by Nick Cook
I grabbed the monitor. ‘Just tell me what to do to help you.’
‘Nothing…you can…do…to help.’ Sentinel’s avatar vanished, replaced by only numbers scrolling across the screen.
‘Sentinel, are you OK?’
No answer.
I stared across at the Lodestone, which was glowing with red runes across its surface.
‘Initiating defence routine,’ Sentinel’s voice said through my eBud.
A whining sound filled the room and the runes on the Lodestone started to flicker between red and blue.
The numbers on the screen turned to text: This is the only way I can communicate with you, but only for a short while longer, Jake. The shutdown protocol was a trap designed to lure me in. The alleged shutdown code disguised the worm virus, and this has already wiped out my higher-level functions and is now spreading throughout my micro-minds network.
The lights in the room began to flicker.
I stared at the lines of text. ‘Could I destroy the Shade device with my TK ability, and stop the virus?’
Already too late for that. However, I have already purged the Lodestone of the Shade’s worm virus, so it no longer represents a danger.
The runes had now turned a solid blue.
Now the text appeared on the monitor a character at a time. I haven’t…got long, Jake… Memory being dissolved by the worm…will be gone soon…won’t be able to help…any more.
Tears filled my eyes. ‘I can’t lose you too, Sentinel. I’ve lost too many people that I love already.’
If I could stop this…I would…my friend…but it’s not the only purpose of the worm to kill me… Already expanding through connected networks…destroying computer systems everywhere on this planet. I am…sorry…Jake… Honeytrap… I fell right into it.
‘But what about the Waveriders?’
In the cities…already cut off…worm can’t reach them…but rip out the network connections…of remaining Waveriders. Go now…protect your world.
My eyes clung to his words on the screen, not wanting to leave the AI in his dying moments. ‘But how can the human race survive without you?’ I asked.
You can…and…you will. But now…time…j8&K$To* *56Say% Goodbye* (‘My;*&Friend.
Every light in the room flickered again as the monitor died.
I staggered to the door, grief churning through me. But no matter how I felt, I had to get the word out to pull the network connections to the Waveriders before it was too late.
I raced out onto the production floor, shouting orders to disconnect the network connections to the machines. People did as I said, swarming around the Waveriders to rip their control boards out. Ten, twenty, thirty were disconnected before all power in the production room died and we were plunged us into darkness. People tried the torches on their phones, but none of them worked. Instead, Awoken lit up sparks to illuminate the gloom.
I stared around me, my head in my hands, taking in the Waverider machines we hadn’t reached – their control boards now destroyed by the Shade’s worm virus.
A blond guy with a Swiss flag on his uniform approached me with a radio clutched in his hand. ‘I have urgent information for you.’
I barely registered his words – I was still trying to process what had just happened. How could we ever recover from this?
‘This really is urgent,’ the soldier repeated gently.
My eyes found his. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Before my radio died, I received a Mayday from the Chinook that just left here. The pilot said all its flight systems had suddenly shut down and he was attempting an emergency landing. He said something about the Awoken on board not being able to teleport out because the helicopter was in flight. Then his radio went dead.’ His eyes held mine as I stared at him.
The next second, I sprinted outside to look at the point in the sky where I’d seen the German Chinook receding into a dot.
‘Chloe!’ I screamed into the night as my heart shattered.
Chapter Twenty-One
Despair rolled through me in waves as I struggled to keep my emotions in check in front of the others. One moment I was fine and the next I was finding it hard to breathe.
Chloe was gone, Ethan was gone – even Sentinel. People were being stolen away from me one by one as if I were cursed. Everything was falling apart, everything was hopeless – which was accentuated by the expressions of everyone milling around the production floor. Many of them were picking over the burnt-out computer control boards – ruined thanks to the Shade’s worm virus. It had to have been that same underhand attack that had made the Chinook plummet out of the sky. As if that wasn’t enough, according to the few reports that had made it through with people using old shortwave radios, it seemed as if the worm virus had killed every networked computer on the planet.
Pain drove deeper into my heart, like a splinter of glass.
I dug my fingernails into my palm as Jason, an Awoken leader, approached me, questions in his eyes. I was meant to be the guy who’d reassure them that everything would be OK. The problem was, I couldn’t maintain that lie any more.
Jason raised his phone in his hand and showed me the screen. ‘It looks as if the virus has affected the mobile networks too – not a single phone is working.’
‘How about the landlines?’ I asked.
‘Same problem – we’re just getting a dead dialling tone when we try to ring out. Even the military’s satellite phones are down. The only way to keep in contact with the Awoken teams already deployed is for us to teleport there for face-to-face conversations.’
‘And what about their Waveriders? Have they been affected too?’
‘I’m afraid so. Everything’s offline and it seems there’s nothing to fix it. So what should we do, Jake?’
There it was yet again: the question I’d already fielded a hundred times without an answer.
‘I’ll get back to you.’ I turned away, the despair deepening its claws in me. Our last gamble to save the world had fallen apart.
I ducked into a stairwell and leant back against the door, breathing hard. I knew I was on the verge of a panic attack. Light-headed, I climbed the stairs to the top landing and kept on going – up a ladder and through a hatch to the metal roof.
I sat cross-legged on the sloping roof and stared out across the rolling green countryside of Oxfordshire that stretched away from the science park. I breathed in the clear night air – but how long before that was replaced with the stench of the Shade and their rolling black fog that would engulf Culham and everyone in it?
We’d lost and the Shade had won. It was that simple. So was there any point in pretending otherwise? Maybe I should go downstairs and tell everybody to head back to their families so they can be with them for the end?
A warm late-summer breeze ruffled my hair as tractors harvested wheat in the distance, the farmers no idea what was coming – that there was no point any more.
Overhead, a bird of prey circled on its wingtips as crows rose to challenge it. A billowing white cloud floated in front of the sun, briefly dappling the light across the landscape. All so heart-achingly perfect…and all of it about to end.
I shifted into the Light Web in an attempt to let the magic of this everyday scene inspire me to carry on fighting a bit longer. The view made the scene even more beautiful, the energy lines weaving their way through every aspect of the landscape before me – wrapping round every tree, hedgerow, building, even the military vehicles parked below, since they had nowhere to go now as the airlifts had ceased.
My eyes drank in the view, clinging on to it like a drowning man kicking desperately to keep his head above the surface.
Chloe…
There, away from those who needed to see me strong, I let my grief come bubbling up. Hot tears rolled down my face, each drip a detonation of sadness for Chloe and all those I’d loved that had been killed.
The Light Web around me shimmered through my curtain of tears and something began to change in the mesh of light
on the roof. The woven strands began to pull on each other, converging as if somebody were grabbing them into their fist. Then an abstract shape rose from the bunched threads – unlike everything else in the Light Web, there was no physical form beneath it. I blinked, but it was still there.
A shudder passed through me as the light-lines sprang from the knot of energy and joined with my own blue energy field. Now connected to it, warmth began to flow through me, washing my grief like a stream smoothing stones in a tumbling brook. Then, in the middle of my despair, a sense of hope started to rise.
I was so grief-stricken that I was tipping over the edge into madness – that had to be it. But the more I tried to bury this new flicker of hope, the stronger it became. I couldn’t help but think I was losing the plot, but this hopeless optimism also had a familiar tinge to it. It was almost exactly the sort of thing I would have expected from Ethan.
Sadness pulsed inside me again and the abstract Light Web knot began to unravel. As it disappeared back into the even structure of the roof I felt a pulse of loss. But the fresh sense of hope inside me didn’t disappear with it. Maybe it was my subconscious giving me a gentle slap around the face and telling me to get my shit together.
I gazed out at the horizon. No, I was deluding myself. How could there be any hope? Footsteps clanged over the metal roof towards me.
I didn’t bother to turn round, only stiffened my back. ‘Can you just give me a moment and I’ll be down?’
‘Actually, I can’t,’ Chloe’s voice replied.
I was on my feet in a split second and staring at her standing right before me. Her face was grey, her eyes bloodshot, but she was really bloody standing there.
‘You’re alive!’ I blurted out.
‘Ten out of ten for your observational powers, Sherlock,’ Chloe replied with a crooked smile. She held out her arms.
I rushed to her and clung on tight, not quite trusting that this wasn’t a trick of my subconscious and she was about evaporate into the air. ‘But when I heard your Chinook had gone down, I thought…’
She pulled away and smiled at me. ‘I thought that too – we were so nearly goners. One moment we were heading towards London and everything was fine, the next all hell broke loose when that Shade worm virus infected the helicopter’s flight system. The pilots fought to keep control as we spiralled in for a crash. Everyone was shouting and screaming – there was no way could any of us could get a lock to teleport out with all that going on. But then in the middle of it all, a weird calmness filled me and in that moment I knew I had to try something crazy to give us a chance of living.’
‘What sort of crazy?’
‘Like batshit crazy – something so far out there that anybody sane wouldn’t try it – but, hey, what did we have to lose? I calmed my team down as the ground came rushing up to meet us and made them all concentrate. I still don’t know quite how we managed to pull it off considering how freaked out we all were. But I also knew that with the helicopter moving so quickly it made a teleport difficult – and that’s what gave me the idea.’
‘What idea?’
‘Rather than trying to teleport out from a plummeting Chinook, which would be too tricky to judge, we should try to teleport the whole helicopter, including the Waverider beneath it, to the emergency rendezvous point inside the Millennium Dome. That seemed as good a choice as any, because everyone had that memorised. And it only bloody worked, Jake. You should have seen the faces of the soldiers around the dome when a bloody great Chinook and an L3 Waverider container appeared out of nowhere. I won’t lie: it was a hard landing and there were a few broken bones and bruises, but everyone made it.’
I stared at her. ‘Only you could pull off a crazy stunt like that.’
‘But it didn’t go wrong and that’s the most important thing,’ Chloe replied. She dropped her gaze. ‘Do you know the first thing I thought as I stumbled out of that wrecked helicopter?’
‘Glad to be alive?’
‘That certainly, but my second thought was how stupid it would have been if I’d died without apologising to you for being such a bitch. I should never have let rip into you like I did about Ethan. I know for a fact that if he were here right now he’d be really pissed off with me.’
‘You don’t need to explain anything, Chloe, especially to me. I know the rollercoaster ride that grief can take you on way too well.’ So here it was – I did have a second chance. ‘And about Ethan, there’s something I need to tell you. Something that I didn’t get a chance to say the last time.’
She slowly raised her eyes to mine. ‘Go on?’
I made sure I looked straight into her eyes for this. ‘Ethan told me to tell you how much he loved you.’
Tears instantly filled Chloe’s eyes and she flapped a hand towards her face. ‘Oh god, that guy… Couldn’t tell me when he was alive, could he?’
‘You know what some guys can be like with the L-word.’
‘Yeah, I do, unfortunately.’ She hugged her arms round herself. ‘This is almost too much, Jake. And on top of everything else, someone just told me that Sentinel was taken out by the virus too.’
‘Yes, it’s true. I already feel lost without him, Chloe.’
She nodded. ‘None of us would be alive now if it wasn’t for him.’
I turned away to watch the tractor. ‘It was awful watching him die, Chloe – witnessing him being stripped away bit by bit by that damned Shade virus.’
Chloe’s arms encircled me. ‘The best way to honour Ethan’s memories – everyone else’s – is by keeping going. We shouldn’t stop until the Void has stolen the air from our lungs and we can’t fight any more. What do you say?’
I turned my face to hers as she smeared her tears away. ‘Too right.’
Behind her, a head appeared in the open roof hatch and Jason waved to us. ‘Guys, Martin and Claire have just teleported back with one of the Awoken teams from the Waverider they were trying to fix. They need to see you both downstairs urgently.’
‘Tell them we’re on our way,’ I replied.
I gave Chloe one last hug. ‘Till our last breath we keep going, right?’
She nodded and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Right.’ She grabbed my hand, and together we raced for the ladder.
By the time we got downstairs, Dad and Claire had the circuit boards removed from one of the dead Waveriders and were surrounded by nearly everyone on the production floor as they watched their progress.
Dad was poking at a circuit board with a pair of tweezers. ‘This one is completely dead too, Claire.’
‘Same as all the others,’ she replied.
‘So is there anything you can do?’ I asked as we reached them.
They both looked up and stared at Chloe.
‘Yes, I’m alive.’
Claire jumped up and hugged her. ‘But how?’
‘Later – let’s hear your news first.’
‘Right. The good news is the control boards can be fixed, but the bad news is that it will take time.’
Dad nodded. ‘The problem is that among other things the Shade’s worm virus damaged the automated manufacturing plants we use to build the circuit boards for the Waveriders. And that means it’s going to make any repairs that much slower – we are going to have to go old-school on this and solder new chips by hand to repair all these boards.’
‘So how much time are we talking here?’ I asked.
Dad gestured at the hundreds of Waveriders around the room. ‘Working by ourselves, it would take months, but with help anything could be possible.’
Everybody craned in to listen to this conversation – Awoken, technicians and soldiers. Those closest were relaying what’d been said to those further out, everyone’s expressions strained. After all, what was being discussed could save billions of lives.
‘In that case, we need to get Hammond to organise a meeting with the prime minister, or whoever it takes, to persuade them to give us all the help they can,’ Chloe said.
There
were lots of nods in the crowd.
‘I think that’s our only realistic option now,’ Dad agreed.
I drummed my fingers on my arm as the faces of those gathered around us lightened a fraction. There it was: hope. And while there was hope, I knew that not one person in here would give up.
My gaze snagged on the screen where the spread of the Shadowlands had been shown. The monitor was dead now, just like every TV and internet webpage – all victims of the Shade virus engineered to slow us down. Outside, the farmer was no doubt still harvesting his crop with no idea of what was about to happen. That had to change. It was time for the truth.
I raised my voice so that everyone would hear. ‘There’s another thing that needs to happen. We’re long past the point of keeping the truth from the people of this world. They should have been told what was really going on from the start – and now everyone needs to hear it, if only to have a chance to say their goodbyes.’
Claire put her hands on her hips. ‘You’re absolutely right, Jake. No more government spin.’
I turned to face my audience. ‘I need to confess something to you all.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I wanted to say that just a short while ago I’d pretty much given up all hope. After all, we’ve suffered a huge setback that no one saw coming and we’ve all lost people close to us. On top of that, we now have to deal with the fallout from this virus. But despite everything, we can do this together. We can keep going. The Shade haven’t beaten us yet.’
Chloe stood by my side. ‘So what do you say, everybody? Raise your fist in the air if you’re ready to carry on fighting whatever the Shade throw at us.’
The back of my neck prickled as every single person in the room punched their fists to the air, like sparks lighting the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We entered a featureless building on a London backstreet, emerging into a lobby with a dead cheese plant in the corner and lots of security cameras all around. Hammond swiped a card through a reader, gazed at a camera over the door, and a discreet red light turned green. The doors opened and we stepped into a small office where an ancient woman in a tweed suit issued us all with ID badges on blue lanyards. She opened a drawer – I couldn’t help but notice it had a pistol in it – and pressed a hidden button. Immediately, a featureless wall slid back to reveal a secret lift. Chloe, General Hammond and I stepped in, the doors closed, and I frowned – rather than the floor numbers ticking up, they were ticking down.