‘I get the point.’
He made me raise my voice . Nicholas Grant is getting to me.
‘Spitfire’s Rise gets lonelier with every failed mission,’ Grant whispered into his ear. ‘Your shining stars are flickering out one by one, as if they know their universe is dying. The sky is getting dark, and your house is growing quiet. How long until the last star goes out?’
The first tear ran down McCormick’s cheek, as if it were trying to flee the conversation.
‘Doctor?’ asked Grant. ‘You do have something to say, right?’
McCormick wiped his fingers over his face, and gasped a sentence.
‘The pain of missing someone is always worth it for the joy of having known them. Always.’
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that even though I miss the friends you killed, I can look back on a year that was far less lonely than yours.’
McCormick had never taken a punch before. Grant’s closed fist struck against his chin, and his head keeled to one side as his brain tried to work out how to balance itself. Grant was yelling something, but no words registered in his mind.
When his sight found its way to the door, two of the three faces were smiling. The odd one out, curiously, was Oliver Roth.
‘You can hit me all you want,’ McCormick rasped, ‘but it won’t change the facts. My friends and I practically took down your empire tonight. Four against infinity, and we’rewinning.’
‘And it’ll all be for nothing in a matter of seconds. A circuit-break alert sounded the moment your little girl fired that sniper bullet, and it even indicated where the break came from. Last I heard, my men were about three minutes away from replacing the Perimeter Point she shot. I don’t know what you think your bomb’s going to do, if it even exists, but it’ll go off ten minutes too late.’
Perimeter Point… Raj was close, calling them ‘ border points ’ .
Raj… another shining star that flickered out under my leadership.
McCormick felt his body falling to the side, but steadied himself just in time. Nicholas Grant packed a serious punch. The white-haired dictator wandered to Marshall’s mahogany desk with a little joy in his step, removed a key from a drawer, and unlocked the plastic covering that surrounded a black switch on the giant computer. McCormick’s eyes followed Grant’s to the digital clock on the wall, which he had not noticed before that moment. It read ‘10:16:23 p.m., 19/05/0001’.
Thirteen and a half minutes without breaking. Easy peasy .
‘That “Kate” you were talking to over the radio,’ Grant started. ‘Kate Arrowsmith, if I remember right. How accurate’s her watch?’
‘Set to Big Ben. Remember that thing?’
‘Collateral damage. But it’s good to know that our clocks are synchronised. I want to know exactly how long I have to deal with her threat.’
You and me both.
‘So I have a few questions to ask,’ Grant continued. ‘Iain, is Gwen nearly here?’
‘She tells me she is,’ Marshall muttered from the entrance. McCormick detected resentment in Marshall’s voice; presumably he despised his office being occupied by his colleagues.
‘You’ll like Gwen Crossland,’ Grant said to McCormick. ‘She’s very persuasive.’
‘I didn’t spend my last Christmas running around and planting bombs just to give the game away with thirteen minutes to go.’
‘We’ll let her be the judge of that. And it’s not just the bomb I’m interested in. How did you shelter so many people in the depths of England, against all my satellites, thermal imaging technology and random clone searches? More importantly, where the hell are you sheltering? Once my shield’s up and we’re done with your little weapon, I’ll want some answers to those questions too.’
McCormick’s breath held itself inside his throat.
He doesn’t know where Spitfire’s Rise is. Alex didn’t give it away after all.
But that’s not the point here. Grant won’t need to go after us on ce he’s raised the shield. He’d be hunting us for revenge, not strategy.
‘Ah,’ chuckled Grant with a slow nod, ‘now you’re nervous. Which reminds me. Iain, Nathaniel, how anxious has the good doctor been since his capture?’
‘No more than you’d expect,’ answered Pearce from the back of the room. ‘Actually, his mood’s the same as when we first met him on Floor F.’
‘So if his nerves haven’t changed, it’s fair to say we haven’t walked into the blast radius by coming here?’
Pearce shrugged.
‘If it were me, I’d take him on a tour of Floor B and watch for a change of expression.’
‘Give me a break,’ McCormick answered with a limp cough. ‘It’s late at night, and I’ve done a year’s worth of jogging today. I’m tired.’
Grant smiled.
‘Iain,’ he said, ‘get on the phone to every section officer in New London and order them to inspect their areas fast. I want the HPFC searched, I want every room the rebels have ever visited to be turned upside-down, I want vehicle ports torn apart and every officers’ sector gone over inch by inch. Nathaniel, load up some security files and find out which of our rooms were targeted around Christmastime.’ He flashed a proud pair of shiny blue eyes towards his twitching prisoner. ‘And thanks for giving that part away, you old fool.’
A phone rang on Marshall’s desk. Marshall jogged across his office and answered. Sadly, the conversation did not take much time.
‘Nick,’ said Marshall, ‘the Perimeter Point has been replaced.’
Nicholas Grant laughed, lifted the plastic cover at his side and rested his fingers on the black computer switch.
‘Dr McCormick,’ he said, ‘it’s a beautiful coincidence that you’re here to watch my empire become utterly invincible – and all before your secret weapon had any chance to make a difference. Iain, turn on your TV. I want to see a security feed to the outside of the Citadel. It’s a shame we’ll be indoors for the man-made northern lights, but watching my victory on television will have to do.’
Marshall obeyed, and flicked around with his remote control until he found a video feed from the upper battlements. The view stretched across the English countryside, soon to be as isolated from New London as Sydney Opera House.
McCormick looked back at Nicholas Grant, just in time to see him flick the switch and activate the AME shield.
Chapter 25
McCormick had never been keen on videogames, but he had seen the ‘undeserved death face’ in plenty of children whose characters had unexpectedly got shot or fallen from high platforms. When the switch was flipped and nothing changed on Marshall’s enormous computer, Grant mirrored those children’s expressions perfectly.
‘What the hell do you mean “coordination error”?!’ he screamed, droplets of saliva landing on the offending screen. ‘I just bloody replaced the Perimeter Point!’
McCormick could not hide his smile. Grant started to pace around the borders of the room, looking for something on his three-walled computer that would make everything right again. Unsuccessful, he glared at McCormick, his neck and shoulders trembling. McCormick decided to speak before somebody forced him to.
‘I may be a mathematician,’ he said, ‘but I know a thing or two about physics. And it looks like you organised your circuits in series instead of parallel. Maybe you had to, given the nature of the shield and how it depends on every single coordinate working. But it means your Perimeter Points are like Christmas tree lights: once the circuit’s broken, you can’t tell how many are faulty at the same time. I imagine you’ve worked out where I’m going with this.’
Grant thumped his fist onto Marshall’s desk with so much force that he almost sent mahogany splinters into his muscles.
‘Long story short,’ McCormick finished, ‘you don’t really think my “little girl” fought her way to the battlements to shoot one of them, do you? Your field must be littered with dozens of broken Perimeter Points.’
Grant had stopped listening. He stomped his way across the carpet to shout at his allies.
‘Iain,’ he began, ‘the borders are your responsibility. Get every one of those things along the northern wall looked at and replaced.’
‘That’ll take a good hour or two.’
‘I don’t give a flying rat’s arse. Do it.’
Marshall rolled his eyes the moment Grant looked away.
What’s it like be ing you, Iain Marshall? Taking orders from a boss who consumed your company and used it to shape world history? How do you feel working for a tyrant who made you build an army and conquer a nation , while he put his feet up and listened to Bach ?
‘If you’re interested,’ Pearce said to Grant, ‘while you were busy shouting at the computer I got a message from Adam King.’
‘Who?’
‘Archives manager. He found where the Christmastime raids were targeted. They were spread all across Floor Z.’
‘Well, that’s helpful,’ spat Grant, throwing his head upward in disgust.
‘Maybe it’s more helpful than you think. He compiled a list of the targeted rooms and mapped them out – turns out they make an approximately straight line, all the way from the outer walls to the border of Inner City.’
Grant froze in place, and glared at Pearce as if he were the man responsible.
‘Every one of those rooms needs inspecting, Nathaniel. Get people on it now. I’ve got a bad feeling there are explosives in every single one of them.’
‘Really?’
‘From one end of Outer City to the other? In a straight line? Engage your bloody brain. He wants to blow a tunnel through the walls for the prisoners to escape!’
Poker face… poker face…
Grant began to laugh, and McCormick tried to turn his head away from his enemies. The dictator barked a tirade of commands, sending every clone on Floor Z to the stretch of rooms on King’s list. McCormick looked at the clock, and found eleven minutes remaining. When he looked forward again, Grant was staring into his face.
‘Game over,’ Grant said with a beaming smile. ‘Either my clones find your explosives and defuse them, or they go off and you create a death tunnel for tens of thousands of escapees to get shot in. A pretty awful plan if I may say so, but I suppose you couldn’t do much better on the lower floors.’
McCormick sighed.
‘So I guess you have a little time to spare,’ he said. ‘Do you offer last requests?’
‘Not normally, no.’
‘But in my case?’
‘You’re welcome to ask.’
McCormick looked at Grant’s face, and used a voice that made his plea sound as gentlemanly as possible.
‘Before I die, I’d like to know what this war is truly about.’
Grant began to laugh, longer and louder than he had all evening.
‘You think we’re opponents in a war?’ he asked. ‘You’re nothing more than civil unrest! An unwelcome brawl! A minor inconvenience from dead men walking! For you, it must look like the biggest war humanity has ever fought. But from my perspective—’
‘Answer my question. Now, please.’
Grant smiled, almost entertained by McCormick’s attempt at a command.
‘I’m going to miss you, Joseph. May I call you Joseph? It’s a shame we’ll only ever get this one chance to talk.’
‘Then let’s make it count. Is this about world domination? Is that your master plan?’
‘World domination,’ Grant repeated with childlike laughter. ‘I dislike that phrase. I don’t want to dominate the world. I just want to subdue it.’
‘But why?’
McCormick was not expecting an answer. When Grant gave one, his heart stood still.
‘Simple. To cull the human population.’
The breath caught in McCormick’s throat, and he could not ask for details. But Grant sensed the question.
‘Nine billion people live in this world. That’s about six billion too many. Everyone goes on about wanting to “save the world”, but the world looked after itself just fine before humans came along. If it needs saving, it needs saving from us.’
McCormick found himself muted. Just when he thought nothing else could surprise him about life on the upper floors, the great Nicholas Grant – son of an oil tycoon – had revealed himself to be an eco-warrior. But not the progressive, philanthropic type, like those who had protested government inaction on climate change before Takeover Day. A rich, powerful, genocidal eco-warrior.
‘Once the power of humans has withered, it’ll give the planet some time. Rainforests will grow back. Polar ice caps will stop melting. Nature will have its oceans back. And once there are too few humans left to wreck the world again, we’ll close down the Citadels across the globe, purge the clones and allow the survivors to rebuild. But that’ll be generations from now. I don’t suppose I’ll live long enough to see the world safe again.’
‘What you’re suggesting is monstrous…’ McCormick said as he found his voice again.
‘Monstrous? Consider this, doctor. The end of every geological era – Triassic, Jurassic and so on – is marked by a mass extinction. The meteor that killed the dinosaurs was the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which killed three quarters of all animal species. The Permian–Triassic extinction event killed ninety-six per cent of everything. But those extinctions took place over thousands, maybe millions of years.’
Grant walked to within a metre of McCormick, so he could lower his face to finish his point.
‘We’re in the middle of a man-made extinction event rightnow. Up to ten thousand species vanish every year – that’s thousands of times higher than the natural rate. And this is just over a couple of hundred years. Just imagine what we’d do over the course of a million!’
McCormick made the mistake of looking into Grant’s eyes, and saw his unbridled enthusiasm. He believed every word, and worst of all, he knew that science backed him up.
McCormick dipped his eyes away from Grant’s stare. At least a dozen people in his life had been part of the climate change protests before Takeover Day. If they were still alive they were now being kept in the Citadels, due to be killed off by a rich man in the glorious name of ‘saving the world’ – as if they were the people the world needed saving from.
‘This is the first time in the known history of the Earth,’ Grant continued, ‘that a mass extinction has been caused by one of its own species. If it were any other species, we’d wipe them out and call it saving the world. So tell me… who are the real monsters?’
McCormick raised his head again.
‘The real monsters,’ he answered, ‘are those who force whole families into concrete prisons, then collect the bodies of their starved children.’
At the back of the room, Marshall took the opportunity to interrupt.
‘Radio message, Nick,’ he said. ‘Kate Arrowsmith got six Perimeter Points.’
McCormick’s broken face lit up just a little. Grant’s culling of the human race was not a certainty just yet.
‘Six? How long will it take to—’
‘An hour. Maybe more.’
Grant gave McCormick his deepest head teacher stare, before turning and heading for the exit.
‘Well sod it, then,’ he shouted, ‘I’m staying in my quarters until the show’s ready. Or at least until this bomb scare is sorted.’
‘You’re not watching the prisoner?’ asked Roth.
‘No. We’re leaving him with Iain.’
‘We?’ asked Pearce.
‘Yes. Nathaniel, you’re going to your own office. Oliver, you’re going downstairs to hunt rebels. Try not to get killed again. Iain, you stay here. And when Gwen Crossland arrives, tell her she’s a slow cow. Stay close to your phones, gentlemen.’
As Grant passed through the exit, McCormick shouted after him.
‘Hey Nick,’ he yelled. ‘May I call you Nick?’
Grant did not turn around.
‘Sorry,
’ he answered, ‘did I just hear a dead man talking?’
‘Probably. But you’re forgetting one thing about the human race.’
‘And what’s that?’
McCormick gave a proud smile.
‘It’s made up of people like Ewan and Kate.’
Grant abandoned McCormick without another word. With a shrug, Pearce walked out and made his way towards his own office.
Marshall stepped further inside. At first, Roth refused to leave.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Roth snapped at his boss, ‘and don’t be stupid. Grant will string you up if you torture him for information.’
‘Why, what would you do? Because I know what I’d do in your position.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Get the hell downstairs like you’ve been commanded, and clear up the other three. Now.’
Roth hesitated, but ultimately obeyed, as Marshall drew out his handgun. McCormick and Marshall were left alone long enough for a quick glance at the clock, which revealed eight minutes remaining. Not one second later, Gwen Crossland walked into the room.
‘How can I help you, gentlemen?’ she asked softly.
McCormick bit his lip. This tiny ageing woman looked like the opposite of a typical villain, but there was a little something in her facial expression that told him she was a perfect fit on the inside.
‘Nick says you’re a slow cow,’ said Marshall.
Crossland gave a discreet smile with the corners of her lips, but no further response.
‘We need your help extracting information from this man,’ Marshall continued.
‘The location of a mysterious weapon, if I heard right.’
‘No, we found that. My soldiers are disarming it as we speak. He has other information we need.’
‘The location of his headquarters,’ said Crossland, adjusting the top button of her cardigan. ‘Well, you won’t get that in eight minutes. I could perhaps get you a precise address by the end of the week.’
Tooth and Nail Page 26