Jane Blonde: Spylet on Ice

by Jill Marshall

  ‘Come on, Twubs,’ said Janey, giving her cat’s head a rub. In spite of his husky-thick fur, he was shivering so much that the scarf around his tail was working its way off and on to the ice. Janey tugged it down again and attempted to look around. A vicious wind billowed around them; standing up, Janey had to lean straight into it to make any headway at all. Not that she knew where to go. It seemed that she had made it to Antarctica, but where exactly were they supposed to go? ‘G-Mamma will know,’ she told herself, but in these temperatures she was reluctant to unzip her SPIsuit to extract her SPIV.

  To her delight, however, someone seemed to know exactly where to go. Trouble staggered purposefully through the billowing wind, wobbling this way and that but refusing to be knocked off course. Janey bent over to grab his tail, and bit by bit the two of them shuffled along in the semi-darkness.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Twubs,’ bellowed Janey, as he ploughed on determinedly. ‘How big is Antarctica anyway? How are we going to find my dad in this?’ It was difficult to see further than Trouble’s nose in the grey half-light and the flurries of snow. The packed ice beneath their feet made the going very slippy, and Janey was jealous of Trouble’s claws as she slithered along in his wake.

  Just then Janey felt Trouble’s tail stiffen, and the next moment he was bounding along, skittering on the ice, towards a shadowy figure that had appeared nearby. Janey grabbed her SPI-Pod quickly. Just below one of the dials was the word ‘MIC’. Spinning the dial to ten, Janey raised the SPI-Pod to her lips and yelled, ‘Hey! Wait for me!’

  In any normal environment the noise would have been deafening, but here in the Antarctic her amplified voice still made very little impression above the wind. The figure waved; Janey peered at it and staggered forward, and suddenly found herself staring up at the surprised, pleased and crinkly eyes of Abe Rownigan. ‘Dad!’ she cried, all but inaudible against the wind.

  With his mittened hand, her father gestured to her to take hold of his belt. He set off, still clutching Trouble, who looked very relieved about the improved travelling situation. Walking in her father’s footsteps, Janey found the wind much more bearable, and within a very short space of time they were sitting next to a hole in the ice, giving each other the thumbs up and sliding down a steep icy tube into the world’s southernmost Spylab.

  As soon as they were all safely inside her father turned to Janey. ‘What are you doing here? You know the conditions here don’t suit you.’

  ‘I know, but I had to see you. You’re all right!’ said Janey.

  ‘I’m fine. Did you think something was wrong?’

  ‘I got a message telling me, “Save our Sol”.’ Janey rattled out information as quickly as she could. ‘And I’d just been to Sol’s Lols HQ, which is completely overrun by Copernicus’s spies operating out of this iceberg, and they’ve got a whole assassination team with a list, and I’m on it and I bet you’re at the very top of it, and everything’s really dodgy and worrying . . .’

  Abe pushed back his hood, his sandy hair standing on end. ‘Let’s check in with G-Mamma.’

  He crossed to his computer as Janey looked around the Spylab. It was just like the one under the wildlife park, except that everything – every workbench, stool, cupboard and shelf – was carved out of startlingly bright ice. In place of a refrigerator there was a series of hollows cut into the dug-out wall; the blacked-out sheet of ice opposite Janey obviously housed the Wower, as the door was otherwise identical to the one in G-Mamma’s Spylab. And on every wall, almost filling the space, was a gigantic ice-plasma screen, displaying surveillance shots from various locations. ‘Wow,’ said Janey under her breath.

  G-Mamma’s face expanded to fill one of the screens.

  Abe said, ‘G-Mamma, Janey’s here. Can you show me the “SOS” message?’

  ‘I’ll hold it up,’ said G-Mamma. ‘Someone’s definitely written over the original message. Blondette thought it might be one of the twins.’

  ‘The black stuff looks like their SPIsuits,’ explained Janey quickly. ‘It shimmers in the same way and it’s got little feathers in it.’

  Abe nodded. ‘You’re right. Rook’s here; he’s been busy at work, so I don’t see how he’d have had time – perhaps Blackbird wrote it. We haven’t been able to contact her for the last twenty-four hours.Can you run a test to see if the sample matches up with their SPIsuits?’

  ‘Good idea. I’ll get back to you,’ said G-Mamma, and with that her face disappeared.

  Abe turned to Janey, taking off his enormous outer padded jacket. ‘It’s pretty warm in here – only just below zero. At this thickness the ice is a better insulator than wood or fibreboard – it’s how the Eskimos survive in igloos. Once you’re out of the wind it feels much warmer, and where better than under the ground?’ He smiled at her. ‘Come and have a look around.’

  They wandered around the Spylab together, opening ice doors and peering into cupboards. Abe then busied himself in the small ice kitchen, warming milk for hot chocolate in the microwave. Janey stared at one of the screens.

  ‘Dad, what’s with all the pictures of animals?’

  Abe sprinkled brown powder into two mugs. ‘I think it’s time I filled you in on this mission. I told you at SPIcamp, didn’t I, that there was something peculiar in the way the animals here were acting? Just look at Trouble.’

  Janey glanced round, surprised. Sure enough, Trouble was perched on one of the highest refrigerator shelves, his back arched, all his hair on end and a steady quiver shaking him from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail. He was positively vibrating, with the beginnings of a snarl revealing the tips of his teeth.

  ‘How weird! Come here, Twubs.’ The cat stared down at her with his hypnotic emerald eyes but didn’t move an inch. Even Abe couldn’t persuade him to come down.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Abe, reaching for a remote control as he slid a hot chocolate across to Janey. ‘This footage was taken just before an earthquake in India.’ The video clip was of a small herd of cows, veering this way and that as though an invisible whip was corralling them into place and quivering with the same intensity as Trouble.

  ‘And this.’ Abe pressed a button and the screen was filled with a news article, headed ‘TSUNAMI – ANIMALS ESCAPE’.

  KHAO LAK, Thailand – The tsunami claimed thousands of human lives, but in the animal world there appears to have been a sense of danger, almost a sixth sense that something was terribly wrong.

  At the Khao Lak Elephant Trekking Centre, elephants Poker and Thandung started to panic – trumpeting and breaking free from their chains.

  Their owner, Jong Kit, had never seen them behave in this way before. ‘We couldn’t stop the elephants,’ says Kit.

  Normally obedient animals, they ignored his commands to stop and ran for higher ground just five minutes before the resort where they’d been standing was destroyed by the tsunami.

  Kit believes the elephants knew the tsunami was coming.

  When the tsunami struck in Khao Lak, more than 3,000 human beings lost their lives in the region. But no one involved with the care of animals can report the death of a single one. The manager of the Khao Lak National Park says all the animals went high into the hills, from where they have not returned. He believes not one perished in or around the park.

  ‘We have not found any dead animals along this part of the coast,’ he says.

  Jong Kit’s elephants’ intuition was very lucky for four Japanese tourists who had climbed aboard them the morning of the tsunami. They all survived, carried on the elephants’ backs to the hills.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said Janey. ‘So you think the animals here know something terrible is on the way? Some kind of natural disaster?’

  ‘Perhaps. Do you know, the Chinese city of Anshan managed to evacuate every person before an earthquake in 1975, all because of the way the animals were acting. Come on, there’s more I want to show you.’

  Janey nodded and followed her father through a
set of ice doors that slid apart at the touch of his fingertip. From there Janey soon became confused as they walked from one corridor to the next. ‘This place is like a labyrinth,’ said Janey.

  ‘That’s right,’ said her father. ‘Not just a Spylab. It’s a Spy-labyrinth. Bedrooms,’ he pointed out, showing her the fur-covered slabs of ice in one of the rooms. ‘Recreation room . . . kitchen . . . Antarctic laboratory . . .’

  Her father stopped, then pressed his fingertip to a spot on another ice-wall. Suddenly Janey found herself staring out at the gunmetal view, at a strange array of enormous, skittish animals.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing to a great black-headed bird, circling above and making occasional dives between icebergs. Its white body was as big as a large dog, and with its enormous wings it looked as though it could carry a couple of people on its back.

  ‘That’s an Arctic tern – one of the few birds that can survive here. Over there we’ve got a bunch of seals. Not so many leopard seals as we used to have – we don’t know why exactly. Some of my scientists are looking into that. And over there . . . just beyond the seals . . . are some other birds that make this place their home.’

  ‘Penguins!’ squeaked Janey. ‘But they’re nearly as big as me!’ Janey had always thought penguins were pretty cute, but these ones looked scary.

  Abe laughed. ‘Yes, not the little fluffy things you imagine they’d be. These are king penguins. And you can see they’re not happy. The seals keep attacking each other, the terns have mostly left and the penguins keep shambling from one spot to another, pecking at each other. Something’s wrong.’ He shook his head, sighing. ‘And then there are the ice-worms – they tunnel through the ice somehow, possibly using the solution they secrete from their skin to melt it, like a kind of antifreeze. They’ve never been found in Antarctica before, so what are they doing here?’

  Janey was fascinated. ‘Worms? That’s what my sign said to begin with: Save our worms!’

  ‘They’re usually only found in the Arctic,’ said her father. ‘We want to find out more about them, but the poor things dissolve in temperatures above freezing, even body heat, so it’s hard to do tests on them.’

  The door closed between Janey and the bitter air outside, and she followed Abe back to the Spylab, deeply concerned. What was wrong with the animals? Trouble was acting oddly too, and now finding tunnelling ice-worms far from their usual home . . . Maybe they’d bored through from the North Pole like she had with her SPILL-Drills. And Janey suddenly remembered that someone else had once taken a great interest in her eSPIdrills and how she’d spun through the Earth – Copernicus himself. As the thought ran through her mind she felt as though the door had just opened again, so icy was the chill that ran through her . . .

  Even more alarmingly, her father had already gone back into the Spylab, and between Janey and the door there now stood a formidable enemy, scaring Janey to the tips of her fleecy earmuffs.

  It had scraggly eyebrows over demonic yellow eyes. It was as big as she was. And it was waddling straight for her.

  zinc or zwim

  ‘Dad,’ Janey croaked, as the king penguin lumbered ever closer.

  She looked behind her, but none of the doors to the rooms of the corridor were visible to the untrained eye. The only one she thought she possibly could open was the one to the outside. ‘Probably just what it wants,’ she thought desperately. ‘Then it can round me up with its mates and they can peck me to death.’

  Janey counted feverishly through her choices. Stab it with the titanium blade in her Gauntlet? No. It might be a killer, but she still couldn’t bring herself to attack it first. Grappling in her pocket for her SPInamite, in the hope she could blast through into somewhere safe, she pulled out something else instead.

  ‘Zinc cream?’ she howled as the penguin backed her ever closer to the exterior ice door. Orange lettering leered up at her: ‘ZINC OR ZWIM – for all those burning issues!’ For a SPI-buy, it seemed pretty hopeless. ‘What use is that?’

  But it was all she had. Holding the open tube in front of her, Janey squashed it as hard as she could. The cream puddled ineffectually on to the corridor floor in a splat like a white cowpat. The penguin kept moving, side to side, swaying, getting ever closer . . .

  Until something very strange happened. Where the zinc cream had landed, a small spiral of steam was now drifting up from the floor. She glanced down. There was a hole in the floor. And the penguin didn’t seem to have noticed. Just as Janey’s back touched the door, the penguin caught its flipper in the hole and fell flat on its face. Then, to Janey’s bewilderment, it lay there, flapping and swaying as if it was still walking, beak down in the ice, as helpless as a baby.

  Suddenly the Spylab door opened. ‘Janey, what . . . Ah, I see you’ve met one of our SPUDs.’

  ‘I thought you said they were kings?’

  Abe grinned as he set the penguin back on its feet and pushed down hard on the top of its head. The waddling stopped. ‘The real penguins are kings, but this is a SPUD – a SPI Underwater Detector. These little robotic devices swim around, sending back data, looking just like an ordinary penguin so enemies would never suspect them.’

  ‘I thought it was attacking me,’ said Janey quietly, wondering how she could ever have been worried

  ‘We are, but Blonde has interesting news.’

  There was a clattering at the door, and Janey looked around to see Alfie, Rook and a dozen or so scientists entering the lab. Alfie’s eyebrows shot up at the sight of her; she smiled and gave him a tiny wave, which he didn’t return. Too cool for that, thought Janey. In fact, he looked a little grey – perhaps he was sick, as Mrs Halliday had said. Rook looked her up and down in much the same way Titian Ambition had, while the scientists’ brows puckered anxiously when they saw Abe leading Janey forward.

  ‘Team, Blonde here has just been up to the Sol’s Lols headquarters. There are enemy spies all over it.’

  ‘Mainly under it,’ said Janey.

  Abe smiled. ‘That’s right. Divers and Navy Seals are burrowing under the building from beneath the lake, and apparently they have teams assigned to various things, only one of which makes any sense to me.’

  He looked at Janey and she swallowed before saying, ‘Assassination. They’ve got a list.They recognized me from it and tried to kill me. I don’t know who else is on it, but the man said they’d sent all their assassins down here. They’re around somewhere.’

  A sombre hush fell across the room, and several pairs of eyes flickered back and forth. If the killers were in the Antarctic, they could be very close.

  ‘We’ve had three scientists die already,’ said Abe, ‘crushed to death in some unidentified clamp or vice. I know we’ll get to the bottom of this. The most important thing is to work in pairs, cover each other’s backs and stay calm. We can’t discover anything if we’re all running around terrified. You are trained professionals and can deal with whatever may come. Rook, how’s the additional security coming along?’

  Rook jumped up on a bench, swinging his legs. ‘No problemo. All exterior doors have been reprogrammed for retinal scans and matched up to every eyeball in the place. Blonde, we’ll have to have yours too.’

  ‘My . . . eyeball?’

  ‘Yes, your eyeball. Hand it over.’ There were a couple of sniggers as Rook held out his hand. ‘No, dummy, your retinal scan. And we’ll need your fingerprint too – not your whole finger, just the print.’ He smirked at Tish, and Janey lowered her eyes to the floor. Rook obviously enjoyed making her look an idiot, and Tish seemed to appreciate it too. He continued, ‘We’ve got fingerprint scanners on all the internal doors. It’ll be pretty difficult for anyone to get in if they’re not meant to be here.’

  ‘Good work.’ Abe said nothing about Rook goading Janey, although he had looked carefully from one to the other as the exchange had taken place. He turned to Titian Ambition. ‘Tish, how’s the underwater surveillance?’

  Tish patted the SPUD, now upright
, bright-eyed and turning its head left and right every so often, exactly like the king penguins outside. ‘Nik here, and all his SPUD buddies, have been doing an ace job. So far there’s nothing too out of the ordinary, apart from a bit of increased seal activity on an iceberg just a little east of here. They look perfectly normal though.’

  ‘The ones in Scotland looked normal enough,’ said Janey, ‘but they were little mini-submarines with a spy in their belly. You should . . .’ Janey paused. Judging by their expressions, Tish, Rook and a couple of the scientists thought she was speaking out of turn. She finished in a little rush. ‘You should check them out again.’

  To her relief, Abe nodded. ‘Blonde is right. Can you get on to that, Tish? The two of you should work together on it. Let’s debrief again at the end of the day.’

  Clapping a couple of the scientists on the back, Abe dismissed them all. Janey sighed as Alfie and Rook left the room; she would have liked to talk to Alfie properly, but he wasn’t here as her friend. He was here as a Spylet with a job to do. So was Tish. Janey sighed again. Even though she didn’t really like Little Miss Ambition, if her father said they should work together, then they’d have to make every effort to do just that.