Battle for Earth (7 page)

He knew his face was as red as a traffic light. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled. “We didn't mean any harm.”

“What, exactly, did you see, young man?”

“It was dark—we couldn't find the light switch and we only had one flashlight,” said Johnny, waving it in the air. “We'd just gone down to have a look around and Mr. Wilkins came out of the cupboard in the corner.” It didn't seem wise to tell her Ashvin had picked the lock first and that there hadn't been the slightest hint of the giant cook.

It felt as if the Manager was X-raying him. She stared in silence, her lips pencil thin. Johnny couldn't bear it for long.

Compelled to talk, he asked, “Is Mr. Wilkins … Gilbey, OK?” He'd discovered the cook's hilarious first name a few months before.

“Mr. Wilkins will be fine,” said Mrs. Irvine, the tone of her voice making clear there would be no further discussion on that particular matter. “And this is everything that happened in the basement?” Johnny nodded. “Let us hope so,” the Manager continued. “Have you heard the story of Pandora, Jonathan?” He shook his head, wondering where, what or who Pandora might be. “There are some boxes that are better left unopened. Once they are unlocked, it may be impossible to close the lid.”

Perhaps Dave was right and Mrs. Irvine was going mad.

The Manager continued, “Other than school, you shall divide your time between your bedroom and the dining room for the next fortnight. You will not set foot in the common room and on no account will you go anywhere near the basement. Do I make myself clear?”

Johnny nodded again. He'd never been grounded before—it seemed completely unfair.

“Someone will be checking on you later, so there will be no sneaking away to meet your friends. If, for any reason, you fail to follow these instructions,” said Mrs. Irvine, “I shall have no choice but to inform the school you are unable to participate in extracurricular activities … namely soccer. There will be no second chances.”

Johnny gulped and nodded again.

“Very well, Jonathan. You may go.”

It was ridiculous. Johnny paced the floor of his bedroom wondering exactly when someone's face would pop through the trapdoor and it would be safe for him to leave. He'd called Sol on his wristcom and also spoken to Alf. Remarkably, the trace
on Peter had briefly resurfaced on an island called Santorini, somewhere in the Mediterranean. Johnny knew he'd heard of it, but couldn't think why. Louise was desperate to go after him, but the android had refused, saying they couldn't afford to be without any shuttles in case of emergency. It sounded as though Louise thought this certainly qualified, but Alf had stood his ground. Johnny promised he'd be returning with the
Bakerloo
the instant it was safe to get away.

For something to do he poked his head into the second Cornicula Wormhole. This one led to Pluto Base where the few surviving Tolimi, very short aliens rescued from the recent Alpha Centauri supernova, had set up home. Nicky had caused the cataclysm while acting as Nymac, under the control of a being known only as the Nameless One.

Now, for the first time ever, the base was deserted. Instead of the usual hive of activity, everything he could see (admittedly not much as the Wormhole made it very hard to look anywhere other than straight ahead) had been tidied away and turned off.

Fed up, he pulled his head out and collapsed on his bed, looking at the stars. There was the Big Dipper—the seven stars that looked like a saucepan and handle and were duplicated as large freckles on his sister's left calf. These formed Clara's Starmark and meant she was one of seven who the Milky Way had given certain special gifts to. Johnny started thinking about the others.

Erin, son of Marin, and Zeta, daughter of Zola, were brother and sister too, a king and princess on the faraway planet Novolis, orbiting a blue giant star. Then there was Nicky. Johnny had told Clara that their older brother might still be alive, but he didn't really believe it. The more he thought about the time a few months ago when their brother's spaceship had blown up, the less likely it seemed that Nicky could possibly have
survived. Bram might have heard something—it would be good to see the Emperor tomorrow.

All those with Starmarks had powers they had no right to expect. Bram had explained it by saying the life force in them was more concentrated than in the galaxy's other inhabitants. He'd said they were a little like the original first ones, the initial life bearers who appeared and spread across the cosmos. The Nameless One had only a single Starmark. As he drifted toward sleep, Johnny couldn't help wondering if he was
the
first one, all alone with no one to christen him. It made sense that he was more powerful than all the others put together.

Johnny awoke with a start. Outside was pitch black—surely no one would be checking on him now? It was the sort of clever thing Mrs. Irvine did, knowing that if someone had come earlier he would have been tempted to sneak out straight afterward. He should probably get up and make his way to the
Bakerloo
. He rolled over. Outside the window, the stars had moved, rotating about the Pole. Orion the Hunter was low above the horizon. Johnny realized that Nicky had worn an insignia of three stars together, nearly in a line but not quite straight. For the first time, he knew that Orion's Belt had been his brother's Starmark. He stared at the little band running across the sky—the leftmost, Alnitak, was Zeta and Erin's giant sun. He closed his eyes …

Johnny was in a long corridor stretching far into the distance, with hundreds of different doors of varying shapes and sizes arranged right and left. He knew this place—he'd been here before, if only in his dreams. He'd met Princess Zeta through one of the doorways, some sort of mental gateway to her homeworld. He turned around, looking for the way, and saw he was not alone. King Erin, even younger than Johnny, was
attaching something to a door Johnny recognized. The boy king's tufty orange hair was sticking up between two stubby horns of hardened skin surrounded by pale lizard-like scales.

Erin turned to face Johnny, revealing the six dark scabs in a perfect hexagon that surrounded his face. “You shall not come here again,” he hissed, a forked tongue poking out as he spoke. “I have forbidden my sister from talking with you—her place is by my side.”

Only now did Johnny notice that it was a “No Entry” sign that Erin had been screwing to the wooden door. He stared at it, wondering where the boy might have found such a thing, and then the door opened. Framed by it, against the background of a blue giant star sinking quickly into a calm ocean, stood a pale girl covered in scales, with long purple hair and bright orange cat-like eyes.

“Please, my brother,” said Princess Zeta. “Let me speak with Johnny. He will have need of me.”

“I am Erin, Son of Marin, King and Ruler of the Alnitak Hegemony,” roared the orange-haired boy. “I forbid it.” He slammed the door in his sister's face, turned to Johnny raising an open palm and shouted, “I deny you entry to this realm.”

Johnny found himself flying backward through another doorway. He fell out of bed with a loud thud and landed on the floor of his attic bedroom. Getting shakily to his feet, he looked out of the window and saw it was already morning.

As soon as he could after breakfast (four slices of burned toast that Mr. Wilkins had spread thickly with Marmite, which Johnny hated) he snuck away and took the
Bakerloo
straight back to the City. The
Spirit of London
wasn't a happy ship. Apparently Clara had snuck out of sickbay to fold Louise and Rusty to Santorini and collapsed immediately afterward. Alf had brought her back and she was now lying on one of the beds. Her eyes were filled with oily black splotches and she was running a fever. She told Johnny it was nothing, that she felt completely fine and if Alf didn't give her the all-clear soon she'd simply fold herself to her quarters—or anywhere else she wanted to go for that matter. When he dared to suggest that might not be such a good idea, his sister practically bit his head off, accusing him of always ganging up on her with “that annoying android” and never letting her make her own decisions about anything.

Meanwhile, when Alf wasn't fussing over Clara or telling her off in equal measure, the android was frantically zooming all over the ship, cleaning and polishing places that already looked spotless to Johnny, which was really annoying Sol. Bentley was moping around because Rusty had disappeared as quickly as she'd arrived and, to make matters worse, Kovac kept banging on about evidence for a complex surveillance operation apparently being mounted from Halader House.

“I don't have time for this,” Johnny told the quantum
computer, which seemed to have forgotten that, thanks to his four-dimensional casing, Kovac really was in two places at once and his other location
was
the children's home. “The Emperor's going to be here any minute now.”

The computer had never met Bram and finally fell silent, not wanting to find himself stowed away on the cargo deck for the duration of the Imperial visit.

Johnny was in his quarters changing into his Melanian clothes when Sol announced that the
Calida Lucia
, the Imperial Starcruiser, had unfolded close to Saturn and was asking them to rendezvous there. He flung on his white tunic top with the five golden stars of Cassiopeia across the front, stepped into his black pants with the matching gold stripe down the sides and went to collect Bentley from the garden. As he walked along the corridor he messaged Alf to say that they were about to fold to meet the Emperor, which sent the android into a blind panic—in his opinion the ship was nowhere near tidy enough for an Imperial visit.

Johnny practically had to drag the Old English sheepdog to the antigrav elevators, but once they were inside and floating, bobbing up and down ever so slightly, Bentley's mood lifted and the sheepdog began wagging his tail. Johnny said, “Bridge,” and the pair of them flew upward to the very top of the
Spirit of London
. They stepped out and Johnny walked across to the captain's chair, placing three fingers on the armrest. Three capsules rose through the floor at the back of the bridge, the gel pods that would make any long-distance fold that much more bearable and far less life-threatening. Johnny tapped the side of the Plican's tank, trying to indicate to the strange creature squashed inside that it wouldn't be long now before it would be released into the main cylinder and able to unfurl its long tentacles. Normally Clara kept the Plican company throughout long journeys while each of the alien's eight limbs took hold
of different pieces of space and conveyed the
Spirit of London
between them. Today, however, it was probably best his sister stayed in sickbay.

Johnny said, “Ten seconds, Alf,” and, roughly nine and three-quarters seconds later, the android emerged from the elevator shaft, still holding a duster in each hand.

Once Bentley and Alf were safely sealed inside their gel pods, Johnny took a last look around his bridge as morning sunlight reflected off the River Thames far below. He said, “Whenever you're ready, Sol,” and stepped into the remaining open capsule. As the door closed he lay down and warm orange goo, smelling of gasoline, flooded the chamber. Almost at once it was over his chest and he opened his mouth to allow the unearthly gel to slide down his throat without touching the sides. As the liquid level rose over his head, he watched his hands and feet inflate, followed shortly by the rest of his body, all through an orange haze.

Cocooned and cushioned, he was dimly aware of the fold beginning and the
Spirit of London
leaving Earth. The walls of the chamber and then the ship herself flew through him without effect. Briefly, he saw the Moon, before traveling ninety degrees in another direction as the distant stars became lines of light in the background. He was pulled another way—the stars changed course—and finally in a different direction again. The walls of the ship and then the gel pod rushed through him into their right positions. On Earth, in London town, the original Gherkin would have sprung instantly back into real space to occupy the void, taking its proper place without anybody noticing.