Battle for Earth (29 page)

“Things can't get any worse,” said Johnny.

“On the contrary,” Kovac replied. “An invasion fleet has now been launched from Mars. And it appears the Krun Queen's ship accompanies it—why transport processed food across the solar system when she can eat it fresh at the source?”

“How long till they get here?” Johnny asked.

“You're lucky they don't have a Plican large enough to fold the Queen. You should see the size of the craft to contain her—now that's what I call a real spaceship.”

“How long, Kovac?”

“Two days, two hours, sixteen minutes and forty-four seconds before they reach high Earth orbit.” Without another word, the quantum computer flew toward and out of the doors, which swished shut behind him.

Johnny lay back on the bed. Could the voice inside his head actually be real? Things were going from bad to worse. The entire Krun fleet was on its way and he had no idea what to do. With no other option, he picked up Clara's journal again, opened it and continued reading.

Today I finished the garden. There's a pool, with a stream running in and out, and I planted flowers, for Mum and Dad, and for Nicky. It's peaceful. I think they'd like it.

Johnny started flicking through the pages. He didn't want to read stuff like that. And whatever Clara got up to on the garden deck wasn't going to help him. He stopped at random and began reading again.

Louise came to talk to me today. She's fun. It's good having somebody else around—especially a girl. She said she wanted to talk to me about something, but that it was difficult. I told her I had a pretty good idea of what it was. We did that funny “You first,” “No, you first,” thing. In the end I said I imagined she wanted to talk to me about my annoying brother and we both burst out
laughing. She looked sooo relieved, and asked if I thought Johnny might be interested in an ordinary girl from Yarnton Hill, and if she had any competition.

I told her that, as far as I was aware, there wasn't anyone else, though I was probably the last person he'd tell. He could have been in with a horrid girl from his school a little while ago, but she seemed to take quite a dislike to me, so the only rival was a purple-haired princess from halfway across the galaxy. But, even if Johnny was interested in Zeta, he was too hopeless to have:

(a) done anything about it at the time

(b) noticed if anyone, let alone Zeta, liked him

(c) followed up and traveled the however many light years it would take to reach her, even if he knew where she was

So I suspected Louise had a clear field. Of course I added it was completely unfair that Zeta's brother, “King Erin, son of Marin,” was an ugly obnoxious little brat, but I don't think she was listening.

Johnny put the notebook down. If anything, his face had turned ever redder than before. Louise couldn't possibly like him—she was older and cool and funny. He didn't know if his kiss with Zeta really was a kiss, or if it counted since it had happened in a dream, but he might like to try it again to find out. Of course he liked Louise lots, and wasn't at all sure that Zeta liked him back in the way that Clara thought—everything was horribly confusing. Coming to Clara's quarters had been a disaster.

He sat up and said, “Come on, Bents. This isn't helping.”
The Old English sheepdog had been snoring gently on top of the duvet beside Johnny and, shaking himself awake, knocked Clara's diary to the floor. It landed face down and open—Johnny hoped none of the pages was creased. He picked the notebook up and realized it had fallen open at Clara's description of a very familiar adventure.

Then the Senator—Bram's younger self—asked me to fold us all to the top of the tower right at the heart of Atlantis. We were going to find the Diaquant (more later!).

And I did! I actually did! I folded space again, but really properly, testing it, feeling my way forward till I got us to exactly the right place. Not everything went well—it was horrid when we got there. We jumped through my arch and came out right on a narrow ledge with the biggest drop ever and if Bram hadn't held onto me I'd have fallen straight down to the bottom or been zapped by the electricity running up the insides. I lost the fold, but he pulled me up. I tried to open it again, but standing there in that horrid place I was too scared and just couldn't—not with that drop.

The Diaquant was trapped in a cage at the very top of the tower, screaming, and these rings of blue sparks kept flowing up the walls, just missing us. Queen Neith and her priest, that Mestor, came out of nowhere and I nearly fell. With my vertigo I couldn't move, so I just sat down and tried again to fold away and escape, but I couldn't do it. I bit Neith—it wasn't funny at the time but it is now—and Johnny ended up rescuing the Diaquant, with the Queen taking its place in the cage.

Then things went from bad to worse. It was only the power of the Diaquant, trapped in the cage, that had been holding back the ocean all around Atlantis. Walls of water came crashing in from all sides, covering everything and everyone. Even though they were all so nasty, it was horrid to watch. Some ships—just a few—escaped from the spaceport, but most were engulfed. It looked like the Spirit of London was gone forever, but then we saw her in the sky above us. Bram was looking after me, but the tower started collapsing into the flood waters. Johnny's dinosaurs were flying to help, but they'd never have reached us in time, until something odd happened and everything slowed down. They rescued us—the one I'd called Donna (from pteranodons—not bad) carried me and Bram back to the ship, but it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire, as Mr. Twyford would have said.

We were trapped. The Atlantean fighters were really advanced and the Spirit of London was about to be destroyed, but then it happened again. Time slowed—stopped even. And we came out here, back in the present. And it was the Diaquant (she'd become a woman and so pretty) who'd done everything. She said she couldn't stay, but she looked really upset. I know it sounds crazy, but the way she hugged us and talked about Dad—I think she's my mum.

Johnny closed the notebook and looked at the smiling figure on the wall. He wished he'd guessed their mom was the Diaquant sooner, like Clara had. Things might have been
different. He couldn't dwell on it now. The diary entry had given him an idea and he had to act quickly—the Krun were coming.

“Sol—if you stop sedating Clara, how long till she wakes up?” Johnny was at his sister's bedside in sickbay, peering anxiously over her face. From behind closed lids, he could see her eyeballs moving frenetically.

“Computing … 31 minutes, 41.56 seconds, approximately,” replied the ship.

“Too long,” said Johnny. “Can you give her some sort of stimulant? So she wakes in five minutes?”

“Consider it done. I expect you're about to do something reckless,” said the ship. “Let me know if I can be of assistance.”

“Thanks,” said Johnny, hoisting Clara over his shoulder in a fireman's lift. “Just make sure the
Bakerloo
's primed and ready to go, with a portable gravity assist inside.”

“As always, the shuttles are in a full state of readiness,” Sol replied. “Wherever you're going, I suggest you hurry.”

Johnny didn't need telling twice. Carrying his sister, he ran along the corridor to the antigrav elevators. A little guiltily, he stepped into thin air saying, “Deck 2.” Johnny promised himself that when all this was over he'd install a proper elevator cabin in the shaft so that Clara wouldn't feel scared to use it.

Inside the black London taxi, Johnny laid his sister across the back seat, thought,
Shields on
, and concentrated on his final destination. The insides of the
Bakerloo
faded and vanished, as did Johnny and Clara themselves, even before his disembodied mind passed through the open bay doors and out into space. There was no time to admire the beauty of the planet below. The
Bakerloo
streaked unseen through the atmosphere at
breakneck speed, the reassuringly familiar outline of the British Isles quickly coming into view. It must be a lovely, sunny day across the whole country.

The invisible ship broke through a wispy layer of cloud not far above London and Johnny homed in on the real Gherkin to get his bearings. Circling above the curved glass-and-steel structure, he marveled at the petal-like pattern at the top of what he knew as the nosecone, before swooping low over St. Paul's Cathedral and following the river to get to Trafalgar Square itself.

A disembodied moan came from the back seat. Johnny didn't have long and this last bit was going to be tricky. With the
Bakerloo
hovering alongside the granite figure of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, forty-six meters above the ground, he felt for the glove compartment and took out the gravity assist, strapping it around his waist. Then he climbed into the back seat and scooped his sister into his arms and from there over his shoulder. He was sure from the noise that he'd banged her head on the unseen roof of the shuttle. She yelped and muttered something unintelligible, but didn't wake up. It was now or never. Knowing that it meant revealing the location of the shuttle to anyone who happened to be watching, Johnny thought,
Door open
, and everything rematerialized before his eyes. He was ready and, gripping the underside of the roof, swung out and upward, hauling himself and his sister onto the top of the black taxi. Instantly Johnny thought,
Shields on
, and the
Bakerloo
disappeared beneath them. For a split second this made things look even worse as now anyone looking up at Nelson's Column would have seen him and Clara apparently sprawled in midair beside the great admiral himself. Happily, still in contact with the shuttle, Johnny and Clara vanished too, until he dragged his sister off the roof and onto one of the four promontories extending outward beneath Nelson's
feet. They rematerialized in the middle of a horde of surprised pigeons, who scattered into the air, leaving behind a pile of many years' worth of thick sticky droppings. Clara moaned again.

“Wake up,” Johnny whispered in her ear.

She sat up in a shot, opening her coal-black eyes, and took in the horror of her surroundings. Trying to secure her footing, she kicked pigeon goo over the side and nearly followed, which would have ruined everything. In Clara's panic to press herself back as far into the plinth beneath Nelson as she could possibly go, Johnny was pretty sure she hadn't noticed that the pigeon droppings fell less than a meter before landing safely on and then apparently dissolving into the invisible protection of the
Bakerloo
's roof.

“Lovely view,” said Johnny, stretching out on the narrow shelf almost fifty meters above the center of tourist London. “We should do this more often.”

With visible effort Clara turned her head to fix her empty eyes on him and said, “How dare you? You go too far, brother. I demand you take me from this place at once.”

Johnny made a point of peering over the sides. “We could always jump,” he said. Standing up, he placed the toes of his trainers over the ledge. This high above the square, it was colder and windier than he'd expected. “It's perfectly safe,” he said, before pretending to overbalance.

“Johnny!” screamed Clara. They were too high up for anyone to hear.

“Gotcha,” he replied, sitting down beside his sister.

“How dare you?” she said again, landing a haughty stare on him. Johnny couldn't help notice that a couple of light patches, admittedly small, had appeared in her eyes.

“You don't like it?” he said. “Well, I suppose you could always fold yourself out of here.” Again he peered over the edge.
“Though make sure you don't fall off in the process. It's a very long way down.”

“Don't think I won't. You're going to be oh so sorry.” Clara brought her knees up into her chest to get as far away from the ledge as she could, and half closed her eyes as though preparing to fold. For a moment the parts of her eyes that Johnny could see turned black as night again, but it was only fleeting and, when she opened them fully, there was definitely more light among the blackness. She was shivering, beads of oily black perspiration running down her forehead.