsolete pipework and a bricked-up tunnel: his mother must have converted a disused pumping station.
Kat stayed where she was, staring at a bank of monitors that showed what was happening outside. She was taking her role of early warning system very seriously, despite looking like she was about to fall asleep on the job. They were all suffering from lack of sleep. It was now five in the morning on Monday, and Brandon had been up since Saturday.
Jason was the only one who seemed to have any energy left. While Talem led Brandon and Gem to a workstation, Jason took an interest in the bag of weapons that Talem had brought down from his ship. There were four serious-looking laser rifles fitted with scopes and tripods, and a couple of laser pistols that looked like plastic toys. Jason began hoisting the rifles on his shoulder and taking aim at imaginary targets. Brandon tried to ignore him and concentrate on what Talem was doing.
The alien had set the cylinder in a specially designed cradle on the workstation. Several nearby machines automatically powered up, and a bank of monitors filled with streams of numbers and complex readouts. ‘Have you thought much about what this might be?’ Talem asked Brandon.
‘I know it’s nanomedicine. So I’m guessing that there are nanobots in there. Tiny robots.’
‘Yes. A billion of them. Funnily enough, nanomedicine on your planet is going the way of simple controllable particles that are intended for specific applications, rather than actual tiny robots. A bit boring, don’t you think? But I wanted something more adaptable, something more powerful, so tiny robots it is! These have a titanium shell and tool appendages, but the body is made largely from my own genetic material. DNA can be used to store plenty of digital information—databases and software that the robots might need—but it also means that I can establish a strong physical link between the robots—the bionoids as I call them—and myself. Complete control over this technology is my ultimate concern.
‘So how do you keep control of a billion individual bionoids?’
Talem smiled. The danger of his return to Earth, and his grief over Brandon’s mother seemed to fade as he talked about his work. ‘I’ll show you, but first we need to program the bionoids.’ He looked expectantly at Brandon.
Brandon recalled the files of genetic code that he had found on his mother’s laptop. The balak king had smashed the hard drive underfoot when they were on the saucer. Good job he had copied the files onto the memory card. He handed it to Talem, who inserted it into a slot on one side of the cylinder dock. He took a similar looking card of his own and inserted it into a slot on the opposite side.
‘The control software?’ Brandon guessed.
‘Yes,’ Talem said. ‘Programming the bionoids to do medical work at a genetic level—well, that was your mother’s area of expertise—but controlling them, directing millions and millions of robots that might be spread over a massive area—that’s what I’ve been working on all these years. It’s a big responsibility. I had to be sure that they will never get out of control again like they did back on Corroza.’
‘Just tell us how you control them,’ Gem said impatiently.
‘With my mind,’ Talem said simply. ‘Okay, we’re good to go; the bionoids are fully programmed.’ He took the cylinder out of the dock and tossed it in the air. It landed back in his palm with a satisfying slap. ‘Each bionoid now has access to the entire reference genomes of humans, balaks and my people—the zelfs; and not only that but they’re also loaded with the instructions necessary to carry out cell repair and surgery pretty much anywhere in the body.’
Talem looked across to where Kat was sprawled across a leather sofa. She was fast asleep. ‘Watch this,’ he said, holding the cylinder out towards her and concentrating. ‘When we’re feeling tired,’ he explained, ‘we are really just being tricked by our body into saving some energy and not putting ourselves at risk by being out and about. It’s an evolutionary thing, keeping us out of trouble in the same way that pain discourages us from putting ourselves in danger of injury. And just as we can suppress pain on a neurological level …’
Kat’s eyes suddenly flicked open and she jumped up off the sofa. She looked wide awake. ‘Hey guys,’ she said, straightening her glasses and glancing at the monitor screens as if she had never been asleep. ‘What are you all looking at me for? You all look knackered!’
‘Come over here,’ Talem said. Kat bounced over to the workstation. Talem put the cylinder down, on its end so that it would not roll, on the workstation surface. ‘I can control the bionoids remotely—neither myself nor the patient need to be in contact with the tube.’ Again, a look of concentration came over his face. Did the cylinder vibrate slightly in front of them? Brandon stared at it closely.
‘I see them,’ he said.
Brandon could detect a subtle shift in the texture of air, as if a barely perceptible cloud was leaving the tube and shooting up towards Kat’s face. ‘You can see them?’ Gem said. ‘I can’t.’ Brandon remembered his mother’s report on his incredible vision. He obviously took it for granted and never realised just how much
more he saw than other people.
Kat took her glasses off and blinked. She looked confused. ‘My glasses have gone all blurry … oh!’ She squealed in delight. The sound made Jason pause in his examination of the laser rifles and look over at what they were doing. ‘Jason!’ Kat said. ‘I can see!’
Talem shrugged and held out his palms. ‘An easy fix,’ he said modestly. ‘I just sent the bionoids to burn away part of her cornea.’
Jason wandered over. ‘Any chance,’ he asked, ‘that you could get them to burn a little part of her tongue out, just so that she can’t talk quite as much?’
Five minutes later, they were all alert and awake after having their tiredness banished by the bionoids. Talem insisted that they must now eat, as they would probably feel like they had more energy than they actually did. They found some frozen lasagnes in the freezer in the kitchenette and put them in the microwave.
As they sat around eating, Brandon reached out to touch the top of the cylinder. ‘So how does the mind control work?’
‘Our brainwaves are like a wireless datastream,’ Talem said. ‘Sure, they’re analogue, not digital, but I’ve programmed the bionoids to be able to read and convert those signals, to recognise my mind and intentions. And I’m relieved to discover that it works in practice as well as in theory this time.’
‘You tried using mind control before?’ Gem asked.
‘Yes,’ Talem admitted. ‘Sarah and I managed to get the bionoids to respond to simple commands, but we would soon lose control of the entire swarm. That’s when the bionoids would do more harm than good. It’s easier for them to cause damage that it is to repair it.’
‘Gem managed to get them to cause some damage on board the alien saucer, that’s for sure!’ Jason said.
‘Really?’ Talem looked troubled. ‘They are set to respond only to my brainwaves, and to Sarah Walker’s to a limited degree. But of course!—the brainwave patterns in the central cortex are hereditary. It makes sense that her children would probably generate a pattern that the bionoids recognise.’
‘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 ha
ve 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.
