Carrie Hatchett, Space Adventurer Books 1 - 3

Mission Improbable-5-2

“Err...to be honest, I don’t actually know.”

“I remember looking at some tools that were on your kitchen table, when the cupboard door under your sink opened. There was this green light and I—I...”

“Got sucked in? Yes, weird, isn’t it? It happened to me yesterday.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“No, I went somewhere else before. It was a job interview.”

Dave straightened and sat up. He wrapped his arms round his knees and swivelled his head, blinking and squinting at the alien landscape. “A job interview?”

“Yeah.” Carrie looked around. They seemed to be alone, and their entry point had, predictably, disappeared.

“What job were you interviewing for?”

How on Earth will we get back? Carrie thought.

“Carrie.”

“What?”

“What job were you interviewing for?”

“Oh...” She waved her hand in a vague gesture. “Space detective, I think it was.”

Dave shook his head. “Space detective? This is insane. I must be dreaming.”

Carrie grimaced. “Yeah, I thought that, too. But, no, it’s real. Sorry.”

His head in his hands, Dave began to moan and rock. “This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening.” He lifted his head and stared at Carrie, his face white. “How do we get back? We have to go back. Now. We have to.” His eyes widened and he pointed a shaking finger at her. “That’s where you got all the stuff on your kitchen table.”

She nodded.

“I thought it looked strange. So those were, like, made by aliens?”

Carrie shrugged. “I suppose so.”

“What do you do with them? I mean, what are they for?”

“To help me do the job.”

“But...”

“They’re back there, and we’re here. Yep, that had already occurred to me.” Carrie wondered if one of the tools was to open a passage back to her kitchen. She thought it wiser not to mention the possibility.

Dave began to moan and rock again.

“Okay, okay, calm down.” Carrie tried to look calm and confident. Inside, her chest was tight and her stomach churned. She stood. “Well, first we can—”

She was thrown to the ground as a massive boom filled the air and the boulder shuddered. She yelled and grabbed Dave as he grabbed her.

“What was th—” he said as another boom came. This time it was from the sea, and a towering plume of pale yellow, gloopy liquid rose into the air.

“I don’t kn—” The boulder shuddered again, and a crack appeared, running from the top to the base.

“Are those b—b—bombs?” Dave asked. “Carrie, are we in a war zone?”

Carrie wrung her hands, trying to remember what the insect had said. She was sure it had been talking about...something. She pressed her hands to her head. Two huge explosions created a spray of the liquid that rained down on them.

“Carrie!” The next explosion widened the crack in the boulder. “Quick, let’s go there.” Dave indicated the forest of huge, single leaves. “Whoever’s attacking, they don’t seem to be attacking that.”

The two of them sped over the plain towards the leaves. A memory flashed into Carrie’s mind. Something about the orange jumpsuit. Yes, that was it. The colour was so she would stand out in...her heart sank. In conflict zones. Conflict zones like the one they were in right now. And the jumpsuit was back on Earth.

The forest drew nearer. Behind them the deafening sounds of explosions continued, the ground vibrating at each one. Dave was ahead, but Carrie was gaining on him. When she drew abreast, he was red-faced and gasping.

“Come on,” she called. “Not much farther.” She silently thanked her Bagua Zhang instructor for pushing her to train outside of class time. The first leaves of the forest were only a couple of hundred feet away. As she reached the first leaf, Carrie stopped and turned. A second later Dave caught up and sank, gasping, to his knees.

“Oh, it wasn’t that far,” Carrie said.

Dave feebly waved his hand by way of reply as he drew in large lungfuls of air. “Haven’t...” pant “run like...” pant “that since I was...” pant “at school.”

In a few minutes Dave’s breathing eased, and they set off through the leaf trees. Each was nearly identical to the next. Wide, with a central rib and radiating veins, they looked like beech leaves, except several thousand times larger and a deep, unsettling red. All were facing the same way, irregularly spaced and casting a maroon shadow.

As they drew farther from the explosions, the ground vibrated less. Carrie squinted up at the cloudless sky where a small, intensely bright sun shone. A sun quite unlike the one Earth orbited. Though the temperature was balmy, Carrie shivered.

She glanced at Dave. His face had regained its colour after their run, but it was still rigid and his eyes were wide.

“Carrie,” he said, after they had walked a little farther, “what are we doing? Where are we going?”

“We’re getting away from those bombs or whatever they are.”

“But we’re far away now. We aren’t in any immediate danger. I was wondering if you’re taking us somewhere we can get back to Earth.”

“Er, I’m not sure.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I haven’t been here before.”

“You said you’d been for a job interview. To become a space detective.”

“Yes...but they didn’t say anything about this place.” At least, she didn’t remember anything, though she hadn’t been paying much attention at the time. Who pays attention in a dream? She decided against telling Dave about her giant bug interviewer with the razor-sharp, dripping fangs.

“So you have absolutely no idea where we are, or where we’re going.”

“Ermm...” Carrie disliked the implications of what she was about to say, but couldn’t think of a way to avoid saying it. “No.”

“Carrie.” Dave grabbed her shoulders and spun her round. His hair, which had been perfectly, stylishly groomed only an hour or so previously was now a tussled mess. Though quite attractively tussled, Carrie thought. His skin shone with sweat. “Carrie. What are we going to do? How are we going to get back? We can’t wander through this forest forever. We don’t have anything to eat, or drink, or, or...what’s wrong?”

She hadn’t noticed it at first, distracted as she was by Dave’s dishevelled good looks, but even she couldn’t fail to see the giant metallic object that was behind him. How it had got there she didn’t know. Maybe it had been following them silently, or it had appeared out of nowhere. But there it undeniably was. A huge, grey length of metallic tubing that was folded—overlapping at the beginning and end—into a rectangle with curved corners. Through the hollow centre Carrie could see the giant leaves that led back the way they had come.

Reading Carrie’s expression, Dave slowly turned around and looked behind him. He grabbed her arm and leaned in close to her ear.

“Does that look like what I think it looks like?” he whispered.

Carrie nodded. “A gigantic paperclip.”

Chapter Seven – Out of This WorldA SOUND LIKE TEN THOUSAND six year olds having their first violin lesson split the air. Carrie bent double and clasped her hands to her ears. She grimaced as the noise winkled its way between her fingers and penetrated her eardrums. She pressed her upper arms to her ears, but still the sound reverberated around her skull. Opening one eye a tiny slit, she found she was looking at Dave’s neatly brushed suede boots. She squinted upward. He was standing, hands on hips, nodding thoughtfully at the massive mechanical alien. His lips moved, but Carrie couldn’t make out his words above the off-key screeching.

She nudged him with her elbow, and he looked down at her. He raised his eyebrows. She read his lips. What’s wrong with you?

“What’s wrong with me?” she shouted. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you hear that terrible noise?”

“What...” Dave’s attention was drawn back to the alien. He shook his head and said something, spread his hands wide and shrugged.

“Dave,” called Carrie. “What’s going on? Are you...”

He was shaking his head vehemently. The discordant sound stopped, and in its place a low vibration hummed. The ground throbbed. Dave raised his arms as if to ward off a blow and began to rise into the air. His feet kicked uselessly. An invisible force gripped Carrie and began to lift her, too. As she left the ground, she spun round and tried to grip the pale, dusty sand, but her fingers snatched at air. She was carried inexorably upward.

Dave was rising with her, his arms and legs windmilling as he fought to free himself from the invisible force that gripped them. They floated towards the empty centre of the alien, where they hung suspended in midair. Open-mouthed, they stared at each other. The low vibration grew more intense, and the metal tubing surrounding them began to blur. The ground drew slowly away. The alien was lifting off and taking them with it.

Carrie closed her eyes as she bobbed gently between the two long lines of metal tubing. After a while, when nothing else seemed to be happening, she opened them again. Below her were the forest of red leaves, the grey plain, and the yellow ocean, all three receding at a steady pace. Above, the mauve sky deepened in colour. She gulped. “I hope this thing’s safe,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to fall from this height.”

Dave was swaying lazily next to her, his arms and legs akimbo, like a marionette whose puppet master had forgotten what he was supposed to be doing. He set his lips and glared.

“What?” said Carrie. “What have I done?”

“What have you done? What have you done? You invited me to your house for a housewarming party, only I was the only one invited. I decided to stay because you seemed lonely and I felt sorry for you, and as a reward for my kindness I was vacuumed underneath your sink and onto another planet.” He paused for breath. “Now I’m flying through the air inside an overgrown item of office stationery towards interrogation and probable execution on an alien spaceship. That’s what you’ve done, Carrie. That’s what you’ve done. If I hadn’t gone to your housewarming—” he raised two fingers of each hand to signal quote marks “—I’d be sitting at home right now with a cup of hot chocolate watching the closing credits of a very interesting biopic on Leonardo DiCaprio. The next time someone’s stupid enough to take the job of supervisor at my call centre, remind me to not to give them cake!”

Carrie’s mouth opened and shut and opened again. “What was that you said about interrogation and probable execution?”

“What? Didn’t you hear what the paperclip said?”

“No, all I could hear was a terrible noise pretending to be music.”

“What are you talking about? It was speaking English, clear as day.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it...” Dave grasped his hair before throwing his hands up. “Oh, never mind. It was asking us what we were and where we were from. When I answered, it got really angry. Then it said we were an unauthorised presence on a colonial planet, and if we couldn’t explain ourselves to its commander we would be subject to the highest penalty. And if this alien and its friends were responsible for the bombing, I think we can both imagine what that might be.”

As Carrie digested this latest piece of information, the sky turned a deeper mauve and the horizon became curved. The yellow ocean stretched over the planet surface as far as she could see. A small patch of red signalled the forest they had left what seemed only a short time ago. The forest sat at the edge of a large, grey, roughly crescent-shaped island.

Carrie thought back over the last twenty-four hours. It had been an eventful day for sure, what with her interview with the bug, her first day at the call centre, finding herself in a war zone, and now zooming up and away from an alien planet while being held within an invisible force field. Through all those events, though, in all that time, at no point had she thought this might be her last day alive.

She gasped. Toodles and Rogue. Who was going to feed them? Who was going to take care of them? Her lower lip trembled, and she began to cry.

Dave grimaced. “Look, it probably won’t come to that. Maybe I misunderstood.”

Carrie was shaking her head, the force making her sway gently. “It isn’t that,” she said. “I’m sorry—” A fresh wail escaped her, and she couldn’t finish her sentence.

Dave sighed. “You don’t have to apologise. I didn’t mean what I said earlier. It isn’t your fault. All this...” He gestured at the deep mauve sky filled with stars and yellow planet below. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant I’m sorry for Toodles and Rogue. Who’s going to look after them when I’m gone? They’ll be all alooooone.” Her final word dissolved into fresh sobs.

Dave rolled his eyes. “Oh well, don’t mind about me, will you? I mean, I’m only another human being, practically a stranger, who you dragged into this mess.”