Alien Disaster (17 page)

‘Dravid!’ Talem exclaimed. Paran subconsciously touched the wedding band at her neck, and Talem instantly knew where the hidden tracking device was.

They could see Dravid’s lips move as his voice was transmitted into their cockpit: ‘You betrayed me. Both of you.’

‘You
bugged
my
wedding band
?!’ Paran accused him.

Dravid stood and leaned forward over his console, as if to close the distance between them. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So that I could watch over you and protect you! Not because I had any idea you might run away with
him
. I always trusted you, Paran. I was never suspicious. All those times you were with him I never suspected anything—perhaps I should have done—but I didn’t. I just needed to know where you were in case you were ever in any trouble …’

He slumped back in his chair. ‘Even now I wanted to believe that you had been kidnapped,’ he sighed. ‘But I see now that I can’t hide from the truth any longer.’

Now Talem stood. ‘Dravid, you have to let us go. Everyone should be free to choose their own path.’

Dravid scowled. ‘You wouldn’t be free at all if it wasn’t for me. I gave you the chance to get away from here, so that one day you could come back and continue your research. I was going to set up a secret lab for you, a fortified base. We could have been
strong
together,
powerful
!’

‘I don’t want to be powerful, Dravid,’ Talem replied. ‘And if I do come back it will be when I have something better to offer than a
genocidal weapon
!’

All the time they were talking, Talem was thinking of how they could escape. They needed to disable Dravid’s ship so that he couldn’t follow, but they had no weapons. Or they had to lose the tracking device that had been permanently cast around Paran’s neck.

He had a sudden impulsive plan. Without giving away his intentions by signalling to Paran, he put
Discord
in a roll that took it down and underneath Dravid’s ship. Because of the artificial gravity, it looked as though Dravid had shot up and out of sight.

Talem hit the button that released the escape pod, and saw the quick bright white flash of an explosion in space as the pod smashed into Dravid’s boosters. He hoped that it would be enough to cover their escape, and once again he engaged the superluminal drive that in seconds would accelerate them away up to a speed of over two light-years an hour.

In those few seconds, Dravid managed to react by firing a blast from his ship’s macrolaser cannon.
Discord
shuddered, not just from the sudden speed, but also from the hit that breached the cockpit and sent Paran sprawling to the floor in a shower of sparks and wreckage.

Discord
floated in space. Talem stood at the port observation deck and stared into infinity. Had Dravid been planning to fire at them, or had Talem provoked him? He’d never know; he could never go home again now.

Paran was gravely wounded, lying in the stasis chamber in the medical bay, the movement of all the atoms in her body, her child’s body—and also of those in her treacherous wedding band—slowed down to a permanent halt. It was beyond Talem’s skills to help her with the equipment on board the ship.

In his hand he weighed the prototype technology that could either be a weapon or a cure. But right now, both options were out of his reach. He needed time, help and resources.

He returned to the cockpit to make one more journey, this time with no one on his tail. He set the co-ordinates for the star system known as Sol.

‘So then you wound up in Oxford and started working with my mum?’ Brandon said, picking up the story at the point where his mother had begun hers. They were all sitting around on comfy leather chairs, under the low roof of a small underground vault, listening to Talem talk.

‘Yes,’ Talem said. ‘Sarah is—
was
—a remarkable scientist: creative and daring, yet diligent and responsible. What we achieved could change
both
our worlds …’ He tailed off. Talem had only landed on Earth hours before Brandon and the others had arrived at Stonehenge. He was still getting his head around the fact that Sarah Walker was dead.

Talem Tarsus was nothing like Dravid Karkor. He was slightly heavier and more careworn, and his ears were not as pointed. Perhaps he had reshaped them himself to blend in better when he lived on Earth. But Brandon could still see that there was something alien about him, in the way he moved, and the look in his eyes.

‘So you got our mum mixed up in all of this, and then only a few years later you ran away and left her,’ Gem pointed out.

Talem smiled sadly. ‘It feels like I’ve spent a lifetime on the run,’ he said. ‘I’ve been all over the galaxy, trying to keep one step ahead of my enemies and keep them away from Earth. It was far too dangerous to stay here, and it was all I could do to keep Dravid away for as long as I have done. But now he’s here, with the balak king and his army in tow. I hope it’s not too late to do something.’

Brandon thought of London smoking in ruins, Brighton washed away by the sea, and the countryside broken and buckled by earthquakes. Was it already too late? He reached into his pack and produced the metal cylinder. ‘Maybe this will help,’ he said, offering it up to Talem.

Talem’s eyes lit up. ‘Bring it over to the science bay,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you how it works.’

They gathered in another quadrant of the vault. This lab, the last of the three, was open plan, with low partition walls forming spokes from the central lift shaft that had brought them all down. The entrance had been ingeniously hidden in the middle of a field on the other side of Stonehenge from where Talem’s ship had landed. It was the first time any of them had been inside: even Talem had only been told about it by Brandon’s mother just before he had returned to Earth. He had wondered how anyone had managed to construct a secret lab so close to Stonehenge, but then he had noticed obsolete pipework and a bricked-up tunnel: his mother must have converted a disused pumping station.

Kat stayed where she was, staring at a bank of monitors that showed what was happening outside. She was taking her role of early warning system very seriously, despite looking like she was about to fall asleep on the job. They were all suffering from lack of sleep. It was now five in the morning on Monday, and Brandon had been up since Saturday.

Jason was the only one who seemed to have any energy left. While Talem led Brandon and Gem to a workstation, Jason took an interest in the bag of weapons that Talem had brought down from his ship. There were four serious-looking laser rifles fitted with scopes and tripods, and a couple of laser pistols that looked like plastic toys. Jason began hoisting the rifles on his shoulder and taking aim at imaginary targets. Brandon tried to ignore him and concentrate on what Talem was doing.

The alien had set the cylinder in a specially designed cradle on the workstation. Several nearby machines automatically powered up, and a bank of monitors filled with streams of numbers and complex readouts. ‘Have you thought much about what this might be?’ Talem asked Brandon.

‘I know it’s nanomedicine. So I’m guessing that there are nanobots in there. Tiny robots.’

‘Yes. A billion of them. Funnily enough, nanomedicine on your planet is going the way of simple controllable particles that are intended for specific applications, rather than actual tiny robots. A bit boring, don’t you think? But I wanted something more adaptable, something more powerful, so tiny robots it is! These have a titanium shell and tool appendages, but the body is made largely from my own genetic material. DNA can be used to store plenty of digital information—databases and software that the robots might need—but it also means that I can establish a strong physical link between the robots—the
bionoids
as I call them—and myself. Complete control over this technology is my ultimate concern.

‘So how do you keep control of a billion individual bionoids?’

Talem smiled. The danger of his return to Earth, and his grief over Brandon’s mother seemed to fade as he talked about his work. ‘I’ll show you, but first we need to program the bionoids.’ He looked expectantly at Brandon.

Brandon recalled the files of genetic code that he had found on his mother’s laptop. The balak king had smashed the hard drive underfoot when they were on the saucer. Good job he had copied the files onto the memory card. He handed it to Talem, who inserted it into a slot on one side of the cylinder dock. He took a similar looking card of his own and inserted it into a slot on the opposite side.

‘The control software?’ Brandon guessed.

‘Yes,’ Talem said. ‘Programming the bionoids to do medical work at a genetic level—well, that was your mother’s area of expertise—but controlling them, directing millions and millions of robots that might be spread over a massive area—that’s what I’ve been working on all these years. It’s a big responsibility. I had to be sure that they will never get out of control again like they did back on Corroza.’

‘Just tell us how you control them,’ Gem said impatiently.

‘With my mind,’ Talem said simply. ‘Okay, we’re good to go; the bionoids are fully programmed.’ He took the cylinder out of the dock and tossed it in the air. It landed back in his palm with a satisfying slap. ‘Each bionoid now has access to the entire reference genomes of humans, balaks and my people—the zelfs; and not only that but they’re also loaded with the instructions necessary to carry out cell repair and surgery pretty much anywhere in the body.’

Talem looked across to where Kat was sprawled across a leather sofa. She was fast asleep. ‘Watch this,’ he said, holding the cylinder out towards her and concentrating. ‘When we’re feeling tired,’ he explained, ‘we are really just being tricked by our body into saving some energy and not putting ourselves at risk by being out and about. It’s an evolutionary thing, keeping us out of trouble in the same way that pain discourages us from putting ourselves in danger of injury. And just as we can suppress pain on a neurological level …’

Kat’s eyes suddenly flicked open and she jumped up off the sofa. She looked wide awake. ‘Hey guys,’ she said, straightening her glasses and glancing at the monitor screens as if she had never been asleep. ‘What are you all looking at me for? You all look
knackered
!’

‘Come over here,’ Talem said. Kat bounced over to the workstation. Talem put the cylinder down, on its end so that it would not roll, on the workstation surface. ‘I can control the bionoids remotely—neither myself nor the patient need to be in contact with the tube.’ Again, a look of concentration came over his face. Did the cylinder vibrate slightly in front of them? Brandon stared at it closely.

‘I see them,’ he said.

Brandon could detect a subtle shift in the texture of air, as if a barely perceptible cloud was leaving the tube and shooting up towards Kat’s face. ‘You can see them?’ Gem said. ‘I can’t.’ Brandon remembered his mother’s report on his incredible vision. He obviously took it for granted and never realised just how much more he saw than other people.

Kat took her glasses off and blinked. She looked confused. ‘My glasses have gone all blurry … oh!’ She squealed in delight. The sound made Jason pause in his examination of the laser rifles and look over at what they were doing. ‘Jason!’ Kat said. ‘I can see!’

Talem shrugged and held out his palms. ‘An easy fix,’ he said modestly. ‘I just sent the bionoids to burn away part of her cornea.’

Jason wandered over. ‘Any chance,’ he asked, ‘that you could get them to burn a little part of her tongue out, just so that she can’t talk quite as much?’

Five minutes later, they were all alert and awake after having their tiredness banished by the bionoids. Talem insisted that they must now eat, as they would probably feel like they had more energy than they actually did. They found some frozen lasagnes in the freezer in the kitchenette and put them in the microwave.

As they sat around eating, Brandon reached out to touch the top of the cylinder. ‘So
how
does the mind control work?’

‘Our brainwaves are like a wireless datastream,’ Talem said. ‘Sure, they’re analogue, not digital, but I’ve programmed the bionoids to be able to read and convert those signals, to recognise my mind and intentions. And I’m relieved to discover that it works in practice as well as in theory this time.’

‘You tried using mind control before?’ Gem asked.

‘Yes,’ Talem admitted. ‘Sarah and I managed to get the bionoids to respond to simple commands, but we would soon lose control of the entire swarm. That’s when the bionoids would do more harm than good. It’s easier for them to cause damage that it is to repair it.’

‘Gem managed to get them to cause some damage on board the alien saucer, that’s for sure!’ Jason said.

‘Really?’ Talem looked troubled. ‘They are set to respond only to my brainwaves, and to Sarah Walker’s to a limited degree. But of course!—the brainwave patterns in the central cortex are hereditary. It makes sense that her children would probably generate a pattern that the bionoids recognise.’