Alien Disaster (10 page)

‘It was the best cover story I could come up with,’ James explained. His eyes didn’t leave the heli controls as he concentrated on their escape. ‘I knew no one would ever believe that I actually was a spy!’

Brandon frowned. ‘Are Hewson and those other guys MI Zero too?’

‘The Lieutenant? Yeah, he’s our top field agent. I’ve got more of a desk-bound supporting role. Well …
had
. There aren’t many desks left at the office anymore.’

Brandon turned to look at Kat. ‘Are
you
MI Zero?’ he joked.

‘Licensed to chill … in front of the TV,’ she quipped. Jason and Gem laughed. ‘Not really,’ Kat added, in case anyone had taken her seriously.

‘I don’t know if there’s anyone left but me now,’ James said. ‘The head of MI Zero was killed on the London to Brighton train.’

The man with the newspaper
, Brandon recalled.

‘So, what are you going to do with us now that you’ve found us?’ he asked James.

It was Gem who replied: ‘Don’t know yet. We heard that you’ve got something from Mum’s lab. Let’s talk about that once we’ve shaken this massive bogie on our six.’

Six o’clock position, Brandon guessed. He tried to see what was behind them by looking out of the side window.

It was the alien mothership, so close that it was blocking out the sky.

‘James, we can’t outrun this thing,’ Gem said. ‘We need to land and find some cover.’

‘Right. On it,’ James replied, wrestling with the joystick.

‘Let’s hope they’ve not got a tractor beam!’ Kat said.

‘I doubt it,’ Brandon told her. ‘Tractor beams only work in the vacuum of space, on an atomic scale; they’re the stuff of, uh, science fiction …’

He tailed off as he realised what he was saying. This whole weekend had been the stuff of science fiction.

There was a sudden grinding noise as the rotors were forced to a stop and the engine jammed. The navigation instruments went haywire and James lost his grip on the joystick as it jerked about spasmodically.

Everyone’s eyes looked upwards. The cabin of the heli was cast into shadow as the saucer loomed over them.

James’ voice cracked in panic. ‘We’re stuck! I can’t move us!’

Jason shook his head. ‘We’ve got MI Zero chance of getting out of this one.’

A thirty metre-wide letterbox-shaped slot opened in the outer rim of the giant saucer. Behind the slot, a long barrel-like chamber was rotating on its horizontal axis like a kind of side-on revolving door. Brandon stared in fascination as the helicopter was dragged in. It must be some sort of airlock, one that Brandon guessed would operate in the vacuum of space too. It was like being inside a massive tombola, and the helicopter shook as the tractor beam’s pull was weakened by the walls of the chamber. The rotor blades were snapped off in the confined space.

Then they were out the other side and into the mothership’s hangar. Brandon was both scared and awed at the same time. He looked around at his companions: Kat seemed just awed; Jason was quietly furious; Gem looked curious—nothing ever seemed to faze her though—and James looked …

James looked like he was terrified. Not a good look for a secret agent.

A whole platoon of muscled alien brutes was lining up to greet them. They tried to arrange themselves in ranks and files, but their discipline and co-ordination failed, and they ended up milling around beneath the hovering helicopter like a pack of hungry dogs.

The tractor beam brought the helicopter down to the floor of the hangar with an inelegant crash, as if it had lost its grip just at the last moment. One of the brutes stepped forward and ripped the door away with its bare hands. It growled at the cringing occupants, until some of its friends pulled it back to allow Brandon and the others to get out.

Brandon stepped out first. There didn’t seem to be any point in staying in the chopper, which certainly wouldn’t be airborne again anytime soon. Gem and the others followed his lead. James seemed to summon up some courage and pushed his way through the group to stand in front of Brandon and address the circling pack of aliens.

‘You’re not allowed to harm us,’ He told them. ‘Do you understand? It’s in the Geneva Convention! You can’t hurt prisoners. My name is James Bentley and I am on Her Majesty’s Secret Service—’

The nearest alien lashed out with a giant paw and sent James sprawling to the ground with a broken nose.

Jason and Gem helped him back to his feet. ‘Take it easy, man,’ Jason cautioned James. ‘I don’t think that dude’s read the Geneva thingy.’ Gem wiped the blood from James’ face with the sleeve of her hoodie.

The crowd of aliens moved in closer, almost forcing Brandon and the others back into the helicopter. Then suddenly the brutes backed off and made a clumsy effort to stand to attention. A new alien was marching through the ranks, sometimes having to push the others out of the way to make a path. This one was clearly in charge. It was bigger, and was wearing a strange combination of armour: some medieval-looking metal plate mixed with sinuous purple webbing of a more futuristic kind. On its head was a crude metal crown.

An alien king?

The king was taller and fatter than any of the other aliens, and twice as ugly. It staggered slightly when it stopped, as if it was drunk. In its hand was something fleshy and bloody which it popped into its mouth and crunched down on.

It spat on the floor, pointed at the laptop case that Brandon was holding, and then spoke,
in English
:

‘Give me that!’

The nearest alien soldier stepped forward and tore the case from Brandon’s grasp. The king pulled out a laser pistol and shot the clasps off. The cylinder, phone and hard drive all fell to the floor. The king gingerly picked up the cylinder and held it up to examine it. The other aliens all took a few steps away. They looked nervous.

The king tossed it into the hands of the nearest alien, who nearly dropped it in fright. ‘Take this and destroy it,’ the king ordered. ‘Throw it into the star reactor. And take these creatures and lock them away somewhere. We’ll give them to Zaal later.’

Who or what was Zaal?

‘Wait, no!’ Kat spoke up. ‘Can’t we
talk
about this? We want to
talk
to you! Why won’t you
talk
to us?’

Brandon put a hand on her shoulder to restrain her. He didn’t want her to get a smashed face like James.

The alien king didn’t even bother looking at her. Instead it grabbed the cylinder back from the other alien. ‘On second thoughts, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll take this myself and make
sure
that it gets destroyed. I can’t have you fools getting mixed up, vaporising these
hoomunz
, and then handing me back
the most dangerous thing in the entire universe
!’

They were dragged, each of them by a brute soldier, down a long corridor that curved slightly to the left. Brandon guessed that it was following the curvature of the ship’s circumference. Despite their terrible situation, he couldn’t help but take an interest in their surroundings. The hangar and the corridor were plain and functional, and not particularly alien-looking. But what had he expected? Organic walls and dark creepy passageways?

The group halted beside a hatch in the inner wall. One of the aliens opened it and before Brandon could think, he was hurled through and found himself skidding down a steep metal chute. His hyper-awareness kicked in and he managed to cover his face with his arms just in time to cushion his landing as he shot out of the chute and onto a hard metal floor.

He rolled to the side as the others came tumbling down. When they had all picked themselves up off the floor, they examined their new surroundings. They were in a small, very cold room with metal walls and a solid door. There was one dim light recessed into the ceiling.

Jason got to his feet and went and tried the door. There wasn’t any kind of opening mechanism.

‘Well, here we are,’ Kat said, a bit too cheerfully considering their situation, ‘prisoners of the alien king! I wonder who this Zaal is that we’re going to meet next.’

‘Whoever or whatever it is,’ Jason said, ‘I’m guessing it’s going to be the
last
alien creature we ever meet!’ He banged his fist against the wall in frustration.

Gem was tending to James, who had collapsed in the corner with blood all down his shirt. She examined his arm, which looked like it had been broken in the fall. Then she glanced at her phone, and threw it to the ground in frustration.

‘No
special access
anymore?’ Brandon asked.

‘Not up here,’ Gem confirmed. James held up his wrist; Gem held hers up to his and Brandon noticed that she was wearing a smaller version of her boyfriend’s watch. She rotated the bezel and both watches’ faces lit up. ‘Time Trackers are working,’ she said. ‘MI Zero gadgets,’ she explained, seeing Brandon’s curious expression.

How involved was his sister in MI Zero? Brandon realised that his mother had been right not to trust anybody with the secrets of her work, not even her own family. Still … what difference did it all make now? He sat back against the cold wall and felt all the excitement of the last few days drain from his body, leaving a gut-wrenching emptiness in its place. They had been taken by the enemy, having lost the alien cylinder—the very thing that they had fought so hard to protect. It was all as good as over.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said aloud, to the room in general. ‘It’s all gone wrong.’

Gem came over and put her arms around him. ‘It’s alright, Bro. Don’t be sorry. I’m just glad that we found you before the aliens got us. If everyone’s going to die, we might as well all die together. You couldn’t run forever.’

Brandon tried to blink away stinging tears. Why did his sister have to be so brave?

‘I wasn’t running, Gem; I found out where Mum was.’

‘You found Mum?’ Gem was surprised. ‘In Brighton?’

‘Yes. There was another lab. She’s dead, Gem.’

Gem was silent for a few moments.
Was she thinking about their mother’s death, or about the second lab?

‘I found Dad,’ she said at last. ‘We managed to contact the gallery and he was there. He was a bit peeved because they were using the gallery to sleep people whose homes had been destroyed. You know what he was like when people breathed near the paintings. He said that we should all meet him there when I’d found you.

‘He was still there when the final meteor destroyed London.’

Brandon broke down completely. His world had fallen apart. Both his parents were dead. The only thing that had been motivating him all day—the mystery of the cylinder—had been denied him just at the moment when he thought that he’d started to figure it out. He had been hoping to find the final lab; finish what his mother and this Talem guy had started; save the world, maybe even the universe …

Now all he could see in his future was a horrible death.

The door clicked and swung open.

Three brutes stepped in. James lurched to his feet and made a valiant attempt to fight all three off. One of the brutes made a high-pitched grunting noise that may have been a laugh, picked James up and pitched him over its shoulder. They carried him out and pulled the door shut behind them. It was over in seconds.

‘Oh no,’ Gem sobbed. ‘James!’

They heard a shout from the other side of the door. ‘Gem!’ James called. ‘I’ll be back!’

The footsteps retreated. Then there was silence.

Eventually Jason said: ‘He won’t be back.’

Brandon gently patted his sister on the back in a pathetic attempt to console her. Was this how it was going to go down? Each of them dragged off one at a time? He looked around at his friends: Kat, Jason, Gem. As he did so he noticed something new: something that hadn’t been there moments before when the brutes had come to take James.

Someone was standing in the corner of the room.

A tall figure, humanoid but not quite human. Not a brute like all the aliens they had seen so far, but definitely alien … at least as far as Brandon could tell.

‘Hello,’ Brandon said cautiously. Gem, Jason and Kat all turned to look at the newcomer.

The stranger stepped forward gracefully. He was slim but his muscles were clearly defined beneath his close-fitting shirt. His clothes were black—black shirt, black trousers and black knee-high boots—as was his long hair. His face was pale though, his eyes a gleaming amber. His ears were slightly pointed, but other than that he had no obvious alien feature or appendages; but rather his whole presence was otherworldly. Even his voice, though it spoke English, had a unique mellifluous tone that none of them had ever heard the like of before.

‘Brandon Walker?’ he said. ‘At last we meet. Interesting that it should be here.’

‘Do I know you?’ Brandon asked. He had a sudden flash of inspiration:
The alien that could pass for human.
‘Are you … Talem?’

The alien laughed casually. ‘No. My name is Dravid Karkor. But I knew Talem; We were friends back on our home planet. In fact, he’s the reason that I’m risking my life by sneaking into your cell. I don’t want to see Talem’s legacy falling into the wrong hands.’