by Rob May
Jason’s anger gave him the energy to rise to his feet. He staggered towards the Arch Predicant, stopping only as several guards moved to block his path.’
‘If you’re trying to make us feel guilty, it won’t work,’ he shouted. ‘Making out it’s our fault that you have to punish the balaks is emotional blackmail.’
The Arch Predicant took Grok from Brandon’s hands and walked back to his throne. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Jason as he passed by. ‘You won’t feel anything—guilt, rage or sorrow—after tomorrow. All you will feel is a great deal of pain followed by endless oblivion. I won’t even make you watch the balaks die—you three will be first to put your backs to the altar. Guards, take them away!’
* * *
The dungeons in the Tower of the Moons were a kilometre below ground. There were thousands and thousands of cells, and although few were occupied, the effect was to make you feel small and alone. Jason had been there for an hour, but it had felt like a day. There was no day and no night in the dim cell. Time played cruel games with his mind.
He wore a scrap of cloth, ripped from Brandon’s black T-shirt, over his ruined right eye. Now that the bionoids were gone, that was all Brandon could do to help. He was now lying in the corner of the cell, fast asleep and snoring.
‘Look at him,’ Jason said to Doo. ‘Sleeping like a baby. Free from all worry and responsibility, I guess, now that he’s thrown away the one thing that could have won this war for us.’
‘Soon he’ll be free of a number of his important internal organs, too,’ Doo said, ‘if the stories I’ve heard about zelf sacrifices are true. But maybe he did the right thing. Maybe it was the only way to keep the bionoids out of the hands of the Arch Predicant.’
Jason sighed. ‘I guess. Maybe Brandon should have given me the power of the bionoids. I would have happily used them to kill the Arch Predicant, and save Brandon the guilt.’
He shook off his thoughts and jumped to his feet. Jason wasn’t one to dwell on the past. ‘Alright then,’ he said. ‘So how are we going to escape this place?’ Three of the cell walls were metal; the fourth was made up of red vertical laser bars. They were only about a millimetre thick … surely they couldn’t do much damage.
Doo stayed put. ‘There’s no escape, Jason. It’s over.’
‘It is not over!’ Jason said, putting the finger of his bionic hand to a laser. The tip melted away, and Jason quickly withdrew his hand. ‘Brandon’s father escaped from one of these cells once. He had outside help, though … Maybe some of your people will be able to infiltrate this place and free us. You are their princess, after all.’
‘And I will face my fate with the courage that befits a princess,’ Doo said. ‘I hope my people don’t risk any more lives trying to rescue me. It will be safer for them now to flee into the deeper, darker unexplored parts of the jungle, and try and build a new life.’
Jason turned to look at her. ‘Why aren’t you queen, Doo?’
She smiled wryly. Jason was getting to the point where he could see past the ugly alien face and fangs, and see the almost human expressions on her face.
‘I told you already,’ she said. ‘Grok is king.’
‘But he’s just a baby! You’re the oldest. You should have been in charge. Should be in charge, I mean. We’re not dead yet!’
‘That’s just the way it is,’ Doo said. ‘Male balaks have always taken precedence. Oh, you think I’m big and strong, but wait until Grok is my age—he’ll be twice as big as you are, Jason Brown. Our family are the biggest, baddest balaks there are.’
‘Well, that’s still hardly fair,’ Jason said. ‘Size matters not, remember! Back on Earth, we had a queen, and the poor guy she married didn’t even get to be a king. And our queen was just some little old lady—not some bad ass chick like you!’
‘If you wanted fair,’ Brandon said, ‘you should scrap the monarchy altogether, and elect a leader instead. No point in complaining about the rules of who gets to be king when the whole game is broken from the start.’
Jason turned to Brandon. ‘So, you’re awake,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling? Oh, that’s right—you weren’t the one who got beat up, mutilated and tortured with the galaxy’s deadliest weapon.’
Brandon sat up and rubbed sleep from his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry how it all went down. But I didn’t have much choice. There are some things that happened out in the jungle that I haven’t told you about yet. Something about the bionoids.’
Jason was suspicious. ‘Is this going to be technological? I hate it when people try to bamboozle me with science.’
‘Not too technical,’ Brandon said. ‘But basically, I had to destroy the bionoids because I wasn’t sure I could control them anymore.’
‘What?’ Jason said. ‘You mean they were damaged? Glitched?’
‘No. More like … that they had a mind of their own.’
‘Well, how the hell did that happen? I thought the bionoids were programmed to your brainwaves or something; to take orders only from you.’
‘Do you remember at the balaks’ party after the funeral, I said I had been using the bionoids to scan the President’s brain?’
‘Vaguely,’ Jason said. ‘I was sloshed on jungle juice that night.’
‘I thought I could use the bionoids a bit like cloud storage: after all, if you convert neurons into bits, then the human brain only takes up about a terabyte: a thousand gigabytes. Imagine the benefits to the survival to the human race if I could preserve the brain of the last ever President!’
Jason frowned and started slowly shaking his head. Even he could see where this was going. ‘So you gave the bionoids a brain. And now they decided they didn’t need yours to tell them what to do anymore?’
Brandon nodded. ‘Sort of. When the zelfs attacked at the wedding, I ordered the bionoids to seek out and help the wounded balaks. But they had other ideas. They must have been scanning the President’s mind for strategy and risk analysis. I could actually hear them quoting the President’s words back at me: this is a just war—a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defence. They decided to overrule my orders and attack the zelfs instead.’
Jason considered all this. ‘Well, I don’t see what would have been the problem in having the President around in bionoid form. He would probably have made better decisions than any of us could.’
‘It wasn’t him though,’ Brandon said. ‘In the temple I could sense the bionoids scanning the Arch Predicant’s mind too. They have the potential to see this war from the perspective of everyone involved, and make decisions that none of us would ever choose. They might have attacked balaks and zelfs if they thought it might help them take control.’
Brandon slumped back against the cold hard prison wall. ‘The reason the bionoids were so easy for me to control in the first place was because they could extrapolate what I wanted them to do from just my thoughts. They are more powerful and knowledgeable than anyone supposedly controlling them could ever be. They can scan and manipulate biological organisms and mechanical systems, including themselves: they even have the potential to self-replicate! I had to destroy them: it was possible that the most dangerous thing in the universe isn’t the Arch Predicant, but the bionoids themselves.’
They all sat in glum silence for a while after that pronouncement. Jason got up after a while and went to the food dispensing unit on the wall. He pressed a button (the only button there was) and was rewarded with a small crumbly cube that looked a bit like an OXO cube. It looked disgusting, but he ate it anyway. It tasted of nothing, which was somehow worse than if it had tasted of poo. Jason could see some kind of deep metaphor in the food cube: just like their whole adventure, whatever journey, processes and ingredients had gone into making it, the end result was just a big fat nothing.
Jason pressed the button again. ‘Want one?’ he said to Doo.
‘Yes please,’ she said. ‘Those things are full of vitamins and nutrients. Balak prisoners sometimes
manage to smuggle some out of here, then they would present them to me as a gift.’
Jason threw the food cube at her, then he banged on the button several times, filling up the plastic tray with more and more cubes. When the dispenser finally broke with a loud crack, he scooped up all the food cubes and flung them at Brandon.
‘Thanks,’ Brandon said.
While they chewed on what was likely their last ever meal, they watched the goings on through the red laser bars of the cell. The prison was slowly filling up: armed and armoured zelfs were prodding dungaree-clad balaks into the surrounding cells. The slaves were quiet and downtrodden, but when they saw Doo they became more animated, and called out to her once the guards had gone.
‘Be brave, my people!’ she said to them. ‘Go to your deaths with the strength of … with strength in your hearts.’
The balaks seemed to accept these words, expecting nothing more from their princess. They set about singing tribal songs in low voices. It was even almost enough to break Jason’s stony heart.
‘You were going to say go with the strength of Zaal, weren’t you?’ he said to Doo.
‘Our god has truly deserted us,’ Doo said sadly. ‘If he was ever here at all.’
Jason gave her an awkward embrace. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That’s like the complete opposite of a deathbed conversion.’
Doo’s face was an expressionless mask. Jason had the sense that she was preparing herself mentally for her fate. In the corner, Brandon was slumped with his head between his knees. Jason didn’t know what to say to either of them, so he went and stood an inch from the bars, staring out across the prison into nothingness.
What would happen if I leaned forward into the lasers? he wondered. Would I get sliced like bread, or fry like on a grill? Either way, it couldn’t be any more painful than getting taken apart piece by piece on a bloody altar.
He closed his eyes and started to rock back and forth on his heels.
The suddenly he was snapped out of his reverie by a familiar voice.
‘Hey, you guys! We’re here. Oh no, I forgot to bring the cake with a file in it!’
13—GOODBYES
It was Kat. She appeared out of the shadows on the other side of the laser bars, dressed all in black: black DMs, black jeans, black hoodie and black plastic specs.
Jason almost fell forward into the lasers trying to reach out and hug her. ‘Sis! You’re just in time! We were just thinking of breaking out of here!’
‘Oh really!’ she said. ‘That’s good then! Better hurry though—I can’t stay long!’
There was a pause … and then Jason finally admitted defeat. ‘Alright! We need rescuing, of course! Just tell me you have a plan for getting us out of here!’
Kat shook her head. ‘Are you crazy? Break you out of here? The most secure prison in the galaxy? This isn’t Guardians of the Galaxy, Jase; there’s no battery for the lasers up on the wall just out of reach. Getting out of this place is impossible. I just came to say goodbye!’
Jason’s jaw dropped. ‘Goodbye? I’m sorry … what?’
Brandon had raised his head when he heard the conversation. He came over now, the happiest that Jason had ever seen him since … well, since the last time Kat had been around.
They held hands through the bars and talked in hushed whispers. Watching them, Jason wondered if he had been wrong about their relationship; he had thought it was doomed, but maybe there was something special between them after all. But either way, what difference did it make now? If what Kat said was true, Jason was watching their last moments together.
‘I brought you something to remember me by,’ Kat said to her boyfriend. She reached inside her top and pulled out a necklace: a small curved piece of bone on a twisted, fraying string.
‘A real catron’s claw,’ Kat said. ‘The very tip of one, anyway. I heard you destroyed the bionoid version. Well, that’s too bad, but you did what you had to do, I guess.’
‘I did,’ Brandon said, absent-mindedly rubbing his thumb over the curve of the claw.
‘The real things are a lot harder to damage than your nanobots,’ Kat went on. ‘You can cut diamonds with this. It will last a lot longer that we will. I thought that maybe it could symbolise eternal friendship or something. Well, maybe more than friendship, if you know what I mean, but I don’t know how to say … I’m not very good with …’
‘Thank you,’ Brandon said simply.
‘Yeah, thanks,’ Jason said sarcastically. ‘Maybe we can use it to scratch out a tunnel all the way back up to the surface.’
Doo came over next. ‘Kat!’ she exclaimed. ‘How did you get in here? Are you alone? Are you with any of my people?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Kat said. ‘The balaks are safe. Everyone’s gone deep into the jungle, to a secret, ancient place a hundred miles north of here called Brightroot Cave. Your uncle Bung is leading them now. I guess he will be the next king after you … well, you know.’
‘But how did you get in here, Kat?’ Jason asked impatiently. ‘And where’s Hewson and the other survivors?’
Kat took a deep breath. ‘The others are with the balaks. They’re safe. Me and Hewson and two of Doo’s other cousins managed to get inside the city. Ha, you’ll love this—we cut strips of rubber off the lighting trees and wrapped ourselves up in them to get through the force field!’
‘That was my idea!’ Jason protested.
‘We’re twins, we think the same!’ Kat said. ‘Anyway, the cousins tracked down one of their friends here inside the city: a balak slave whose job it is to refill the food dispensers in the prison. He let us in here. Oh, you guys—I’m so glad I got to see you one last time. If you want me to carry messages back … your last words, if you know what I mean …’
Kat had tears in her eyes, and Doo looked like she was about to crack, too. Brandon looked calm and sad at the same time. But Jason was incredulous, furious, bewildered … he couldn’t honestly believe what he was hearing.
‘Kat, are you crazy? You came all this way, got all this far, just to say goodbye? You have to go find a way of deactivating the laser beams! There has to be a control room with a switch nearby. Go and have a look!’
Kat turned to her brother with a pained expression. ‘Jason, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. I can only go where the food dispenser guy can go, and they’re hardly likely to give him any access to the lasers.’
She sighed. ‘When we heard the guards saying that Bran had destroyed the bionoids, all our hopes of a rescue died. But look on the bright side: the zelfs will never ever be able to turn the bionoids against the balaks again. We’ll try and escape tonight with as many slaves as we can, and then disappear into the jungle for good. There will be no more war between the zelfs and the balaks, and you three will be remembered forever … immortal heroes! Oh, Jase … are you crying?’
‘No!’ Jason sniffed. He reverse-snorted hard, dragging a big glob of snot down his throat. ‘I was laughing of course. Laughing at the whole stupid big mess that we managed to get ourselves into. Now go, Kat! Scram, before they catch you and stick you in here with us. And tomorrow night, be ready, because I’m going to come back and haunt you real good!’
* * *
The prison was silent for hours after Kat left. Jason and Doo sat shoulder-to-shoulder, not speaking. There was nothing left to discuss: no crazy plans, battles or escapades to dream up. In the other corner, Brandon sat in silence, too, endlessly turning the bony catron’s claw in his fingers, no doubt thinking of Kat, and how he had lost her as well as the bionoids.
Then, when it seemed that time couldn’t drag on any longer, the laser bars flicked off.
Jason jumped to his feet. There was a squad of ten armed zelfs outside the cell. They all wore the colourful advanced body armour that followed the contours of their muscles, making them look like a team of superheroes from a Marvel or DC movie.
They were, of course, anything but. Their leader touched a finger to his helmet, and his visor slid up, re
vealing a cruel grin. Jason recognised the captain who had captured them inside the city wall earlier.
‘Hello again, alien scum,’ the captain uttered, his voice dripping with exquisite contempt. ‘Ready to take your last ever trip up to the temple?’
Jason surged forward, but Doo held him back. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth it.’
‘It most definitely is worth it,’ he said, closing in on the captain with his bionic fist clenched.
The captain stood perfectly still, an amused smirk on his face. When Jason was halfway through a potentially devastating uppercut, the surrounding guards quickly jerked up their laser rifles and all fired on Jason simultaneously.
He was struck by heavy jolts of electricity that sent him sprawling to the ground. The pain was excruciating, and it didn’t go away for a long, long time. When he could finally open his clenched lips to speak, the only words he could muster were, ‘Argh agh.’
‘Sorry about that,’ the captain drawled. ‘I would have loved to have put you down permanently, but the Arch Predicant gave strict orders to bring you all to him alive.’
‘Ugh,’ Jason moaned.
Doo spoke up on his behalf. ‘You’re monsters,’ she accused the zelf. ‘At least the Arch Predicant only hurts people because he thinks Zaal tells him to. What’s your excuse?’
The captain laughed. ‘Zaal is just a word that keeps the city and the slaves in line. No god whispers in my ear, telling me what I can and can’t do, so I do what I like. Now get moving!’
They were ushered out of the cell and down a long series of corridors. There were armoured zelfs everywhere, standing by the cells holding the two hundred balaks, ready to oversee their transfer to the temple. The slaves gave Doo silent salutes as she passed. She acknowledged every one of them with a grim nod.
