by John McNally
King looked down from the gantry and saw young Finn hurry to and fro, busy and integral, now joining the entomologists making their way to the reanimation suite.
It had become his opinion over the course of the night that Finn was the most important person on the project, not just as kin and comfort for Allenby, but as sounding board, test bed and “asker of bloody awkward questions” throughout – his tireless good humour and sense of adventure a tonic to all.
His plea to join the entomology team had been something of a classic. When Professor Lomax had pointed out his lack of correct qualifications, Finn had said, “Yeah, but there’s this friend of mine at school, Hudson, who can’t go on school trips over, say, twelve hours because he can’t go for a poo on any toilet but his own – he doesn’t say so, but there’s a note from his mum in the register – so he’s always left behind, and yet he’s the only kid really interested in glacial geology or the Horrible Histories show or stuff like that. Instead everyone else goes and all they do is mess about.”
Professor Lomax’s face had been a picture of confusion and distaste.
Young Dr Spiro had touched knuckles with Finn in a gesture that King believed was meant to denote ‘respect’.
The only glitch had been Finn’s scheduled 9pm ‘call to Grandma’ (her monitoring regime was admirably simple: she expected reports morning, noon and night) during which she had asked to say goodnight to the dog. Finn had claimed the animal was “out chasing bats” which was far from acceptable. A team had to be scrambled and despatched to the vicarage in Langmere where the dog was briefly kidnapped and secret recordings made of its barks, snuffles and other noises for the requested call back. The vicar, a Christabel Coles, remained glued to Celebrity Come Dine With Me throughout.
Upstairs in the control gallery, dignitaries and politicians were arriving from across the globe, in person or onscreen.
Downstairs the excitement was about to begin.
Shortly King would have to go up and make polite conversation, answer pointed questions.
He almost wished he was twelve years old.
* * *
DAY TWO 05:46 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
A dry, translucent husk. A sudden movement within. The husk cracks to reveal a wet, thousand-celled eye.
The fight for life had begun.
Through heavily gloved hands and behind the thick glass of an isolation tank, Dr Spiro worked on the nascent Beta Scarlatti, with Finn in support holding a heat lamp, and Al right on the shoulders of both. Using tweezers and other instruments, Spiro picked away the husk that had been the Scarlatti’s final skin at the nymph stage. Tiny 400mA electric shocks sent through instruments were bringing the Scarlatti back to life after thirty years in cold storage.
Professor Lomax glowered at them over his glasses from the sterile transfer trolley. The trolley was essentially a life-support system for the Scarlatti, one that would keep it isolated as well as subdued, allowing Lomax to glue the nano-scale tracking device on to exactly the right thorax plate following miniaturisation.
Beyond, other scientists and technicians fanned out. Those gathered in the control gallery watched onscreen.
Waiting for the newborn Scarlatti was a titanium harness – a sausage-shaped cage – that would muzzle the beast’s wings and stings to allow the attachment of the miniaturised tracking device to its thorax.
Once harnessed, the Beta would be transferred to the loading bay ready to receive the nano tracking device the moment it was available – all achieved via airlocks to prevent the Beta’s hypersensitive nervous system getting a hostile fix on any crew scent. They wanted it focused on the Alpha Scarlatti’s pheromones and nothing else.2
Slowly, the giant insect began to wake. Deceptively slowly.
Just below the nascent Scarlatti’s squirming head, Spiro used the tweezers to split open the rest of the husk…
SNAP!
“Ahhhh!” screamed Spiro.
The creature seemed to explode in his hand – whipping its huge tail clean through its dead outer layer. Bursting out. Vile and wet. A cluster of scales and stings – poisonous yellows and reds glistening through black. The clatter as it unstuck and buzzed its silver-black wings for the first time…
WWKWZZZWZWZWWKZWZWKZ
“Will someone please get a grip,” hissed Professor Lomax.
Dr Spiro was stunned. Finn dropped the heat lamp and grabbed the flipping, writhing Beta. He felt it struggle against his thick glove like a frenzied rat. Finn held on and waited for Spiro to jump back in. But Spiro seemed to need a moment to recover. Finn looked across at him. Up close, his eyes were strangely speckled, blinking sporadically behind his glasses. More like a computer trying to reboot than a person reacting in surprise.
Finn wondered if he should yell for Al to take over, but Spiro just as quickly snapped out of it, pinning down the Beta Scarlatti with the tweezers. Between them they manipulated the beast into the titanium harness, carefully closing the topside release mechanism so as not to nip the monster’s furious wings.
It was like a nightmare cigar – silver, live and absolutely lethal.
Spiro fed it through an airtight duct to the smaller tank on Professor Lomax’s sterile trolley. Finally, a small grey atomiser unit on the outside of the trolley was switched on to produce a mild anaesthetic steam that would keep the beast subdued until release.
When it was all over, Spiro was relieved but also angry with himself. Again Finn noticed he seemed to be blinking strangely. Maybe he was just nervous. Finn wanted to tell him it was OK, nobody would mind, but it was not the sort of thing a kid could say.
“Congratulations,” Professor Lomax said instead, with heavy sarcasm, “a triumph.”
What an odd couple, Finn thought as they walked off in opposite directions, Lomax pushing the trolley through to the loading bay.
“That’s what happens if you hang around entomologists too long,” Al warned Finn. “You develop…”
“Oversensitive antennae?” said Finn.
“No. A sting,” said Al.
The conversation was interrupted as the first countdown alarm sounded.
BEEEEEEEEEEEP. “T-MINUS TEN.”
Ten minutes to zero hour.
* * *
DAY TWO 05:50 (BST), Hook Hall, Surrey
Everyone moved at once – Al so quickly that Finn had to jog to keep up.
They made their way into the centre of the CFAC where they both climbed up to Al’s cockpit command pod. It was crammed with control computers and sat just in front of the Large Accelerator. Finn’s final job was to bring down the perspex dome of the pod and shut Al in.
“Are you going to watch from down here with the Bug Club, or up top with the Bigwigs?” Al asked.
The politicians and honoured guests would be watching the action in the control gallery with Commander King. Most of the scientists would be opposite in the laboratories along the north side of the CFAC. They were already jostling for position, noses pressed up against the glass, spectacles clashing.
“I’ll stick with the Bug Club.” There was a great view down into the Large Accelerator. “Think it’s going to work?” asked Finn.
“The chances of disaster are always between one in three and evens.”
That didn’t sound too promising, but Finn knew everyone had done all they could. All they needed now was… luck.
He touched the stone at his chest, then pulled the leather tie from round his neck.
“Take it, for luck,” said Finn, handing the lump of spharelite over to Al.
“Luck? I’m a man of reason.”
“My mother would insist,” said Finn.
Al grabbed his head and gave it an affectionate knuckling. “Oh, ye of little faith…” but took the stone all the same.
“You’re not going to sneak on the mission without me, are you?” asked Finn, the thought suddenly occurring to him.
“I’m the only one who knows
how to drive this thing. And frankly, do you think me, you and your friend Hudson who can’t move his bowels would be a better choice than trained killers like Kelly and Ms Salazar?” He looked over to where Salazar and the crew were being laid out on trolleys ready to be anaesthetised.
“My name’s not Frankly,” said Finn, “and hers is not Ms Salazar, it’s Delta, and can you stop staring at her like that? It’s so embarrassing.”
“Hey!” said Al and knuckled him again a little harder. “I am not staring!”
The five-minute alarm sounded.
“Promise you’ll let me have a go at this one day?” said Finn.
“No, but I do promise we’ll get to the Pyrenees for a full week in the summer, and as guests of the President of France. Imagine the catering.”
Finn brought the lid down and secured it over Al, who grinned and gave him the thumbs up.
He was the picture of absolute happiness.
TEN
DAY TWO 05:56 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
Finn knew he should be excited as he walked back to the labs.
Instead he felt suddenly tired, really tired, and he could think of only one word. “Summer,” Al had said. “We’ll get to the Pyrenees for a full week in the summer.”
There was a concept in quantum physics that Al had tried to explain to Finn that he just couldn’t get his head around, and yet it seemed to be true, called the Uncertainty Principle. It meant the more you could know about the position of a particle, the less you know about its momentum, and vice versa; or, as Finn figured it, the more you knew what you wanted, the less you could have it.
The last eighteen hours or so had been extraordinary, brilliant, engaging, exciting and important: and in a few short minutes it would be over. It was ungrateful, he knew, but he had a gut full of that awful end-of-holidays feeling. Summer was an age away. He could see himself back at school and sense the empty weeks stretching ahead.
Who would ever believe this had happened? Would it remain a total secret? Almost certainly. Grown-ups had so many secrets.
If only he could keep something, thought Finn, some souvenir to remind him, proof to himself if no one else. That miniature goat would be neat. Or maybe he could add the Scarlatti itself to his collection? Imagine showing that off…
Then he thought of the next best thing.
* * *
DAY TWO 05:58 (BST). Siberia
After seventeen hours of effort and agony, the Arctic fox had finally managed to drag his broken body over the frozen tundra and back into his lair. He was exhausted, but he was home.
At last he could rest for however long the wound might take to heal. Or he could die.
Deep beneath, Kaparis watched Finn hurry back to the laboratories.
Deep beneath, Kaparis watched Allenby grinning in his pod.
Since 19:43 the previous evening, he’d had access to the entire CCTV and surveillance system of Hook Hall, the heart of which now lay, not in Surrey or anywhere in England, but with a fourteen-year-old girl, another one of his Tyros, Li Jun – half blind and hunched over her keyboards and screens in the communications wing of Kaparis’s bunker, less than fifty metres away.
She had emerged from his seminary aged just nine. She still barely spoke, but her work – Kaparis had to admit as he watched King making tense small talk with a member of the royal family in the control gallery – was perfection.
* * *
DAY TWO 05:59 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
Outside dawn had broken.
The labs that looked directly on to the CFAC were crowded with the exhausted scientists, engineers and technicians who had built the accelerator, who had designed and put together the whole extraordinary mission.
Politicians and scientists were gathered in the control gallery. The atmosphere was tense and expectant.
One by one the crew were given a short-duration anaesthetic. (Delta’s last thought as she passed out, looking up at Al in the cockpit, was a cross between I hope he knows what he’s doing and problematic boyfriend material.) Then, one by one, they were wheeled on to the conveyor. Already in place at the centre of the accelerator was the helicopter; on the conveyor waited Stubbs’s workshop truck, a fuel tanker and now the crew. The rest of the supplies to be shrunk waited in the loading bay, and just the other side of the loading-bay doors waited the trolley containing the imprisoned Beta Scarlatti.
Finn knew this was his last opportunity.
Leaving the crowd of technicians and scientists at the big Lab One windows, he slipped away and headed back through the now deserted corridors and laboratories to Lab Four where the entomology team had been based.
His plan was simple. To pocket the empty Beta Scarlatti husk.
He walked into the deserted lab and there was the husk in the corner of the chamber, just as he expected. Like an exploded purse, the shed skin sat there, just waiting to be taken home and mounted on a piece of A3 card, its Latin name printed on a slip beneath. It was the size of a small pine cone and was bound to provoke wonder. In his friend Hudson at least.
Finn was just looking around for something to put it in when he noticed a brand-new box containing sterile gloves that would be the perfect size, and remembered they’d thrown the old box away earlier. It was when he opened the bin to find the old box that he saw it.
The small grey atomiser unit.
The small grey atomiser unit that was supposed to be on the back of the trolley providing anaesthetising steam to the Scarlatti.
What was it still doing here? He’d better check the trolley and warn someone.
Finn didn’t quite know what conclusion to jump to. Had there been a change of plan? What was the atomiser unit doing in here? He had to tell someone. Half dreading he might get in trouble, he hit an alarm button beside the door.
But no alarms sounded. No lights flashed. He hit it again. Nothing.
Finn jogged back down the empty corridors towards the doors which faced the CFAC loading bay. There was the trolley. There was the Beta Scarlatti safely onboard.
There was young Dr Spiro.
Al’s speech from the cockpit was short.
“This is history, or we are. Let’s go.”
With that, he threw a switch and power dipped all over Europe.
With a surge in noise, the accelerator started up and began to find its va-va-voom.
Al started to manipulate the input interface and up the power. He wore earplugs and shades.
Upstairs, even through the control gallery’s thick safety glass, the noise was extraordinary.
In the accelerator great arcs of lightning spun themselves into a blur, like electric candyfloss.
“The atomiser! I found it back in the lab!” yelled Finn at Dr Spiro over the sound of the accelerator just the other side of the loading-bay doors.
“It’s been replaced!” Spiro shouted back. He seemed to be excited, glowing almost.
Finn looked down. The slot on the back of the trolley where the atomiser should have been now contained something else. Like a lump of clay or playdough. Some wires were coming out of it. Finn didn’t get it at first, couldn’t process what it might be, just that it definitely wasn’t an atomiser unit. All was noise and confusion.
And then, in Spiro’s hand, he saw a grey cover, just like the outside of the atomiser box. Just the right size to fit over the lump of clay. Still without joining the dots, but feeling something was very wrong, Finn hit the alarm at the loading-bay doors.
It was difficult to hear, but again nothing sounded, no lights flashed.
Then Finn saw something that really threw him.
Dr Spiro wasn’t wearing any shoes.
They were just behind the trolley. Both heels were askew. In fact, the heels seemed to be chambers, open and empty. The playdough has come out of his shoes, thought Finn absurdly. In a microsecond, a series of fearful connections flashed through his brain and he arrived at an even more absurd conclusion.
While everyone else was watching the display
, Spiro was putting a bomb on the trolley. There was plastic explosive in the shoes.
“The boy has seen the shoes. Deal with him,” said a voice only Spiro could hear.
Spiro became very calm and still. As if in a trance.
Just turn, thought Finn.
Just walk away.
Just tell someone as fast as you can.
Better still…
RUN.
The door back into Lab One was right there. He was less than ten metres from it. There were more than two dozen scientists and technicians just the other side, crowded at the window, marvelling at the Large Accelerator as it spun liquid lightning round its core.
All he had to do was make it through the door and scream.
But all he felt was the pain of the kick Spiro delivered to his ankle as he turned, and the floor rushing up to meet him as he fell.
The air was blasted out of him as he hit the deck, then again as Spiro followed up with a kick straight into his solar plexus. For a moment he could neither breathe nor scream.
He tried to roll and wriggle and claw his way towards the lab doors. But Spiro was up and over him in a heartbeat. Finn fought for breath, for life. But Spiro was crushing his chest with his weight now, his face a cruel gargoyle.
Finn used every last ounce of his strength to bring his leg hard up and over, as if performing one of his much-practised overhead kicks, and his knee met the back of Spiro’s skull with what felt like the force of a cannonball. For a fraction of a moment Spiro was stunned and off balance.
It was all Finn needed. He bucked his body out from under Spiro, tipping him over.
Finn scrambled towards the lab door. He could see movement through the glass panel. He was going to reach it. He was going to collide with it and burst through and raise the alarm…
But, before he could make it, Spiro snapped out a leg that connected with Finn’s ankle. Almost as Finn hit the floor, Spiro was over him and spraying something from a small phial directly into his face.