[Sarah Jane Adventures 04] - Warriors of Kudlak

  For Brian and Lindsey.

  And, of course, Lily the confused rabbit.

  BBC CHILDREN’S BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Australia) Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,Victoria, 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa

  Published by BBC Children’s Books, 2007

  Text and design © Children’s Character Books, 2007

  10 987654321

  Sarah Jane Adventures © BBC 2007

  BBC logo ™ & BBC 1996. Licensed by BBC Worldwide Limited All rights reserved.

  Warriors of

  Kudlak

  Written by Gary Russell

  Based, on the script by Phil Gladwin

  ‘I saw amazing things, out there

  in space. But there’s strangeness

  to be found wherever you turn.

  Life on Earth can be an

  adventure, too.

  You just have to know

  where to look.’

  SARAH JANE SMITH

  Table of Contents

  Face

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  Game on

  Mark Grantham was standing in the street outside Combat 3000, chewing his favourite gum, a happy man. Well, relatively, as he knew things were soon going to get much better.

  The Combat 3000 in Ealing, and the other branches he’d opened around the country, owed a lot to his investor, Mr Kudlak.

  But he didn’t give Kudlak all the credit — Combat 3000 was his idea, his baby, his design. Kudlak had just come up with the extra ingredient that brought more punters in.

  A boy walked past him and knocked into his elbow.

  For a moment, Mark Grantham’s first thought was to complain, but then he looked at the lad.

  He was sour-faced, about fourteen or fifteen, his world blocked by the MP3 player blasting music into his ears. He glanced up at Mark, and actually muttered an apology.

  See — Ealing, better class of kid.

  ‘Where’re you off to in such a hurry?’ Mark asked, spitting his gum on to the pavement — well, some street cleaner could clear it up later. It’s what they’re paid for.

  The lad seemed surprise that a total stranger was talking to him, but having got his attention, Mark pressed on, pulling a leaflet out of his back pocket.

  A small glossy flyer for Combat 3000. ‘Fancy testing yourself?’

  The lad pulled the headphones from his ears. ‘What?’

  ‘Virtual reality war gaming, mate,’ said Mark. ‘The more kills you score, the better your chances of getting to the next level. And that’s when the fun really starts.’

  The lad shrugged and started to move away. ‘Boy like you,’ Mark tried once more. ‘Boy like you should love it. Lots of running about, lots of exercise. Impresses the girls, you know.’

  That last one was a bit desperate. Mark had no proof it did impress the girls, but he remembered when he was fifteen and the phrase ‘impresses the girls’ was an automatic invitation to show how masculine he could be.

  And it seemed to work on this lad. Mark could tell. The lad looked at the Combat 3000 flyer, then the poster on the wall behind him. ‘How much?’

  ‘What’s a few quid between mates?’ asked Mark.

  The lad shrugged. ‘I’m not your mate.’

  Mark shrugged. ‘Five-fifty for twenty minutes of full-on shoot ’em up action,’ he said.

  The lad looked at his watch. ‘Gotta be at Haven Green in a couple of hours..

  Mark cut across him quickly, having got him to take the bait, he needed to reel him in. ‘Be out of here in twenty minutes if you lose, forty-five if you get to Level Two. After that, well, the sky’s the limit!’

  He laughed at the irony of that, knowing the lad wouldn’t get it. Yet.

  And the lad shoved his MP3 player into his pocket and pulled out a wallet.

  ‘Follow me,’ Mark said and pushed open the door to Combat 3000. He shoved his hand into his pocket, pulling out some chewing gum, and offered the lad a piece, but he refused. ‘Keeps the breath fresh,’ Mark muttered. ‘Nothing worse than bad breath, mate. Take it from someone who knows.’

  He led the way inside the building and smiled at his latest customer.

  ‘Welcome to the unique combat experience that is Combat 3000. Blam those drones,’ said Pam the cashier, in a voice so devoid of enthusiasm and sincerity, Mark actually winced.

  ‘Check him in, Pam please,’ Mark said as the lad passed over a tenner and Pam slowly counted out his change. ‘I have a good feeling that this lad’s gonna get to Level Two, no problems.’ Mark then looked straight into a security camera mounted just above the entrance to the changing rooms. ‘It’s in the eyes. He was born to fight.’

  And Mark headed towards his office, a good feeling in his chest. Mr Kudlak was going to be pleased with this one.

  An hour, and one game, later, Mark Grantham sat on the only chair in his office — a large room with a desk and six television screens and a row of buttons and switches snaking out of them.

  He was staring at the screens, showing five boys and a girl (at least he thought it was a girl, not always easy to tell when they had their sensor vests on) running around the concrete areas of Combat 3000, the advanced level, hiding behind walls, upturned plastic crates and a few large drums with glowing red lights in them.

  There were a couple of stairwells and doorways to hide in and shoot people from.

  One of the boys was lying flat on a staircase, aiming carefully and picking off his opponents one by one, his thin red laser beams zapping out and hitting the others in the chest, counting down their lives from 100 to zero.

  Then the boy was frowning, and Mark grinned. Too cocky, mate, he thought. The boy’s gun wasn’t firing any more.

  ‘Get shot yourself, soldier,’ he muttered aloud to no one at all, ‘and your guns quits working.’

  Sure enough, down the stairs stepped another lad, older by the look of it, who had waited until this one boy had picked off the others, then shot him and quickly shot the others before their guns came back on.

  The older lad scampered down the steps, around a wall and towards the LEVEL ONE EXIT sign. He was a good shooter, with a tactical mind.

  Mark liked that. Number seven according to his sensor vest.

  Mark punched up a screen that showed he players’ hi-scores, Number seven was called LANCE METCALF apparently.

  Lance was now in the waiting area, a green light rotating around, flaring across the concrete walls, announcing him as the winner.

  And on one of his screens, Mark saw his face. It was the lad from outside.

  ‘Don’t think you’re gonna be making your appointment in Haven Green, soldier,’ he murmured.

  Reaching out, he pressed a switch on the control bank in front of the screen and watched Lance’s face break into a smile as the huge double doors to the right of the Game Zone slid open. Mark pre
ssed another switch and a red sign above the door announced ENTRY TO LEVEL TWO.

  Mark began chewing another of piece of gum as Lance wandered through.

  ‘Here you go, General,’ he said quietly, even though no one else was present. ‘Another unwilling victim to the cause,’ and Mark tapped a large red button in the centre of the controls.

  He never took his eyes off the screen — well, this was his favourite bit — but he did notice the sudden clap of thunder followed by the immediate pelting rain tip-tapping on Combat 3000s tin roof.

  And he laughed.

  In another part of Combat 3000 was a smaller room, dark and cold and very slightly damp. Not because it leaked with the sudden rain outside, but just because its occupant seemed to make everything around him feel damp, and slightly mouldy.

  General Uvlavad Kudlak was staring at an identical set of television screens, but with one more, perched above them. Bigger, flatter than the others, with strange writing running along the bottom, like the news tickers that trail across the bottom of News 24.

  He looked up at a face on the flatscreen, which was frozen, caught in the moment almost, but mainly because the digital signal wasn’t quite strong enough to get through the thick concrete walls.

  ‘Mistress,’ the occupant of the room hissed, his voice low and guttural, like water draining out through a blocked sink plughole. ‘Mistress, I bring you another.’

  And Kudlak stared at Lance Metcalf on the screen, who stood in the Waiting Zone, ready to be taken to the second level of Combat 3000.

  ‘More, General Kudlak,’ the Mistress replied, her voice as sibilant and piercing as his was low and grating. ‘I need more. So many children.’

  ‘It shall be done, Mistress,’ said Kudlak and he wrenched down a lever on the far left of his controls.

  Another crash of thunder from outside, and Kudlak smiled and stared at the monitor screen that showed the Waiting Zone for Level Two.

  But Lance Metcalf was gone, just a wisp of smoke left where he had stood seconds before.

  ‘It is done.’

  And General Kudlak breathed a sigh of relief.

  Chapter Two

  Missing

  It was the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old boy, no doubt about that, thought Maria Jackson. Posters advertising computer games, gory movies and a couple of pop singers who were clearly relying on their looks rather than vocal talents to sell their downloads.

  Boys — one day she might understand what made them tick.

  The room was a bit of a mess, although some effort had been made (by his mum no doubt) to tidy up the clothes.

  ‘I just left it as it was,’ Lance’s mum had said earlier when Maria and Sarah Jane Smith had first turned up.

  ‘Very sensible,’ Sarah Jane said quietly, and Mrs Metcalf had smiled for the first time that morning.

  Sarah Jane was good like that — she could make anyone relax, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

  Actually, that wasn’t entirely true: Marias mum seemed to go mental when Sarah Jane was around — not in an unpleasant way, she just couldn’t seem to cope with her.

  Maria’s dad said her mum was just a bit jealous.

  Oh well.

  Mrs Metcalf appreciated Sarah Jane and right now, that seemed important.

  Sarah Jane had called Maria earlier that morning.

  ‘Have you got a friend at Park Vale called Lance Metcalf?’

  ‘Oh yeah, year above us. Oh, and he’s not a friend. He’s an idiot.’

  ‘Well, most fifteen-year-old boys are I seem to recall,’ Sarah Jane had said. ‘You know anything about his disappearing?’

  Maria had said she didn’t, other than the fact that one of his mates, Brandon Butler had reckoned he’d done a runner after what happened to his dad.

  Sarah Jane had explained she was interviewing Lance’s mum, who’d posted on a couple of message boards that her son had vanished.

  Maria had briefly wondered about the types of message boards someone like Lance would frequent and why exactly Sarah Jane was also accessing them. Perhaps it was Luke. Or Mr Smith, Sarah Jane’s talking computer.

  ‘So, I wondered if you would come along — I can pretend you’re a junior reporter, doing a placement for your exams. I mean, I can do the whole “journalist interviewing worried mum” bit for the paper, but you might spot something in his room that could help.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Maria had laughed. Cos I know fifteen-year-old boys so well —’

  But Sarah Jane had cut her off mid-sentence. ‘Hey, Maria, this is serious. Mrs Metcalf is really worried and kids going missing is something that every parent fears. What if it was Luke?’

  Luke was Sarah’s… well, adopted son. Although he was human, he’d been grown by a race of aliens called the Bane. That was how Maria had met Sarah Jane, they’d both got caught up trying to solve the mystery behind the Bubble Shock drink, and had found Luke in their factory. He had been born a few minutes earlier but as a fourteen-year- old boy, who knew an encyclopedia’s worth of information.

  So there they were — Sarah Jane (a bit older than Marias mum) and then her and Luke at school together. Luke could be dead embarrassing when he tried to cover up his intelligence but then asked stupid questions about day-to-day life. And he could be so literal and —

  ‘Earth to Maria Jackson?’ Sarah Jane had said down the phone.

  ‘Sorry, drifted off a bit,’ Maria said. ‘And yeah, course I’ll come with you. Do you think he’s been abducted by aliens?’

  ‘Doubt it,’ Sarah Jane said.

  And so they found themselves in Lance Metcalf’s bedroom, with Mrs Metcalf explaining what had happened last Saturday.

  ‘I keep thinking my head’s going to break,’ she said. ‘That’s what it’s felt like — for a whole week now. I’m on edge every minute, thinking I’ll see him coming up the front path. Or the police will knock and… and tell me…’ Mrs Metcalf glanced at a framed photo on Lance’s bedside table. Maria had spotted it earlier — it seemed out of place. Not many fifteen-year-old boys she knew would keep family photos amongst all this stuff.

  And then Maria remembered something else she’d heard at school — it was all very hush-hush but she’d overheard a couple of the girls in Lance’s year talking about it in the toilet after school. His father was dead — he’d been a soldier, stationed in another country and killed when his truck hit a landmine or something.

  And Maria went cold — of course, Lance’s dad. Poor guy. Maria had found it hard enough when her parents split up, but to lose one of them like that, Maria couldn’t begin to imagine how she’d cope.

  ‘Children do turn up safe and sound,’ Sarah Jane was saying. ‘There’s still every chance. And someone may have seen something important, you know, without knowing it. Maria’s going to talk to the kids on Monday. And when the story’s printed, someone may come forward.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Mrs Metcalf said, still staring at her late husband’s photo. ‘I can’t lose Lance too —’ Sarah Jane quickly cut across this, not wanting to let Mrs Metcalf get even more down. ‘Has anything like this ever happened before? I mean, has Lance ever run away after an argument or something?’

  Mrs Metcalf passed the photo to Sarah Jane. ‘We don’t argue. Me and Lance, we’re all each other’s got now. We know life’s too short for arguments.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Sarah said gently. ‘I do understand. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Could you tell us what happened on Saturday?’ Maria asked.

  Mrs Metcalf swallowed hard — she’d probably been through this with the police a few times — and took a deep breath. ‘Nothing. Nothing happened. He just went out and never came back. He was off to meet up with Brandon, down the arcade. They live for their video games, those two.’

  ‘Quite an impressive collection,’ Sarah Jane said, quietly, looking at the shelves dotted around the room.

  ‘Plays them all the time,’ Mrs Metcalf agreed. ‘Here or at the arcade with Brandon.’ S
he sighed. ‘Only Brandon never saw him on Saturday — he never showed up. Just vanished into thin air.’ Mrs Metcalf suddenly reached out and grabbed Sarah’s hand. ‘Help me get my boy back, Miss Smith. Please?’

  Chapter Three

  Soldier boy

  A couple of hours later and Maria was wandering through the streets with Luke, while Sarah Jane headed home to write her story up for the local paper.

  Luke had been at the railway station for a school project. ‘Time and motion studies he’d started to say, but Maria desperately wanted a day off schoolwork, so she’d pointed out that maybe he was happy to spend his Saturday exercising his brain, but she wanted to head up to one of the car boot sales up by Hangar Lane — retail therapy.

  ‘I invented a joke,’ Luke said to break a brief silence. Most silences with Luke were brief — he was adorable in a puppyish kind of way, but hadn’t quite realised that it wasn’t necessary to fill every lull in conversation with more talk.

  And jokes. Oh, please, no.

  He was staring at Maria with his big brown eyes which she couldn’t help but warm to.

  ‘Go on then,’ she heard herself saying, her brain thinking: Maria! What are you doing? Don’t start him off!

  Too late.

  ‘At breakfast time, I am so hungry I could murder a bowl of cornflakes. Does that make me a cereal killer?’ He grinned and held his arms out, as if anticipating applause.

  Maria just linked her arm around his and carried on walking, almost dragging him.

  ‘You’re not laughing?’ he said.

  ‘You noticed,’ Maria smiled at him. ‘That’s ‘cos it wasn’t funny.’

  Luke frowned and stopped walking just as they reached the start of a row of shops. Maria sighed.

  ‘But I’ve been studying jokes,’ he said. ‘Their structure and history, and that’s what you do. You swap words around. So that was a joke.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll get you on the telly,’ Maria nodded, ‘but yeah, I guess it was.’

  ‘So what makes a joke funny? I’ve read that timing is important. How, exactly?’