Free Alien Disaster by Rob May

this sometimes—on his home planet. He assured me that he’d be back, and that he’d even keep in touch if he could. He left me money to continue our work; we still needed to test everything thoroughly in secret before revealing it to the world.
    ‘And then he left. I didn’t see him blast off in his spaceship. Two days after you were born he just disappeared out of my life, and that was that. I haven’t seen him now for almost fourteen years.
    ‘The money that he left was quite a substantial amount. Enough to expand the lab at the hospital. Enough to hire my own team. Amrit Kang wanted to be a part of it, but he was perhaps a bit too eager and I worried that he knew too much, so I did what Talem had done before: picking promising students from those who were on placements at the hospital.
    ‘Without Talem around, the development slowed, but we made progress. Keeping the project a secret was hard, but no one could ever know that this technology was of alien origin. The only person on the team who had complete knowledge of every aspect of the project was myself. And so to make it that much harder for anyone who might be interested, we split the research between three labs: London, this one, and another in … well, let’s just say, Brandon, that it’s about two hundred kilometres east of your favourite place.
    ‘The hardware, software and control mechanism are worked on separately at the three labs. I am the only person who knows about the existence of all three. Not even Talem knows about the third lab, and that one I built specially for him for when he returns. His area of expertise was the control and deployment of the nanotechnology. No matter how advanced the medical and technical sides of the project became in all those years, Talem had made me promise never to reveal the technology to the world before he had a chance to return and prove that he could control it fully.
    ‘He feared that, ironically, people would be prepared to kill for this life-saving technology if they ever knew where to find it … and not just people from our own planet either.
    ‘And just yesterday he finally got back in touch to say that he was on his way back to Earth to complete the project. But he warned me that he wouldn’t be alone. I just hope he gets here before—’
    Sarah’s phone beeped. She picked it up and pressed a button.
    ‘You found it.’
    A pause.
    ‘Good grief! Brandon, get out of there! The place won’t withstand more than two direct strikes.’
    Sarah stood up and quickly closed the lid down on her laptop and shut the case. She made to leave the room, phone in one hand, laptop case in the other. The recording software was still running as she moved away from the camera.
    ‘Go, Brandon,’ she pleaded into her phone, ‘but don’t go home. Bring the cylinder to—’
     
    The video was now a black screen.
    She was dead then. Brandon had feared as much.
    With a heavy heart he transferred the ebook and all its hidden extras to the memory card that he still had from his mother’s safe. He took the laptop out of the case and removed its hard drive. The case, which was obviously bomb-proof, was too useful to leave behind, so he put the cylinder, his phone, the memory card and the hard drive all in the case. Then he shut the lid.
    He had second thoughts, and removed the memory card and hid it in his sock.
    Kat came out of the kitchen and presented Brandon with a plate of fish: two not quite completely defrosted battered-cod fillets, one smothered in Heinz tomato ketchup, the other with Helman’s mayonnaise. ‘Enjoy!’ she insisted.
    ‘Thanks, Kat.’ Brandon said, tucking in.
    Kat took a seat opposite him and attempted to bite into a messy triple beef burger that was almost as big as her head. ‘So?’ she asked. ‘What did you find out?’
    ‘I know what the cylinder thing is. It’s not a weapon, or a bomb, or an ancient relic or anything we ever guessed that it might be. It is alien though. It’s a