by John McNally
“There is no means. We are not meant to exist,” the Primo said. “There are no phones, no electric. Even fires do not burn by day. We are made to live as of old.”
Finn looked at the bells and the speaking tubes hanging around the dais and started to understand. This place was undetectable.
“There are NRP machines in the infirmary, but nothing else,” said the Primo.
“What are NRP machines?” asked Carla.
“Neuroretinal programming,” explained the Primo. “A probe is put through the eye into the brain, to program Tyros with expertise, strength, character.”
“That’s what made you blind …” Carla realised, appalled.
“The Master searches care institutions across the world for children of exceptional intelligence. I am from a local orphanage, but others are from the farthest corners of the earth. If we are suitable for NRP, we become Tyros and begin our training. If NRP fails, but we are still of use, we are put to work with the Carriers – local unwanted children,” the Primo said. “If we are not of use, we die.”
Finn felt Carla give a shiver.
“Your Master is a monster,” she said.
“We are here. Nowhere else,” said the Primo, dead simple.
At Carla’s ear Finn said, “These NRP machines must use computers of some kind, they must be connected to something?”
“Primo, these machines, are they computers? Do they have electricity?”
“They are connected by wire to the Caverns, but no Carrier can go there.”
Finn’s ears pricked up.
“What caverns?” asked Carla.
“Beneath us. Great halls within the mountain.”
“What is in them?”
“We cannot know. But flying machines go there at night sometimes.”
“Flying machines?” said Carla.
“We have to get out and tell someone about this,” insisted Finn. “We have to get off this rock!”
“In the morning, I have to leave, I have to get help,” Carla told the Primo.
“You will never make it. First you have to escape the Siguri, then the peasants – who all depend on the Protectorate – then the elements themselves.”
“Santiago gets out,” said Carla. “How else did he find me?”
“They know Santiago will never leave. He was the unwanted runt of some peasant girl. As a babe he was left to die in the snow, but an old crone heard his cries, rescued him from wolves and nursed him back to health. Later, when she was dying, she brought him here. He knows nothing else.”
“I got dragged across half the world by a mad Tyro – I’ll make it,” said Carla.
The Primo, not used to being challenged, tilted his perfect chin and turned his blind eyes on her. She felt as if they were staring through her.
“For every runaway the Siguri catch, they let the Tyros kill another five Carriers for sport. To set an example.”
Finn sank back against Carla’s scalp, challenge fading in the face of such cruelty. A lump rose in Carla’s throat.
“Baptiste was the worst,” the Primo added, more conciliatory. “We are grateful he is dead. He would have killed me, but the tutors stopped him.”
“Why?”
“They need me. For the Carriers to be effective slaves, they must be led,” he said simply.
Carla looked around at the ragged Carrier kids. They were all shapes and sizes, all colours, all abilities and disabilities. They certainly needed someone.
“This place is like an evil fairy tale,” Finn said in Carla’s hair.
“We’ve got to help them,” Carla insisted. “Primo, if I can get one message to the authorities, important people – and soldiers – will come, will stop this.”
The Primo silently considered the matter and Carla stared at his face and wondered what it must be like to be without sight in such a place, a darkness within darkness, and yet be so strong.
“Nothing can be done before the spring melt.”
“Before spring?!”
“Follow Olga. Tomorrow we will make you a Carrier. Live as she lives, do as she does. As long as you work hard, you will be safe.”
FEBRUARY 20 03:17 (GMT+2). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea
Kaparis did not by nature sleep.
He seethed.
Usually Heywood would knock him out with a powerful sedative, but Kaparis had refused, wishing instead to pickle himself in fury and self-pity. He considered that he had got everything he had in life through application, imagination and sheer hard work. But never once had he had any luck – despite having inherited his vast wealth, good looks, charm and a brain the size of a small planet.
It wasn’t fair. Other people got lucky all the time, while he had to slog his guts out. Or at least other people’s guts, which was frankly messy.
Nothing was fair …
Then Heywood interrupted his musings and said, “Sir? The Abbot is on the line.”
“At this hour?”
Moments later, coloured bars of data danced on his life-support monitor, like nymphs in spring, and Kaparis ordered: “Bring me the head of Baptiste!”
On the screen above him, the Abbot presented the gory remains of the Tyro’s head on a cushion, like some precious jewelled thing.
“We retrieved it from a bear den on the Kalamatov Ridge!”
“HAAAHH!” Kaparis laughed, baring his teeth like a hyped primate.
“And where is she? Are you keeping her back as a surprise? Oh, I can barely stand it!”
“Who, Master?”
“THE SALAZAR GIRL!” Kaparis roared.
The Abbot was clueless.
“Three of them disappeared in China,” he explained to the Abbot, as if to a fool. “Baptiste, Carla Salazar, and, very likely, Infinity Drake. If Baptiste walked all that way, do you think for one moment he would have left them behind?”
“We carried out an extensive search, Master …”
“RUBBISH!”
Fools. Morons. Scum. Could they not FOR ONCE match the scale of his intellect? He gurgled with rage, unable to speak a moment, as the Abbot whimpered …
“We scoured the mountain! We can assure you he was quite alone. All we found was a dog …”
Kaparis almost suffered a seizure.
A dog?
A dog?
A dog with a supernatural sense of smell that had successfully traced its 9mm master before? A dog idiot enough and faithful enough to follow that scent for three thousand miles?
“Get me a picture of Infinity Drake’s dog!” snapped Kaparis.
An image flashed up on the screen array. Yo-yo. A vision of joyous furry idiocy.
“Was it, by any chance … this dog?” asked Kaparis.
The Abbot gulped. It was a thousand times cleaner than the one they’d found, but it was the same dog.
“We thought he must have picked it up along the way …” the Abbot tried to explain.
“WHERE IS IT?”
The Abbot’s mind was blank. He dimly remembered someone kick it aside. He scrabbled around for some consolation. “Perhaps the Carrier children have it? They have value as rat catchers. We will have the whole complex searched! If there is a dog – if there is a girl – we shall slay them!”
The Siguri chief beside the Abbot was nodding vigorously, but Kaparis slammed on the brakes—
“NO! Don’t you see what this means?”
His mind was a spinning Catherine wheel. If the dog was there, then Drake was there. If so, where? If Baptiste had brought the girl with him then was Drake somewhere on the girl? But where was the girl? On the mountain? In a bear?
“Find the bears, slice them open. The Salazar girl has to be somewhere—”
“Or Santiago found her!” exclaimed the Abbot.
“Santiago?”
“The idiot boy. The trapper.”
“The hunchback?” said Kaparis, vaguely remembering the wretch.
“Sometimes he finds lost souls. He was out late on the mountain – we question
ed him. But not about a girl …”
“Brilliant!” gasped Kaparis.
“Really?” said the Abbot.
Kaparis’s voice fell to a rasping conspiratorial whisper. “If Drake is hidden somewhere in the monastery, we’ve caught him, with or without the girl.”
No one was dumb enough to ask the obvious question: how? How do you catch someone 9mm tall in a complex the size of a cathedral? Nobody asked, because they knew the Master always came up with an answer more fiendish than they could ever conceive.
Nano-radar4, thought Kaparis. They could scour the buildings, scour the mountain. But Drake could hide from it behind steel, behind rock. But why would he? If he didn’t know they were looking for him, he would have no reason to hide. We must do it by stealth, thought Kaparis, we must lure him out into the open.
“We must set a trap, we must bait it …” Kaparis thought aloud.
What did Infinity Drake want more than anything in the world?
His father …
With a blink, Kaparis wiped the image of Yo-yo from his screens and directed his optically controlled cursor to retrieve a file marked ARCHIV23874378KAP-ENCRYPT. The title read: “Intel. report 498090bb – Drake, E.”
It was the report Kaparis had commissioned thirteen years before into the mysterious disappearance of Ethan Drake, father of Infinity, during an experiment at a lab in Cambridge. He opened it across the screen array. Kaparis knew it almost by heart, though it had always posed more questions than answers, always deepened the mystery.
Ethan had built a machine – the forerunner of the Boldklub machines – a machine that proved his genius. It was not just a masterpiece of science and engineering, it was a work of art. It was more than the sum of its parts, more than all it was designed to be. It reached out beyond the boundaries of physical laws into the unknown. Kaparis had been furious. How could he compete? First he had lost the love of his young life to Ethan, now he had lost the future. Why? It made no sense. Kaparis considered himself the supreme applied human intelligence. Perhaps you could be too perfect?
Or did Ethan Drake simply have all the luck? If he did, it ran out the day he attempted an unwise experiment in quantum teleportation. He had thrown himself into the subatomic magnetic vortex at the heart of his machine … and disappeared without a trace. Not an atom of him remained. No one understood why.
Kaparis had taunted Infinity Drake with the existence of this report when their paths had crossed in Shanghai, taunted him too that Ethan had chosen suicide over life with his wife and newborn child. The boy had been enraged; he was clearly obsessed with his father’s disappearance.
Here was the bait.
Now for the trap. If the boy was in the monastery, then …
Then out of nowhere it finally happened.
Luck.
As Kaparis turned his rational mind from nano-radar to all the practicalities and complexities of designing a trap, and a miniature jail, his eyes and his subconscious mind drifted across Ethan Drake’s original notes. The notes were rough – fast, shorthand equations, sketches like cartoons, thoughts caught and set down as they happened. Numbers and letters and symbols that danced down the page, all the way down to the final mysterious biro scribble: L = Place? Mysterious because, in conventional physics, L represented locomotion. And “Locomotion = Place?” was an impossible and perplexing statement. But because on this occasion he wasn’t concentrating, Kaparis suddenly saw with his subconscious what the scribble really was: Ethan Drake had written the L lopsided. Because the L was actually not an L at all. The two lines of the L were in fact the crudely drawn hands of a clock—
Time! In Ethan Drake’s hand, the cockeyed L was Time.
L = Place? became Time = Place?
Kaparis convulsed. His mind overloaded. Suddenly Ethan’s notes began to come to life, growing and taking shape in three dimensions and glorious Technicolor. The whole system sprang to life in his head, the genius of Ethan Drake, dancing for him, only him …
Time = Place? The fabulous conclusion changed everything.
It had been there all along. Yet only he, Kaparis, had finally seen it.
The Boldklub fractal equations that he had so long sought, for which he had spent years terrorising and blackmailing Al Allenby and the G&T, were now blindingly obvious.
And there was more, so much more … The implications …
It was as if he had climbed out of a propeller plane and strapped himself onto a rocket.
He was about to seize control of the future.
SIX
FEBRUARY 20 08:53 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK
SPLASH!
Six foot six and sixteen stone of pure military meat hit the muddy water at the foot of the five-metre wall, sending it in all directions at once.
Unstoppable, Captain Kelly of the SAS (seconded to the G&T’s informal military detachment) hammered every muscle in his body towards the next obstacle on the course that ran through the woodland surrounding Hook Hall, the stately home and laboratory complex in Surrey that served as the HQ of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee.
Thirty metres of monkey walk lay ahead. Kelly grabbed the first bar and began to swing beneath the frame, enjoying the pain, loving it, the complications of the abortive Monte Carlo mission forgotten for a few blissful moments.
And they had to forget. All who had experienced life at nano-scale had found it difficult to adjust to life back at normal size, but more than anything, life without Finn …
THUD!
A four-inch, six-ounce throwing knife, travelling at 130mph, split the surface of the target post, transmitting the concentrated intent of the young woman who threw it from the far end of the Zen-white martial arts studio in the Old Manor.
Flight Lieutenant Delta Salazar bent her body over and took up her second position. When she wasn’t on fire, chasing down Tyros on motorbikes, she was ice. Lukewarm tears were just not her thing. Except when it came to her little sister. About Carla – still missing, possibly captured, possibly dead … she was a complete mess.
Hence the yogic knife-throwing routine she indulged in every morning to try and clear her mind.
THUD!
Crinkle.
Engineer Stubbs unwrapped a boiled sweet, popped it into his mouth and began to suck. It was a twenty-two-calorie Werther’s Original, containing soya lecithin and flavouring, and it was the first solid to pass his lips in forty-eight hours.
He was in his chaotic workshop in the old stables at the back of Hook Hall. He had not taken an active role in the Monte Carlo mission as he didn’t “travel well” and just the thought of going to France caused him an upset tummy.
Also, he knew it would all go wrong. It was his default position.
He was a man not of action but of make do and mend. In his time at nano-scale he had improvised a jet-powered jeep and a hydrogen balloon on the hoof, as well as having designed the Ugly Bug experimental nano-vehicle.
Fat lot of good it had done poor Infinity though, he thought …
VVRVRRVRRRRRRROOOOOM!
The De Tomaso Mangusta had been designed to take the breath away, a beautiful piece of jet-age engineering built for speed and named Mangusta, or mongoose, to imply it would eat its 1960s rival, the AC Cobra, for breakfast. With Dr Al Allenby’s customisations, it was capable of lunch and dinner too. Al didn’t just drive it round the runway at Hook Hall – he tried to plough it into the earth, so brutal was his cornering, so crude his acceleration. The thrill ride used to take his mind off things.
Used to.
He passed the Start/Finish line for the ninth time at 145mph – VVRVRRVRRRRRRROOOOOM! – and saw the chequered flag.
The signal that the Monte Carlo post-mortem meeting was about to begin.
With a sigh, Al slowed, left the track, and drove down through the complex to the hangar-like building known as the CFAC (Central Field Analysis Chamber). The huge doors parted as he approached and he drove straight into the vast concrete space that w
as dominated by a ring of particle accelerators capable of whipping up an electromagnetic vortex that could shrink all matter.
His Boldklub machine. It had been used first during Operation Scarlatti, when Finn had first got caught up in the nano-world and where, somewhere, he remained. Now it stood idle, waiting for his return.
Al crushed the lump that rose in his throat and spun the Mangusta to a handbrake halt at the centre of the array.
Commander James Clayton King, the Hook Hall supremo, on his way up the steel gantry steps to the control gallery, didn’t look down, break step or in any way acknowledge him. The impeccable figure who had coordinated saving the world any number of times hated showing off of any sort.
In moments, the G&T Committee were assembled: engineers, scientists, thinkers, soldiers. There were no formalities. Commander King reviewed the Monte Carlo débâcle using video to illustrate the handover, the roar of the motorbike, the pop of the empty cigar tube, the chase and kill. When the recording finished, he concluded: “We‘re not the first to leave the casino having incurred a loss. We knew this could happen, which is why we took precautions. Kaparis duped us. We duped him.”
Pictures flashed up of the dead rider and the girl who’d made the exchange.
“Tyros, of course. Note that they’ve taken to wearing coloured contact lenses to disguise the scarring left by the brain programming.”
The last known picture of Kaparis flashed up, able-bodied and evil, standing with a group of super-rich investors in Zurich, Switzerland, sometime in the late 1990s.
Al had to look away.
“As ever, he is playing games, displaying his power.”
“What goes on in that pretty little head of yours …?” Delta wondered aloud as she imagined three separate ways she’d like to snap that pretty little head off.
“We go again,” said Kelly. “We have no choice. He knows we have no choice. We wait for him to make contact again and we start again.”
“And we look ridiculous, again,” said Stubbs gloomily.
“Shut up, Stubbs,” said Kelly automatically.
“We are prepared for every eventuality,” said King. “Except one.”
“What?” said Al.