by R T Green
The only person on the planet who could help him make his decision.
Chapter 134
I watched through the bridge windows as the tiny island of Tobago grew rapidly smaller. Then the nose of the shuttle pointed to the sky, and we could see nothing but blue.
Higher and higher we climbed, the incredible power of the alien craft rocketing us into the upper atmosphere in what seemed like seconds. Coop’s eyes were wide open, a permanent and silly grin on his face, his lifetime dream of flying in a spacecraft finally coming true.
I poked him, jolted him back to reality. ‘Hey boss, not a good look… you still with us?’
He grinned. ‘Nah… somewhere on another planet maybe.’
‘Best Christmas present ever, huh?’
He grinned. ‘For sure.’ Then he glanced across to Zana, sitting in the pilot’s seat, pressing diamond-shaped buttons on the console wrapped around her. ‘And you got your perfect gift too.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I think so.’
He frowned, the grin fading away. ‘Am I detecting an I’m not so sure note somewhere in that sentence?’
Guess I should have just said a simple yes. ‘It’s just… she seems a bit distant. Emotionless. But yes, it’s still the perfect gift.’
He turned me away from the others. ‘You gotta give her time. She’s been to hell and come out the other side. We can all see the physical scars, but she’s suffering inside.’
‘I’ve been to hell too, Coop. I’m suffering as well.’
He took my hands, squeezed them gently. ‘Yeah, and I have nothing but awe-inspired admiration for how you’ve coped with more shit than a body should be able to handle. But you ain’t suffered the wrath of family members, have you?’
‘Guess not.’
‘Give her time. You’s both got hard shit coming your way, but all I can do is hope you can be there for each other when the time comes.’
‘Me too, boss.’
‘Madeline…’
Zana was lifting herself from the pilot’s chair. She looked dead on her feet again, and she wasn’t the only one. ‘Madeline, please will you help me back to my quarters. I wish to rest now. The ship is on auto-navigation, flying just below the limits of the atmosphere, higher than any aircraft can fly. We are cloaked and cannot be detected, and we have four hours until we reach the UK. There is nothing to do until that time, so I suggest we all take the opportunity to rest.’
I put an arm gently around her waist, she wrapped hers across my shoulder, and we headed slowly to the door of her cabin. As it slid aside she eased herself away from my support, looked at me with expressionless eyes. ‘Thank you, Madeline. I can manage from here.’
‘I thought… perhaps we could rest together. Be close?’
Her eyes dropped to the floor. ‘My body hurts, all over. And the bunks are small. Your body against mine will cause me discomfort, please understand that.’
‘I understand.’
The door slid to a close. And I had to fight away another heartbreaking déjà vu moment.
The night I took the suitcase back to Zana, when she’d left it in the trunk after I’d driven her back from Dawson’s Hill.
The night she’d looked at me with those same cold, emotionless eyes, and told me our relationship was over.
Chapter 135
The phone on the bedside table tried to shake itself to bits. Wrenched from a disturbed sleep that had finally graduated to something resembling decent, Jane Daniels fumbled for the accept button and mumbled a reluctant, ‘Yes?’
‘Sorry to disturb your sleep Jane, but I need you here. Right now.’
‘Assia? You still working?’
‘Tell me about it. Something with the body got me worried. With good reason, as it turns out.’
‘What have you found?’
‘Not over the phone. Just get here, please.’
‘Ok. Give me thirty.’
She glanced at the clock as she put the phone down. Five in the morning. The team was due to begin combing the alley at seven, first light. It looked like her day had begun.
She dragged heavy legs out of the comfort of a warm bed, grabbed a thirty-second shower and a chocolate-flavour Frijj, and a few minutes later was spraying deicer onto the Vauxhall’s windscreen.
A thick frost had added another layer of white to the snow-covered ground, but the clouds had gone, the early-morning air dead still. She grimaced at the temperature gauge on the dashboard. Minus five. It was likely going to be another day when it wouldn’t get above freezing.
She felt her body shiver as she pressed the accelerator and the car moved off. Maybe it was the temperature, maybe Assia’s urgent call.
It was impossible to know for sure.
London was deathly quiet. Something it never was. Wasn’t. Since the alien invasion that never happened, despite assurances from a government desperate to quell panic that no Calandurans had survived, Londoners seemed to have suddenly got afraid of the dark.
A home with locked windows and doors had become even more of an Englishman’s castle.
She made the lab in record time, despite the icy roads that even the council salt-trucks seemed reluctant to venture onto until it got light. Assia was alone, the look in her eyes sparking another shiver that didn’t want to stop. ‘Come and see this,’ she said in a whisper, even though there was no one there to hear.
She took Daniel’s hand, led her to an electroscope and virtually shoved her face into the viewer.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘That’s the scrap of skin you saw under the girl’s fingernail.’
‘It looks… odd.’
‘Keep watching.’
She watched, for ten seconds, and then turned to look at the Indian girl. ‘It’s… moving?’
‘Kind of. But it’s not living. Quite the opposite. It’s disintegrating.’
‘Oh shit.’
Daniels ran a shaking hand across her mouth, the petrified look in Assia’s eyes not helping it get any steadier.
They both knew the implications of the truth handed to them by the tiny sliver of skin.
‘I’ve one other thing to show you.’ Assia led her over to her desk, pointed to a glass slide sitting in a tiny air-sealed container. ‘Just in case you needed any more proof.’
Daniels peered closely at the slide, could just about make out a few specks of vaguely-blue dust. She nodded desolately, and asked the question she already knew the answer to. ‘That’s the blue substance we saw on the body?’
‘By default, yes. I just about had time to try and analyze it before it decided to turn to dust.’
‘Try?’
‘None of this state-of-the-art technology here could recognize it. Which means by default it can only be one thing.’
Daniels words were a whisper. ‘Calanduran blood.’
‘Our girl fought for her life, Jane. With everything she had, by the looks of it. Somewhere out there is an injured alien… and my guess is he’s not alone.’
Daniels slumped into the driving seat of the car, her heart beating far harder than was good for it. When she’d first knelt next the body in the alley, something in her gut was telling her it wasn’t just another violent murder. It had crossed her mind the events of five weeks ago might be connected, but it was such a remote possibility she’d told herself to stop fantasizing.
Now, fantasy had become smack-you-in-the-face reality.
After the attack, the government had issued a detailed press-release through a once-secret department of MI6 codenamed DIAL. In response to the insane media demands for pictures of whole or part alien bodies, they’d explained that Calanduran physiology caused their bodies to turn to dust a day after death.
There were a few hastily-taken pictures of bits of body parts with red-dappled smoky-pink skin, but other than that, nothing to photograph.
Half the professional snappers on the planet must have spent the night of the press release drinking away their desolation. The potenti
ally-greatest money-shot since cameras were invented just couldn’t exist.
But every senior police officer in the country knew that one fact. And now she was the first to see it for real. Horrifyingly, terrifyingly real.
She rubbed her eyes to try and bring a little life back into them, glanced up to the sky in the east, turning a faint shade of dark blue as the sun prepared to say hello to another day. She pressed the phone to her ear.
‘Paul, sorry to do this but you’re going to have to sweep the alley without me. Got somewhere important to be.’
He started to ask what was going on, she didn’t offer an explanation, killed the call and floored the throttle. Later, she’d have to report to her bosses at the Met, but right then going through the proper channels would be a painful delay she could do without.
As she sped through the gates of the lab car park and turned left to head to the city, she asked the sat-nav to take her to the MI6 HQ.
Chapter 136
Coop was on the phone to Duncan Scott, the speaker relaying their conversation to us all. We were in a slow descent, crossing the frozen white ground of southern Ireland, still way below us.
Not quite the Caribbean.
Zana sat in the pilot’s chair, flying us manually now London was just thirty minutes away. She looked up to Coop, listening in to Scott’s words.
‘We’re planning to bring you in to Battersea Power Station, Coop. It’s half a mile from HQ, and there’s a large pier on the riverfront, empty right now. It’s fifty feet wide… ask Zana if that’s wide enough to land on?’
She nodded to say it was. Coop didn’t seem too sure about the location. ‘The power station, sir? I thought there was, like, five thousand construction workers there with it being redeveloped?’
Scott laughed, in an ironic kind of way. ‘There was, until our alien visitors arrived. Like most everything else it got shut down temporarily; not scheduled to restart until mid-January, so there’s a couple of weeks the place will be deserted, apart from a small army of security staff, who’ve been told to take today off.’
‘Sir, we have to protect Zana… no one can see her. How do we get from there to you?’
‘The US embassy is right next door. Their boat will be waiting at the pier, so you’ve got a pleasant river trip from there to our moorings. What’s your ETA?’
‘Thirty minutes, sir.’
‘Really? I’ve got to get me one of those! Ok Coop, let me get sorted. See you on the quayside.’
Coop put the phone onto the mess table with a shaking hand. Like the rest of us, the Caribbean experience was one he wanted to forget. But what awaited us in London could end up being far worse.
‘Almost home, folks,’ he whispered.
Home. Where pissed-off aliens were waiting to exact revenge, where Zana would for sure be in grave danger… and where I had to face justice for my crime.
Maybe Tobago was the better option after all.
The morning sun was low in the sky as the Thames came into view. Zana flew us in a couple of miles to the west of the station, banked to the right and followed the river, cruising two hundred feet above the water. No one could see us, the shuttle cloaked and invisible to the eye.
It wasn’t hard to spot Battersea power station; the four huge chimneys had long been a famous landmark, almost visible from space. Replaced by the developers with plastic effigies that shone out at night in multi-coloured patterns, it was still an impressive sight.
As we drew close, the massive new construction of the redevelopment almost took my breath away. I’d passed by on the train from Waterloo a couple of times a few months ago, but from the air the sheer scale of the work was much easier to see. Luxury apartments, shops and restaurants, entertainment complexes; all were climbing upwards from the bed of the famous old power station, as construction workers and an uncountable number of tower cranes did their work.
But not today. Through our windshield it looked a sad sight, a vibrant hub of development abandoned because of an epic event no one could have foreseen.
It would come to life again, and soon. But right then the huge deserted site was our friend. Our quiet harbour offering shelter from a very stormy sea.
Zana jolted me away from my philosophic and very uncharacteristic mood, which I guess was brought on by a massive dose of uncertainty about the future for any of us. ‘Bringing us in now… I assume that’s it, with the small boat moored against it?’
Coop nodded. ‘You sure that pier is big enough? Looks tiny to me.’
She smiled. ‘Have faith, Mr. Cooper.’
‘You the boss, Zana.’
We were hovering thirty feet above the Thames, moving sideways towards the concrete pier. I could see two guys in the well at the rear of the boat, one of them with binoculars, gazing out along the river. Surely someone had told him the ship was invisible?
Maybe not. As we passed over the boat and the heat from the engines blasted over them, I just about caught the shock on their faces before they disappeared from sight beneath us.
It was kind of funny. Mostly not. Given the jittery state of the human race, they probably thought for a moment they were being attacked by some kind of alien force.
Sorry, guys. That isn’t funny at all. I should know.
Zana’s piloting skills were faultless. With the faintest of jolts we settled onto the pier. And Coop looked at me, blew out his cheeks. Miles put a hand on Zana’s shoulder, said, ‘Well done’, and then strapped his gun holster around his chest. I put my hand on my chest, a vain attempt to stop my heart beating right out of it. And the hum of the power core died, taking away the womb-like comfort, and rendering the bridge in a silence that somehow seemed unnervingly final.
We were home.
For better or worse.
We grabbed what meager bits we’d managed to bring back from Tobago. Zana appeared, wearing another red cape.
‘You got an endless supply of those?’ I smiled.
She found a smile too. ‘Perhaps a good job, given how I look. May I have a hug please?’
‘I could use one too.’ I pulled her into me, felt her body trembling against mine, and knew she was just as petrified as I was. For a moment the joy of our unexpected closeness brought me a strange mixture of relief and strength, but then she pulled away. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, turned and pressed the hatch open button.
For better or worse?
An arctic blast sent a sub-zero chill right through me. A real one this time. And in a nanosecond I wished I was sitting on the beach outside Joe’s bar, a tropical sun beating into me, and a beer in my hand as I celebrated Christmas, Caribbean style.
Stop fantasizing.
Look where that got you last time you did that.
None of us seemed too thrilled at the temperature except Miles, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat. Some people are just too English.
Coop was beckoning furiously. ‘Get your asses into gear, folks. Someone might be watching.’
He was right, of course. We headed to the boat, and I smiled at the faces of the two men waiting for us. Not only had they been blasted by an invisible heat source, they’d just witnessed four people appearing out of nowhere in front of their eyes… one of them anything but human.
Zana had the hood of the cape tight around her head, but her face was visible. The older of the two men, dressed in an immaculate blue suit, tried not to stare too much. ‘Welcome home, guys,’ he said in a slightly faltering American accent. ‘I’m Walter Jameson, US embassy. This is Rick Kowalski, US navy commander.’
Coop quickly introduced us, and the commander who didn’t seem able to speak untied the ropes, and Walter advised us to hang on tight. The twin diesels growled into action, and the bow seemed to head for the sky as the silent Rick shoved the throttles forward.
‘I thought Scott said we would have a nice trip on the river?’ I shouted through the noise and the artcic wind that felt like it was freezing my eyelashes together.
He grinne
d back. ‘Enjoy it while it lasts, kid!’
About thirty seconds later I knew what he meant. Vauxhall Bridge flashed over us, the boat banked steeply and slowed to a welcome crawl. And the MI6 building was right in front of us.
Through eyes teared up by the icy wind and spray, I could just make out Duncan Scott, standing on the quay waiting for us. Someone was with him, a woman I’d not seen before.
The commander brought the boat alongside the stone steps, and saluted us. Still he hadn’t said a word. But I guess being in the company of an alien for the first time was a pretty dumbfounding experience.
The kind-looking Walter said, ‘Be safe, folks,’ and we made our way up the steps. Extremely carefully, the frozen snow making things more than precarious.
Duncan Scott actually smiled as we made the safety of the riverside lawn fronting the MI6 building. Maybe it was a smile of relief we’d made it back from Tobago. Or that we’d made it safely up the steps. Either way, it was a welcome sight.
That didn’t last long.
As he introduced us to the tall, slim woman standing by his side, my heart sank to the bottom of the Thames as his words stabbed into me. ‘I’d like you to meet Detective-inspector Jane Daniels, Metropolitan Police.’
Fuck you, Scott. I’ve been off the plane five minutes, and already you’ve organized the cops to cart me off to the tower?
Chapter 137
I don’t know if he suddenly realized what he’d said, or he saw the anger and petrified fear on my face, but he looked me straight in the eyes and gave a slight shake of the head.
I breathed again. A little bit, anyway.
Scott beckoned us to follow him, saying, maybe for my benefit as much as anyone else’s, ‘Jane arrived at my door half an hour ago with some disturbing news. But let’s get inside… this damn temperature must be a shock for you…’
Yes it is, but you didn’t help either, Duncan.
