by John McNally
Back in the Vitalis, the siren stopped.
ASSSTSTSTSTSTSTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS …
The reactor did not explode in the first vital moment as planned. Instead, its fuel began to burn and it dropped like a white-hot diamond, through its housing in the craft, then through the hull, then on and down, as hot as the core of the sun, through blood and brain tissue, as it built towards critical mass …
The first thing Kaparis noticed was an irresistible urge to twitch his left eye.
The first thing Kelly noticed was that Kaparis had suddenly stopped talking.
The first thing Finn, Carla and Nico noticed, at the back of the eye, was the sudden orange glow behind them. Instinctively they clung to each other.
The second thing Kaparis noticed was the worst pain any human had ever felt.
At nano-scale, the explosion was huge. At normal scale, it was just enough. Enough of the nuclear fuel in the reactor had reached critical mass and detonated – not as planned beneath the frontal lobes, but directly behind the left eye, gravity having taken it burning through the optic canal and out of the skull because Kaparis was leaning over Kelly. So although the eye socket protected the brain, nothing, sadly, could be done for the eye.
The energy released naturally took the path of least resistance out. SSSSSSKAAAAAABAAABBABAAAALOOOOOOSH!
Kaparis’s eye literally exploded.
“ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRHGGGHHHH!”
Finn sensed a moment of perfect noise and blinding light as they became instant nothingness.
“ARRRRHGGGHHHH!” Kaparis screamed as his eye spattered across Kelly’s face.
Kelly had seen many horrors, had caused a few. But he’d never experienced anything as revolting as this. He passed out.
“ARRRRHGGGHHHH!” Kaparis clutched his burning empty eye socket. “INFAMY!” The pain. The frustration. The shattered remnants of his eye all over Kelly. “ARRRRHGGGHHHH!”
BOOM! BOOM! DRTRTRTRT!
The enemy closing in.
The indignity!
Kaparis did not linger – SPLASH!
Into the blackness and the maelstrom, into the gaping yaw of hell he dived, the freezing, rushing water possessing him, spinning and sending him down, down into the ice-cold deep …
“ARRRRHGGGHHHH!”
THIRTY-SIX
FEBRUARY 22 08:53 (GMT+3). BODY OF CPT KELLY
Finn was in a dream. It was a dream he often had, of walking along a perfect white beach on a beautiful day with a load of people he knew, and ahead of him was his mum – she was always ahead – and, as he ran along the perfect white sand, he reached out for her and she reached back to catch his hand, and always at the moment their hands were about to touch … he would wake, or she would disappear, or the dream would change. And every time, even though he knew he was in a dream, he thought, One day, it’s going to happen; we’re going to touch …
He woke up with a gasp.
He was still in the mask. He was breathing. He was floating in a perfect whiteness, a perfect white ocean. Was this the end of life? Was this heaven?
Someone was swimming towards him. Mum? He looked closer. It was Carla.
“Are we alive?” he asked, incredulous.
“I think so,” said Carla, unsure herself. “Look!”
There was another body coming towards them, from below, deep in the water, riding a scoot at speed through the whiteness – Nico. Shouting, insisting, already sure.
“His eye! We’re on the surface of his eye!”
“Kaparis’s?”
“I don’t think so …”
The implication was clear, but so incredible that it took a moment to sink in.
The face. Kelly. The blast.
They couldn’t be …? Could they?
Finn still had the laser scalpel across his back.
“DIVE!” he shouted.
FEBRUARY 22 08:55 (GMT+3). Great Cavern, Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki
DRTRT!
The last shots were fired by the units of the relieving force that Kelly and Delta had led down the monorail tunnel. The last of the Siguri raised their arms and signalled their surrender. Technicians, cowering among the stalagmites in the crystal fringe of the Great Cavern, did the same. Troops spread out, ordering them out.
Yvette Dupuis spotted it first – the technicians being herded out of the stalagmites were avoiding crossing the henge.
“ARRÊTEZ!”
Instantly, the troops in the Great Cavern came to a halt.
Nobody moved. The injured groaned. In a wisp of fine dust, she spotted it. A perfect line of laser light leading from the bottom of one of the particle accelerators to the next. A trap.
“ICI!”
In the minutes that followed, while the booby-trap explosives rigged around the henge were being dismantled, it was established that Kaparis had got away. A search was initiated for a secret escape tunnel and specialist divers were summoned to take a look in the river.
Kelly was located, badly injured and unconscious on its bank. Al, Delta and even Stubbs were all there when he was brought round.
Kelly saw their faces … and knew the mission must have ended in some kind of disaster.
“Kaparis got away,” said Al. “Did you see him?”
“I …” said Kelly, wringing out his traumatised brain, trying to remember as the medics worked on his wounds. “I can’t think, I …”
Stubbs, distracted, picked up what he thought was a pickled egg. It turned out to be half a fried eyeball.
“That’s his! I remember!” yelled Kelly, recalling the moment it was propelled directly down at him. But his mind was shot by battle shock and he couldn’t remember the message Kaparis had growled down at him before his head exploded, or which way he had gone.
For once, Delta didn’t hold back. She abandoned emotional control and cried. She let herself sob for Carla. After they had come so far …!
Al put an arm round her. He felt her sorrow and knew her despair. Any words of comfort or reassurance stopped dead in his mouth. They had lost him, and perhaps their last best chance. He’d tried everything. He knew Finn would have tried everything too. In the heart of the mountain, the pit of the earth, he thought he’d never been at a lower point in his life … Would Finn exist for him now – like his mother and father existed – as a dream more than a reality, a memory more than a hope?
Then his own mother arrived. Al would have to tell her the bad news, and the thought of this broke him, the thought of letting her down and breaking her heart all over again …
Violet Allenby was helped out of a monorail cart. She took a good look at the Great Cavern and thought it the womb of hell.
Stubbs watched in silence as Kelly was moved onto a stretcher. Stubbs was no good at times like this. He didn’t get on with emotion or upset. He would just take his bag of engineering tricks and hide himself away. Try and find a cup of tea. Polish up his screwdrivers and micrometers …
Kelly saw him turn away as they lifted the stretcher, saw Delta wailing, saw Al saying something to Grandma, saw her shoulders trying not to sag, saw the whole mad cavern …
Flash, Flash, Flash went his eye, bluish flashes pricking his vision, like a twitch. But it wasn’t a twitch. Again, FlashFlashFlash, then immediately slower – Flash, Flash, Flash – repeating in a pattern, over and over. FlashFlashFlash – Flash, Flash, Flash – FlashFlashFlash …
“Stop!” he cried to the medic attending him. “Something’s happening to my eye!”
In the ocean of Kelly’s eye, Finn fired the laser scalpel down through what he prayed was the pupil. Bubbles ballooned in the tears along the line of the flashing blade, and he prayed as hard as Carla and Nico prayed.
Suddenly white light bloomed around them.
FlashFlashFlash – Flash, Flash, Flash – FlashFlashFlash …
“Can’t you see it?” Kelly asked the medic who was staring into his eyeball through an ophthalmoscope.
“Describe it ag
ain?”
“It flashes blue like in a rhythm: FlashFlashFlash – Flash, Flash, Flash – FlashFlashFlash. Three fast, then three slow, then three fast again, like in a pulse. Maybe it’s my pulse or …”
He stopped dead.
FlashFlashFlash – Flash, Flash, Flash – FlashFlashFlash.
… / --- / …
SOS.
Save our souls …
Kelly shot up and off the stretcher and screamed.
“STUBBBBBBS!”
Ow, thought Hudson. Owwwwww.
He had passed in and out of consciousness several times, and always the pain was too much, or the cold was too much. He was encased in snow and he would soon be entombed. And though the snow immediately around him was beginning to melt, he knew he’d never be spotted, even from the air.
Owwwwww.
He felt like he’d broken every bone in his body. And now he would die here …
Snow death, slow death, he thought. I could have used that in one of my poems. Then he saw the snow melt away from the very tip of a very tiny bright green shoot, right in front of his face. New, he thought. Spring, he thought.
Owwwwww … and he closed his eyes to pass out again.
Wowwooww … Owww … Wowwow wow wow wow bow wow wow!
His eyes snapped open.
Not far off, zeroing in on six different trajectories, kicking up snow and bashing into one another and hitting trees with idiot force, ran the ratters at full speed, the scent of the kill – or at least of Hudson – in their nostrils, Yo-yo pulling ahead of the others, sensing him near, sensing him strong – YAP YAP YAP!
THIRTY-SEVEN
FEBRUARY 22 16:05 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border
Kaparis had emerged freezing from the rock, bubbling up from one of the black springs that ran from the tree line to the pasture. He had staggered out, the Abbot’s robes he was wearing soaked, his eye socket a pit of agony.
He had walked for hours by the time he reached a dilapidated woodcutter’s hut.
He shivered in the ruins of it. A dead place in a frozen valley. Pathetic signs remained of the simple life once lived there: rotting furniture, pages of magazines …
And suddenly, there at his feet, he saw it. A tiny, delicately carved rattle, an extraordinary and complex little thing made from a single piece of wood. What craftsmanship, what hours and dedication it must have taken to create. What … love.
And for whom?
He dropped it back in the snow. He knew the answer. He could feel it.
It was the end of the story that Heywood had told him. It was the story of his son.
An hour later, he started his long walk. He would head west towards the Alps. He was now dressed in rags he’d found in the woodcutter’s hut and he made use of a staff. His wounded eye was covered by a hat pulled low over his forehead. He would stay off the beaten track until he was well clear of the mountains, then he would summon his forces. He would recover in the Alps, in his vaults, in the impenetrable heart of his empire and of Europe itself.
And then.
When he was ready.
He would begin.
FEBRUARY 25 09:09 (GMT+3). Great Cavern, Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki
WOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!
The accelerator had whipped up a whirlwind of pure energy. The sound was deafening.
WOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!
The crucial moment had arrived. The tipping point. All it needed was the final order.
The chief technician announced: “Ready to commence Boldklub sequence.”
Al nodded. They had spent thirty-six hours reconnecting and testing the henge in the Grand Cavern. They had not seen daylight. They had not slept.
A switch was thrown. Power surged.
WOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!
In a flash, the hot area became its magnificent self, a dynamic orb of perfect white light. It was impossible to look at directly, but everyone positioned round the Great Cavern was focused on it, praying for a miracle.
Commander King was, certainly.
Stubbs, who had successfully filtered Infinity Drake and his companions out from the fluid in Kelly’s eye, definitely.
Grandma and Al, for sure.
There had been talk of rebuilding and recalibrating the henge back at Hook Hall in line with the “Time = Place” breakthrough Kaparis had made, but Al had quickly established that it would be faster and wiser to revive the system where it was. Besides, if he’d had to wait, he would have lost his mind, either to anxiety or to overexcitement. And besides, it was great getting to play around with someone else’s toys, especially after Li Jun had retrieved all the blitzed operational data from the control computers, a task that should have taken more than a billion hours to complete – and would have done, if Li Jun herself had not written the crucial line of code in the self-destruct program.
Tests had been run. Results had been analysed. Finn and Carla and Nico had waited, under the lens of a microscope, communicating via a crude system of flashing lights.
Now there was only one light, throbbing away at the centre of the henge.
Grandma closed her eyes. Delta held her hand, nearly wringing it off.
A notification alarm sounded on the control panel.
REANIMATION 100% COMPLETE flashed across the screen.
Al gulped. With a shaking hand, he hit the keyboard. Cut the power. Heart thumping clear out of his chest.
At once the orb evaporated into a million pinpricks of sparkle, and faded like a wish. All that was left was the shape of the orb still present on the retina. Eyes blinked it away.
And at the centre of the henge, three figures stood, posed as if in a statue from antiquity …
Quite still. Holding each other …
Then the first one moved.
Gasped.
And Delta Salazar let out a cry and ran into the henge to embrace her sister.
And Nico too staggered out towards her bemused husband.
And Finn …
Infinity Drake blinked, blinked at the world anew, a world of lights and faces and shapes at the edge of things, a world he opened his mouth and lungs to scream his approval of, to swallow whole – or at least he would have done had his grandmother not met and enveloped him at ramming speed, almost bowling him over and drowning him in happy, happy tears …
And Al ran too, ran in on the ecstatic scene – ran in, saw something, and stopped …
He felt his heart seize in horror … No, please no. Something had gone wrong … He had changed. Something had happened in the reanimation. Finn seemed to have been warped or distorted or … Had they gone too far?
Grandma stood back and, to the delight of the waiting world, hovering respectfully outside the henge, introduced her grandson in the manner of grandmothers throughout history by saying …
“Hasn’t he grown?”
Which was a fair estimation, and perhaps not unsurprising, given he had been trapped first at 9mm tall then at just 9 microns tall for over a year.
And Al’s heart burst as he embraced him, as he realised Finn had not become some freak. He’d become a teenager, a young man.
“Hasn’t he grown!”
And Infinity Drake could not speak for the joy that stopped his throat and filled his eyes and the relief, oh! the extraordinary relief, as he smelt it – smelt it and sensed it and felt it – on them both, on them all.
“Hasn’t he grown!”
“Shut up, Mother! Of course he’s bloody grown!”
Home.
THIRTY-EIGHT
JULY 6 14:58 (GMT). Langmere Secondary School, Buckinghamshire, UK
The day had been long. Too long.
Sun had baked the desks and the smell of ink and plastic and overheated teens gave substance to the stale air. Everyone had that end-of-term feeling, with nothing to do but mark time before the start of the summer holidays. Some teachers set up amusing tests, some stuck on a DVD and disappeared, and some unrepentant dullards pressed o
n, “tackling the curriculum”.
Finn had biology with Mr Penna and an irritating hour had been spent writing up an experiment. They worked in silence as Penna had totally lost it about three times. It was mundane to the point of madness.
And Finn loved it. Absolutely loved it.
He loved normal. He loved sitting in this room full of big and splendid full-sized human beings, loved being able to pick up a pen, loved seeing and being seen, loved fitting into the world so perfectly, loved living a life he’d so nearly lost. The miracle of just being made him want to cry with luck. It made him old. Weird, maybe. He didn’t fit in as well with everyone as he’d used to. But he didn’t care. There were just enough others like himself.
He looked at the pen in his hand, at its point trailing ink across the page, and for a moment his imagination saw the massive rolling ball-point thundering towards him, a thing the size of a house, careering forward with massive force, spilling and spewing a slick blue sea which engulf—
He jolted awake as the bell went and the class broke up. Released.
July 6 18:27 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK
Hook Hall never looked more glorious than in late June and early July. The flower borders sang with colour and the cream stone of the manor was perfect against the sky blue – and there was no more glorious occasion at Hook Hall than the annual ‘Frocs and Docs’ Summer Ball. The one time of the year when the assembled brainiacs, soldiery and support staff could really let their hair down.
All day, vitally important projects had been abandoned in favour of attention to dress and dance routines as each department prepared for the climactic ‘dance off’, a prospect that brought Stubbs out in hives. Never before had he made such a spectacle of himself, but he had solemnly promised Li Jun he would at least try and pretend to be trapped in a glass box as the centrepiece of the Ad Hoc Engineering entry.