Alien Disaster (9 page)

Jason led the way up. The ladder creaked and rattled as they climbed. At the top was a small maintenance platform that was just about big enough for them all to fit. It was windy and cold, despite the sun.

‘We can just slide back down if we need to leave in a hurry!’ Kat pointed out.

A loud explosion caught their attention. On the esplanade around the entrance to the pier, a noisy firefight was taking place. Smoke from an amusement arcade fire was drifting over the road. Brandon could see figures moving between cover, and could hear the rattle of guns and the fizz of lasers. Brutes versus black-clad soldiers.

‘Who do we want to win?’ Jason asked.

‘Looks like the creatures are outnumbering the soldiers,’ Brandon said, peering across the distance. ‘And the way that they’re running into the clouds of smoke, it looks like they can see and breathe through it.’

The soldiers were pinned down behind a beachfront cafe. Their situation didn’t look good. Then something hovered into view from behind a large hotel: a small black box with four arms that ended in rotor blades.

‘What’s that?’ Kat said. ‘An alien robot?’

‘It’s a military scout drone,’ Brandon said. ‘The aliens will want to shoot it down as soon as possible.’ He could see that one of the soldiers was operating a touch-screen control pad.

The brutes didn’t even spot it, let alone shoot it down, and seconds later a shower of tiny but accurate missiles rained down on the targets that the drone had scouted out, eliminating almost all of the alien horde in one strike. The special ops team were freed from cover, and they quickly shot down the remaining enemies.

Jason was impressed. ‘Nice job,’ he commented.

‘Looks like we’re next,’ Kat said. The soldiers had regrouped at the foot of the pier. They left two men as guards, and the remaining eight began to march up towards the dome.

Brandon recognised Lieutenant Hewson leading the squad.

‘I think we should get down to the boat,’ Jason said.

‘Not yet,’ Brandon said. ‘I want to talk to him.’

‘Maybe we should do the right thing and give him the thingy,’ Kat suggested. ‘Now that we know it’s not a weapon and all.’

‘I’m not giving it to anyone,’ Brandon said, ‘except the one person who’s still alive that can safely use it.’

Kat and Jason gave each other blank looks. ‘Who would that be?’ Jason asked.

‘I’ll tell you in a bit,’ Brandon said.

Lieutenant Hewson walked up to the foot of the dome, stopped, looked up and gave Brandon an ironic salute. ‘You’re a hard man to pin down, Brandon Walker,’ he said.

‘What do you want?’

‘You know what I want: the device that you took from the lab in London. You did us a big favour getting it out of there before the city got hit—hell, Brandon, you did
me
a big favour leading us on this merry chase—but we’re taking it off you now.’

‘You don’t even know what it does,’ Brandon challenged.

Hewson shrugged. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘My orders are to bring it in.’

‘Who
are
you guys?’ Kat shouted.

‘You really want to know? Alright then. We’re a secret division of the Secret Intelligence Service. Every country has one: a team devoted solely to exploring the possibility of alien life—and alien technology—here on Earth. We’re so secret that even the government doesn’t know we exist; have you heard of the term
plausible deniability
?’

‘Yeah,’ Brandon said. ‘It means that the government can plausibly deny that they had anything to do with the hunting and terrorising of a group of kids.’

Hewson stiffened. ‘It’s not
you
that we’re interested in,’ he insisted. ‘I’m a soldier, Brandon. Ex-SAS. I’ve killed terrorists, insurgents, fanatics … and now aliens. My job is to
protect
kids like you, not frighten you.’

One of Hewson’s soldiers was monitoring what looked like a real-time map on his tablet computer. ‘Uh, Sir … we have a large unidentified object approaching from the south.’

Brandon turned. The sun was in his eyes, but there was something immense hovering above the thin cloud layer.

‘Brandon!’ Hewson was shouting. ‘Get down here now!’

‘Oh my God,’ Kat gaped.

The mothership—it was too big to be anything but a mothership—was almost a kilometre wide. It was a saucer with a spherical middle, making it look like a gleaming chrome version of Saturn and its rings. Rotating slowly, it lowered itself into position over the sea, about a kilometre offshore. The sunlight sparkled off it.

‘Would now be a good time to get to the boat?’ Jason asked.

‘Uh, yeah,’ Brandon decided. As one they hurled themselves over the safety barrier and slid down the south side of the dome. Jason led them down the ladder that led to the jetty beneath the pier.

Brandon looked up and out to sea to see what the saucer was doing. An opening had appeared under the central sphere. From inside came a ominous blue glow. Brandon looked down at the boat.

‘Jason, this isn’t a boat!’

‘Get in, you idiot!’

‘It’s a pedalo!’

‘Then get in and start peddling!’

Brandon hopped aboard—what choice did he have?—and he and Jason took to the pedals while Kat perched between them. ‘Hold on to this,’ Brandon told her, handing over the laptop case. Then with agonising slowness they began to put some distance between themselves and the pier. The cold dirty seawater splashed around them.

Hewson’s men hadn’t followed them down to the jetty. Brandon glanced back and saw them running back down the length of the pier.

Then the giant alien saucer fired its weapon.

There was no noise, no beam of light, just a horrible hum in the air that battered Brandon’s eardrums. Then the water around their tiny craft swelled up and suddenly they were hurtling towards the shore.

‘What’s going on?’ Kat cried, trying to find a stable position between the pedalo seats.

‘Electro-magnetic beam!’ Brandon guessed. He noticed that the pier that they had just left was shaking violently. ‘They’re inducing an earthquake under the sea!’

Jason swore. ‘We’re going to get smashed against the promenade.’

Brandon, though, was looking back out to sea. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re not. Turn the boat around. Quick!’

Their forward momentum slowed, and now they found themselves being dragged
back
away from the shore as the powerful drawback sucked all the water from Brighton beach. At the moment that the pier was completely exposed, its supports collapsed and it smashed down on to the seabed.

Brandon had stopped peddling, and Jason was working twice as hard in order to turn them around. When he saw what they were now facing he swore again. And again.

An enormous wave crest was looming over them. Forty metres high and topped with churning froth, it advanced on Brighton with devastating potential.

Jason started to peddle madly in panic. Kat looked like she was about to jump off and into the sea. Brandon held his nerve though. His brain seemed to focus under pressure, and he knew what they had to do.

‘Jason, stop peddling! We’ve got to hit this thing head on and bust through!’ He was thinking back to last summer: a beach in Devon, a hot day, a wetsuit and a surfboard. To get further out to sea to catch a wave that was even further out, you had to know how to bust through the waves that were in your way.

He crouched low in his seat, leaning forward. Jason looked terrified, but copied the position. ‘When we’re almost at the crest, tip the weight forward!’ Brandon ordered.

The small pedalo began to climb the giant wave. Their entire world became a solid wall of grey water that blocked out the sun, creating a wet and scary world of cold shadow. Brandon judged the moment when their upward velocity peaked, then shouted, ‘Now!’

The three of them tipped their weight forward as far as they could over the front of the pedalo, gripping the bottom of the seats as tightly as they could. The tiny vessel cut into the wave, taking a short cut through the apex, and avoiding the deadly crest. They burst out the other side onto the back of the wave.

‘Well, that was gnarly,’ Jason said flatly. He spat out a mouthful of saltwater. They were all soaking. Kat wiped her glasses clean and then pulled a small fish out of her jacket pocket and flung it away.

The immediate danger was over, but they were still being carried along behind the wave, heading for the town. The water broke on the esplanade, lifting cars and smashing shop windows with its incredible force. The white-fronted hotels were surrounded by rushing water that pushed through the third floor windows and flushed the contents of the rooms out through the other side.

Brandon, Jason and Kat had no control over the pedalo now. Luck alone saved them from being smacked against the buildings. They were funnelled up a gap between them instead, following the leading edge of the tsunami as it flooded Brighton’s roundabouts, roads and parks.

They were heading towards Brighton’s Royal Pavilion: a long oriental-looking palace that wouldn’t have looked out of place next to the Taj Mahal. The wave reached it first, swamping the palace’s domes. Only the top of a tall minaret was left above the waterline, and as the pedalo passed it, Brandon and the twins jumped out and onto the small gallery.

They collapsed in a pile behind the stone parapet. Kat looked exhilarated as usual, but there was a wild look behind her eyes that Brandon hadn’t seen before. Jason looked angry. ‘Why?’ he complained. ‘Why are aliens trying to kill us?’

Brandon tried to explain briefly. ‘You might not believe this,’ he sighed, ‘but my mum met an alien twenty or so years ago and they’ve been working on some kind of new technology ever since. Now a whole load more aliens seem to have come to wipe out their efforts completely.’

‘Brandon,’ Kat said. ‘After what I’ve seen today, I’d believe you if you told us that
you
were an alien.’

He laughed, then looked out over the edge of the wall to see what was happening. It was chaos out there.

Out to sea, the mothership was still hovering above the water, malevolently rotating as it appeared to watch the devastation that its tidal wave had caused. Two fighter jets—Tornados, Brandon guessed—their wings heavy with missiles, flew in close to the saucer and circled around it, presumably looking for weak spots to target. But before they could fire, the saucer zapped them with lasers—spidery thin blue lines that effortlessly found their targets despite the Tornados’ speed.

One of the jets went into a spin and exploded against the hull of the saucer, disintegrating completely, but leaving no mark on the shiny alien craft. The pilot of the second tornado ejected, but he was in the air for less than a second before another laser spat out and vaporised him.

Across the city, Brandon saw that only a handful of Brighton’s tallest buildings were above sea-level. One of the Chinook helicopters was hovering over the roof of a hotel in order to collect some stranded soldiers. Brandon couldn’t see Hewson’s secret black-clad team though. He wondered if the regular army even knew that they were here.

Hundreds of small pleasure boats from the nearby marina were bobbing around with all the rest of the floating debris between the surviving buildings. On the outskirts of the city, the wave had swept away the army’s mobile barricades and had sloshed across the golf courses, only coming to a halt at the line of hills four kilometres north of the city.

The waters began to slowly recede, but the destruction wasn’t over yet: the mothership’s seismic weapon was glowing again, gearing up to generate another wave. Brandon was looking around desperately for a way to escape: a jet ski, a handy speedboat, a path made up of conveniently placed floating boxes …

There was nothing. This wasn’t a movie.

The world shuddered and the minaret shook violently. The wave that was approaching this time was sixty metres high and would engulf even the tallest block of council flats in Brighton. Brandon knew then that they were finished. He should have told all he knew to Lieutenant Hewson, he realised that now.

‘Look!’ Kat shouted.

There was a helicopter approaching from the north, just as the killer wave approached from the south. Brandon recognised it: a bright yellow Bell 206 JetRanger.

It was James and Gem. Brandon and the twins leaned out and waved and shouted frantically, and eventually caught the chopper’s attention.

The snub-nosed five-seater helicopter hovered over the minaret and let down a rope ladder. Jason made Kat hurry up it first, then he and Brandon simultaneously hooked their arms and legs around the lower rungs, just as the helicopter started to climb at a fast—but maybe not fast enough—seven metres a second.

Brandon and Jason clung to each other tighter than Brandon had ever clung to anyone in his life.

‘It’s probably safer for me to stay down there,’ Jason roared in Brandon’s ear, ‘than to follow you wherever you’re going next!’

Brandon just laughed out loud in relief and exultation as the new onslaught of water passed just metres beneath them.

Gem grabbed Brandon’s hand and pulled him up into the heli. ‘Hi, Bro,’ she smiled. She was still wearing her running trainers, but had now teamed them up with grey skinny jeans and a soft grey hoodie. Brandon went to hug her, but she directed his dirty wet body down into a seat next to Jason and Kat, and then threw a blanket over him.

‘How did you—I mean, thanks, Gem. But how did you find us?’

Gem nodded over to James, who was concentrating on flying clear of the town. He gave Brandon the thumbs up. ‘James is MI Zero,’ Gem explained, shouting over the noise of the rotors. ‘It’s a secret agency! They found out that you were here in Brighton and sent us to pick you up!’

MI Zero?

‘Wait, what?’ Brandon spluttered. ‘MI? As in Military Intelligence?’

Gem nodded.

‘I thought you were joking when you said you worked in Military Intelligence!’ Brandon shouted to James. The divisions of the British secret services also included MI5 (homeland security) and MI6 (foreign intelligence). MI Zero was a new one to Brandon though; it must be the
secret
secret division that Lieutenant Hewson had mentioned.