by Rob May
‘This is where I first came when I arrived on Earth,’ Talem told them as they jogged. ‘Salisbury Plain was isolated and uninhabited. I left Paran here, still in stasis, hidden in the ship, while I made a life for myself first in Oxford and then London. I would come back here often to see her and to work on some of the more complex aspects of the technology. What we did in London was advanced, for sure, but not unrealistic. What I did here was—from everyone else’s point of view at least—positively alien. I’d try anything to heal her wounds and save our child. Anything of course that didn’t risk their lives.’
They reached the ancient stones. Jason and Kat conversed quickly, then Jason boosted Kat up on top of one of the monoliths so that she could get a view of the surrounding area.
‘Three aliens approaching from ten o’clock!’ she reported.
‘That’s between us and the ship,’ Jason said. ‘Better get ready for some action.’ He held up his rifle. ‘Pull this lever to take the safety off. I loaded each gun with three power cells which should be enough. They eject automatically when empty, so don’t be surprised when one pops out. I’ve got a bag full of spares.’
Blue laser fire filled the air around them and scorched the stones. The balaks were close. ‘Don’t shoot to kill,’ Brandon warned. ‘We can shoot their legs out and then heal them later.’
Jason’s expression was one of disbelief. ‘Are you crazy? I think it’s less morally twisted to shoot them through the brain and kill them before they know it.’ He didn’t wait for Brandon to argue, but ran and found a position where he could shoot though one of the stone trilithons.
‘He’s right, Brandon,’ Talem said, readying his own weapon. ‘We can’t heal everyone, and this is war: in a combat situation you are justified in defending yourself with lethal force.’
Brandon reluctantly slid off the safety catch on his gun. Gem was grinning as she did the same.
‘This is the last fight, right Gem?’ Brandon said. ‘We let Talem escape with the cylinder, let him lead the balaks away from here, and then it’s over.’
‘Once I’ve managed to shake them off, and enough time has passed, I’ll come back and see you all if I can,’ Talem promised.
There was the sudden sound of lasers: three loud sizzling zaps.
‘You got ’em!’ Kat shouted down from her perch. ‘Two more coming in from three o’clock though!’
Jason ran across the middle of the stone circle and found a new position.
Gem had more questions to ask of Talem. ‘That’s your plan then? To run away? How does that punish those aliens for what they’ve done to our planet? How does that avenge our parents, and James …’
‘I’m not interested in revenge,’ Talem told her. ‘I just want to use what I have created to help and do good in the galaxy. If I have to spend the rest of my life on the run, then so be it.’
Gem’s expression was bleak. She obviously didn’t agree.
‘Three more at nine o’clock now!’ Kat squealed.
‘Some help would be good!’ Jason called over to the others.
Gem ran over to Jason, and Brandon and Talem took the nine o’clock position. Brandon set up his gun on a grassy slope and peered down the scope.
‘Hold the trigger half-way down and the laser will focus on whatever’s at the centre of your sights,’ Talem instructed.
‘Got it,’ said Brandon. ‘So what happened with Paran? You couldn’t find a way to heal her in time?’
‘She’d still be alive today if I hadn’t brought her out of stasis,’ Talem said, aiming his rifle across the fields and squeezing the trigger. ‘Missed. You try.’
Brandon tried to hold the rifle steady as he brought the sights to bear on one of the advancing balaks. The alien must have been about five hundred metres away, but Brandon could make out the vicious expression on the brute’s face. He centred the crosshair on the balak’s ugly pug nose and started to depress the trigger. The crosshair turned from red to green. Brandon kept the pressure on, and suddenly the balak’s head disappeared as it was scorched clean off its neck by the laser. The headless body fell to the ground.
‘Wow,’ Brandon breathed. ‘I was expecting recoil or something, but the gun didn’t move a millimetre.’
Talem took out the other two enemies with two quick and accurate shots. ‘I made these guns in the years that I was on the run. I had never held one, let alone fired one before then. I have never killed anyone with one until today.’
‘If you want peace, prepare for war,’ Brandon said knowingly.
Talem nodded. ‘You’re well-read, Brandon.’
Brandon kept quiet. He had got the quote from a video game.
Talem was gazing across the fields. ‘Sarah fell ill,’ he said. ‘She was pregnant too, so the illness threatened two lives, not just one. At that time we were making great advances with the prototype, but still, in all aspects of life it’s just so much easier to hurt someone than it is to heal them, and that applied to our work too. We wanted to use the bionoids, but at that point it was still such a risk.’
‘But it worked!’ Brandon said. ‘My mum told me. You tried it and it worked! You saved her!’
Talem gave Brandon a pained look. ‘That’s not quite what happened,’ he said.
‘Multiple targets at eight o’clock! Eleven o’clock! Five o’clock!’ Kat shouted down. ‘Oh hell, they’re coming from everywhere all at once! And they’re getting closer!’
‘Switch to wide beam!’ Jason ordered.
Brandon looked at Talem in confusion. ‘This switch here,’ Talem said. ‘It switches lenses and provides a wide beam for ranges up to twenty metres.’
‘Twenty metres?’ Brandon questioned as he turned the switch. ‘That’s leaving it a bit late.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Talem told him. ‘You won’t miss.’
A group of four balaks were closing on Brandon and Talem’s position, scorching the monoliths with their laser fire. As they came within range though, Brandon felt his hyper-awareness kick in as his adrenaline surged. He rolled out of cover, easily dodging under one incoming laser beam, and tilting away from another. He brought his rifle up and fired instinctively.
It was like turning on a red torch. All four balaks were instantly engulfed in the wide cone of amplified light that emitted from the end of Brandon’s rifle. They burned like bugs under a magnifying glass. Brandon was sickened and exhilarated at the same time.
He heard similar noises and shouts of shock and glee from all of his friends. An inhuman howl of rage rang out from somewhere nearby. Brandon saw the giant tattooed balak disappear behind one of the outlying stones. Dravid had obviously sent him to lead the attack.
The rest of the oncoming balaks also retreated to cover. Brandon and Talem took a breather from the carnage. ‘I did indeed save Sarah, but I was over-confident,’ Talem said, continuing with his story. ‘I thought that because I had saved Sarah, that I could then also save Paran and our child. So I took her out of stasis: a dangerous move because not only did I now have only hours to save her, but the tracker that Dravid had placed in her wedding band was re-activated. I knew that we would have to go back on the run almost as soon as I had healed her.’
Talem paused in his story to turn and fire at the head of a balak that had popped up from cover behind a low rise. The shot was deadly accurate. Talem nodded to himself in satisfaction and went on:
‘I had them both down in the lab under Highgate cemetery; Paran and Sarah, the two most important people in my life, side-by-side. While Sarah was recovering I set to work on Paran, but this time focusing the bionoids on our child, who was due to be born. With my encouragement, they were able to help push him out and into my arms. Him: a perfect healthy boy.
‘Then it started to go wrong. I lost control of the bionoids. My scanners indicated that they had left Sarah’s healthy body and were attacking her unborn child. And in Paran’s case, after they had helped her child into the world, they turned on her. I had to operate immediat
ely, but by the time I had gotten to Sarah’s baby, it was too late.’
Brandon was confused. Too late? But here I am!
‘It was too late for Paran too. I was distraught; angry, guilty and confused. And I couldn’t stay on Earth; I had to leave, but how could I go and leave Sarah to cope with her grief and my failures on her own?’
Brandon wasn’t slow on the uptake. ‘Oh my god,’ he gasped. ‘You gave your baby to my mum! And you never told her!’
‘Yes,’ Talem admitted. ‘I had to make a few quick cosmetic fixes to make your ears and face grow into a more human arrangement, but yes, Brandon. You are my son.’
Brandon was lost for words.
‘Once Sarah was awake and well and you were in her arms, I told her that I was an alien, and that I had to go home. I don’t think she took me seriously, until I made her examine my DNA. I insisted that we run some tests on you too, Brandon, and again I did a quick fix to make the results appear human. Any irregularities could be explained away by the bionoids’ interference. I was thinking and acting fast and irrationally—so who knows what Sarah might have suspected in the years I was away?
‘Anyway, I left Earth a few days later. I gave Sarah’s son and Paran a funeral in space.’
‘Look out!’ Kat shouted. ‘Nine o’clock! Quick!’
Five balaks were rushing Brandon and Talem’s position. Talem took down two, then Brandon soaked up the rest with his wide-angle laser when they got close.
But it was a diversion. The monoliths that they were taking cover behind crashed down as the giant balak came charging in from their blind side. Brandon leaped out of the way, but his father was caught underneath the immense stone. Talem gasped in agony as his legs were crushed beneath him.
The giant balak jumped up onto the fallen stone, and loomed over Talem’s prone body, a laser pistol in each hand. Brandon’s father took one desperate look at his son before the balak shot two holes at point blank range straight through his chest.
Brandon sprawled in the dry dusty grass, panicking as he tried to process what he had just seen. The giant alien fixed Brandon with a deadly gaze and slowly swung his gun barrel in Brandon’s direction.
In the next instant, the balak had dropped his gun, spread his arms, arched his back and was screaming at the sky. Brandon looked about for some clue to this sudden change. He saw Gem running over, holding the cylinder out in front of her. She looked furious. All of her anger was directed, via the bionoids, into the body of the giant balak. Brandon could hear squelching noises coming from inside the alien’s body.
Jason hurried over in Gem’s wake. He stood and took careful aim at the convulsing balak, then shot one, two, three lasers at the alien’s head and arms. What was left of the giant beast collapsed to the ground and lay still.
Kat flew down from her perch and went straight to Brandon. ‘Are you okay? Brandon! It’s alright, it’s over!’
‘That’s the last of them,’ Jason confirmed. ‘Let’s get to the ship.’
Brandon crawled over to his father.
‘Leave him,’ Jason snapped. ‘He’s dead!’
Kat shoved Jason away as Brandon knelt over Talem’s body. He wasn’t dead; not yet, anyway. ‘Brandon,’ his father gasped.
‘I can help you,’ Brandon said. ‘I can fix this!’ But he knew that he couldn’t: his father had two massive holes burned into his chest. You couldn’t heal what wasn’t there.
‘I’ll get them!’ Brandon promised instead. ‘I’ll kill them all. From now on, I won’t even think except to think about revenge!’
‘No,’ his father said softly. ‘Brandon … you can command the bionoids. They’ll respond to your thoughts just as they did to mine. But don’t turn this into a war. It’s what they want …’
Then he died. Brandon, who had only known his true father for minutes, cried like it had been years instead. Kat eventually pulled him away, and arm-in-arm they made it across the fields to Discord, where Gem and Jason waited at the entrance ramp, watching the horizon with guns in hand. They stood by awkwardly as Brandon and Kat stumbled aboard, and then they followed up the ramp.
Brandon made it through the midsection of the long, narrow spaceship until he reached the cockpit, and then he collapsed in a daze into the large leather-upholstered pilot’s chair. The wide panoramic window provided an expansive view of the plain. Was Dravid Karkor still out there somewhere? Had he watched the laser battle, and was he now thinking up a new scheme to get his hands on the cylinder?
The others came into the cockpit and sat around: Gem in the co-pilot’s chair; Jason and Kat on the floor.
‘Do you need a minute?’ Gem asked Brandon.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, resting his head against the cool console.
‘I mean, to work out how to fly this thing?’ she persisted.
Brandon almost laughed. He pulled himself together and swung round in the chair. ‘You don’t have to all come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop you off somewhere safe.’ He looked at Jason and Kat. ‘France, if that’s where your parents are. It shouldn’t take long to fly there in a spaceship!’
Gem and Jason exchanged glances. ‘Where are you planning on going, Bran?’ his sister asked.
‘Space,’ he said simply. ‘Talem was my father. I’m an alien. So out there in space is where I belong. I’ll lead the balaks far, far away from here. Earth will be safe again.’
Gem looked serious. ‘They killed our parents, Brandon.’ She paused for a second. ‘Mine and yours now! And James. And countless other people. We can fly this ship straight to their giant UFO and end this thing right now; we can take them all down!’
Brandon opened his mouth to reply, but Gem obviously wasn’t in the mood for discussion. She stood up and marched out of the cockpit. ‘Get this thing off the ground at least,’ she ordered. ‘We should check if there are any other weapons stashed aboard. Come on, Jason.’
Jason gave Brandon a serious stare as he followed Gem. ‘Kat,’ he said. ‘Come on. I’ll need to show you how to shoot. Just in case.’
Brandon slumped back in the pilot’s seat. The leather was soft, blue and alien. What kind of animals did they have on Corroza anyway? Blue cows? Probably something he couldn’t possibly imagine. Perhaps he would find out one day, he thought, as he scanned the controls and instruments in the cockpit. There was an animated map of the galaxy showing on one of the screens; perhaps there was a pre-programmed course set that would take him to what he had better start calling his home planet.
Propped against one of the screens was a framed photograph of Talem and a woman at a party. She had striking violet eyes; it could only be his mother. Paran. Brandon spent a few moments absorbing every detail of her face. His parents looked happy. He wondered if Dravid Karkor was the one behind the camera.
He sensed movement behind him. Kat was still in the cockpit. She sat close to him on the arm of the blue leather chair and gave him an encouraging smile.
‘I thought you were going to go and do some shooting,’ Brandon said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. I just watched twenty or so people get zapped to bits by lasers. I don’t think I want to be part of anything like that ever again.’
Brandon raised an eyebrow. ‘People?’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Aliens are people too, right? Or at least they must think of themselves as people, and us as aliens.’
‘I don’t even know what to think of myself as now,’ Brandon admitted.
He closed his eyes as Kat prodded his face with her fingers. ‘I always did think that there was something strange about you, Brandon Walker.’
He smiled. ‘I feel human,’ he said. ‘But how do I know what other humans think it feels like to be human …’
He stumbled over his thoughts. Kat’s fingers were very distracting ‘Um, I mean …’
‘I know what you mean,’ she said.
‘I mean,’ he babbled on, ‘maybe being human isn’t anything to do with what planet you’re from
; maybe the word human should be changed to mean something that all people from all planets can aspire to be like: something decent, fair and good. I want to be human—if I can’t call myself human, then I don’t know what to think of myself as.’
‘You’re definitely completely unique,’ Kat said. ‘Brandon, are you really thinking of trying to fly to the aliens’ planet in this ship?’
Brandon caught Kat’s wrist in his hand to stop her probing fingers. ‘No. Not there. That’s the last place I can go right now; wherever I take this technology, someone will always want to use it as weapon, or for profit, or to divide or oppress people.’
‘You’re going to destroy it?’ Kat asked.
‘No!’ Brandon laughed. ‘This isn’t the One Ring, Kat; it’s not inherently evil! But I have to go on the run, I think: wander the galaxy, helping people if I can, but always moving, always staying one step ahead of those who want to steal the cylinder.’
He sighed. ‘Well, that’s the plan, anyway. I don’t think Gem and Jason will let me go.’
‘Let me talk to them,’ Kat said. ‘I’ll trick them into leaving the ship. I’ll think up a sneaky reason.’
‘They won’t be very happy with you if you help me get away.’
‘I don’t care,’ Kat said. ‘Jason needs to stop giving a hey about what I do and think. And I never really liked Gem much. Anyway, I’ll help you if …’
‘If what?’ Brandon asked suspiciously, holding Kat’s gaze.
‘If you take me with you,’ she finished.
‘I dunno, Kat …’ Brandon began.
Kat moved in to head off Brandon’s arguments with an eager kiss on the mouth. His super-fast reactions didn’t see that coming. Kat held him prisoner with her lips for a good minute before letting him up for air.
‘You can’t go alone,’ she breathed. ‘You can’t fly across the galaxy, chased by angry aliens, all on your own. It’s too dangerous. Either that or you’ll get bored in space! You’ll need someone to play I Spy with at least!’
