Battle for Earth (10 page)

It was hard to know how much time had passed, or if time flowed in the same way, if at all, in the stillness around the golden lake. The Monks slowly dispersed from the place where Bram had disappeared, but they did not approach. Johnny stared at the ground. Where his clone had shot at him in the past, there were now no craters from the blaster fire. Where the pillars of blue crystal had been shattered, they were now whole. After what felt a long while, it was Clara who spoke first. “I'm sorry I've been moody.”

“Hey—you've been ill,” Johnny replied. He hated heart-to-heart conversations like this threatened to become—girls seemed to cope with them so much more easily.

“Thanks for making me come. I feel so much better here,” she said. “Will you help me use the chamber? I don't know how to work it.”

“I think you just look inside,” Johnny replied. Bram had once told him the thought chamber showed you what was happening to people or places that were connected to you. He didn't much care for the strange dome, however impressive it was meant to be. He remembered the many times he'd peered inside and found the Nameless One staring back, eyes filled with such powerful hatred that it had looked as if he might break out of the chamber and kill Johnny on the spot. He didn't think he'd ever look in there again.

“Johnny, come and see. I think it's Nicky.”

“What?” In a flash his thoughts were all forgotten and Johnny was on his feet, staring into the dome. A man lay face down in the snow in the middle of a blizzard. His body was nearly covered by a carpet of white. It was impossible to tell who he was, let alone if he was still alive.

A pair of feet appeared beside the prone figure, feet wearing garish, jewel-encrusted slippers. A long, spindly alien arm reached into the snow and flipped the man onto his side.
The body was mangled, burned and broken, the face horribly disfigured all down one side.

“It is him,” said Clara. “Where?” she asked, her nose pressed against the very top of the transparent dome. “Where is he?”

Now Johnny could see him better, there was no doubt she was right—lying on top of the thick white covering was their brother, eyes and black hair encrusted with ice and frozen solid, looking every bit as dead as Bram had claimed. The alien's hand began digging around, dipping into the snow at various points. It paused at one place, felt around for a few seconds and then scooped furiously, sending snow flying upward. Ice was beginning to form over the long, thin hand when it stopped digging and pulled, from the blanket of snow, a black mask—made to cover one side of Nicky's face.

Clara looked to Johnny, her expression caught somewhere between horror and amazement. “We have to find him,” she said.

“Clara, he's dead,” said Johnny. “I'm sorry.”

“You don't know that,” she replied, her eyes blazing. The act of turning away from the chamber had broken the link to her thoughts. When she looked back, Nicky had gone and the ice world with him. Instead, a new image was forming, a swirling vortex of pink, purple and black with a tiny figure almost lost at its center. Johnny watched with his sister as the view slowly zoomed in on the person, tumbling alone in nothingness—trapped in the void that was hyperspace.

Closer up, he could see her blond hair. As she fell her body turned toward him and he recognized her face, even though it was contorted in absolute terror. Inside the dome was a second Clara and this one was screaming. The Clara standing beside him began screaming too. He pulled her away so she didn't have to watch herself falling, seemingly forever, trapped inside the horror of a Klein fold. She was breathing heavily, her heart pounding, her eyes wide with fear.

“I don't like it here anymore,” she said. “It's not right. I want to go.” She broke free from him and began running toward the lake. Johnny chased after her. The Monks converged on Clara, trying to block her path and prevent her from leaving. He heard their cries somewhere inside his head. She brushed them aside and ran up the little slope away from the lake, away from the Fountain of Time, and vanished through the invisible wall.

Johnny followed, taking one last look over his shoulder. When he turned away, he found the
Piccadilly
waiting, Alf in the pilot's seat and with Clara already on board.

Alf appeared even more confused than Johnny about what was going on, but the android piloted the shuttle up and away through the thick atmosphere. Johnny sat one side of his sister on the back seat of the bus, with Bentley jumping up on the other. Gradually, as the Old English sheepdog snuggled beside her, a tiny amount of color returned to Clara's face, but she looked too afraid to speak.

By the time they reached the
Spirit of London
, the
Calida Lucia
and her internal armada had already folded away to begin their long journey beyond the rim and away from the galaxy. Bram was out of contact. Johnny wouldn't be able to tell him that Nicky had been found, or his suspicions as to who might have found him. He couldn't be sure about the alien's arm and hand, but was almost certain he recognized the slippers as belonging to Chancellor Gronack. Bram had said that the traitor had fled Melania. If only Johnny had asked the Emperor where the scheming Phasmeer had gone.

The space around Saturn was too unsettled for them to fold straight to Earth. Instead they would have to travel more conventionally, which could only be better for Clara's health. Johnny asked Alf to scan their surroundings and, as luck would have it, Mars was nearly as close as it ever came to Saturn. A detour might cheer Clara up—take her mind
off things, especially the image she'd seen of herself in the thought chamber. He decided they would finally visit the red planet.

Early space probes had taken intriguing but inconclusive photographs of the Martian surface, showing what were called the Pyramids of Elysium, next to what appeared to be a gigantic human face gazing upward. Johnny had always meant to visit and see for himself. For his part, Alf was curious to hear about the probes that had gone missing, so Johnny repeated the conversation he'd had with Clara, in a little more detail. Given the great expense of space exploration, the failure rate for Mars was unusually high. It wasn't only
Beagle 2
that had bitten the dust as it neared the planet. Over the years, around half the missions launched had failed for one reason or another.

Alf stayed on the bridge while Johnny asked Sol to locate Clara for him. She was on the garden deck with Bentley. As he went to check in with her he couldn't help remembering Mrs. Irvine's warnings to him and wonder if, even now, someone was poking their head through the trapdoor at the top of Halader House and into a deserted bedroom. He joined his sister, sitting on top of the rocky outcrop, and told her about their new destination. She smiled and Johnny noticed it was the first time he'd seen her do that for ages. It was on this very spot that he'd first told her about their brother. He had wondered if she would want to begin searching for Nicky straightaway, but perhaps the two scenes she'd witnessed in the chamber were too closely linked for her to even think about that.

“I have to tell you something,” said Clara. “I've known for a while, but I didn't want to face up to it.” She sounded resigned but relieved. Johnny didn't know how to respond, but Clara
seemed content for him simply to listen while she continued. “What we saw in the thought chamber … after Nicky … me in the Klein fold. That's what's going to happen to me.” They were both looking down at their black Melanian boots. “If I keep folding I'll be sucked into hyperspace and trapped forever. Alf knows, Bram knows … even those Monk things know. So I have to stop.”

“OK, then stop,” said Johnny.

Clara laughed. “It's not that easy,” she replied. “The thought of never doing it again … it's beyond words.”

She slid down off the rock and, for the first time Johnny could remember, set off for the antigrav shaft with Bentley alongside. “C'mon,” she said, looking back to him. “We're going to Mars.”

Sol interrupted Johnny as he was gathering his things together. She had disturbing news to report—a low-level dispersion field was operating between certain latitudes on the planet. This was very odd and Johnny went straight to the bridge. It was soon clear that any spaceship attempting to land within a certain area on the surface would have its circuits fried—and that area included the Martian pyramids, from one of which the ship said the field was being generated. It certainly explained some of the probe failures. Sol had automatically increased her hull shielding to maximum and, in high orbit, was safe and likely to be undetectable from the planet's surface, but it wouldn't be possible for her to land without revealing herself and causing considerable damage.

The magnified image of Olympus Mons was being shown on the viewscreen—they were overflying the gigantic volcano, the largest mountain anywhere in the solar system and three times taller than Everest. Still digesting their unexpected discovery of
Martian technology, Johnny stared at the summit crater, itself nearly a hundred kilometers across, imagining the force of the eruption it would have produced. All of a sudden it came to him why he'd heard of Santorini, where Peter had resurfaced. It was the site of a huge volcano on Earth, apparently ending a great early European civilization. Some archaeologists even claimed it was this that had caused the destruction of Atlantis, but as he'd been there, Johnny knew that had been nothing to do with volcanoes. A flash of light inside the caldera caught his eye. He shouted to Sol, who magnified the view still further.

Climbing into the Martian atmosphere the ship identified a Krun Hunter-Killer, Assassin Class. The long black flying cylinder ended with a curved prow and sported needle-like protrusions all along its hull—a mixture of sensors, communications equipment and, of course, weapons. The dispersion field had been briefly switched to stand-by, enabling the craft to reach orbit unimpeded. Johnny asked Sol to project its intended destination—the reply left little doubt that the HK was heading for Earth.

In the half-hour they'd been observing from orbit, two more Krun ships had left through the mouth of the volcano. Although all three vessels were on a course that would take them to Earth, Johnny decided not to follow. First he had to discover what was happening directly below. What were the Krun doing on Mars? He'd left Alf in command of the
Spirit of London
and was sitting in the pilot seat of the
Bakerloo
, beside Clara, hovering just above the limit of the dispersion field. Currently invisible, his sister was wearing a spacesuit the same as his, a tight-fitting outfit that served as a second, highly protective skin, topped by a clear bubble helmet. They were hoping for another Krun launch, when the field would be turned off and the shielded
shuttle could pass through undetected. They didn't have long to wait.

This time, one of the smaller Krun spheres was coming the other way, in to land. They followed it down through the atmosphere, its trajectory taking it toward the largest pyramid rather than the great volcano—it touched down immediately in front of the pointed structure. Johnny piloted the
Bakerloo
nearby, well hidden (he hoped) within a gulley bounded by a line of smooth-topped boulders. The sensors revealed a lot of methane within the thin atmosphere, normally a strong indicator of life and not at all what he'd expected.