by John McNally
“Er…”
“Finn likes chips, don’t you, Finn?”
“Or potato wedges,” Finn explained, unsure why this was relevant.
“We have a canteen…?” tried the Professor.
Al took in the line-up of trucks. “What’s all this for? Are you having a pageant?”
By now Professor Channing was completely confused.
“No, it’s… every centrifuge, laser and electromagnetic accelerator we can lay our hands on. This has just arrived from Harwell, part of the new Woolfson Accelerator, and…”
“Oh my goodness, I think I spot an old friend!” said Al, taking off down the line of transporters, Professor Channing trotting to keep up.
Finn’s strong instinct was to keep out of the way, but Al pulled him along front and centre, determined to make a spectacle, leading everyone a merry dance as he searched among the trucks like a weekend shopper in the aisles of Ikea.
As they entered the Central Field Analysis Chamber, Finn felt like they were entering a game, the ‘facility’ level of a first-person shooter – concrete industrial construction, glass control booths, steel gantries and outsize scientific equipment: an outlandish vision of a not too distant future. The big difference here was that real human security personnel carried real guns: large, heavy and scary.
“Aha!” Al cried. “It’s you, Fatty!”
Al seemed to be addressing a large vehicle. But, as they came round it, Finn saw what was inside. Huge quarter-sections of a giant metal doughnut, each the size of a cottage, were being manoeuvred off the transporter by an outsize forklift, a freak-show mirror of perfect polished steel on the inside, a mess of hydraulics and wiring on the outside, featuring domestic plumbing and gaffer tape – a dazzling piece of engineering that looked like it’d been knocked together in a shed: very Uncle Al.
Finn caught his distorted reflection on the perfect inner surface and remembered a night at home the year before when Al had appeared unexpectedly on the doorstep to demand Toad-in-the-Mustard-Hole from Grandma (the family comfort food). He had sworn and ranted at the table saying “they’ve mugged me” and “they have press-ganged Fatty”. There was little indication who ‘they’ or ‘Fatty’ were, but a general hatred and distrust of anyone In Charge had come across before he’d drunk too much and fallen asleep in front of Match of the Day.
“Ah yes, the Fat Doughnut Accelerator you developed at Cambridge!” said Professor Channing.
“Stolen from me a year ago in the dead of night!” said Al.
“Ah… it was?”
Commander King appeared on the gantry above them like a materialising vampire.
Al pretended not to notice.
“Ripped from my still beating breast and shipped to the military by that perfidious, superior, mendacious, warmongering…”
“Dr Allenby.”
“Ah… Lord Vader.”
King allowed himself a minuscule, dry smile (no one else dared) and descended slowly. Finn hid behind Professor Channing.
“As I recall, we commissioned a preliminary study into possible defensive potential only after you had withdrawn cooperation, concealed the sequencing codes and thrown what my nanny used to call ‘a wobbly’?”
“Because I said NO to weaponisation.”
“But you were already working with the military?”
“Only with my guys – and we were having ‘fun’. Didn’t Nanny ever teach you to ‘have fun’, Commander?”
“Certainly not. She taught us Cleanliness, Godliness and to Ignore Naughty Boys.”
“Then what are we doing here? Because I warn you, if you’re on holiday too, there’s no pool.”
“We need you, Dr Allenby. If not your terrific sense of humour.”
There was a cold connection between the two, the ghost of a mutual respect.
“So spill the beans,” said Al.
Without even looking at Finn, King said: “Not in front of the children.”
Uh-oh.
Finn shrank further behind Channing.
“They’re perfectly normal human beings, just smaller and largely odourless. Say hello, Finn, you’re frightening the King.”
Finn emerged from cover.
“Hi. Sir. Finn. I mean, I’m Finn. Not sir. Not you, you’re sir. I’m just…”
“Hello, Infinity, I am sorry we’ve interrupted your excursion. We have a canteen area. There’s a television, some magazines. Why don’t you go with Nigel and he’ll show you the—”
“I think I’ll stay and watch!”
(Canteen. Television. Nigel. Apart from an absurd facility for science and maths, Finn was average or hopeless at most other things, but he did have an Acute Sense of Dread – the one great advantage of being orphaned. Just keep going.)
King, not used to interruptions, raised an eyebrow.
“He thinks he’ll stay and watch,” confirmed Al, dragging Finn forward for a formal introduction.
“Meet my late sister’s child, my sole heir, my DNA. I promised him an adventure and my mother a week of respite care – and that’s exactly what they’re going to get. Wherever I go, he goes.”
Finn felt briefly at ease, proud even, till Al continued, “He may look like a scruffy, not particularly well-coordinated boy from a bog-standard comprehensive…”
“Hey! It’s an academy. It has academy status.”
“…but he’s in the top set for science and maths and has been schooled by me in the wilder side of theoretical physics, rocketry and blowing things up. What’s more, he has a soul a mile deep, a smile a mile wide and can be trusted absolutely.”
Finn thought this might be overselling him a little, but still couldn’t help tacking on, “And I’ve had two letters published in Amateur Entomologist. It’s a specialist magazine.”
“You surprise me,” said King drily and took a step forward so that he and Al were eyeball to eyeball.
“This is an extraordinary situation, an aggregate threat to human life that demands a global response through the G&T and the reconstitution of Boldklub…”
Al whispered back, “He already knows.”
Commander King turned a shade of white not known in nature.
A shade of murder.
Al slapped Finn on the back and drove him on up the gantry.
“What do I know?” Finn whispered.
“Shut up and go with it,” hissed Al.
Up in the control gallery, Finn no longer felt like he was in a video game. Up here it was more like the bridge of a spaceship in some movie. There were banks of computers and displays and an observation window that ran the length of the gallery and looked down across the vast CFAC below.
“Wow!”
Beyond the giant lorries that were depositing the accelerators and physics kit, Finn could see more trucks arriving, military green and brown. He could make out the tarpaulin-covered shapes of what he took to be vehicles, and maybe even a helicopter. Signs were appearing everywhere that warned ORDNANCE – EXTREME CARE – RESTRICTIONS APPLY.
Al headed straight for two soldiers – one huge, the other small and wizened – who had risen to greet him: the first like an old friend, the second with wary resignation.
“Kelly and Stubbs! My boys! The old team back together again!” laughed Al.
Captain Kelly wore an SAS badge and was a comic-book action hero: six foot six and one hundred kilos of scarred flesh and raw power. He poked Al’s chest in mock accusation (nearly breaking his sternum) – “They let you back in?” – before following up with a laugh and a bear hug.
“And Major Leonard Stubbs! Sir!” gasped Al once he was free.
Stubbs grimaced and Kelly ruffled his hair.
“He’s happy,” insisted Kelly. “He’s wagging his little tail.”
With the physique and charm of a defeated tortoise, Engineer Stubbs was technically retired and past pensionable age, but, as a minor genius with both mechanical and information systems who could fix anything, he’d been given an honorary commiss
ion at sixty and asked to stay on – which, considering he had never attracted a Mrs Stubbs, was a blessing all round. He clearly didn’t do hugs or emotion, which of course made Al kiss him on both cheeks like a Frenchman.
“For goodness’ sake…”
Al introduced Finn. “My nephew – Infinity Drake.”
“Please, just Finn.”
“I’m looking after him for a week. He’s a short version of me without the looks, brains or char—”
“He always says that.”
Stubbs sighed as if he knew exactly what Finn had to put up with.
“We can shoot him for you. Seriously,” said Kelly, crushing Finn’s fingers with his handshake.
“Ow!”
“Don’t listen to anything these men say,” said Al. “No one knows how they got in here.”
“Seats,” ordered Commander King.
Seats were duly taken. Technicians were setting up a series of digital projectors, fiddling with cables and tapping at keyboards.
As Al took his seat, Finn sat beside him and whispered, “By the way, Al?”
“Hmm?”
“What the hell is going on and why do all these people think you’re some kind of—”
“It’s just what I do. Sometimes.”
“Just what you do?”
“The secret side. There have to be secrets, Finn, to protect the innocent.”
“But how…? When…? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“When you were eleven? Come on. Who would tell an eleven-year-old something like that?”
This stumped Finn.
“Now go hide,” said Al, nodding to a gap between two banks of computers, out of sight.
“Why?” Finn asked.
“Oh, you’ll see,” said Al.
Screens came online.
World leaders started to appear.
FIVE
“Mr President.”
“Commander King.”
“Prime Minister.”
“King. Mr President.”
“Prime Minister.”
“Guten Tag, Frau Chancellor…”
King went through the introductory motions.
Finn thought, I’m supposed to be in double geography right now.
The President of the USA was in shirtsleeves – the Oval Office in the background familiar, if a little less tidy than in its TV incarnations. The British Prime Minister was in a large, book-lined room – not the smooth PM of news bulletins, but an alarmed posh little man. The German Chancellor settled herself into a reclaimed pine ‘ergonomische stuhl’ as the President of France came online from the gilt and ornate Élysée Palace.
“Is Allenby there?” said the US President.
Al leant into shot and waved so that the leaders of the free world could see him.
“Guys,” said Al.
Guys? Finn thought.
“So. What have we got, Commander King?” asked Al.
The room fell silent. The lights dimmed.
“Slide,” ordered King.
A digital projection lit up a wall-sized screen and showed… nothing.
Or at least nothing but a blank whiteness with a black dot in the middle.
King snapped, “Bring it up to scale.”
The lens zoomed in on the dot and suddenly the creature exploded across the screen.
Projected to the size of a man, a vile black, yellow and red-flecked monster, fresh and newborn-slick from its final moult. Its exoskeleton was extended, exaggerated; its thorax like a clutch of girders; its head a felt and fang atrocity; its silver-black wings still plastered against its abdomen which, cruelly coloured, scaled and distended, hung bulbous from its thorax like a great droplet of buzz-fresh poison. And, at its end, an ugly cluster of three barbed, glossy harpoon stings.
Finn froze and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. For a moment he tasted his own fear. The fear of death he sometimes got when he thought about his mother. A sense of something terrible, unstoppable and unknowable. He gulped it back.
A mouse click and the next image flashed up. A rear shot of the insect with a better view of the array of stings emerging from the bulbous abdomen.
Click. The underside, amour-plated and beetle-black. How does this thing fly? Finn thought.
Click. In the next image, the answer: silver-black wings fully extended, as long as a dragonfly’s, but broader.
Wow.
Click. The head and mouthparts, feelers and proboscis. Finn felt his stomach turn. He didn’t want to look, yet couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Click. The egg pouch and reproductive organ.
The six legs.
The black and yellow and red-tinged whole, like some vile bullet that in flight must look like… Who only knew what.
And the sound? thought Finn. What evil bass buzz would those wings make?
Al watched, face frozen, King pleasantly surprised to observe that even he was stilled by the sight.
“Meet Scarlatti,” said King. “Named after the eighteenth-century Italian composer noted for writing five hundred and fifty-five piano sonatas, because it registers a score of five hundred and fifty-five on the Porton Scale: that used to measure the lethal potential of weaponised organisms. A single Scarlatti could theoretically kill five hundred and fifty-five human beings.”
“Sacré bleu…” said the French President, without a hint of irony.
“During the Cold War, all sides developed and produced biological weapons. One of the main branches of study at our research institute at Porton Down was entomology, the study of insects, and how they could be adapted to carry and spread disease. In 1983 a geneticist accidentally developed a whole new genotype of insect by exposing the embryo of a highly engineered smallpox-carrying wasp – phenotype Vespula cruoris – to gamma radiation. The result was… Scarlatti.”
An old video recording came up onscreen of live Scarlattis being studied in a laboratory.
“Scarlatti is an asexual self-multiplier that, given a sufficient supply of simple protein – the body of a dead mammal say – can lay up to fifty eggs. It’s pesticide resistant, seventy-five millimetres long (the size of a hummingbird or a human thumb) and is all but physically indestructible. It nurtures supplies of a unique and fatal strain of smallpox in the poison sacs of its abdomen. Accelerated development means a single egg can become a viable flying insect in four days. Therefore a single insect can produce a fifty-strong swarm in four days. And swarm they do – given how much protein is required during their nymph, or rapid hemimetabolic, phase. Each swarm produces many new colonies, each swarming every four days, and so on ad infinitum. Or until the supply of protein dries up.”
Finn could taste something sickening.
He means people by ‘the supply of protein’. He means… us.
Onscreen, the video turned nasty. White mice were introduced to the test chamber and seized upon by frenzied Scarlattis. They seemed to relish the kill, whipping their stings into the poor creatures long after they were disabled or dead.
“This hideous project was immediately discontinued, the remaining nymphs first being frozen and then incinerated at the end of the Cold War under the Biological Weapons Convention.
“However, two specimens remained. One was sent to the United States under the Hixton-Fardale Shared Research Agreement, and has presumably been destroyed.. A second was secretly frozen and stored at Porton Down by the government of the day ‘just in case’ or, as we like to put it more formally, for ‘Reasons of National Security’.”
Commander King allowed his eyelids to close so as to avoid the righteous glares of the other committee members. Then he took a deep breath.
“One of our Porton Down research fellows, a Dr Cooper-Hastings, seems to have lost all reason, found a way to access the secure cold store and… has released the last remaining Scarlatti.”
There were gasps.
“He did what?” asked the US President.
King turned to his screen. “Dr Cooper-Hastings
released the specimen into the atmosphere, sir.”
A staff-card mugshot of a middle-aged scientist flashed up. Thick glasses. Dull eyes.
“He stayed late at work, leaving at 10pm. A search was initiated six minutes later when an algorithm discovered an access control code override on his staff card. An empty cryogenic support cylinder was eventually found outside his abandoned car at 03:32 this morning near the village of Hazelbrook, thirty-six miles north of here.”
A map of Hazelbrook flashed up onscreen and a photo of the abandoned car.
“The area around the village has been declared a biohazard zone and evacuated. We’re conducting a full investigation and every available officer from every agency is involved in the manhunt for Cooper-Hastings.”
“Cut to the chase. What exactly are we talking about here – worst case?” asked the US President.
King and Professor Channing exchanged looks. The Professor stood up to deliver the bad news.
“Worst case: we estimate that with a first swarm in four days national contamination will be total within four to six weeks, continental within three months, global-temperate within six months.”
“Global-temperate?” repeated the US President.
“Nearly all of Western Europe, a good two-thirds of North America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, most of South America, Australia. Only cold air and altitude offer any protection. In total, two-thirds of the land mass of the earth.”
There was a pause.
“Nearly six billion people,” said King.
* * *
DAY ONE 13:38 (BST). English Channel
Dr Miles Cooper-Hastings opened his eyes. They stung. Blackness and stars swam before him. His throat was so dry he half retched to bring forth some saliva. He could see nothing, but he could feel his head pressed up against something wooden. He was freezing. For a waking moment of pure terror, he wondered if he was buried alive. But, as his body repulsed and kicked out at these thoughts, the lid of the sea chest he had been locked in for eight hours or so leapt up as far as its lock and clasp would allow and for a split second let in a strip of daylight.
He kicked out again. He saw light flash again. And he realised he could taste the freezing sea.