‘We should have mowed a pathway for them,’ said Charlie. ‘We kind of owe them that much.’
They caught up to the warriors in the clearing outside Tom’s cottage. Poor Enrick was being pestered by a dozen different suggestions for the new song he was trying to compose, ‘The Ballad of King Hibble and the Earth Rats’. King Hibble himself was at the head of the procession, laughing with his companions. When they heard the kids coming through the leaf litter, the whole army turned.
This time, Amelia knew exactly what to do, and it didn’t feel awkward at all. She dropped to one knee, bowed her head and said, ‘Your highness, you saved both our families. Thank you!’
The king laughed again. ‘Yes, Metti Rosby came to tell us as she left. We are pleased for you, cubs.’
‘But now you’re going, and we haven’t done anything for you,’ said Amelia.
‘I’ve got a chocolate in my pocket,’ said Charlie. ‘You can have that.’
‘We have our honour back,’ said the king. ‘We can go home without shame. That is enough for us. And,’ he added, ‘Metti Rosby promised to send a crate-load of the Guild’s best salted scorpions as thanks from Control.’
A cheer went up from the warriors.
‘You’d rather have salted scorpions than chocolate?’ said Charlie.
The door of Tom’s cottage opened with a creak.
‘I thought I heard voices out here.’ Then Tom remembered who he was talking to. ‘Your grace.’
‘Did you hear we get to stay, too?’ said Amelia.
‘And Ms Rosby said Amelia and I should get to know everything!’ Charlie added.
Amelia didn’t think that was quite what Ms Rosby had said, but she let it go for now. Tom grunted.
‘Did she come to see you too?’
He nodded. ‘Said she wanted to send someone to do up this place.’ He looked sullen. ‘Said it’s not good enough for the most active gateway on this side of the galaxy to look like it’s run out of a slum. A slum! Can you believe some people?’
Amelia thought of the plates of forgotten sandwiches. And the apple cores. And the open packets of biscuits that lay among the piles of charts and clockwork. It said something, she thought, that even a nest of cyber-rats had preferred to live in a nearly empty hotel than come anywhere near Tom’s squalor. She had no idea what the rats had been eating, but apparently it was better than any of Tom’s leftovers.
Tom stood back from the door to let the Brin-Hask through, and just rolled his eyes as Amelia and Charlie followed them.
‘So what will Control do to this place?’ said Amelia.
‘Nothing!’ he growled. ‘I convinced her it was far safer to leave it as it is. If she does it up too flash, well, that’d only raise suspicion if anyone from Forgotten Bay came looking, wouldn’t it? Some old shack in the woods, and all clean and fancy inside?’
‘Oh,’ said Charlie. ‘So all this mess is just a clever disguise, is it?’
Tom scowled at him.
The gateway grumbled.
‘What time will our wormhole align?’ said King Hibble.
‘I’m not sure, your grace,’ said Tom, immediately polite. ‘The wormholes keep speeding up, but unpredictably. And as you know, the Brin-Hask connection is always unstable.’
‘Why?’ said Charlie.
Tom glared, but the king answered him. ‘We come from one of the furthest reaches of the universe where gravity works slightly differently. It’s stronger in our world, for one thing.’
Charlie nodded. ‘Is that why you’re all so short?’
Charlie! Amelia thought anxiously. Why would you say that?
But the king just nodded. ‘And, to be modest, why we are so strong. Your planet’s gravity is like a shadow of what we are used to at home.’
To make his point, he put a hand under the corner of Tom’s sofa and lifted. Without any apparent effort he held one end of the sofa above his head. The other end was still on the ground but Amelia was in no doubt, he could have easily lifted all of the sofa’s weight – it was only the size that was too much for his paws.
The gateway grumbled again, and this time Amelia heard the cawing of distant birds.
‘It’s here!’ said Tom. ‘You have to go now.’
Amelia wondered how sixty warriors could get down that long stone staircase quickly enough, but gravity was the answer there, too. King Hibble simply called out, ‘In ranks!’ and the warriors fell into rough formation and jogged into the next room.
‘Farewell!’ the king cried and they ran, leaping, into the hole in the floor.
Charlie would have run forward after him to get a proper look, but Tom caught the back of his shirt and said, ‘They practically bounce down. Imagine it for yourself, because you’re going nowhere near those stairs.’
Charlie frowned, but didn’t argue for once. The gateway’s grumble increased until the noise hurt their ears, and the door at the bottom of the stairs was sucked shut with a bang. The cottage was silent.
‘Right, then,’ said Tom. ‘Off you go.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Charlie. ‘And we only came to invite you to celebrate with us up at the house.’
Tom snorted. ‘You can celebrate, I have work to do.’ He poked around the clutter on his desk and began fiddling with an old music box, undoing the screws.
‘Will the Brin-Hask come back?’ Amelia asked.
‘Who can tell?’ he shrugged. ‘But I wouldn’t hold your breath. The Brin-Hask wormhole is not only unstable, it also moves very slowly.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Charlie.
‘It doesn’t need to make sense to you!’ Tom snapped. ‘I’m telling you how it is. The Brin-Hask connection with Earth only lines up every three or four years, so, no –’ he looked at Amelia, ‘I wouldn’t count on seeing the warriors again for a while.’
‘Three or four years,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I sort of thought aliens could travel whenever they liked.’
‘Don’t you kids pay attention to anything that goes on here? The gateway operates on wormholes. No wormhole, no travel. The whole point of the hotel is that people have to wait for the right wormhole. The Brin-Hask and Miss Ardman stayed overnight, but some guests have to wait for weeks or months.’
‘But not Leaf Man,’ said Amelia.
‘What?’ Tom gaped.
‘Leaf Man doesn’t seem to wait. He doesn’t stay at the hotel, and he told us he was leaving yesterday afternoon, but then I saw him again last night. Either he was lying about going or … well, maybe he can control the wormholes.’
Tom’s face contorted alarmingly. ‘You – nosy – little –’ he began.
Amelia thought it was a good time to go, before he finished that sentence. There was a violent bang as a blast of wind from the gateway blew open the door downstairs.
‘What was that?’ Charlie yelped.
Tom looked satisfied. ‘A blowback.’
‘A what?’
‘A good lesson to you two not to get over-excited about the gateway – not to think you can just ask a couple of questions and know what’s going on here.’
‘So what is going on?’ said Amelia.
Tom looked stern. ‘A blowback is a reminder of how dangerous the gateway is. Not interesting, not amazing, and not cool,’ he sneered on the last word as only a grown-up who thought kids were idiots could. ‘It’s none of those things. It’s raw danger.’
Charlie was thrilled. ‘But that is cool!’
‘Listen to me!’ Tom bellowed. ‘You don’t know what a blowback is. You can’t know!’
‘So tell us,’ said Amelia.
‘I am telling you! No-one can know. A blowback can be literally anything in the universe – anything that has wandered too close to a shifting wor
mhole and got sucked into the current it creates after itself. Downstairs, the door was ripped open by wind. Now,’ he said more calmly, ‘it could be that it was only wind – a gust of air trapped in the wrong place and escaping here. Noisy, but more or less harmless.’
Charlie sniggered.
Tom, ignoring him, went on. ‘But it could have carried anything at all with it. Sometimes, I have been down the stairwell and it’s been full of fish. Or alien leaves. Or enormous shoes. Once there was half a tree – only half, split down the middle from leaves to roots, as though the wormhole had sliced it through like a laser. And that could have easily have been a person standing there. So do you see? There could be anything at the bottom of the stairs.’
Amelia said meekly, ‘So how do you find out?’
Tom looked bleak. ‘How do you think? I go and look.’
Amelia stared at him: an eye-patch, a hand missing a finger, the limp that Charlie believed was a wooden leg. How much of that had been the gateway?
He sighed deeply and fetched a climbing harness from behind the sofa. It was attached to a rope that was bolted to the floor with a heavy iron ring. He strapped himself into the harness, tugged on the rope and then said, ‘You both stay in this room, understand? Not a single toe beyond the doorway. And if I am longer than a minute, or if I yell out, or if you hear anything that isn’t me, you go. Don’t hesitate. You run, close the door behind you and go straight to your parents. Right?’
‘Promise,’ said Amelia.
Tom grumbled to himself and limped towards the stairwell. Halfway there, he paused. The gateway had been still since that last bang, so he continued over to the top of the stairs. The rope had been tied so he had just enough length to make it across the room and down the stairs. Amelia watched it slither across the floor after him, uncoiling, straightening and then tightening as he reached the bottom. They heard the door close – carefully, not slammed shut by the wind, so it must have been Tom – and then the thud of his boots returning up the stairs.
When he emerged from the stairwell, he was in his singlet, carrying his shirt rolled up in a bundle.
‘What’s that?’ said Charlie.
Tom carried the bundle over to the kitchen table, shoving aside some plates. ‘Shut the door, Charlie. Let’s not let anything in or out of here until we know what we’ve got.’
Charlie pushed the door closed and Amelia crossed her arms, uncertain. It didn’t smell like dead fish. It was smaller than a tree. That still left a lot of things in the universe it could be.
Tom unwrapped the corner of his shirt, and out popped a square, black head, softly furred with two enormous yellow eyes.
‘What’s that?’ said Charlie.
The eyes blinked and then a wide, toothy mouth opened in a yawn, revealing a long, purple tongue.
‘It’s a puppy!’ said Amelia, and ignoring Tom’s gruff, ‘Hey!’ she stepped forward and lifted the little animal into her arms. She gazed at it, taking in the stout body, the fat paws and the soft black fur. The animal gazed back, cocking its ears intelligently.
‘That’s not a puppy,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s an alien.’
The creature turned its head and looked balefully at him.
‘It’s a creepy alien,’ he corrected himself.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Amelia. ‘He’s lovely.’ She snuggled her face against his fur.
‘Don’t do that!’ snapped Tom. ‘You don’t know where it’s been!’
‘Don’t know where he’s from,’ Amelia said. ‘So what do we do with him?’
‘I’ll have to contact Control,’ said Tom. ‘Search the databases, match the description and find its origin. There’s all probability that it’s from the Brin-Hask planet, but we’ll have to verify that officially. Unless the thing can talk for itself …’
He regarded it for a moment, but it only wagged its tail and tucked its head trustingly under Amelia’s chin.
‘What will Control do with him?’ she asked.
Tom ummed and ahhed a bit. ‘They’ll most likely order us to negate the security breach.’
Amelia looked at him steadily. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning,’ Tom admitted, ‘that they’ll send someone to put it down.’
‘Oh, no, that won’t happen,’ Amelia said. ‘I’ll keep him. Dad said I could get a dog anyway.’
‘Hmm,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s not exactly a dog, though, is it?’
Of course it wasn’t a dog. His glowing yellow eyes had vertical slits for pupils, like a cat’s, and he smelled more like the beach than an actual dog. And rather than yapping his head off and trying to bite and chew everything in reach, he was cuddling quietly into her arms. But those didn’t seem like reasons to let Control kill him. If anything, didn’t they make him more precious? More deserving of her protection?
‘I’m keeping him,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
The little creature opened its mouth into a wide, happy smile and barked, just once:
‘Grawk!’
Cerberus Jones
Cerberus Jones is the three-headed writing team made up of Chris Morphew, Rowan McAuley and David Harding.
Chris Morphew is The Gateway’s main story architect. His job is to weave the team’s ideas together into awesome, page-turning story outlines. Chris’s experience writing adventures for Zac Power and heart-stopping twists for The Phoenix Files makes him the perfect man for the job!
Rowan McAuley is the team’s chief writer. Her role is to expand Chris’s outlines into fully-fledged novels, building the excitement and fleshing out the characters. Before joining Cerberus Jones, Rowan wrote some of the most memorable stories and characters in the best-selling Go Girl! series.
David Harding’s job is editing and continuity. After Chris and Rowan have done their part, David arrives to iron out all the kinks. With his superior knack for spotting issues and coming up with solutions, David is the polish that makes The Gateway series shine! He is also the man behind Robert Irwin’s Dinosaur Hunter series, as well as several RSPCA Animal Tales titles.
The Warriors of Brin-Hask
published in 2015 by
Hardie Grant Egmont
Ground Floor, Building 1, 658 Church Street
Richmond, Victoria 3121, Australia
www.hardiegrantegmont.com.au
This ebook is also available as a print edition in all good bookstores.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.
A CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia
eISBN 9781743583159
Text copyright © 2015 Chris Morphew, Rowan McAuley and David Harding
Illustration and design copyright © 2015 Hardie Grant Egmont
Illustration by Craig Phillips
Book cover design by Latifah Cornelius
We welcome feedback from our readers. All our ebooks are edited and proofread vigorously, but we know that mistakes sometimes get through. If you spot any errors, please email [email protected] so that we can fix them for your fellow ebook readers.
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