Alien Disaster (12 page)

He looked up. The balak king’s chamber was at the top of the shaft, at the very top of the ship. A maze of walkways and steps rose above them. The blinding light from the reactor would prevent them from being seen from the opposite side, but it would still be a dangerous climb.

Looking down, he could see that the bottom of the shaft was open: the fields and roads of England could be seen passing by beneath them. Brandon figured that the ship’s seismic beam must have been generated by the star reactor itself and fired down and out the bottom of the shaft.

He looked at his watches. Fifteen minutes had passed since Gem had been taken; thirty since the aliens had grabbed James. The room that they had been locked in must have been checked by now; He expected an alarm to start wailing at any moment.

Jason had shrugged off his denim jacket. He was wearing a white T-shirt underneath. ‘It’s getting hotter and hotter in here,’ he complained. A gust of warm wind grabbed his jacket and took it from his hands. It flew down into the shaft.

They froze. If a balak saw it …

But as the jacket floated near the glowing core of the ship, it burst into flames and disintegrated.

‘We’re almost there,’ Brandon said, starting up a set of narrow steps like those on a fire escape. ‘Once we get to the top of the ship, it doesn’t matter if every alien on board knows where we are.’

If we can trust Dravid Karkor’s plan
, he thought.

Brandon stepped out in front of the two aliens that were stood guarding the king’s chamber, stuck his middle finger up at them, then legged it as fast as he could back around the corridor. The guards were in hot pursuit; if it wasn’t for the curve of the corridor he had no doubt that they’d gun him down with their laser rifles.

This close to the centre of the mothership the corridors were so tightly curved that in seconds Brandon was back in front of the door he had just run from. Jason and Kat were waiting. Jason thumped the switch to open it and they all hurried through.

The room they entered was circular, with a stepped surround, like a Roman amphitheatre. It had a clear domed roof through which the sun could be seen blazing away in the summer sky. The floor was made up of thousands of semi-transparent tiles, and the light from the reactor below was softly defused through them. As for the decor, there was none of the plain functionality of the rest of the ship; the walls around the top level of the steps were panelled in a white glossy wood and hung with paintings. There were small tables all around that displayed sculptures and pots full of unusual plants.

Brandon breathed a sigh of relief: they weren’t too late. Gem and James were still alive. James was standing in the dead centre of the room. He looked beaten-up and barely conscious, and was held upright by a giant balak, the biggest and scariest that Brandon had seen so far. This one must have been three metres tall, and its muscular chest was tattooed with swirling tribal designs. The ink was the same deep red colour as the alien’s eyes. The king was here too, and stood facing James. It was eating—chewing on a giant greasy chunk of meat on a metre-long spit.

Gem was kneeling to one side. She looked up in hope as Brandon and the twins burst in.

Dravid Karkor was here too, standing at the top tier, examining a painting. He acted like he barely noticed the newcomers enter.
So far, so according-to-plan
, Brandon thought. Karkor had promised that he would be there. So now all Brandon had to do was provoke the balak king into revealing the cylinder.

The king calmly turned its attention from James. It had discarded the plate armour and was now wearing a red fur cape over a purple jumpsuit. The zip was open to the waist, exposing grey-green rolls of fat. Grease and drool were running down its chin and chest. The two soldiers that had been chasing Brandon around the corridor caught up and entered the room. They scrambled to attention. ‘You idiots!’ their king barked. ‘I said one at a time! I haven’t even finished with the first one yet.’

The guards made to grab Jason and Kat, but the twins evaded them and jogged off in opposite directions around the circular walls of the room. Brandon advanced purposefully out towards the centre. ‘Was it worth it?’ he demanded of the balak king as he approached. ‘All that death and destruction, to stamp out someone’s life’s work just because you don’t understand it and you’re frightened of it?’

The fat king didn’t reply. It didn’t even acknowledge Brandon, instead turning to Karkor and laughing. ‘Can you believe this, General? These—what do you call them?—
hoomunz
are very irritating!’ The king spat out a chunk of meat. ‘They don’t even taste very nice!’

‘That’s not a human you’re eating, My Liege,’ Karkor murmured dryly. ‘It’s called a
kebab
.’

The king tossed the meat away. ‘When I ordered human food, I didn’t mean I wanted what
they
eat!’

Brandon reached his sister. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked her.

‘You’re just in time. I think James is about to get sacrificed to Zaal.’

The giant tattooed alien glared mutely at Brandon from over James’ shoulder, perhaps watching for any trouble. Kat and Jason were standing together on the top tier of the steps, under a large painting. There was a guard on either side of them, but the twins had done well: they were in the right spot for when the escape attempt came.

The king went on expressing its views to Karkor. ‘
That
one tried to attack me, the female keeps shouting insults; now
this
one seems to think that it can question me!’ It laughed—a horrible rasping sound. ‘Zaal’s really got it in for me!’

Karkor turned from the painting he was seemingly absorbed in. ‘Perhaps Zaal is testing you.’ He stared pointedly at Brandon. The balak king followed Karkor’s gaze.

‘Could I perhaps have a word to Zaal about all this?’ Brandon asked innocently.

‘Zaal speaks only to me!’ the king spat at Brandon, addressing him directly for the first time. ‘Hoomunz—’

‘Humans!’ Brandon butted in. It didn’t look like it was going to be difficult to wind up the balak king.

‘Humans, hoomunz, any of the creatures on this nasty planet—none of them are mentioned in the Book of Zaal, so I can kill, sacrifice and eat as many as I like!’ The king reached across and laid his large clawed hand on James’ shirt, then ripped it away, leaving bleeding scratches all down James’ chest. James groaned, but then finally found his voice:

‘I hope Zaal chokes on me!’

The king prodded James in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him.

‘
My Liege
,’ Karkor said mildly, ‘we should leave soon. We don’t have to stay here. If the humans deploy atomic weapons …’

‘We will, General,’ the king said, not taking his eyes off Brandon. ‘When all my forces have returned. You said that the hoo—
humans’
pathetic weapons will just bounce off this ship anyway. We have time to make Zaal happy before we leave!’

Brandon was sweating under the hot sun that streamed down through the dome, and the heat that rose up through the floor. It was as hot as
The Eden Project
in here. The balak king was dangerous and unpredictable, and he wasn’t sure that Gem wasn’t about to do something impulsive either; she looked like she could barely contain her anger. They needed to escape this crazy saucer as soon as possible … but not without the cylinder. ‘What
is
so dangerous about this so-called-weapon,’ Brandon challenged the king, ‘that you had to come all this way to destroy it?’

The fat alien looked puzzled. ‘How do you not know?’ He peered into Brandon’s sparkling eyes. ‘What do you call yourself?’

‘Brandon Walker.’

‘And where do you come from?’

‘London,’ Brandon replied. ‘Or what’s left of it. Why?’

‘Hmm.’ The king belched loudly. ‘I have seen hundreds and thousands of my people killed in the most horrible ways by this weapon. Such a thing cannot be called science or progress, even if Zaal cared about those things—which he doesn’t! The one who created this evil thing thought that he could run and hide here on this planet, but there is no place in the galaxy to hide from the will of Zaal.’

‘You said you were going to throw it into your star reactor,’ Brandon reminded him. ‘Did you? Is Zaal happy now?’

The king’s mouth twisted into a grotesque smile, and his gaze flicked to Karkor.
He’s more in thrall to Dravid Karkor than to his god
, Brandon thought. The king took the alien cylinder out from a pocket in his space suit and swished it through the air in front of them.

‘This weapon was dangerous enough before, but now it turns out that it has been made even more powerful since it was brought to this world. Now it is deadly to
all
life on our planet, not just to us. A weapon like this will make me feared by my enemies and my people alike. I’m going be a great ruler with this in my possession.’

Brandon shook his head.
No! That wasn’t it. His mother had been working to heal and cure all life forms, not to kill them.
But obviously they were just two sides of the same coin: life or death, depending on who flipped it.

‘I’ll have it made into a sword hilt,’ the king announced. ‘The most fearsome weapon in the balak kingdoms. I’ll call it …
Catron’s Claw
!’

He pointed his imaginary sword at the large painting that hung where Jason and Kat were standing. It showed two creatures rolling in battle: fearsome scaled tiger-like aliens with unfeasibly long claws. One was dark green, the other pale grey, and the composition of the painting—the way that the two creatures mirrored each other as they fought—reminded Brandon of the Chinese yin-yang symbol.

‘The catron is one of the most unusual creatures from our world,’ Karkor told them. ‘Their wicked claws have grown so deadly, that to protect themselves from each other their venom has evolved into a powerful regenerative fluid. A fight between two catrons can go on for hours as they are constantly injured and restored.’

‘To all other creatures, the claw means death!’ the king exulted.

‘They look friendly,’ Kat offered.

Kat was doing almost too good a job of trying to anger the king.
Brandon glanced across at Karkor.
Now would be a good time to execute the escape plan.
The slim alien was surreptitiously pressing some buttons on a small hand-held device. The king had turned his attention back to James, idly tossing the cylinder in his palm as he looked over his offering to Zaal. ‘It’s time to show this human,’ the king gloated, ‘what the heart of a star looks like!’

Brandon had to keep the king’s mind off human sacrifice for just a little longer. ‘Yeah, like you’ve actually got a star on board this spaceship,’ he challenged.

‘What did you think it is?’ the king snapped. ‘They caught a star and trapped it at the centre of this ship.’

‘Seriously?’ Brandon looked to Karkor for confirmation.

‘Not quite,’ Karkor explained. ‘It’s an artificial star, created by splitting and refocusing lasers. Then splitting them again, millions of times over. The whole superstructure of this ship is essentially a container for keeping the massive amount of energy that it produces in check.’

‘And you let the brutes have this ship?’ Jason accused Karkor from across the room. ‘I’d have set it to self-destruct rather than hand it over to them!’

‘No one gave it to us,’ the king shouted. ‘The balaks
take
what they need!’ He gestured to the giant tattooed alien, who shoved James forward so that he was kneeling in front of the king.

James was stirring again: shaking his head as if summoning the energy to make a move.

Brandon kept his eyes on the cylinder as the king waved it back and forth.

‘Yeah, you took my parents’ lives too, you monster,’ Gem fumed. ‘What did you
need
them for?’

The king was getting visibly angry. ‘I don’t answer to you!’ He reached forward and grabbed Gem around the wrist. ‘It’s time that
you
answered to Zaal!’

Kat gasped, and made to run at the king. Jason held her back.

Brandon looked desperately across to Dravid Karkor. The mysterious alien gave him a subtle nod and activated something on the small device that he had been playing with.
Finally
, Brandon thought.
It’s time to get out of here
. Then he saw James lunge forward to attack the king.

The fat alien was taken by surprise. James knocked the balak king’s hand away from Gem’s arm and then grabbed the king’s other wrist and tried to prize the king’s fingers from around the cylinder. The king easily ripped his hand free and shoved James back down onto the floor. Then he leaned forward and spat the word, ‘
Krabba
!’ at James. The word must have voice-activated something, because the central circular floor tile suddenly opened up underneath James, who fell silently down into the star reactor.

The bright glow as his body caught fire was clearly visible to everyone through the semi-transparent tiles.

Gem pounced, launching herself forward to attack the king. But then there was a sudden loud explosion and the whole room shook. The king sprawled forward, the cylinder falling out of his hands and spinning across the floor.

‘We’re under attack!’ Karkor shouted at the king, who was disoriented. ‘I warned you!’

Brandon, however, had been expecting this. There was no attack, just an explosive charge that Karkor had planted as a distraction. Brandon reached down to pick up the cylinder from the floor.

But Gem was there first. She grabbed the cylinder and advanced on the suddenly terrified balak king.

‘Gem, no!’ Brandon shouted. ‘We have to go!’

The king had rolled over on the floor, but Gem jumped on top of him before he could get up. She began hitting him over and over again with the metal cylinder. The balak guards were circling with their laser rifles drawn, but they were unable to get a clear shot. The cylinder appeared to be glowing and blurring in Gem’s hands. Brandon felt a sudden pain in his head. He noticed that the giant tattooed brute was also staggering about with its head in its hands. Across the room, Dravid Karkor looked slightly uncomfortable.