Moon Dust (Alien Disaster Trilogy, Book 2) Page 15

  The guards were impassive. ‘Can’t do that, sir,’ one of them said. ‘We work for the Senate, not you. With all due respect, it’s our job to protect you, not to take orders from you.’

  The President gave a friendly laugh, undercut with steely resolve. ‘Is that the same Senate who operate out of the Capitol building in Washington? A city that’s now buried under fifty feet of ice?’

  The guards took his point without further argument, and stood clear of the elevator doors as they closed.

  As the elevator began to descend, the President initiated conversation. ‘You guys ever been to New York before?’

  ‘Nope,’ Saoirse said with a straight face. She didn’t look happy; Kat guessed that the alien girl would rather be anywhere but here.

  Brandon and Gem shook their heads, but Jason piped up: ‘Mum and Dad brought us here when we were ten. We stayed in this big hotel overlooking Central Park, and had bagels for breakfast every day!’

  He paused. ‘I don’t remember much else. We went to the zoo … and saw a show on Broadway, didn’t we, Sis?’

  ‘Batman, The Musical,’ Kat remembered. ‘That was great!’

  Gem wasn’t interested in making small talk though. ‘So, what’s the deal with this secret bunker then? How long has it been here?’

  The elevator continued to descend. Kat realised that armoured cube must really be an oblong that extended deeper underground. The President had time to explain as they went down: ‘It’s been here since the fifties. Fallout shelters of all sizes were being built in every major city during the Cold War. We came this close’—he held his fingers a centimetre apart—‘to bombing the Russians to kingdom come, so we needed to be ready in case they ever decided to do the same to us. This particular shelter has been expanded and strengthened over the years by a secret government committee, who were not so much concerned with an attack from Russia or China, but from those who scrutinise us from outside our solar system …’

  ‘This secret committee?’ Brandon said. ‘MJ-12?’

  ‘You’ve heard of them?’ the President said.

  ‘I’ve only told them what I know,’ Hewson answered on Brandon’s behalf, ‘and that’s next to nothing. We were invited by this MJ-12 to pool our resources. But we don’t know exactly what resources you people have yet.’

  ‘Right,’ Gem said to the President, a cold glint in her eye. ‘So don’t get any ideas about us hanging around and helping you until we see what you’ve got to bring to the table too.’

  The president raised an eyebrow. ‘Negotiating with the UK never used to be this hard,’ he joked. ‘We’re used to you rolling over and doing what we tell you.’

  Gem gave him a hard smile. ‘I’m just protecting my little brother’s interests, that’s all.’ She put an arm around Brandon, who looked awkward and gave a goofy grin.

  ‘Alright then,’ the President said. ‘Well, you’re about to find out exactly what we have … when we reach the top.’

  The top? Kat had assumed that the elevator had been going down all this time; that the armoured core was sunk deep into the earth. But if they were going up then that would mean …

  The elevator doors opened. When they all stepped out, Jason gave a whistle of amazement.

  They were in a huge pyramidal space, exposed to muted—but natural—light by way of hundreds of triangular windows. Powerful arc lights suspended from the steel rafters made up for the deficit of sunshine though, and the chrome fittings of the room shone like they had just been polished. A handful of men and women gathered in the middle of—and walked upon—a large computer-generated map that filled the floorspace: a digital representation of Manhattan, the other four boroughs, and much of the state of New Jersey too. The room fell silent as the President entered, and everyone looked up from the map.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the President announced to the room, ‘I’d like to introduce some friends from the United Kingdom—members of their Military Intelligence, Department Zero.’ He turned to Kat and her friends. ‘And MI Zero, I’d like to introduce you to the Majestic Twelve!

  ———

  The Twelve, according to the President, were a secret committee consisting of a dozen men and women, pulled from the elite of the armed forced, government and the Ivy League: scientists, diplomats, and even a representative from some church or other: all united in making preparations for dealing with the eventuality of alien life visiting earth. Naturally they all flocked around Brandon and Saoirse, and started bombarding them with questions. General Stormkopf’s voice was the loudest—even the President could only take a back-seat and observe.

  Kat drifted around the perimeter of the map to the nearest window, an isosceles triangle, two metres wide and three metres high. The view took her breath away. At first, all she could see was swirling clouds of grey-white dust, but then the wind cleared the skies for a brief moment, and the ruins of New York were revealed, spread out before her. She could see an incredible skyscraper about ten blocks away … and from what she could tell, she was almost as high up herself.

  Jason came and stood beside her at window. ‘What a dump!’ he said, looking out.

  ‘Can you guess where we are?’ Kat asked him.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Empire State Building?’

  ‘No, you idiot!’ she laughed, pointing out the window. ‘That’s the Empire State Building!’

  ‘Whatever,’ he shrugged. ‘No one will remember what this city was even called, let alone the buildings, when the whole planet is covered with ice and dust. I just can’t wait to leave … go and fight some aliens!’

  ‘Is that all you think about, Jase? Fighting?’

  ‘I just want to …’—he clenched his fists—‘hit something, you know? I know how Gem feels now, wanting revenge all the time for what all these aliens have done to us. We were talking about it: she wants to go to this Corroza place and find the man responsible for it all, this Arch Predicant—the guy who antagonised then enslaved the balaks, who oversaw the thanamorphs’ creation. She wants to arrest him … bring him to justice.’

  Kat looked over to where Gem and Hewson were talking at the next window along. ‘And you?’ she asked her brother.

  ‘I want to kill him!’

  Then the President joined them. ‘Hell of a view!’ he said, looking out over the city.

  ‘Are we really safe here?’ Kat asked him

  ‘You certainly are,’ the President assured her. ‘This facility was funded by the Chrysler Corporation, one of the biggest automobile manufacturers in the states. Chrysler also built rocket boosters for NASA, and their top aeronautical engineer in the fifties was a founder member of MJ-12. He was brought on board to head up the design of, amongst other things, a base of operations for the secret committee.’

  ‘Wait! This is the Chrysler Building!’ Jason exclaimed in a moment of lucidity.

  Kat smiled at her brother, then turned back to the President. ‘Brandon can’t use the bionoids to help you, you know,’ she told him. ‘They have absolutely no effect on the thanamorphs.’

  ‘So he just informed us,’ the president said.

  ‘I guess you could just wait it out. Thanamorphs don’t breed amongst themselves. I think Saoirse said they don’t eat either … they’ll just naturally die out … eventually.’

  ‘In around ten years or so, yes,’ the President agreed. ‘She was just explaining that to us too.’

  Kat looked up into the President’s calm, confident face. Could she trust him? He seemed like a genuine guy. But then, of course he would; it was his job to appear that way. ‘So then …’ she began, ‘we don’t need to hang around here much longer, do we? Are you going to stay or come with us? I warn you though, there’s already one less bunk than we need aboard our ship. You might have to share with Jason.’

  ‘That’s a situation,’ Jason grinned, ‘that would look great on my résumé, Mister President, but no so good on yours.’

  The President laughed. ‘That won’t be necessary,
’ he said. ‘But we do need Brandon’s help with something. We understand he has a device that allows spacecraft to travel faster than the speed of light.’

  The superluminal drive. ‘Maybe,’ Kat said cautiously. ‘Why? Do want to see how it works?’

  ‘No,’ the President said. ‘We want to borrow it. You see, we have a spaceship too, a very large one. I don’t want to come with you aboard your ship, Discord, I want you guys to join us aboard ours: the Majestic!’

  ———

  Kat looked down at her letters.

  S L E A I N O

  Slowly, one letter at a time, she added five of them on to the end of the word that Jason had just played, to make a new eight-letter word.

  ‘ALIENATE,’ she announced. ‘That’s eight … nine for the double letter …and the triple word makes twenty-seven. That's twenty-five more than you just got for playing ATE.’

  To his credit, Jason refrained from his usual reaction to Kat taking such a lead, which was either spinning the board across the room like a Frisbee, or lowering his head and trying to blow all the letters off. Instead, he just nodded and went back to pretending to study his rack. Kat knew it meant he wasn’t really engaged with the game.

  They were in the living room of their apartment halfway up the Chrysler building. The comfortable space was wood-panelled, with Art Deco detailing. It looked like the set of a period drama from the nineteen-twenties or thirties: The Great Gatsby or King Kong. They had all been given clean clothes too: the shelter was stocked with thousands of pairs of Levi’s 501s in every size (but only one colour: indigo), white T-shirts and red sweaters adorned with the Chrysler logo from the fifties: two overlapping arrows, a graphic image that could almost be a spaceship.

  Brandon was sitting on the brown leather sofa talking to Saoirse. Kat did what she guessed Jason was doing: she stared at her rack of letters while listening in on their conversation …

  ‘… take off your clothes you might be able to bond better with the bionoids,’ Brandon was saying. ‘It might be that you need a DNA connection as well as a brainwave link in order to control them. You say you’re wearing bionoid-proof rubber, but for all I know you might be a thanamorph in disguise!’

  Saoirse giggled. ‘Do I look like a thanamorph? Maybe when we’re back home, and I know you a bit better, I’ll let you scan me …’

  Kat coughed loudly and not very convincingly. Brandon had the sense to look just a little embarrassed and apologetic, and he shifted away slightly from Saoirse. The violet-eyed girl just grinned.

  ‘Have you decided yet?’ Kat asked Brandon. ‘Are we going to Corroza in our ship, or in the Presidents?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Brandon said. He dug into his pocket and took out the gaming chip that held the superluminal drive, and then flipped it in the air like a coin. ‘I’d much rather fly out there in my own ship; travel alone—with you guys of course!—but as a free agent. I want to be able to help out at Corroza, but then keep on the move. I promised my father, remember, that I’d never commit the bionoids to any one faction or cause.’

  Saoirse was nodding. ‘Corroza is arguably more dangerous than Earth. Humanity would be safer here anyway. Not to mention,’ she added, ‘that the President is a very clever man. He has a strong mind … it’s even possible he could steal the bionoids away from you, Bran.’

  The door opened and Gem entered. She had been with Hewson taking a tour of the facility.

  ‘Did you see the ship?’ Jason asked. ‘The Majestic?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I saw the plans, and the boosters. It’s too big to see until they get it above ground: it’s massive. It must be at least the size of the Chrysler building itself. I think we should give them the superluminal drive and fly to Corroza in the Majestic. We’ll claim asylum there in return for helping oust the Arch Predicant.’

  Gem moved behind Kat and started kneading her shoulder muscles. ‘What do you think, Kat? Better than flying into the unknown alone, hey?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kat replied. I don’t care just so long as we get off this wretched planet, she thought. But right now she’d side with Gem in an instant: Brandon’s sister seemed to pay more attention to her feelings than her so-called boyfriend did these days.

  She looked at the five new letters she had pulled from the cloth bag. Now she had:

  R O G A S S I

  Oh god, she could almost spell Saoirse. Would the alien girl torment her everywhere she looked?!

  Brandon was debating with himself. ‘It would be easier if I could make Earth safe for them before we leave. After sitting with that Captain for hours, I’ve figured out most of the thanamorph’s genome … just not enough of it to be able to defeat them …’

  ‘Well, you can’t get to be the hero all the time,’ Jason said. ‘This isn’t a film where you’re the star. Time to give someone else a chance! MI Zero can protect what’s left of humanity. I say we go with the President in his big spaceship.’

  Saoirse seemed to agree. ‘There’s no time to deal with the thanamorphs anyway, Brandon. You’d need to monitor another infection from scratch. Wait until we get back to Corroza. It’s not exactly ideal conditions here, working in the field, as it were.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Brandon said. ‘My parents were diligent scientists. They had fully-fitted out labs for these kind of experiments, and they always tested their work thoroughly …’

  He tailed off, lost in memory.

  Gem had been given a radio, and it suddenly have a loud bloop. ‘Walker receiving. Over,’ she said in an adult tone. Then: ‘Oh gosh! Okay, we’re on our way up!’

  Kat, along with everyone in the room, turned to look at her. ‘We have to get back up to the control room,’ Gem said. ‘Something has been picked up on the scanners.’

  ‘Oh, give us a break,’ Jason moaned as they all headed to the elevators. ‘Can’t we at least have one night’s rest before things kick off again?’

  In the huge map room, Kat and the others hurried over the surface of the map itself to the centre, where the President and General Stormkopf were standing over the digital representation of Manhattan. It was dark outside the room’s triangular windows, and the President was dressed in jeans and a sweater like the rest of them. The general, clearly permanently on duty, was still in uniform.

  ‘Something’s heading our way,’ Stormkopf told them. ‘It’s coming over the frozen sea and has almost reached Long Island.’

  Kat ran over to the spot on the map. The surface was toughened glass like a phone, and the high-resolution display showed a detailed image of NYC and everything in a fifty kilometre radius. It was a daytime representation, so it wasn’t actually a real-time satellite image; they were getting their information via radar, she guessed. the thing approaching Long Island was just a pixelated blob, but it was a big blob, as big as some of the skyscrapers in its path.

  ‘We’re hoping you kids know what it is,’ Stormkopf said. ‘Are you expecting any of your alien buddies to fly down in another UFO?’

  Kat was trying to work out was strange about the flickering shape: it was wobbling as it approached—a kind of rhythmic shuffle that seemed to suggest that whatever it was, it was … walking …

  Saoirse turned to the general. ‘There are no more aliens coming; none that aren’t already here at least. There’s only one thing in play that it could be. You’d better pull out all the big guns, cos you’re about to be paid a visit from the Thanamorph Prime.’

  22—PRIME

  ‘Oh cool!’ Jason said. ‘I want to see this thing!’

  ‘Trust me, you don’t,’ Saoirse said. ‘She turned to Brandon. ‘We really need to decide if we’re leaving now or not!’

  Kat noticed that Brandon seemed lost in thought. He didn’t respond, and Kat’s focus turned to Gem, who was talking to the President: ‘Can we get a closer look at it? We need to know if we can fight it!’

  General Stormkopf was already on the case, snapping crisp orders into her radio: ‘Send a couple of birds out.
Load them up with Hellfires.’ She looked across to a man sitting at a console on the perimeter of the map room. ‘Morse, let’s get a visual.’

  Morse—Majestic Twelve’s IT specialist, Kat presumed—went to work on his keyboard, and almost instantly, a cinema-sized display lowered slowly from the cavernous vault of the ceiling. When it flickered into life, an image appeared showing a vault door rolling away to reveal the dust storm outside.

  Jason was watching the map beneath his feet, where a couple of icons shaped like black crosses had appeared moving slowly outwards from the Chrysler Building. ‘What are these birds?’ Kat asked her brother.

  ‘Apache helicopters,’ Jason said. ‘We saw them down in the hanger, remember. Hellfires are missiles, as in Helicopter-launched, fire and forget. They’re tankbuster missiles, so I’ll be damned if they can’t crack open the skull of this Thanaprime dude, no matter how big it is.’

  Kat tried to ignore Saoirse’s sceptical look, and turned her attention to the big screen, which showed the Apache’s point of view as it rose up through the snow and dust into the night sky over New York. Visibility was next to zero.

  ‘So, this Thanamorph Prime,’ Brandon asked Saoirse, finally finding his voice. ‘Is it different to other thanamorphs? Apart from being bigger, obviously.’

  ‘Its poison is more concentrated and faster-acting. The venom tends to dilute through the generations, but if you get bitten or clawed by the Prime, and you’re likely to have a thanamorph ripping its way out of your skin in less than half an hour.’

  There was something big and bulky looming out of the storm, two dull red glowing spots emanating from what must have been the head of the Prime. ‘Get a spotlight on that thing!’ Stormkopf shouted impatiently.

  ‘What else?’ Brandon was asking Saoirse insistently.

  ‘It can do a lot of things that regular thanamorphs can’t do: it’s the blueprint, remember—the common ancestor that they’re all descended from—and the designers experimented with lots of abilities that it may not have been able to pass down the generations. For example, given its size, it either has the power to grow, or, more likely, to … fuse.’