Chapter Twenty-One

It seemed to Harriet that time stood still. The clanking machinery pumped in rhythm with her heart. The guard’s smile broadened.

Harriet saw his finger squeezing the trigger of his electrostatic blaster. Sibelius yanked her aside as the gun’s charge exploded into the balcony, sending hot chips of stone flying. Her friend dove forward, tackling the guard at his knees. They crunched to the ground, but Sibelius wrenched himself free and leaped onto the balcony’s edge. Harriet clasped his outstretched hand, and he hauled her up beside him.

The guard dragged himself upright. Another flash illuminated the tunnel as a bolt of electrostatic energy shot toward them.

“Mademoiselle, sauter!”

“Jump?” she said, incredulous. The electrostatic bolt destroyed the stone beneath her feet. Sibelius pulled on her hand, flinging her out into the cave.

Not… his… best… idea, she thought, arms and legs flailing as machinery, scaffold, lights and faces whizzed past her in a confusing blur. Then she slapped into a vat of water.

Harriet wasn’t sure which way was up and which down. It was dark and silent. She kicked, struggling to find a place to break water. At last she splashed through the surface. Noise and light smashed on her senses. She kicked down with her feet but they didn’t reach the bottom. A mouthful of acrid water left her choking.

“Sibelius!” she spluttered. “Sibelius, I can’t swim!”

A sodden, hairy arm hooked round her and dragged her onto wet stone. They had landed in a cistern for storing the water for the steam engines pumping around them. Another electrostatic bolt seared the air, sizzling as it hit the water.

“In among the machines,” Harriet shouted. “They won’t want to damage them!” They ducked under cover, tucking themselves beneath a complex of pipes. “We ain’t got a chance,” she said, raising her voice over the noise and ripping off a few strips from her shirt. She passed two to Sibelius before scrunching the other two up and stuffing them in her ears. “Not just the two of us.”

Sibelius winked. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was gesturing, pointing. Hundreds of fearful faces had turned to look at them. The kids!

“Blimey,” she said, giving him the thumbs up to show she’d understood. “You’re right. There’re blooming hundreds of us!”

The guards whipped the children nearby, who had seen them plummet into the cistern, back to work. At this level the soldiers, wearing visors and ear protectors, hadn’t noticed what had happened at all. The guard from the balcony would alert the others, Harriet was sure, but he’d have to get down first and she guessed he wouldn’t jump after them into the cistern. Dunno how long it’ll take him to get here, but we got a bit o’ time, she thought. “How’re we going to get all of that lot unchained?” she shouted, miming manacled wrists.

“If we can unchain one who can unchain another,” Sibelius shouted back, “then we can start a chain reaction!”

“But how can we break the chains?”

He held up the skeleton key.

“Ain’t there some other way?” Harriet put her mouth right up to his ear. “I mean, we’ll use it if we have to, but that might be our only hope o’ rescuing Davy, Barney and Sam. If we lose it…”

Sibelius looked around. And suddenly he had gone. He climbed out from beneath the pipes and swinging down the side of the scaffolding he unhooked a ring of keys from a guard’s belt. The guard remained oblivious.

A moment later and he was back. “It is quite within my line of work!” Then he had gone again, loping along a line of slaves, ducking out of sight just when a guard turned to look in his direction. He released their chains and handed the keys to the last child on the row, indicating that he should release himself and pass the keys up to the next line. He pick-pocketed another guard’s keys and started the process again.

Information spread among the children by gestures and signs as they grabbed whatever they might use as weapons – crowbars, spanners, even their chains.

Harriet saw the guard from the balcony slam through a door on the other side of the factory. He was speaking to another soldier and pointing toward the cistern.

Sibelius jumped back under the pipes next to her. “Now,” he said, “we must provide a decoy.”

The guards were approaching fast along an iron walkway, their guns lowered but at the ready. “We’ll jump out. They may shoot, but I think we have the advantage of surprise. When attention is on us, the children will attack.”

Harriet nodded. “Ready when you are,” she said.

“Un, deux… trois!”

Harriet’s heart leapt as she sprang onto the walkway. “Hoy,” she yelled waving her arms. “Over here you dunderheads!”

Three guards spinning round toward her. The barrel of an electrostatic gun. A blinding flash of light. Harriet threw herself from the walkway, landing hard on metal. She scrambled to her feet and span round. Blimey, I’m still alive!

The children, seeing their moment, threw off their chains and fell upon the guards: grappling, biting, beating, thrashing with all their strength. They outnumbered the guards a hundred to one. It was a short battle. The guards barely had time to work out what was happening before they were wrestled to the ground, their weapons removed and their hands and feet chained.

Sibelius stood by Harriet’s side. He grinned, his gold tooth flashing. Harriet smiled, too. “Reckon this lot can take care of them now,” she said. “We got to find our own.”

Harriet and Sibelius bolted along the walkway, dodging the hordes of liberated children. They stopped when they came across a guard, bruised and bleeding, slumped against the cavern wall near a steel door. Harriet knelt down and shook his shoulders. “Hello mate,” she said. “You all right?”

The battered man grunted. “They got free,” he managed wiping blood from the corner of his mouth before opening his eyes. “It’s you!”

Harriet and Sibelius held him down as he struggled to resist. Sibelius took the guard’s gun and pointed it back at him. Harriet said, “Where can we find our mates – the aliens from the starship? How do we get to the prison?”

The guard laughed, closing his eyes again, his head falling back against the stone. “You’re too late,” he said. “They’ve already been taken for hanging.”

Harriet’s blood ran cold. She and Sibelius exchanged anxious glances. She could not speak. Sibelius rested his hand on her shoulder and grabbed the guard by the scruff of his neck.

“Where?”

“You’re too late.”

Sibelius tightened his grip. “Where?” he said again, leaning closer to the injured man’s face and baring his teeth.

The guard blanched, choking, and stammered, “In the Place of Assembly, opposite the front of the palace where the gallows are.”

“Which way?”

The guard lifted his weakening arm and pointed toward the steel door. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but then he slumped back, his body loose and his jaw slack.

“Maybe we still got time,” said Harriet. “This way!”