A light started to flash on the panel and an alarm rang. It rang in ScreeWee, but it was still pretty urgent even in Human.

The Captain spun around. The Gunnery Officer jumped backwards, hit the ground running, and sped towards the door. He was through it in a blur.

‘He can’t go anywhere,’ said the Captain, staggering across to the controls. ‘I . . . can deal with him later . . .’

‘You’ve got some nasty scratches,’ said Kirsty. ScreeWee blood was blue. ‘I know some first aid . . .’

‘A lot, I expect,’ said Johnny.

‘But not for ScreeWee, I imagine,’ said the Captain. Her chest was heaving. One of her legs seemed to be at the wrong angle. Blue patches covered her tail.

‘You could have just shot him,’ said Kirsty. ‘It was stupid to fight like that.’

‘Honour!’ snarled the Captain. She tripped a switch with a claw and hissed some instructions in ScreeWee. ‘But he was right. Sadly, I know this now. There is no changing ScreeWee nature. Our destiny is to fight and die. I have been foolish to think otherwise.’

She blinked.

‘Take off your shirt,’ Kirsty demanded.

‘What?’ said Johnny.

‘Your shirt! Your shirt! Look at her! She’s losing blood! She needs bandaging!’

Johnny obeyed, reluctantly.

‘You’ve got a vest on underneath? Only grandads wear a vest. Yuk. Don’t you ever wash your clothes?’

He did, sometimes. And occasionally his mother had a burst of being a mother and everything in the house got washed. But usually he used the wash-basket laundry, which consisted of going through the basket until he found something that didn’t seem all that bad.

‘But she said you wouldn’t know anything about ScreeWee medicine,’ he said.

‘So what? Even if it’s blue, blood’s still blood. You should try to keep it inside.’

Kirsty helped the Captain to a chair. The alien was swaying a bit, and her scales had gone white, speckled with blue.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ said Johnny.

Kirsty glanced at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Is there anything you can do?’

She turned back to the Captain.

We’ll all die, Johnny thought. They’re all out there waiting. And here’s me at the controls of the main alien ship. We can’t turn round now. And I can’t even read what it says on the controls!

I’ve done it all wrong. It was all simple, and now it’s all complicated.

You think about doing things in dreams, but we’re always wrong about dreams. When people talk about dreams they mean daydreams. That’s where you’re Superman or whatever. That’s where you win everything. In dreams everything is weird. I’m in a dream now. Or something like a dream. And when I wake up, all the ScreeWee will be back in game space and they’ll be shot at again, just like the Space Invaders.

Hang on . . .

Hang on . . .

He stared at the meaningless controls again.

On one of them the symbols rearranged themselves to form ‘Main Engines’.