Tooth and Nail

by Chris Bonnello

  Ewan’s fingers began to twiddle with the phone cord, for whatever anxiety relief it would bring. The game had changed, without warning or mercy. Everything had changed. Marshall’s computer destroyed by half nine? He and his friends had never even been to Floor B. A thirty-minute time limit wasn’t enough. It was lunacy.

  ‘Why are you telling us?’ he asked in a meek whisper.

  ‘Because I’d rather you knew. You’re far more likely to lose a gunfight if you know you’ve already lost the war. Psychological warfare, Ewan. Now I’ve put that knowledge into your head it’s going to stay there, bouncing around in your thick little skull. If the Taliban had used that kind of genius against Major George West, they might have actually won and you’d never have been born. They’d have improved the world in one way, at least.’

  ‘Did you ever fight the Taliban?’ Ewan spat, the mention of his father restoring some of his energy. ‘They were smarter than the cavemen everyone thought they were. Dad told me the stories. I grew up with them.’

  ‘Afghanistan was a playground, Ewan. You think that barren, mountainous country is hard work? Try selling anti-tank rockets to two West African militia leaders, each of whom is trying to commit genocide against the other. Money and firearms are all you have, and they’re all your clients care about. Have you ever looked into the eyes of an ally who values the clip of bullets in your hand more than he values you?’

  ‘Maybe you’re just crap at making friends.’

  Ewan glanced to the computer once more. Only a fraction of the data remained. The promise of progress both energised him and frightened him. According to Alex’s face, Ewan was not alone in his stress.

  ‘That’s fine talk, coming from you,’ said Marshall. ‘Your father may have been a decent soldier, but he couldn’t turn you into a decent person.’

  The phone trembled in Ewan’s hands. Not through fear, but anger.

  ‘My dad was more than a decent soldier. He was everything to me.’

  ‘And now he’s a decomposed skeleton scattered across your living room floor. Along with your useless mum. And your aunt, and your uncle, and eight-year-old Alfie. Still, it was nice that we kept the whole family in one place after we killed them.’

  ‘Not the whole family,’ snarled Ewan. ‘You should have killed one more.’

  ‘Oh dear. We missed the retard.’

  ‘Yeah. And don’t you regret it now?’

  He turned around, expecting Alex to be grinning. Instead, he was worried.

  ‘Only for the next few minutes,’ said Marshall. ‘Because that’s the thing with rats who chew at computer wires. They’re too stupid to know when they’ve spent too much time chewing. And one flash later, they’re dead.’

  Ewan heard running footsteps.

  ‘Any last words I can pass on to Grant?’ asked Marshall with a laugh.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ewan with his eyes pointed at the CCTV camera. ‘Tell him his daughter’s a great kisser.’

  Ewan hung up the phone, grabbed his assault rifle, and ran to the nearest clone’s body. He plucked the keycard from its pocket, assuming Salter’s to have been deactivated. Then he ran to the computer screen. So close. So close.

  ‘A great kisser?’ said Alex. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that. It was disrespectful to talk about her that way.’

  ‘You mean you and Shannon are—’

  ‘When we leave,’ Ewan interrupted, ‘we split up. Whichever one of us reaches the experiment chamber first, burn it to the ground.’

  A dozen pairs of footsteps grew louder.

  The progress bar vanished, replaced with the shape of a little green tick.

  Half an hour to bring down an empire. Starting right now.

  ‘Go!’ he screamed at Alex, who picked up his printed papers and charged for the exit. The two Underdogs fled the Central Research Headquarters like murderers from a crime scene, with five clone bodies in their wake.

  We don’t stand a chance.

  But I’m fighting anyway. W e didn’t survive the last year by respecting the odds.

  Chapter 19

  Kate’s night had been boring. Under normal circumstances, boring missions were good. Less action meant fewer people got hurt.

  But not tonight. Things needed to happen tonight.

  She understood why McCormick insisted on walking up the stairwell rather than running. But she felt like a child wanting to run towards an ice cream van, tethered to a grandparent who couldn’t run along with her.

  She stood at the exit to Floor S, her handgun pointed towards the door handle just in case. After a short while McCormick arrived behind her, and it was time for his next mission: ascending the steps to Floor R.

  W ill we even reach Floor B by midnight?

  Alongside her annoyance, Kate couldn’t help but feel enormous admiration. McCormick clung hard to his forced habit of never, ever losing hope, and his attitude towards each set of stairs never worsened or became less enthusiastic.

  Kate ran up to Floor R, and guarded the exit as before. When McCormick was halfway up, Ewan’s voice screamed out of her waist pocket.

  ‘Guys, big trouble!’

  McCormick took the shouting as an excuse to rest against the wall, and caught some breath as he retrieved his radio.

  ‘Talk to me, Ewan.’

  ‘We don’t have until midnight! Grant’s pushing the button at half nine!’

  The panic in Ewan’s voice spread to Kate like an airborne disease, and her body froze in place.

  ‘Do you have any evidence of this?’ asked McCormick from half a floor below.

  ‘The words of Iain Marshall himself. The shield was supposed to kill us when we arrived, but we got inside before the last transport vehicles made it from some weapons cache somewhere. Unless we can do everything in the next thirty minutes, Grant’s going to win the war. There’ll be no way for us to get out, or for the others to break in with weapons ever again!’

  Kate commanded her body to stop panicking, but it wouldn’t obey. Her brain was congested with so many thoughts that she couldn’t pin down a single one.

  ‘Looks like we’re doing it in half an hour then,’ said McCormick, having ascended the stairs and rested next to her. ‘How’s it looking on your floor?’

  ‘Part way there,’ answered Ewan between gasps. ‘We wiped the files and we’re heading to the Experiment Chamber. But they know we’re here – Salter’s dead. What about down there?’

  ‘We’re on Floor R,’ answered McCormick, ‘the right place for the paper archive and two floors away from the backup servers. Leave it to us – you and Alex destroy that chamber and fight your way to Floor B.’

  ‘Yeah, nice and simple,’ said Ewan. ‘See you later, sir.’

  The radio fell silent as Ewan resumed his sprinting. Kate’s eyes sank to the floor as the enormity of their task settled in her brain.

  Fiveobjectives, and we’ve still got four left.

  Destroy the Experiment Chamber. Destroy their backup system. Destroy the paper archive. Destroy Marshall’s computer.

  All in thirty minutes .

  ‘I’ll phone comms and ask for directions,’ McCormick said, his breath mostly steadied. ‘You go for the archive, I’ll go for the backup servers.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Kate with a quiver in her voice, ‘I’ve got a better idea…’

  Years of experience told her she had done the wrong thing by speaking out, and should prepare for her opinions to be corrected. She knew that McCormick was an approachable adult, but her instincts had been burned into her brain by countless adults and peers who had loved telling her she was wrong.

  To her relief, McCormick listened.

  ‘Those battlements on the roof,’ she continued, ‘where the snipers hide to watch over the countryside. Is it just me, or are there lower battlements too?’

  ‘Floor L, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘I can buy us some time. I’ll go to Floor L, you go for the paper archive, and whoe
ver finishes first goes for the data servers.’

  Even then, it’ll only work if Ewan and Alex reach Floor B. But it’s our best shot.

  ‘Sounds good,’ said McCormick, as he fumbled around in his pocket for his phone and battery. For the first time since they had started their climb, there was a moment of silence in the stairwell.

  ‘No need to wait,’ said McCormick. ‘I’ll radio you any directions you need.’

  ‘Sir,’ she answered, ‘I’m not going to start running without a goodbye.’

  ‘Then say it quickly. I enjoy your company, but time’s not on our side.’

  Kate marched across to McCormick, and demanded his eye contact. Painful as it was – and McCormick would know how painful she found it – the eye contact was worth it to make her point.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said, in the most commanding voice she dared use. ‘The rest of the Underdogs will slaughter me if they find out I left you alone. If you get caught or killed while I’m away, I’m taking it personally.’

  ‘No, you will not take it personally,’ McCormick said in his calmest voice. ‘I don’t want anything clouding your judgement tonight.’

  Kate stared at him, open-jawed, as he powered up his phone.

  You don’t really think it’s that simple, do you?

  She began to quicken her breaths, the expression in her face a dangerous cocktail of protective love and anger.

  ‘I know your week’s been horrible, Kate,’ McCormick said to her. ‘And I’m not going to try telling you to get over it. But if there’s one thing on Earth that Kate Arrowsmith is good at, it’s facing her fears. Without your anxiety, you wouldn’t be half as brave as you are – and all you need to do tonight is use the bravery you’ve always had. And that includes overriding whatever fears you have about me.’

  A stray tear fell from Kate’s eye. McCormick smiled and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Run upstairs, and buy the boys their extra time. If I need a hand I’ll give you a shout.’

  Kate nodded. No words came to her. She turned and ran up the stairs towards Floor L as McCormick began to dial. One floor up, she stopped to eavesdrop on her leader’s conversation.

  ‘Lorraine, it’s me,’ McCormick began, followed by a brief pause. ‘Yeah, not bad. I’m on Floor R and can find my way to the paper archive. Have you got directions to the data servers yet?’

  There was a brief silence. Kate could not hear Lorraine’s words, but they were easy to work out.

  ‘Nothing’s beyond my reach. Not tonight.’

  I don’t like the sound of this.

  ‘No, not even the HPFC. Tell me where to go.’

  Kate gasped, hopefully not loud enough for McCormick to hear. She had not heard the High Priority Functional Cluster even mentioned through most of the war. And there was a good reason for that.

  But time was running out, and Floor L was high above. With gritted teeth and a sense of powerlessness over McCormick, Kate looked up the stairwell and ran.

  *

  As far as Ewan could tell, his sense of direction had not let him down. Distractions were everywhere, but he was pretty sure his route was the correct one.

  The biggest clue was that the clone patrols were getting heavier. Ewan thought it might have been the perfect opportunity for them to blow him apart with speed mines, but clearly they didn’t want to damage any rooms important enough to be on Floor F.

  He took a peek around the next corner, and was spotted by six biorifle soldiers.

  Bringing in the big guns now. Literally.

  Marshall wants me to run out of ammo. He’s using the soldiers with weapons built into their arms – guns I can’t steal once they’re dead.

  His first spray of bullets took down four of the soldiers. Despite their advanced weaponry, the remaining two did not last much longer. Ewan double-checked the corridor and ran over to the bodies, and found that some of their other weapons could be stolen.

  By far the most interesting weapon was the belt of incendiary grenades. Four of them. Ewan grinned. He couldn’t have asked for a more suitable weapon to bring to the Experiment Chamber. He seized the whole belt for himself, and astonishingly found the room he was looking for three doors later.

  About time we had something good thrown our way. Right, let’s do this.

  He used the seized keycard against the door, and it worked. He wouldn’t have long until someone noticed a dead clone checking into the Experiment Chamber, but fifteen minutes between check-ins would be more than enough.

  Come to think of it, Ewan was surprised they hadn’t locked down the chamber altogether. But it had been out of action since the research was completed, and would never be needed again unless all their research mysteriously vanished.

  Ewan walked inside. The Experiment Chamber was far from what he had expected. He found himself in a small, caravan-sized control room lined with computers, swivel-chairs, microphones and telephones, bordered by a wall of glass that separated him from the main body of the chamber. Small adhesive signs had been stuck to the corners of every glass panel, reading ‘DANGER: no metal or metallic products inside the chamber’. Beyond the glass, the chamber contained very little – just a large pile of metallic objects in one corner that included weights, empty weapons and clothing with metal attachments. Meanwhile its tiled floor had been half-cleaned of powdery bloodstains: clone blood that had come to rest between two stone pillars.

  Ewan checked the porthole-shaped window on the door. No sign of Alex approaching. He hoped his teammate was OK, wherever he was. Or at least alive.

  ‘Alex,’ he whispered into his radio, ‘updates?’

  Silence.

  ‘Alex.’

  ‘Still far away,’ came Alex’s voice, tired and gasping. ‘Got chased the wrong way down the corridor by a load of biorifles.’

  ‘OK,’ answered Ewan. ‘I’m here now, so no worries. Head to the nearest stairwell and get as close to Floor B as you can. I’ll meet you up there.’

  ‘Got it.’

  The radio went silent. Ewan was on his own, but the work could easily be done alone. And it started with making sure he was in the right place.

  He looked back at the desk, trying to guess the uses of the several dozen buttons and levers across the control panel. The red button next to the microphone was obvious, and the palm-sized button on the wall labelled ‘kill switch’ must have been there to stop experiments before someone important got killed. The dial at the far right seemed to control the lighting for some reason, and for all he knew the brown lever delivered fresh coffee or something.

  There was another red button, protected beneath a translucent panel of plastic so nobody would use it by accident. Ewan’s instincts, fuelled by a whole childhood of toying with anything that looked interesting, commanded him to push it.

  When he did, there was a brightly-coloured burst of light on the other side of the glass, like a red camera flash. Ewan looked up, and lost his breath.

  Between the stone pillars, he saw the same type of shield his team had watched light up the skies around Harpenden. The same type of shield that had surrounded Oakenfold, and killed Raj. He stared in hatred at the crimson waves that flowed between the pillars like vertical water, and the little lightning bolts that leapt out from the metal ‘border points’ – or whatever Raj had called them before he killed himself. After a brief squall of excitement, the shield faded into invisibility.

  Ewan could barely feel the organs inside his chest. Adolf Hitler with atomic weapons would have been less dangerous than a dictator with this technology. If Grant had his way, the same kind of shield would surround the whole of New London, and in time his other Citadels too, rendering him invincible forever.

  Ewan reached for his assault rifle.

  He released a flurry of bullets into the glass wall. The glass did not shatter, and the bullets only produced a couple of spider-web-shaped cracks. Clearly the chamber’s glass was bulletproof.

  Bullet resistant, not bulletproof
, Ewan corrected himself. No glass is perfectly bulletproof. You just have to get creative.

  Ewan put his brain into gear. When it came to non-academic tasks, his brain was a formidable weapon. At that moment, it was remembering a school trip to the Roman walls at St Albans, back when he had been allowed on mainstream school trips. The tour guide had shown him a legionary’s sword – a gladius, if he remembered right – which had a little steel stub at the end of the handle. It was for braining enemies who got too close, by thumping the handle onto their head where the tiny stub would crack through their skull. The full force of a Roman’s arm would be concentrated into a square centimetre, and the results would be devastating.

  The glass could be broken. Ewan just needed a gladius.

  The butt of his rifle made a fine handle, with a flat enough surface to attach some kind of stub. He reached to the corner of the nearest window pane and peeled off the adhesive warning sticker, rolled it backwards over itself to make it sticky on both sides, and placed it across the rifle butt.

  On the desk at his side, some smart-arse scientist had left his coffee mug behind – one that literally read ‘smart-arse and proud of it’. He grinned, and wondered whether that scientist had been smart enough to know a little fact that Ewan had learned via YouTube: that ceramics were great for smashing windows. He threw the mug to the floor, and picked through its shattered remains. He stuck a promising-looking piece to the butt of his rifle, and after three hits from his makeshift gladius the entire pane of glass shattered.