Star Blaze (23 page)

His request was met by silence. Something sparkled on the
edge of Johnny's field of vision—for the first time in a while, the face of his wristcom had turned green and showed no sign of changing back. As he stared at the strange gift from his even stranger brother, Johnny couldn't help but think it remarkably rubbish. So what if he knew Nicky had thrown off his alter-ego, Nymac, for the time being? It wasn't much use when he couldn't contact his big brother, especially when he could really do with some help. If Nicky'd had any brains he'd have given Johnny something that was actually useful, like some sort of deep-space walkie-talkie.

Johnny switched his attention to outside and the colorful bands encircling the gas giant. He knew these were boundaries between the ferocious air currents that swept around the globe, but he'd learned surprisingly little else about this class of planet—largely because very few of the galaxy's spacefaring civilizations came from them and those that did were so odd they tended to keep themselves to themselves.

The
Jubilee
entered the atmosphere and began to shake. Weightless, Johnny bounced around in his seat as the shuttle headed vertically down toward spectacular multicolored cloud formations. He concentrated hard, desperately trying to take his tiny ship out of its dive, but the London taxi was in free fall. As it plunged through a fine, purple mist, level with the tops of pillars of angry red and blue cloud, the turbulence became so bad that Johnny was flung violently around the cabin. He bashed his bubble helmet on the shuttle roof and was glad of the extra protection of the spacesuit but, just when he thought either he or the
Jubilee
might be shaken apart, the vibrations stopped. He'd crossed into another atmospheric layer and relative calm returned, broken only by occasional, mighty peals of thunder when lightning bolts from massive electrical storms flashed nearby.

Scarily, the little taxi's normally shiny black bonnet was
already glowing red as it heated to beyond safe limits. Johnny pulled himself down underneath the steering wheel, trying to remove the panels that hid the inner workings of the small craft. It was immediately obvious why he'd lost control—the fuel cells were all but exhausted. No wonder the shuttle's communications were down. He couldn't understand how that had happened when they were always fully charged in the shuttle bay. Then Erin's horned face flew into his mind's eye and the full extent of the act of sabotage became clear. The final few drops of energy left had now been diverted to the front shields to try to hold the black cab together. At this rate they would soon fail.

Then something screamed. It was a high-pitched, otherworldly wail that made the hairs of Johnny's neck stand on end. He jumped, smacking his helmet on the bottom of the steering wheel. The language was too primitive for the speck of Hundra inside him to translate, but he picked up enough to know it was some sort of terrible death cry. The voice had sounded close by, only just beyond the
Jubilee
's cabin, but as his eyes darted this way and that there seemed nothing to see, save for a long twisted green cloud like a colorful unicorn horn, above a solid swirling wall of paler green. Rushing from window to window, he also spotted a cluster of straggly mushroom-shaped clouds, like distant hot-air balloons, but it was only when he peered upward through the narrow rear window that he found the source of the shrill cries. Swooping down from above was a school of what looked like purple flying sharks, bigger than buses, with tall fins along their backs. They were pumping their powerful bodies from nose to tail to propel themselves on streamlined wings toward him—very fast. Even as Johnny watched, their coloring began to fade and give way to the fainter green of the surroundings, like deadly chameleons, making it harder to see the danger. Johnny, on the other hand, didn't have
nearly enough energy left to make the shuttle invisible.

The pack of flying hunters careered toward the
Jubilee
in a V-formation. Totally powerless, Johnny took a deep breath and steadied his hands on the steering wheel. In the rearview mirror he watched a pair of jaws larger than the shuttle open, ready to swallow his ship whole. The inside of the animal's mouth was like a runway, luminous skin cells pulsing as if landing lights, directing the creature's prey to its doom between row upon row of fearsome curved teeth.

Then Johnny's world turned white. Something exploded all around and he was forced down into the driver's seat, before the pressure lifted and he began somersaulting around the cabin. The light was so bright it took a few moments to realize he'd closed his eyes. As the flash faded, he opened them slowly, wondering if the creature had fired on him. His ship was spinning like the insides of a washing machine, while part of the bonnet had sheared away. Outside, a bolt of lightning arrowed across the sky, lighting the
Jubilee
through the passenger side windows. Only a direct hit, moments before, could have saved him. The bolt would have been drawn toward the
Jubilee
, which had only half-survived it, but the creature behind had come off even worse. Charred and lifeless, both it and the broken shuttle fell together toward and then into the next layer of cloud, a thick blue fog that Johnny could only hope would hide him. Desperate to right itself, the
Jubilee
must have used the very last ounce of remaining power to stabilize the roll. Johnny dropped into the pilot's seat, just as the craft again nosedived into free fall.

Slowly, from out of the gloom, the shadowy outlines of shark-like hunters began to appear. As Johnny's eyes adjusted, he could see more and more lights from their cave-like mouths, circling the shuttle and its lifeless companion. Still plunging downward, the beasts' shrieks were coming faster and faster
and rising higher and higher, as though counting down to the kill. Then the noise stopped. Johnny held his breath as time seemed to stand still.

The creatures poured forward as one, drawn not to the
Jubilee
but to the other of their kind. A terrible feeding frenzy began as the carcass was shredded in only a few seconds, like watching a time-lapsed film speeded up. The
Jubilee
was ignored and left to continue its descent alone, as the flying sharks halted their fall and slowly began to gain altitude, fighting among themselves for the remaining scraps of flesh. Johnny watched as they shrank into the distance, envious of their power, until he was interrupted by a loud bang. This time he was certain the noise had come from within the cabin and then he saw it—a tiny crack in the front windscreen, no longer than a fingernail. Agonizingly slowly, millimeter by millimeter, it began to grow, spidering out in all directions. Next, the roof of his craft buckled and flying glass from the rear window flew all around, bouncing off Johnny's helmet. The front windscreen blew in too, allowing the cabin to fill with purple vapor. The roof peeled away, like the lid of a tin can, leaving Johnny pinned in his seat as the wind whistled around his spacesuit. The passenger door went next as the rest of the black cab disintegrated about him. He watched it tumbling into the distance and held onto his own door handle, more for comfort than anything else. The next thing he knew he was falling forward through the thick atmosphere just in his seat with only the driver's door beside him—the rest of the
Jubilee
had been completely stripped away. He marveled at the strength of his own spacesuit, but knew it wouldn't be long before he, too, was torn apart.

With a great effort, Johnny was able to haul the door round so it was beneath him, acting as a shield to stop the wind buffeting him as he fell. In doing so, he lost his seat which somersaulted
away, disappearing into the ever-thickening mist. Holding either side of the door, he pulled his feet into its middle and crouched, grateful for the shelter it offered, if only for a few minutes until the pressure overcame his suit or he crashed into the gas giant's ocean of metallic liquid hydrogen—Johnny laughed at himself for having remembered that would be the planet's core. Already droplets were forming on the outside of his helmet making it harder to see. Wondering if the air rushing past might blow them away, he rose slowly to his feet until he was standing like a surfer with a fishbowl on his head, riding the biggest wave of anyone in history.

Clara was his only hope. Swooping across the sky of this deadly, unknown world, he tried the wristcom and could have cried when met by the faint sound of a panicked Alf coming through his spacesuit helmet.

“Alf!” Johnny screamed back. “Am I glad to hear you.”

“The feeling is mutual, Master Johnny. We are having to use geothermal energy from the moon we landed onto power the
Piccadilly
—quite ingenious if I may say so. I based the idea on the Ghordian civilization on Ramos IV, whose cities float on planet wide lava flows and …”

“Alf—I don't have time for this. I need you to lock onto my position and have Clara fold me out of here.”

“Master Johnny—I do worry Miss Clara does far too much folding as it …”

“Alf! It's urgent—life or death. Get Clara now.”

“Of course, Master Johnny.”

Moments later, Clara's trembling voice came through the spacesuit helmet. “Johnny! Alf's getting a lock on your position—it's hard cos the atmosphere's so thick. Are you OK?”

“Not especially,” said Johnny, determined not to let his own voice waver. “The
Jubilee
's gone. I'm in my spacesuit—just falling. I don't have long.”

“Don't worry. I'll fold you out,” said Clara, her words so distant they were barely audible.

“Clara—it's a huge planet. You might not find me.” As Johnny spoke, the clouds parted and, far below the board on which he stood, he could see the planet's otherworldly, shiny ocean. He'd almost run out of time. “Listen to me. Someone will hear the distress signal. Bram will come. You've got to protect Earth.” Face to face with death, Johnny was consumed with a new urgency. He'd made a decision. “I can see the core now. It's almost over. There's something you must know—it's important.”

“I'm not losing you, Johnny.” The signal had almost gone.

“You can't always save me, Clara.” There was no reply and it was now or never. He took advantage of her silence to carry on. “I've been trying to tell you for ages—you've got another brother.”

He couldn't blame her for saying nothing.

“Nicky's alive. I don't really understand it,” Johnny went on. The ocean was rushing toward him faster than he'd expected. He could see waves now. “He's Nymac—it's short for Nicky Mackintosh. He doesn't know about you. And something's controlling him. Something bad … from Andromeda … called ‘the Nameless One.' I'm sorry I couldn't tell you before, Clara. I'm so sorry.”

There was a crystal clear chime in Johnny's ears. Focusing on the inside of his helmet, he saw the thinnest of hairline cracks. Any second now it would implode.

An archway opened in mid-air a couple of hundred meters to the side. By some miracle Clara
had
found him. For a second, he could see his sister, sitting on a rocky outcrop of a dark moon while Alf stood further back, struggling to hold onto Bentley's lead. The bright red
Piccadilly
looked out of place.

He angled his surfboard toward the portal. Clara leaned
forward, only just on the other side, arms reaching out to grab hold, but Johnny knew he was losing height too quickly and would never make it through the gap. As he came close Clara reached right down, straining so far she was almost falling through. Johnny stretched his arms upward, risking losing the board. Then, at the very last moment, he took his hands down. It was instinctive. Their fingertips brushed for a tiny fraction of a second. Any longer and he knew he'd have been pulling his sister down to her death as well.

His helmet cracked, just above the surface of the ocean. Johnny's hand reached for the locket that was his link to his family, but he couldn't hold it—it was tucked inside the spacesuit which had somehow kept him alive till now. His silver reflection, distorted by the waves in the liquid metal ocean, was almost touching him.

Then another silver-haired figure burst through his mirror image, breaking the shimmering surface and rising upward, its arms outstretched. Johnny thought he must be dead—that he was falling into the arms of his father. Then he understood. The gray-cloaked figure wasn't his dad. Bram Khari, Emperor of the Galaxy, caught hold of Johnny and gathered him in.

A great wet tongue slopped across Johnny's face and around his ear, tickling as it rolled onto his neck. He opened one eye to see Bentley's shaggy gray and white face pressed close to his own and wrapped his arms around the Old English sheepdog.

“He's awake,” squealed Clara.

Gently, Johnny pushed Bentley off him and sat up, looking sheepishly across to where her voice had come from. His sister, the fear draining from her face, ran over, flinging her arms around him and burying her head in his chest. It was as if what he'd told her about Nicky didn't matter at all—that everything was forgiven. A great wave of relief washed over him. Awkwardly, he patted her blond hair and squinted past her to take in his surroundings.

They were in a room looking out across the biggest, brightest, neatest cargo bay Johnny had ever seen. The first thing he spotted, fitting comfortably upright against one wall was the
Spirit of London
. All the lights in Johnny's ship were still out. Above her, hanging from the roof, stacked as far as he could see were row after row of sleek white fighters, ready to be deployed at a moment's notice, while far in the distance was a collection of what looked like giant dandelion seeds. Closer at hand, beneath the floor-to-ceiling gap (which presumably contained a force field) and spoiling the neatness just a little, stood a rather grimy red double-decker bus—the
Piccadilly
.