Star Blaze (2 page)

Clara's ability to fold space was something usually reserved for the octopus-like Plicans who floated in tanks at the heart of every faster-than-light spacecraft. Unfortunately Alf's
complicated circuitry was incapable of handling this distortion in the fabric of the universe and he needed a reboot. Johnny bent down and twisted the android's left ear three hundred and sixty degrees so it snapped back into its original position. Alf sat bolt upright.

“
Cheybora
,” Johnny shouted above the wailing of the alarms. “We're here. What do you want us to do?”

The sirens were immediately silenced and the ship spoke. She had been through many dangerous space battles, but Johnny had never heard her frightened before. “The rest of my crew are simply unconscious, Johnny, but it's my captain. I fear his hearts have stopped beating.”

Johnny was already standing beside the captain in front of the Plican's tank. Valdour must have strapped himself in tightly so he could retain control of the ship during whatever it was he'd come from. That meant he'd been unable to avoid the sharp metal rod which had been uprooted from a weapons console, flown across the bridge and pinned the captain to his chair like a javelin. Johnny checked the humanoid's grotesquely battle-ravaged face. A deep scar ran all the way down the right side, beneath a black eye patch. His other eye was closed. The remainder of the brown face was blackened with scorch marks and the man's dark hair was matted to his scalp, perhaps with blood. He wasn't breathing.

“What do I do,
Cheybora
?” asked Johnny. “Help me.”

“You must remove the obstruction, then restart both hearts simultaneously. My sickbay has been destroyed. Do you have equipment on your ship? Please hurry.”

Clara turned immediately to reopen the fold, but Johnny stopped her. “There isn't time,” he said. “I can do it.”

He felt Alf by his side. The android took hold of the massive pole and began to pull. It slid out as effortlessly as if he were plucking a pin from a cushion. Acrid smoke hissed from the
wound as the captain's alien physiology sealed itself shut.

“Where are his hearts,
Cheybora
?” Johnny shouted, his throat tightening. As he stood before Valdour he began to wonder if he could really do this.

“One under each arm,” the ship replied.

Cheybora
's confidence calmed Johnny, who placed a hand in each of the captain's armpits, ignoring the sticky secretions. Then he closed his eyes and willed the electric current he needed to come. During the last few months he'd discovered he could sense and even control electricity with his mind—the movement of electrons was becoming like music to him. He began to hum his favorite song; the current inside him fed back in a loop, resonating so it doubled on every beat. By the end of the first verse it was so strong he had to release the barriers holding it in check. He looked down to see blue sparks jump from his fingertips to underneath Valdour's arms. The captain coughed and opened his one eye. He smiled weakly at Johnny, which made his face appear even more horrific, looked down at the puncture hole in his chest and whispered, “That hurt—and the scar won't even show.”

Only now did Johnny realize he'd been holding his breath. He let out a long sigh and sank to his knees. With Captain Valdour alive and talking, Alf and Clara left for the galley, returning a couple of minutes later with armfuls of protein-based drinks that would revive
Cheybora
's personnel. Like most Imperial spaceships, she was crewed by a consignment of Viasynth—white, triangular-faced aliens connected by a hive mind so they could respond instantly to any situation on board. Waking the first was difficult, but once one Viasynth was conscious, the others soon followed.

Johnny carefully undid the straps holding Valdour in the chair, so the injured captain could breathe more easily. Then he asked, “What happened?”

“Truly, I have never seen such horror,” replied the captain. “Whole planets burned … billions of lives with them. The Fourth Fleet destroyed in a Star Blaze brighter than a galaxy. They exploded a sun in the Toliman system.”

“A supernova?” asked Johnny. “How did you get away? No ship could outrun that.”

“However long the odds, there is always a way,” said Valdour, gripping Johnny's arm. “The fight must go on.”

“But who?” Johnny asked. “Who could even do that?”

“The Andromedans,” said Valdour. “It was Nymac.” As he said the name he spat thick brown blood out onto the deck.

It was a name that Johnny had heard before. There was a war going on—a war between galaxies. The Andromedans were invading the Milky Way and, with their evil General Nymac, they seemed to be winning.

With Sol working around the clock,
Cheybora
and her crew were out of immediate danger, but the
Spirit of London
's repair droids would need several more hours to make the Imperial Frigate battle-ready. Then there was the question of setting up defenses. Who was to say where Nymac's trail of destruction would lead now? Toliman was a triple star system known on Earth as Alpha Centauri—only four light years away, it was the closest collection of stars to the Sun. According to Captain Valdour, Earth's Sun could easily be next. What the captain had called Star Blaze had to be what astronomers knew as a supernova. Johnny was fairly sure the Sun was too small to become one, but the same should have been true of the stars of Alpha Centauri. What Nymac had done defied the laws of physics, but there was no time to investigate—Johnny still had his stupid meeting to attend, due to start in Halader House in only twenty minutes.

While there seemed many more important things to do, Johnny's children's home in Castle Dudbury New Town was a special place. He couldn't afford to miss this and be moved elsewhere in his absence, or have too many questions left hanging over his future. The home was Johnny's link to the Emperor, and if there was one person in all the galaxy that Johnny wanted to speak with right now, it was Bram Khari.

So, with Bentley alongside him, Johnny found himself on deck 2, sitting inside what looked like a black London taxi. This was the
Jubilee
, one of the
Spirit of London
's three shuttlecraft. They were about to try something special: Clara was going to fold a portion of space immediately outside Sol's shuttle deck, orbiting Saturn, all the way to low Earth orbit. Her clear bubble helmet was the only giveaway that she was wearing a spacesuit. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside another black cab and a red London bus, the palms of her hands facing forward to where the familiar archway opened, not far beyond the bay doors. Through it Johnny could see the beautiful swirling blue and white world that was home—from space, Earth had no borders. In his mind he thought,
Forward
, and the shuttlecraft obeyed him. To make the fold easier, the gravity generator on the
Jubilee
had been turned off, so once they left the
Spirit of London
, both he and the Old English sheepdog floated out of their seats. When he turned to look back, the fold had already closed. All he could see was the blackness of space and the beauty of the non-twinkling stars, including Cassiopeia, the big “W.”

Johnny couldn't help but stare at his favorite constellation, the one that matched the pattern of freckles on the inside of his left forearm. After a few seconds, he turned to face forward and saw, with horror, that he was not alone. Only a few hundred meters below was the International Space Station. Johnny thought,
Shields on
, and hoped for all the world that he hadn't
been spotted. Around him the sides of the taxi disappeared, followed by Johnny and Bentley themselves. Now they were invisible minds floating alone in the cosmos. Except that an invisible long wet tongue slopped across Johnny's face and then Bentley barked with joy. Johnny hated to spoil his best friend's fun, but he turned on the gravity generator so they slipped out of zero G and he could pilot the shuttle without distraction. Three hundred and forty kilometers above Earth, they passed the space station windows so close that they could see the astronauts inside. Johnny would have loved to stay for longer, but he had to press on for the meeting.

Far below, the outline of the west of Africa was clearly visible. He took the
Jubilee
down into the thin layer of atmosphere that protected Earth. If Nymac could turn the Sun into a supernova, all this would be boiled away into space. One day, when Earth's local star swelled to become a red giant, it would happen anyway, but astronomers weren't expecting that to be for another five billion years—roughly speaking. Johnny was determined to do everything in his power to ensure they were right.

To that end he'd put Clara in command and the
Spirit of London
would, for the first time, be journeying through space without him. He hated being away from Sol, but she was off to the dwarf planet Pluto, on the fringes of the Kuiper Belt, where Clara and Alf would start work on an early-warning system. If the Andromedan Navy came calling, Johnny wanted as much notice as possible.

He reached over and stroked Bentley's invisible coat as he took the
Jubilee
down through the clouds. They emerged over London and his mind, almost unconsciously, directed the small craft northeast toward the Essex town that was their final destination. Luckily, Barnard Way was free of traffic so the shuttle was able to land, light as a feather, on the tarmac. As it did so, the
Jubilee
's ingenious shields changed so the invisible
spaceship again became a black taxi, and anyone looking from the pavement would have seen an ordinary cab driver with a single passenger in the backseat. They would have seen the taxi turn into the driveway of Castle Dudbury Railway Station and come to a halt in the taxi rank alongside a row of trees opposite the main entrance. They might then have been a little surprised to see a thirteen-year-old boy and a gray and white Old English sheepdog clamber out and run across the station carpark toward the children's home located in the far corner.

Johnny glanced at his wristcom and saw he was already five minutes late. He opened the gate that led into the backyard of Halader House, tied Bentley's long leather lead to the side of the dog's kennel, ignored the sheepdog's offended whine and hurtled through the back door. He raced down a windowless corridor past the computer room and the kitchen–dining room and then jumped up the stairs, three at a time, onto the first floor. Soon he found himself at the very end of the corridor in front of a wooden door on which a brass plaque read “Manager's Office.” He took a last deep breath and knocked.

The door was opened by a striking woman with gray and black striped hair, wearing pointed glasses that made her eyes appear huge and owl-like. Through them Mrs. Irvine, the children's home manager, was staring disapprovingly at Johnny making him feel just a few inches tall. In a sing-song Glaswegian accent she said, “Jonathan, you're late.”

She held the door open, allowing Johnny to duck underneath her arm and pass through into the spacious office. Behind a modern wooden desk, one floor-to-ceiling window made up the entire far wall, looking out across the carpark toward the train station. In the distance, Johnny could see the
Jubilee
. To either side of the desk were tall bookshelves full of dusty volumes that didn't look as though they'd been read in a very long time. In front of the desk was a circular, wood-effect table around which
sat three familiar faces.

Miss Harutunian, Johnny's red-haired American social worker, smiled as he entered, said, “Hi, Johnny,” and tapped the vacant seat next to her.

On the other side of the empty seat was Mrs. Devonshire, Headmistress of Castle Dudbury Comprehensive School, which Johnny still attended as often as he could. Miss Harutunian was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt, while Mrs. Devonshire sported a stripy pink jumper and flared white trousers. She, too, gave Johnny a smile, but there was no warmth behind it.

Next to Mrs. Devonshire, for some inexplicable reason, sat Mr. Wilkins, the Halader House cook. His huge frame was taking up a large amount of the table. The cook's matted hair and bushy beard reminded Johnny of the fur of a Pilosan, a race of large aliens with powerful mind-control techniques whose planet he'd only just escaped from a couple of months earlier. Johnny shuddered as he recalled the way the creatures grew bigger and bigger as they gorged on the unhappiness of others. For reasons best known to himself, Mr. Wilkins acted as though Johnny was the vilest, most despicable person he had ever had the misfortune to meet and said as much to anyone who was prepared to listen. His tiny beetle-like eyes scowled full of loathing as Johnny sat down.

Mrs. Irvine closed the door and took the remaining chair, calling the meeting to order. Mrs. Devonshire leaned forward and interrupted. “As I'm sure we are all aware,” said the Headmistress, smiling again, “under the 2003 Education Act a school has the authority to require the re-housing of a young person in local authority care, should their place of residence be unable to enforce regular school attendance.” Johnny's heart sank. He'd suspected this, but he hadn't known for sure.