The Moon Stealers and the Quest for the Silver Bough (Book 1)

28. Running into Danger

After Coldred and Seward had left, Steven and Georgia ordered dinner from the bar in the pub and were now sitting on the bed going over what the two men from MI6 had told them. Georgia couldn’t believe that it was actually possible for humans to be a source of protein for these alien creatures to feed on. More incredible was the simple fact that an alien bacteria had developed freely on the planet into a living creature and was surviving. She thought back to what Seward had said:

'Mankind has not had a predator since the age of dinosaurs. Until now.’

'We must act quickly,’ Steven had said to the two men who didn’t seem to feel the urgency that he did. ‘People need to be warned.’

'As we already said, mass vaccination will be used to prevent infection from the bacteria. But, the unknown part is what to do once they reach the creature stage.’

‘I already have some of my team working on the creature Miss Brown brought to us,’ informed Coldred. ‘We are trying to develop some form of equipment that emits ultra violet light, as well as chemical weapons but it’s still early days.’

‘We also don’t know how the creature will change as it develops and grows. It could quickly adapt to any weapons that we might use on it, which would make them useless. At the moment we are resorting to conventional equipment such as guns and incendiary weapons. But the biggest challenge we face is that we don’t know how many creatures actually exist. At the rate of growth we saw in the laboratory there could already be hundreds if not thousands in this area alone.'

'How can we find them?', Steven had asked.

'They don’t appear to be warm-blooded animals so they won’t show up on any heat-sensitive cameras. We have to physically look for them with our eyes, but we can’t bring in the army to do it. We would have to evacuate the whole village and prevent anyone coming in or out whilst we search. Unfortunately, this would create too much publicity and media attention. Once again we need to do things discretely to prevent panic and chaos.' Seward paused, ‘your role in this has now changed. We want you and Miss Brown to start searching for the creatures. We will give you weapons and additional boxes of antibiotics.' He laid a black case onto the desk, flicked the metal clasps and showed them two hand-guns embedded within a shaped foam interior, together with several additional ammunition clips and two boxes of antibiotics.

'But, Sir, I wouldn’t know where to start looking?', protested Steven.

'The arm that was found has been identified as being from a security guard that went missing from one of the factories up river, so start there. Locate the biggest concentrations of creatures and we can send in a small team of soldiers to exterminate them.’

‘What does Sir Adam think?’, asked Steven who suddenly noticed that his superior hadn’t joined the other two men on their trip from London.

There was an uncomfortable silence in the room as the two men looked at each other.

‘Sir Adam’s body was pulled out of the Thames this morning. He drowned,’ Seward explained. ‘He was seen walking across Tower Bridge last night and an anonymous witness rang the Metropolitan Police saying they saw a man jump.’

Steven was stunned. He hadn’t thought that Sir Adam was the sort of person who would have taken his own life. Especially now that alien life had been found on the planet, something he had been searching for his whole life and was as desperate to discover real evidence as Steven was. Something didn’t seem quite right. He recalled his commanders warning about not trusting the other two men when they had walked to the secret meeting beneath MI6 and wondered if they had anything to do with his unexpected death.