The Dark Giants (2 page)

A small, neat person walked quietly between the tables, making her way to Amelia.
She was dressed in her usual drab uniform of cargo pants and a sleeveless T-shirt,
but no-one seemed to notice what she was wearing. Everyone was staring at her extraordinary
face, at her sweep of long, jet-black hair, at the acrobatic elegance she compressed
into just walking across the floor, and at the silver scar that twisted its way up
her arm.

‘Who is that?’ Sophie T gaped.

‘That is Lady Naomi,’ said Charlie smugly.
‘I told you she was cool.’

Amelia hadn’t thought for a moment that Lady Naomi would be at her birthday. Apart
from the research that usually kept her out in the bush until well after nightfall,
Lady Naomi preferred to avoid crowds, and Amelia could see why. For a very private
person, it was almost impossible for her to go anywhere without attracting attention.

‘Happy birthday,’ she smiled as she reached the table. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting.’

‘Never,’ sighed Sophie T.

‘Do you want some cake?’ said Charlie. ‘There’s loads left.’

‘Maybe later,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘Right now, I was wondering if Amelia would like
her present?’

‘You got me a gift?’

‘Well, not just me. I had an idea, but Ms Rosby ordered the parts, and Tom did all
the actual work.’

Charlie goggled at Amelia in open jealousy.
‘I hope you know when
my
birthday is,’
he said to Lady Naomi.

‘It’s not just for Amelia. You can all enjoy it together.’

Mrs Flood came over to the table and caught Sophie F’s eye. ‘Time we were off, pumpkin.’

‘Oh, but Mum …’

‘No, come on. You’ve had cake and given Amelia her present, and now we have to go.’

‘Oh, could you possibly stay another ten minutes?’ Lady Naomi asked. ‘I’m sorry to
have left it so late, but I wanted to wait until it got properly dark. And we only
need to go out to the lawn. You’ll have to walk past anyway, won’t you?’

‘Well …’

Amelia grinned at Sophie F. No-one could resist Lady Naomi.

‘Just ten minutes,’ Mrs Flood agreed. ‘And then we really have to go.’

Sophie F didn’t waste any time discussing it; she was already out of her chair and
on her way to the door. Lady Naomi began to follow her and then realised that everyone
in the dining room was still looking at her. She paused to check with Amelia. ‘If
it’s all right with you, birthday girl, everyone here can come too.’

Amelia was confused now. What kind of gift could a hotel full of people enjoy at
once? She couldn’t wait to find out, and scrambled after Sophie F.

It wasn’t until she was standing with Charlie and Sophie F on the lawn that she noticed
Sophie T wasn’t there. She looked around and spied her friend standing on the hotel’s
verandah, underneath a lantern. ‘Come on, Sophie!’ Amelia called. ‘Stand with us.’

‘I’m fine,’ Sophie T called back. ‘I just don’t want to get any dew on my new shoes.’

‘Oh, but there isn’t any –’

Amelia stopped as Sophie F touched her arm and whispered, ‘
She hates the dark.
’

Amelia blinked in surprise. She never would have guessed something so ordinary would
bother Sophie T, but she tried hard not to show any reaction. She just nodded, then
glanced over at Charlie. He had a triumphant gleam in his eye. Why did he have to
have such sharp hearing?

Before he could do anything with this new information, Amelia said to Lady Naomi,
‘Where should I be looking? Is it here yet?’

‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, thankfully changing tack. ‘Where is it, Lady N? Did you get
her Wonder Woman’s invisible jet?’

Sophie F snorted with laughter.

‘Or did you get her a star? You can do that, you know: buy a star and name it whatever
you like.’

‘True,’ said Amelia, ‘but you don’t usually order
parts for a star or get Tom to
work on it.’

‘Or invite everyone to see it,’ Sophie F added.

‘Well, what then?’ said Charlie.

Lady Naomi appeared to ignore him, but called down the slope of the headland, ‘Ready
when you are, Tom.’

Amelia held her breath and peered into the darkness, wondering what Tom might be
bringing up the hill. She was staring so intently that when the first explosion came,
she gave a little scream.

‘Whoa!’ cried Sophie F, looking up as more explosions popped and thumped around her.

Amelia saw the sky bloom with colour. All the guests from the hotel went ‘Ooh!’ together
as one pinprick of yellow burst into a ball of blue sparks, and then they all sighed
‘Ahh!’ as stream after stream of red sparks shot up like pillars.

It was a brilliant show, and much more exciting than any fireworks Amelia had ever
seen before.
Partly this was because these were so close she could feel the shock
waves in her belly, and the ground reverberating through the soles of her feet. It
was also because, as well as the usual green and white and red crackers, there were
a number of more … peculiar ones.

A mauve firework puffed out like a chrysanthemum and then turned lime green, with
hot pink stars winking at the edge of each petal. A turquoise jet drew a sparkling
oval in the sky, which then swam with dozens of orange fish. And as the grand finale,
a golden comet squealed through the sky and wrote
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMELIA
in letters
so huge and bright, it took a couple of minutes for the image to fade from her retinas.

‘That was amazing!’ cheered Sophie F. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it!’

‘I know!’ crowed Charlie. ‘Who knew Tom was
a pyrotechnics expert? No wonder he blew
off his finger and eye! I’m going to get him to teach me everything!’

Mrs Flood waved and called.

‘Oh, bum, I’ve got to go,’ said Sophie F. ‘Thanks for having me, Amelia. That was
the best!’

She hugged Amelia and then ran back to her mum and their car. Amelia smiled after
her, still dazzled from the fireworks. In fact, it almost seemed as though she could
see a dull yellow glow out of the corner of one eye …

She turned her head to see if the illusion would persist and got a nasty shock as
something like a camera flash almost blinded her.

‘What was that?’ yelped Charlie.

Amelia blinked furiously, trying to recover her night vision, and pointed. ‘Over
there somewhere.’

‘I see him,’ said Lady Naomi, and strode off
toward the bush at the edge of the hotel’s
gardens.

Amelia looked back toward the hotel, torn. There was Sophie T, standing under the
light, her arms crossed. She looked small and uncertain, and Amelia knew she should
go back to her –

‘Come on, Amelia!’ Charlie called over his shoulder as he jogged after Lady Naomi.

She bit her lip, on the verge of letting Charlie go on without her, but then saw
Sophie T’s face break into a wide smile as James walked over to talk to her. Ignoring
her guilty feelings, she turned and ran to catch up with Charlie and Lady Naomi.

They were almost at the edge of the hotel’s lawn, where the grass gave way to the
bush, when Amelia heard twigs snapping ahead of them.

‘Stop right where you are,’ Lady Naomi called out, running now. But from the sound
of crunching leaves and rustling bushes, whoever it
was had no interest in taking
orders.

‘Right,’ said Lady Naomi grimly, ‘have it your way, then.’ She sprinted ahead with
a sudden burst of speed.

Amelia heard a great commotion – more branches being snapped and the frantic scuffling
of several feet, and then a yipping voice: ‘Get your hands
off
me!’

Amelia and Charlie pushed their way toward the ruckus. There was just enough light
in the sky for them to make out two figures: one, obviously, was Lady Naomi. The
other –

‘It’s the fox guy from Tom’s cottage!’

‘Why don’t you have your holo-emitter on?’ said Charlie. ‘You know Tom will tell
Control.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘What was that device you were just using – and
where is it now?’

‘He’s got a pouch,’ said Amelia. ‘That’s how he
smuggled it past Tom, I bet.’

‘A pouch?’ said Lady Naomi, and there was a moment’s more struggling and then a high,
foxy scream of fury.

‘You picked my pocket? You shameless barbarian! You ignorant savage! I’ll have you
know that I’m –’

‘Be quiet,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘We don’t care who you think you are. The only thing
you need to tell us is what this device is, and what you were doing with it.’

‘It’s nothing!’ he barked. ‘Nothing you’d understand, anyway.’

‘Try us.’

‘Is it a scientific instrument?’ said Amelia. ‘He said he’s an exobiologist.’

The alien sighed. ‘Fine. It’s a multi-channel bio-scanner. I use it to scan the environment
for specific signs of life. Look: I can put in criteria –
say, iron-based blood system,
a single four-chambered heart, bipedal, put in the estimated size-range of the animal
and its usual body temperature and –’ The machine gave an excited clockwork whir
and a screen lit up with two pink dots. ‘See, there you are: two humans.’ He paused
and then looked at Lady Naomi. ‘But not you …’

‘Right, good,’ she snapped. ‘A bio-scanner. And what are you doing with it?’

‘Surveying the local environment, of course! That’s my job. I’m a junior professor
in gateway ecology – I’ve been studying how wormhole activity impacts the local wildlife.’

‘And does it?’ said Amelia.

‘Of course it does! All that magnetism, all those wormholes emitting strange gusts
of atmosphere or blasts of alien dust. Imagine how many bacteria and fungi spores
and different pollens are wafting onto Earth every time the gateway opens. Not
to
mention the muck we travellers bring through on our clothes and feet and fur. And
what about blowbacks? Ever think about them?’

‘Er, maybe …’ Amelia shuddered. She’d thought about Grawk, but never invisible things
like diseases and pollution.

‘Well, that’s my area of study, and I think you can see why it’s so important. I
mean, I did my research before coming here – this is Australia, isn’t it? How much
trouble have you caused yourselves by bringing rabbits and cats and cane toads here?
And they were at least native to Earth! Can you imagine how catastrophic it would
be if just one breeding pair of Saulidean snapping yabbies got through? Or if –’

‘All right, all right,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s a good story, but we’ve heard those before.
It doesn’t prove that you’re not up to something else.’

‘But Charlie –’ Amelia didn’t disagree with
him, exactly, but she’d been hoping to
find a way to ask if Foxy had seen any signs of Grawk before they’d burst in on him.

‘Charlie’s right,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘Even if your story is true, you ought to have
registered your purpose for travel with Control as a science expedition.’

‘That process takes months! If I’d missed this wormhole, I would have had to wait
over a year and a half before I could get to Earth. It was far better for me to travel
as a tourist, and then later –’

‘I can see your point,’ said Lady Naomi, ‘so I hope you can see ours, too. We are
going to have to escort you down to Tom’s so he can contact Control and –’

‘Nope, sorry!’ Foxy suddenly snatched his bio-scanner out of Lady Naomi’s hand, and
took off deeper into the bush. He might have been a scrawny little thing, but he
was seriously fast on those paws.

Lady Naomi growled in annoyance. ‘Fantastic. You two, tell Tom. I’ll go and get this
genius.’ She ran up the trunk of a leaning gum tree until she reached its first branch,
a few metres above the ground, and looked for Foxy’s path. ‘Got him,’ she murmured,
and then sprang in that direction, disappearing immediately into the gloom.

‘Wonder what Sophie T would say if she’d seen
that
,’ said Charlie.

Sophie T!

‘Oh, no, I can’t!’ Amelia groaned. ‘She’s –’

‘You heard Lady Naomi. We’ve got to tell Tom
now
.’