by S. K. Holder
‘Just shows how you little you know.’ He sneered. ‘I thought you’d been out here before. If you weren’t destroying aliens, what were you doing?’
He knew Erard was trying to steer the conversation away from the stolen egg by raising his own suspicions about where he had been earlier. ‘I was trying to get away from them. They almost killed me.’
‘It’s what they do, almost kill. Did you choose to join up?’
Connor eyes narrowed unable to hide his irritation at the question. ‘I didn’t volunteer to join the fleet.’
Erard shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not. There’s not much else to do around here.’ He snatched the Wreath from his holster and threw it inside the rock stack. It made a loud boom. The rocks splintered. The structure held. A clear slimy liquid oozed from between the cracks.
‘Easily done.’ Erard jammed his transcom back on to his ear. ‘We’re done father,’ he said, his eyes on Connor.
‘Good,’ he heard Brett say. ‘I’ve got two Varipods on the way to you. Ride them to Bodelm. I’ll pick you up from there.’
‘I tried speaking to him earlier,’ said Connor, ‘he wouldn’t answer.’
Erard shut off his transcom. ‘Probably because you were whining and whimpering. Father doesn’t have time to listen to your complaints. Remember that.’
‘I wasn’t whining,’ Connor shot back. ‘I was asking him for advice.’
Brett sighed and dug his foot into a small recess in the rock. He watched with disinterest as it caved in. ‘He already gave it to you – when we were on the carrier. Half asleep were you?’
Connor bit his lip. He didn’t want to give Erard the satisfaction of seeing his fear, let alone his ignorance. ‘Why did you take one of the eggs?’
Erard grinned at him almost manically. ‘Souvenir.’
‘It’ll hatch.’
‘Not if it’s kept cold. I’ve got five more at home.’
‘I guess your father doesn’t know.’
Erard’s eyes blazed. ‘You won’t want to mention it to him,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t planning on it.’ Mentioning anything to Brett would be a waste of time. This wasn’t his world and he had no friends in Pyridian. If Citizens wanted to risk their lives by bringing eggs into the city, who was he to stop them?
Erard gave an affirmative grunt. ‘Good. Most of the eggs in that last nest were rancid. They would never have hatched.’
Connor heard the Varipods before they came into sight. He felt little relief when he saw them, gliding swiftly towards them. He could barely ride the vehicle and wasn’t looking forward to any more of Erard’s taunts. He watched Erard mount the bike and heard the controller acknowledge him. Only then did he realise where the true danger lay. The last Varipod he rode had not recognised him as a registered user and had voiced it loud and clear. The Varipod would reveal his real name. And he could only imagine how quickly Erard would relay the news to his father.
‘It’s not far,’ said Erard. Oblivious to Connor’s distress, he tested the handlebars.
Connor gripped one of the handlebars and tried to think of a way to override the settings so the Varipod would permit him to ride with the same name as the one held on his cadet badge: Jemyr Moss. ‘Can I walk there?’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know how to ride a Varipod. My sister knows how and she’s eight,’ Erard said with added scorn.
‘I don’t think I’m registered.’
‘You have to be registered. You’re a Citizen. You’ve got a chip in your ankle haven’t you?’
It took a while for Connor to understand what he was talking about. He looked down at his left leg. His name was inscribed on his ankle. There had to be a computer chip embedded beneath it that the Varipod could read. ‘I think it’s defective.’
‘They can’t be defective. They’re part of your blood.’
‘And what if someone chopped off my leg?’
‘Your leg will grow back and the chip will be cloned along with it you freak. Now get on!’
Connor mounted the bike under Erard’s scrutiny. ‘You go on ahead,’ he told him.
Erard turned on his transcom. His eyes cold. ‘We go together.’
‘Don’t!’ said the Authoritative Voice.
The Authoritative Voice was stern. It wasn’t the first time the voice had warned him of impending danger and threats as it surfaced from his own subconscious. In Narrigh, the Authoritative Voice had been of little help to him, if anything, he had found it a nuisance. Here, the Voice was different. It was as if it had bonded with him. It wanted to help him.
He guessed that Erard and his dad had been wary of him the moment they had set eyes on him. His lack of knowledge about Citizen weapons and Citizen protocol would have deepened their suspicions.
He climbed on to the Varipod, taking his time and hoping it would stay silent. He had no other choice. He took a deep breath, and placed his feet in the footrest. He clutched the handlebars tight and felt the machine spring to life.
‘New passenger detected,’ said the bike’s robotic voice. ‘New passenger identified…Citizen First Status…Citizen Connor…House of Brailey. State your destination or override for cruise control.’
Erard frowned and dipped his head as if trying to work out if he had heard right.
Connor winced and bowed his head as he thought of the consequences. Erard would tell his father and soon the whole fleet would know of his existence.
‘So you’re not who you say you are,’ said Erard, ‘thought as much.’ He paused to listen to the voice in his ear. ‘Yes,’ Erard told his father. ‘You heard right.’ He cast a quick glance at Connor.
It was as if a pistol went off in Connor’s head. The urge to keep his identity a secret became, in that moment, all-consuming. He jerked on the handlebars and the bike sped away. He pitched forward and kept his back straight as if he were riding a horse. He spurred it on with the handlebars pulled tightly towards him. He leaned left and right to stop himself blundering into the shrubs and trees that were scattered on the landscape. He heard Erard behind him, screaming at him to stop. He hadn’t thought about where the Varipod would take him. He mounted a ridge thick with rock stacks like the ones they had left behind. Erard came alongside him matching his speed. Connor pushed the handlebars away from him and slowed to a halt.
‘Have you lost your mind?’ asked Erard, hopping from his bike. He ground his teeth in anger.
Connor could only stare at the Varipods handlebars and wonder at his own foolishness. He needed Erard to lead him back to the armoury. He raised his head. There had to be more than a hundred alien nests stretching into the distance and he had been about to ride straight into them. He saw another cadet emerge from the rock stack, his arm swung across his face. He walked in the opposite direction without spotting them. ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ he murmured. ‘I panicked.’ He recognised that he wasn’t looking at an alien nesting colony. He was looking at a farm. Erard had destroyed the nests which contained the rancid eggs and was taking a sample back to Swordul, probably for them to dissect, to find out what went wrong, why the eggs had gone bad. It explained the stacked pods he had seen in the armoury’s storeroom.
‘Father said I’m to bring you in at once,’ said Erard. ‘We’ve passed the assembly point. We’ll have to double back. We should hurry or he’ll leave without us.’
Connor turned away from Erard. He didn’t like the way the cadet looked at him as if he were a new kind of alien species. He swung the Varipod around, preparing for the journey back.
‘Which branch of the Brailey tree do you hail from?’ said Erard.
‘None. The Varipod made a mistake.’ Whatever accusations the fleet made, he would deny them. Even if they stripped the boot from his left foot, he would say the name was a lie.
‘That would have sounded more convincing if you hadn’t tried to run.’ Erard shrugged, surveying the rock stacks. ‘We’re not safe here. Let’s move out.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ted passed the information he had overheard between Celeste and Kane to Steve Lepton the moment he returned to Tridan Entertainment. Not that there was much to tell; the pair had given nothing away. Ted had pondered over why the boys mum hadn’t called the police, and who she meant by them, in the long taxi ride back to the office.
But by the time he pushed his way through the revolving doors, he had put aside his intrigue concerning the conversation and reserved his musings to that of saving his own neck.
He took a nonplussed approach as he relayed the eavesdropped conversation to Steve. He frowned and dipped his eyebrows to give a forced look of bewilderment. He didn’t want his boss to think he had even an inkling of the Braileys private affairs. Steve turned away from him to gaze out of the window. Not even the word, ‘thank you’ passed his lips. Fortunate to have survived another day, Ted kept his grudges to himself.
His plans to shut himself away in his office for the rest of the day were ruined. He returned to his temporary office to find someone had cleared out his desk, opened the blinds, emptied the bin and scrubbed his name off the white board. He had left no impeaching evidence behind; the drawers contained nothing more than scraps of paper, pens and empty packets of aspirin. No one had claimed the office Ted had made his own for the past four months. He tried to shrug it off, but he knew it was Steve’s way of telling him that he had failed him and the company, and that he was on his way out of the company.
He would have to find himself a new workspace. He had an official desk on the fifth floor with his colleagues, which he hardly ever used. He enjoyed his privacy. Few Tridan Entertainment employees sat at their own desks. The company had more office space than it needed and they regularly leased it out. Even so, there were always offices scattered throughout the building sitting vacant.
As Ted stalked up and down the corridors in search of a discreet, unused office, he came to the conclusion that Luke was dead. It was the only explanation. Steve may have killed the kid or he had become trapped in the capsule in the basement and couldn’t get out. He also thought that the best way to ease his guilty conscience was to get hold of one of Steve’s laptops and pay a little visit to the guys at the London Institute of Science and Technology.
He abandoned his search for a new office and tried to think of where he might find one of the special laptops, which had mysteriously disappeared on the same day as Beth Crosswell.
He took an early lunch at a nearby café. He crammed a sandwich in his mouth and guzzled a cold Latte as he thought about the special laptops. It was possible that Steve still kept them in his office. And there was always the seventh floor. The place where nobody ever went. You couldn’t access the basement or the seventh floor from the lifts located in the foyer.
When he returned to work, he dashed to the secret lift, swiped Professor Hatleman’s key card through the electronic card reader, and then pressed the button that would take him to the unused floor.
The seventh floor turned out to be a big dowdy disappointment. It was nothing but a shell of cubicle partitions, desks, corridors and empty rooms.
Now that he was here, thought Ted, it wouldn’t hurt to look around. He had nothing better to do, other than fret and worry over the horrific death that awaited him at the hands of Steve Lepton. He strode around the maze of empty cubicles.
He paced the corridors and found the first few doors he came to locked. Tridan Entertainment had a policy about locking office doors: the policy was you didn’t lock them. It was the security staff’s job to lock them at the end of the day, which is why any Tridan Entertainment employee with any sense took their private belongings home with them or locked them in a drawer when their working day ended. If you wanted to claim a room, you hung a notice on the front door. It was an unwritten office code. If the floor was out of use, there was no reason for the security staff to lock the doors.
He had passed the eighth door on his lone journey when he heard a rhythmic tapping sound. Spooked witless, his mouth sprung open and he froze in the middle of the corridor holding his breath. Deserted rooms and buildings had a tendency to attract vermin, birds − and assassins. He took a breath, determined to not let his imagination run wild. He just had to be extra careful that was all, extra quiet and keep his ears and eyes open. He realised he hadn’t done a preliminary scan for security cameras. He glanced up and down the corridor. How small were security cameras these days?
The tapping grew louder and became more erratic. He found the source of it behind the twelfth door. He pressed his ear against it. He heard no distinct animal sounds, like beating wings from a pigeon that had gone berserk or the scratching paws of a ferret-sized rat.
He tried the door handle. The door was locked like the others. What if a human was in there? Banging to be set free in their last frantic moments before death? It was Professor Hatleman’s key card that got him through the double doors. What if Professor Hatleman had never left the building? He knew of a woman who had got locked in the staff cafeteria overnight and a courier who spent hours stuck in the lift.
‘Professor Hatleman,’ said Ted, not caring if he was overheard. ‘It’s me, Ted Carthy. I’m going to find a key, okay?’ He didn’t know how to pick a lock. And how was he going to find a key to the door without alerting one of Steve Lepton’s loyal security guards? He knew he didn’t have the strength to kick the door in; he was under no illusion on that score.
He weaved in and out of the empty cubicles more out of panic than anything else. He found a box of paperclips on one of the desks. He grabbed them and went back to the door where the tapping noise had become an unruly bang. He opened the box, spilling paperclips onto the floor. He plucked one open and fumbled to pull it apart. He had seen intruders pick locks on the television using paperclips. He had never attempted it himself. If it was that simple, everyone would have been at it.
He straightened out his first paperclip, thrust it into the lock and wiggled it around. The clip disappeared within the door mechanism and he fumbled for another. This time he made two hooks in the clip instead of completely straightening it out, so that it resembled a key. He wiped his sweaty hands on his trousers, gained a firm grip on the wire and poked it through the keyhole. He went through nine paperclips before the door popped open. He fell back in shock, hardly believing that his clumsy persistence had paid off. It occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t locked in the first place, just jammed.
He had spent over half an hour working the door and the banging had ceased. A light came on and Ted made his way inside, wondering if he had arrived too late. The room had been fitted with grey cabinets and a large metal closet big enough to fit three people.
‘That you Professor Hatleman?’ he said in a hoarse voice. The willingness to rescue whoever had made the banging noise had left now that the noise had stopped. He didn’t have the stomach for corpses.
The cupboard door rattled. Ted’s heart leapt in his chest. Something was in there. Something inhuman and heavy! He reached for the handle. There was no visible lock on the outside. ‘Professor Hatleman. It’s me Ted,’ he said in a loud voice just to be sure he was justified in abandoning whatever was in there.
‘It’s Luke. Let me out.’
Ted puffed out his cheeks with relief and opened the door.
Luke staggered out squinting.
‘Why didn’t you say it was you from the get go?’ asked Ted. He thought about the bashing Luke gave him. He could have done with being locked in a cupboard for a few days. The kid smelt a little ripe and his clothes looked as if they had been boiled in a pan overnight. His eyelids were swollen and the whites of his eyes were red. Well that’s what you get for snooping.
Ted raked his hand through his hair. ‘Geez, how long were you in there?’
‘Long enough. One of the security guard’s shut me in there. What made you think I was Professor Hatleman?’
‘Wishful thinking.’ Ted didn’t like the squinty-eyed look of suspicion the kid gave him and the sudden interest he had taken in
his hands, which hung loose at his sides.
‘How did you get out of the cafeteria?’
Ted didn’t think he owed him an answer. Luke had recovered mighty quickly from his ordeal. Too quickly for Ted’s liking. And he hadn’t thanked him for rescuing him either. ‘One of the security guard’s let me out.’
‘And my laptop?’
‘I’ve locked it in my desk drawer.’ He now understood why Luke had stared at his hands. He must have been wondering where Ted had put it. He imagined the kid would go crazy if he knew Steve Lepton had got a hold of it. Crazy enough to summon the energy to give him another whooping. ‘Look, I feel bad about your brother. I want to help you find him. I just don’t know how. If you tell me what sort of trouble you’re in, we can work together.’ Or work apart, depending on what he told him.
Luke didn’t answer. And Ted then knew that no matter how much he prodded him, the kid’s lips would remain sealed.
Luke dragged his brother’s rucksack from the cupboard. ‘Follow me. I think I’ve found something.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
They hadn’t gone far when they heard the alien sounds. Enveloped in their shadow, Connor had a better handle on his Varipod than he had done the first time he had ridden it, mainly because he had ground his feet in the footrest and did not let his hand slip from the taut grip he had on the handlebars. He heard Erard roar, and looked across to see the manic grin on his face. The alien’s breath seemed to rip through his clothes, making them ripple as if there were a breeze on the horizon.
Connor couldn’t share his joy and was relieved when they arrived back at the first two nests Erard had destroyed. He watched a mucous-covered tentacle whip Erard from his Varipod despite his attempts to duck. Erard clenched his arms and legs to his chest and rolled across the ground. Connor looked over his shoulder to see a Korack trailing after him. Its great tentacle hung dangerously close. He banked right, heading in the direction he had seen Erard fall.
