The Ancient Starship Page 2

  ‘What do you expect?’ said James casually. ‘We’re a hotel.’

  ‘But there’s already a line at the front desk!’ said Charlie. ‘Also, since when are you so –?’

  ‘Shh!’ said Amelia. Whoever was coming through, she didn’t want the first sound they heard on Earth to be Charlie complaining about them. Still, she understood what he meant. So far, they’d only ever had one or two groups of guests coming through the hotel at a time, and already that had been more than enough to deal with. What would it be like when the place really started to fill up?

  ‘Hey,’ said James, unrolling a chart and squinting at it. ‘Am I reading this wrongly, or is this connection an hour and a half early?’

  Rather than answering, Tom just grumbled and went to his drawer of holo-emitters, pulling one out for the new arrival. Once the holo-emitter was activated, it was impossible to tell who was really human and who was just faking it.

  Amelia heard footsteps coming from the stairwell and, despite everything, felt a shiver of excitement. She didn’t think she’d ever get bored of seeing what amazing creature came through the gateway next.

  The visitor’s head emerged from the stairwell in Tom’s other room – a neat, pretty scarf tied over its hair, and a nice, oval face beneath.

  Amelia frowned slightly. As the alien appeared, step by step, Amelia’s disappointment grew. A plain navy blue jacket. Nicely polished nails at the end of ten fingers. Two hands and two ordinary arms. A pair of legs in navy trousers ended not in flippers, tentacles or robotic wheels, but two neat leather shoes. She was so … ordinary.

  ‘You’re human,’ Charlie gasped.

  The woman turned and glared at Charlie. She was plainly offended, but Amelia didn’t know why.

  But she can’t be human, Amelia thought. Humans came from Earth – and there was only one Earth. Wasn’t there?

  Tom limped toward the guest. ‘Hello, I see you’ve brought your own holo-emitter. Do you mind if I check to see if it’s correctly set to our sun’s wavelength? Or if you’d rather I didn’t alter yours, perhaps you would like to use one of mine?’

  After Amelia got over the amusement of hearing Tom doing his polite voice, she realised how silly she’d been. Now she thought about it, of course a regular traveller would want their own holo-emitter. They must come in handy on all sorts of planets, not just Earth, and if you had your own, you could actually design your avatar for yourself instead of just picking from whatever Tom had stored on his.

  The woman’s scowl only deepened as Tom spoke. In fact, she looked more offended by Tom’s offer of help than she had by Charlie’s outburst. Lifting her chin, she swept past them all, striding through the cottage in her sensible shoes and out the door to the hotel grounds, as though it were beneath her dignity even to acknowledge anyone had spoken to her.

  Amelia caught one last whiff of parmesan, and then the visitor was gone. For once, neither she nor Charlie made a move to follow or escort her to the hotel. Not only had the woman been rude, but Amelia wondered for a second if she might actually be bad. Not Krskn-level evil, perhaps, but a problem.

  Grawk didn’t seem fazed, though. He sat in the doorway and gazed dreamily after the woman, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth as he breathed in her cheesy aroma. Amelia felt slightly better. Grawk had never been wrong so far.

  With Dad in Egypt, it was up to James and Mary to run the kitchen that night. Usually that wouldn’t have been too much effort – but tonight, between the five human guests that had arrived that afternoon (including the two children, who turned out to be extremely picky eaters), and that one snooty alien woman, and Lady Naomi, their permanent resident, the hotel was the busiest it had ever been.

  Lady Naomi rarely ate in the dining room with everyone else. Usually she was off somewhere doing her mysterious ‘research’ – but since their run-in with Krskn last week, she’d become a bit more sociable. Teaming up to avoid getting kidnapped by an evil alien mercenary had a way of bringing people together. Amelia wouldn’t exactly say they were friends yet – she was still a little starstruck by Lady Naomi – but she thought Lady Naomi liked them, too.

  So it seemed quite natural when Lady Naomi sat at their table in the dining room. Even so, Amelia sat up straighter and remembered to tuck her elbows in.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ said Lady Naomi in a low voice. ‘Am I interrupting something?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Amelia, afraid she’d move somewhere else.

  ‘We’re trying to figure out why that guy in the bowler hat keeps staring at us,’ Charlie said. ‘And whether humans evolved on Earth or actually arrived here through the gateway from some other part of the universe, and where that spaceship in Egypt came from, and what Amelia’s dad is up to over there.’

  ‘Shh!’ said Amelia, glancing over at the man in the bowler hat, who was still watching them intently. He sat a couple of metres away at the next table, but somehow she felt sure he was listening to every word they said. In fact, he was concentrating so hard on them, he hadn’t noticed he’d dripped gravy down his suit jacket.

  Perhaps he was from Control – one of Arxish’s people, trying to prove that humans couldn’t run the gateway properly and should never have any contact with aliens.

  Charlie opened his mouth to respond but before she could say a word, Lady Naomi said something so unexpected, it stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to come out to my research station and see if we can find out?’

  Charlie would have bolted out the door there and then, but Lady Naomi insisted on having her dinner first.

  ‘But it’s already getting dark,’ he whined.

  Lady Naomi just smiled.

  ‘Oh, right.’ He slumped in his chair. ‘I forgot – you can see in the dark, can’t you?’

  Amelia kicked him under the table and flicked another quick look over at Bowler-Hat Man. Luckily he seemed to be too busy sawing through a rock-hard roast potato to have heard Charlie. She was about to breathe a sigh of relief when she noticed that the woman in the scarf was now staring at them instead.

  Why now? Amelia wondered. She didn’t want anything to do with them before.

  Lady Naomi gave Charlie a stern look, and said to Amelia, ‘I’ll go up and order my dinner at the servery. It looks like James and Mary are far too busy to wait on tables tonight.’

  She rose from her chair and weaved between the tables of guests, as graceful as ever, even in the hiking boots and cargo pants she always wore.

  Lady Naomi was a quiet person – short, slim and sort of neatly made. There was nothing about her that was flashy or asked for attention, and yet Amelia thought she was the most watchable person in the world. Partly it was her beautiful face, partly it was the terrible silvery scar that twisted down the length of her right arm, but mostly it was a sense of perfect stillness about her – as though she were always balancing on an invisible tightrope. Or as though she had her own gravity field inside her, so that wherever she went, she was the centre of everything.

  Sometimes, when Amelia tried to analyse just what it was about Lady Naomi that was so fascinating, she thought perhaps she was being silly and making it up. But right now, as the woman with the scarf watched Lady Naomi pass Amelia, she wasn’t so sure. All of her arrogance was gone. She stared after Lady Naomi with almost … desperation?

  The guy in the bowler hat was watching them again, too. Waiting for Charlie to say something else he shouldn’t have.

  ‘I think we should wait for you in the lobby,’ Amelia said as Lady Naomi got back to the table.

  ‘Actually,’ said Lady Naomi, ‘it would probably be a good idea for you both to put on some long pants and decent shoes, while you’re waiting for me.’

  ‘But aren’t we just going down to the lab in the caves?’ said Charlie.

  Lady Naomi shook her head. ‘You’ll see.’

  Charlie followed Amelia into her bedroom and flopped down on her bed – her new/old one. That is, her
parents had finally replaced the mattress on the big four-poster bed that had been in the room when they’d arrived. They’d even got her new curtains for it.

  ‘I’m so sick of waiting for adults,’ Charlie moaned. ‘No matter how exciting something is, they can never just go now. It’s always like, “Yeah, Charlie, I already said we’re going now – in twenty minutes.”’

  Grawk, who’d been sleeping on a cushion in the bay window, yawned and wagged his tail when Amelia came over. She got her jeans and some thick socks and pushed Charlie off her bed.

  ‘Move,’ she said, drawing the curtains on all four sides and enclosing herself. ‘I’m getting changed.’

  ‘What about me?’ he said from outside the curtains.

  ‘You can use my tracksuit pants, if you want.’

  She smiled as he grumbled to himself, and when she finished changing, she called out, ‘Ready?’ before opening the curtains.

  Amelia smiled again to see him standing, quite dignified, in her black trackie-daks. A nice pink stripe ran down one leg, and a fat pink daisy was embroidered on one hip. He had his back to her, and was staring at the little safe door on Amelia’s other wall. As if looking serious and thoughtful about how to unlock it would distract Amelia from the cute little row of diamantes that sparkled across his bottom.

  He turned and glared at her. ‘Say nothing.’

  They hurried downstairs to the lobby, Grawk padding ahead of them. Mum was on the phone behind the reception desk.

  She covered the receiver with one hand. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘Oh, I hope you don’t mind, Skye,’ said Lady Naomi, coming from the dining room. ‘I asked them if they’d like to go for a walk with me. I won’t keep them long.’

  Mum instantly relaxed. ‘Oh, no problems, then. Be good, you two.’ Her attention was pulled back to her phone conversation. ‘Yes, I’m here, Mr Snavely. The question is –’

  Amelia and Charlie followed Lady Naomi out of the hotel, down the main steps and across the sloping lawns, almost in the direction of the hedge maze.

  ‘Are we going into the bush?’ asked Charlie.

  Neither he nor Amelia had explored the bush side of the headland yet. There was so much to discover in the hotel itself, not to mention the steady stream of alien guests, that they hadn’t bothered to investigate past the maze. And the bush was so dense with spiky, scratchy trees, thorny bushes and cutting grasses, and so full of biting, stinging creatures everywhere, that it hardly invited you in for a nice bushwalk.

  Lady Naomi led the kids to a shaggy old banksia tree, checked behind them, and then pulled aside a low-hanging branch.

  In the grass behind it was a path. If Amelia had found it by herself, she would have thought it had been made by wombats and ignored it, but now Lady Naomi was urging them on. Grawk ran ahead, his nose to the ground, his tail up like an antenna.

  ‘You do your research here?’ said Charlie.

  ‘Yes. Well, not here exactly. I have to go quite a bit further to get away from the headland’s magnetism before I can use my equipment.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Amelia. ‘That’s why. We always thought you went away because what you’re doing is so top-secret.’

  ‘That too!’ Lady Naomi laughed, then paused as if listening for something. They stood silently for several long seconds, then Lady Naomi shook her head and kept walking. ‘So how much did your dad tell you about that starship in Egypt?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Really?’ Lady Naomi pressed her. ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘He didn’t have time to tell us anything,’ said Charlie. ‘He just whooshed away with those Control freaks.’ He snorted. ‘Hey, get it? Control freaks?’

  ‘Ms Rosby’s not a freak,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ said Charlie. ‘I mean, she’s cool and stuff, but come on – she’s six years old and looks like Santa’s grandma. That is actually, literally freaky. Admit it.’

  ‘So you don’t know any more about the starship than what was on the news?’ Lady Naomi said.

  Amelia suddenly wondered just why Lady Naomi had brought them out here. She’d been so careful up until now to keep all her comings and goings private, and she’d done such a good job that Amelia hadn’t even had a clue which direction she went in. And now she was inviting them in? That seemed like more than just friendliness. And now, from Lady Naomi’s questions, it seemed as though she’d been hoping to find out something from them that would …

  Well, she didn’t know what Lady Naomi wanted. Information about the spaceship? Or about Control’s interest in it? Did she think there was some connection between the crashed ship and whatever it was that she was researching out here?

  They turned a corner, the light now so dim that the colours had almost completely faded out of the landscape. Amelia stumbled over a root, then straightened up to see they’d reached a small clearing in the trees. In the middle of the clearing was a huge granite boulder.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Lady Naomi.

  ‘What do you want us to do?’ said Charlie. ‘Climb up and look for Egypt from there?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Lady Naomi took a little device from her pocket and the boulder vanished. In its place was a small workstation – a desk made up of various screens and keyboards, like something halfway between a jumbo jet’s cockpit and the computers from Dad’s old job with the government. None of it was human technology, though. Maybe it was the strange sounds and weird glow that gave it away.

  Not that it mattered. It had come as a surprise when Krskn didn’t know what species Lady Naomi was, but Amelia hadn’t ever thought being an alien was a reason not to trust or like someone. And yet, she couldn’t help feeling a prickle of unease as she looked at Lady Naomi’s equipment and realised that every piece had been brought to Earth to study … what? What was Lady Naomi getting up to out here?

  ‘This is amazing!’ Charlie said. ‘But what do you do when it rains?’

  Lady Naomi pressed a button and a holo-roof flashed into position overhead. ‘Want to see what all this can do?’

  Amelia and Grawk drew closer and watched as Lady Naomi brought her machinery to life. She entered a series of passwords and scanned her fingerprints and retinas before an enormous holo-screen lit up. Amelia gasped. The bush was hidden from them by a vast image of Earth – the whole globe rotating in space.

  Lady Naomi put her hands into a pair of holographic gloves and began to manipulate the image, turning the planet until she found Africa, then zooming in to Egypt. Amelia saw the Nile winding like a piece of green string against a pale yellow background. As Lady Naomi zoomed in tighter again, Amelia realised this wasn’t a computer generated map – this was a real satellite image. She could even see cars and trucks moving along the road. The image drew closer until she could see the texture of the roads themselves, and the dry grasses growing beside them.

  ‘Are you a hacker?’ Amelia asked. ‘Is this all government spy satellites?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘It’s all perfectly legal.’

  Amelia noticed that she hadn’t answered her question. Lady Naomi didn’t even say which laws she was obeying – Earth’s? Control’s? Or someone else’s?

  ‘All right,’ Lady Naomi murmured to herself. ‘We know it’s near one of the pyramids of Giza …’

  ‘Underneath one,’ Charlie corrected.

  Lady Naomi clicked her tongue, a disappointed kind of sound. ‘Truly ancient, then. If it crashed into the ground before the pyramids were built, then it must have been there for over five thousand years.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, well, let’s see for ourselves …’

  It wasn’t hard to work out which pyramid they wanted. A black perimeter fence with orange flags had been set up around the corner of one, and the fence itself was now surrounded by cars, vans, film crews, tourists and their tour buses, and local people who were either keen to get a glimpse or sell drinks and snacks to those who were.

  Lady Naomi zoomed
in to the centre of the fenced area. The whole dig had been roofed in with a black tarpaulin. Charlie groaned.

  ‘No, no, this was to be expected,’ Lady Naomi said. ‘They know that every single kid with a camera and a drone helicopter will try to get a shot.’

  ‘What then?’ said Charlie.

  Grawk grumbled beside Amelia and shifted around to gaze into the bush. It was completely dark by now, and Amelia couldn’t see what had caught his attention. Probably a possum up a tree.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Lady Naomi. The image changed from the natural colours of the desert to a dull blue-grey. The dig site, though, was different. An oblong shape glowed red.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Amelia.

  ‘Radioactivity,’ said Lady Naomi.

  ‘It’s a nuclear bomb?’ Charlie gaped.

  ‘Not that kind of radioactivity,’ Lady Naomi went on. ‘Everything has some radioactivity, even you and I do. I’ve asked the computer to screen out every expected radioactive signature, which is why the screen is basically all blue. But this red – well, that’s a radioactive signature that is out of time, and out of place.’

  ‘Alien?’ said Charlie.

  ‘Definitely.’

  Another click, and the holo-screen became completely black, before quickly filling with tiny green dots. The dots were grouped together in one place, with some slowly drifting away from the group, and others coming in to join it.

  ‘What are the dots?’ said Charlie. ‘People?’

  ‘Close,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘They’re phones.’

  ‘You can see a dot for every mobile phone?’

  ‘Yes, and …’ Lady Naomi typed at the keyboard, and some of the green dots disappeared. ‘That removed the phones without cameras. And this …’

  Half the dots turned red. ‘This shows up which phones have taken video in the last fifteen minutes.’ She beamed at the kids. ‘Who wants to see what those guys are filming down there?’

  Amelia did. But she was also slightly freaked out by what Lady Naomi was doing. Could she really get into the memory of any mobile phone on the planet? Did that mean she could also look into any computer? And why would she want to do that? She thought about Callan shouting about the Illuminati, and wondered if it was really all that crazy an idea …