Bill and Emma looked up in the sky at the fireball lancing towards the earth. Towards them.

  They were the couple managing the remote emergency airport at Forrest in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia.

  They maintained the airstrip and the cottages that were available for those that found themselves stranded while their airplanes were waiting to be fixed.

  “That’s coming down only a few kilometres away!” said Bill, “Let’s take cover.”

  The Brick hit the earth with a tremendous explosion and the ground shook, followed by a dust storm washing over their house, airport and cottages. Bill finally opened the door to their cellar and stepped out, helping Emma up.

  “I reckon we’re going to have guests,” said Bill, looking at the column of smoke rising in the distance, “I’ll get in touch with the authorities.”

  “I’ll get the cottages ready,” said Emma.

  ****

  Hortense stared at Patter over the video screen.

  Patter stared back. Neither would break their stares and lose this battle of wills.

  On Patter’s desk was the report from Scree. Although not a complete disaster, the news was terrible. The MSPC had crashed on Dirt before completing the cleanup. There was a fragmentary view on the ship’s monitors which had been received by Scree before the disaster. It showed what at first seemed just another piece of Dirtling orbiting space junk. Upon closer inspection by his security team, the unknown object accelerated and landed on top of the MSPC just before communications ceased. There was no further information from Navi or the automatic security cameras placed on the MSPC by his security team.

  After the contact with what must have been a Dirtling assault craft, the MSPC appeared to continue as normal. A few days later, after the clean up was down to the lowest orbit, the ship lost all power and descended to Earth, crashing on the largest island - or was it the smallest continent?

  Hortense was not happy. His brother was missing and Patter needed to quickly send in some troops to retrieve the ship and Navi.

  Patter had argued with Trotter about sending the Hunter Safety Team as they were the closest and had plenty of experience visiting Dirt. But Trotter recommended not to get Harrick involved in this clean up work. Harrick wasn’t a secure part of Patter’s inner team.

  “What about using some Imperial Guards?” suggested Trotter, “They would get in and sort out the mess.”

  “We can’t get the Imperials involved,” said Patter quickly, “This is an NC planet. Therefore it’s impossible for the locals to do what they seem to have done. We need to clean this up before we involve the Imperials.”

  Trotter agreed, “Then you have to use Hortense.”

  Patter considered the option but was reluctant. Hortense would be a bit, how should he put this, involved and had personal issues to deal with in this matter.

  And that is why Patter was involved in a staring competition of wills with Hortense.

  In as few words as possible, Hortense had proposed going down with Hortense’s own professional cleaners.

  Patter sighed and said to Hortense while maintaining eye contact, “All right! You can go. But don’t make things worse! This is an NC planet and must match the classification when the Imperials investigate!”

  Hortense nodded and disconnected the call.

  Hortense contacted his team and arranged for an expedition to Dirt. He would complete the clean up and get his brother back. No matter what.

  ****

  Ariel was once more working on her crowd sourced sky search. She was famous in the small circle of astronomy watchers and with the people from NASA and Cartwright Space Centre people, but watching space is not a generally exciting hobby. Her computer ran some automated search routines on her assigned areas. ARSE let Ariel continue to monitor the same sections she had last time. The odds of anything else appearing in the same location twice were pretty low.

  “Dad!” she shouted from her room.

  Ariel’s younger brother, Martin rushed in and leapt on to her bed, and asked, “What did you find? Another brick?”

  John and Audrey raced in moments later as Ariel said, “Yes! I think it’s another brick and a smaller ship with it.”

  She moved over a little as she zoomed in on what she had found, “See Dad? This is in roughly the same area The Brick came last time. I prioritised my search for that area.”

  Highlighting her mouse pointer at the zoomed image, she highlighted another anomaly that looked similar to the Brick, “And there! See? Something just passed in front of it. I reckon that is some sort of support vessel.”

  “Or defence,” said John, “Well done! Do you think you’ll get naming rights this time?”

  Ariel grinned, “I think I was lucky to get away with it last time. They’ll probably go with something exciting like Brick II and Bogie 1. Hmmm.”

  Ariel sat back and pondered, “How about we go with Brick II and Humphrey?”

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Audrey asked, “Humphrey?”

  John grinned and said, “I get it. Bogie like Humphrey Bogart. Ha! Let’s see if you get away with it.”

  ****

  Johnny Cartwright and his team were together with General Gant at the Cartwright Space Centre meeting room.

  “General,” said Rudy, leading the discussion, “It looks like we have an alien replacement being sent out to finish the orbital cleaning operation. And this time it looks as if they brought protection.”

  “Another Brick?” asked the General.

  “Yes Sir,” said Rudy, “The Australian girl who spotted it called it The Brick II and Humphrey.”

  The General stared at Rudy, “Why does she get naming rights?”

  Johnny Cartwright said, “We are working closely with the Australian Space and Research Exploration people. Their crowdsourcing efforts to watch the sky have proven really effective. For no pay and many hours of mostly fruitless drudgery, many amateurs around the world are closely looking at the entire sky. Our budget doesn’t cover that and it is too tricky for computers, even AI assisted. I think the potential prize of naming rights is a fair price to pay.”

  “Humphrey?” asked the General, “For what we think might be the protection vessel?”

  The others waited and the General groaned, “Tell that Aussie girl she watches too much TV! A Bogie, indeed. At least it’s based on an American actor.”

  General Gant continued, “Back to business. When will these ships get here?”

  “General, we have four weeks,” said Rose, who monitored her tablet while they were talking. Since she had been the one to notice the change in The Brick’s course last time, Rudy had made her his assistant.

  “We have had some intense discussion here and we reckon Brick II and Humphrey will be coming straight here. They will probably finish the cleanup and retrieve the remains of The Brick,” said Johnny.

  “And probably the alien too,” said Rose.

  “Why?” asked the General.

  “Well, when hunters are left behind, those security guys beam down and retrieve the body. I think whoever sent The Brick will do the same,” Rose said.

  “Do we have contingency plans for the complete loss of all our satellites?” asked Rudy, patting the shoulder of Johnny who sighed sadly.

  The General sat upright and said, “We have been rolling out updates to our systems to bypass the satellites. Our tech guys have developed some floating buoys around our coasts to act as location beacons. The internet was designed with lots of failsafes. We think by setting up many of these beacons we can replicate most of the functionally of GPS too. But connectivity will be difficult in areas away from main centres and towers.”

  Johnny added, “Yes. We hope that CartNet will continue once the aliens have left. I’ll just send up satellites again.”

  The General stood up, “I need to make contact with the teams examining The Brick. They have four weeks to leave it ready for the owners to get their stuff back.”

  ****

  With teams from ARRG providing security, related scientists from Australia and around the world, as well as specialist construction and mechanical engineers from Perth and other mining areas, The Brick was examined and disassembled.

  Father Pacioli was present as the Australian ARRG chaplain and looked down at the alien, still in the control room of the crashed ship. The scientists had set up cooling equipment to “preserve the body” but also to keep themselves cool while they worked.

  “You know, this fellow was just defending his ship,” said Father as he helped Phil, one of the ARRG troopers, lay out the body into a more dignified pose. Navi had been thrown around during the crash. Surprisingly, The Brick had survived the impact in mostly one piece. The scientists and technical boffins believed that the vessel had some sort of force field which protected the ship, even with the engines off. They were frantically poring all over The Brick to discover its secrets.

  “Padre,” said Trooper Phil, “Should we , like, clean him up a bit? He looks a bit battered.”

  Father considered and nodded, “Yes, I think we should.”

  Phil added, “I know he’s dead and all, but he fought bravely and we - the others and I - reckon he deserves better.”

  They left and spoke with Bill, one of the managers of the nearby Forrest air strip, “Bill, do you have some cleaning gear we can use on this alien?”

  Bill was at the crash site to provide any assistance they might need. Their emergency airport was now in constant use and the trains were bringing in supplies and taking away things that had been retrieved from The Brick almost continually once the first investigators had arrived. Bill had to admit these people had most of what they needed, but he was very curious and this type of thing didn’t happen every day, especially not in Forrest.

  “Sure, Padre,” said Bill and went to the back of his utility truck. He rummaged around for a short while and brought back a variety of cleaning equipment, “There you go.”

  He looked at Father and added, “Here, let me help.”

  Father nodded with a smile and the three of them cleaned up Navi, wiping away the blood into appropriate containers for later study. Once clean, some of the scientists brought across an X Ray, CT Scanner and more. Heeding Father Pacioli’s admonition to respect the dead, they lifted Navi onto a trolley and captured all the images they could possibly need.

  “Can’t we just take him back to our labs?” asked the head scientist.

  Father Pacioli had discussed this with Major Tierney and the ARRG leaders, “No. We want this alien to stay with the ship. If past experience is any guide, the aliens will be back to retrieve him. Do you want to fight them off to keep the body?”

  The scientist had seen the footage of the alien security teams in fights and decided that discretion was the better part of valour, “No, Padre. I am sure we have everything we need. Thanks.”

  The scientists left and Father looked at the body with Phil, with Bill trying to be inconspicuous at the side.

  Phil looked at the sun outside the resealed window and turned to Bill, “Is it always this hot?”

  Nah,” said Bill, “It’s only 40 Celsius today. Our record for this time of year is almost 50.”

  “Oh,” said Phil, wiping his brow and smiling, “ A cold spell then.”

  “Padre, he’s a bit banged up,” said Phil, “Should we provide some cover for him? His clothes were mostly burned off in the fight.”

  Bill stepped forward and put up his hand, “I may have something? We have a bit of everything here. Just in case, you know.”

  He rushed back to his truck and came back a short moment later, carrying a bag.

  “Here,” he said, “These are spare clothes. We sometimes get miners here and they are pretty large.”

  Bill stopped and looked the alien up and down, “Although he is pretty big.”

  “Eight feet tall, I reckon,” said Phil

  “Two hundred and forty two centimetres,” said Father, “That was one of the first things we did. Here are the measurements.” Father handed over a sheet of paper to Bill.

  Bill looked at the measurements and back to the dead alien, “Emma can help. We can do anything here. We have some spare cloth. What colour do you want?”

  Father looked at the remains of the alien’s clothing and said, “Do you have a blue, similar in colour to his old clothes? And just a robe is fine. We don’t want to try and put pants and shirt on him.”

  “Got it. We have something close enough,” said Bill, “We’ll have it ready for when we come out tomorrow.”

  Major Tierney strode purposefully towards their group, “Padre, Phil. We have news.”

  He stopped and looked at Bill who smiled and said, “I’m providing local support.”

  Major Tierney bent his head in acknowledgement and said, “We have news. A new Brick is coming. With support this time. They will be here in about four weeks. We will NOT be here when they return.”

  Father looked over at the people working on The Brick. Their activities seemed much more energetic. They had a time limit.

  “When we go,” said Father to Bill, “You and Emma should come with us. Just in case.”

  Bill nodded.

  ****