by John McNally
This was the end.
And the girl … What if the boy was right and the mountains did end up crawling with enemies? Then he would have to leave and start all over again.
If all this was true, then time was scarce, the future so very precious.
His lips pursed in frustration.
Heywood the butler, who knew when his Master needed his spirits raised, interrupted to deliver some better news.
“Sir?” he said, gently raising an eyebrow. “The party of neurologists has arrived.”
FEBRUARY 21 14:14 (GMT+3). Intel. OBS post #4, Valley of the Son of St Demetrius, Carpathian Mountains, Romania
Commander Henri Clément of The Commando Hubert flicked open a knife, a lick of silver steel, and began to cut, very carefully, the way his mother had taught him.
He was concealed within a den of banked snow on the ridge opposite the monastery. He enjoyed the extreme environment. He enjoyed the existential loneliness. But most of all he enjoyed the food. For, while crawling through the undergrowth, he had stumbled on a subterranean paradise. Truffles. Three of them, each the size of his thumb.
“Mon dieu …” he gasped as the knife released the hypnotising scent. He was about to weep when his eye was caught by a sight so extraordinary he almost dropped the heavenly fungi.
A golden egg. Splitting in two …
He had to blink. Was the truffle not a truffle but some poisonous fungus? Was he hallucinating? The ruined dome of the monastery seemed to be opening like a great golden beak.
Now a helicopter was approaching fast over the mountains. Skimming the peaks – no radar alarm had sounded! And as if this wasn’t extraordinary enough – SNAP – movement! A dozen metres ahead, a figure, almost human, a bow across its back, was lolloping out of the snowbanks straight for him …
Henri had three Croix de Guerre14, but nothing could stifle his scream as he snapped open the emergency comms link to G&T Romanian Command at Kluge—
“ARRRRGHGHGHGHH!”
“Shh!” the figure insisted, stopping close enough to kiss him, a magnificent, topsy-turvy fairground face.
Shh?
“Blue 4! Confirm?” Henri heard in his headphones, but he remained speechless as Santiago dug a note out of his layers of rags.
It was written in formal flowing script—
The great dome opened and the whup-whup-whup-whup of the radar-cloaked transport helicopter echoed down the shaft into the Great Cavern. The medical party then appeared, winched down in a rescue cage.
There were three of them, escorted by Siguri. Two of them looked distinctly unamused.
“AHA!” said Kaparis, feeling his mood suddenly lift. “Heywood, put the boy aside – but not too far! I don’t want him to miss this.”
The boy must die, thought Kaparis, and soon. He would leave nothing to chance. Not now that he was so close. But before he finished him off, he must let him glimpse the glorious future he’d be missing. He must know that Kaparis had won …
SIXTEEN
Finn felt the world turn as Heywood picked up the test-tube and popped it into a rack on a side cabinet. He had a ringside seat as the glass screen that sealed off the chamber slid open.
“Doctor Leopold and party,” announced Heywood, as the visitors entered the chamber.
“Ah! How good of you to come,” said Kaparis.
The three medical specialists were led in. Two of them stared at the iron lung and optical array in disbelief, while a third, Dr Thomas Leopold, a hipster prince, beamed. His teeth beamed, his forehead beamed, even his blond hair beamed. Kaparis had identified him seven years earlier as the outstanding neurological medical student of his generation, and a personal weakling. Kaparis had extravagantly funded, corrupted and inspired him ever since to the point where Leopold had become the Splice15 program’s chief technician.
Beside Thomas Leopold stood his former classmate and the woman he most admired in the world, the Indian neuro-engineer Dr Nico Sharma, still wearing the surgical “greens” she had been kidnapped in. Leopold thought her beautiful when angry. She was furious.
Their one-time supervisor, the great neurosurgeon Sir James Tattersfield, glowered at the back, a wrinkled owl of a man in thick-rimmed glasses and full evening dress.
“Dr Kaparis!” beamed Leopold. “May I introduce – at long last! – Dr Nico Sharma and Sir James Tattersfield?”
“I’ve heard so much about you both,” enthused Kaparis.
Sir James stepped forward to interrupt.
“Now listen to me, Dr Kaparis, or whatever you call yourself. Leopold has clearly lost his senses. Call the police and have us released! Immediately!”
“Ah Professor, your famous bedside manner. Well, it isn’t your manners I am interested in. It is your expertise.”
“We absolutely refuse to cooperate!” said Dr Nico Sharma, raising her chin in defiance. Like Cleopatra! Leopold thought.
“My dear, let us hope you’re as intelligent as you are proud.”
Spinning his eyes across the optical array, Kaparis called up two files, one on Nico and one on Sir James, and opened them over his screen array. They looked up to see their professional lives laid out above them in scientific papers, documentary clips, awards and commendations.
“Would you mind explaining what the hell is going on?” exploded Sir James.
The Siguri escort bristled.
“Sir James, you will remain calm,” ordered Kaparis from beneath the optical array. “I have brought you here to assist in an operation that will revolutionise medical science and change the world.”
Sir James scowled. “What nonsense is this?”
“The very ‘nonsense’ that you yourself and Dr Sharma have spent your careers researching,” said Kaparis. “I’m talking about repairing damaged and severed nerves with artificial nerve fibres: the dream of neuroscience since Luigi Galvani first animated a frog’s leg.”
As he talked, Kaparis called up a video of twitching frog’s legs, paraplegic patients being tested, and complex technical drawings of medical inventions.
“In theory it’s possible; in practice impossible. The problems are threefold. One – how do you tap into the individual nerve fibres to pick up specific signals, then efficiently translate that signal? Two – how on earth can you build something small enough to be practical? Three – how on earth are you supposed to surgically attach such tiny things even if they could be produced?”
“Don’t teach us to suck eggs,” snapped Sir James.
Kaparis ignored him.
“Dr Sharma, you have managed to transfer two per cent of a signal being sent down a primary nerve via one of your ionic conductors?”
“Two per cent so far,” insisted Dr Sharma.
“Admirable,” slurred Kaparis, “but not much use if, like me, you fancy popping to the shops, or even just picking up a glass of Château Beychevelle.”
Right on cue, Heywood appeared with a bottle and poured them each a glass of ruby magic. Sir James caught a hint of its aroma and allowed himself a moment of respect.
“Sir, I must stop you. A man in your position hopes against hope for a cure. Dr Leopold has clearly lost his head in telling you we have one. We do not. You have broken the law and gone to extraordinary lengths for nothing. We are decades away from any kind of practical breakthrough,” stated Sir James.
“Oh yes? Dear Leopold, would you kindly explain what you and the Zurich team have come up with?”
“Yes, Master,” said Leopold, bursting to tell all.
“‘Master’?” Nico repeated, appalled.
“Yes, Nico, ‘Master’. Let us start with the nerve fibre. For years, you have been engaged in trying to capture individual nerve signals? Right? Well, this is what we call a Splice cup.”
He took a coiled-up cable, one of the cables that Finn had seen stacked in huge numbers outside, and showed her one of the cups fitted at either end.
“This cup has been designed to clamp on to the end of a severed nerve fibre.�
�� He fitted the cup over his fingers to illustrate. “It picks up the electrochemical impulse the nerve is trying to transmit and carries it down one of these cables, made from highly conductive polymer, to the other side of the severed section. What we’re going to do,” Leopold continued, “is attach a thousand of these cups and cables to either side of the break in Dr Kaparis’s spinal column, thus reanimating his entire nervous system. Where you have been working, theoretically, to deliver two per cent of available signal, we will deliver, in practice, one hundred per cent!”
Sir James shook his head sadly. Poor Thomas Leopold was clearly mad.
“One hundred per cent?” Nico repeated in sad disbelief. “Thomas, this is adness!” She had tears in her eyes for her old friend.
“Don’t be such a fool!” barked Sir James, wanting to bring this nonsense to an end. “Even if these things could be manufactured at the appropriate scale, you would never be able to attach them!”
Leopold pointed through the bulletproof glass into the Great Cavern, to the submarine at the centre of the stone circle of particle accelerators. The hold doors of the craft were still open and, lying in them, packed tight like spaghetti, were hundreds and hundreds of Splice cables, each ten metres long with a connector cup at each end.
“But don’t you see? Everything is ready aboard the Vitalis, Sir James,” said Leopold in awe.
“What on earth do you mean? Who are you going to fit them to – a giant?”
“HAHAHAHAHA!” exclaimed Kaparis. “Oh my dear professor! Of course we’re not going fit them to some giant – hahahahahahaaaaa! We’re going to shrink YOU.”
“What?” Sir James whispered, uncomprehending in the laughter that followed.
Laughter from Kaparis. Laughter from Leopold, who looked as if he was about to go totally doolally. Obsequious smirking from Heywood.
“You are all quite mad! Call the British Ambassador!” he demanded.
“Shrink?” Nico demanded of Leopold.
“Yes! A miracle!” said Leopold, his eyes shining.
“Quite,” said Kaparis, recovering. “Here’s something I made earlier.”
And with that, the chamber door hissed open and a small bird flew in.
Wacawacawacawacawacawacawacawacawacawaca …
A tiny helicopter. One of those remote-control toys? thought Nico. But then it landed on top of the iron lung. And two toy soldiers got out … They were no more than a centimetre tall. And human. And moving …
Nico gasped.
Sir James held his breath.
“Say hello, Tyros.”
Pan and Amazon, the two tiny figures from the surviving Apache, met the eyes of the doctors. Amazon, 10mm tall and proud, strode forward as if on a catwalk. Pan simply cackled up at their giant disbelieving faces.
“Pan! Amazon! To your places!” Kaparis ordered, and the two tiny Tyros climbed onto a Petri dish offered by a technician which was then taken out into the Great Cavern.
“What have you done …?” whispered Nico, overcome by fear and fascination as they were carried past.
“Impossible …” said Sir James, feeling each of his sixty-eight years of age.
“It’s called the Boldklub process. And this is only the beginning. Thanks to my latest breakthrough, we now have the ability to shrink you to just a hundred-thousandth of your normal size.”
Even though Finn had had a perfect view of what had unfolded, just like the doctors, he struggled to believe what he had heard.
“One hundred thousand times …? What is he talking about?” he said aloud.
The way Al had explained the Boldklub process to him, you’d need such huge amounts of energy to get anywhere near microscopic scale that it was practically impossible … But Al had also once told Finn that it wasn’t because Kaparis was so evil that made him dangerous, or because he was so intelligent. He was dangerous because he was so imaginative. Maybe he had made the breakthrough he was boasting of … and maybe this operation – the cables, the submarine, the doctors – had been behind his pursuit of the Boldklub secret all along …
But how on earth was it all going to work?
He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
“Leopold, do kindly talk us through what is to happen. I would hate to run out of time.”
“Of course, Master,” said Leopold. “First, let us look at the injury site,” he announced, and he called up an X-ray that, despite the passage of time, caused a stab of pain and self-pity in Kaparis.
“In 2000, Dr Kaparis undertook an experimental medical procedure designed to enhance his physique and extend his life, under the care of his then-wife, Dr Ondine St Emmanuel de Morales.”
Kaparis gritted his teeth as a picture of the extraordinary Ondine flashed up, a Latin-American beauty beyond compare – dark-skinned, head thrown back, demanding attention, magnificent right to the tips of her sharpened green nails.
“This involved injecting the stem cells of panthers into various sites across his anatomy. The extraordinary result was that Dr Kaparis and his wife became forty per cent stronger. Cell analysis showed they were actually getting younger. But then some sort of temporary insanity in his wife – possibly a side-effect of the treatment – led to a domestic dispute that ended in a near-decapitation.”
“She was a most unreasonable woman,” Kaparis managed to explain. He blinked away a flashback of falling against the sword. Of the blood. Of his inability to move … Ondine …
“As we can see from the X-ray, this resulted in a fracture in the spinal cord at the top of the neck, between the first and second cervical vertebrae – so high that Dr Kaparis now lacks automatic lung function, a condition, ironically, known as ‘Ondine’s Curse’.”
Kaparis twitched.
“The spinal fluid is clear and tests indicate nerve cells on either side of the wound are healthy and responsive. The rest of Dr Kaparis’s body has been constantly stimulated by electrodes to maintain perfect musculature, and by spending his life in a negative-pressure ventilator, or iron lung, his chest cavity and all internal organs have remained in perfect condition.”
Leopold tapped at the keyboard and called up a 3D holographic CAT scan of Kaparis to illustrate and animate his plan, an electric green body that hung in the air like a diabolical mannequin. Leopold hit a key and a point of light appeared in the scan’s left thigh.
“Ever since Dr Kaparis discovered the Boldklub process, we decided this procedure was theoretically possible. Two years ago, we began developing and perfecting the Splice hardware. One year ago, we began to plan in detail the operation. Now, here, today, it will come to fruition. The Splice cables and all personnel will be loaded aboard the medical-support craft Vitalis and shrunk via the Boldklub process to a scale one hundred thousand times their actual size.”
Nico let out an uncomprehending curse. Sir James just stared.
“Once at scale, the craft will be injected into the femoral artery and fed via a tiny tube, a cannula, through the arterial system into the neck, as close as possible to the injury site.”
As he spoke, the point of light moved and an animation of the whole operation played out on the hologram.
“Once in the neck, we will pilot Vitalis through the local arterial system until we reach the intervertebral foramina, where we shall anchor. We shall then leave the craft and Sir James will lead us into the spinal column.”
Sir James’s owl eyes almost bulged from his head.
“The submarine’s atomic reactor will be emitting a radioactive pulse, allowing it to be traced in real-time by particle detectors. Manipulation of this pulse will allow the craft to contact us using Morse code. In addition, we will carry radioactive flares in case we get lost in the bloodstream. Simply set one off and you will be evacuated by hypodermic needle. Once we’re in the clear spinal fluid, it will be much easier to navigate and to work. Dr Sharma will be in charge of the distribution and arrangement of the connectors between the two sides of the wound.”
“What?”
Nico said, the power gone from her voice.
Leopold picked up a Splice cable again.
“To give you some idea of scale, we will be around 50 microns tall. A blood cell is usually about 5 microns in diameter. A nerve fibre is less than a single micron thick – just perfect for one of these cups to clip on to.”
He pinched the body of the cup and clipped it on to his fingers again.
“But … there’s a thousand of them?” whispered Nico, wondering if this was all a dream and she was going mad.
“We plan to be on site for ten hours, making one hundred connections per hour. We’ll have a staff of ten to help us – the two nano-colleagues you’ve already met, plus eight more crew members drawn from the senior Tyro group.”
He grinned and gestured outside. There, being escorted into the Great Cavern, were eight more Tyros.
“Each crew member has been trained and programmed specifically for this mission, and should be capable of fitting twenty cables per hour,” Leopold continued.
“More than enough time,” insisted Kaparis.
Leopold turned to Nico and Sir James, trying to transmit his joy to them.
“Just imagine!”
Imagine … thought Finn, trying to digest the implications. Kaparis paralysed was bad enough. The thought of him fit and able and evil was too much to bear. He had to do something – sabotage the mission, get word out, anything. But from here? How? Could he even be in a more difficult position?
He watched the new Tyros filing in.
He’d messed up. Why did he stop to admire the view when he’d reached free air in the Skimmer? Why didn’t he—
Wait … Carla?
There she was – unmistakable at the end of the line of Tyros.
Oh no …
Carla as a Tyro? She must be looking for him. His heart bulged. What a girl. What a sister. What a trooper.
What a mess.
What was she going to do?
The holographic animation showed the nervous system of Kaparis coming back to life.
“By the time we’ve finished, the spinal cord will be linked by a thousand new fibres,” said Leopold.