‘Will you people kindly tell me what’s been going on around here?’
Major Upshott, a small, bristly man with a large, bristly moustache, addressed himself to Frank and Em Townsend in the farm’s kitchen. He was in charge of a hastily arranged joint police and army exercise code-named ‘Operation Breakfast’.
‘I will if you will,’ Frank said, gesturing for him to take a seat at the kitchen table as Em set down a tray of tea things. ‘Swapsies, eh?’
‘Mr Townsend, I am an officer in the New Zealand Army and commander-in-chief of this operation. I will certainly not do ‘swapsies’ for the classified information that brought us here in the first place.’
‘Well, that’s information.’
‘What is?’
‘That whatever brought you down here in the first place is classified information. That’s a start.’
Upshott glared at him.
‘Milk and sugar in your tea, Major?’ Em asked.
‘Both please.’
‘There, I’ll let you help yourself.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So, you were saying ...’ Frank said.
‘I wasn’t saying anything!’
‘Well, what else can’t you say?’
‘Mr Townsend––’
‘Look, you come down here with your SAS troops and helicopters, take over our farm, close off the only road out, practically arrest a bunch of kids – including our niece and nephew – and then you tell us you can’t say what’s going on. In fact, you ask us to tell you.’
‘I admit it’s a somewhat difficult situation.’
‘Somewhat difficult? I’ve got to pick up that phone in a minute and tell my brother and sister-in-law that their kids appear to have been kidnapped by aliens.’
‘Yes ...’ Upshott drummed his fingers on the table. ‘I appreciate your difficulty. Look, all I can tell you is that we came down here expecting to find something completely different to what we actually found.’
‘You mean terrorists?’
‘What? How could you possibly know––?’
‘That’s about the only thing that motivates you people these days, isn’t it? Bit of flood or famine and the army’s nowhere to be found. Breathe the T-word and they’ll surround your house and block off your town.’
‘That’s unfair.’
Frank said nothing, just looked past him to the tent that had been erected in the area between the house and the milking shed. At the collection of police and army vehicles parked around it. At the troops bustling to and fro.
Upshott saw the direction of his gaze.
‘Look.’ He leaned forward confidentially. ‘What I can’t tell you is that we might have had a tip-off from a member of the public. A tip-off about a caravan parked at that reserve up the road. What’s more, I can’t tell you what the tip-off might have concerned.’ He raised a knowing eyebrow. ‘But what I can tell you is that that caravan contained something else entirely.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like a body that turned out not to be a body at all, but some sort of sophisticated robot.’
‘A robot?’ Frank and Em both spoke at once.
Upshott nodded and sipped his tea. ‘Then there’s all this spaceship business. We had no idea about that either. Perhaps now you see why it’s important for me to know what’s really been going on around here?’
‘Well, I can tell you that in a single word,’ Frank said. ‘Nothing. At least as far as we know.’ Em nodded. ‘We haven’t got a clue about any of this stuff.’
* * *
‘That was a historic artefact!’ Coral exclaimed.
‘Sorry about that,’ Albert said.
‘Probably the most important artefact in human history!’
‘Not any more,’ Norman said.
‘I don’t know why you’re being so casual. I thought you of all people would be upset about it.’
‘Well, I am. A bit. But it did just save our lives. That missile was right on our tail, you know.’
‘Two point seven seconds away from impact, to be precise,’ Albert said.
‘That’s like one ... two ... BOOM!’ Norman added. ‘Rather it than us.’
‘What was it exactly?’ Tim said.
He heard his sister snort.
‘I only caught a glimpse of it. It looked like a big old-fashioned bedstead covered with gold foil.’
‘That was the landing stage of Apollo 11. You know, July 1969? The first men on the moon? And we just blew it up!’
‘Technically, the Sentinels did that,’ Norman said.
‘But we led them there.’
‘True.’
‘Where are they now?’ Tim said.
‘Examining the debris.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Sit and wait.’
The evacuation craft lay still and silent, nestled in a gravel-bottomed crater in a darkness blacker than the blackest night. Immediately after the explosion, Albert steered for the terminator – the line that separated the light side from the dark side of the moon – parked the ship and shut off all non-essential systems.
‘That debris might just fool them,’ Albert added. ‘And if it doesn’t, the only way they’ll find us is to radar map the entire surface.’
He’d dropped a tiny camera as they raced away from the explosion. It had landed at an odd angle, displayed only part of the scene, but even that was enough to show the boxy Sentinel craft scanning and probing the moon’s surface. And its newest crater.
‘So, how long do we sit here?’ Coral said.
‘Unknown.’
‘Can we get out of these things? Have a stretch?’
‘Certainly,’ Albert said. ‘Except for Tim, of course. We need to begin his treatment.’
Tim switched the image in his mask from Exterior to Interior and looked around the ship. It was a broad, circular, domed space with a dozen gel bed capsules set around the perimeter. Inside that was a circle of couches arranged around a low table containing the ship’s control console where Albert’s memory bulb had been plugged in. The bulb contained the essence of the old syntho. All his memories, thoughts and discoveries, even his personality. Tim recalled how he and Alkemy had recovered it from the wrecked synthetic person it had once controlled.
A faint blue glow from four of the other beds showed where his friends and sister were. As he watched, the rounded glass covers slid back and one by one Coral, Norman, Alkemy and Ludokrus sat up.
There was something odd about the scene. Something out of the ordinary. He watched as Coral looked left and right, smiling at the others. Then he realised what it was. Her long blonde hair responded only slowly when she turned her head, drifting out and falling to her shoulders like a slow-motion sequence in a hair commercial.
‘Go careful. Low gravity,’ Ludokrus said, but Norman had already pushed himself out of his bed and was swinging his legs to the ground. He travelled in a graceful arc, hit the floor, bounced on his toes, jumped, then had to throw out an arm to stop himself from banging his head on the curved ceiling of the capsule almost two metres above.
‘Oh man, this is amazing,’ he said, laughing, grabbing at a support strut as he came down again.
Coral moved more cautiously, gripping the side of her bed while her feet settled on the deck. She went to take a step, but her leg rose up higher and quicker than she expected, and she fell over backwards. Slowly.
‘Oof!’ She grabbed the side of a gel bed for support. ‘That is so weird.’
‘Almost like flying,’ Norman said, bouncing on his toes and sending himself back towards the ceiling.
‘Gravity is only one-sixth of Earth,’ Ludokrus said. ‘Best to walk by only using thigh and feet. Like this.’
He demonstrated a sort of bunny hop. Legs spaced, flexing his muscles. He bounced ahead half a metre and came down gently.
‘Just like the astronauts did in the moon walks,’ Norman said.
‘I still can’t believe that’s actually where we are,’ Coral said.
‘Would you like a view?’ Albert asked.
‘Yes, please.’
The interior lights dimmed and the upper surface of the dome grew transparent. Apart from the lines of the support struts, it was like standing under a glass dome. Stars, masses of them, stood out sharp and clear. Without Earth’s atmosphere, they didn’t flicker and twinkle. The vast sweep of the Milky Way was like white dust on black velvet. Lower down, they could see the silhouette of the crater rim in which they were sitting. To the south, the high outline of a jagged peak.
‘Ama-a-a-a-a-zing!’ Norman’s voice.
‘Turn it off,’ Coral said. ‘It’s too creepy. It feels like I’ll fly out into space if I take a step.’
Albert adjusted the light levels so that the stars showed for what they were; a projection on the domed ceiling.
‘The astronauts never saw stars like that,’ Tim said, recalling photographs of the moon landings. Apart from occasional pictures showing the sun and Earth, the skies were uniformly black.
‘That’s because they were on the bright side,’ Norman said. ‘The sunlight’s so intense you can’t see them. It’s a contrast thing. Like you can’t see the stars during the day back home. They’re there, but they only become visible once the sun sets.’
‘And this side never sees the sun?’
‘Actually it does. That “dark side of the moon” stuff is a myth. The moon rotates every twenty-eight days, but that’s also the time it takes for it to go round Earth. So from our perspective it looks like it doesn’t actually move. Whenever there’s a new moon – when it’s dark to us – this side is in full sunlight.’
Tim watched as his friends moved about the craft, wishing he could join them. The blue gel had cleaned them up a little, removed the dust and dirt from their clothes and even healed a few of their minor cuts and scrapes, but it hadn’t yet had time to work on deeper injuries. Ludokrus, who’d been caught in a landslide, still moved as if one leg troubled him while Norman, knocked unconscious by falling timbers, kept flexing his shoulders and neck.
Coral and Ludokrus stared out at the view. His right hand found her left and their fingers intertwined.
A tap on the cover of Tim’s gel bed distracted him. He shifted his view to see Alkemy looking down at him.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
‘Numb, mostly.’
The ship’s instruments were still working on him. He could sense them, but only vaguely now. It was like being wafted by a gentle breeze.
‘That is good.’
‘Do you think it’ll take long to patch me up?’
‘Many day, I think. You are hurt bad. When I first see, I think ...’ She didn’t finish. Forced a smile and wiped her cheek. ‘But the ship will make you mend.’
He recalled how the Eltherian’s first ship had helped Norman’s mum recover from a bullet wound in little over an hour. How a pair of inflatable leggings had helped Alkemy recover from the Sentinels’ flesh-dissolving solution in less than a day. And here he was, many days from recovery. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about it.
‘I was thinking about the Sentinels,’ Norman said. Tim opened his eyes again. ‘They’ve been using Cakeface and Smudge as spies for years now. What happens to the hosts once the parasites have gone?’
No one had an answer to that.
A low hum started somewhere deep within the ship.
‘What’s that?’
‘Our attackers seem satisfied with what they found,’ Albert said. ‘They’ve recovered some debris and look like they’re about to leave.’
‘You mean the Apollo 11 debris fooled them?’
‘They think that wreckage is all that’s left of us. Which means we can go too. Return to your gel beds everyone, and prepare to launch in sixty seconds.’
‘Launch in T minus sixty seconds,’ the ship said. ‘All personnel should return to their gel beds.’
‘Oh shut up, ship,’ Albert said. ‘I just told them that.’