Golden Spy

by Jill Marshall

  The hatch was now six metres above her head. Unwinding her SuSPInder from her waist, she looped it over her arm like a lasso, shouted, ‘Ready! On three,’ then showed one, then two, then three fingers to the gorillas. And as her three fingers fell the gorillas gibbered manically and tossed her into the air. Like a cork from a champagne bottle she shot upwards, unravelling her SuSPInder and throwing it towards the hatch. The line went taut. The tiny grappling hook had lodged itself in the rim of the hatch; now she just had to haul herself up.

  ‘Erm, problem,’ she shouted down to the others. ‘There’s no handle on this side.’

  There was a general muttering from below, then Alfie shouted something.

  ‘Forget it? No way, Al!’

  ‘No,’ he hollered back. ‘Four-F it!’

  Ah. Four-F. Good idea. Janey swung upside down as the apes below grunted their approval, then she clamped her feet on to the underside of the metal hatch. She tried not to think about how she was hanging like a bat, ten metres up in the air. With superhuman effort she straightened herself out as much as possible, hanging grimly on to the SuSPInder cord, and pushed up and sideways at the same time.

  It had been a great idea. The hatch opened just a crack, then a little more as Janey slid her feet to the side. When it was just about wide enough, she popped her feet through the gap so that she was hanging from her knees, then pulled the rest of her body up. Rather clumsily she managed to wriggle through the gap until she found herself upright in a small cube of a room. Along one wall was a rail loaded with spacesuits, and to the other side was a small ladder leading to a similar hatch above her head.

  Janey found a remote control attached to the wall. She yanked it free and dropped it through the hatch. ‘It’s an airlock,’ she shouted down to her friends. ‘I’ll have to close this door before I can open the next one. But there’s the remote so you can open it from that side.’ Then, ‘Come on, Blonde,’ she told herself sternly. ‘Before there’s a traffic jam.’ Already a line of apes was wriggling up the SuSPInder cord. In no time at all they’d be catching up with her.

  She quickly donned one of the spacesuits and sped up the ladder, pressing the green button that opened the hatch. ‘Wow,’ she whistled when she was inside the next segment of the rocket. This was no empty holding area. All around her were flashing lights, tubes and ducts, banks of buttons and dials, tanks, turbos . . . Jane Blonde was deep within the operation room of the rocket. This section had seats too, on which the astronauts would be held down in a complex web of straps and buckles. Five seats, counted Janey. A chair for everyone who’d got off. So where had Copernicus been sitting?

  There was no time to consider that. He had her mum at his mercy somewhere on this golden planet. She stepped outside and she could hardly believe it: she was actually walking in space. ‘Wow,’ she said again.

  The feeling was unlike anything she had ever known. Excitement, fear, exhilaration – all piled up on top of each other with a headiness that could easily make a person go a little mad. She wanted to throw herself off the ladder . . . float out into the galaxy . . . feel what it was like to be such a minuscule, atom-sized, unimportant part of this amazing, staggering creation . . .

  Just in time, she remembered that someone had actually gone mad, had tried to be part of the creation process. And more to the point – they were holding her mum hostage. Janey forced herself off the ladder on to the surface of the planet. It felt firm underfoot – just like the Earth really, though when she moved another foot forward the ground seemed to shimmy just out of reach before she made contact and felt it, firm and steady again.

  ‘Slowly, slowly catchy monkey,’ she said with a smile. She was just about to take her third step when there was a blinding flash in front of her, some thirty or forty metres away. To her astonishment, a tall, deformed figure, his spacesuit specially adapted to fit his tentacled body, seemed to step out of nothingness. Janey stopped. There was no tiny rocket beside him, no visible means by which Copernicus could have arrived on his planet of gold, but he clearly had just appeared. Spotting Janey, he waved two of his tentacles impatiently and slithered away.

  Janey allowed herself to breathe out. Thanks to the spacesuit, he hadn’t recognized her. He must have thought she was someone else, a member of his team. As quickly as she could, Janey lunged across the sandy surface, following him.

  When she reached the spot where Copernicus had appeared, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  ‘No way,’ said Janey. It couldn’t be . . . but it certainly looked like . . . ‘A bus stop?!’ The slender pole waved in the wind, a breeze that appeared to be coming from a shimmering disc of dense air next to it. She peered more closely at the bus-stop sign, which had something printed on it in large golden letters: COPER- NICUS.

  Janey touched the pole gingerly, but nothing happened – although the strange wind that blew from the disc seemed to gust more strongly. Turning away, Janey stepped off in the direction Copernicus had taken. She could no longer see him, which meant that he must be inside somewhere, in a Spylab perhaps.

  After several minutes, Janey found a column with a keypad and small screen sunken into its surface. This must be the entry system to his Spylab, she thought. Yes!

  There was a code to crack in order to gain entry, but Janey was not concerned. Codes and puzzles were her particular strength. She looked at the letters that blinked on the screen.

  DYSYR UPIT FRDOTR

  Janey looked at them again. They really didn’t make any sense. She hesitated, her gloved fingers hanging over the keyboard that would allow her to enter if she could just crack the code. What should she type? Her brain clicked into action as she mentally scanned through possible solutions. And suddenly it came to her. Each of the letters in the three words was in a particular position on the keyboard. She looked to the left of D. S. To the right of Y was T. Then an S. What was to the left of that on the keyboard? ‘A.’ she whispered.

  She continued until she had spelled out the coded message.

  STATE YOUR DESIRE

  Using the same code, Janey carefully keyed in the word ‘ENTER’: R . . . M . . . Y . . . R . . . T.

  And to her joy and relief, the ground beneath her feet gave way. She had just enough time to whip round and wave to the stream of spacesuited figures making their way from the rocket before she found herself sliding down a long tunnel.

  The entry tube was obviously operated by some kind of airlock. At the bottom there was a slight pause and a loud sucking noise, before Janey – minus her spacesuit – was spat out into the Spylab.

  The place was empty and Janey crept along the corridors, surprised to find that for once Copernicus’s lab was not black. It was golden. Just like her new SPIsuit.

  After a few minutes she came upon a vast bank of windows, very similar to the Launch Control Center she had been in just hours before. Janey peeped around the corner. There was Copernicus, pointing out various things on a screen before him to Twelve, who stared back at him with sad, dark eyes. Janey watched the boy shake his head, then drop his chin, then shake his head again, and she remembered again what G-Mamma had said about him at the beach. He couldn’t speak. ‘Of course!’ she whispered. ‘He’s using sign language.’

  She zoomed in with her Ultra-gogs: Twelve was repeating the same sign again. At least, it was almost the same sign. He was doing two signs rapidly, over and over: two fingers from his right hand slapped against the palm of his left, then the index finger of his right hand pointing to the fourth finger on his left. His head rattled from side to side. ‘No,’ she said, mimicking him. ‘He’s saying no.’ And that must be what the signs meant. N and O. No. Two fingers on the palm – N. Fourth finger on the left hand – O.

  But what was he saying no to? Janey fished out her SPI-Pod and turned up the volume. Instantly she could hear what Copernicus was saying as he pointed to the huge screen in front of him. It showed outer space, with the Earth in the distance and something like the point of an enormous pencil ang
led towards it.

  ‘. . . the laser beam,’ Copernicus was saying urgently. ‘Just one press. We’ll still be here. They’ll all be there.’

  N . . . O . . . signed the little boy, rattling his head back and forth.

  ‘They won’t feel anything!’ Copernicus’s voice was getting louder and higher. He was getting angry, Janey could tell. ‘The laser beam is painless.’

  But Twelve was not to be convinced, and he started to back away from his father.

  A tentacle seized him around the wrist. ‘Oh no you don’t, boy. The first son gave up on me. I won’t let you fail me too.’ And he flung Twelve backwards across the floor of Mission Control.

  Janey wanted to rush in and grab Twelve, but at that moment the two gorillas entered the room. Although . . . when she looked again they seemed less like gorillas and more like men. So he did have some of his henchmen with him on the planet, and now they were picking up Twelve as if he was dropped litter and carrying him out of the room.

  Janey sprinted down the corridor as fast as her Four-Fs would allow. Finally she found herself at a lift and, slapping the button, she scrambled in and closed the door just as the henchmen were rounding the corner.

  She got out at the next floor and immediately heard her mother’s voice. ‘But it must be a dream. I’ve had a lot of them in the last year. Maybe it’s time I saw someone . . .’ It sounded as though she was in the next room, but when Janey found it empty she remembered that she still had her SPI-Pod on, amplifying the sound. It took a few minutes and the search of at least ten rooms before she found her mother, sitting on the edge of a bed talking to Leaf.

  ‘I wonder what the whole squid thing means?’ Jean Brown was saying. ‘It’s a recurring nightmare. Must mean something. Oh, Janey!’

  Leaf spun around at the mention of her name, but Jean hardly seemed surprised that her daughter had just turned up in the middle of yet another strange hallucination.

  ‘I have been telling your mother that this is all real,’ said Leaf after he’d recovered himself, ‘but she does not believe it.’

  Janey ran over and gave her mum the most enormous hug imaginable. ‘It is real, Mum,’ she said, ‘and I’m sick of lying to you and pretending, and you being the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on. I’m going to tell you. Leaf, mind the door, would you?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, making sure it was closed behind him and looking out through the little glass panel.

  Janey’s mum frowned. ‘I’m really not sure you’re—’

  ‘I am real,’ interrupted Janey. ‘It’s all true. And I’m going to tell you. Everything.’

  hand signals

  Jean Brown listened without interruption as her daughter described everything that had happened since G-Mamma had first turned up at the gates of Winton School, and quite a few things that had happened before (including the fact that Jean Brown had once been Gina Bellarina, married to Superspy Boz Brilliance Brown).

  ‘And now it looks like Copernicus has built his own planet with some Supersized bit of the core of the Earth, and he’s planning on doing something terrible with a laser beam. Plus, he’s been leaked the secret of R-Evolution, Dad’s biggest discovery – oh, and he has all these apes up here too. I don’t know what for,’ finished Janey eventually. She looked at her mother, who hadn’t moved for the best part of half an hour. ‘So . . . what do you think?’

  It was Leaf who first threw in a question, however. ‘So Copernicus has really abandoned his own son and tried to kill him?’

  ‘Really. Who would do that to their child?’ Jean Brown’s voice was barely more than a whisper.

  ‘Mum, do you believe me?’

  Jean stood up, wiping her hands down her trousers. ‘Janey, what can I say? You tell me that for the best part of a year now you’ve been crawling in and out of the fireplace like a jack-in-a-box; that the dreadful Rosie Wotsits is your tutor or something . . .’

  ‘SPI:KE,’ said Janey and Leaf together.

  ‘Well, whatever you want to call it,’ said Jean with a toss of her head. ‘And the man I’m in business with is some reincarnation of your father who isn’t dead after all. It’s all nonsense. It has to be. I’m caught up in one of those strange dreams again.’

  ‘It is not a dream,’ said Leaf. ‘It is more like a nightmare, I suppose, but it is very real.’

  Jean cast a wary eye in Leaf’s direction and then turned to Janey. ‘Wake me up. Wake me up now and I’ll be able to forget all this.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to forget it all, Mum,’ said Janey. ‘I don’t want to tell lies any more. And I don’t want Dad to have to pretend to you either. If you know the truth, we can be a family again.’

  At this Jean rolled her eyes towards the ceiling, but did a double take as they slid past the glass pane in the door. ‘Oh, here we go again. Squid Man.’

  With a gasp, Janey spun around. The panel was filled now by an evil yellow eye, taking in the three of them with a malevolent curiosity and more than a hint of hatred. The door slid open. ‘Blonde. Again. You have a curious knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ snapped the grotesque creature.

  And before Janey could speak, a tentacle had coiled around her waist, and another around her mother’s, and they were yanked out into the corridor. Leaf staggered after them.

  ‘You know, for a dream monster, you actually hurt rather a lot,’ barked Janey’s mother, trying to struggle out of the tentacle’s hold and grab Janey’s hand at the same time. ‘Put us down.’

  At that, Copernicus simply dropped her, and Jean collapsed on the floor. ‘Your wish is my command, Bellarina,’ hissed Copernicus, a thin rasping sound grating from the back of his throat. ‘And here’s your darling Spylet daughter.’

  In one smooth move he swiped his tentacle across a keypad at a nearby door, placed another tentacle on Jean Brown’s back and shoved her across the glossy, polished corridor floor into the room he had just opened up. Janey was thrown in behind her and managed to forward-roll to the right so that she didn’t collide with her mother. The door slammed behind them, and darkness descended.

  ‘What is going on?’ said Jean, groping for Janey’s hand in the gloom. ‘Are you all right?’

  But before Janey could answer, her mother let out a blood-curdling scream. ‘Argh! We’re in a dungeon. With rats! A rat just ran across my leg. I hate rats! Hate them! Oh, it squeaked. It’s coming back . . .’

  Janey reflected the laser of her Girl-gauntlet on to her golden suit and a warm amber glow radiated out across the room. A small creature ventured out of the darkness. Janey reached out an arm, and the creature ran up and sat on her shoulder. ‘Look, it’s a monkey. A really tiny one.’

  Overcoming her horror, Jean stared at it. ‘I think it’s a marmoset. A pygmy marmoset. We’ve seen them at the zoo.’ She chucked it under the chin and the marmoset chattered obligingly. ‘Aw. Poor little thing.’

  But her words were drowned out by the sudden screeching and gibbering of a menagerie of monkeys, accompanied by some loud guttural bellows and an odd thumping sound belting out a bass line. It was like listening to a very bad school orchestra tuning up.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said Janey.

  ‘I’m going nowhere,’ replied her mother with a groan. ‘Except the psychiatrist’s when I wake up,’ she added darkly.

  Handing the squirrel-sized marmoset to her mother, Janey shuffled forward. She headed for the nearest sound – a quiet gibbering that sounded more desperate than threatening – and suddenly a cage came into view. Behind the bars was a chimpanzee . . . no, several chimpanzees, their eyes wild and full of fear. ‘It’s OK,’ said Janey softly. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  She did a quick headcount of the eleven chimps and moved on around the room. The next cage held a variety of smaller primates: lemurs, more marmosets, tiny tamarins with strange lion-like faces. The marmoset had obviously managed to slip between the wires of its cage.

  ‘Janey, what are you doing? I can’t see
you.’

  ‘I’m just finding out where we are and who’s in here with us,’ said Janey. Baboons and gibbons were in the next cage, glaring at her indignantly and then turning their backs with disdain. ‘This room is massive. And it’s full of apes in cages. This one’s got . . . um, orang-utans, I think. And that weird thumping sound came from the gorillas.’

  Jean sighed. ‘So we’re trapped with a bunch of wild animals. Marvellous.’

  ‘Someone’s coming!’ Smothering the light from her laser by curling her finger into her palm, Janey slithered back across the room and threw herself down next to her mother.

  There was a scratching sound at the door, and Janey heard her mother’s breath quicken as the door handle rattled. Yet the door stayed closed. Someone was trying to get in – someone who didn’t have the right codes or fingerprints to gain access. ‘I bet it’s the SPI team!’ she whispered. ‘Night vision, and zoom.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said her mother.

  Janey laughed. ‘Not you. My glasses. Ultra-gogs. I need to see who’s at the door, and if it’s Alfie or the others we can . . .’

  But it wasn’t one of her spy friends. It was a little boy, too small to see through the glass panel into the room from floor level. From the angle of the door handle and the peculiar sideways manner in which he was staring into the room, Janey guessed that he must be standing on the handle and hanging on to the top of the door frame. And judging by the way he moved his head from side to side, he was searching for something.

  Janey felt sorry for him. He might be Copernicus’s son, but so was Alfie, and it wasn’t anything he was proud of. In fact, Twelve looked just as reluctant to do his father’s bidding as Alfie had been. Her instincts told her that Twelve was not an enemy. She’d been wrong before, but this time Jane Blonde would have staked her life on Twelve not being on the side of evil.