Alien Velocity (13 page)

It was not all one-sided, though. Heavy fragments and sharp objects were being hurled into the luminous swarm. Now and again a dragonfly creature would drop out of ranks, spinning lifeless to the arena floor. Mostly it was genocide, an eons-old reckoning and ethnic cleansing that this planet, and countless civilizations across space, had waited for.

Charlie would have applauded the fliers if his arm weren’t prizing apart at the shoulder and elbow. He couldn’t breathe. His mouth had claws that clutched at the air. He summoned all his strength and managed to kick a leg up and around the girder. Upside down, switching arms, he inched his way back to the crumpled skywalk, somehow manoeuvring himself upright onto a kind of wire mesh netting draped from a collapsed panel in the wall above. A deafening groan told him the entire city was in danger of toppling.

The explosion had wreaked more damage than anticipated. Or perhaps Blake and Hippolyta had known all along, and they’d not expected Charlie to survive this far.

He clung closely to the mesh. Countless jolts and shimmies branded his climb. Exhausted, gasping for oxygen, he said prayers to thank the netting for holding him so secure. Near the top, he rubbed his face against the mesh while he climbed, eyes closed, toward dazzling sunlight. He tongued a breeze of clear air. He swivelled onto a giant diagonal panel that had collapsed from the roof. On his hands and knees, he inched upward, thinking only of his dry throat and how exposed he was to the dragonflies’ rampage. Would they recognise him?

Before he knew it, he’d crawled onto the silver roof. Huge sections were peeling away or crumbling like the shell of a mountainous, hollow egg. A chaos of purple streaks dizzied the arena below. Ear-splitting screeches spun him in every direction. So tired now, he thought for a moment about sitting there and waiting for the end to come—just let it take him. At least it would be quick.

“Dad.”

Charlie recognised his father’s face through the heat haze. He reached out to touch it.

“Dad?”

The face smiled. It wore the blue collar of his dad’s racing jacket as well.

“Dad!”

Then a plume of grey smoke blotted out the image, and his shoulders sank again. It was all in his mind but at least he had a direction. His limp grew sprightly as he picked a path through the hazy air-oil, dodging tears in the roof. He ran steeper and steeper downhill. Christ, his shoulder tore. On the verge of sliding, he stopped and waited for a break in the smoke cloud beneath.

“There. It’s there.”

The tiniest trail of purple glitter hinted at a river below. He remembered the widening course just before the dome, where he’d levitated above his boat, and how the channel was more or less dead straight—a hundred yards to the right. That ought to see him fall into the water.

It was still a vague, untranslatable hope, but he eased himself down the smooth dome on palms and the flats of his feet, right into the god-awful mist. His coughing didn’t last long. He began to slither.

Charlie held his breath, decided to roll rather than slide—the friction burned his buttocks. The metal surface became slick as a waxed car bonnet, moisture from a steam cloud having condensed to line the lower half of the dome. He loved the heady, freewheeling sensation. It made him feel eight years old again, at the handlebars of his no-brakes bicycle flying down the steep grass hill on Oyster Street. Or maybe racing down the ten-storey slide at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, on nothing but an empty sack.

Without warning he left the dome and dropped into freefall. Not so pleasant. His stomach drew back like never-ending elastic, and all the fears he’d forgotten—missing the water, what he might land on—rushed him at once.

Thud!

His legs slapped down on something as hard as concrete. Charlie held his breath underwater. He surfaced and regained his breath, noticing a channel running along the dome’s perimeter. He followed it. After a few minutes, it turned right. He could swim there, upstream, without much effort. Here the canyon walls were not very high. He eventually encountered a low bank on his left, so he scrambled out and up a crumbly yellow verge, all the while checking behind to make sure the giant dome wasn’t about to collapse. It didn’t, but he did a quarter mile on, in the cleft between two dry yellow mounds.

He shut his eyes but couldn’t sleep. For hours he heard the hissing, groaning, gruelling, squealing ordeal play out behind him. His cocoon remained sufficient, though. Nothing cut through his sense of escape. The mud in his mouth soaked any threats he perceived.

“Show me the way to go home…I’m tired and I want to go to bed…”

The biggest sun and two of its sisters were about to set when he next got up and surveyed the northward vista—sky lava and silhouettes. To the west, smog completely shrouded the dome. Charlie nursed more cuts than he could count before he saw something in the sky that made him first frown, then pump a fist with glee.

His father, Reginald Thorpe-Campbell, had risen to guide him.

The face he’d seen through the haze on top of the dome had not been a trick of his mind. It was a spotlight portrait projected high in the sky, like the Bat-signal. He could see the beam, and he knew in his heart it was meant to guide him home. Blake, Hippolyta and Marley were showing him their exact position in the desert, across the mountains.

He almost cried.

His dad was famous once again, for the world to see.

It was a long way back to the crash site, but he now knew he would make it in no time.

* * *

Marooned vessels from a hundred different worlds descended upon the smashed dome. Their lightshow blazed the sky for hours. To Charlie, it was an unimaginably exciting event that, in the histories of these disparate, far-flung travellers, would be recorded as a profound achievement of the galaxy. Yet what had it really entailed—deception, misdirection and incredible luck? The plan to smuggle in Blake’s tiny explosive could have gone wrong in a million different ways. He’d had no idea whatsoever of the bloodthirsty spectator sports being orchestrated inside. For all he knew, it could have been an intergalactic tasting party, part abattoir, part soiree, in which the blood and flesh of a thousand alien creatures were sampled nightly, to the tune of some sleazy jazz number. He could easily have been eaten as an hors d’oeuvre by now.

“That’s funny.” His heart grew legs and danced with the celebratory vibe. He felt he could clear the final peak in a single leap, touch his dad’s face smiling down at him. It was like walking home, juiced, after a great night out, a gorgeous girl’s phone number in his pocket. He couldn’t wait to tell it to Marley and the others, then to Sorcha. And the rest of the world—his world.

God, how could he describe what he’d just done? The enormity of it. The overwhelming strangeness, the horror. The pride of being from Earth, of achieving something unprecedented and significant—not for self-aggrandizement or money. He felt butterflies. Picturing the press conference on his return wound him tighter than a cyclic conveyer at maximum rpm. What could he say? Who would believe him? What would the world say when he emerged from an alien spaceship?

Grey smoke columned from Blake’s crash site as he approached. His hopes sank. Even in the embers of dusk, giant black scorch marks were visible around the site, and the cigar-shaped craft was now a mangled wreck.

“Oh no. God, no!”

He remembered the lone, exiled overlord he’d defeated in the desert, and Marley’s theory. The brute would have returned to the dome to tell his superiors he’d seen their ancient kin alive on Baccarat. How easy would it then have been for them to pick up on Charlie’s and the children’s tracks through the mountains, following them to the crash site? He shut his eyes. It would have been a massacre.

He wanted to puke but there was nothing to bring up. A part of him needed to bypass the wreckage altogether. Seeing those smouldering infant shells and skeletons would be too horrific but he had to make sure, and there was nowhere else for him to go. Reaching the great forest was out of the question. It stood too far away, and he’d not eaten or drank properly for days. The spotlight shining into the sky might at least attract the bioluminescent fliers, or another kindly spacecraft, to his aid.

His steps over the dried yellow mud were weak, reluctant. He’d always hated funerals. His dad’s, his mum’s, elderly RAM-runner friends’, Sorcha’s granddad’s. Somehow, the words always stuck in his throat with the exact same tightness, as though there was an object permanently lodged in there, preventing him from swallowing any more grief. He knew the object well.

Shiny.

Hard.

About the size of a thumbnail.

Strange how the tiniest things seemed to cause the most damage for Charlie. A stud had ripped off his glove on Europa, possibly killing his dad. Now, a tiny undigested pill had destroyed the enemy of all things good in the universe. He spat the absurdity out with a ball of phlegm he’d been gathering under his tongue.

“Welcome back, Charlie. Job well done, sir,” he murmured.

There were no corpses among the wreckage or thereabouts. He didn’t bother searching for any. It had been a helluva trek. He located the source of the spotlight beam—a silver cone mounted on a tripod—then sat next to it, staring up at the inconstant streaks high above as they ghosted through his father’s face and across the farthest reaches of the sky. Why had they all forgotten about him? He wanted to drink the citrus orange then wish himself back home.

His old elbow scar itched once more. It was too tender to scratch, so he caressed it instead, missing Sorcha more than he’d missed anyone in his life.

Within minutes, he had curled, foetus-like, around the tripod. Nothing could have woken him, nor would he have wanted to be woken. He dreamt of adventures inside his adventure, and this time they were all for love, and survival had no dominion.

* * *

“Do you ever lose?”

The quiet ring in Charlie’s ear flared up before the monotone voice poured a few moments of static. He stretched, answered with a choirboy “Uh?” then yawned, sat up, his butt scraping on the coarse dirt. The intense light dazzled him. He couldn’t open his eyes, not even to blink. “What was that? Who—”

“You won the Tonne Run eight times,” the voice replied. “But no one expected you to be victorious this time. Not even Marley.”

“Huh? Who? Marley—”

The light seemed suddenly to tilt away and, after rubbing his eyes, Charlie could see without trouble.

“Wow!” He crabbed backward. An awful surge of desperation skinned him from the feet up. The creatures of Baccarat were everywhere—encircling him, hovering over him, some standing no more than five feet away. There were the biomechanical friends he’d thought dead, too many to count, peering at him with those inscrutable green eyes. The host of bioluminescent fliers resembled caterpillars with wings, though they were far more elegant, even liquid-like in their movements. They had to face him side-on, owing to the blinding light emitted from their fronts. The fliers had no eyes, nor features of any kind he could see. They were airborne water-bugs, dragonflies. Thousands of them watched silently, their hummingbird wings rippling the dusty air the only physical disturbance.

Marley stepped forward, held out her cybernetic hand. “Welcome back, Charlie. We missed you.”

Flicking his eyebrows up to pretend nonchalance, he sighed and took her hand. His heart glowed. “Yeah, likewise. I thought you guys, you know, hadn’t made it. Glad to see… What the hell happened?”

“We anticipated the exiled attacker would report our presence, and also that measures would be taken to eliminate us. So we left for the forest as soon as you left for the city. Our winged friends here assisted us. Turns out we were correct. A deadly droid arrived during the night and demolished our craft. It could not follow our footprints to the forest because we were flown there. Then when we saw the orb fall and the great dome crumble, we knew you had succeeded. Our friends placed the spotlight here for you to find your way back.”

Charlie nodded. “So you had your own little adventure as well.”

“Aye. Now you must tell us how you did it. How did you succeed where so many others have failed?”

He got up and stretched again, this time with his full body. “First things first. How about a drink and a bite to eat? I’ve had nothing but sand and sweat since I left you guys.”

Little Christina emerged from the throng carrying two horns full of the organic soup. She had a spring in her step. Just before she reached him, she tripped over a groove in the ground. Charlie caught her.

“You’re all right, I’ve got you. This for me?” He took a swig. “Ah! Now that makes the whole thing seem almost worthwhile. Just one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t they know about the bomb in the capsule? I mean they read my thoughts—they should have known about the whole thing.”

The voice didn’t hesitate. “Do you really know what you drank before you left?”

“Um, no, not really.”

“Best keep it that way. There will be no lasting brain damage. It cloaked your short-term memory. That was all. Just enough to befuddle their sensors.”

“Oh? You guys really did think of everything.”

“Not everything. You played a small part as well, Charlie.” Marley left a little gap between two of her outstretched fingers, as if to joke, “You did this much.”

“That was about the size of it, yeah.” He grinned. “But it sure packed a punch.”

The numerous cuts and abrasions all over his body stung when he sat again after a bout of light-headedness. “Okay, you’ll have to bear with me. I’ve never been much of a storyteller, but here goes.”

Every creature inched closer while he stuttered through his account of life and death inside the great arena. Reliving the horrors pricked him with both pride and a sense of providence, for that which he had survived did, in hindsight, appear curiously tailor-made for Charlie Thorpe-Campbell, insofar as his stubbornness, his particular physical attributes, his single-minded desire to win. But he had also called upon his fellow competitors’ esprit de corps to solve both invisibility and the rocket conundrum, and he, in turn, had done his part to free them. Nothing like that had ever happened in the Tonne.