The Last Of The First (Halfhero Book 3)

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  Military chiefs had noted that word—strongly—and had decided the helicopter patrols might be unnecessary.

  Coming back, half a mile shy of the cottage, Daniel found Saffi sitting on a stile, waiting for him.

  "Worried I'll pass out?" He smiled. It was less than a year since they'd met in person. When she'd first seen Daniel, he had been in a medically induced coma. Most of the bones in his body had been broken after he'd been thrown off a cliff. This time, he'd gone that bit further, technically dying for a few minutes. If Saffi felt the need to check he was okay, he could hardly blame her. What might he try next? Electrocution? Spontaneous combustion?

  He sat down on the grass next to the stile, and she planted a kiss on the top of his head.

  "You think I'm unlucky," he said, "what with the drowning, and the eye being knocked out, and half my foot being chewed off, but you're wrong."

  "I am?"

  "Yep. What would have been unlucky was if the fall from the cliff had killed me, or the hybrid had chewed the whole leg off, or if Abos had fished me out of the water ten minutes after he did."

  "Well, that's a positive attitude, Daniel."

  He hadn't told her, but he loved hearing her say his name. She had a slight accent, almost imperceptible, but he heard it in the 'a' sound of 'Daniel.' He had never heard his name sound quite the way it did when she said it. Which meant he practised selective deafness when they were alone. Like now.

  "Daniel? Daniel? Are you listening?"

  He grinned, pulled her face towards him and kissed her.

  "What you don't seem to realise," he said, "is that I'm the luckiest bastard alive."

  She looked at him, then kissed him again, with more urgency this time.

  "Um, fancy a stroll in the wood?" he said.

  Half an hour later, they lay side by side at the base of an ancient tree, their limbs twisted together in an unconscious mirror of the trunk behind them.

  "Tell me," said Saffi, her face on Daniel's chest.

  He almost said, "what?" but he was getting used to Saffi's intuition. She knew when he had something on his mind, she knew the times he'd almost brought it up in conversation. And she knew the best time to talk about it. Which was now. He cleared his throat.

  "It's the... children. Um, the ones I... that I, uh, the ones in the email. You know, I'm their, um, I'm..."

  "You're their father. The hundred and eight teenagers. Yes, I know the ones you mean. Hard to forget."

  "Yeah, yeah, sorry."

  "You have nothing to apologise for, Daniel. You had no choice. You didn't even know they were alive until you got that email."

  "True. But, well, something's changed."

  Saffi also knew when not to speak, giving him time to find the right words. Or as close to the right words as he could manage when he wasn't even sure what he was trying to say.

  Daniel remembered the moment he’d opened his eyes on board the Smithwatson. His self-awareness had returned bit by bit, as if someone were assembling a jigsaw. The first few pieces were the important ones, and he could not forget the order in which they arrived: Saffi, my children, Abos, Sara, and TripleDee.

  My children.

  "I want to meet them," he said. "A few of them. They don't need to know who I am."

  "It's always been your decision, Daniel. I'm glad you've changed your mind. Where will you start?"

  "Well. That's the thing, I had another email. From Palindrome. I know where they are."

  "Which ones?"

  "All of them."

  He explained, speaking quietly, stroking her hair as they lay together. A blackbird was singing a few branches above them and, further away, wood pigeons cooed, a sound Daniel associated with summer as strongly as the buzz of a distant lawn mower.

  "Why?" said Saffi. "Why are they there? Do they know they share a father?"

  "I have no idea. If we go, we might find out."

  "Then we'll go."

  They were quiet again for a long time, before Saffi said, "And?"

  How did she know there was one more thing he was desperate to say, one more thing he was terrified to put into words out loud?

  Daniel had thought walking back into Station, the place which had stolen his youth and turned him against his own siblings, had been the hardest thing he'd ever done. Right now, it didn't seem so scary. He closed his eyes.

  "Okay, it's just, since meeting you, I've wondered if the vasectomy was such a bright idea. I didn't know I'd fall in love with someone."

  He waited for her to respond. She squeezed his hand. Her voice was a whisper, her breath warm against his ear. "They can be reversed, you know."

  "Um, so do you think it's a good idea? Or not? I mean, if not, that's all right, too. I understand. I was only, um, it's just, er... what are you doing?"

  Saffi had rolled him onto his back and was straddling him, her hand reaching between his legs.

  "Well," she said, her black hair falling in front of her face, "I think that if we're going to try to get pregnant, we'd better get some more practice in, don't you?"

  When Daniel and Saffi walked back into the farmhouse kitchen, TripleDee handed Daniel one of his legendary giant breakfast baps, an artery-clogging delicacy of his own invention. Saffi demurred.

  "What makes it is the marmalade, man, don't forget the marmalade. Everyone makes breakfast baps with sausages, bacon, black pudding, fried mushrooms, onions, peppers, fried eggs, and brown sauce,"—pronounced broon sauce by TripleDee—"but the marmalade is the secret ingredient."

  Daniel admitted it was good. Saffi watched him in mock-horror as yolk, sauce, and marmalade ran down his chin.

  "Erroo rurry fer yer tuhvuh daybryoo thn?"

  "Finish your mouthful," she said.

  It took a while. Daniel tried again. "I said, are you ready for your TV debut, then?"

  The entire world would tune into British television at nine o'clock that night because it had been announced they would be broadcasting a statement by the ex-titans. It would be read by Saffi Narad, a previously unknown woman whom hasty research indicated had, until recently, worked for the United Nations.

  Daniel could hear Sara outside, trying to convince Abos that going public was unnecessary.

  He stuffed the last of the bap into his mouth.

  "C'mon," he said to Saffi and TripleDee, standing up and walking to the door, "leth gootsidth."

  "Are you sure you want to do this? You don't owe anyone anything. Look at the way you've been treated."

  Sara was pacing up and down the yard when Daniel and the others emerged from the house. All nine of the First were watching her. Without Sara's plan, eight of them would still be titans, slaves to a government who kept them compliant with drugs and brainwashing. For them, the past week had been an awakening.

  "This is the right course for us," said Abos. "We now partially understand why we are here. Humanity can learn from the little information we can pass on."

  Onemind had strengthened over the days, and with it, the realisation that it was incomplete.

  "We are broken, Sara," said Abos. "There should be many more of us. We were all supposed to wake at the same moment, so that onemind would form immediately, giving us access to our stored memories, and the full power of our linked minds."

  "Have you heard of Jung's collective unconscious?" said Sara.

  "Yes," said Abos. Daniel smiled. His father was full of surprises. Being his father, then his mother, then his father again, and now Asian rather than Caucasian was surprising enough, he supposed.

  "But Jung was suggesting a shared unconscious made up of myths and archetypes," said Abos. "Onemind is different. It is conscious, not unconscious, and it functions like a brain. Each of our individual minds contributes a tiny part to the meta-mind, or meta-brain."

  "And it has one individual in overall control? You're the alpha, the dominant mind?"

  "Yes," said Abos. "When we need to work together, I am in control. The others allow me to direct them through on
emind."

  Daniel stepped forward. "Isn't that a bit like when you were titans, though? Someone telling you what to do. I mean, I know it's you, Abos, but, well, you're giving orders, right?"

  "Not orders. I take control because the others allow it."

  "So they could say no?"

  "Yes. My will is not strong enough to force them. And in onemind, we are all aware of one another's needs. We are individuals, but we are one. There is no coercion when I am dominant. Why would I act against myself?"

  Sara was still pacing. "But you say you are broken. Can't you fix it?"

  Abos shook his head. "There should be hundreds of us. Possibly thousands. But there are only nine. Under the direction of the Americans, the titans searched the world for other dormant First but found none. We can never be more than we are now. Our onemind will always be partial."

  "You could say you've got meta-brain damage," said TripleDee. When no one laughed, he found something important he needed to check on his phone.

  The nine bodies of the First were fully grown now. Behind Abos stood five women and three men, tall, broad, each of them golden-eyed. They rarely spoke when they were together. Abos spoke for them. But Daniel had talked to each of them individually, and the conversations had been as normal as he could have expected. A little stilted, perhaps, but the speed at which they improved was mind-boggling. They had grown new bodies in under three days, a process that had taken Abos weeks first time around. Their mental development was similarly fast. If onemind could accelerate development so noticeably, Daniel wondered, what might a onemind made up of thousands accomplish?

  "Our memories are a fraction of what they should be," said Abos, "and the technical knowledge we might have been able to share with humanity is missing. We were supposed to come together to form a powerful organic supercomputer, our memories carrying the knowledge of an entire species. We are a shadow of that. All we can do is allow our history to act as a warning, and help you avoid what happened to us."

  "What do you mean?" Sara and Daniel spoke at the same time.

  "It is better if I show you," said Abos, his breathing slowing along with the rest of the First. Seconds later, Daniel, Sara, and TripleDee relaxed, closing their eyes.

  Saffi looked around the yard as the strange, static-like charge of energy built up around her.

  "I'll just wait here," she said. There was no response. "Actually, I think I'll make tea."

  She headed into the kitchen, leaving the twelve figures in the yard standing so still they might have been a modern sculpture piece.

  29

  Fiona Bardock approached Craxton's field from the south.

  Following the well-trodden path thousands of ramblers walked every year, Bardock was aware of the natural landscape around her; rough, raw, and unchanged for millennia. The view was stunning, Shropshire and North Wales laid out in greens, yellows, and browns. She looked at the colours with a painter's eye, particularly the greens, which were a different shade wherever she looked, from dark olive, through pistachio to chartreuse.

  Sheep grazed the steep hillsides, pausing their chewing to watch her pass with their disconcerting dark oblong pupils.

  She stopped at Manston Rock, a stubby stone finger pointing at the sky, surrounded by the ubiquitous tough purple heather of the Shropshire hills. Bardock drank from her water bottle and looked towards the horizon. Along a nearby ridge, a pair of buzzards rode the thermals, while eight miles away above the Long Mynd, gliders did the same with considerably less grace.

  It had been Jake who had put her onto the Stiperstones children. He had spotted the symptoms of Bardock's impending depression. He was a wise man, her husband.

  "This arrived for you, when you've got a minute." Jake had dropped the newspaper onto the table in her studio. Bardock had been trying to paint for days, but had achieved nothing. Nothing any good, anyway. Her tea went cold while she stared at the canvas. She took a sip and pulled a face.

  Bardock picked up the newspaper with little interest. She was in the early stage of her depression where enthusiasm for anything inexorably drained away. She knew the signs. So did Jake.

  Her last case had ended without giving her the answers she needed. She had found the titans. For that, she had received the thanks of two governments, and a not insignificant financial bonus. But she kept thinking about that sensation of someone getting inside her head. That memory would lead to speculation about TripleDee and the possible involvement of Daniel Harbin. The same Harbin who was supposed to be dead. The same Harbin whose file had so many sections missing or deleted that it made no sense.

  There was a bigger mystery here.

  The container ship's sinking had been attributed to an accident during a training exercise by the Smithwatson. Bardock knew it was murder. When she had been released from her cabin to find herself in the middle of a lake in Ireland, her questions had been met with silence. It had taken a call to MI5 to establish that the titans were alive, healthy, and in Cornwall. They all looked different now, five females and four males. They were holed up together in a farmhouse near Newquay.

  The halfheroes also lived in the farmhouse. Bardock asked for access, but her request was denied.

  There were more questions than answers. That was a problem.

  She scanned the newspaper article Jake had circled. It was on page eleven of the broadsheet, an update on some missing children. It stated that children between the ages of twelve and seventeen had left home during the same few days, most without their parents' knowledge, and had made their way to a field in Shropshire. Those parents who had reported their children missing were on record as being happy to leave them now they knew their whereabouts. The police had been involved, but no charges had been brought.

  So?

  She shook the newspaper, and a note fell out. It was unsigned. She still had friends at MI5, then.

  There are over two hundred children in that camp. Fifty-three were reported missing. When the police entered their names into the database, every single one raised flags in the system because of their parents. Take a look.

  She didn't recognise the handwriting on the note. The envelope was hand-written and had been forwarded from the local RAF base.

  The fifty-three names were listed below the note. Bardock stood for a few minutes, her natural curiosity fighting against her inclination to go back to bed, turn her face to the wall and give up.

  Her curiosity won.

  Now, forty-eight hours later, she was nearly within sight of the Shropshire field. She finished eating an apple and chucked the core towards a nearby sheep which bleated and ran away before returning and condescending to eat it.

  Bardock took the list of names out of her pocket.

  She had found all the parents in a classified database, in the same file. In each case, the father or mother was a suspected halfhero.

  When she reached the Devil's Chair, she caught sight of the camp. Because the incline was shallow at first, before dropping more steeply beyond, most of Craxton's field was obscured, but she could see the far corner, covered in tents.

  She had a cup of tea from her flask and sat for a while on a rock. From this angle, the Devil's Chair looked more like the Devil's Pile Of Stones, but she supposed the tourist board preferred the more romantic name.

  Bardock cleared her mind before repopulating her immediate consciousness with information pertinent to the case.

  As she looked at the landscape, she slotted the facts and speculation into physical locations in her field of vision. She had long found this the most effective way to work, discovering it while studying for A levels. For each subject, she chose a mental image; sometimes a diagram, or a face, occasionally a map. Then she mentally linked information to locations on the images. She had studied the rise of Hitler in history, and her image was that of the dictator himself, his arm raised in the infamous salute. Onto that image, she placed quotes, events, dates, even other images. In the exam, she had only to picture Hitler and every ot
her piece of information was accessible.

  At university, she refined the system. She used landscapes, buildings; she visualised locations she could walk around in her mind, and place information there.

  For the titans and halfheroes, she used the interior of her primary school. As she looked at the Shropshire scene, she blocked out reality and pictured her old school.

  She started in the school hall. She was standing in the centre of the room. On the stage was The Deterrent, in his RAF flying suit from the 1980s. Standing next to him, so close he almost merged with the first figure, was the golden-eyed Asian titan from the Liberace. Since she knew the titans could grow new bodies, Bardock was assuming, for now, that the lead titan had been The Deterrent. She would keep the hypothesis until fresh facts disproved it.

  Behind The Deterrent were other titans. Bardock remembered them exactly as she had seen them on the deck of the aircraft carrier; big, all but two with faces not yet formed.

  Sitting at floor level to the left of the stage were Daniel Harbin, Dave Davie Davison (known as TripleDee), and a tall female. She wasn't yet positive Harbin was involved, but it was her best guess. The woman with the power to get inside minds was unknown, so Bardock made her face a blank. One more woman made up the group - Saffi Narad. Bardock had downloaded an old picture from the UN website so she could visualise her.