by Paul Teague
An all-points alert came over his comms tab. Apparently they’d got Henry Pierce in the med lab now, but the crisis situation still remained. In all his concentration, Viktor had missed an earlier text alert.
‘Two minutes to detonation,’ came the voice on his console.
He glanced at it and gave it a quick scan, noticing the words ‘Lake Karachay’. He’d return to it later. His fingers were working furiously at his screen.
When President Ronald Reagan had imagined this Global Defence Grid in 1983, it is unlikely that he ever conceived that it would be used as it was on that day. One man, alone, trying to save the world from destruction, while his friends – he felt that he could call them that now – struggled in their own battles: Xiang to save the twins, Mike to get a breakthrough which might end the sabotage, the twins to fight for their very existence and Amy who was battling to save her children.
Even if he stopped this attack, Viktor knew that the war was not yet over, the enemy would remain undefeated.
‘One minute to detonation,’ came the voice on his console.
A circular clock countdown appeared at the bottom of his screen. Sixty seconds – fifty-nine seconds – fifty-eight seconds ... that’s how long his wife and daughter had to live. Thousands, if not millions of people would die when that first bomb fell.
Viktor typed furiously at the screen.
He was in, he could target each nuke individually now.
Forty-five seconds – forty-four seconds – forty-three seconds …
Where is the activation system, what’s the code?
‘Mike, do you have any codes in your data-set for the Defence Grid?’ he spoke down his comms tab, calmly but urgently.
He felt sweat all down his back, a drop trickled from his forehead onto his work station.
Thirty-four seconds – thirty-three seconds – thirty-two seconds …
Above Moscow, four nuclear weapons separated off at right angles and fixed on their final coordinates.
‘A-1-00-JKL-4897 … that’s Alpha, One, Zero, Zero ...’
Viktor cut Mike off as he completed the code. ‘Got it, thanks!’ and he quickly typed in the information.
No time for pleasantries now, in just seconds the detonations would begin.
As Viktor keyed in the data he recalled an event that had happened in his own military life, before he’d even had a family that he cared about. A gun held to his head, a terrible game of Russian roulette by a vindictive prison guard and a dead colleague at his side. Viktor had stayed calm then, in spite of seeing his friend’s head blown away right by his side. He’d stayed calm, waited for his moment, and survived to fight another day.
Fifteen seconds – fourteen seconds – thirteen seconds …
The code was accepted, The Global Defence Matrix was activated. On his screen, a red grid appeared around the graphic representation of the globe. Each nuclear weapon was marked and tracked by a yellow symbol on the screen.
Nine seconds – eight seconds – seven seconds – six seconds …
Viktor slammed the activation button at his console and watched his screen. The red grid illuminated and from each nodal point on his display a green line mapped to the nukes and indicated that every weapon had been targeted in an instant.
One by one, the yellow symbols disappeared on his screen.
The Defence Grid disabled the closest to detonation first, then took out the nukes which had furthest to travel.
Two hundred nuclear weapons blown out of the skies in an instant. There would be some injuries on the planet surface as missile debris hurtled to the ground below, but nowhere near the millions of lives that would have been lost on that day had Henry Pierce and Zadra Nurmeen succeeded in detonating those nuclear bombs.
Viktor sat back in his chair, the sweat on his shirt and forehead the only indications of the intense stress he’d just been under.
A huge cheer went up in the control room. Viktor had been so focused that he hadn’t realized that everybody around him had been watching him, praying that he’d be able to make this right.
Viktor closed his eyes and thought back to the cold war of 1983 which had caused President Ronald Reagan to create the Star Wars programme. And he took a moment to thank his country’s former enemy, because without that Defence Grid they would all have lost their lives that day.
* * *
Failure
* * *
At last Xiang made a breakthrough. Mike and Magnus had determined that the trooper in the med lab room was actually the twins’ natural father.
She could only imagine how difficult that must have been for Mike to discover, having raised Dan and Nat as his own kids, but she knew him well enough already to know that today would not be the day for petulant obstructions. Dan and Nat would be his dead kids if they didn’t all work together. They were down to their last forty-three minutes of life now.
She’d taken a moment to celebrate the news from Viktor that the nukes had been disabled, but it was far from over yet. She drew blood from the restrained trooper – Jeff, as they would have to get used to calling him now. He was in an extreme state of desolation – whatever had happened to him since his helmet was removed was causing him problems. It had been difficult for Xiang to take the blood that she needed. He was wriggling and squirming on the med lab bed, in spite of full body restraints, and his mutterings were just not making any sense.
Xiang left him to the med lab staff. She moved through into the larger room that her team had commandeered to help to save the lives of Dan and Nat. Had it been anybody else but Xiang, this might have looked sinister and threatening, but this equipment and these tables had been set up to heal, not to harm. There were two operating tables, two hover trolleys and a bed. It was the best they could do. Whoever had equipped these bunkers had not anticipated the need to carry out any complex processes like this. Xiang needed to be ready for the worst case scenario – or the best case scenario – depending on which way you looked at it.
She knew that potentially she had two groups of hybrids – Dan and Nat and the Pierces – as well as the Queen, the twins’ birth mother. She now had access to the father too. She’d quickly run some tests to see if she could eliminate the nanovirus that had passed between the hybrids by accessing the uncontaminated blood from the human parent.
The fate of the Pierce brothers was less certain. She was sure that she could make it work for Dan and Nat if she could access the same hybrid DNA from a parent, but she wasn’t so sure that she could do the same for the brothers. Not now that both of them seemed to have been infected by the nanovirus.
She received a message via her comms tab – the med lab had incoming casualties. Nat was being brought in by the security team, and there was one other person with her who may be of interest to Xiang. It was one of the Pierce brothers, but he was wounded.
Two of these empty beds would now be full. She’d start to wire everybody up and begin running tests. Now she had live subjects to work on, surely success was within her grasp. She would have to work fast. Dan and Nat had only thirty-four minutes of life left.
* * *
Survivor
* * *
When the airlock doors opened there was a violent and terrifying rush of air out of the area. When the first poor soul had been flushed out into space earlier, he had counted how long it had taken – he estimated that the process took no more than twenty-five seconds.
He’d struggled to remember that part of his degree course. How long was it that a human with no breathing apparatus or protective clothing could survive in space? It was many years ago that it had come up in his studies, but he was sure it was thirty seconds. When it came to it, he knew that he’d have very little time. There was a cluster of pipework and wiring in the corner of the airlock. He would never be able to hang on in a zero gravity environment. But he was carrying a gift that had been given to him by a Zatheon friend many years ago. Then it had been a token of trust and friendship. At that moment
it was to be the thing that saved his life.
The minute he’d been thrown into the airlock, he’d torn the tie from around his neck and wrapped the noose tightly around his wrist, pulling the knot firm.
As the airlock doors slid shut and he heard the activation process begin through the strengthened glass, he tied as many knots as he could around the pipework. He managed three. Would it be enough to hold onto a man of his size in a zero gravity rush? He wasn’t sure, he would soon find out. Harold closed his eyes, took a deep breath and started to count. He heard the airlock doors open and as they did so his entire body was pulled with an almighty force to a horizontal level.
As the last oxygen vacated the area, the violent tugging on the tie around his wrist stopped and he began to float. He dared to open his eyes and look out into space, but his mouth remained tightly closed.
By his count it was nineteen seconds – surely the doors would close again soon?
He could feel his internal organs pounding, his tongue was beginning to burn and he was struggling to maintain consciousness. As he stared out into space, he felt himself fading fast. The outer doors slammed shut once again on his count of twenty-two seconds.
The vacuum was replaced with an injection of oxygen and the return of gravity. His body slumped gracelessly to the floor. His wrist was red raw where his body had been pulled violently towards the nothingness of space. He was bruised and sore, no longer just from the beatings of his own brother.
Harold Pierce had survived an attempt to flush him mercilessly out of the Nexus, and now he was going to start to fight back. Only he could reverse the sabotaged terraforming process, but if the Nexus were destroyed, there would be nothing that anybody could do to save the planet. It was the Nexus that controlled the programming of the shards.
He sat slumped in the corner, allowing himself time to recover. He thanked his friend Davran Saloor for her wonderful gift. A simple token, a tie made of a special Zatheon fabric. But on that day it had saved his life, and would give him a last chance of rescuing the planet they both loved.
He could see the Helyion ship approaching the Nexus for docking. They were going to connect via a larger airlock, they would not use the one he was in.
The airlock’s inner doors opened swiftly without warning and he braced himself for the violence that would surely follow if they’d seen how he’d survived their attempts to end his life.
He didn’t recognize the man, who was looking behind him urgently, as if there wasn’t a moment to spare. ‘I’m Dae-Ho,’ he announced. ‘Come with me!’
* * *
Legacy
* * *
Magnus stopped to draw breath. There was a lot going on, a constant stream of updates coming his way and he was beginning to feel frazzled. The trooper’s helmet was still on his work area, fully illuminated, receiving communications that were no longer being listened to by its owner.
A thought struck Magnus – he wasn’t sure where the idea had come from. He’d been troubled by Jeff’s spinal implant, all the troopers had them. They were not unlike his own work in this area, when he’d been running cybernetics trials in the lab.
They’d come down really hard on him when he’d started to branch out into the non-military applications of his work, but it seemed uncannily similar to him, albeit a bit more brute force in its delivery. Nobody would be able to achieve this without some form of adaptive algorithm, he’d secured that concept many years ago, surely someone hadn’t created their own version?
Magnus fumbled in his pocket and took out a paperclip that he kept in there to fiddle with. He bent one of the arms and used it to flick the lid off a small box that was concealed in the rear of the helmet. It was packed with micro-circuitry, but this was familiar territory for Magnus. He knew exactly what he was looking for. He found the main chip and pulled off the label that was obscuring the logo. He was right. Nobody else could have re-created his adaptive algorithm.
The logo on the chip was printed with the words ‘Magnum Enterprises’. They’d used his own technical innovation to create these monsters. And now they were going to destroy him and his planet.
* * *
Simulation
* * *
Simon and Kate ran along the corridor. They could hear the heavy boots of the troopers behind them, and the flashes from their weapons struck the sides of the walls as they struggled to outpace them.
‘I’m out of condition,’ gasped Simon. Kate stopped to let him catch up. ‘I wish I was as fast as the first time we had to do this.’
Kate thought back to their simulation exercise all those years ago. Both of them were younger, fitter and more naive in those days. Now they had experience on their side. They would use what they’d learned in their twenties to help them survive this day. They wanted the troopers away from the ops area, out of the heart of the Nexus. They were going to be the distraction. The bait.
Nat was safely dispatched in the transporter and they’d successfully diverted the troopers in their direction. Now they just had to keep them occupied and buy time … in the hope that somebody, somewhere would do something to end all of this, before it was too late.
In the meantime, they’d create as much mayhem as they could. Kate fired at a mass of pipework overhead and a cascade of sparks shot across the corridor like a firework at a display. Simon smiled and they began to run again, Kate pacing herself so that he could keep up. They’d already prepared to die once, in the simulation exercise they’d been involved in years earlier. They’d both stared death in the face already, and they’d do it again.
As Simon’s hand slammed on the pad of the simulation area, he activated the programme via his remote. The green grid lines which lined the vast hangar disappeared as the virtual renderer created in perfect detail the battle scenario they’d faced together eighteen years ago. The wire cutters were by the fence as they always had been, the camp was immersed in darkness and a rat scuttled across the yard. A laser appeared from nowhere and shot it dead, burning it to crisp in an instant.
Beyond the doors they could hear the thundering boots of the troopers approaching, a small army preparing to eliminate the last resistance to block its path.
Kate cut the wire and Simon climbed through the fence. The battle for survival had begun.
* * *
Predator (T minus 31 minutes)
* * *
As the comms tabs faded to nothing, the transporter began to surge into life. We’d been slow, we should have known they’d follow, of course they would. We were trying to save Davran Saloor, my birth mother. They wouldn’t let that go unchallenged.
This transporter was not like the others. It wasn’t tied into my DNA. It was a bit do-it-yourself, to be honest. It looked like it had been lashed together on one of those TV science shows. There was a single unit in the ops area and this one on the ISOCell was almost exactly the same. You couldn’t fit more than three people onto it. It wasn’t for a military invasion or anything like that – I’d guess that Henry Pierce and his pal used this to get from wherever they were based to Davran’s capsule in space. To do whatever they’ve done to her.
This appeared to be the only way on and the only way off the ISOCell, which meant we were about to be boarded by somebody – or something. I grabbed Mum’s arm.
‘Mum, split up! Don’t wait for me – if you find Davran, get her back to Quadrant 3. Just do what you can.’
Mum nodded and as we headed off quickly in opposite directions, I thought I heard her voice calling after me.
‘I love you, Dan!’ are the words I thought I heard, but I couldn’t be sure.
This place was much smaller than where we’d come from. It made sense, I suppose. It only needed to house one person. I hadn’t even thought yet about how we could get off this thing without it exploding. If I had to, I’d stay behind if it meant Mum and Davran could get out alive. I was going to die anyway from the nanovirus, so it might as well be in this ISOCell. I was running completely blind now
– I didn’t know how long I had left to live. I must be down to my last minutes. I was feeling fine, but how long had I got? Twenty-five minutes maybe?
I glanced behind me and saw a figure materializing on the makeshift transporter behind me. It was Zadra Nurmeen. He was armed, but not with a gun, he was carrying a sword. He looked reptilian. I hadn’t noticed that before – it was his eyes that did it. I wanted him to follow me, not Mum. She needed to find Davran and get her out of here.
‘Hey, ugly!’ I shouted. Zadra Nurmeen’s eyes narrowed even further and he scowled at me. He gripped his terrible sword, lowered his head and set me in his sights.
Damn, I hadn’t got a weapon. I’d grabbed a comms tab but had forgot to bring something to defend myself with. I hoped Mum had something to shoot him with – surely she would have been more on the ball than I’d been. That sword he was carrying had been saved for me. He might have been holding it like a normal sword, but I knew it was a much more sinister tool. This alien was a predator – and I was its prey. Well, I was going to give him a run anyway, hopefully long enough to buy Mum the time she needed.
I started to run away from Zadra Nurmeen, along the curved corridor that circled the cell. There couldn’t be many places to hide here. It wasn’t that big, the size of a spherical house perhaps. I was beginning to think I could outrun him when things turned against me.
Zadra hurled his sword at me, but it turned out it was more like a boomerang. It spun through the air at a frightening speed, gashing my right leg, then returning straight back to its owner. I let out a cry of pain. Jeez, that hurt like hell – I could feel the blood seeping into my trousers. My chances of outrunning Zadra Nurmeen had just reduced drastically.