They were the first Rats to set eyes on their new enemy. The probe had been right. It wasn’t a spider. Just something like one.

  Berrin found himself staring at a giant scorpion.

  THE SCORPION CAME TO a halt twenty metres from the Dodgem. In those few moments, Berrin took in every detail. The shiny blue body was low to the ground and protected by a series of armoured plates, each overlapping the next. There were legs, four on each side, as the probe had predicted. But there was something else as well. Wheels. Berrin knew instantly that this was no animal, like the Gadges or the Rhino Dogs. This was a machine.

  If he had doubted it, the ‘eyes’ on the front would have settled the matter for him. They glowed red. That was how it knew they were there, he realised. It was picking up their body heat. In Berrin’s mind, though, it was still a scorpion. It had one feature that would always link it to the real ones he had seen scuttling about in the pipes: its tail.

  As the scorpion advanced towards them, using its legs now instead of the wheels, that tail reared up menacingly. But it didn’t have the sharp point of a stinger at the end. No, at the tip of this scorpion’s tail, he could make out a hole, two centimetres across.

  ‘Wendell, watch out!’ he screamed. ‘Its tail is some kind of cannon.’

  Wendell was already taking aim. As Berrin called out, he sent a bolt hurtling towards the scorpion. It bounced off its armour harmlessly. Then the scorpion fired back.

  The sound was deafening; the impact devastating. The single shot from the scorpion’s tail destroyed the front of the Dodgem and threw it back against the two boys sheltering behind it. Berrin just managed to pull Wendell free before the motor and battery burst into flames.

  Wendell wasn’t badly hurt, but he barely knew where he was.

  ‘This way. We have to get as far down the pipe as possible,’ Berrin called, dragging Wendell’s limp body away from the flames. The pipe was narrow and made movement awkward. He looked up and found they had only retreated ten metres. The scorpion would advance on them at any moment. One direct hit from that deadly tail and they were history.

  Back along the tunnel, he could see the scorpion on the move. It had already reached the burning wreck of the Dodgem. The flames offered no threat to its protective shell. But as Berrin watched, waiting for the boom of its cannon, expecting the sound to be the last he ever heard, he found a moment of hope. The twisted metal was an obstacle the scorpion could not get round.

  If we can only get out of its line of fire, he thought.

  Another ten metres of desperate hauling and he had Wendell at a junction. He was slowly regaining his senses. ‘What … what happened?’

  ‘No time for that now,’ Berrin told him. ‘This way, quickly!’

  A second explosion rocked the tunnels. The shot hadn’t been aimed at them, though, or they would be dead. A third ear-splitting crash shuddered through every inch of Berrin’s body. The Dodgem. It was firing at the Dodgem, blowing it to pieces, so it could come after them.

  Wendell was almost himself now, but he was bleeding from the head and he couldn’t put any weight on his right arm. Somehow, they struggled on, Berrin providing the energy for both of them. They reached another T-junction and by then Wendell had had enough. ‘I have to rest,’ he pleaded.

  But Berrin took no notice. Which way? Left or right? He chose the left. That simple decision, taken quickly and without a moment’s thought, would save their lives.

  NINE

  A Gift for a Saviour

  WENDELL FOUND THE STRENGTH to drag himself ten metres along the pipe, then twenty, but that was it. He flopped, exhausted, onto the muddy concrete and no amount of prodding or pulling from Berrin would move him.

  Berrin was still trying when another explosion thundered through the pipes. When the echo had died, a new sound took its place, one he had heard only briefly before. The scorpion was on the move again.

  Berrin flicked off his helmet lamp, then Wendell’s too. In total darkness, he listened as the whirring of its motor grew louder. It had followed their trail at the first corner. Had it seen them go that way or was it using its heat sensors?

  In a matter of seconds, the scorpion was at the T-junction only twenty metres away. They had no crossbow. Wendell had dropped it back at the Dodgem. As for swords, what use were they against an armoured shell? The scorpion would finish them with a single shot from its tail.

  A clicking sound joined the whirring. Muddy gravel popped and grated as the scorpion turned, first to the right, then to the left. It would be using its heat sensors now.

  Then it was on the move again. Berrin’s heart felt as if it was trying to jump out through his throat. They wouldn’t see the scorpion coming. The flash of its cannon would be the last light they saw.

  But the noise was growing fainter. The scorpion had turned to the right at the T-junction. It wasn’t coming towards them. It was heading away.

  They were safe for now, but Berrin guessed this was only a brief reprieve. The scorpion hadn’t gone far. It was beginning a search of each pipe it came to, like the machine it was. It was only a matter of time before it tracked back to the T-junction to search in the opposite direction.

  ‘Wendell, can you move?’ Berrin whispered.

  ‘I’ll try.’ Wendell struggled painfully on, but twenty metres was as far as he could go before his muscles demanded more rest. ‘You go on ahead, Berrin. Get back to base if you can and tell them about this thing. Tell them it’s a robot,’ he said, using a word Berrin had never heard before.

  Wendell had saved Berrin’s life when the Dfx tied him to a stake for the Crocodilian to eat. He couldn’t abandon him now. They would die together. And their death wasn’t far off, it seemed.

  ‘What’s that?’ Wendell asked, not for the first time that day.

  Berrin could hear that it was a machine. It wasn’t coming from the T-junction, but that didn’t mean much. The sound grew louder. They had no plan, no weapons, no hope.

  Along the distant tunnel, Berrin thought he detected a dim light. No, it couldn’t be. The scorpion didn’t need light to find its way around. The light became stronger. There was no doubt now; it wasn’t his imagination.

  He dared to hope, just for a moment. Then it appeared, a Dodgem, its powerful headlight flooding the narrow pipe so that Berrin had to put his hand up to protect his eyes.

  ‘Berrin?’ a voice called as the Dodgem came to a halt just in front of them. It was Quinn.

  Now there was a second light racing towards them. Another Dodgem, this one with Olanda at the wheel.

  ‘Quickly, help me get Wendell into a Dodgem,’ Berrin called.

  The three Rats heaved and groaned in the narrow space. Wendell didn’t measure down any more and it was no easy feat getting someone his size into a Dodgem, even when he wasn’t injured. Then Berrin heard a sound that made his blood run cold.

  He turned to stare up the tunnel. The Dodgem’s headlight was still on, illuminating the tunnel all the way to the junction. There it was, the scorpion. It had dropped onto its eight legs and was steadying itself ready to shoot. As Berrin watched, its tail arched up over its back, until the short barrel of its cannon pointed at them.

  Quinn had seen it too. Without a word, he took the crossbow from his Dodgem.

  ‘It’s no use,’ Berrin warned him. ‘The armour is too thick. And watch out for that tail. It’s some sort of gun.’

  Despite his fear, Berrin continued to shove Wendell into the Dodgem’s seat. There, it was done, not that it mattered. The scorpion would surely fire any moment now. He turned around just as Quinn released the bolt from his crossbow. Berrin knew it was useless against the scorpion’s hard shell. Worse, Quinn had aimed rather badly. The bolt flew well above the robot’s twin red eyes.

  Then he heard a dull thunk. The arrow had hit something after all. With his helmet light back on, Berrin looked for the impact. Were his eyes playing tricks? No, he stared even harder and knew it was true. The bolt had lodged in the barrel of the cannon, like a cork in a bottle.

  The scorpion didn’t fire. Instead, more clicks and whirring filled the tunnel. Berrin was amazed to see one of the red eyes rise upwards on the end of a stalk. The tail pressed forward and the eye swivelled on the end of its stalk to inspect the damage.

  ‘Quick, into the Dodgems while it decides what to do,’ Olanda called.

  Berrin scrambled and squeezed past the nearest Dodgem, groping his way to the second until he fell into the seat behind Olanda. He looked back to see Quinn doing the same. They were ready to go and still the scorpion hadn’t fired. Berrin looked beyond Quinn to where it had stood, but the tunnel was empty.

  ‘HOW DID YOU KNOW WE were in trouble?’ Berrin shouted to Olanda, who seemed determined to challenge Quinn for the title of Most Reckless Dodgem Driver.

  ‘The probe,’ she yelled back. ‘She told us where you were. Insisted we take two Dodgems. She said yours was badly damaged.’

  ‘Damaged! It was blown apart.’

  ‘What was that thing?’ Olanda cried.

  ‘I don’t know, but I can guess who made it.’

  AT THE BASE, QUINN WAS a hero. Berrin described how his shot from the crossbow had disabled the scorpion. ‘A miracle,’ he called it, and who would argue with him?

  ‘Did you really aim at that tiny opening?’ Olanda asked. She was no mean shot with a crossbow herself these days and marvelled at such skill.

  Quinn grinned from ear to ear as they praised him. ‘Yes, I aimed for the cannon,’ he assured them.

  ‘But what are the chances you could ever do it again?’ Dorian asked.

  Quinn’s smile widened even further. ‘One in a hundred, maybe. I just hope I don’t have to try a second time.’

  They all swallowed a little harder when they heard this. ‘That scorpion will be back, that’s for sure,’ said Berrin. ‘We’d better be ready for it.’

  Before they faced this problem, they had to help Wendell out of the Dodgem. He groaned as they took his arm, but it didn’t seem broken. Dorian held a cloth to the cut above his ear.

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Wendell. He cautiously let go of the pair who were holding him upright. ‘I thought we were going to die in that tunnel. Just as well Dorian sent those two out to scout around.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Not until the probe told me what had happened to you.’

  ‘The probe,’ he repeated suspiciously.

  Dorian nodded, but didn’t say what she might have said. She didn’t need to. The others were all thinking the same thing. Wendell knew it too.

  ‘You saved us then,’ he said to the probe.

  ‘I helped a little, maybe,’ she answered modestly.

  ‘More than a little,’ he said. The suspicion and anger had left his voice at last. ‘I’ve been hard on you. Maybe I was wrong. No,’ he said immediately, straightening up as best he could. ‘Not maybe. I was wrong. Berrin and I owe you our lives. If Quinn hadn’t arrived when he did, miracle shot or not, we were dead ducks. I wish … I wish there was something I could give you.’

  But there was nothing. These tunnels were no place to find gifts. No, there was nothing they could put in her hand, Berrin thought, but he was remembering his whispered conversation with Ferdinand. Now was the time to speak.

  ‘I have something for the probe,’ he said.

  They all turned in surprise, eager to see what he had found to give her.

  ‘It’s nothing you can see or touch,’ he announced, teasing them a little and enjoying every second of it. ‘I asked Ferdinand to help me choose it, and he came up with the perfect thing.’

  He turned to the probe. ‘It’s a name,’ he said. ‘We’re going to call you Belle. It means beautiful.’

  TEN

  The Scorpion Returns

  ‘BELLE.’ THE PROBE SAID it again and again, as though the word had become a precious stone and she was turning it over in her fingers. To hear it was to see it. For a creature with such finely tuned senses, perhaps that was true.

  ‘My own name. Thank you,’ she said to Berrin. ‘Thank you so much. This is the first thing anyone has ever given me. I love it.’

  ‘It was Ferdinand who came up with the name.’

  ‘Yes, but it was your idea, wasn’t it?’

  Berrin blushed a little and there was just enough light from Dorian’s lamp for the others to see. Olanda couldn’t resist the chance to tease. ‘It means beautiful,’ she repeated, rolling her eyes.

  ‘Ferdinand also told me that Olanda means girl with dirty face,’ Berrin shot back at her. Not that he had managed to insult Olanda. She replied just as quickly, ‘It suits me then.’

  There was no time to celebrate Belle’s naming. ‘The Gadges will take my bolt out of the scorpion’s cannon and then it will be back,’ Quinn predicted.

  They knew he was right. Less than an hour had passed before Belle’s specially shaped ears twitched.

  ‘It’s the scorpion, isn’t it?’ Dorian asked. ‘Which way is it heading?’

  Belle listened with her hand on the wall of the pipe. Waiting for her response was agony. ‘Not this way,’ she said finally. ‘At least, not at the moment. It’s travelling quickly, following each new tunnel that it comes to and then tracking backwards to where it started. It’s searching for something.’

  ‘Yes, for us, and if it keeps going like that, eventually it will find us.’

  ‘It will find Ferdinand too,’ added Wendell, who was no longer reluctant to say the name in front of Belle.

  ‘We’d better go down and see him,’ Dorian decided. ‘With the electricity cut off, all he has is a helmet lamp and the battery will be low by now.’

  Berrin was again invited to join them. Quinn and Olanda crawled along the tunnel behind him, while Dorian led the way. It was a tight fit for her in the smallest pipe. The hips of her pants were starting to fray where they grazed constantly against the concrete.

  Ferdinand was pleased to see them.

  ‘Here’s a new battery for your helmet lamp,’ said Dorian. Together they fitted it in place, giving the gloomy tunnel a little more light.

  ‘I’ve sent Ruben and Vindy to see what they can do about the electricity,’ she told him. ‘But the Gadges are keeping a careful watch. It could take days, and even then they might find the new place where we cut into the power lines.’

  ‘Don’t give up. We need electricity to survive,’ Ferdinand said solemnly.

  ‘We need it more than ever now,’ Dorian went on. It was time to tell Ferdinand about the scorpion.

  He listened without showing any fear, even when Quinn explained that the deadly machine was small enough to reach into this very chamber. He was particularly interested in Berrin’s story about his narrow escape with Wendell. ‘It didn’t detect you at that junction?’ he asked thoughtfully.

  ‘No. It clicked and whirred and turned in both directions, but then it went off the other way.’

  ‘Its heat-seeking sensors are weak then. The clicking noises you heard were probably sonar. That must be how it finds its way around.’

  Sonar. Another new word.

  ‘Bats use it,’ Ferdinand explained. ‘They send out a high-pitched screech that you and I can barely hear and then listen for the echo.’

  ‘Like Belle?’

  Ferdinand’s face softened into a smile. ‘So the probe has a name, does she? Yes, your new friend Belle uses sonar, but she seems to be far better at it than this scorpion.’

  ‘I wish she had a cannon for a tail, like the scorpion,’ Quinn muttered.

  Ferdinand didn’t concern himself with wishes. He was thinking deeply about what he had been told. ‘A map,’ he said at last. ‘The scorpion is building a map into its thinking circuits.’

  ‘Why would it be making a map? It’s out to destroy us, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes, but a map is a very powerful weapon. That’s why we needed one of the surface if we were going to defeat Malig Tumora. How can you destroy your enemy if you don’t know where to go? The Gadges had no way of knowing where they were underground, so they covered the same tunnels over and over as you led them on a merry chase. They would never have found our base. But this scorpion … it will soon know our tunnels better than we do.’

  At these words, each of them remembered the meeting they had held in this very pipe only a few days before. They had embarked on a struggle to the death with Malig Tumora. Doomsday. There would be only one winner.

  But the Gadges had cut their power, they couldn’t recharge their batteries and a robot scorpion was loose in the tunnels. Right now, the Rats were losing.

  ‘We have to stop the scorpion creating this map,’ Dorian decided.

  Quinn carried more hope in his heart than most, but even he doubted they could manage it. ‘The only way to do that is to stop it altogether,’ he pointed out.

  ‘We need an obstacle,’ said Dorian.

  ‘It blew our Dodgem to pieces with three shots from its tail.’

  ‘Something stronger then. Thicker.’

  ‘An access hole cover,’ said Olanda.

  ‘It’s worth a try.’

  DORIAN SENT THEM OUT in teams to steal the access hole covers. This wasn’t easy. There were plenty of access holes, but there were plenty of Gadges too, waiting on the surface for frightened Rats to come scampering out of their tunnels as the scorpion went about its work.

  The access hole covers were heavy too. (They wouldn’t be much use against the scorpion’s cannon if they weren’t.) And when Berrin and Olanda finally found one unguarded, they discovered another problem. The covers were too big to fit through the hole they sat in. Round ones, anyway.

  After another hour of looking, they found a square one and, by angling it cleverly between opposite corners, managed to drop it down into the large pipe below. What a noise!

  The extra weight wore down the batteries of the Dodgem. How much longer would this one hold out? When they reached base, they found only one other team had matched their success.

  ‘Where is the scorpion now?’ Dorian asked Belle.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9