'Go...’ he sighed.

  'Vade Gideon,’ Vai farewelled in their native tongue of Nat-El. Her globe became whole, much to the consternation of its furred occupants, before humming back into life and rapidly ascending out of the poplar grove.

  Gideon the Saviour never saw his ship lift briskly away into the leaden sky on its final mission. Death had finally claimed the last living Berranian and brought his race to the end of the road to extinction.

  * * * *

  Rexus stumbled forwards.

  He shook his head, ridding himself of a peculiar ringing in his ears. Something was wrong. He felt as if he had just stepped out of a sticky mud-hole and was both slow of mind and body. Then it dawned on him. The Thunderfoot was gone. So was that queer flying egg Festur had first informed him of. Had the cow won? The tyrant-king blinked. That was not all. Gideon had apparently lost his head and was dead because of it. What else had he missed?

  Turning to bark at Luthos, the mystified regent found empty space instead. Confusion blew up into outright panic. Where was his prized Chosen claimant? Movement caught his eye and Rexus peered down as an innocuous slip of a reptile slithered between his legs. The lethargic predator stumbled around and bent over, peering at the oddball lizard lacking any legs whatsoever. Judging by the scales, it indeed seemed kindred. He sniffed deeply and was rewarded by that familiarly musty reptilian scent. The snake reared up into an S-pose, annoyed by the Killjaw's interest. She flicked her forked tongue rapidly in and out, tasting the air. Rexus stooped lower, drawn by the serpent's strangeness.

  'Why haven't I seen the likes of you before?’ he growled wonderingly.

  The snake began to sway hypnotically and the captivated monarch searched those cold, slitted eyeballs for enlightenment. A spark of recognition ignited the puzzled Killjaw's questing brain and he uttered a hoarse snarl of incredulity.

  'Luthos, is that you?'

  The strike was blindingly fast. The snake darted forward with the speed and accuracy of a homing missile to sink her fangs into Rexus's muzzle hovering scant inches away. Taken completely by surprise, the shocked tyrant-king failed to back away fast enough, allowing the serpent to follow up the initial bite with two more hits.

  'I've been bit!’ Rexus howled, reacting more from indignation than pain.

  He brought a foot down to squash the offender and roared louder, this time proclaiming his hurt. Having foolishly slammed his gouty foot onto the hard ground, his bad leg gave way under his weight and the king of the Killjaws toppled sideways, landing belly-first on the forest floor. He lay there stunned for a moment, idly watching the undulating snake slither her way through the carpet of unsettled leaves to disappear into the underbrush.

  'I'll have you!’ Rexus vowed insanely, promptly forgetting about Gideon, the Chosen One and the asteroid streaking earthwards. He made to rise and collapsed, feeling oddly light-headed. Gazing cross-eyed down the length of his pained muzzle, he noticed swelling around the half dozen puncture marks made by his tiny aggressor's fine fangs. ‘Only scratches,’ he mumbled defiantly and again tried to raise himself, only to flop back down.

  Little did Rexus know that the serpent's deadly bite was venomous; even now the injected nerve poison was racing through his bloodstream, spreading its fatal potency. In fourteen hours or less, after being subjected to headaches, vomiting, double vision, progressive muscle weakness and finally paralysis, he was going to die from respiratory failure. With no antivenom serum even thought of, let alone synthesised, the gruesome death of the Killjaw king was a foregone conclusion, irrespective that the end of the world was nigh.

  Rexus gave a disheartened snort and closed his eyes, feeling nauseous.

  'I say, is anyone out there?'

  Opening his peepers, the sickly tyrant-king was greeted by the blurred spectacle of a gangly waterbird staggering his way. ‘What in Hunting Forest are you?’ he spat.

  The unsteady Honker stopped a prudent distance from the prone Killjaw. ‘Fitzfeather's the name, flying's my game.’ The haughty avian, looking the worse for wear, sighed dejectedly. ‘Past tense I'm afraid now, old boy. I rather buggered my wing after collecting that tree. I fear I am permanently grounded.'

  Rexus focused his bleary sight to take in Fitzy's broken right wing hanging limply at his side. He could not even muster an insensitive laugh at the waterfowl's plight. All he managed was a measly growl. ‘Doesn't matter, birdie. You'll be dead in next to no time, like your pals.'

  Fitzfeather glanced at the surrounding corpses. The body count stood at one example each of Clubtail, Shieldhorn, Thunderfoot and Berranian. ‘Have they all left the land of the living?’ he softly honked.

  'Of course not, you silly goose. They're napping.'

  'No need to be rude, old thing.’ Fizty moseyed on over to the mangled body of his Shortfrill friend. ‘Such a grisly demise for you, old chap ... one hardly befitting an officer of your calibre, eh what?’ He looked back over at Gideon's lifeless form. ‘Shame. He and I could have swapped ripping aviation yarns.'

  The saddened Honker returned to the company of Rexus and, unafraid, plonked himself on the ground alongside the monster carnosaur.

  'Don't get too comfy,’ warned Rexus. ‘I have the nasty habit of biting in my sleep.'

  Fitzy chortled. ‘You don't look as if you could bite your way out of a magnolia bush,’ he panned. ‘Aren't you that Killjaw kingy I was doing my aerial survey on?'

  Rexus stiffened. He may have lost his sense of humour and the race to establish his favoured of the Chosen and his life, but he certainly had not mislaid his pride. ‘I am lord of this forest.'

  'Exactly what is your pedigree?’ the Honker asked out of interest.

  'Longer than your tail feathers,’ the peeved tyrant-king snapped.

  'Let's not beat around the nest, Rexus. The both of us know you are a black-hearted rotter responsible for the carnage hereabouts, and that we will shortly be bombed out of existence by an incoming shell bloody well bigger than Redmount. You are plainly feeling poorly and my flying days are positively over. We have only the other for companionship. Therefore, we simply must make the most of a bad situation.'

  'My, aren't we just the chatterbox. You planning to talk me to death?'

  'Mmm, quite the comedian, old boy. Your suggestion does have some merit, however. Conversing will help pass the time during this frightful business. Have you a particular subject in mind.'

  'Yeah. Letting me die in peace.'

  'Haw, haw. But seriously, do you have any particular requests?'

  Rexus glowered at the gibbering bird and to his horror saw two of Fitzfeather, their bills poised to launch into mindless small talk. ‘How about shutting up,’ he pleaded.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  'I hate water.'

  Vai had deposited her furry passengers on a pebbly beach on the western continental seaboard eleven hundred miles north of Mother Forest and Alphie was sizing up the stormy ocean. Breakers rolled onto the rugged coastline in a flurry of noisy spray, while beyond the crashing combers the grey-green sea was whipped into a frenzy of whitecaps by a mounting gale. Screaming saw-toothed gulls wheeled overhead, heading inland away from the roiling sea. They sensed disaster looming.

  'I'm frightened.'

  The Treefur glanced at the trembling changeling at his side, her body shaking from more than the chill, blustery sea wind.

  'Don't be scared. I'll protect you,’ pledged Alphie, hoping he sounded braver than he felt. The expanse of heaving saltwater seemed limitless, dwarfing even Crescent Lake back home, filling the marsupial with dread.

  A background hum made him turn around to see the separated starsphere halves joining up to become whole again a foot above the wave-smoothed oval stones littering the beach as Vai made ready to depart.

  'Er, thanks for the ride, round-body,’ he awkwardly said, transfixed by his reflection in the globe's mirrored hull. ‘It was ... interesting.’ Alphie was being polite. The supersonic flight from the Midwest had scared him witless.

  'You're welcome.’ Vai's metallic voice had a drained edge to it. ‘The two of you do make a cute couple. I hope she's worth all the trouble.’ The cybernate had scanned her passengers along the way and deduced from the changeling's unique genes her origins and purpose. Gideon had completed his holy mission.

  'Me too,’ agreed the Treefur. ‘A lot of good animals died getting her here.'

  'Make sure she survives, dearie.'

  'Count on it.'

  The spherical starship rose sedately from the stony beach. Alphie backed into the shivering changeling, their fur rising from the discharge of static energy put out by the alien craft's active magnetic field. ‘Where are you going?’ he chittered to the departing computer.

  'Obeying orders,’ she replied. ‘Assuming I've power left for my final jaunt.'

  The ball of silver laboured into the windy skies over the choppy sea. When the unsteady spaceship reached an altitude of 500 feet or so, and was perhaps 1,000 yards offshore, Vai executed the self-destruct command issued by her late commander. The fated starsphere disintegrated in a fireball with a sharp bang, the reflective shards falling like chaff from an expanding cloud of whitish smoke into the swell below.

  Alphie gaped, horrified by the grisly sight of the exploding globe. He could not have possibly known how Gideon, with his dying breath, had merely tied up loose ends.

  The auto-destruct mechanism had been an added on fail-safe device installed in all Berranian space vessels as a direct result of their warring with the Tsor. Conceived to prevent human technologies falling into saurian hands, it was in fact nothing but a lethally bigger version of the detonator housed in his defunct Energy Dome. It had now served to eliminate any mechanical evidence of the exobiologist's visitation. The fragments of twisted alien metal would sink to the ocean floor and be buried under progressive layers of silt, hiding any trace of the future humans’ extraterrestrial ancestry and leaving their evolution uncorrupted—assuming Gideon's fossilised bones were not one day unearthed by palaeontological rockhounds.

  'I think it's time we got off this beach,’ the stunned Treefur announced to his unnamed companion, motivated by the fiery demise of Vai and the emergence from the thundering waves of a flock of flightless seabirds.

  Standing three feet high, the black-backed swimmers with their stark white undersides were a blend of penguin and loon. They were waddling their way up out of the surf toward the furry landlubbers, flapping their vestigial wings vigorously and squawking loudly from pointy beaks filled with serrated teeth. Though dedicated fish-eaters, Alphie did not want to take the chance that the web-footed intruders would not try to supplement their seafood diet with a couple of mammalian snacks.

  'We'll head inland,’ he informed the changeling, nosing her in the direction of the evergreen forest hedging the rocky seashore, ‘and make for that hilly bluff sticking up over there.’ Alphie had the overpowering urge to seek high ground.

  They began scampering in a zigzag fashion over the loose pebbles. When they reached the tangle of washed-up driftwood defining the high tide mark and began worming their way upwards through that barrier of bleached sticks, the Treefur asked the changeling sow, ‘What do I call you?'

  She returned a blank stare to her guardian. Alphie sighed. He had been saddled with a scatterbrained bimbo. Oddly enough, he relished being her protector.

  'Can you talk? What is your race?’ he tried again.

  'I ‘m a ... Burrower, I think,’ she falteringly informed him.

  'You must have been given a name,’ he pressed.

  This time was different. His question triggered a stronger response implanted deep in her subconscious. ‘I am to be called Dawn,’ she asserted.

  The Treefur sniggered. The Originator was truly a master of the theatrical.

  Pawing their way clear of the pile of snags, they scurried through the ferns leading up to the pine woodland, Alphie confidently in the lead. He stopped periodically to test the air, his little whiskered snout working overtime as he sniffed various scents, some vaguely familiar, others completely foreign, always alert for the telltale smell of danger.

  Dawn suddenly lagged behind, whimpering. Alphie instantly doubled back. ‘What's wrong?’ he squeaked worriedly.

  'My pups are restless,’ the changeling softly explained. ‘They really want to come out into the big wide world.'

  'How near?'

  'Very soon.'

  Alphie, never a particularly religious creature, mumbled a prayer. ‘I hope He has given her mothering instincts.'

  Dawn nuzzled Alphie's furry cheek. ‘You're going to be a dad.'

  The Treefur actually blushed. He had not parented, even as a foster father, since losing his last litter and mate to a torrential downpour that had flooded out their den amongst the hollow roots of an old oak, drowning his unfortunate family.

  'Okay,’ he decided, taking charge once more. ‘I had better dig us a sett before night falls, right after we climb that hill.'

  Together, the pair of prehistoric cousinly mammals scampered into their wooded sanctuary and the promise it held for the future.

  * * * *

  The Annihilator finally arrived.

  The massive six-mile wide astral rock punched its way through the atmosphere at close to 100 feet per second, its craggy extremities glowing red hot from the friction encountered at the end of its eight-year journey. It streaked downwards like a rocky bomb to hit a shallow sea in the southern gulf of the continent Mother Forest was sited on, impacting off the coast of a peninsula destined to become part of a country titled Mexico. The asteroid vaporised on contact, detonating with the explosive force of ten million atomic bombs, blasting a 130-mile wide crater nine miles deep into the Earth's fractured crust. The struck planet shudders from the blow.

  The curtain raiser to the doomsday event was certainly a showstopper!

  A shockwave of hurricane proportions radiated outwards from the impact point, partnered by mile-high tidal waves that swamp the nearby coastline. Whole beech forests were uprooted, their boles snapping like twigs, as the mountains of seawater rushed inland at a speed in excess of 400 miles per hour, covered by the shrieking winds. The terraforming blast triggers a chain reaction of volcanic and seismic activity, rocking the planet with magnitude 12 earthquakes that persisted an hour after the initial strike. Thirty-foot ground waves rippled the land as if it were liquid.

  And still the destruction was only just beginning.

  Molten rock spewed skywards to rain down planetwide, igniting anything flammable and setting global fires that would consume a quarter of the Earth's vegetation. Trillions of tons of debris were ejected into the atmosphere from the colossal explosion, pluming into the sky and dispersing in a parabolic arc at eight miles per second. The swirling shroud of dust, gases and vapour carried aloft by the windy maelstrom encircled the entire globe, smothering the ill-fated Earth and cutting her off from the vital sun. Three months of utter darkness would prevail, broken only by corrosive drenches of acid rain formed by chemical reactions in the blanketing cloud layer.

  Truly nightmarish, but the worst was yet to come.

  Seventy per cent of planetary life was going to be extinguished. On land, nothing upward in size over fifty-five pounds stood even the remotest chance of surviving. Billions of plants and animals will perish: incinerated, bashed, drowned, choked, and starved. Food chains, both terrestrial and marine would break down to completely fail in the dreadful grip of the global winter, further contributing to the horrendous death toll. On top of all that, the biosphere would overheat from a worldwide greenhouse effect in the aftermath of the concussion, the globally soaring temperatures completing the devastation.

  That is the grim news.

  On the plus side, Planet Earth did eventually bounce back, after millions of years of recuperation, to once again become a green and fertile place, though glaringly devoid of the ruling reptiles collectively known as the dinosaurs. Already on the brink of disappearing due to changing sea levels and microclimates that were forcing a decline in species numbers, these magnificent creatures were pushed over the precipice by the colliding asteroid. Very few organisms in fact endured the holocaust unscathed, the only pure reptilian forms being turtles, crocodiles and snakes. Pint-sized and hardy scavengers thrived in the adverse conditions, amongst their number salamanders and frogs, but including birds and, of course, the precious mammals.

  Epilogue

  Life is full of irony.

  Take Gideon for example. He got his wish—eventually. Although it took over sixty million years to achieve, the hominid ancestors of mankind did walk upright from the searing plains of East Africa to plant the flag of humanity across Planet Earth. In the space of a mere 160,000 years the globe was peopled from Eurasia to the Americas and every place in between.

  But that's another tale.

  What I am talking about is the Berranian race. Make no mistake, they were fully human and did evolve anew from the ancestral stock modern man also sprang from. What I find ironic is that the new and improved version died out in the course of natural selection.

  Forty thousand and more years ago a race of stocky humans toughed it out in the glacial conditions prevalent at that time in Ice Age Europe. Their Latin name is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis: we know them better as the Neanderthals. These were extraordinarily similar to the extraterrestrials from Berran, right down to their distinctive splay noses and brooding brow ridges. Anthropologists at first regarded these ‘cave people’ as the forerunner of Homo sapiens sapiens—that's you and me. Nowadays, the Neanderthals are considered brothers and sisters to us. They made use of fire and tools, lived socially in tight knit family groups that cared for the old and infirm, communicated in an articulating language, and expressed spirituality through ritually burying their dead.

  Why did they become extinct, one might ask?

  Popular misconception holds that they could not compete with their racial siblings (we were titled Cro-Magnon back then) on an intellectual parity; they lacked ingenuity, were incapable of developing abstract thought into the artistic concepts that supposedly define a culture. Rubbish! Neanderthals succeeded as a species for well over 100,000 years—you don't last that long by being dumb. They were likely a practical, no-nonsense people focused on enduring the harshest livable environment imaginable. Their only apparent failing was sedentariness. Excavated Neanderthal campsites portray Stone Age technology unrefined for tens of thousands of years. Sticklers for the status quo, they appeared disinclined to tamper with tradition. Why mess with normality? Change, to them, was an unnecessary risk in the survival stakes.