What She Does Next Will Astound You

by Patrick Ness

  Seraphin leaned over her, a little too close, a little too smiling. ‘Just do what you can,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ Tanya said, and looked at the fake pug snuffling curiously around April’s legs.

  Ram turned to Quill, waving at her across the Bay.

  ‘It’s Charlie! He’s trapped in a Combat Chamber!’ Oblivious, Quill carried on backing away, firing.

  Ram turned back to Charlie. ‘We’re getting you help!’ He waved his arms at Quill again.

  ‘Miss Quill! Come here! Help me open this door!’ Miss Quill didn’t seem to notice.

  Charlie hammered on the door, shouting through it, urgent, strong. ‘Quill! My life is in danger! I order you to help me!’

  Quill, a world away, calmly carried on firing at the creatures.

  Ram, desperate, flung himself into the path of her gun. Wonderfully, at the last moment, his new leg steadied him, more or less, and he stood, wobbling, eyes shut as Quill’s bullets blasted past him.

  She stopped firing. Had she stopped because he was in her way, or because the genome-lock on the gun had kicked in? Deciding he’d rather not know, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

  ‘Hi.’ He smiled.

  ‘Mr Singh, what are you doing?’ she asked. ‘You’re getting in the way of my fun.’

  ‘It’s Charlie!’ shouted Ram, indicating the Combat Chamber door with a frantic pantomime.

  Miss Quill followed his gesture. She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Riiiight,’ she said, with the enthusiasm of someone who has to scrape something off her shoe.

  Ignoring the Skandis, she strode across the Bay, and activated the release trigger for Charlie’s door.

  She counted off five seconds on her fingers then threw open the door, yanked Charlie out, fired three times into the creature rushing out behind him, and slammed the door shut.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you,’ she said flatly, then strode away, raising her gun and shooting into the advancing horde.

  April leaned over Tanya’s shoulder, peering at the screen.

  ‘Amazing,’ said Tanya. She didn’t stop typing. ‘Honestly, endless amounts of processing power dealing with the helmet video feeds, nothing, nothing at all about opening doors or letting me help anyone. I can see the systems, I just can’t reach them. It’s like I’m stuck in a fish tank in a vast library trying to work out how to reach the books.’

  ‘Yes,’ said April. ‘Look, I was wondering. Wondering about the Skandis and the helmet cameras . . .’

  ‘And the pug?’ asked Tanya.

  ‘Oh, you’re there too, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Tanya nodded. ‘I do listen to what you say. Everyone’s like all “We just have to fight them because they look so awful . . .” and you’re all flower child and “I think we should hug them” and we’re all “Oh, that’s disgusting”. But what if you’re right . . .’

  April tapped the screen, at all the footage from the helmet cameras. ‘What if I am?’ she mused.

  ‘Well,’ said Tanya, ‘once I can get out of my fish tank, I’ll see if we can do something clever for you.’

  She got on with typing.

  Charlie stood, slumped and winded against the wall, taking in the situation. Monsters. Screaming. Quill with a gun and a smile. Then, gathering himself together, he went over to Ram.

  ‘Sorry about that. She’s deafened by the blasts,’ Ram said, wondering why he was making feeble excuses for her.

  ‘Sure,’ said Charlie. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good. Thank you.’ Charlie nodded, and suddenly Ram saw the alien prince in him. He wasn’t just reacting to the situation around him. He was considering it. ‘So. We’re being invaded?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right.’ Charlie agreed, looking vaguely affronted.

  ‘Fancy ordering them to stop?’ suggested Ram.

  Charlie ignored the jibe. ‘Quill said she couldn’t hear me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ram.

  Charlie nodded again, a sad little nod that made it quite clear he didn’t believe a word of it. Then he looked away, surveying the chaos in the bay with the aloofness of a general.

  Soldiers were fleeing from the Combat Chambers. There were now about two dozen creatures. The only person trying to hold them back was Quill.

  ‘Hum,’ said Charlie. Then he indicated the fleeing soldiers. ‘Quill can’t hold the invaders back on her own. Can you get them to help?’

  ‘Why me?’ Ram hated it when Charlie treated him like this.

  ‘Because you’re a good soldier and they respect you.’ Charlie didn’t seem fazed. ‘It will save time.’ He looked around again. ‘I’m going to try to get into the systems. Maybe there’s a way to block the area off.’ He turned to go. Then he stopped. He looked at Ram.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’d forgotten about your leg.’ Ram blushed, feeling humiliated. But also, Charlie was right. His artificial leg had frozen, rooting him to the spot.

  ‘Here,’ Charlie said, reached out his arm, and, balancing Ram, led him over to the other soldiers.

  ‘You lot,’ Ram shouted at the soldiers, ‘don’t move—listen to me . . .’

  Tanya hadn’t stopped typing for several minutes.

  ‘How we doing?’ asked April.

  ‘Well,’ Tanya groaned. ‘The fact that I’m still bashing this keyboard and not doing cartwheels should tell you that it’s not good. This system was designed to display information, not to give me control. It’s maddening—I can select footage from the helmet cameras, I just can’t open or close doors. I can’t do anything.’

  Seraphin appeared next to her, and handed her a carton of juice. ‘You might not be able to do anything, but I can,’ he said, and grabbed a microphone.

  An alarm sounded across the Void, echoing through its corridors. The soldiers all scrambled to the Big White Room, where footage was projected over the walls, showing the carnage taking place. Seraphin’s voice boomed over it.

  ‘So, this is happening,’ he said. ‘We’re being invaded and we need to stop it. The best place to defend is the Big White Room. Get guns, get there, and get ready to fight. We’re trying to seal off the corridors, but I doubt it’s going to work.’ He stopped then started again. ‘I mean, we’re hoping that we’ll get it to work. But we’ve got to do everything we can to stop them.’

  At the end of the Combat Bay, protected by the rest of the invaders, two Skandis gathered around a service hatch, and, prising it open with their mandibles, began to work among the machinery with surprising skill and dexterity. An interface screen popped up, and a tentacle swiped across it, leaving a sticky trail.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tanya, ‘someone else is in the system.’

  ‘Is that good?’ asked April.

  Tanya squinted at the screen. ‘No. Probably not.’

  The soldiers had retreated to the Big White Room. There’d been nothing else they could do. The screens around them were still showing the chaos.

  A fleeting glimpse of a frightened soldier, sat on a bench, despondent, no longer a soldier, not much more than a child.

  Another soldier backing away as the jaws of a Skandis wrapped around her head.

  A group of soldiers looking at one another, their faces blank, empty, exhausted.

  Quill firing and firing and firing and laughing. ABNORMAL. ABNORMAL. ABNORMAL.

  They’d formed a barricade of sorts, using the tables and benches and a lot of hasty shoving. The Skandis, dozens and dozens of them, were still coming, but the barricade had seemed the right thing to do.

  ‘Keeping out the monsters, keeping out the night,’ Charlie said, grabbing the other end of a table from Ram and shoving it.

  They stood, surveying their work.

  ‘They’re coming,’ someone said, and someone else stifled a sob.

  With a roar, the barricade shattered, falling like a Jenga tower as the Skandis surged through.

  Ram and Charlie were pushed asi
de. There were screams and shouts, then a soldier ran forward to confront the Skandis as they poured into the Big White Room.

  For a moment the girl stood there. She was scared, everyone could see that. But she was also determined. She held her gun up but she did not fire. Her posture, everything about her, said that she was going to defend this room to the death.

  A boy crawled out from under a table, and went to stand beside her. He raised his gun as well.

  Three more soldiers formed a line with them.

  All of them stood, pointing their guns at the rows of Skandis.

  The invaders stood silently, watching them, as if curious. The girl nodded to the rest of the line, and they all levelled their guns and pulled the triggers.

  Nothing happened.

  They pressed them again. Nothing.

  They turned to one another.

  Then they turned back to face the Skandis. The soldiers’ faces were open in a look of comic alarm, almost embarrassment. ‘Well, this is awkward . . .’

  ‘Shoot them!’ screamed Quill. ‘What’s wrong with you? Shoot them!’

  But no one paid her any attention. They were staring at the five soldiers, standing there, against an alien army, just five lonely, defenceless children, lowering their useless guns in utter, miserable defeat.

  The Big White Room fell silent, the walls filling with pictures—everyone was staring at the five students, alone in the middle of the room.

  Ram leaned forward to help, to provide covering fire from his gun, but it didn’t work either.

  ‘What the hell?’ he asked.

  Charlie shook his head. ‘They’ve interfered with the genome-locking. The guns are useless now.’

  Charlie was wrong.

  The Skandis pushed the five soldiers back against a wall. One of them picked up a gun, examined it, and aimed it.

  ‘No,’ shouted Ram. ‘No!’

  But they fired anyway.

  FIFTY

  THE SKANDIS WAR AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked April. ‘Surely we’re there!’

  Tanya mumbled something.

  April leaned over to see what she was doing. She was immersed in a series of protocols. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Something new,’ Tanya grunted. ‘The Skandis have disabled the weapons. I’ve got to reactivate them. Otherwise it’s going to be a massacre. It’s all very well trying to get into the helmet cam systems, but I can’t see how it’s going to save lives.’

  ‘If I’m right,’ said April, ‘then we won’t need guns. Please. Sort it.’

  Tanya shook her head. ‘People are dying right now. I’ve got to stop it.’

  April put her hand on Tanya’s shoulder, but she brushed it off.

  Seraphin appeared at April’s side. ‘I’m not her,’ he said quietly, ‘but there’s another terminal by my bed. Perhaps we can do something there.’

  The Skandis surged forward, lashing out with their tentacles. Soldiers were crouched behind whatever cover they could find, aiming their guns fruitlessly. They may as well have been yelling ‘Pow! Pow! Pow!’ Children playing with toys. Damn, thought Ram, that’s what we’ve been all along. Bang bang, you’re dead.

  Tanya appeared on the screen, hovering over the slaughter. ‘I’m trying to get the guns back online!’ she yelled.

  ‘Try harder,’ Miss Quill roared back.

  ‘Not encouraging, Miss,’ Tanya said.

  Benches and tables flew past, swept aside as the Skandis surged into the hall.

  ‘Wow, that escalated quickly.’ Seraphin was watching as the Skandis took control of the Big White Room. He and April sat on the edge of his bed, trying to get sense out of his tablet.

  ‘Are you getting anywhere?’ she asked.

  He smiled at her, and his sweet smile was very sad.

  ‘No, not a clue.’ He tossed the tablet to one side, and Captain Pugsley made a leap for it and vanished through the bed.

  ‘What were you looking for anyway?’ Seraphin asked, opening a drawer, dusting off an old laptop, and plugging it in.

  April stared at the weird half-a-dog embedded in the bed.

  ‘Not certain. Not really my area.’ April looked sheepish.

  ‘Not really a hacker.’

  ‘Neither am I!’ called Tanya. ‘What you trying to get into?’

  ‘The helmet cam systems.’

  ‘It’s pointless. You just can’t hack into them,’ explained Tanya. ‘Believe me I’ve tried. Gah.’ She waved at the desktop. ‘Seeing the feeds is easy, getting beyond that is a nightmare. The operating system I’m trying to talk to is weird. Like an onion skin. You peel off layers of icons to get to what you want. See?’

  On screen, she was pulling away sheet after sheet of icons, all of them labelled in an alien language. ‘The deeper I go, the harder it gets to understand.’

  Seraphin had finally booted up his old laptop, and had got into the helmet camera feeds. ‘We can do just as much from here,’ he said. ‘The problem is, it’s not got as fast a processor, it’ll be sluggish.’

  April had one of those beautiful quiet moments where the entire world and her urge to scream at it just faded gently away.

  Helmet cameras. A slow laptop.

  A holographic pug. Empty cartons of juice. Got it.

  ‘You say you still get sent freebies?’ she asked Seraphin.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Don’t know how the post works, but—’

  ‘Not important,’ April said. ‘Anything electrical?’

  The Skandis swept towards the humans. People had stopped trying to make a run for it. Any attempts were met with lethal stuff. Bodies crashed and snapped against the walls.

  ‘Stand still!’ ordered Quill. ‘Don’t be idiots. Don’t run.’

  The great walls lit up, fizzing.

  ‘Tanya!’ shouted Ram. ‘Is that you doing this?’

  ‘No!’ replied her voice. She sounded lost, desperate. Washing into focus on the screen were hundreds of images of the terrified humans, lined up against a wall.

  Charlie realised they were now being shown what the Skandis saw. They would be able to watch themselves being devoured.

  April was tearing apart Seraphin’s cupboard.

  ‘Anything electrical?’ she’d said. ‘Computer stuff.’

  He’d started throwing boxes at her. ‘It’s pretty much all useless,’ he said. ‘The Wi-Fi link back to Earth from here is so slow . . .’

  ‘Good,’ said April.

  ‘And they tell me they’d rather not have stuff installed on their systems.’

  ‘Excellent.’ She laughed, pulling out armfuls of things—USB mini-fans, motion-sensitive Christmas tree lights, small drones, wireless dongles, thumbsticks, and hard drives.

  In her head, her suddenly clear, pin-sharp head, she was thinking: What if it’s not just me who finds computers annoying? And she was smiling. She remembered how much trouble she’d had when she’d first plugged her piano keyboard into her computer.

  Tanya looked up from her keyboard to see April marching through the room with a bundle of kit. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Being very dumb indeed,’ April told her. She threw the bundle onto the bed, and Seraphin began plugging them into the USB hubs.

  The humans were stood in a line, waiting to die, watching themselves on the screens of the Big White Room. Some were still holding their useless guns. Others had let them drop to the floor.

  ‘This is sick,’ said Ram.

  ‘It’s an impressive act,’ purred Miss Quill.

  The Skandis had stopped. They were waiting. Enjoying the moment.

  ‘Nearly there!’ called Tanya’s voice over the speakers. ‘I’ve nearly got the guns back on line.’

  ‘We. Are. Out. Of. Time,’ grated Quill.

  She raised her gun. All the other soldiers raised theirs.

  ‘I would very much like to go out fighting,’ Quill said. ‘If that’s not too much to ask.’

&n
bsp; Seraphin scratched his head and looked helplessly at April. ‘What happens now? I’ve plugged everything in.’ He pointed at the forest of cables snaking out from this laptop across the duvet. The head of Captain Pugsley appeared through the duvet and nipped ineffectually at them.

  ‘We wait,’ said April. ‘We wait for something ordinary and human to happen.’

  ‘I’m in!’ shouted Tanya. ‘I’m into the weapons. They’re rebooting now! Get ready to fire!’

  A window on Seraphin’s laptop popped up. ‘New technology detected. Finding driver.’

  And then another one appeared over it. And another.

  Quill and the others tightened their fingers on the triggers. They were ready to fight.

  And then the Skandis did something remarkable.

  FIFTY-ONE

  THEY THOUGHT THEY’D WON UNTIL THEY FOUND OUT THEY’D LOST

  ‘Stop!’ yelled April. ‘Stop! Something’s happened! Can’t you see what’s happened?’

  But no one was firing. Everyone was staring.

  ‘What the hell?’ gasped Ram.

  ‘Oh God.’ Tanya stared at her screen and gaped.

  The Skandis had changed. They were no longer nightmares of tentacles, slime, and spikes. They were instead so beautiful that to look at them stole a breath. They were childlike, fluttering creatures, an agreeable merger between angels and butterflies—they glowed with beauty, from their silver hair to the furthest tips of their silk wings. They hovered just off the ground, and that seemed right, as though to actually touch the floor would have somehow lessened them.

  ‘Their faces,’ gasped Tanya. Their faces were remarkable. They had about them an aura of universal beauty. Their eyes were wide and golden, they had tiny furred noses, and their mouths were delicate wispy things, their skin stretched with fine markings that suggested these were mouths made for smiling.

  They were not smiling now.

  April’s plan had been simple. Seraphin’s laptop had been crammed full of USB technology, all of it searching desperately for a new driver. The sudden inrush of requests for software, the old processor, the sluggish internet speed, all allied to do what Tanya’s skills couldn’t—they hit the helmet camera systems and brought them down.