The Warriors of Brin-Hask (9 page)

‘I’ve got a chocolate in my pocket,’ said Charlie. ‘You can have that.’

‘We have our honour back,’ said the king. ‘We can go home without shame. That is
enough for us. And,’ he added, ‘Metti Rosby promised to send a crate-load of the
Guild’s best salted scorpions as thanks from Control.’

A cheer went up from the warriors.

‘You’d rather have salted scorpions than chocolate?’ said Charlie.

The door of Tom’s cottage opened with a creak.

‘I thought I heard voices out here.’ Then Tom remembered who he was talking to. ‘Your
grace.’

‘Did you hear we get to stay, too?’ said Amelia.

‘And Ms Rosby said Amelia and I should get to know everything!’ Charlie added.

Amelia didn’t think that was quite what Ms Rosby had said, but she let it go for
now. Tom grunted.

‘Did she come to see you too?’

He nodded. ‘Said she wanted to send someone to do up this place.’ He looked sullen.
‘Said it’s not good enough for the most active gateway on this side of the galaxy
to look like it’s run out of a slum. A slum! Can you believe some people?’

Amelia thought of the plates of forgotten sandwiches. And the apple cores. And the
open packets of biscuits that lay among the piles of charts and clockwork. It said
something, she thought, that even a nest of cyber-rats had preferred to live in a
nearly empty hotel than come anywhere near Tom’s squalor. She had no idea what the
rats had been eating, but apparently it was better than any of Tom’s leftovers.

Tom stood back from the door to let the Brin-Hask through, and just rolled his eyes
as Amelia and Charlie followed them.

‘So what will Control do to this place?’ said Amelia.

‘Nothing!’ he growled. ‘I convinced her it was far safer to leave it as it is. If
she does it up too flash, well, that’d only raise suspicion if anyone from Forgotten
Bay came looking, wouldn’t it? Some old shack in the woods, and all clean and fancy
inside?’

‘Oh,’ said Charlie. ‘So all this mess is just a clever disguise, is it?’

Tom scowled at him.

The gateway grumbled.

‘What time will our wormhole align?’ said King Hibble.

‘I’m not sure, your grace,’ said Tom, immediately polite. ‘The wormholes keep speeding
up, but unpredictably. And as you know, the Brin-Hask connection is always unstable.’

‘Why?’ said Charlie.

Tom glared, but the king answered him. ‘We come from one of the furthest reaches
of the universe where gravity works slightly differently. It’s stronger in our world,
for one thing.’

Charlie nodded. ‘Is that why you’re all so short?’

Charlie!
Amelia thought anxiously.
Why would you say that?

But the king just nodded. ‘And, to be modest, why we are so strong. Your planet’s
gravity is like a shadow of what we are used to at home.’

To make his point, he put a hand under the corner of Tom’s sofa and lifted. Without
any apparent effort he held one end of the sofa above his head. The other end was
still on the ground but Amelia was in no doubt, he could have easily lifted all of
the sofa’s weight – it was only the size that was too much for his paws.

The gateway grumbled again, and this time Amelia heard the cawing of distant birds.

‘It’s here!’ said Tom. ‘You have to go now.’

Amelia wondered how sixty warriors could get down that long stone staircase quickly
enough, but gravity was the answer there, too. King Hibble simply called out, ‘In
ranks!’ and the warriors fell into rough formation and jogged into the next room.

‘Farewell!’ the king cried and they ran, leaping, into the hole in the floor.

Charlie would have run forward after him to get a proper look, but Tom caught the
back of his shirt and said, ‘They practically bounce down. Imagine it for yourself,
because you’re going nowhere near those stairs.’

Charlie frowned, but didn’t argue for once. The gateway’s grumble increased until
the noise hurt their ears, and the door at the bottom of the stairs was sucked shut
with a bang. The cottage was silent.

‘Right, then,’ said Tom. ‘Off you go.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Charlie. ‘And we only came to invite you to celebrate with
us up at the house.’

Tom snorted. ‘You can celebrate, I have work to do.’ He poked around the clutter
on his desk and began fiddling with an old music box, undoing the screws.

‘Will the Brin-Hask come back?’ Amelia asked.

‘Who can tell?’ he shrugged. ‘But I wouldn’t hold your breath. The Brin-Hask wormhole
is not only unstable, it also moves very slowly.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Charlie.

‘It doesn’t need to make sense to you!’ Tom snapped. ‘I’m telling you how it is.
The Brin-Hask connection with Earth only lines up every three or four years, so,
no –’ he looked at Amelia, ‘I wouldn’t count on seeing the warriors again for a while.’

‘Three or four years,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I sort of thought aliens could travel
whenever they liked.’

‘Don’t you kids pay attention to anything that goes on here? The gateway operates
on wormholes. No wormhole, no travel. The whole point of the hotel is that people
have to
wait
for the right wormhole. The Brin-Hask and Miss Ardman stayed overnight,
but some guests have to wait for weeks or months.’

‘But not Leaf Man,’ said Amelia.

‘What?’ Tom gaped.

‘Leaf Man doesn’t seem to wait. He doesn’t stay at the hotel, and he told us he was
leaving yesterday afternoon, but then I saw him again last night. Either he was lying
about going or … well, maybe he can control the wormholes.’

Tom’s face contorted alarmingly. ‘You – nosy – little –’ he began.

Amelia thought it was a good time to go, before he finished that sentence. There
was a violent bang as a blast of wind from the gateway blew open the door downstairs.

‘What was that?’ Charlie yelped.

Tom looked satisfied. ‘A blowback.’

‘A what?’

‘A good lesson to you two not to get over-excited about the gateway – not to think
you can just ask a couple of questions and know what’s going on here.’

‘So what is going on?’ said Amelia.

Tom looked stern. ‘A blowback is a reminder of how dangerous the gateway is. Not
interesting, not amazing, and not
cool
,’ he sneered on the last word as only a grown-up
who thought kids were idiots could. ‘It’s none of those things. It’s raw
danger
.’

Charlie was thrilled. ‘But that
is
cool!’

‘Listen to me!’ Tom bellowed. ‘You don’t know what a blowback is. You can’t know!’

‘So tell us,’ said Amelia.

‘I am telling you!
No-one
can know. A blowback can be literally anything in the
universe – anything that has wandered too close to a shifting wormhole and got sucked
into the current it creates after itself. Downstairs, the door was ripped open by
wind. Now,’ he said more calmly, ‘it could be that it was
only
wind – a gust of air
trapped in the wrong place and escaping here. Noisy, but more or less harmless.’

Charlie sniggered.

Tom, ignoring him, went on. ‘But it could have carried anything at all with it. Sometimes,
I have been down the stairwell and it’s been full of fish. Or alien leaves. Or enormous
shoes. Once there was half a tree – only half, split down the middle from leaves
to roots, as though the wormhole had sliced it through like a laser. And that could
have easily have been a person standing there. So do you see? There could be
any
thing
at the bottom of the stairs.’

Amelia said meekly, ‘So how do you find out?’

Tom looked bleak. ‘How do you think? I go and look.’

Amelia stared at him: an eye-patch, a hand missing a finger, the limp that Charlie
believed was a wooden leg. How much of that had been the gateway?

He sighed deeply and fetched a climbing harness from behind the sofa. It was attached
to a rope that was bolted to the floor with a heavy iron ring. He strapped himself
into the harness, tugged on the rope and then said, ‘You both stay in this room,
understand? Not a single toe beyond the doorway. And if I am longer than a minute,
or if I yell out, or if you hear anything that isn’t me, you
go
. Don’t hesitate.
You run, close the door behind you and go straight to your parents. Right?’

‘Promise,’ said Amelia.

Tom grumbled to himself and limped towards the stairwell. Halfway there, he paused.
The gateway had been still since that last bang, so he continued over to the top
of the stairs. The rope had been tied so he had just enough length to make it across
the room and down the stairs. Amelia watched it slither across the floor after him,
uncoiling, straightening and then tightening as he reached the bottom. They heard
the door close – carefully, not slammed shut by the wind, so it must have been Tom
– and then the thud of his boots returning up the stairs.

When he emerged from the stairwell, he was in his singlet, carrying his shirt rolled
up in a bundle.

‘What’s that?’ said Charlie.

Tom carried the bundle over to the kitchen table, shoving aside some plates. ‘Shut
the door, Charlie. Let’s not let anything in or out of here until we know what we’ve
got.’

Charlie pushed the door closed and Amelia crossed her arms, uncertain. It didn’t
smell like dead fish. It was smaller than a tree. That still left a lot of things
in the universe it could be.

Tom unwrapped the corner of his shirt, and out popped a square, black head, softly
furred with two enormous yellow eyes.

‘What’s that?’ said Charlie.

The eyes blinked and then a wide, toothy mouth opened in a yawn, revealing a long,
purple tongue.

‘It’s a puppy!’ said Amelia, and ignoring Tom’s gruff, ‘Hey!’ she stepped forward
and lifted the little animal into her arms. She gazed at it, taking in the stout
body, the fat paws and the soft black fur. The animal gazed back, cocking its ears
intelligently.

‘That’s not a puppy,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s an alien.’

The creature turned its head and looked balefully at him.

‘It’s a creepy alien,’ he corrected himself.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Amelia. ‘He’s lovely.’ She snuggled her face against his fur.

‘Don’t do that!’ snapped Tom. ‘You don’t know where it’s been!’

‘Don’t know where he’s
from
,’ Amelia said. ‘So what do we do with him?’

‘I’ll have to contact Control,’ said Tom. ‘Search the databases, match the description
and find its origin. There’s all probability that it’s from the Brin-Hask planet,
but we’ll have to verify that officially. Unless the thing can talk for itself …’

He regarded it for a moment, but it only wagged its tail and tucked its head trustingly
under Amelia’s chin.

‘What will Control do with him?’ she asked.

Tom
ummed
and
ahhed
a bit. ‘They’ll most likely order us to negate the security breach.’

Amelia looked at him steadily. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning,’ Tom admitted, ‘that they’ll send someone to put it down.’

‘Oh, no, that won’t happen,’ Amelia said. ‘I’ll keep him. Dad said I could get a
dog anyway.’

‘Hmm,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s not exactly a dog, though, is it?’

Of course it wasn’t a dog. His glowing yellow eyes had vertical slits for pupils,
like a cat’s, and he smelled more like the beach than an actual dog. And rather than
yapping his head off and trying to bite and chew everything in reach, he was cuddling
quietly into her arms. But those didn’t seem like reasons to let Control kill him.
If anything, didn’t they make him more precious? More deserving of her protection?

‘I’m keeping him,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

The little creature opened its mouth into a wide, happy smile and barked, just once:

‘
Grawk!’

Cerberus Jones

Cerberus Jones
is the three-headed writing team made up of Chris Morphew, Rowan McAuley
and David Harding.

Chris Morphew
is
The Gateway’s
main story architect. His job is to weave the team’s
ideas together into awesome, page-turning story outlines. Chris’s experience writing
adventures for
Zac Power
and heart-stopping twists for
The Phoenix Files
makes him
the perfect man for the job!