"Gone off camping? Where? No, of course you don't need to tell me, I'm just being nosey."
The hacker stopped calling after she had spoken to the parents of twenty names on the list. The pattern was clear enough.
She wrote an email, short and to the point, signing it Palindrome. She attached an invoice.
"Good luck," she said, as the email pinged away. She poured herself another drink. "I hope you can work out what the hell's going on, cos I don't have a clue."
27
The sales assistant in the electronics shop kept up a constant stream of incomprehensible verbiage while the Old Man held the device in his hands, tilting it this way and that.
"This is the cellular version which means you don't have to worry about patchy wifi."
The Old Man put his finger on the screen as he'd seen the assistant do. It lit up, showing a picture of an iguana so realistic it was as if it were there. Just behind the glass. He looked underneath to check. The sales assistant raised his eyebrows at his manager.
"Anyhow, you won't get better than a Globlet. That one's got half a terabyte of memory and four gig of RAM. If you want to upgrade to the eight gig version, I can just slot it in now for you, or you can pop back any time. Paying by card?"
Card? The Old Man, excited by how close he'd come to finding others of his kind, considered just taking it, but he had not survived for so many centuries by taking unnecessary risks. He might be vastly more powerful than humans, but they were capable of surprising cunning. He would not underestimate them again. The last time he had done so had been in this very country, and he hadn't been back since. Hundreds of years ago, it been the closest he'd ever come to dying, and he had no wish to repeat the experience.
He was known as Wild Edric. He ruled a great swathe of land running along the north Wales border. Tired of constantly moving on, he had been careful to conceal his true strength, contenting himself with garnering a reputation as the fiercest fighter in the land. He treated his followers well. He was generous and fair to those who looked to him for protection.
When the French challenger for the English throne invaded, killing Harold at Hastings, Edric stayed true and fought the invaders with intelligence and ferocity, making Shropshire one of the few areas that did not fall to the usurper. As the months wore on, however, Edric saw it was a matter of time before the invaders took the area. William's claim to the throne had been legitimised, and almost every lord in England had bent the knee to the French pretender.
Edric met King William's representatives in secret, and they struck a deal. He would keep his position and his lands. It was a pragmatic step and avoided unnecessary bloodshed.
Wild Edric's mistake had been to assume that his men would agree with him. They did not.
He had taught them well. When they turned on him, they did it when they had the greatest chance of success. They were returning from a patrol along the border and had camped on the range of hills known as the Stiperstones. There had been pockets of rebellion protesting Edric's change of heart regarding William, and he had quelled the last of them that day. He had not slept for three nights straight. Rumour had it that Wild Edric never slept, but his men knew better, and they waited until he was at his weakest.
Borrod, his most trusted adviser, suggested they camp for the night by the old lead mines. Borrod's betrayal was hard to take, Edric having practically brought him up. When the men had murmured about Wild Edric's ageless appearance or his unique yellow eyes, it had been Borrod who had assuaged their concerns, who had reminded them of their leader's great deeds, and his generosity. Edric had noticed a distance between the two of them of late, but had delayed dealing with it until he had broken the rebels' resolve. A mistake.
The short tunnel just inside the mine entrance culminated in a drop of more than a hundred feet, where the tunnel had collapsed months earlier, killing fourteen. Another cave-in was thought likely, and the seam had been abandoned.
Wild Edric was so deeply asleep as to be near-unconscious when his treacherous men, led by the turncoat Borrod, picked up his pallet, rushed him along the tunnel and threw him into the pit.
The fall was sufficiently violent to break his body. He experienced cold panic as the process of returning to his dormant state began. He was so far from the surface, so far away from the blood which would give him new life that he wondered if he would ever walk the earth again. When the rocks fell as his men buried him, he was sure of it. It was over.
With a determination born of blind instinct rather than reason, he dragged his dying body across the cave. More rocks fell around him. One landed on his ankle and crushed the bone flat. He redoubled his efforts.
At the edge of the cave, there was a narrow band of light from a crack in the side of the hill. It was narrower than his forefinger and no longer than his hand. He pushed his failing body hard against it.
The sound of falling rocks became louder as his men's efforts triggered a landslide. The Old Man faced death with no assurance he would ever open his eyes again.
Eighteen years later, a shepherd passed by. When his sheep were set upon by wolves, his dog threw itself at the pack, meeting his death in a flurry of claws and teeth. The animal breathed out his last on that hillside, slumped against a rock. His blood stained the stones and the grass. Some of it trickled through a gap in the rocks, following a course hollowed out by centuries of rainwater, until it dripped onto a slime-like substance buried beneath.
Two nights later, a courting couple's tryst was interrupted by a violent rumbling in the hill beneath them. Although rare, earthquakes were not unknown in England, and the half-dressed lad and his wench hung onto each other in terror. When the old mine entrance burst open with a shower of rocks and stones, and a giant, black dog with flaming eyes burst out, the girl fell into a deep faint. The lad returned her to her worried parents an hour later, with a story of their walk being interrupted by a devil dog. His terror was so obviously unfeigned, the girl's mother decided not to mention that her daughter's blouse was back-to-front.
A month passed before Wild Edric found an opportunity to regain human form, whereupon he left Shropshire, vowing never to return.
"Sir? Sir?" The shop assistant had backed away a little. How long had he been lost in his memories, the Old Man wondered? There was fear in the young man's eyes. Had he said anything aloud?
"I apologise," he said, forcing an unnatural smile onto his borrowed lips. "I have a... condition."
The young assistant was still tense.
"I'm feeling better, and I'd like to buy this, please."
The assistant relaxed at once, greed overcoming his fear. The manager smiled and moved away from the door.
"Paying by card?"
The shop assistant had said that before. The Old Man only had a hazy notion of what he meant. Some concepts were too complex to understand, even with his access to this body's memory. He pulled out the thick wallet in his pocket and opened it, removing the printed notes within.
"Cash? Excellent. That'll be six nine nine."
Six nine nine? The Old Man removed all the notes and placed them in the younger man's hand. The assistant walked to a desk and counted it out.
"I'm sorry, sir, there's only two hundred here. That's another four hundred and ninety-nine, please."
The Old Man held open his empty wallet. He was getting impatient. And angry.
"There's a cashpoint just around the corner, sir. After the junction with Wardour Street. On the right."
A mental picture accompanied the word cashpoint.
"Yes," said the Old Man. "Four hundred and ninety-nine more."
He left, the bemused shop assistant still staring at the cash on the counter.
Just after a sign for Wardour Street, he saw the machine the man had mentioned. It was tucked around the corner of a building. As he watched, two teenage girls walked up to it, slid a piece of plastic inside, pressed numbers etched onto a metal shelf, then took their plastic back. Seconds later, a whirri
ng sound announced the delivery of bank notes, which they grabbed, giggling.
The giggling stopped when they turned from the machine to see the big, bearded man watching them. They edged away from him, then, once they'd reached the corner, broke into nervous laughter and hurried away.
The Old Man looked at his wallet. There were at least ten cards that would fit into the slot the girls had used. He picked one with a photograph on it first. The machine rejected it. He tried another. The machine returned that one. The same with a third, fourth and fifth. He was getting angry. He needed to look at the internet, so he needed this Globlet device. Which cost money. Which this stupid machine was withholding.
The next card slid inside and stayed there. The machine beeped, and a message on the screen said, Please insert your PIN number, followed by ENTER. The Old Man pressed buttons at random.
Incorrect PIN. Two attempts remaining.
He searched his memory, but numbers were hard. There were some that came into his mind, so he tried them.
Incorrect PIN. One attempt remaining.
He clenched a fist. He knew this screen was not conscious. Even though it asked questions, it was merely mimicking intelligence. It was no more alive than a table or a pencil. Nevertheless, he hated it.
He tried another number.
Third incorrect attempt. Your card has been withheld. Please contact your branch.
Now the machine had stolen his card, and he was being asked to speak to a tree.
Enough.
The Old Man took two paces away from the offending machine. Three people were waiting to use it. The nearest, a big woman in a floral coat, gave him an irritated look.
"Excuse me," she said, "there are other people waiting, you know."
She folded her arms and gave him a glare, assuming he would apologise and scurry away. The British had a long tradition of doing anything to avoid a scene. It was a mystery how such a polite people had successfully invaded so many countries.
The Old Man roared at her. No words, just an animal sound learned long before apes had come down from the trees and ruined the planet.
The woman dropped her shopping bags and ran, as did the two men waiting behind her.
The Old Man faced the cash machine and made a pulling gesture. With an explosion of brick dust, it came away from the wall and fell at his feet. As shrill alarms sounded, the Old Man bent down, ripped the solid metal casing apart and took two fistfuls of cash, stuffing the notes into his pockets before walking back onto the main street.
A light breeze picked up some of the remaining notes and blew them along the pavement. As the Old Man headed back to the shop, a crowd of excited people blocked the entrance to the cash machine, scrambling to pick up the twenty and ten-pound notes that were blowing along the street.
The Old Man dropped a pocketful of notes onto the counter and the shop assistant counted them.
"Well, that's nineteen hundred pounds altogether, so here's your Globlet, sir, and twelve hundred and one pounds change. Thank you, sir. Can I interest you in our three-year extended warranty?"
His customer had already left.
The Old Man had a headache. It wasn't from the six pints of beer he had consumed. Over the centuries, he had grown to enjoy consuming alcohol. At first, he drank because it had a strong effect on him. He would forget, albeit briefly, about his Purpose, the curse that had kept him wandering the planet in a thousand forms for uncountable lifetimes, long before humans had discovered fire. Alcohol was how he had allowed himself to fall in love with Khryseis, to pretend he was one of them. To father a child, a mistake he had vowed never to repeat.
Of all the inventions that had shaped human history, surely alcohol was the most influential. How many declarations of love, or of war, were partially a result of drunkenness? There was something so attractive, and frightening, about the way you could lose your sense of self while drinking. The Old Man had experienced true comradeship, friendship, and love while in his cups. He had seen similarities where once he had seen differences.
But it had been an illusion. On sobering up, the differences were still there, more pronounced than ever when viewed through the lens of self-hatred gifted by a hangover. He had fallen into a pattern of abstinence followed by bingeing that, to his shame, was common among the inferior species around him.
In the end, it wasn't willpower, or his Purpose, that had saved him from becoming alcohol's slave. It was his true form, the real creature looking out of human bodies with golden eyes. His body learned to process alcohol. It took time. Hundreds of generations. But, one night in Russia, as others stumbled away or slept where they sat, while he finished a third bottle of spirits, he realised he wasn't even tipsy.
For decades afterwards, he didn't bother drinking at all. Now, he drank because of the taste. Or, rather, because of the way the taste reminded him of when he'd been able to lose his sense of otherness, if only for a few hours. To fool himself that he belonged. He couldn't fool himself any longer. He didn't belong. Or, rather, maybe he belonged and these clever apes didn't.
He rubbed his forehead. The headache came from staring at this screen, but he couldn't look away. From the moment the bartender had shown him how to find information on the Globlet, he had sat down at a corner table in the darkened pub and stared at it with a mixture of horror and fascination.
Everything was there. The library was an anachronism, a relic from another time. He now had a window which could look into every corner of the planet. Well, not quite. He discovered that if you didn't know which words to use, you were likely to be led down blind alleys that forked off into other blind alleys, which opened into a labyrinth of other venues, none of them relevant.
He wasn't surprised by the amount of copulation available to view on the internet. Every variation was there, every combination. He had seen it all in ancient Greece and during the heyday of the Roman Empire. It had long since lost its fascination.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for. There was a lot of older information about The Deterrent's exploits forty years earlier, and an endless list of news, speculation, and comment about the titans and The Deterrent's return.
His old shame burned within him when he read about the so-called halfheroes, the children of The Deterrent. The Old Man had allowed his bloodline to be diluted among the inferior humans. But he had seen his error and had never repeated it. Sometimes, back when alcohol still affected him, he had found his mind turning to Khryseis, remembering her eyes, her lips, the body she had surrendered to him. The son she had given him. Then he had hardened his heart against his weakness, pushing it away, and re-dedicating himself to his Purpose. This 'Deterrent' was weaker by far, fathering so many. If these halfheroes had children of their own, there was no telling how many mongrels there were by now. There would be no more. He would see to that.
The Old Man sat in the pub until the bartender asked him to leave. By that time, he had reached some conclusions about the flying beings. The uniform appearance of the titans meant they had grown bodies from the same source - the president who claimed them as his servants. And yet the president lived. They did not kill those whose bodies they replicated. In this way, and with their displays of power, they had made their non-human status clear. They were not hiding their otherness. But they were puppets.
Frustratingly, incomprehensibly, they exhibited no sense of purpose at all. They served the whims of humans, taking sides in their ridiculous charades, their pretence that they owned land, that a continent could belong to one set of humans, then, after a conflict, might pass to another. The titans were no better than slaves. They shared the golden eyes of the Old Man, but nothing else. They were lost.
The Old Man walked the London streets, looking neither left nor right. People moved aside to let him pass, some deep instinct warning them to stay out of his way.
The titans would not be lost for much longer. They needed a leader, and he needed to find his purpose. Their time had come. His time had come.
Four days later, back in the pub, the titans themselves appeared on his screen, and on every other screen in the world, to tell him exactly where they were. Only they weren't calling themselves titans anymore. They were the First.
When he heard that word, the Old Man felt something awaken within him, a change as profound as if the planet had shifted on its axis.
He tossed the screen aside and flew, much to the terror of the publican and his customers as he tore a hole in the roof and headed towards the stars.
At cloud level, he looked down at the Thames, twisting through the centre of the city. He followed it west then, when it ended, kept going until he found the coast, and turned south.
He had found them.
28
The Cornwall farmhouse had six bedrooms. Nine titans, three halfheroes, and Saffi were a squeeze. Saffi bought extra bedding and, besides putting mattresses in each room, she and TripleDee lined the two bathtubs in the outbuilding with duvets. The two First who took their three-hour naps in the baths had once been Shuck and Susan and were now the two women who had helped Abos drop an aircraft carrier in an Irish lake.
Daniel had taken four days to recover, initially shrugging off the effects of his near-drowning, then discovering even someone as strong as he was couldn't inhale a few litres of the Atlantic and stop breathing with no ill-effects. He had collapsed the first night and allowed himself to be confined to bed.
Even now, he knew he wasn't entirely himself. He wondered if he ever would be. His strength had returned, but his speed had not. Never the fastest of the halfheroes, he had still been able to out-sprint all but the most highly trained human athlete. Now running made him feel dizzy and nauseous.
For the past two mornings, instead of a jog, he had gone for a brisk walk in the nearby fields and into the wood a mile away. An hour ago, waking early, he'd looked through his emails. After reading one from Palindrome, he'd headed out alone. Now, from the highest point of the wood, he could see the perimeter set up by the military, two tanks standing sentinel at the junction where the village lane joined the main road. To the south, east, and west, it was the same story; the army checking everyone coming in, or going out. Squads of uniformed soldiers walked the perimeter, radioing in to the temporary base in the village. Helicopters had kept up a constant tour of the fifteen-mile diameter area for the first twenty-four hours, until Abos had opened the door of a chopper mid-flight and climbed in. He asked the pilot to return to base and pass on his request for no more helicopter patrols. He reminded them that the First had done nothing to injure or threaten any individual or organisation in Great Britain. He promised they would release a statement soon but, until then, would prefer to be left alone. Strongly prefer.
The Last Of The First (Halfhero Book 3) Page 15