by Paul Teague
* * *
Disappeared
* * *
As Simon pushed Nat and Pierce into the transporter, Nat slammed her hand on the unusual symbols and began the transportation process. The coloured lights began to activate immediately and she knew they were on their way to Quadrant 3. Relative safety at last. But without Dan. Damn it, they’d lost Dan in the confusion.
She struggled to find connection with him, she got glimpses of him, but nothing certain or lasting. They were still getting used to this telepathy thing – whatever it was between them – so it was a bit erratic. She saw that he was okay, he had a plan. He’d conveyed to her that she needed to get back to Xiang, to try to solve whatever was going to kill them. If the nukes didn’t fall first. Yes, Dan had work to do. She wished she was with him, but she’d been set on a different path by Simon and Kate’s rescue attempts. She’d have to leave it to Dan – to trust him.
Something had been unsettling her as the elevator transported back to Quadrant 3. She’d been looking at Doctor Pierce – distracted by her thoughts while she’d been thinking about Dan – but not particularly registering him.
He was wounded and stunned, but there was something about him that wasn’t right. He didn’t have the head wounds that Harold Pierce had had. And he wasn’t wearing that tie.
She was in the elevator with Henry Pierce.
There had been a switch somehow – or Simon had grabbed the wrong Pierce in all of the confusion. She was stuck in a space the size of a closet with the man who had tortured and tormented her for over three years.
This was the opportunity for revenge that she’d stayed alive for.
Chapter Seventeen
ISOCell (T minus 54 minutes)
* * *
I caught a moment to breathe. I think it worked. I’d never felt such a rush of adrenalin. I was terrified but exhilarated at the same time – it was a bizarre combination of wanting to run away and hide, yet not wanting to miss the action.
I took a leap of faith when the smoke filled the ops area. It must have been Simon and Kate. It was about time too. I knew they were probably trying to bust us out, but I had other plans. And this one I wanted to carry out on my own. If we still had some time left before everything started to go up in flames, well I wasn’t going to sit there twiddling my thumbs. There was no way I was leaving our mother on that ISOCell to die alone. Who can you rely on if you can’t rely on your family? And I was her family now.
I’d been thinking back to when I was stuck alone in the bunker entrance when the sirens first went off. I didn’t recognize that Dan. There was no way I’d just sit there now, waiting for somebody to come and rescue me. The cavalry perhaps? If I’d taken things into my own hands a bit more in the first place I might have been able to stop some of these events happening. No more would I just sit there waiting for stuff to play out around me. This was the new Dan – the one who took a crazy chance that a hunch might just pay off and he’d be able to beam to some mystery location deep in space and rescue his real-life alien mother.
Okay, it sounded mad to me when I said it to myself like that, but what other choice was there? I was seeing this thing through to the end. I wasn’t going to sit there scared and powerless. This situation would play out anyway, with or without me.
There was a problem though. I’d planned on doing this thing alone and then Mum popped out of the smoke, just like that, and I’d suddenly got a companion. I’d intentionally kept Nat out of this, her temper kept landing us in deep trouble. I thought she was amazing but I needed a level head for what I was about to do.
‘Where did you come from, Mum?’
I gave her a hug. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated my family so much. I was so glad to see her.
‘It’s a long story, Dan, but we need to move fast. You haven’t got long left now.’
I’d grabbed my comms tab before running for the contraption at the back of the ops area. I took it out of my pocket. I knew I’d lost track of time, but I was shaken to see how long I had left before this genetic problem killed me. Fifty-four minutes. That number seemed to have gone up and down every time I’d looked at it, but it stared me in the face now. Less than one hour to save my own life and Nat’s too.
And there were the nukes as well – there was no knowing how soon they would start to fall. It was almost overwhelming, but I calmed myself. One thing at a time. Each person would do their job. Trust that process, Dan, do your bit, hope that everybody else hits their own deadline.
I needed to speak to Magnus. I called him on my comms tab and he responded straight away – he patched me in to Dad, Simon, Viktor, Kate and Xiang. I think they call it a conference call in the business world, but I’ll bet no corporation ever had an agenda like ours. The reception was terrible – it was hard to make out what was being said. Wherever we were, it must have been very deep in space. I couldn’t even see the sun. I was no expert on space exploration, but shouldn’t there have been a sun here? Somewhere?
We needed to get this done fast. I wasn’t sure the signal would hold.
Magnus was good. He was obviously watching the clock – just like everybody else – and he brought us up to speed in a couple of minutes. I then quickly explained how I managed to transport to the ISOCell – at least that’s where I thought I was. Pierce and his alien chum must have had a way to get to the ISOCell and it had to have been portable if nobody was supposed to find or visit Davran once she’d been banished.
I’d taken a chance. I hoped I was right. We were still in space, I could see that through the windows, and we were in a different place now. It had to be the ISOCell. My plan was to rescue Davran and to get all of us out without exploding the place. How I’d do that, I’d figure out later – first thing: find Davran.
Xiang was excited by this. She said that if we rescued Davran she’d be able to save me and Nat. It was exactly what she needed, some uncontaminated alien blood which she could use for a transfusion. She wasn’t sure how she’d do it yet, but that was going to be her priority.
Simon and Kate rushed off before we’d even finished talking. They were going to lure the troopers into a trap. Then they’d try to finish off Henry Pierce and Zadra Nurmeen. They’d asked Magnus to check out Lake Karachay to see if it was of any significance. Magnus was working on the trooper helmet, he thought he was on to something. Viktor was tracking the nukes. He only had minutes left before the first one struck. Dad and his team were trying to sort out some SD card that Nat was carrying. They thought there might have been something useful on it.
And that was when we realized that someone crucial was missing from this meeting. Simon had told us that she was on her way with Harold Pierce, but she hadn’t arrived yet. Where was Nat?
As if that wasn’t enough, Mum and I had a new problem. Our comms tabs just died and we couldn’t hear anybody. We were on our own.
* * *
Access
* * *
Mike returned to the SD card. He’d been distracted by Magnus’s request to cross-check some data he’d retrieved from the trooper’s helmet. At first he’d cursed the interruption, then he became completely absorbed in finding the information Magnus needed. He reckoned that if he was right they might be able to save Dan and Nat with the help of this trooper – this man.
Magnus was right. It had taken Mike some time, but he’d referenced the records and confirmed the theory. This part-man, part-machine was the first trooper. He was the original model. And his records had been altered. Clumsily, as it turned out, which probably meant there had been tampering. His records dated back to 2003. It seemed a bit hazy as to how he’d got involved. As far as Mike could see, the troopers had been assembled from teams of mainly military personnel who’d successfully completed a series of special tests. From the little that Amy had managed to tell him about what she and James had been involved with before they married, it did occur to Mike that she might have narrowly escaped this same process.
He was appalled t
o see that the troopers had been issued false death certificates. As they’d passed the tests – whatever they were – they’d had faked military deaths and had, quite literally, been removed from their everyday lives, to become a living army, kept in stasis. All achieved using cyber technology procured and adapted from a company called Magnum Enterprises. Mike struggled with his anger, he’d stumbled across yet another outrage connected with this project. Had these troopers given their consent to this? Their families thought they were dead, yet all this time they’d been alive.
Then he found it. The reference was JB BLP/0786. The ‘J’ stood for Jeff. The ‘B’ didn’t seem to be important to anybody. But he’d been part of a cover up. Jeff wasn’t even supposed to be part of this project. He was supposed to have been ostracized, whatever that meant – Mike didn’t know. Jeff had appeared from nowhere, it seemed. He certainly hadn’t been a part of the selection tests. Neither did he have a death certificate: his removal from life on Earth didn’t appear to be a problem. For anybody.
It was only when Mike cross-referenced the data with a seemingly unrelated incident that had occurred around the same time that he made this particular sum add up. Dan and Nat’s mother was called Davran Saloor. She’d had a relationship with a man called Jeff, which had been forbidden. Davran Saloor had been banished somewhere, and that’s what was supposed to have happened to Jeff too. Instead, he’d been spirited away. He’d been placed in stasis for several years. He’d been adapted for use as a trooper using a new technology created by Magnum Enterprises. He’d been the first trooper.
None of that mattered, not now. There was only one thing that counted in that mass of information, in spite of the evil that had been inflicted on this man. He was Dan and Nat’s natural, human father. He could save their lives. And he was lying there in the med lab right at that moment.
* * *
The Thirtieth Ship
* * *
Zadra Nurmeen prowled through the ops area as if he were the King of the Jungle. He owned this place, it was now his domain. He was quick to take control.
He sent updated objectives directly to the Queen who cascaded them immediately to the troopers: hunt down the escapees and kill on sight; terminate all humans on board, including the twins, but bring their spines back, he’d need those. They would contain enough genetic data to take out the Zatheon population when the time was right.
He then contemptuously turned off the holographic screens projecting the faces of the world’s leaders. He didn’t require their presence any more. As far as he was concerned, they were now dead. In reality, they were still in stasis on the Earth’s surface, their consciousness now turned off. Like the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, either they would never wake up from their sleep or they would be revived from stasis to find that Earth’s greatest battle had been fought without them.
He checked on the nuclear arsenal that the twins had helped to launch and noted that the first bombs would start to fall very soon. An excellent bonus – the Helyions thrived in a radioactive environment. It was like pure oxygen is to a human being.
Zadra Nurmeen picked up his weapon and shot the remaining two human slaves that Pierce had procured. They’d been keeping their heads down, as they had for the past five years in captivity, trying to survive, desperate not to be noticed.
Something beeped on his wrist and he responded to a message on the communication device which he’d been using earlier. He used an alien language – nobody on board the Nexus would ever have been able to translate the content of that conversation.
On Earth there were twenty-nine Helyion ships clustered around Lake Karachay. There was still one ship missing. It would soon dock with the Nexus and be boarded by Zadra Nurmeen’s Helyion army. He would not require the troopers for much longer, but he would retain a hundred or so, as a backup plan. Deactivated, of course.
It would be a short time until the cloaked ship docked with the Nexus. Just enough time to tie up a final loose end. He grabbed Harold Pierce by his hair and unceremoniously dragged him to the airlock. He didn’t utter a word. Zadra Nurmeen was not like the unstable Henry Pierce – a true despot feels no need to explain himself. He threw Harold into the airlock, turned his back on him, and nodded his head to one of the troopers. He didn’t even look back as the trooper closed the door, activated the external doors and blasted whatever wasn’t secured in that area out into space, directly into the path of an approaching Helyion ship.
The doors were open for twenty-two seconds, but that’s all it takes to jettison something – or someone – out into the oblivion of space.
Chapter Eighteen
Remnants
* * *
The Queen knew they were on board the ISOCell – she felt their presence as they arrived.
The last remaining part of her not yet dominated by the machine Henry Pierce had constructed to restrain her struggled to focus on these two people. It was a woman, younger than her, and a boy. The woman was human, but there was something special about the boy.
Hundreds of messages clouded her thoughts. She was tapped directly into the minds of the entire trooper army. She was receiving commands via the console on the Nexus but now something strong was coming through. The boy … he was not entirely human. She felt a Zatheon connection with him, and it was strong.
As she fought to focus on this single train of thought among the voices in her head clamouring for attention, she struggled to work out her connection with this boy. She flashed through her fading memories which were now subjugated by the cruel treatment Henry Pierce and Zadra Nurmeen had inflicted upon her.
Then she caught it, only for an instant. She knew this boy, she recognized his Zatheon trace. A strong maternal reaction surged through her body, but it was quickly adjusted and was extinguished by the machine to which she was attached. The boy was her son. She’d seen it just for a moment, in a precious glimpse of memory, before her mind was clouded by a thousand thoughts and feelings from her trooper army.
Viewed as she was now, crucified on this machine which controlled every part of her, she looked like an abomination, a monster created in a lab. But the Queen was capable of emotion – this was an evil thing that had been done to her.
And had anybody been watching, they would have seen a single tear run down her cheek before those memories were obliterated by her distant master.
* * *
Impetuous
* * *
As the transporter door opened to Quadrant 3 and seven laser targets fixed on the two figures inside, the security team were taken aback to see what was going on.
‘Kneel down and show us your hands!’ the security chief had shouted, nervous about an impending trooper attack, even though Pierce’s recent announcement had denied that it would now happen.
The two figures inside the elevator completely ignored him. They were fighting. They recognized one of the figures as Doctor Pierce, the man who’d addressed them in the past hour via his ops area on the Nexus. Yet here was Nat, pounding his face with her fists, and clearly doing a good job of it.
Like all bullies, Henry Pierce was just a regular person. Once you removed his weapons, entourage and support network, he was nothing. Caught in that transporter together, it was just Nat and him. And once Nat recognized who he was, she had some catching up to do. Henry Pierce was only in his early fifties, but the force of a sixteen-year-old, six foot girl launching at him without warning had come as a shock to him. Particularly as he was already struggling to recover from a wound he’d got in the fight that had just taken place in the ops area.
Nat was angry, very angry, and she didn’t stop to think how valuable this new captive might be. With only fifty minutes of life left, this was how she’d decided to spend it. While her twin was risking his life to bring resolution to the problem which was destroying them, Nat was creating a delay which might kill them both.
So hard were Nat’s blows, so violent was her rage, that she’d left Henry Pierce a bloody mess on t
he floor of the elevator. It took three security guards to pull her off – she continued punching and screaming even once she’d been restrained.
Henry Pierce’s wounds were so bad that by the time he’d arrived in the med lab, he’d sunk into unconsciousness. Had he been awake, Xiang could have shown him how he too was in peril from the nanovirus that had been released into the bodies of the hybrids, himself included, and perhaps worked towards a swifter solution.
But now, because of Nat’s rage, they were no further forward and he was useless to them.
* * *
Interception
* * *
The missiles with the shortest distance to travel would fall on the Kremlin. Viktor thought of his own family. They would be among the first to perish in their apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. He had thought when this mission began that they would be safe, deep in sleep after the darkness fell and secure in their family home. Now they would be among the first to die. Maybe that would not be such a bad thing, they would feel no fear and know no pain.
But Viktor was not about to send his own family, or the people of Moscow, to the grave without a fight. He’d activated the Global Defence Matrix thanks to the data supplied by Mike and he was making headway. He looked at the missile projections on his screen. There were three minutes before the first nuclear detonation took place.
He forced his mind to focus – if he looked at all the missile trajectories shown on his screen, he’d just curl up in a ball and give up. Somehow he had to take out all of these nukes, their destructive capability was immense. If they reached the bunkers it would be ‘game over’ – there would be nobody left to fight.