Battle for Earth (21 page)

Even so, there was no escaping Clara's absence. Without her, the
Spirit of London
could no longer land undetected so she was forced to remain shielded in high orbit. Johnny felt terrible leaving his ship, but Sol would be busy searching for centers of Krun activity, with Alf and Kovac helping. With Santorini already identified as a hotspot, Johnny decided to go there first. If he could find Louise, she might be able to tell him more about what was going on.

The signal from her wristcom was still broadcasting, but she hadn't responded to Alf's and then Johnny's attempts to contact her. So, with Bentley beside him, Johnny was flying an invisible
Piccadilly
over the Mediterranean. It had been
Kovac's idea to take the larger shuttle—according to the quantum computer, a red double-decker bus was less likely to look out of place on a Greek island than a black London taxi.

He overflew Santorini, scanning for Louise's wristcom. The entire place was part of a giant volcanic crater, blasted apart three and a half thousand years earlier by an immense eruption, leaving a crescent island as the only trace of the original caldera. The inner side sloped down to a rectangular lagoon several kilometers across and filled with sparkling turquoise water. The outer rim of the island was bordered by steep cliffs to which ancient villages clung. It was along this sheer edge that Johnny located the source of Louise's signal.

Homing in, he flew low over the site a couple of times but there was no sign of anybody, let alone his friend. The area only seemed fit for a handful of skinny goats to graze. Johnny was impressed at how well hidden Louise was keeping. He couldn't risk turning off the
Piccadilly
's shields even for a second so she could see him, as the big red flying bus would have instantly become visible across much of the island. Instead, he set the shuttle down as close as he could to her signal, landing at the very end of a winding, hilltop road. He checked to ensure no one was watching, turned off the shields and stepped out onto Santorini.

The warm air engulfed him and he stood briefly, soaking up the sun. Bentley, with his thick shaggy coat, didn't look nearly so pleased. They walked along a windy cliff top path, clumps of grass and scrubby plants growing in the rocky soil on one side, with a sheer drop twice the height of the
Spirit of London
on the other. Again Johnny thought of Clara. He wished he'd been stronger on Titan and able to cope with the Monks' training. He stopped and turned toward the shuttle—it
looked absurdly out of place in this landscape, making him wonder if this was Kovac's idea of a practical joke.

Alf's voice came directly into Johnny's inner ear, via the wristcom, wondering how he was getting on. Johnny replied he was fine and resumed his rather tricky progress toward the signal, which was stationary. Bentley was out in front and Johnny quickened his pace to keep up, wanting to reach his friend from Yarnton Hill before she moved on. The steep path opened out onto a flat and very windswept patch of land which Johnny thought he recognized as the area he'd flown over earlier. A few goats had been chewing at the tufts of grass, but they scampered away as soon as Bentley began chasing after them and the sheepdog soon wore himself out. Johnny's wristcom told him Louise was no more than twenty meters away. He called her name, but there was no reply. Shouting “Rusty” only succeeded in getting Bentley excited and it soon became perfectly clear that the red setter wasn't about to appear. Johnny walked right to the edge of the cliff shouting, then sat down with his feet dangling over the side. Seagulls were climbing on thermals toward him—they made him think of the Owlessan Monks and again of Clara.

Calling Sol to aid in the search didn't help. Even looking down from on high with far better sensors than Johnny had at his disposal, the ship told him that the two wristcoms were within two meters of each other. This patently wasn't the case. Johnny called Bentley over and the pair made their way back to the
Piccadilly
.

Johnny had to hope Louise hadn't been captured by the Krun ship that had splashdowned nearby. He wished he could turn back time and follow the aliens straight here, as Kovac had suggested. At least the island was tiny. He decided he'd search as thoroughly as he could, starting with somewhere called Fira which, although Sol told him was the largest town,
didn't actually sound very big at all. Perhaps someone would have seen a young English girl and her distinctive copper-colored dog. At times like this, having a speck of a Hundra's soul living inside you came into its own—the Greek residents would understand every word he said. Inside the
Piccadilly
, he thought clearly of the destination and of staying on the roads and the shuttlecraft began a precarious journey down the hillside, through villages built of white stone from where little children ran out of their homes to chase after the bus.

It took less than twenty minutes to reach the island's capital. From the safety of the
Piccadilly
Johnny surveyed the main square for any sign of Louise. Then he did a double take. Someone he knew was standing nearby, but it wasn't a tall girl with long brown curly hair—it was Stevens in his human form.

The Krun was shepherding a group of tourists into a waiting coach—Johnny didn't like the look of it one bit. He opened the bus doors, stepped out onto the dusty pavement and circled around the back of the murdering alien. The tourists were coming out of a whitewashed church which had exposed bells hanging from a tall tower at its entrance. Johnny crept closer, keeping a hold on the back of Bentley's collar. It sounded as though the Krun had learned German. He was trying to explain to the elderly tourists that their original transport had broken down and the holiday company had sent him to take them back to their ship in the harbor.

The Germans began to board, not questioning the alien in his pale linen suit and dark sunglasses. Johnny had no idea what to do, but now he was here, right among them, he couldn't let these poor people become more unwitting food for the Krun Queen. Bentley growled and bared his teeth. Stevens jumped and turned around, backing away. The Krun hated dogs, who
seemed able to sniff them out even after they'd changed their DNA.

“You!” said Stevens.

“Hi, Bugface,” Johnny replied as casually as he could. Although his heart was racing, he beamed a smile at the Krun, who looked confused. “There's been a mistake,” Johnny shouted past Stevens to the tourists—he knew they'd hear his words translated into perfect German. “This is the wrong bus,” he continued, slapping the panels of Stevens's coach to alert the people already inside. “The holiday firm sent the one over there.” He pointed to the
Piccadilly
—many of the holidaymakers nodded approvingly. Those climbing onto Stevens's coach stopped, shouted inside, and everyone set off across the square toward the red double-decker.

“
Nein … Warten Sie bitte
,” shouted Stevens. “He is only a boy.”

“
Ja
,” said the nearest of the tourists, “but he is a good German boy.”

Johnny walked past Stevens as calmly as he could, with Bentley still snarling beside him.

“Don't think you've done anything,” Stevens hissed at him. “We're everywhere—we can take more of them any time we want.”

“No you can't,” said Johnny, turning to face him. “I'm going to stop you.”

As Johnny walked stiffly away he thought he felt something in his back and wondered if Stevens was shooting. He froze and waited for the bolt of green energy to follow, but Stevens simply shouted, “Be seeing you, Johnny.”

Relieved, Johnny walked on, reached the
Piccadilly
and climbed on board, with Bentley following a little reluctantly, aiming a final growl in Stevens's direction. A sea of expectant faces turned toward Johnny and his dog. Almost all the
tourists were sitting on the lower deck, with only a handful of brave souls venturing upstairs. A particularly large female passenger sitting closest to the driver's seat gave Johnny an encouraging smile.

“Where, exactly, do you need to go?” he asked her.

“
Ozeangeist im Hafen
,” she replied. “You know vere this is?”

“
Ja, kein Problem
,” Johnny heard himself saying. He brought the place the woman had spoken to the forefront of his mind and the
Piccadilly
began to move.

While Johnny knew that the shuttlecraft was probably the safest means of transportation on the entire planet, the road down toward the harbor must have looked rather precarious to his aging passengers. Given that they were being driven by a fourteen year old, they seemed to be taking it very well. He was spending much of the time using the
Piccadilly
's internal sensors to keep an eye on them and make sure they didn't touch anything they shouldn't, so didn't notice when his little craft rounded a particularly sharp bend, only for a red setter to run straight into the middle of the road.

The shuttlecraft stopped instantly, the inertial dampeners working overtime. Many of the passengers nodded approvingly at each other as they admired the efficient brakes of the British bus. Through the front windshield, Johnny saw Louise, very shaken, walk into the road and shovel Rusty into her arms. She was shouting at the dog and looked close to tears.

Johnny opened the doors. Still glaring at the red setter she was cradling, Louise stepped on board saying, “Thank you … thank you so much. I don't know how you stopped in time—I thought she was for it.”

“No problem,” said Johnny, who couldn't help laughing.

For the first time, Louise looked up and almost dropped Rusty in shock. Then she turned and forced an uncertain
smile toward the host of beaming faces watching her. “Er … Johnny,” she said slowly, “what's going on?”

While Johnny was keen to unload the strangest crew his shuttle had ever carried and talk to Louise about what had been happening, he couldn't say no to the many requests from his passengers who wanted to pose for photographs with him and Bentley in front of the red double-decker. As more and more were taken, the tourists were slipping rolled up bills into Johnny's chest pocket. When, finally, they'd all left and climbed the ramp to their waiting cruise ship, Louise plucked a couple of the pieces of paper from Johnny, unrolled them and said, “You owe me big time—I ran out of money ages ago. Do you have any idea what it's like not eating for days?”

Johnny mumbled, “Sorry.”

Without saying much more, Louise led him to a restaurant overlooking the lagoon. A sign outside it read: “Traditional English Fish 'n' Chips.” Once they were seated at a rickety table, she looked up from the badly translated menu and simply said, “Well?”

From the beginning, he recounted everything that had happened since Clara had folded Louise over to Santorini. Quickly he felt her mood soften and, by the time he told her about Clara vanishing, she reached over and touched his hand, which he instinctively pulled away. He looked up, a little red-faced, and saw her eyes were full of tears.

For Louise's part, she had managed to find Peter again, but it had taken a while to win his trust. The longer she'd spent with him, the less frightened and more human he was becoming. Peter had told her that he, and hundreds like him, had been injected with stem cells taken from aliens who dwelled beneath the surface of a distant, water-covered planet. They'd
started to transform, some faster than others. The gills had come first, followed by webbed hands and feet. The Krun were using them to look for spaceships lost at the bottom of Earth's oceans and were becoming increasingly violent after every failed mission. Some of Peter's fellow hybrids had been killed. Beaten after trying to escape, Peter had been sent to Santorini to search here—it didn't make any sense at all to Johnny. If there were spaceships hidden on Earth, he was sure Sol would have noticed by now.

The waiter brought the food, which was the strangest fish in batter Johnny had ever eaten, but tasted OK. The chips were crunchy on the outside, powdery on the inside and totally delicious. Louise gobbled up everything on her plate and finished miles ahead of him. Johnny offered her half of what he had left and, after a slight breather, she devoured that too. For dessert the menu even offered Prince William cake. Louise chose the chocolate-and-biscuit combo, but Johnny couldn't resist his favorite, sticky toffee pudding. When they'd finished, Johnny licked his lips and asked, “Can I see him? If you like—if Peter likes—we could take him to the
Spirit of London
. Alf might be able to find a cure.”