Terror Firma. Matthew Thomas

head, saying: ‘How’s this for a turnaround, you sneaky grey bastard? One of us abducting one of you for a change?’

      Then he hastily stuffed the creature under a nearby thorn-bush and turned his attention to his own survival. Now came the tricky part. In practice he’d got it down to thirty seconds flat, but whether it was the excitement of doing it for real, or the thought of his former colleagues bearing down on him like a pack of hounds, he now managed it in half that time.

      Soon the desert’s diverse fauna had a new addition: a six-foot silver caterpillar wriggling its way under a convenient tangle of tumbleweed. Until the first wave had passed him by all he could do was wait, lying perfectly still, his ears straining to count the number of rotor blades they’d sent to find him.

      Twenty minutes later, aboard the unmarked Black-Ops helicopter gunship that hovered overhead like some diabolical nocturnal insect, Freemantle’s superior was in a state one step beyond apoplexy and immediately adjacent to an embolism. After failing to find so much as a hot-dog over the sort of distance even the fastest man could cover on foot, he had proceeded to administer to Captain Freemantle the sort of ear-bashing normally reserved for British heavyweight boxers.

      As he listened, crippled by embarrassment and shame, Freemantle silently made himself a solemn oath. It was the sort of oath best made in deserted crypts at midnight, with candles made from boiled-down choir-boys and pentagrams of virgins’ blood daubed on the floor in case of misfire. He knew exactly who had got him into this career-threatening mess, he knew just how the renegade’s burnt-out fried egg of a brain worked, and as far as he was concerned this knowledge gave him a crucial edge. As the Colonel ranted on, Freemantle began to marinade in the vitriol of his planned revenge.

      ‘You’re gonna have to answer to some very influential people over this, Freemantle, do you hear me? Very influential. When it gets out you’ve mislaid a visitor, security agencies you ain’t even heard of are gonna be queuing up to mince your manhood! Freemantle, you there? … Freemaaaaantle!’

      But the Captain had already embarked on a personal blitzkrieg all his own. Brandishing his combat knife, he went charging off into the gloom shrieking like a banshee with toothache.

      A hundred metres to his rear, weighed down by a cargo never meant to walk this Earth, and discarding tinfoil like a born-again Christmas turkey, Frank was too busy running for his life in the opposite direction to care.

       3. Invasion

       Present day, somewhere far above North America

      The vast alien mother ship slid silently through the interstellar void. Round about it the de rigueur invincible space armada jostled for position as it plunged towards the small defenceless disc of Earth.

      Or perhaps not. From behind an insignificant, and conveniently placed, asteroid a handful of single-seat fighters swooped to the rescue. Crewed by pilots representing the full ethnic and sexual diversity of their home planet, this brave band of warriors charged to almost certain death. Sportingly, the aliens held back the myriad of wonder-weapons their ancient civilization was no doubt able to deploy, instead launching swarms of their own tiny fighters. These craft, bearing an uncanny resemblance to various Earth insects, were piloted by the most clumsy and ham-tentacled of their species. Those that made it out of the vast hangar doors without crashing engaged the Earthlings in a swarming battle of instant death. Even so, due to the sheer numbers of alien craft, the humans faced an uphill struggle. Today was no day to be without their hotshot ace pilot.

      Aboard the alien Emperor’s personal star-barge Captain Troy Meteor, Hero of the Earth Defence Force and Olympic Low-G Fencing Champion, stood tied to an over-endowed and scantily clad cheerleader. It had been a tough break getting captured the way he had. Odds of 9000–1 were not usually a problem, but then Troy knew all about tough breaks, just like he knew all about ‘War is hell’, Officer’s Club banter and YMCA gymnasium showers.

      The alien commander squatted in a vat of bubbling indigo goo atop an unholy dais. ‘So you see, our plans are quite simple,’ it croaked like a multi-hued perversion of a tobacco company’s research-lab beagle. ‘Even though our two races developed light-years apart, changes in the radiation signature of our sun mean we can obtain sustenance from one source and one source only.’

      ‘But why are you telling me all this?’ muttered Meteor darkly, trying hard to make it look like he was attempting to free his hands, but all the while touching-up the cheerleader’s bottom. ‘If I escape I’ll know every detail of your conniving scheme.’

      Bringing forth his ceremonial gorging straw the Emperor cackled. ‘It matters not, my simian-based friend, for very soon, via your nasal cavity, I shall have sucked out what passes for your brain!’

      Half way down aisle C, Dave yanked the lightweight plastic headphones from his aching ears and shook his head in stupefied disbelief. How was his fledgling science ever to be taken seriously when they continued to churn out this Troy Meteor shit? It was enough to make him weep. Beckoning a glassy-eyed stewardess, Dave ordered himself a stiff drink and made yet another effort to read the in-flight magazine.

      But it was no use. The text that made up the thirty pages of glossy advertising copy was completely unreadable for anyone with a mental age higher than their shoe size. The words seemed to slip under Dave’s conscious brain only to be sucked into the subconscious box marked forget forever. With a weary sigh, he settled back in his economy seat and did what he always did at times like this. He thought of Kate.

      He had asked her to come with him, but he had done it with that same air of hopeless, optimistic resignation that he asked her to do anything – go to a movie, share a curry, or on those rare occasions when copious amounts of lager got the better of his natural timidity, let him get inside her knickers. The answer to the last of these, as always, was no. A movie and curry were OK, but hot gusset action wasn’t the sort of thing best friends did.

      ‘But what if I meet a stunning Californian babe and we fall madly in love – what will you do then?’ he’d asked her.

      ‘Then I’ll look forward to the wedding and pray you name your first trans-Atlantic toddler after me. But if that’s the biggest risk I’m running letting you go on your own, fine. It’s not even a proper holiday. If you expect a girl to put up with two weeks of emotional blackmail, the least you can do is throw in a beach and a gallon of pina colada.’ Then she’d paused, looked at him searchingly, sadly maybe, and said: ‘Does everything you ever do have to be tied in with that ridiculous magazine?’

      He’d been hurt, as he always was. The ‘ridiculous magazine’, as Kate insisted on calling it, was Dave’s pride and joy: none other than the internationally renowned ScUFODIN Monthly – the official journal of the Scientific UFO Discovery and Information Network. And the international renown bit was no idle boast, either; only last month Dave had received an enthusiastic letter from Belgium.

      Kate steadfastly refused to acknowledge the journalistic worth of the magazine Dave edited. ‘It’s written by cranks, for cranks,’ she said.

      ‘And where does that leave me?’

      ‘Lovable but misguided? Your letters page reads like the visitors’ book of a care-in-the-community drop-in centre.’

      It was hard to disagree with this particular point in her otherwise unfounded argument. All of his formal education had trained him for a career in science, viewing the world as a rational and logical place. Inevitably enough he often found himself at odds with the New Age and conspiracy theory wings of the movement. He did his best to keep things on an even keel, but it was an uphill battle – like trying to catch a monsoon in a thimble. As an editor who largely relied on the contributions of his readers Dave was at the mercy of the zealots. By the time he’d cut out pieces on ‘Holes at the Poles’, Flat Earth Society propaganda and ‘I’ve had sex with an alien who looked like Helena Bonham-Carter’ abduction stories from the live-at-home-with-my-mum boys, his heavyweight magazine