With his racing heart drumming a tattoo of hope, Gideon radioed his ship. ‘Vai, you out there?’ He was answered by the unbearably loud static. ‘Are you receiving me, Vai?’ he tried again.

  'I copy, honey bunch,’ a faraway voice came back.

  Alphie gave Orridus a worried look. ‘He's talking to thin air, spike-nose.'

  'Who is he speaking with?’ the like-minded hermit whispered to Bronte.

  'His mother, I think.'

  'It's good to hear your synthesised voice,’ Gideon was heard telling his ‘mother'.

  'Can you clear up the line a bit? We've got a bad connection.'

  'Filtering out the distortion.’ Vai's crackly voice came back a fraction stronger. ‘That's the clearest I can get it.'

  'It'll have to do. Report your status.'

  'My, aren't we Mister Efficiency.'

  'Quit the backchat, Vai. I honestly don't have the time for banter.'

  'Plasma reserves are holding at twenty-three per cent, even with the long range scan operational.'

  'I distinctly remember telling you to shut down all non-essential ship's functions.'

  'I got lonely and had to find out exactly where you were. Can't blame a girl for seeking male company.’ Vai's flippancy covered her true concern.

  'You always have had trouble doing what you were told. So did you?'

  'What?'

  'Locate me.'

  'Would you like precise map coordinates?'

  Gideon began to cough again and sputtered, ‘I'd prefer a doctor.'

  'You don't sound too good.'

  'I'll live,’ Gideon lied with dry humour. ‘Give me the bad news. How far off is the Annihilator?'

  'Close enough to touch. It's shooting past this biosphere's only satellite even now at close to twenty-four kalacs per semic. That's just over half its original speed. The gravities exerted by this system's outer planets have been putting the brakes on. Which puts impact time at two point one ikars.'

  The expletives Gideon used made even the worldly Orridus blanch.

  'You still have a healthy tongue,’ the cybernate ribbed, but there was definite anxiety in her artificial voice. In four and one quarter hours carnage would be raining down from the punctured sky. ‘I've missed your colourful language.'

  'You always scold me for swearing.'

  'You're excused this once. There was a recent explosion. I thought you'd been killed when I discovered your Energy Dome had detonated itself.'

  This was bad news for the ailing Berranian. He had counted on becoming reunited with his personal power source. ‘I need you here, Vai,’ he decided.

  She laughed. ‘I'm grounded, darling. You know as well as I that I can't fly the starsphere without a certified pilot aboard.'

  Gideon already had the solution to that problem ready and waiting. ‘Command priority override Epsilon Alpha two-two-five.'

  Vai felt a peculiar throbbing surge through her circuitry. ‘What have you done, Commander?'

  'Given you wings. I'm putting your flight inhibitors offline.'

  Feeling her electronic shackles disengaging one after the other, the bemused computer commented aloud, ‘I always wondered what that hidden file contained,’ as she gradually felt freer in her servile existence than she had ever sensed before.

  'Power up and come get me,’ Gideon ordered her.

  'On my way,’ she gaily said in response. ‘Wait ... picking up ... seismic readings ... heavy activity ... northwest ... your ... position.'

  'Vai, you're breaking up. Repeat all after seismic.'

  The crackly comlink channel faded back into pure static.

  'What was that was all about?’ Tank asked Gideon.

  'My ride's coming.'

  'You going someplace?'

  'No.’ The injured alien raised himself into a sitting position with an effort. ‘I'm hoping Bronte will be.'

  'I am so sick and tired of being told what to do!’ the cow exploded.

  The hermit was visibly startled by the outburst. Thunderfeet were typically slow to anger.

  Her rage got into full swing. ‘Bronte do this, Bronte do that. Go there, stay put, don't see that bull, mate with him.’ She faltered, remembering the Thunderfoot male at her side and desperately tried to backtrack. ‘Darved, I...'

  'You never told me you felt that way about us ... about me.’ There was hurt in his trusting eyes.

  'I don't, not really.'

  The damage was done. Darved gave Bronte a parting wounded look before trudging away to sulk alone amongst the leafless trees. She made to follow and was stopped by Tank's unfeeling observation.

  'Let your huffy boyfriend go. This get-together was way too crowded with him here anyway.'

  'What does a Clubtail know about love?’ was her flinty comeback.

  'Tank's right, in his own blunt way,’ echoed Gideon. ‘We have stuff to do and need to be getting started. I can't have you distracted.'

  'Weren't you listening? I've had enough of being ordered about. I'm a grown Thunderfoot. My life belongs to me and right now I'm going to go find Darved and beg his forgiveness. After he has taken me back, we're plodding as far away from you and this whole insanity as we can get!'

  'You can't get away!’ the alien sharply pointed out. ‘There's nowhere to run to, no place to hide in.’ Gideon was angry enough to lurch to his feet. He leant against Tank, his breathing raspy. ‘In no time at all a rock with the dimensions of an island is going to hit and wipe out virtually every living creature. On top of that, I'm dying here. You'll excuse me if I don't indulge you in your melodramatics.’ He addressed the lingering Shortfrill and his Treefur jockey somewhat tersely. ‘The two of you are in the way. I haven't the foggiest what interest you have in this matter and don't wish to be rude, but I need you out of here pronto. This is no place for bystanders.'

  'He's your would-be rescuer,’ Tank said of Orridus, glossing over the Treefur balanced on the hermit's back.

  'Plus Bronte's keeper since her herd's slaughter,’ Orridus pointedly added.

  'The both of us, whitey,’ chimed in Alphie. He would be overlooked no longer.

  'Then stay,’ invited Gideon, his cyclopean gaze strangely fixed on the loudmouth marsupial. ‘Bronte, are you ready to undergo the Transformation.'

  The Thunderfoot dug her heels in. ‘Are you prepared to be honest?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'I have it on good authority that Gideon is responsible for the planet-killer,’ she blabbed to Orridus.

  'Who is your source?’ the Shortfrill wanted to know.

  'Moldar told me.'

  Orridus turned on Gideon. ‘Is this true? Are you guilty of setting the sky-rock on its path of destruction?'

  'I am not.'

  'Liar!’ indicted the cow, looming over the alien like a thundercloud about to loose a lightning bolt.

  'Hold your accusation, Bronte,’ admonished the hermit, bodily shoving her aside. ‘I wouldn't call Moldar the most trustworthy of sources. The soothsayer has an unsavoury reputation of manipulating weaklings for his own amusement, and for his own ends.'

  'Sadly, this Moldar fellow happens to be right.'

  The animals glared at the confessing offworlder.

  'You said you had nothing to do with creating the rock,’ disputed Orridus.

  'Not personally. My people—my herd—did however. The asteroid came about because of their indirect action.'

  The sagely Shieldhorn levelled his horned gaze at Gideon. ‘You've got some explaining to do, my boy.'

  'It's about time you revealed all,’ Bronte said crustily.

  Gideon gingerly lowered himself and sat cross-legged on the leaf matting in case he risked passing out. He was feeling poorly and had no wish to fall flat on his face in front of the reptiles. There simply was no time remaining to be sick. ‘I come from another planet,’ he began.

  'Skip the preamble and get to the juicy bit,’ Tank said impatiently. Brand new facts were on the horizon, begging analysis. He was not interested in hearing old details.

  'I was only introducing myself for the benefit of our newcomers,’ Gideon retorted with a petulant lilt.

  'They'll catch up,’ the unfeeling Clubtail decided.

  'Follow me as best you can,’ the alien told his uninformed listeners. ‘The Life-giver my planet revolves around was dying.'

  'Suns die?’ Tank was intrigued. This was an aspect of astrophysics not covered in their previous discourse.

  'Stars are living things. They are born, grow old and expire. In a way, such celestial bodies are the personification of the cycle of life. Like every entity that's alive, they come into being haunted by their own mortality and seek to preserve their individuality through the legacy of children. Planets are the offspring of the stars, which nurture their kids by showering them with warming rays of light. Parents eventually do die and the drawback with stars is that the unbreakable link between a sun and its attending satellites always means the collective death of the immediate family when that time rolls around. Ours was no exception and was coming to the end of her mortal span.

  'Funny how inanimate objects are dubbed female. Maybe it's a male response dating from infancy. Boys and men alike are attracted to the charms of the baffling creatures we know as women, whether it be mother or girlfriend, so transferring a feminine personality onto a prized hover car or an awesome solar furnace makes an inorganic thing of beauty and mystery more endearing.

  'Anyhow, for ten thousand million ontwas she burned bright and warmed my homeworld of Berran. Good things seldom last forever, and our sun started to dim and cool when she entered the first stages of becoming a White Dwarf.'

  'This tale is boring the patience out of me,’ griped Bronte. ‘What has it to do with the planet-killer?'

  'You have the attention span of a cockroach,’ Alphie bravely insulted the trillion times larger Thunderfoot. He wanted to hear the rest of the story.

  'Are you trying to be funny, midget,’ she grouched.

  The impudent Treefur sniggered. ‘Heck no—I like roaches. The big, succulent ones especially.'

  Bronte cringed. The thought of eating flesh, even a crunchy insect, made her hide crawl.

  'If the pair of you have finished exchanging insults, I'd like to find out what Gideon's explanation is leading to,’ cut in Orridus.

  'The truthfulness of Knowledge,’ Tank revelled, his armour-studded snout intense with curiosity.

  The Berranian carried on. ‘My planet was doomed. Without heat and light our cherished globe was destined to become a ball of frozen, uninhabitable rock. Accordingly, the greatest intellectual institute on Berran, the combined Academies of Learning, was tasked with finding a way of saving my people.'

  'Why didn't you just migrate to new feeding grounds?’ Orridus sensibly asked.

  'Relocating seven billion souls was an impossibility,’ Gideon said sadly.

  'You have space travel,’ Tank reasoned.

  'Only a select few cruised the stars. General space flight was denied the masses on grounds of cost.’ Gideon caught himself. ‘What would you lot know of money? The concepts of finances and economics are no doubt as alien to you as I am.'

  'Not so,’ rebutted the hermit. ‘Wealth to us is measured in territory and herd strength.'

  These prehistoric lizards never ceased to amaze Gideon.

  'The logistics of shifting an entire planetary populace was staggering,’ he continued, ‘had we the ships to move everybody, which we didn't, and there simply wasn't enough time or material to build a fleet of interstellar transports for just such a monumental task. Besides, my people were very big on unity. After thousands of ontwas of racial strife our divided races had long ago learnt to coexist in harmony, so we preferred to live, or perish, as one. Thus it was decided to pin our worldwide hopes on Berran's scientists. They were charged with devising a way of re-igniting our failing sun.'

  'You're talking about filling the stomach of a flaming Life-giver to give back its strength?’ Tank construed. The astute Clubtail was indeed paying attention.

  'The program had the acronym FIRE,’ confirmed Gideon, ‘which stood for Fusion Injection and Replenishment Experiment.'

  Tank rumbled laughingly, appreciating the pun. His companion animals failed to the see the humour in the play on words. Fire to them meant unimaginable danger—searing heat, choking smoke, burning brush and roasting flesh. Anyone who commanded that fiery beast was to be respected, if not feared outright, so they hung on the small alienaut's words as if their very lives depended upon them.

  'I won't bore you with the details...'

  'That'll make a nice change,’ interrupted Bronte.

  ’ ... other than to say that the plan was to refuel the star pronto,’ finished Gideon. ‘It was an ambitious scheme which stood a chance of success if it weren't for the blasted accident.'

  'What mishap was that?’ asked Tank.

  'The complex housing the research facilities blew up,’ the Berranian elucidated. ‘A gigantic explosion demolished the laboratories and ended our hopes for salvation.'

  'Very sad and all, but what's the tie in to the sky-rock?’ the fed up Thunderfoot wanted to know.

  'The lab buildings, caves to you, were sited off-planet on an orbiting asteroid for safety reasons. The atomic blast shattered the base rock into a million pieces. Your planet-killer is the largest of those fragments.'

  Bronte slowly absorbed the enormity of that disclosure. ‘It is your fault!’ she thundered.

  'My people are culpable,’ Gideon freely admitted, ‘but of course it was completely unintentional—we had no way of knowing that would happen.’ Bronte, her snouted face as dark and furious as a brewing storm, was unimpressed. She remained unmoved when he footnoted in a sad voice, ‘We paid the ultimate price for our aspiration. My whole race died.'

  'That explains you always referring to them in the past tense,’ she cruelly noted.

  'Don't be so mean, Bronte,’ chastised Orridus. ‘The two of you have that in common. You've both lost your herds.'

  The gargantuan cow was shamed by that condemnation and backed down, allowing Gideon to round off his tale of woe.

  'The loss of the FIRE laboratories was an unrecoverable blow. It was too late to rebuild and retry. Warring with the Tsor had cost us dearly in terms of depleting valuable resources and wasting precious time. Our sun failed, taking her earthy daughter with her...'

  He broke down and quietly wept, picturing in his fertile mind his sun expanding to many times its original size in the grip of its death throes, engulfing Berran in that flaring embrace. Seas would have boiled and the parched land cracked and split under that fierce heat, before the stricken furnace shrank into a dense, earth-sized lump of cooling matter and the devastated globe was entombed in a frigidity lasting for all time. Getting a grip on his emotions, Gideon muttered hatefully, ‘Fire and ice. What a perverse combination.'

  Alphie passed the comment, ‘You managed to survive well enough, bug-eye.'

  'I escaped before the end.'

  'Coward,’ mumbled Bronte.

  Gideon heard the denunciation. ‘I had good cause to abandon them.'

  'What was that—fear?'

  'No. I came to save your hides.'

  Once more Bronte felt the sting of chagrin for running off at the mouth.

  Orridus put a valid poser to the alien. ‘How do you know for certain your whole herd was wiped out if you weren't there to witness it?'

  'Call it an educated guess.’ Gideon was not going to be drawn back into the first stage of denial where an endless stream of ‘what ifs’ muddled one's thinking. The pain of that the first time around had certainly been bad enough. There was no possible way his people could have survived a disaster of that magnitude. Those living planetside and on the orbital stations would have uniformly fried and froze. Vai's unanswered hailing signal transmitted on the journey here confirmed the envisaged outcome—Berran was as lifeless as her dead and empty airwaves.

  The hermit posed another question. ‘What made you forsake them for us?'

  The humanoid shrugged. ‘Guilt, I suppose.'

  'It was more than that,’ intuited Tank.

  'You're not wrong there about his holiness,’ Bronte murmured.

  'Can't you ever speak above a mutter,’ Gideon censured the scaled giantess. The smartness of the reptiles was starting to bug him. ‘Alright, you got me,’ he said. ‘Only first you have to understand where I'm coming from.'

  'Wouldn't that have been Berran?’ Tank wisecracked.

  The offworlder let that slide. ‘We all have our assigned roles in life—predator, prey, scavengers,’ he typified. ‘Mine is as an exobiologist. I study the exotic life forms of alien worlds, mostly on their home planet in natural settings, although on occasion back on Berran. That's how I was made aware of all you lizards. You were my special assignment.'

  Alphie coughed poignantly.

  'Not forgetting the marsupials,’ Gideon hastily threw in.

  'How come no-one saw you till now?’ frowned Orridus.

  'I was an unobtrusive watcher high up in orbit. Space provides an ideal window from which to gaze.'

  Bronte was disgusted. ‘You spied on us.'

  Gideon was himself untroubled at being labelled spy. ‘If that's how you want to look at it.'

  'It is and I do,’ the Thunderfoot huffed. The foiled alien was making no progress with Bronte whatsoever. She let out a thoughtful rumble. ‘You said you sometimes studied other life back on your home range.’ Bronte ran with her postulating. ‘That would have meant taking them away. You must've kidnapped them!'

  'Not me personally,’ disclaimed the Berranian.

  'That seems to be your favourite answer,’ she retorted. ‘You were aware of such kidnappings though?'

  'Kidnap is such an ugly word.'

  'Alien abduction is even uglier,’ intoned Alphie.

  'These abductees,’ ruminated the hermit. ‘What became of them once you had finished studying them?'

  Gideon began coughing violently again.

  Bronte was heartless. ‘That's right, avoid the issue,’ she charged.

  'Show some compassion,’ Orridus scolded the cow.

  She lapsed into a morose silence, waiting for the hacking alien to be able to speak again.