by Paul Teague
Mum goes to press the symbol to get her to Quadrant 1, but nothing happens. She tries a few other options but there’s nothing. The SymNode must be broken – or even worse, deactivated. That would make sense – if Kate realized we were able to use these things, she’d block us immediately. Just like Dad did when he found me logging into his social media accounts and writing daft messages.
Before I press the button, a hunch makes me grab one of the explosives packs that have been secured around the lift. The explosives won’t transport with us – it doesn’t seem to work that way, so I need to pick them up and carry them. I do the honours with the buttons, and it all works fine for me. After all, I am the boy with the special genetics. The same genetics that are going to kill me in a couple of hours.
The light display begins in the lift to show that we’re being transported. There are no explosions and I take Mum back to the upper level in Quadrant 1. We pause and wait a moment until we open the doors.
I draw the weapon that I have tucked away in my pocket from our earlier gunfight. We nod to each other, I press the button to open the doors and we take a side each. I can’t believe our luck.
There are two Troopers, one on either side, and we incapacitate them straight away. That was a bit too easy, but we don’t waste the opportunity. Maybe they think they have us on the run, perhaps they never expected us to make our way back here.
Mum gives me a massive hug, the kind of hug you give somebody if it might be the last time you’re going to see them.
‘I love you Dan … and I’m so proud of you,’ she says.
‘I love you too Mum,’ I reply. ‘Kick some butt and make sure you get back alright?’
‘How can me and Nat get killed by a NanoVirus if you’re not even around to say goodbye?’
She’s tearful but I still manage to make her laugh. She gives my arm a final squeeze.
The black lights in the necks of the incapacitated Troopers are pulsating furiously – we’ve a good idea what that means. We just stuck our hands in a hornet’s nest.
We’re too useless to have the weapons set to kill, Mum and me just stunned them. It’s an effective stun though, it seems to knock people out for at least an hour. I might be threatened with death myself, but I don’t want to kill anybody. Not yet at least.
Mum rushes up the corridor. She grabs one of the Trooper’s weapons and a helmet for good measure. She’s thinking of the darkness beyond the bunker doors I reckon – maybe she doesn’t trust that thing in her neck which seemed to protect her before.
Despite what these Troopers look like, we have to remember that they’re human underneath. Sure, they seem to have it in for us, but they may be as responsible for their actions as Mum and James were earlier. If I can avoid a kill, I will, so long as it doesn’t put any of our lives at risk.
Mum’s gone. I hear movement along the corridors. They’re onto her already. I have a bright idea, I’m not sure if it’ll work.
I place the explosives that I transported with us about 100 yards along the corridor, in the opposite direction to Mum. That’s all I dare to do. I can hear the thudding boots of the Troopers approaching at speed.
I run back to the lift, take cover inside with the doors still open, then shoot at the explosives along the corridor. Two shots, three shots, then another. Darn, I keep missing it. I’m a lousy shot.
I run out of the lift, along the corridor and get ready to shoot again. I don’t even know how powerful this stuff is, surely it won’t make too much of a bang?
The first Trooper appears along the corridor, and I shoot again. I hit, but it doesn’t explode. One more try. I change the settings on my weapon to kill. I fire again, and miss.
Laser fire flies to the right of my head. It was close, but it missed me. The Troopers are trying to kill me. I fire one last time, then I’m going to have to run. I hit and it explodes.
It’s a huge explosion – what have I just done? I’m thrown right back, with massive force, and it takes me a few minutes to come around. I’m stunned by the noise and the violence of what just happened. My ears are ringing, my God that was loud.
There’s dust and debris everywhere. I can’t see any Troopers about and their weaponry fire has stopped, for now at least. I pick myself off the floor, run into the lift, and press the new button. The fifth button.
That must have bought Mum some time. If she can get to James, the two of them will be able to work together to make it back to Quadrant 3. Or they can just sit it out until this is all over. However it ends.
The lift explodes into the array of lights which I’ve already grown accustomed to, and the transportation takes place. It’s amazing how it works, I can’t feel anything, I’m just aware of being in a brightly lit grid which moves me from one place to another thousands of kilometres away. Magic? Or something to do with where I’m heading more likely. Space. Little green men perhaps?
I take a deep breath before the door opens, much like you might do if you’d travelled to the top of a very tall building, collecting your thoughts while you brace yourself for what lies ahead. I open the doors, ready to see Nat. But as I step out into the corridor I walk straight into a firestorm.
Chapter Seven
Collusion
Magnus had been quick to work out the type of man Viktor was. He was an astute judge of character and he saw an intelligence, cunning and potential for violence in Viktor which he did not possess himself.
Magnus was at heart an entrepreneur, a man with an amazing vision for technology and the ability to assemble a team with talents far greater than his own and thus make great things happen.
In Viktor he saw an opportunity, a chance to connect with somebody who may help this entire situation play out in a different way.
Like all of the Custodians in the bunkers, Magnus was largely blind to what was going on. Bit by bit, snippets of information were emerging, but it was not even clear yet who the enemy was, or how powerful they might be. So Magnus was making contingency plans.
He would never have mentioned it in front of Mike, Amy or the kids, but the chances of Dan and Nat getting out of this situation alive were pretty slim. Xiang had had to relocate her laboratory set-up to Quadrant 3, effectively starting again, except for the full data compilation which she’d brought with her on her E-Pad.
Magnus’s team was made up of brilliant people. But in his Quadrant they’d been assembled on the basis of their technical abilities, not their experiences in the field of biology, as with the Beijing Quadrant. So it was unlikely that Dan and Nat were getting out of this in one piece, and Magnus saw in Viktor’s eyes that he understood this too.
The steps they’d taken to protect against a Trooper assault would hold off an attack for now, but it would only delay it in the short term, and eventually this Quadrant would be overrun just like the others. Who knew what would happen to the bunker personnel? Those poor souls unlucky enough to be caught in the other Quadrants would already be confronting their own fate at the hands of the enemy.
Magnus knew that he needed another plan, a final option – the nuclear option. To his knowledge, with the limited information that he had at his fingertips, Quadrant 3 was where the last stand would be made.
He had already sanctioned the launch of Viktor’s nuclear subs along with Xiang earlier, but now it was time to arm them and set in some targets. Just in case.
So, when Viktor and Magnus quietly sidled off into a meeting room, they were not discussing how Viktor might contribute to the work being done in Quadrant 3, as everybody else might have thought. They were actually discussing targets for the biggest nuclear assault that the world had ever seen.
Lab Tests
Xiang was frustrated. She’d made excellent progress so far, but now she was no longer able to access her own lab facilities and she was struggling.
She looked at the readings on her E-Pad. Nat’s progress through the NanoVirus process was at 71 percent, Dan seemed to be accelerating at 44 percent. She would keep wo
rking until the final moment, but she had a strong feeling that the twins weren’t going to make it.
She was weighed down by the responsibility on her shoulders. She held the lives of those two teenagers in her hands, yet she seemed to have so little chance of saving them in the ridiculously tight timescale she had to work with.
She felt alone and isolated, Magnus had assigned her a team, but these people were not specialists in her field. She really needed people who could keep up with her, who might even be ahead of her at times.
She was overcome by a surge of concern and sadness for the people that she’d left back in Beijing. Communications had been cut as soon as the Troopers had breached their Transporters; she didn’t know how many of the mobile masts had been disabled, what damage the drones had done to her city, and what terrible things might be happening to her colleagues at that precise moment.
Xiang shuddered, then focused her mind on the task in hand. This situation would have to play out – there were forces at work here over which she had no influence.
Other people were dealing with security matters. That was not her main area of expertise.
Xiang understood that the greatest contribution she could possibly make to this crisis would be to save the twins. At any cost. They were pivotal to this entire scenario. They weren’t moping around, waiting to die. They were fighting, and that’s what Xiang would do.
She would play this change in circumstances to her advantage. Her new team were not biological experts, but that meant they had unique and differing perspectives. And that’s just what she needed right now, fresh pairs of eyes on a tricky problem.
Xiang steeled herself for the most important two hours of her life. That’s the time she had left to save these two important youngsters: twins in whose hands the key to this terrible situation appeared to be held.
She would flip this on its head, and look at it from another angle. If she couldn’t fix the twins in time, how could she circumnavigate that?
What if she could find somebody like the twins, with the same genetic make-up? A transfusion of blood might be possible, it might buy her some time to figure out how to fix them.
This thing had been done to Dan and Nat – in fact something had been done initially to Nat to trigger the process. If something can be done, it can be undone. She’d need some tech to do this. This was a NanoVirus, created with micro technology and biological processes. It would not take a regular transfusion or medical procedure, but she had a room full of techs to help her. She could do this – now she was certain that she could. She’d do the biology, they could manage the nanotech element of this task.
If only she had the missing piece, somebody with the same genetic make-up as the twins.
Hidden Folders
Mike felt guilty that he’d barely acknowledged Amy and now she was off, who knew where? He was so focused on the task in hand – he needed to start breaking into these files and getting some answers.
Dan and Nat had about two hours left by his reckoning.
Xiang was working on it, he knew that, but if he could only get into those damn folders, he’d be able to shortcut a lot of the learning processes and get directly to some answers.
Mike was feeling his age. Sure, all of this stuff followed consistent principles which had been in place since he was a teenage hacker himself. But things change of course, and he was having to figure them out as he went along. It felt like the team that Magnus had assigned to help him were streets ahead of him in that respect. Only they’d never hacked, they’d been the kind of geeks who’d created the systems that Mike had broken into all those years ago.
He had to spin his mind around and take another approach, this was taking too long.
Then he saw it – it had been there all the time, right in front of him. He was looking for something that wasn’t there, and it’s why all these young techs surrounding him couldn’t see it either. These files were old school.
Whoever set up these systems must be his age or older. They’d made the whole system more secure by playing the younger geeks at their own game. Clever. Very clever.
He’d missed it at first. All the young coders think that they’re so cool with their hacking and amazing scripts.
They have a good laugh at MS-DOS, CP/M and TSR routines, but they don’t know these systems, they regard them as prehistoric.
So the best way to cheat the youngest, best and fastest coders? Go retro, they’d never expect it. They’d be looking for all the latest whizz-bang encryption techniques, when right under their noses, you’ve gone flashback.
Sure, there was some modern stuff in there to throw them off the scent, but Mike had it now, he could see it clear as day.
It was like being 16 years old again. This security was a nod back to the good old days when only a handful of geeks were hacking in their spare time, rather than it being an actual category at the job centre as it seemed to be these days.
Mike put his theory to the test. He was in, he’d been right. One by one, the folders unlocked. Mike had opened up the heart of the Genesis 2 project.
And now he was able to peer right inside and find out what made it beat.
Captured
A red ray narrowly misses my head as I begin to step out of the Transporter door. The windows opposite confirm that I’m in the right place – I can see stars and blackness, just like Nat said.
I’ve no time to gawp just yet, I’ve obviously walked into something that I shouldn’t have.
I wish I’d taken more explosives with me now, though I’m not sure I’m ready to chance an explosion in space. A thick, concrete bunker on Earth is about the limit of my risk taking I think.
‘Dan, is that you?’ I hear from around the corner. It’s Nat. I can hear her returning weapon fire – I daren’t step out into the corridor, I’m not sure who is where.
‘It’s me Nat, what’s going on?’ I yell over the sound of a battle. It’s noisy and dangerous out there.
‘They’ve started to fill this place with Troopers, it happened just after we heard the weird voice over the speakers.’
‘This is the heart of it Dan ...’
Nat stops, she curses as she is almost hit by one of the red laser rays.
‘You okay Nat?’ I ask.
‘Yes, I’m with Simon and Kate. They’re going to help me give you cover.’
Kate? Does anything stay the same here for more than five minutes?
‘What’s Kate doing here, have you captured her?’ I ask.
This is the woman who launched all the drones too, I’m not sure that I’m ready to be bezzies just yet.
‘I’ll explain later Dan, she’s one of us, it’s okay,’ Nat answers. ‘We’re going to cover you, then you need to turn right out of the lift.
‘After three Dan … 3-2-1, now!’
I run out of the lift, turn right and walk straight into a blaze of laser fire. All around me there are violent explosions as the rays of light hit the walls, the ceiling and the floor
‘You mean your right Nat!’ I yell, realizing that I turned the wrong way out of the doors. I was running straight at the Troopers. I can see them there, black, strong, formidable.
You’ve never seen such a fast direction change. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever done something quite so athletic in my entire life.
Simon, Kate and Nat start a constant blast of fire in the direction of the Troopers – I can’t believe that none of these deadly rays has hit me yet. I do wonder for a moment if they’re actually trying to kill me, but once again, this is no time to compile a FAQ.
I turn and dive in a way that I would never have thought I was even capable of before. As I land near Simon’s feet, I roll and take cover around the corner, well out of the way of the red rays. I’m breathless, but relieved, and just a little bit impressed with myself.
I wish I could have rustled up some of those moves while my PE teacher at school was advising me to spend less time at my PC and more time kicking a football
around outdoors.
‘Give them everything we’ve got, then run!’ shouts Simon.
‘Shouldn’t we escape in the Transporter?’ I suggest, but I’m overruled by Kate of all people.
‘No Dan, this is where this thing ends. We need to be on board whatever this spaceship is, this is where we’ll get our answers.’
It makes sense. With just about two hours left to live, Nat and I need to run at this problem, not away from it. And if we’re hit in the heat of battle? Well, we’re both goners in two hours anyway.
I glance at the feed Xiang added to my Comms-Tab. My NanoVirus level is at 49 percent – how did that go up so fast and all of a sudden? Adrenaline maybe, I hope that Xiang is working away in Quadrant 3. She’s going to need to pull a white rabbit out of a hat. And very soon too by the look of it.
‘We need to separate guys,’ says Simon. ‘We stand more chance of making progress if we split off.’ I think we’re all agreed on that.
‘I’ll go with Kate, you two need to stick together,’ Simon continues. ‘Dan, Nat, make sure you keep checking in with Magnus, they need to know where you are if they make a breakthrough.’
He’s talking sense. We can’t just disappear – if Xiang gets a breakthrough, we need to be back in Quadrant 3 as quick as we can. If it hasn’t fallen to Troopers by then of course.
‘We’ll take the left fork, you take the right one,’ says Kate. I’m finding it difficult to place my trust in her, but I can’t see any life in her neck device right now, so I have to follow Simon’s and Nat’s cue.
‘Are we all connected via Comms-Tabs?’ Simon asks, and we check our devices. Whatever technology these things use, it seems to work fine up here. The same with the Transporters, it’s quite obvious now that all of this is linked up.
This space station, or whatever it is, could just as easily be part of a bunker, it looks exactly the same.