Star Blaze (7 page)

By the time the porridge was ready, a spluttering gray gloop barely denser than water, Johnny was miles behind schedule. He flew out of the kitchen, climbed the stairs and raced along the first floor corridor with his wrist to his mouth, apologizing to Alf for his lateness. He reached the spiral staircase, pulled down the trapdoor and carried on through. Outside the box window, a black car door opened out of nothing, before the remainder of the
Jubilee
reappeared and a flustered android climbed awkwardly through into Johnny's bedroom.

“Master Johnny, we are going to be late. The Tolimi will wonder what can possibly have happened.”

“I'm doing my best,” said Johnny, as he rummaged through some old clothes covering the bottom of his wardrobe, before standing up holding a translucent turquoise wheel-like container by two of its four thick spokes. The colored light came from five stones encased in the central hub—the five Cornicular eggs. “Let's go,” said Johnny as he lifted one leg onto the windowsill, the container held tightly under his arm.

Alf shouted to stop. Johnny turned around to see the android looking nervously at Johnny's untidy bedroom floor, spinning his bowler hat between his fingers.

“What is it, Alf?” Johnny asked. “I thought we were in a hurry.”

“But is this not the place you speak with the Emperor?”

Johnny nodded.

“Then we should maintain it as our communications center,” said the android. “We must hatch an egg in here.”

Johnny felt stupid for nearly leaving the room without doing the most important thing. He sat down on the bed with the container perched on his lap and looked up at his pinstriped companion for guidance. Alf simply shrugged. Johnny had opened the disc once before, to release the original Melanian Worm. That time he'd willed it to happen and it had.

Now he concentrated on what he needed, aware that he was getting so much better at controlling the strange power he possessed. Focusing on the little hatchery, he could sense the fluctuations in the energy field around it but he couldn't stop the flow. It was too fast—a blur of motion that wouldn't settle. In frustration, he tossed the container on top of his pillow and lay down beside it. He closed his eyes, trying to shut everything out, but bright lights from the five eggs danced across the insides of his eyelids. Johnny watched them, almost looking
inside himself. The lights began to drift, very slowly at first, until they settled into the W-shape of Cassiopeia. As they did so, the turquoise glow filtering through Johnny's lids became so intense it was as if they weren't even shut. The case had opened and the little attic room was alive with light from the eggs, glowing like embers in a white-hot fire.

The scent of vinegar wafted up Johnny's nostrils, reminding him of the fish and chips he loved so much. Smiling, he reached inside and picked one of the eggs up, hoping it wouldn't burn. It felt no different from having a soap bubble on the palm of his hand. Very carefully he lowered it into the outer ring of the container, connected to the hub by the spokes. Then he closed the lid. There was a hiss of gas escaping before the whole thing sealed itself shut. The egg began to stretch, growing in both directions. As it became elongated around the outside of the wheel, it changed color, ripples of light passing through all the colors of the rainbow. The two ends grew ever longer and looked just about to meet, when the egg's outer casing melted away leaving a turquoise blur of light racing around as close to the edge as it could get. It was a newly born Cornicula Worm and when Johnny next opened the container to release it on Pluto, he knew it would return to this exact spot, leaving open a tunnel in the space–time continuum.

Johnny looked at Alf who smiled back. “Master Johnny,” he said. “Congratulations to the father.”

Stage one of the plan to defend the solar system was to have Pluto Base operational, but the Andromedans might not be so obliging as to unfold on its doorstep. Johnny's visit to the dwarf planet had been all too brief, simply checking in on the little Tolimi and releasing the Cornicula Worm (which immediately vanished, tunneling straight to Johnny's bedroom).

Now they were even further out, some thirty trillion
kilometers from the Sun in the region known as the Oort Cloud. Here was the solar system's final resting place for the leftovers of failed planets from a few billion years before. They were so far from home that, standing on the bridge, the Sun appeared as just another (albeit bright) star in the heavens. Even so, Johnny still felt a special draw toward it. A handful of Sol's nanobots had been reprogrammed to become spatial disturbance detectors, and were about to be released to join the frozen debris. Over the next few weeks they would multiply, building copies of themselves from the material in the cloud, finally forming a giant nebulous neural net that would encase the entire solar system, feeding information back to the Tolimi in their new home and from there, via the newly opened Wormhole, to Halader House. If an Andromedan ship unfolded anywhere in the outer solar system, both the Tolimi and Johnny would soon know about it.

The defense net was quite an engineering feat, all designed by Alf who had the honor of pressing the button on Johnny's console to set everything in motion. Clara was wearing a sparkly dress and had curled her hair specially for the occasion. She'd poured glasses of lemonade for the three of them, making sure Alf's was as full to the brim as it was possible to be, as it was always fun to watch the android drink effortlessly without spilling a drop. She also added some to Bentley's bowl, before they raised their glasses in celebration. Sol joined in by creating a spectacular laser light show just outside the ship, which the sheepdog especially loved, standing on his back legs to get a better view through the sides of the bridge. Although Alf made a point of complaining that the beams could theoretically be visible through Earth's most powerful telescopes, confusing astronomers for decades to come, Johnny had the feeling that the android was secretly rather pleased.

With the nanobots released, they were ready to leave for
Melania to ask the Emperor for ships to protect Earth. There wasn't much point knowing the Andromedans had arrived, if they didn't have the firepower to stop them. Clara had programmed a series of folds for the Plican to follow. Once the divide that held the creature in a tiny compartment at the very top of its tank was released, the alien would propel itself through into the main section, unfurling its eight tentacles to take hold of pieces of space itself and send the ship on its journey. Johnny placed three fingers on the console by his captain's chair and three capsules emerged from the floor around the edge of the bridge. These were the gel pods that protected space travelers from the ordeal of folding. As ever, Clara would remain outside to keep the Plican company—she didn't seem to mind having her stomach repeatedly turned inside out. It was Captain Valdour who'd first recognized her unique ability to withstand the manipulation of space that would cause anyone else to be, at best, violently sick and, at worst, seriously dead. It wasn't just that Johnny's sister could handle what no one else seemed able to—she positively thrived on the special sensation of folding.

Special or not, in Johnny's experience she was welcome to it. With Alf and Bentley safely inside their compartments, Johnny asked Sol to turn off the gravity generators and he and Clara floated upward, laughing together. Being weightless was one of many elements of space travel he did love. For a couple of minutes the floor became the ceiling and they somersaulted in mid-air, before chasing after each other while several meters up—it was impossible to even get close. Johnny persuaded Sol to release a hundred liters of water into the bridge, which hovered near the Plican's tank in a giant, wobbling ball that they took turns diving through. Finally, soaking wet, Johnny entered his own gel pod and the long journey to Melania could begin. In several days' time when he next stepped onto the bridge, it
would be to see the fabulous world that was the capital of the galaxy.

The water was a dress rehearsal for entering the capsule, but this time Johnny didn't hold his breath. All his instincts told him to do that when surrounded by the thick orange fluid oozing into the chamber around him—that survival required keeping his mouth clamped tightly shut—but one thing Johnny had learned as he'd traveled the galaxy was to conquer those instincts. He opened his mouth and let the gloop slide down his throat without even touching the sides. Even so, he couldn't avoid the petrol-like taste. His body began to swell. It started with his fingers and toes, each one, in turn tripling in size as the cushioning gel began its work. Soon, Johnny's hands looked like inflated rubber gloves while his feet were big as boats. The swelling spread up his limbs and reached his torso. Fully inflated, and unable to bend his arms or legs, Johnny became aware of the first fold beginning. The sides of the pod and the walls of the
Spirit of London
herself rushed through him and away. Stars and nebulae flew past at astonishing speed as the space between them shrank and disappeared. He changed direction with no warning, dragged at ninety degrees toward a young star cluster. Without the gel, it would have been unbearable; with it, he just felt a little queasy.

Clara had divided the route into twenty-three stages. The Plican, initially a baby when brought on board, had quickly grown strong, but even now it could only manage five or six folds before it needed to rest. Johnny had brought along some homework from school to think about so he didn't fall too far behind but, although his head was now twice its normal size, his brain power clearly hadn't expanded. However hard he tried to concentrate, he found himself drifting off into other, much more interesting, daydreams, most of which involved Nicky and some way of finding his mother and father again, whatever
strange place or dimension they'd gone to. His history textbook was sending him to sleep, so he gave up. Trying to do something useful, he turned instead to a much more interesting problem Alf had set him. It was about Einstein's theory of relativity and was called the twin paradox.

When Johnny awoke, the gel pod was nearly empty. An elephant-like trunk was hoovering up the orange remains from Johnny's clothes. It hovered over his wristcom, so he gently pushed it away, revealing the red lights around the face. Johnny pulled down his sleeve to cover them. Then, as always, it tried to suck up the locket dangling around his neck—Johnny grabbed it before it disappeared down the suction tube. He got up and pressed a large switch on the wall. As the door swished open, he entered the bridge, bathed in dull red light through which he could see Clara. She was sitting on the floor, arms outstretched and pressed against the outside of the Plican's tank. On the inside, two of the creature's tentacles were reaching out to his sister. Johnny had no idea how Clara communicated with the strange being, but it was always reassuring to see her when they arrived at the faraway places Sol took them to. He strode forward to study the viewscreen. Clara turned round and smiled. Maybe it was the light from the twin red giants Arros and Deynar, but the silver flecks in her eyes shone more brightly than normal.

“Any problems?” asked Johnny, as he stared at a large white globe in front of him. Twice the size of Earth, and with practically every square kilometer built on, this planet-wide city was Melania. The Imperial Palace, with the only areas of greenery and water anywhere on the surface, was out of sight on the far side.

“We took a detour halfway,” said Clara. “Unfolded close to a
lot of ships. Didn't stop to see whose side they were on, but I didn't recognize them.”

“No one followed us?” Johnny asked.

Clara rolled her eyes. “You can't follow someone through a fold—space gets too messed up. You'd be torn to pieces.”

“I'm being hailed,” announced Sol and, as Johnny nodded to nowhere in particular, the viewscreen changed to reveal a bone-crested alien with a spotted, scaly face.

“Terran vessel
Spirit of London
. I have no record of a flight plan logged. State the purpose of your presence in Regency space.”

Terra was what the rest of the galaxy called Earth, and Johnny often forgot that Bram wasn't actively running Melania or the Empire—he'd delegated power to the Regent. In fact, until Johnny and Clara had arrived on the planet a few months ago, no one other than a handful of civil servants had seen the Emperor for nearly a hundred years. “Visiting His Imperial Majesty Emperor Bram Khari,” Johnny replied. “Request permission to land.”

The alien made a gurgling sound that might have been laughter. “The Emperor is not in the habit of granting audiences,” it said, barely concealing a patronizing smile.

“Check our transponder signal,” said Johnny through gritted teeth. “You will see this Terran vessel flies under the Imperial banner. I'm sure Bram will want to say hello.” Johnny was equally sure the alien had never heard the Emperor referred to as “Bram” before. The first time Johnny and Clara had landed on Melania, they'd heard a list of his formal titles that lasted for over five minutes.