The Ancient Starship (8 page)

As they sped around the last bend in the path, Amelia saw Dad, Lady Naomi, and the Control crew all frozen in astonishment. Several long wires were already attached to the spaceship, buried in lumps of what Amelia guessed was plastic explosive. Or whatever aliens used instead.

‘Please! Stop! You
can't
,' the woman sobbed. She had fallen to her knees in the clearing and was almost lying with her face in the dirt, her arms stretched out in front of her, begging and abject.

Arxish stared down at her in disgust, then rounded on Dad. ‘Just exactly how many people know about this site and what we're doing here?'

When he saw Amelia, Charlie and James, his lip curled. ‘The children,' he sneered. ‘I knew they would tell others. This whole facility will come under Gateway Control's direct authority when I've made my report, Walker. You'll be lucky to find a job scrubbing toilets after I'm done with you.'

He was so boilingly furious, even Ms Rosby looked nervous.

‘Now, steady on,' said Dad. ‘There's no need to –'

‘
Don't
you tell me to steady on!' Arxish fumed.

‘You're the most incompetent, arrogant, ignorant –'

‘All right,' snapped Lady Naomi. ‘That's quite enough.'

That made him stop. Arxish gaped in outrage. Amelia doubted he was interrupted very often. If ever.

‘You dare to –' he spluttered.

‘This is
my
facility,' Lady Naomi went on calmly. ‘Gateway Control is here by my invitation, and so are the children.'

Amelia felt so shy at this, she looked at her feet. No Grawk. She glanced over to the woman in the scarf, then back at James and over to Charlie. Finally she found a pair of luminous yellow eyes low in the grass as Grawk hunched in the shade of a rock. Who was Grawk hiding from?

Lady Naomi went on. ‘This woman followed me here the other day. It had nothing to do with the kids –'

That wasn't completely true, but Amelia was more grateful than ever.

‘– and whatever her interest in the ship, I would like to hear her out before you destroy it.'

‘She lied to us!' said Charlie. ‘She said she was looking for her husband, but –'

‘I am!' the woman cried, lifting her face again. It was filthy now, smeared with dirt and tears. ‘That's his ship! And he's still inside!'

‘Nonsense!' Arxish scoffed. ‘The ship has been buried in the ground for almost seven thousand years, and we don't know how many centuries it drifted in space before that. Not even the Guild's deepest hibernation units could survive that long.'

‘And yet,' Lady Naomi said evenly, ‘I still want to hear her story.'

Arxish snorted and shook his head but before he could speak, Ms Rosby said, ‘Quite right. Come on, my dear, stand up now. You've got our attention.'

Kindly, she shuffled over to the woman in the scarf and helped her to her feet. ‘Now then,' she said, patting her arm and dusting some of the larger twigs off her clothes. ‘Go on.'

The woman steadied herself. ‘My husband and I – we are among the last survivors of our race. Our people …' She seemed uncomfortable, as though she desperately wanted to explain everything, but at the same time, felt desperately sure everything had to be kept secret. ‘The Munfeep,' she said, and Mrs Rosby gasped, ‘are a very long-lived people, but we do not have many children, so there have never been many of us. We lived together quietly, in great prosperity and contentment, until the army of the Fourth Law decided to wipe us out and steal our homelands and all our wealth.'

‘The Fourth Law?' one of the Control agents choked out. ‘But that was …'

Ms Rosby looked at the Munfeep woman, her eyes shining. ‘That was twenty thousand years ago – nothing more than a myth to us now …'

Amelia wondered what it must be like to be an old, old lady at six years old, and meet a woman who was still young after twenty
millennia
.

Arxish and the other Control guys shifted awkwardly. ‘My husband,' she went on, ‘was on an exploratory mission, deep in the outer reaches of our galaxy when the Fourth Law found him. He sent me one last message, telling me he'd detected a rift in space, a kind of trans-spatial portal, that he could use to escape – this was long before the gateway system evolved, you understand – and that if he survived, he'd – he'd –' she sobbed, ‘he'd never stop looking for me.'

She cried quietly to herself for a minute or two, then raised her head again. ‘Since then, I've searched for him. It took centuries to narrow down even which galaxy that rift had connected to, centuries more scanning every sentient planet's transmissions for a clue that his ship had been discovered. And then, when I was almost beyond hoping, I read a notice from Earth to Gateway Control headquarters.'

‘You broke into our secure communications?' Arxish burst out. ‘You –'

Ms Rosby quelled him with a single glare. ‘Go on, dear,' she said soothingly.

‘I knew at once it was his ship. I immediately booked myself on the next wormhole, and had just enough time to
reconstitute
myself.'

‘Reconstitute?' said Charlie. ‘What does –'

‘But why didn't you tell us from the start?' said Amelia. ‘We could have helped you as soon as you arrived.'

The woman didn't answer. Instead, she gazed at Arxish, his mouth hardened into a stiff, disapproving little line.

‘The Fourth Law …' Arxish muttered, his face flashing with something halfway between disgust and terror. He quickly wiped the expression away. ‘Not completely unjustified …'

Amelia understood. Even without knowing a single thing about the Fourth Law, or the Munfeep, or whatever had gone on between the two, she could tell that Arxish saw this woman as a kind of grotesque fable come to life.

Luckily, Dad never noticed extremely awkward moments, so he ploughed in happily, ‘Well, guys, I'm convinced! How about we deactivate the explosives and let the lady see her husband?'

‘Of course we will,' said Ms Rosby. ‘Let's make it so.'

Arxish couldn't slink away fast enough, almost flinching as he passed the ship, now that he knew what was inside. So Dad disconnected the detonation wires.

The woman in the scarf walked over to the ship, hovering at chest height on its anti-grav field, and lovingly ran her hand over its surface. Amelia didn't know what there was to feel there, but after a second or two, the woman pressed her fingers into a small ridge and, with a soft hiss, the whole ship split in two. Immediately the first split divided into dozens of little splits, like branches off a tree. Suddenly Amelia realised that the ship was made of tightly fitting plates that were now moving and shifting, lifting up and sliding over one another so that an opening formed in the roof.

The woman stood on tip-toe, her face ablaze with happiness, and looked into the hole.

‘No!' she whispered. ‘After all this time!'

‘What's wrong?' said Lady Naomi.

The woman swung back, her whole body rigid. ‘It's empty!'

The woman in the scarf collapsed to the ground like a balloon when all the air rushes out – only not at all funny. Ms Rosby and Lady Naomi hurried to her while Dad, James and Arxish began discussing what might have happened to the man.

With the adults distracted, Charlie was free at last to go over to the ship. Amelia could see that it was too high for him to look inside, but she knew that wasn't going to stop him. He reached up to touch it. Instead of firm resistance, it spun on its anti-grav field, as easily as if it had been a log in water.

Amelia pushed aside her fears of alien radiation and joined him, watching as the open hatchway rotated toward them.

‘Hey!' Charlie yelped. ‘Another one!'

Amelia's skin tingled all over. The inside of the ship
wasn't
empty. There was no alien inside, dead or alive, but there
was
some loose sand and, filling almost all the available space, another hollow, woolly bundle of webbing, just like the one the fake Bowler-Hat Man had dumped in the bush.

The woman's head snapped up. ‘You've seen one of these before?'

‘Yeah,' said Charlie. ‘About twenty minutes ago. We were on our way to tell Amelia's dad about it.'

‘We phoned Mum,' added Amelia.

‘Where did you see it?' The woman reached up to grip Charlie's wrist. He didn't look too happy about it, and Amelia didn't blame him. The woman was almost muddy with tears by now, her eyes swollen and her nose runny, and sitting in the dirt she looked pretty deranged. Charlie flinched, and she shuffled toward him on her knees. ‘Tell me! Please!'

Amelia was never so glad in her life that there were so many adults around, or that so many of them were Control agents and armed with explosives. If their theories were right, this woman's husband had somehow been eaten by the same spider alien that had eaten poor Bowler-Hat Man.

‘Tell us what it is,' said Charlie stubbornly, ‘and we'll show you the other one.'

As the woman hesitated, Amelia saw Arxish shudder.

The woman braced herself. ‘It's a cocoon. Whenever my people are sick or injured or feel themselves getting too old, we spin a cocoon around ourselves and after a day or so, we emerge – reborn, almost. Our bodies are completely renewed, healed of any injuries or scars, and young again.'

‘Oh …' said Charlie in wonder. ‘Not spiders – butterflies!'

‘For thousands of years,' she went on, ‘the Munfeep lived this way on our home planet, regenerating our bodies as needed. But then, K'Torl – my husband – discovered that by taking a little DNA from another species, we could reconstitute ourselves and emerge from our cocoons in a different body! Still ourselves – our own minds and memories and personalities, but in almost any type of body we liked. It was this, in fact, that set the Fourth Law against us in the first place.'

Not even butterflies,
Amelia thought.
More like
fairytale genies – tricky, shape-shifting, and practically immortal.

Arxish snorted, a harsh, judgmental sound, and for once Amelia didn't entirely blame him for feeling hostile. Not that she felt that way, but it was intimidating to realise how powerful the Munfeep might be.

‘My husband should have been hibernating in his cocoon all this time,' the woman said. ‘But how did he get out? His cocoon is torn open and empty, yet the ship was closed and encased in glass –' She stood up and turned to Charlie. ‘The other cocoon – will you show me now?'

‘You bet,' said Charlie, keeping his bargain.

‘Don't worry about the cocoon!' Amelia said, almost laughing now that it was clear the hotel wasn't full of hungry alien spider babies. The real Bowler-Hat Man was just fine after all. ‘We can take you to the Munfeep guy himself!'

‘Who?' the woman said faintly.

‘You had dinner in the same room on your first night here!' Charlie hooted.

‘Look,' said one of the Control guys, ‘can we blow this ship up or what?'

The woman didn't so much as glance at him, so fixed was she on Amelia and Charlie. She waved a hand over one shoulder and said, ‘Go ahead. The ship is nothing to me.'

The woman nodded at Amelia, and began walking toward the hotel.

Amelia went to follow her. ‘Come on, Charlie,' she called.

‘You go. I'm good here, thanks.'

‘Charlie?'

He shrugged. ‘I'd rather see the spaceship explode. I've seen grown-ups meet old friends and talk about the old days loads of times already.'

Amelia raised her eyebrows, but didn't argue. ‘Whatever,' she murmured to herself. She had to jog a bit to catch up with the Munfeep woman, who hadn't paused at all.

As they got past the first bend and out of sight of Lady Naomi's clearing, Grawk slipped out from the undergrowth and joined her on the path.

‘Is it the Control guys you don't like?' she smiled to him.