by John McNally
“She hasn’t drawn a single screen, a single phone, a single piece of hardware. There are no lights even …” said Al, thinking hard.
“So?” said Kelly.
“So they’re off-grid!” said Al.
“Off-grid?” said Delta.
“I mean, living slow – no communications, no Internet, no conventional power. Goodbye modernity – hello total isolation.”
“Total security,” added Commander King.
“Rank all the possible locations by geographical isolation,” said Al to one of the technicians.
Moments later, on the new list, the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki had shot up – to number seventeen.
“What else have we got?” said Al, still manically pacing. “Come on, Li Jun!”
Grandma handed Li Jun a cup of tea and a Welsh cake, looking over the girl’s shoulder at the cloudscapes. “Looks heavenly, dear.”
Heaven …
Something fired in Li Jun’s brain. She thought of stained glass. She thought of a face.
She dived forward and immediately started to draw. Grandma, Al and everyone at Hook Hall watched intently as a face began to appear … A male face, a beard. It wasn’t a very good face, but then Li Jun added another detail that gave it away—
A halo …
Al turned to the technicians and shouted, “Cross-reference with religious buildings! Or a building with some kind of church or chapel in it!”
The technicians entered the filter and a new ranking list was drawn up, by age, materials, isolation and religious use. At number nine on the list was the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.
Then Li Jun added colour to the halo – gold … and a great fissure opened up in her mind. She said the word “Abbot” aloud and immediately started to draw an Orthodox Christian cross …
Now only one name remained on the list.
NINE
Hearing his name called and smelling Finn, Yo-yo ducked out of the rough-and-tumble in the ratters’ yard and ran up to the kitchens. He found the good girl among a forest of legs – Yap!
“Good boy! Come!” said Carla.
She took Yo-yo into the service passage, ran her fingers through her hair and deposited Finn onto Yo-yo’s head.
Finn disappeared into his fur and made his way through to a position just behind Yo-yo’s left ear. His old pilot position. Back home, he’d been able to steer Yo-yo wherever he wanted to go. But now? After so long?
There was only one way to find out.
“Up, Yo-yo! Up, boy!”
YAP!
Finn felt the whole happy mountain of Yo-yo erupt beneath him as he jumped clean into the air.
“Good boy! Through the door!”
“Don’t do anything stupid!” Carla warned, as Yo-yo pushed through the swing doors back into the kitchen.
“What’s over there, what’s on the other side?” Finn demanded, and Yo-yo yapped and ran joyously through the legs, dodging dropped pans and puddles of soup. Finn clung on happily, riding a galloping dinosaur once again, all the old feelings coming back as they broke through the far doors to hit the Forum.
Directly opposite, Finn could see the arched entrance to the catacombs, which Olga had told them led eventually down to the Caverns.
“Through there, Yo-yo,” ordered Finn, and the dog bounded ahead. “Come-by!” he yelled to steer the bounding dog the right way. No one noticed because no one cared about a dog. The ratters were even more invisible than the Carriers, given freedom to roam and licence to kill.
A little beyond the archway was the catacombs door.
“What’s in there?” Finn demanded.
He felt Yo-yo rise as he stood on his back legs and pawed at the handle till it turned, the same as he’d done at Grandma’s house all his doggy life.
The door swung open – and they were greeted by skulls, set into the walls like bricks, the remains of thousands of ancient monks. Yo-yo whimpered.
“It’s all right, boy. Go on.”
They trotted down the skull-studded passageway, claws skittering across the flagstones. Finn heard a distant hum – mechanical? – coming from somewhere beyond, and footsteps too, ahead of them. There!
“Easy, Yo-yo,” Finn urged as they closed on the figure hurrying ahead of them. Finn remembered her as the one who’d struck Carla the blow – the Abbot’s secretary. Could she be on her way to the Caverns? Where else would she be going?
“Follow the lady. Easy. Nice and slow,” ordered Finn.
Yo-yo obligingly padded after her as they wound through the catacombs, keeping at a steady distance. Eventually they emerged at the top of a steep stone staircase.
The secretary was disappearing through an archway far below and the hum was getting louder.
“Down you go, boy.”
When they reached the bottom, Finn saw the archway was the entrance to a tunnel into the bedrock. Three burly Siguri stood guard.
“Lie down!” ordered Finn, so that Yo-yo would remain hidden from view. How were they supposed to get through? Wouldn’t the Siguri just kick back a dog?
With a squeak, a solution presented itself. A few feet ahead, a brown rat emerged from a drain cover. Immediately, Yo-yo’s body twitched.
“That’s right, boy! Chase the rat! Fast, boy!”
YAP!
“Hey!” one of the Siguri called in surprise, as a dog exploded out of the darkness. He raised his gun – but just as quickly one of his comrades stayed his hand.
“Ratter! Let him do his job!”
All three stepped aside as the rat sped forth, with Yo-yo snapping at its tail – YAP YAP YAP!
As soon as they were clear of the Siguri, Finn called out, “STOP! Let it go! Stay …”
They had entered the start of a natural cave system. For the first time, electric light and not oil lamps illuminated the glassy walls. Then, as the tunnel opened out into a small cavern, came the next surprise—
A monorail! A gleaming steel rail winding down into the heart of the mountain. Four open carts were just leaving the rail’s end, the secretary the only passenger, drawn by a humming electromagnetic current.
Finn had left the Middle Ages and walked into the twenty-first century.
“Go, Yo-yo! Follow!”
YAP! – Yo-yo pelted forward and jumped into the last cart, just as it picked up speed.
The descent that followed was, to Yo-yo’s mind at least, tremendous fun – carts flying along the rail as they snaked down a crystal flume carved by millions of gallons of water over millions of years; walls worn smooth and streaked in all the colours of a bruise. But the real wonder lay at the end: the twisting tunnel levelled and the carts slowed as the flume opened out suddenly into a huge cavern.
Finn was stunned. It was a vast natural cave full of the shapes and shadows of nightmares, a warped and irregular void the size of the CFAC, arc lights bouncing a chromatic cacophony off its weeping crystal walls.
On the bed of what Finn thought must have once been an underground lake lay containers and machinery and equipment of every kind: banks of command computers worked on by dozens of young technicians, bearded hipster types in uniform casual clothing. All of which was remarkable. But what really took Finn’s breath away was at the cavern’s heart – arranged in a circle were a dozen huge blocks of metal and wiring. Immediately Finn knew he was looking at a great ring of particle accelerators. A Boldklub henge, capable of creating a subatomic magnetic field so powerful it could shrink matter. He’d been in one just like it …
Finn gaped and tried to take it all in.
He had to try and get closer. No dog could wander here unseen and unchallenged. Stalactites and stalagmites formed a spiked perimeter that gave way to a river at the far end of the cavern, a torrent that disappeared into the rock as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Yo-yo, into the woods, boy. Hide!” Finn ordered.
Yo-yo grasped the instruction and jumped from the cart into the calcite jungle. Finn urged
him through it, trying to see what he could. But the closer they got to the equipment, the more mystery he found.
In one area were crates and crates of long cables. In another was equipment that looked like subaqua gear: oxygen tanks and futuristic-looking wetsuits bristling with technology. There even seemed to be small surfboards. Most bizarrely of all was an extraordinary beached submarine, a fat steel shark the size of a bus with two thick arms and two giant impeller5 fists.
What on earth would a submarine be doing down here? Was it something to do with the underground river at the cave’s end? And how on earth could they have got such massive components down here?
Whatever it was, Finn thought, the whole place was pure Kaparis. He hadn’t just found a Tyro hive – he’d hit the jackpot. But what next? This place would surely have all the communications they’d need to get a message out, but how could he get Carla anywhere near it?
He needed a plan.
He turned Yo-yo round and they started to make their way back through the stalagmites.
Beeeep Beeeep Beeeep – then came the next revelation. An alarm sounded and lights started flashing on an area of the cave floor, then Finn looked up.
There was a gap in the roof of the cavern. A large circular shaft that rose through the rock, manmade, lined with concrete and now illuminated by landing lights.
High above, at the very top of the sleeping monastery, the great dome, apparently ruined, stirred. Exquisite engineering whirred just beneath it and the massive gold hemisphere split in two, the halves cleaving open like a giant Fabergé egg.
Finn urged Yo-yo to stray to the edge of the stalagmites to get a better look and watched amazed as a slice of snow-cloud sky began to expand at the very top of the shaft – then a wap-wap-wapping aircraft appeared, blotting out the sky. Finn knew the sound well. Helicopters in whisper mode, coming in to land … Flying machines descending into the mountain.
And there, waiting to greet them on the cave floor, was a reception party headed by the Abbot.
“Hey! Get rid of that dog!” cried a Siguri, spotting them and reaching for his gun.
They had seen enough.
“GO!” ordered Finn. “Home, boy!” And Yo-yo ran for the mouth of the flume and the monorail, just as the carts were starting their automatic ascent.
“In the box! What’s in the box!” cried Finn, and Yo-yo leapt.
By the time they made it back to the Forum, handbells were echoing down every passageway, summoning the Carriers and stirring Tyros and tutors alike. Ding-a-ling-a-ling!
Finn steered down towards the library in search of Carla. Carriers were streaming out and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the freezing air.
YAP!
Carrier children were appearing from every nook and cranny and hurrying along to the Primo’s dais. It was like a fever breaking out.
Carla saw Yo-yo and ducked out of the crowd to intercept him in the shanty shacks.
“Good dog!” she said, giving him a stroke, and picking out Finn like a flea from his fur. Even at nano-scale she could see how wide his eyes were.
“I know what’s in the Caverns and it’s definitely not cave paintings. There’s a Boldklub machine. We have to get you down there,” said Finn. “This is a save-the-world situation!”
“Again?” said Carla. “Are there phones?”
“There’s everything!”
“How do I get there?”
“You can fly or take the train – long story – but you’re going to need help.”
Carla pushed her way to the front of the Carrier queue at the dais. The Primo and his assistants were snapping out orders, as service bells rang and disembodied voices barked down the speaking tubes.
“Primo! I have to get to the Caverns and I need your help,” Carla started.
“Get to the kitchens with Olga,” the Primo ordered without raising a blind eye.
“No. Something has happened that’s so important the world needs to know …”
“The world has changed,” the Primo snapped back. “If you try anything now, you’ll kill us all.”
“What?”
“The Master is in the mountain.”
FEBRUARY 20 16:48 (GMT+3). Great Cavern, Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki
On compressed air pads the iron lung slid in stately fashion across the cavern floor to a side chamber, specially adapted to include a domed screen array and all the usual support apparatus. The adaptations, as ever, were the work of eccentric Scots architect Thömson-Lavoisiér, master builder to the criminal cognoscenti.
Inside the iron lung, Kaparis was not just a paralysed hunk of meat. He was a coiled spring.
“Welcome home, sir,” Heywood, the butler, said as they docked, inwardly beaming. They had met in a mental hospital twenty or so years before, both recovering from nervous breakdowns. It was the place where Kaparis had forged his cruel ambition, and where Heywood had found a god he could worship. There was nothing he liked more than to see his Master happy.
And Kaparis was happy.
Home. The monastery and its mountains. He’d always loved it up here, perched between East and West, heaven and earth, between impossibility and experience.
He cast a reflected eye out of the optical array that encased his head and took in the great circle of accelerators he’d started building five years before. Over the course of the day they had been rigged into an entirely new configuration and the mathematics of the Time=Place breakthrough had been incorporated into the control code.
He could not wait to try it out. The Abbot hovered in obsequious attendance. All it needed was an order.
“Fiat lux6,” Kaparis declared …
Twenty-two minutes later, a perfect white orb of energy glowed and spun and throbbed deep within the mountain. The bearded young technicians held hands in collective reverence. The noise had been tremendous as it developed, white lightning cracking like candyfloss around the core before resolving into this silent, glowing miracle.
Boldklub. At last. And in a more perfect form than had ever been created – of that Kaparis was sure. The Time=Place breakthrough meant he’d needed just a tiny fraction of the energy that Al and the Hook Hall team had been using; it also meant it would be many, many times more powerful.
His eyes flicked to the Abbot.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Get in,” he commanded.
The Abbot’s eyes nearly popped from his burnt head and he broke into a fearful sweat. But a lifetime’s love of bullies kicked in. The Master had chosen him. This was not a privilege to be wasted on an underling.
“Oh Master! I had never in my wildest dreams—”
“Get on with it,” snapped Kaparis.
The Abbot walked towards the hot area, paused, then ran and threw himself in. The vortex swallowed him with barely a ripple.
The technicians held their collective breath.
After observing for a few seconds, Kaparis ordered, “Kill it!”
Power was cut and the orb evaporated into glitter. The technicians blinked and squinted. There was nothing there. No orb, no Abbot.
Yet up close?
“Find him,” Kaparis ordered.
The technicians moved forward in a line, scanning the ground with cameras, looking, searching, until—
“Yes!” one cried.
Kaparis flicked to the feed.
There was the Abbot on the floor, astonished, picking himself up to stand just 10mm tall …
At last the path was clear.
Only the tiniest problem remained. And he would soon be dealt with.
The years of waiting were over. Tears, actual salty unfamiliar tears, ran down the much-moisturised skin of his cheeks and his mouth just managed to move and whisper three words: “Quod erat demonstrandum7”.
He had never felt so alive.
“Heywood? Call the doctors.”
TEN
FEBRUARY 20 18:18 (GMT+3). Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki
“CARRIERS!” the tutors cried from their quarters.
“CARRIERS!” the Tyros cried, just to burn off their excitement.
Even the ratters picked up on the mood and chased each other through the cellars and stores, barking madly, running back up to the kitchens for another fill of fervour and to take in the preparations for the feast.
And through it all Carla searched, in the snatched moments between scrubbing floors, lighting lamps, washing pans, for Santiago. He was their only hope now. He and the dog collar, lost on the mountain.
Kaparis … Finn kept thinking. Here … Just a few hundred feet beneath their feet. A sitting duck. They had to get word out. But tracking Santiago down without asking the other Carriers, without the risk of one of them telling the Primo, was proving difficult.
Then, amid the chaos, as she emptied a bucket, Carla heard someone shout: “Santiago!”
She turned. A cook was roaring at the black iron furnace at the kitchen’s heart, kicking a grill at its base. “Santiago!” Suddenly the fire within the furnace glowed and responded.
“He’s underneath!” shouted Finn at her ear. “He must be underneath!”
Carla dumped the bucket and took a chance, ducking out of the fray and heading for the cellars.
There they found him, working the bellows beneath the furnace, sending blasts of air into the fire; a dirty, vital job.
“Santiago!” said Finn, spotting him first.
He scrambled away like an animal when he first saw Carla.
“No! Angelli!”
“It’s OK. I just want to talk to you,” said Carla, softly.
He tried to look away from her, wary.
“I just have to ask you a question. When you found me in the woods – was there anything else with me?”
“In mountain.”
“That’s right. Did you find a collar too?” Carla mimed a collar around her own throat. “I had a dog collar with me.”
Santiago’s face corkscrewed in confusion.