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“Woo-hoo!” Drue shouted. “Nice shot, Jazz!”
“Looks like the backs of their ships are their weak spots,” Hot Dog added. “We know where to aim. Take ’em down!”
“I hope I didn’t injure the thing inside,” Jasmine said.
“Uhhh,” Drue groaned into the comms. “Not exactly what I’d be worried about right now.”
“Our goal isn’t to hurt them,” Benny said.
“Sure, but I don’t think these dudes are trying to be very careful when it comes to my own safety.”
Benny watched the damaged alien ship fly up into outer space – hopefully retreating. That was one down. At least they weren’t technically outnumbered now – even if two ships were still gaining on him.
He clenched his jaw as his Space Runner jetted towards the ground, the dark surface of the Moon filling his windshield. Alarms began to go off throughout the cabin as he got closer. When he was within just a few metres of smashing into the lunar crust, he pulled back on the flight yoke and levelled out. He shot across the crater floor, pushing his car’s hyperdrive as hard as he could as he twisted the flight yoke back and forth, avoiding enemy fire. For a split second he wished he were in something with wheels – he wasn’t doing badly in the flying car, but he definitely would have felt more at home on the ground, in a buggy or something he was more familiar with. In the rearview and side mirrors, he watched the alien ships loop around each other, trading shots at him, before finally one of the crafts took position above the other, the two of them lining up directly behind him.
“Not good, not good, not good,” he muttered to himself as sweat began to bead on his forehead. Suddenly, a barrage of red lights flashed on the windshield. He was about to hit the crater wall.
“Ahhh!” he shouted as he wrenched the yoke to the left just in time, until he was flying sideways, following the curve of the wall and dodging sharp outcroppings of rock. The two alien ships followed suit, firing their energy blasts. The cavern wall below him exploded with each missed attack, spraying debris and dust up all around Benny’s Space Runner.
He tightened his grip on the flight yoke as he struggled to make out the terrain in front of him, and, for a flash, he remembered a day he hadn’t thought of in a long time. A few years before, his caravan had raced across the Drylands trying to outrun an approaching sandstorm. Benny’s grandmother and brothers were in the RV, but his father was behind driving a truck full of gear at the time and had let Benny ride with him, buckling him into the passenger seat and covering his mouth with a bandana in an attempt to spare him from getting a mouth full of sand. It had seemed to Benny like they’d flown across the dunes at the speed of light, the two of them bringing up the rear of the group as they tried to reach an abandoned farm with a working well they’d planned on camping at for a while. They’d almost got there, too – Benny could see the huge, rusty barns just a few miles away – but in the last stretch the wind picked up, blowing sand across their path until Benny couldn’t make out the other vehicles and trailers that had been in front of them. His father hit the brakes, and in seconds they had stopped.
“Standard procedure,” his dad had said. “Nothing good’d come from driving in a storm like this.”
The sound of the storm was so loud around them that Benny could hardly hear him.
“But so close?” Benny had said.
His dad had just shaken his head and pulled off his own bandana now that he was sure the sand engulfing the truck wasn’t going to get in too badly.
“What if we went over a cliff? What if we ran into someone from the caravan?” he’d asked as he slid his seat back and put his boots up on the dashboard. “Nah, we’ll wait it out. There’s no GPS or stars to help us through something like this, and it’s too easy to get lost when you can’t see where you’re going. Only a fool would try.”
Benny couldn’t say that he’d always been able to see exactly where he was going the last few days, but the memory did give him an idea.
He aimed his Space Runner’s laser as low as it could go and began blasting the crater wall beneath him, gouging a deep trench into the rock and sending clouds of debris floating into the paths of the ships behind him. He had just a few seconds of invisibility to work with and he tried to make the most of it. Pulling up on the flight yoke, he flew in a loop, hoping to take the ships by surprise.
And he did. Or one of them, at least. His laser hit its crystalline wing, causing it to ram into the crater wall and fall behind. The other ship, however, dodged him and corrected itself so quickly that Benny didn’t have a chance of avoiding its counter-attack. A bolt of energy slammed into the pilot’s side of his Space Runner with such force that Benny was sure the whole car was going to break apart as he banged his head against the side window, straining against his seat belt. Lights all over the dashboard started blinking as he struggled to both catch his breath and regain control of the vehicle. But it was too late. He was too close to the ground, and before he could pull up on the yoke the car slammed into the bottom of the crater, spinning over the craggy ground, throwing Benny around until finally it skidded for twenty metres and came to a stop upside down.
Smoke began to fill the cabin of Benny’s Space Runner. Coughing, he hurled himself against the door a few times. On the third try, it gave, and he rolled out onto the surface of the Moon, the force-field helmet of his space suit automatically appearing round his head and filling with oxygen. He half crawled for a few seconds before managing to get to his feet just in time to see the alien ship returning, circling around and heading straight for him.
He tapped on his collar, trying to connect to his friends’ comm systems. “Guys? Anyone? I’m kind of defenceless down here!”
Suddenly they were all shouting in his helmet, on their way to rescue him. But even as they raced towards the crater, he realised they’d never make it in time. The ship coming after him was too fast, and in the low gravity, there was no way he’d be able to avoid its blasts for long. It was homing in on him now, already within range to attack. Benny could see a surge of blue light on the back of the ship. This was it.
Suddenly, a bolt of gold light shot forth, briefly illuminating the dark corners of the crater and striking the side of the alien craft. The ship exploded in a flash of fire, quickly snuffed out by the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere. The few remaining pieces of the ship then fell towards the surface in a rain of smoking metal and minerals. Benny hit the ground and covered his head as the wreckage battered the rocky crater floor around him.
When he was sure that it was over he got to his knees, looking about, breathless. The alien ship had practically disintegrated, and the pilot inside …
The others were still shouting through the speakers in his collar, telling him that the two remaining ships were retreating after the explosion. He scanned the direction the gold bolt had come from.
And then he saw it. In the shadows near the crater wall there was some kind of vehicle that was too big to be a normal Space Runner. He watched as a long, cannon-like tube folded back into the hood of the craft as it lifted off the ground. It hovered in the air for a few seconds before jetting towards Benny.
Sweating and shaking, he held his breath and clenched his fists as the craft landed near him. The pilot-side door opened. A figure wearing a space suit that was patched in several places stepped out. Whoever it was also wore a force-field helmet that was completely black, as though they had an inky egg for a head.
Benny had just enough time to breathe a sigh of relief that the figure looked human before the person was upon him, with one giant gloved hand round his neck, lifting him off the ground, fingers pressing against his collar.
“Stop!” Benny shouted, beating his fists against the figure’s broad chest.
Then there was a beep inside his helmet and the hand let go. Benny drifted back down to the ground as a man’s voice, low and gravelly, came out of his collar speaker.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Benny Love,” he replied in a wheeze as he scrambled to his feet. His hands immediately went up to his throat – the man had been manually connecting their radios, not attacking him. Or at least, he didn’t think he’d attacked him. Behind him, his friends’ three Space Runners landed.
The man tilted his head and pressed something on the back of his neck. His helmet slowly became transparent until Benny could see who was standing in front of him. The man’s hair was matted and oily, grey but for a streak of jet-black across the front, contrasting the ghostly pallor of his skin. A thick, dark beard pushed up against the inside of his force-field helmet. He stared at Benny through thick goggles.
Benny gaped at the man. “Um …” he started. “Dr Austin Bale?”
The man raised one bushy eyebrow and nodded.
“Are you OK?” Hot Dog shouted as his friends rushed to his side.
Jasmine stopped in her tracks when she saw Dr Bale. “It’s you.”
“Well, that was easier than I thought it would be,” Drue said. Then he frowned. “Except for the aliens, I guess.”
Dr Bale looked them over one by one, stopping on Hot Dog. “You, I recognise. The girl in the crashed SR.”
Hot Dog just nodded.
“It was a matter of good fortune for you,” Dr Bale continued. “I’d gone to see if the Taj was still standing after our radar picked up on that approaching storm.” He looked to Benny. “You’re welcome for saving your life just now.”
“Yeah,” Benny said. “I mean, you’re right. Thanks! Sorry, I just … guess I didn’t expect to find you so fast.”
“You came looking for me?” he asked.
Benny nodded as his mind spun, hardly believing their luck. This man – the elusive scientist they’d been searching for – had utterly annihilated one of the alien ships with some sort of weapon unlike anything Benny had ever seen.
He had so many questions.
Dr Bale’s nose twitched, his overgrown beard and moustache scratching against the inside of his helmet.
“There’s nothing for you here,” he said, turning back to his big Space Runner. “Go back to your fancy hotel. Tell Elijah to keep a leash on his children. This is my side of the Moon.”
“Wait,” Benny said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re here. Elijah’s not at the Taj any more.”
Dr Bale stopped, turning back to them slowly, staring at Benny. “What do you mean he’s not there?”
“It’s … kind of a long story,” Benny said.
Dr Bale narrowed his eyes before glancing at the sky. “It’s not safe to be out here. You may have damaged the other four crafts, but they’ll be back.”
“How did you …? I mean, that level of … Where? Up here?” Jasmine asked, the questions spilling out of her mouth.
Dr Bale took a moment to look at each of them again, and then back at the three Space Runners parked a few metres away. Finally, he nodded towards his own vehicle. “Why don’t I show you? My campsite isn’t far.” He glanced back at Benny. “I think we have a lot to talk about.”
(#ulink_80532f23-c444-5bf0-a8f4-991b89f6d67d)
There was something oddly familiar about the inside of Dr Bale’s vehicle. A coating of dust covered the consoles – touch surfaces that were scratched and practically obsolete compared to those inside the Space Runners Benny had been in. In fact, everything seemed dated, from the switches where there could have been holographic buttons right down to the strumming acoustic guitar that was pumping out of the speakers. The whole thing felt like a vehicle better suited for the caravan than the Moon, though it must have had a solid environmental system in it since Benny’s helmet had automatically disappeared after they’d taken off.
He glanced in the side mirror to make sure his friends were still following close behind, three chrome brush strokes against the black sky. They’d been hesitant to let him ride alone with Dr Bale when the man had suggested he do so, but Benny had figured if they were going to ask him for help, they should at least try to be friendly. And Dr Bale had just saved his life.
Benny turned his attention to a gear lever between him and Dr Bale. He’d seen them on Earth on the rare occasions that the caravan stumbled across ancient cars with primitive transmissions, but he couldn’t imagine what one was doing here.
Dr Bale must have noticed his staring, though he didn’t look over at Benny when he spoke, his voice deep. “It controls the cannon. Not the most delicate instrument, but it gets the job done. As you saw.”
Benny swallowed hard, thinking of the alien ship: there one moment, gone the next.
“So …” he began, unsure exactly what to say. “You have a … I don’t know. It looks like a space truck?”
“We call this the Tank. It’s my own design.”
“That makes sense.” Benny paused. “Powered by one of Elijah’s hyperdrives?”
Dr Bale grunted, which Benny took as a yes. He continued.
“And you built it to take down the Maraudi ships?”
At the mention of the alien species by name, Dr Bale raised an eyebrow. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “I saved you back there, so you owe me a little explanation as to why four kids are wandering around out here alone. I assume you’re some of Elijah’s scholarship winners.”
“You know about the EW-SCAB?”
“Just because I’ve been living on the dark side for a while doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of what’s going on in our solar system. I’ve been back and forth to Earth regularly over the years.” He tried to smooth his beard down – finally free from the helmet, it was still curling up at the end. “Besides, Elijah’s not the only one who can launch a satellite.”
“So you’re in contact with Earth?” Benny jerked forward. “Could you—”
“Don’t get excited. That asteroid storm last week killed our communications. I take it the same can be said for the Taj’s. From what I can tell it destroyed almost every usable satellite for hundreds of thousands of miles.”
Benny hunched back in his seat. “Oh.”
There was a brief silence between them before Dr Bale spoke again. “Did he send you?”
“Did who send us?”
“Elijah,” he said, his voice dropping even deeper at the last syllable. “Of course he did. Summoning me to that gaudy metal palace of his after the Maraudi finally made a move. I suppose he’s seen reason at last and is ready to enact countermeasures. No doubt he’s lobbying on Earth, trying to play the role of the white knight. I just can’t believe he sent a bunch of children out to find me. He could have had the decency to come himself.” He glanced at Benny. “Tell me he at least had military forces piloting the fleet that went out this morning.”
“You don’t know,” Benny said. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d have to explain everything that had happened in the last few days, to Dr Bale. “Uh, where do I start? OK, so you know about the aliens and that Elijah was using the EW-SCAB to recruit kids to basically sort of be the last of humanity once the Alpha Maraudi came for Earth …”
Benny went on, catching the man up to speed as best he could. By the time he was finished, Dr Bale’s face was contorted in disgust, his lips twisted and teeth half bared.
“The idiot, he …” Dr Bale said, his eyes flashing wide for a second. Then he took a breath and adjusted his goggles as he shook his head. “Of all the preposterous ideas he had, I don’t know why the plans behind the scholarship should surprise me. I always assumed the Taj would become a stronghold for the elite. I suppose I have to give him at least a sliver of credit.”
“Yeah, well, things obviously didn’t turn out like he planned,” Benny continued. “We found out about the aliens and confronted him. I guess the important part is that a bunch of us weren’t going to let Earth get destroyed, so we flew to the oncoming asteroid storm and tried to blow it up.”
“How? I thought Elijah didn’t have any weapons at the— Ah, wait. The lasers I saw you shooting. Let me guess, they were for excavating?”
“Yeah,” Benny said.
Dr Bale nodded. “Hmm. Very clever.”
“They worked pretty well until the aliens attacked. We did our best, but in the end it was Elijah who showed up and saved us. He got sucked into this big asteroid – a mother ship – by a tractor beam and overheated his Space Runner’s hyperdrive.”
“Causing it to explode.” Dr Bale pursed his lips for a moment. “Yes, I see. And the mother ship?”
“Retreated. I was inside it for a while. It was like the whole thing was made of rock. But I could breathe in there. My helmet didn’t come on.”
Dr Bale twisted the end of his beard while staring out at the landscape in front of them. He nodded a few times but didn’t say anything. The silence was just starting to get uncomfortable to Benny when the man finally spoke again. “Colour me impressed. The lasers were a good idea, but they’re primitive at best. You’re lucky you didn’t all get yourselves killed. You never should have had to go after the Alpha Maraudi yourself – for that, I must apologise on behalf of all the adults who failed you. Fortunately, I’ve been working on a means of combating these invaders since we first encountered them all those years ago.”
Benny glanced at the bonnet of the car where the cannon had disappeared. The word invaders lingered in his ear. “Yeah, I can see that. But, actually, the Alpha Maraudi aren’t what you and Elijah—”
“Who’s running the Taj now that he’s gone?” Dr Bale asked, cutting him off. “Not that simpering fool Max, I hope.”
“Uh, that’s kind of a good question. Pinky’s sort of in charge.”
“Pinky Weyve?” He let out a single grim laugh. “Elijah’s personal-assistant-turned-girlfriend-turned-computer is in charge of the most sophisticated artificial environment humanity ever created?”
“Well, yeah,” Benny said. “She and one of Elijah’s Pit Crew thought you might be able to help us figure out what to do next.”
Dr Bale made a noise, but his lips never parted and Benny wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or a groan. “So the Taj has lost contact with Earth and is being run by a bunch of kids and an AI.”
“Basically,” Benny said, and for some reason he got the feeling in his gut that maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to say to the man with a grudge against Elijah West. He tried to change the subject. “Plus, you know … We figured we should warn you. If there were aliens on this side of the Moon. We’d tracked some headed this way at the battle this morning.”
“As you saw, I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.”
“Right.” Benny looked at the gear lever again. “And, uh … where are we going?”
Dr Bale nodded at the giant, shallow crater they were shooting towards. “Home sweet home.”
Benny looked through the windshield, but there was nothing but empty space and rock ahead of them. “I don’t see any—”
There was a slight shimmer as they passed through some sort of hologram field, and then suddenly everything outside the Tank changed.
“Holy whoa,” Benny murmured as he tried to make sense of his surroundings, his eyes darting around.
“Holographic environmental mimicry equipped with sensor cloaks,” Dr Bale said. “The site’s invisible from the outside, obviously.”
Half a dozen boxy, dull metal sheds lined the right side of the camp, thick-looking canvas hanging over the doorways. Nearby, two older-model Space Runners were parked beside a row of trailers and what looked to Benny like some sort of missile launcher. The centre of the site was filled with tables and benches, most of which were piled high with gadgets and tools like something out of the Taj’s research labs. To the left, three tents made of shining silver fabric had been pitched.
All round the perimeter, Benny could make out a sheen of distortion in the air that must have signalled the boundaries of the hologram.
