Lethal Planet (17 page)

23—
PARADISE

There wasn’t any time for further recriminations: almost as soon as they had entered the wormhole, they were through the other side. Looming in front of Jason was a monochrome planet, with white land masses and black seas.

It was only when he recognised the triangle of India, and the boot of Italy, that he realised they were home.

But between them and Earth was a dense asteroid field.

‘Get to the lasers!’ Brandon shouted.

Jason stopped gawping at the view and hurled himself into the passenger seat. Last time he had checked,
Discord
didn’t have any weapons, but in front of him was a joystick and targeting display.

‘When did we level up?’ Jason said, taking aim at a massive spinning rock and blasting it into a million pebbles.

‘I took the laser cannon from one of the zelf ships,’ Brandon said as he banked to avoid a collision. ‘I guessed they might come in handy.’

‘Well, you’re lucky I decided to come along for the ride,’ Jason said, his words dripping with sarcasm. ‘Or did you think you could fly and shoot at the same time?’

‘Um, well I didn’t think the moon debris would still be this bad,’ Brandon said as he rolled to avoid an impact. He failed:
Discord’s
starboard wingtip was smashed into oblivion.

‘Oh great. We’re going to crash again,’ Jason said. ‘Can we not go down in Kazakhstan this time? The food was terrible there!’

‘We’re not going to crash!’ Brandon insisted.

‘Or France,’ Jason said. ‘The food wasn’t particularly amazing there, either. Although I
would
rather eat frog’s legs than the vegetable slop Doo cooks up.’

‘We are
not
going to—’

Discord
slammed violently to the side as something punched hard into the hull.

‘What about America? Bet there’s loads of tinned Spam and cans of Pepsi lying around that’s still good to eat. Let’s crash there.’

‘Of course!’ Brandon said, snapping his fingers. ‘I forgot that the wormhole links two different points not only in space, but in time too. The reason there’s so much moon rock flying around is because we’ve gone back to nearer the time when the moon was destroyed. That’s good!’

‘How is that good?’ Jason said, flinching in his seat as they had another near miss.

‘It means that we’ll have a more time to work on terraforming Earth.’ Brandon tapped away at the computer. ‘An extra thousand years!’

‘Great,’ Jason muttered. ‘Well, I’ll help out a bit, but I think I’ll be sleeping away most of that bonus millennium.’

Brandon didn’t answer. He continued to mess around on the computer.

‘Concentrate on avoiding those rocks!’ Jason shouted at him, blasting away at a storm of football-sized chunks that threatened to pebbledash
Discord’s
window.

‘Alright, alright,’ Brandon snapped back. ‘I’m just trying to find us a place to crash … er, I mean land.’

They eventually made it through the asteroids, albeit with two broken wings and a ruined booster that belched out black smoke behind them. Brandon took them down into a cloud of dense dust. Visibility was non-existent.

He slapped a button on the dash. ‘Autopilot on,’ he declared.  He swivelled in his seat to face Jason. ‘You know, I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. ‘It
will
be good to have some help. You always did say you wanted to fly through space, fight bad guys, meet alien princesses and save the world. Well, hanging out with me you got to do most of those things. Now you can cross the last one off your list.’

Jason just grunted in response. Spending an eternity with Brandon, doing what sounded like gardening and zookeeping, wasn’t exactly what he had in mind.

They hit the ground with a thump and skidded along at speed. Jason could still see nothing through the dust, but he fought back his rising wave of panic when he saw Brandon sitting calmly, following their location on an on-screen map. Jason couldn’t tell where it was, but it looked like they were shooting up a long city street. Brandon reached over and nudged the joystick to the left, and suddenly they were rattling over rough ground.

And then they were slowing down, as
Discord
hit a slope and started to climb.

Finally, the crazy journey that had begun halfway across the galaxy was over.
Discord
had come to a halt. Jason let out a massive sigh of relief.

‘Well, so far so good,’ Brandon said. ‘We made it. Do you know where we are?’

‘No idea,’ Jason said.

‘Go outside and see if you can guess!’ Brandon said, and turned back to the ship’s computer monitor.

Jason strolled back out to Discord’s long tubular midsection and pulled on his zelf body armour and helmet. The right sleeve and glove hung loose from the stump of his shoulder. He hadn’t noticed in the rush to save Brandon earlier, but there was a handy laser pistol holstered on the suit’s belt. He drew it and hit the door release with the butt of the gun.

He stepped out into a still world of white and grey.

‘Earthquakes have stopped, at least,’ he muttered to himself.

The planet’s spin and orbit has settled down
, Brandon explained, his words popping into Jason’s skull via the bionoids.
Losing the moon was like losing a leg … or an arm, ha ha … but things soon adapt!

‘Tell me about it,’ Jason agreed. He was now slightly peeved. Was this how it was going to be now? Having Brandon constantly invade his thoughts over the next however many centuries?

The dust will settle down eventually, allowing the sunlight in. That’s when we can start planting—

Jason started humming to himself to tune Brandon out. He ambled down the ramp and found himself walking on dust-clogged grass. He bent down to examine it: the grass was knotted with weeds, had both grass and weeds had a silvery sheen to them.

It was true: the thanamorphs had infected every living thing on the entire planet. And now that the biological nightmare had run its course, everything on the planet was dead.

The dust shifted in a slight breeze. Discord was revealed to be parked at the top of a hill. Through the ever-changing clouds, Jason could see the ruins of a city below him. There were no recognisable landmarks anywhere, though: it could have been any apocalyptic city anywhere in the world.

Then Jason saw the bench.

He walked over to it, holstered his gun and sat down, taking in the view like he was on a Sunday morning stroll. Then after a few moments, he twisted in his seat and wiped the dust off the back of the bench, revealing words carved into the wood. Words he knew would be there, since he had written them himself when he was twelve years old:

JB WOZ ERE

ERE I WOZ

WOZ I ERE?

YES I WOZ!

He changed the tune he was humming to something more appropriate: ‘
London Calling dum dum dumdede dum …’

* * *

Forty years later …

Jason stopped work, leaned on his hoe and wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was hot; the sun was shining down through a gap in the dust. One of the first things Brandon had done when they arrived was send an army of bionoids up there to clear the skies over London with an electrostatic field.

There were even birds flying around in the sky now—strange alien birds that Brandon had created himself, using all the tricks in his scientific repertoire:  the bionoids’ DNA records, a freezer full of eggs and cell samples he had packed aboard
Discord
, and even chunks of living tissue he had surgically removed from Jason and himself.

‘It’s not playing god,’ Brandon had said as he had sent the bionoids to slice a sliver off Jason’s kidney and bring it out through his nostril. ‘God supposedly snapped his fingers and created life out of nothing. In the real world, you have to start with something!’

And here he came now, stomping across Jason’s wheat field with his catron kitten bounding along at his side. Brandon was sporting a shaggy black beard these days, shaving being one of life’s pleasures he seemed to have no intention of ever experiencing.

Jason, on the other hand, maintained a flawlessly shaved head
and
cheeks. He enjoyed the routine and discipline, and he also liked the fact that it hid the bald spot that he had first noticed in the mirror on his twenty-third birthday.

Jason and Brandon were now both twenty-five years old. They worked for six hours every day, and spent the rest of the time in a bionoid-induced sleep. Forty years had passed, while they had aged only ten.

Did it feel like forty years, though? Not really. The days were packed with farming and building, and partaking in Brandon’s scientific experiments; the years seemed to have just flown by. At the end of every day, they were exhausted. They would spend an hour playing chess while eating Corrozian purple pig burgers (Jason was responsible for breeding, and culling, the herd) and then turn in for the night. Home was a massive fortress, that Brandon had designed and Jason built, made out of salvage from the ruins of London. It was a large multi-coloured, multi-textured box, three stories high. They called it the
Rubik’s Cube
, and it stood on the site of Brandon’s old house in Highgate.

Still leaning on his hoe, Jason watched as Brandon approached through the corn. At one point he picked a stalk and popped it in his mouth to chew. What with the beard and the faded jeans, all he needed now was a straw hat and the transformation would be complete.

‘Hello, Kang,’ Jason said, tickling the kitten under the chin. It was as big as an Alsatian already.

He didn’t have kind words for the kitten’s owner, though. ‘Get orf my land,’ Jason said, doing a passable impression of a West Country farmer.

‘I wouldn’t have to come looking for you,’ Brandon said, ‘if you let me talk to you inside your head. Are you sure you won’t change your mind about that?’

‘We’ll discuss it at the next committee meeting,’ Jason grunted. ‘Then take a vote. I predict another tie, though. What do you want, Brandon?’

‘It’s finished!’ Brandon said, with a grin.

Jason sighed. ‘
What
is finished?’ Brandon usually had about ten crazy projects on the go at once. Last week he had crashed a solar-powered car into the Thames. This week he had been trying to bio-engineer a chicken that provided milk as well as eggs. ‘If you’re going to insist on breeding animals for food,’ he had said, ‘you may as well just create one animal that provides everything!’

Brandon nodded in the direction of the hill. ‘Come and see.’

So they walked, in silence (an almost comfortable silence), through the fields and up Parliament Hill, the catron kitten bounding ahead of them. At the summit, they stood looking out over the city for a good few minutes before Jason realised what was different.

‘Oh, you put the dome on it.’

One of Brandon’s projects had been to slowly rebuild, stone-by-stone, the vast edifice of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He had bionoids flying through the air in dense swarms, lifting small blocks and pieces into position. ‘This place survived the Blitz,’ Brandon had said. ‘So I’m going to make sure it survives a galactic war, too. All the bits are just lying around; it’s like one big real life Lego set.’

‘Well, it’s great,’ Jason said, trying to summon up some enthusiasm. ‘But I know you’re not the sort to want to go and use it for Sunday prayers. What are you going to do? Turn the inside into a science lab?’

Brandon laughed. ‘Now that would be a good idea. But no—it’s going to stay original and unspoiled. After all, you and Doo are going to need somewhere to get married.’

Jason’s face fell. ‘Don’t go there, Bran,’ he said. ‘You know as well as I do that we’re not going to be around when the others turn up in three thousand years’ time. You said yourself that our bodies wouldn’t survive that long a biosleep without getting up to exercise.’

‘Nothing’s certain,’ Brandon said. ‘There
might
be a way to survive that long that I just haven’t thought of yet. But that’s beside the point … I’ve discovered a way to get
you
back to Doo, Kat, Hewson and the others.’

Jason felt a sudden surge of hope, tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that it was probably just another idea of Brandon’s that wouldn’t pan out.

‘Go on …’ he said cautiously.

‘Well, you know I’ve had
Discord
scanning for wormholes all this time. They pop up and disappear all over the galaxy, all the time, so it was just a matter of waiting for the right one to materialise. And this morning, one just did!’

‘Okay. So where does it go?’