Aliens In My Garden

by Jude Gwynaire

  ‘Damn and blast the thing,’ spat the mage.

  ‘I’ll damn, you just blast it,’ Alditha called back.

  Odiz fired a couple of his special favourites at the orb, and they hit it. ‘Grab the girl,’ he said, and Alditha moved, pulling Celeste towards her. It was hard work for a second, but with the orb stunned, she pulled Celeste out of the beam that was trapping her, and the girl fell into her waiting arms.

  ‘Got her,’ Alditha reported.

  Odiz advanced on the orb, curious—it was still in the air, its beam still operating, but otherwise it was silent and still. Sperrywaller’s Dagnabbit was a spell rarely cast in battle, its effects were angry and mostly unpredictable. Odiz wanted to be sure the orb was no threat anymore. He frowned at it, tiptoeing forward.

  ‘ALERT. ALERT.’ The orb’s metallic voice came suddenly, making Odiz jump. He was a mage, and he was fond of his dinner, but Alditha had to blink as she saw him zoom past her, running for the stairs.

  ‘Leg it,’ Odiz called down to them. ‘You’ve got the girl, what are you-’ The rest of his speech was lost as he ran away, and the orb started to remember what its function was.

  Alditha clicked her tongue. Wizards. Still, on this occasion he was right. ‘Leg it, Mr. Alpha. Run.’

  Alpha took Celeste from Alditha, nodded, and ran up the stairs after Odiz.

  Alditha closed the big wooden door after him, then turned to face the orb.

  ‘That was a mighty fine hat you cost me, orb,’ she told it. ‘I think it’s time you and I came to an understanding.’ She rolled up her sleeves.

  __________

  The Green Man chewed fretfully on a strawberry marshmallow as Big Red filled him in on what had been going on.

  ‘-so we need your help,’ the demon finished.

  The Green Man said nothing, just kept chewing.

  ‘Skoros has to be stopped,’ Big Red added, in case the Green Man hadn’t understood him.

  The Green Man swallowed, looked sadly at the demon. ‘I’ll not help spill the blood of any creature in this Garden,’ he said. ‘And that’s what “stopped” means, isn’t it? You plan for him not to be alive?’

  ‘Haven’t thought that far ahead,’ admitted Big Red. ‘Too busy worrying about us not being alive by the time he’s done. You know what he did to his forest?’

  The Green Man raised a spindly hand, closed his eyes. The memory of the tree-burning still haunted him. He had felt them die, his brothers and sisters in consciousness.

  ‘Every effect has a cause. Every cause is an effect, and that effect in turn had a cause,’ he murmured. ‘Skoros is a dangerous being, we all know that now, if we didn’t before. But once he was a child, as innocent as any in the Garden. Evil is not born, Big Red, it is made. Begging your pardon, of course.’ Demons were a bit hazy on the whole good and evil thing.

  ‘That’s as may be,’ sniffed Big Red, ‘but he ain’t a child no more. He’s a wizard, and he might even be a whatchamacall. An EngineSeer. Or somesuch. Big, powerful herbert, Odiz says.’

  The Green Man frowned. It was an impressive frown, rippling across his wooden, lined face. He sighed, like a breeze through branches.

  ‘I’m going to need more marshmallows,’ he said, walking over to his dresser and opening the drawer. He saw the bag that Celeste had given him, full of the little round silver balls. ‘Hmm,’ he said, scooping up the bag. ‘You’ll give me your word, Big Red, or I will not go on this journey with you. Skoros does not die. Not by our hand.’

  The demon grunted. ‘Not by mine, nor any I can stop. Good enough?’

  The Green Man looked at him. Getting a demon’s word on a bargain was traditional. Usually it had to be in writing for it to mean anything, but looking at Big Red, the Green Man relented. The demon was scared.

  The Green Man put the bag of Celeste’s silver balls on a side-sprout on his leg, and paid it no mind as thin branches wove themselves around it, keeping it safe. He straightened his trunk. ‘Good enough,’ he agreed.

  Big Red nodded and led the way outside.

  __________

  Odiz and Alpha were crouching in the undergrowth outside the castle’s blasted door. Crouching wasn’t a position that came naturally to Odiz, and he was trying not to moan about it in the presence of his unusual company.

  Celeste had come too, and he’d introduced himself to the two of them. Introducing Sagar, flying in circles above them had been...trickier.

  ‘What’s keeping her?’ demanded Celeste.

  ‘Would you like to mount a secondary rescue plan, Celeste?’ asked Alpha.

  ‘Calculate strategies, given known parameters and skill sets,’ she said, which appeared to translate as ‘yes, please,’ in Astarian.

  They all heard it more or less at the same moment. The sound of cheerful whistling. It was a smug whistle that seemed pleased with itself.

  Then, from out of the doorway came a different noise. The noise of metal rolling on flagstone. An orb rolled out of the door and stopped when it hit grass.

  Alditha strolled out after it. Whistling.

  ‘How the blazes did you-?’ blustered Odiz, bursting from his cover.

  ‘Me and the orb, we had a conversation. Came to an understanding,’ she explained airily. ‘It understands quite well now.’

  Odiz stared at the orb. Though he couldn’t be sure, it appeared to have several dents and marks on its side that it didn’t have before. Badass witch. He thought to himself.

  ‘Alpha, cancel strategic planning,’ said Celeste, popping up from behind the bush she’d been using for cover.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ said the bio-mech, as Celeste went to greet Alditha.

  ‘Thank you for the rescue,’ the alien girl said, smiling.

  ‘Oh we’re not out of the woods yet,’ Alditha told her. ‘Not by a long way. But it’s time we got out of here.’ She put two fingers in her mouth and gave the most piercing whistle any of them had ever heard.

  The Blue Dragon swept round in a wide arc, lowered and came in to land, his feet scrabbling at the earth for the last few metres.

  ‘All this flying about is giving me the most terrible indigestion,’ muttered Sagar. ‘Not to mention the stress. But that’s just fine, don’t worry about me, just climb on my body and expect to be flown wherever you like. Maybe I should start a service. Blue Dragon Air. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Riding me around like you own the place.’

  ‘Have you ever paid a witch for your stomach medicine?’ asked Alditha reasonably.

  ‘Paying? A witch? The very idea.’

  ‘Then think on and get flapping,’ Alditha told him shortly.

  ‘It’s exploitation, that’s what it is,’ muttered the dragon, as he began to flap his wide blue wings.

  __________

  It took Skoros quite some time to reach the castle. He’d been humiliated. By aliens. Outsiders.

  That’s not going to happen again, he told himself as he reached the front door.

  Or at least where the front door had been. Now there was a gaping hole and the stone around it looked melted and charred.

  Tedious.

  He didn’t waste time on it though, marching straight to the corridor of the ancestors and his secret room. He pointed his wand and watched the cogs and wheels on the wall turn.

  Make me run, would you? Me.

  When the door opened, he went inside and straight to his desk. He took his headset out of its drawer and pulled it onto his head. Then he cranked the handle and saw his machine grind and groan and steam its way into life. He felt under the desk and plugged the helmet in, feeling the spikes poke through his hairline and connect him to the machine.

  Now then...

  __________

  Zirca smiled, standing in the square. He had bio-mechs stationed at the far edges of each of the legs of the crossroads, to keep the local lifeforms out of what was now Astarian territory. He’d sent a pair of orbs into the atmosphere to scan the cracks in the dimensional eggshell above the planet
, and had been surprised to hear a message from Astarian Command. The fleet was close, and in just a couple of slow-slips, or what the bio-mechs said the local life-forms called hours, the Hedge would activate, the cracks would align like lenses in a telescope, and the fleet would be able to come through to this dimension without endangering the fabric of them all. His job would finally be done.

  Of course, before that, he had to rid the planet of all its irritating sentient life. That was outside his mission parameters, and when they’d found the planet, it hadn’t been a problem. He was determined it would not be a problem again by the time the fleet arrived. He hadn’t mentioned it when he’d contacted Command, hadn’t wanted to tell them there were indigenous lifeforms here now, and that the long Astarian search for a new home planet would have to continue.

  That was the trouble with going into prolonged cryo-sleep of course—you never knew what would happen while you were locked away.

  That idiot, Ven Tao.

  If he hadn’t been so busy looking at the local lifeforms, this would never have happened. It was just as well he’d died when the engine had flared. I’d have had to execute him otherwise.

  Zirca hadn’t decided yet quite how he was going to kill all the primitives. He could send the bio-mechs and the orbs to destroy them all of course, but there seemed to be rather a lot of the wretched creatures about the place, and life had developed in unusual ways here—his scans showed him there were intelligent vegetables here, even intelligent fungi and minerals. He clicked his tongue—that was what you got when you went to sleep for 6.8 thousand years. Even the mushrooms started getting ideas above their station.

  Zirca squinted down one leg of the crossroads and frowned. There was a darkness in the sky there, moving deliberately towards the square. A cloud? He pointed a scanner at it. No, a swarm. A swarm of flying creatures.

  ‘Because the day wasn’t complicated enough already,’ he murmured to himself. The swarm grew closer, and closer, a formation of black, flapping creatures. He glanced at his scanner again. Bats, apparently. Zirca’s lips twitched in a smile. This was a stupid planet, with its talking mushrooms and argumentative potatoes and walking trees and so on. For all I know, the bats are coming to beg for mercy, he thought.

  But no—suddenly, the swarm dipped, dropped out of his eye line. It took him a moment to adjust his view to see they had fallen out of the sky and were landing on bio-mech Gamma-Omega-Delta. The swarm seemed to be attacking it, but then, after a handful of seconds, the bats detached, flew off and dispersed, flying individually again, not with the same purpose. Gamma simply stood there, seeming unfocused for long seconds as Zirca watched him. Then he turned his bulbous head and swiveled to look at Zirca. Gamma’s huge black eyes seemed to grow larger and blacker in his head. And then the bio-mech started to run.

  Straight towards Zirca.

  Zirca’s smile grew broader. What have we here?

  ‘Bio-mechs Delta and Lambda, run Astarian defence protocols, apprehend bio-mech Gamma-Omega-Delta.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ said two almost identical voices through Zirca’s headband. The bio-mechs ran fast from another leg of the crossroads, then headed to intercept Gamma.

  They always looked odd when they ran, thought Zirca idly. The spindly legs didn’t look as though they were built to move at speed, but they did, the organic components being taken over by the mechanical in moments of need and powering them precisely where they were instructed to go. The two loyal bio-mechs stood between Gamma and Zirca. Gamma moved rapidly—almost too rapidly for Zirca to register what happened. The rogue bio-mech tore the head off Lambda before he could even raise his hand. Gamma slipped a leg out, tripped Delta, grabbed him as he fell, and pushed both thin-fingered hands against the sides of Delta’s head. Blue electricity sparked from Gamma’s fingers, and Delta shook and slumped. Then he got to his feet, and both bio-mechs jogged, calmly and in perfect unison, towards Zirca.

  Zirca stuck out his chin as they arrived. ‘Bio-mechs Gamma and Delta, you are in contravention of your ord-’

  He gasped, as Gamma’s long fingers grabbed him by the throat and lifted him up, squeezing gently, but with a perfect judgment that was a message in itself. ‘One wrong move,’ the grip said, ‘one wrong word, and you join Lambda in the Headless Astarians Club.’

  ‘Do I have your attention now?’ demanded Gamma, his voice more angry and grating than any bio-mechanoid’s in Astarian history. ‘As I was saying, I am Skoros, King of the Garden, and you will obey me.’

  17

  ‘What in the name of sanity?’ murmured Alditha. Unfortunately it did no good to murmur when you were on the back of a dragon, flying high over the Garden, because nobody could hear you. ‘I SAID WHAT IN THE NAME OF SANITY?’

  ‘What?’ Odiz called back. He was fine with most magic, but whereas witches traditionally flew about on broomsticks, wizards, if at all possible, liked to keep their feet firmly on the ground, so he wasn’t looking down any more often than he had to. ‘What’s going on?’

  Alditha looked down. She saw the crowd of Gardenfolk, marching more or less in unison, towards Skoros Castle. They had banners, and signs, and from what she could see, they seemed to be chanting something, occasionally throwing an arm into the air.

  ‘IT’S LIKE A RIOT,’ she explained. ‘ONLY SLOWER.’

  ‘Eh? What’re you-?’ Something in Odiz’ brain told him this was one of those moments when he had to look. He looked.

  ‘The damn fools,’ he said. ‘The man’s a pointy hat short of a wizard. There’s no telling what he’ll do to them when they get there.’

  Wizards, thought Alditha again. ‘OF COURSE THERE’S A TELLING WHAT HE’LL DO TO THEM. HE’LL BLOOMIN’ WELL KILL THEM ALL, THAT’S WHAT HE’LL DO TO THEM.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ said Odiz after a moment’s consideration.

  Alditha raised her eyebrow, but Odiz, behind her, couldn’t see it. ‘I KNOW,’ she told him. ‘SAGAR. LAND.’

  ‘Oh yes, m’lady, as you say, m’lady. HUMANS,’ bellowed the dragon, tilting his wings towards the ground.

  __________

  Alditha always commanded attention whenever she arrived anywhere. That was part of being a witch. When she thought back though, she didn’t think she’d ever commanded so much attention with so little effort as when she landed in front of the crowd of marching Gardenfolk and swung herself off the back of the Blue Dragon, followed by the highest-ranking mage in the world, an alien teenager, and a bio-mechanoid. You commanded a lot of attention when you did that.

  ‘Afternoon,’ said Alditha, nodding ever so slightly to the crowd. ‘Blessings be upon you this Midsummer Hallowe’en. You’ll be turning around now, I expect.’

  Some of the folk in the front row looked sheepish. It wasn’t that witches ruled anything, anywhere, or that people would necessarily let them if they tried. It was just that people who didn’t listen to witches’ warnings had a history of spending periods of their lives hopping about on lily pads eating flies. Some of them even got turned into frogs first.

  ‘No, madam, we will not,’ said a strong voice to Alditha’s right.

  Some of the folk in the front row winced.

  Alditha turned to look at the speaker. He was tall and willowy with long blonde hair and features that seemed designed to minimize wind resistance. ‘Brangle the Elf of Recycling Hill, I see you,’ she said. It was the witch equivalent of ‘You disrespecting me?’

  Brangle appeared either not to know what it meant, or not to care. Really speaking, it was a miracle he’d lived as long as he had. ‘We intend, madam,’—the crowd winced again—‘to present our grievances to the dictator Skoros, and to demand he forfeit his claim to be “king” of the Garden.’

  ‘I see,’ said Alditha. ‘That’s a lot of words for an elf without a head.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ Brangle demanded, looking down the ski-slope of his nose.

  ‘Certainly not, Mr. Brangle. Witches do not threaten, you should know that. We do
promise a good deal,’ she said, letting the words dangle there. ‘But at this time, I’m merely pointing out that Skoros is as nutty as a squirrel’s privy, and he’ll zap your heads into dust before you get a fine long speech like that out of your mouths.’

  ‘Scuse me, Miss Alditha?’ said a small, squeaky voice from somewhere rather nearer ground level. ‘But if he zaps our heads off, won’t that make it hard to rule us, like? As king and all?’

  Brangle sniffed. ‘Stupid boy,’ he muttered.

  Alditha crouched down. ‘It’s Sprat, isn’t it? Sprat of the Pratts of Lower Hedgerow? My, how you’ve grown since I last saw you. I must get over and visit the pixies more often.’ Alditha was being extra-specially friendly to the young pixie, mostly, she admitted to herself, to get right up Brangle’s pencil-hole nose. ‘The thing is though, there’s lots of you here, aren’t there?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘So he could blow your little head off your shoulders, and Mr. Brangle’s, and Old Mr. Ragbag the scarecrow’s, who I see hiding behind Mr. Verno Hefterlink there, and still have plenty of noses left to grind into the dust as his slaves, you see?’

  ‘We’re doooooomed,’ moaned Ragbag, who’d been carried away with the moment in the Red Petunia the night before. The scarecrow buried his head in his hands with a rustle. His head came off, but people were used to that, so nobody said anything.