The Warriors of Brin-Hask by Cerberus Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

defence has
collapsed. Look – can you see him there with his broadsword? He’s going to call for
their surrender and start taking prisoners.’
    But as King Hibble raised his voice to shout out his willingness to show mercy, there
was a harsh fizzing noise and all the lights in the kitchen flickered, then went
out.
    ‘What’s this?’ roared King Hibble.
    The fizzing noise grew louder and in the dark, Amelia saw all the glowing red rats’
eyes flicker and die. Without the glowing eyes, she could see nothing, not even the
moon outside gave any light, but the air around her began to thicken with the foul,
wet smell of burnt fur, and here and there came a slow sizzling pop, as though something
big had flown into a bug zapper.
    When the lights came back on, King Hibble stood astounded, before his face fell in
disgust. Every rat lay dead on the ground, electrocuted and slightly smoking.
    ‘The rats exploded themselves?’ said Charlie.
    ‘Maybe,’ said Lady Naomi. ‘Or someone else did.’
    ‘Who?’ said Amelia. ‘Not King Hibble?’
    Lady Naomi shook her head. ‘Never. None of the Brin-Hask would act so dishonourably.’
    ‘Then who?’
    ‘A good question. Perhaps if we knew who put the cybertronics into ordinary Earth
rats in the first place?’
    ‘They weren’t alien rats?’ Amelia asked.
    ‘No, poor things. They were just the hosts for someone else’s technology. Right now,
though, I don’t know who that someone else would be, or what they were trying to
achieve. The only thing we can tell from this is that they would rather destroy their
entire operation than risk having us capture even a single rat intact.’
    ‘But I did!’ Charlie said. ‘I caught Hugo and we put him in a tank!’
    Lady Naomi beamed at him. ‘You did? Oh, well done! If we can –’
    ‘James let it go,’ Charlie interrupted her, his excitement gone.
    Lady Naomi looked stricken, something deeper than disappointment, almost a grief
in her eyes. Then she forced herself to smile, and said, ‘Ah, well. I see. Never
mind.’ She stretched and stood up on the workbench, then lightly leapt down to one
of the exposed beams in the destroyed floor, landing as neatly as an acrobat. ‘Is
there any pizza left?’
    She picked her way across the battlefield, hopping from beam to beam and balancing
with no apparent effort. At the doorway to the hall she turned back and bowed to
the Brin-Hask, who waved her goodbye from the now rather gruesome mess that was the
cavity under the floor.
    Charlie leant over the edge of his sink and surveyed the damage. Clumps of fur, spatters
of blood and the corpses of slaughtered rats lay all over the kitchen. The combined
stench of blood, guts, singed hair and burnt barbecue was unbearable. It was hard
to imagine anyone ever being able to cook in there again. In the midst of it all,
the Brin-Hask laughed and cheered and pestered Enrick the bard for another story.
    ‘That,’ said Charlie, ‘was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Amelia, still gazing after Lady Naomi, ‘she really is.’

    Dad could only laugh – not a particularly happy laugh, more the helpless, hysterical
kind – when he saw what had happened to his kitchen. When he remembered that Mr Snavely
would be back the next morning with a Control superior, he peeled off into wild giggles.
    ‘Well, we can’t hide it,’ said Mum. ‘We can’t fix it or change it, so there’s no
use worrying about it.’
    ‘So what do we do?’ asked Mary.
    ‘Right now, we turn our backs on it.’
    James hadn’t said a word. He’d stood in mute shock as the Brin-Hask warriors marched
past him on their way back to their picnic blanket. He’d just turned pale when he
saw the kitchen.
    Amelia felt sorry for him. She could see it was almost physically hurting him to
accept that he’d been wrong, and the aliens were real. Changing his whole view of
the world to include the existence of an interstellar gateway at the bottom of his
garden