‘Rach, I hear you, but you know as well as I do that even the Doc can’t help you if you get stung. No one can.’
Sam groaned, his face contorting as a fresh wave of agony swept through his body. Each breath was excruciating. He was vaguely aware of Rachel and Jay’s voices, but they were muffled, sounding like they were coming from somewhere distant. He felt himself slipping away from wherever those voices were coming from as the last of his strength faded and the world turned black.
Eighteen Months Earlier
‘Come on, Sam, time to get up.’ Ellen Riley rolled up the blind in her son’s bedroom, filling the room with sunlight.
Sam groaned in protest, pulling the duvet over his head.
‘It’s Saturday,’ he moaned. ‘Can’t I just stay in bed?’
‘You promised me that you’d tidy your room this morning and if you don’t do it now you won’t have time before going to the cinema with Ben. So, it’s your choice – you can stay in bed if you want, but I’m not taking you to his house until you’ve got this room sorted.’
Sam lay in bed, listening as his mother went back downstairs. He stuck his head out from under the duvet and looked around. Yesterday, it had seemed like a pretty good deal, but now, in the cold light of day, it didn’t feel like quite such a reasonable arrangement. His bedroom looked as if a highly localised but extremely powerful tornado had passed through it. Video games were piled up, discs out of their cases, dirty clothes lay scattered on the floor, a pile of discarded comic books lay next to the bed and countless dirty mugs and glasses covered every flat surface. It was, even by his elevated standards, a spectacular mess.
‘This is going to take hours,’ he groaned to himself.
He climbed out of bed and staggered across the landing to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and stepped inside, the torrent of hot water washing away the last of his morning drowsiness. He ran his fingers through his wet hair and felt the five-centimetre-long scar that ran across the back of his skull. He had no memory of the surgery that the scar was a relic of but he understood its significance. Since he was little he’d suffered from epilepsy and the device that had been implanted in his skull was to control the neural electrical storms which caused it. He’d had no seizures since and, although the procedure had been experimental at the time, it appeared to have been a remarkable success. He had to go for occasional check-ups, but otherwise he barely even knew it was there. His parents had told him about it just over a year ago and explained that he’d been extremely lucky to be one of the first people to receive the implant. Everything had been fine up until recently when he’d started getting really bad headaches that seemed to always start around the same area as his scar. His parents had been very worried and they’d taken him for a scan, but it had turned out that everything was OK. He’d just needed to take some anti-inflammatory pills and the headaches had faded away. He hadn’t had a headache for a couple of weeks now, but that didn’t stop his parents fussing over him.
Sam threw on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt before heading downstairs to get some breakfast. He passed his older sister coming up the stairs.
‘Morning, midget!’ she said with a grin. ‘Are you actually getting slightly shorter every day or is it just me?’
‘Very funny, Jess,’ Sam muttered, ‘but still not as funny as you getting dumped by Greg.’
‘He didn’t dump me,’ Jess snapped back. ‘It was a mutual decision.’
‘That’s not what he’s telling everyone,’ Sam said, grinning to himself.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Sam said over his shoulder as he walked into the kitchen. ‘You might want to check Facebook though.’ His grin widened as he heard his sister running up the stairs to her bedroom and slamming the door behind her, almost certainly heading straight for her laptop.
‘Will you please stop teasing your sister?’ Sam’s mother said. ‘She’s really upset about Greg, you know.’
‘She started it,’ Sam said. ‘It’s not my fault she can’t take a joke.’
‘Just leave her alone,’ his mum replied, frowning.
‘OK, OK,’ he said as he took a carton of orange juice out of the fridge. ‘Where’s Dad?’
‘In his study. Something came up at work and he’s been on the phone all morning. Don’t disturb him.’
Sam nodded as he poured himself a glass of juice.
‘I’m going over to Aunty Carol’s for a couple of hours this morning and I want that room done by the time I get back. Understood?’
‘Yes, boss,’ Sam said with a cheeky grin.
‘Too right I’m your boss,’ she replied with a smile, picking up her handbag and checking her watch, ‘and don’t you forget it, young man.’
She kissed him on the top of the head as she headed out of the kitchen and towards the front door. Sam finished his juice before reluctantly heading back upstairs. He could hear the frantic clattering of the keys on his sister’s laptop as she updated all her friends on the ongoing soap opera of her love life. As he walked across the landing towards his room and the Herculean task that awaited him within, he noticed that the door to the study was ajar. He heard his father’s voice and he stopped for a moment, listening to the hushed but urgent-sounding telephone conversation.
‘I know that, James,’ his dad said, ‘but it’s just too soon. If they’re already intra-lunar, then we’ve got what . . . hours? Minutes maybe? I knew we should have rolled the latest batch out sooner. We had enough data, the kids are fine, but now it’s too damn late.’
Sam frowned as he heard his father talking. There was a note of panic in his voice that he had never heard before.
‘I don’t know, James,’ his father continued, ‘I really don’t. You saw what happened at Inshore; you’ve seen what they’re capable of. If this is what it looks like, then this is going to be something on a totally different scale. I have a horrible feeling that it’s going to be much, much worse.’
Sam had no idea what his father was talking about, but it had to be something to do with work. His dad never talked much about what he did. It involved the military and computers, but that was as much as Sam knew. A few times Sam had caught glimpses of the stuff that his father was working on but it had just been meaningless screens full of schematics and equations that gave no real clues.
‘At this point I don’t think that there’s anything we can do,’ his father said, ‘except wait and see what happens. There are plans in place – let’s just hope that we don’t have to use them. I suppose we’ll all know soon enough. Yeah, you too. I’ll speak to you later, James, hopefully. Thanks.’
Sam heard the phone bleep and crept away from the study door, heading for his bedroom. He couldn’t help but be curious, even slightly worried about the conversation he’d just overheard, but he knew that his dad might be angry if he realised that he’d been eavesdropping. He was halfway across the landing when his dad walked out of his study, frowning.
‘Have you seen your mum, Sam?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, she just left. She was going to Aunty Carol’s. She said she’d be back in a couple of hours,’ he replied.
His dad sighed and rubbed his temples. ‘OK, I’ll ring her on her mobile. Listen, I don’t want you or Jess going anywhere today, OK?’
‘But I’m supposed to be going over to Ben’s later, Dad,’ Sam moaned.
‘Well, you’ll have to cancel. Something’s come up.’
‘Is everything OK, Dad?’ Sam asked. He’d never seen his father look so worried before. It was worse than that, Sam thought to himself, he almost looked
scared
.
‘Yeah, it’s fine. Just a bit of a crisis at work,’ he said.
‘OK, I’d better get on with tidying my room, then,’ Sam said, nodding towards his bedroom door.
‘Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,’ his dad replied, sounding distracted as he pulled out his phone and tapped at the screen.
As Sam walked into his bedroom he heard his dad speaking to his mum.
‘Hi, honey! Listen, I need you to come home right now . . . Yeah, I know, but this is really important. I have to go in to the office. Something’s come up. I know . . . I know, but this is urgent. Yeah, look I realise it’s not fair and, yes, I’m sure Carol is going to be cross with me, but I need you to come home and look after the kids.’
The rest of the conversation between his parents was inaudible, but there was no hiding the fact that something weird was happening. Whatever was going on, it couldn’t be any worse than having to tidy this lot up, Sam thought to himself. He dug through the mess on his desk, hunting for the remote control for the television in the corner of his room. He turned it on and switched to one of the music channels, so he would at least have something to listen to while he tidied up. He began to pick up his dirty clothes from the floor and dump them into the laundry basket, humming along with the music. A few minutes later, he heard the front door opening and closing and his mum calling for his dad. Over the music from the television, he could just make out the muffled sounds of their conversation downstairs. Then the telephone started ringing in his dad’s study. Sam heard him hurrying up the stairs to answer the call. Then he heard the front door slam and the sound of a car starting. Sam looked out of the window and saw his dad pulling away from the drive at speed. Suddenly the music stopped as downstairs his mother switched channels on the satellite receiver and the pop video was abruptly replaced by a newsreader sitting behind a desk with a slightly bewildered expression on her face. The bottom half of the screen was taken up by a caption that read
Breaking News – Unidentified Object Over London
.
‘. . . still unclear as to the exact nature of this unidentified object, but reports are coming in from all over the world of similar objects appearing above major population centres, and tracking stations say that these mysterious devices do, in fact, appear to be extraterrestrial in origin. We’re going live now to Martin Staples outside Buckingham Palace.’
The picture changed to a reporter standing in front of the Buckingham Fountain, surrounded by people who were all staring and pointing at something above them.
‘Extraordinary, chaotic scenes here as police continue to clear the immediate area beneath the object . . . hovering several hundred metres above St James’s Park.’
The camera panned slowly upwards and Sam’s mouth dropped open.
‘Oh my God,’ he whispered.
The object, too big to fit on the screen all at once, was a giant black disc several kilometres in diameter, its curved underside covered in an array of hundreds of enormous segmented parabolic dishes. The edges of the dishes glowed with a pulsing green light, which seemed to ripple outwards in waves from the centre of the disc.
‘Eyewitnesses report that the object simply dropped out of a clear blue sky and, with no other obvious explanation, there is only one question everybody here is asking. Could this really be our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation?’
The view changed to another shot from a camera further away, which showed the true scale of the vast disc now casting a shadow over central London. Its upper surface was covered in towering blocky structures surrounding a single, needle-like central spire, which reached high into the sky. The dark surfaces of the towers were covered in pinpricks of the same green light that illuminated the dishes on the underside. There was only one word that Sam could think of that could possibly be used to describe it . . .
alien
.
‘Twitter just exploded!’ Jess said breathlessly as she dashed into Sam’s room. ‘Everyone’s going on about something really weird happening in London.’
Sam didn’t reply – he just pointed at the TV.
‘As you can see,’ the reporter continued, ‘at its widest point, it stretches from Hyde Park to Waterloo station, a distance of, I would say, at least three kilometres. There has been no sign of activity anywhere on the disc and, as yet, no official word on the government’s response to this developing situation.’
‘What on earth is that?’ Jess asked, her eyes wide with surprise.
‘There’s nothing
on Earth
like it,’ Sam replied. ‘I think that’s the point.’
‘We’ve just been informed that the prime minister is currently meeting the COBRA emergency response committee at an undisclosed location,’ the newsreader continued. The newsroom, visible through the glass behind her, was frantic with activity. ‘We’re also hearing that similar discs are appearing in the skies all over the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. It is unclear, as yet, if these . . .’
Suddenly, the image of the disc on the screen flared with light as the central spire on the top of the vessel lit up with an intense white light and a single beam of energy streaked upwards into the sky. Moments later the dishes on the object’s underside lit up, the dim green glow replaced with an intense, bright green light. Sam winced as his skull was filled with a pulsing, high-frequency whine. He shook his head as the volume of the sound increased and he started to feel a strange pressure building inside his head. He clapped his hands over his ears, but it made no difference. He gasped in pain as the screech got louder and louder. Then, just as it felt like his head would burst under the pressure, the sound stopped as abruptly as it had started.
Sam removed his hands from his ears warily and watched on the television as the lights around the dishes on the bottom of the disc faded back to their previous dim level. Suddenly, Sam noticed something odd about what he was seeing on the screen. The newsreader had fallen silent and was now simply staring at the camera with a glassy-eyed vacant expression. Behind her the previously bustling newsroom had fallen silent, and the men and women who had been dashing frantically around just a few moments earlier now stood immobile, like statues.