by John McNally
“It doesn’t look good…”
King held the moment, suffocating hope, then released it again.
“…however,” he continued, “if by some miracle they are still alive, there’s still the chance they can reach the Alpha Scarlatti and complete the mission. In which case we can avoid displacing half a million people and burning out the heart of England. I think the delay of a handful of hours is a risk we can take.”
Al breathed a sigh of relief.
“Horseshit,” said General Jackman.
“Thank you, Linden,” said the President.
“The crew has till 06:00 hours tomorrow. The original mission time,” demanded Al.
“We’re carrying all the risk we can handle,” said King. “We’ll reconvene at 18:00 hours BST for an update and if necessary to coordinate the evacuation and plan for the nuclear option.”
“But—”
“Six hours. No longer,” warned the US President.
King glanced at Al. “Agreed.”
Al walked out of the room before he punched someone.
The meeting broke up with no sense of resolution, just a continuation of anxiety.
* * *
Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep…
“Two degrees west… sixty-five macro… Another two west… sixty-four…” went Stubbs in monkish incantation, reeling off the tracking data for Delta to follow, as he’d done all afternoon.
Delta responded and guided the Apache across a field of young green wheat, skimming the top of the ears that bobbed and waved in patterned unison in the afternoon breeze. They seemed to Finn like hands in countless millions reaching up at them.
They had covered nearly twelve miles and burnt three-quarters of their fuel tracking the Beta across open country. Now the tracking pattern had changed and the Beta had swung due north towards an ancient wood.
They were right on the western edge of the predicted search area, not ten miles from Langmere. Most of the modelling in Hook Hall had assumed the Scarlatti would drift east with the prevailing wind. Clearly that hadn’t happened. Finn prayed that they’d disregard their models and extend their search this far.
As soon as they crossed the boundary wall at the edge of the field and entered the woods, they passed out of the sunshine they’d bathed in all day and into the relative darkness of the wood. Delta took off her shades so her eyes could adjust. The canopy of native broadleaf trees was thick with rampant early summer growth; below all was cool, damp and calm. It had been a gardeners’ May of sunshine and showers, great for plant life, birdlife… and for every last spider and insect.
Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep…
“Fifty metres… Another two degrees east… forty-five metres… forty— Wait, I think it’s stopped.”
Delta turned to Finn. “Noob?”
“It’s either feeding or… it’s found something.”
“The Alpha?” said Kelly.
Finn didn’t dare respond. He didn’t want to jinx it.
“Let’s take her up and come down real slow on it,” suggested Kelly.
“And stay downwind whatever happens,” said Finn.
Delta hovered over a stream that split the wood and held the chopper and compass steady, looking down at the surface of the water. After a couple of ripples, she deduced the exact direction of the breeze.
“Still westerly. Is the Beta still stationary, Stubbs?”
“Forty macro-metres. Hasn’t moved.”
“Then take us round the northeast,” said Kelly.
Stubbs navigated the tiny craft through the wood, beautiful and still to the normal eye, but to Finn, at the nano-level, alive with activity, like a dystopian city, full of chaos, noise and strange flying objects.
He leant forward and all but pressed his face up against the glass canopy to try and take it all in. He had to. Gnats and midges whizzed in circles, but with so little weight and force the helicopter’s blades scythed through them, creating such a fine mist of red-yellow innards that Delta had to use the windscreen wipers to clear off the glass. The air was thick with nature’s detritus: flaking, floating plant debris, clouds of tree pollen, excrement dumped by grubs and caterpillars in the canopy. Bees dodged and bulleted back and forth to their hives, urgent and loud. Most spectacular of all, damsel and dragonflies sped past along the banks of the stream, stopping dead to hang stationary, magnificent creatures in highlighter blues and greens, almost the same size as the Apache, but many, many times more beautiful.
Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep…
“Another ten macro then swing back due west. That’s it… thirty… twenty…”
“Go high.”
“Climbing.”
Delta took the chopper high into the canopy, rollercoastering in and out of branches, clipping swathes of swaying green.
As they closed in on the signal, she slowed and descended.
Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep…
“Ten macro due west…”
They crept down through the canopy.
“Anybody got visual?”
And then Finn saw it.
“There!”
“What is it?”
“Dead stuff.”
It was as if it had all been laid out for some bizarre cult. A ring of death. In the centre lay the sow badger, now bloated through decomposition, and surrounding it a festering circle of dead crows, two foxes, half a dozen rats and one no-doubt-much-loved domestic cat.
“Woah…”
“That has to be it, Noob?” said Delta.
“Does it match the signal?” asked Kelly.
“Exactly,” said Stubbs.
“Then it’s the nest,” said Finn. “I think we made it.”
“Scope,” ordered Delta.
Stubbs called up the scope function on the main screen and operated a powerful lens beneath the main fire position on the aircraft’s nose. They watched as he used a joystick to zero in on the sow badger.
As Stubbs tracked the flanks, Finn again spotted something.
Two things.
The Alpha and Beta Scarlattis, writhing and dancing in the guts of the corpse.
“Oh my God…” said Delta.
It had worked.
They took a moment. Of disbelief. Of pride.
EIGHTEEN
Swarm… swarm… swarm… swarm… swarm…
The twin Scarlattis, Alpha and Beta, danced round and round each other in frenzy, in joyous reunion, wings clattering and straining, hormones and pheromones and musk pouring out. Bodies twitching and flicking, senses alive, biting and even stinging each other in joy.
Swarm… swarm… swarm… swarm… swarm…
In the corpse the newly hatched nymphs could taste it too and wriggled their nascent wings, desperate to join them, desperate to be free.
* * *
DAY TWO 15:02 (BST). Siberia
Kaparis had decided to let the authorities ‘stew’ for a while. He had picked up plenty of tertiary evidence of increased military activity in east Surrey and other signs of blind panic in the environs of Hook Hall, including a huge and steady increase in sensitive diplomatic communications around the world. Now, having watched the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet put to sea from its base in Faslane, Kaparis decided it was time to ‘put them out of their misery’ and launch Phase 2.
“Get me Stefan,” he ordered.
Stefan was the oldest and most trusted Tyro in the field.
Aged between twelve and seventeen, the Tyros were Kaparis’s proxy selves, children of every race, creed and colour, brilliantly educated via NRP in everything from quantum mechanics to unarmed combat, often specialist in one area; ruthless, cunning and, above all, totally loyal and obedient.
And, to the outside world, just children. Nondescript teens. Invisible. All that linked them was the ‘speckled iris’ scarring of their eyes, a result of repeated NRP work. But who would ever notice?
Following his paralysis, Kaparis had scoured the orp
hanages and charity hospitals of the world, rigorously testing the brightest, selecting, adopting and developing a select few into a ‘higher state of being’, in his seminary in an abandoned monastery in the Carpathian Mountains.
Few entered and only thirteen had emerged alive so far (NRP drove unsuitable subjects insane).
The comms link to the Atlantic could be bitty during a heavy sea, but Stefan’s blond head soon flicked up onscreen.
“I think ‘Go’, Stefan, don’t you?”
The blond boy bowed.
* * *
DAY TWO 15:18 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
Al stared listlessly at a plate of scrambled eggs. He knew he had to eat something, otherwise he’d be consumed by the acid in his stomach, but he didn’t feel like it.
He’d had the wreckage from the Merlin sifted, checked and rechecked, and there was still absolutely no sign of the nano-crew or the Apache helicopter or, indeed, of any unidentified organic remains. This was positive. This was a straw, and he clung to it.
However, the search was getting nowhere. Trying to cover nearly fifty square miles when the signal range for the crew was only a few tens of macro-metres was a mammoth task. They’d flown a series of aircraft in a grid pattern across the area and come up with nothing. They were continuing to use a shifted grid, but with the same result, and the number of low-flying aircraft they had out searching was itself becoming dangerous.
He forced a mouthful of eggs into his mouth just as King appeared and sat down next to him.
He swallowed the mouthful, and asked King, “Anything?” – reflexively, as he’d been doing all day.
“Nothing,” King replied – ditto.
King held out a battered schoolboy mobile. Finn’s. Al had been avoiding it.
“This keeps going off in a desk draw in the gallery. Children should not have phones. Your mother keeps calling.”
Al took the chipped and stickered handset, his heart contracting for a moment. He had promised Finn a new one. But who could ever want to replace a thing so precious?
Six missed calls from his mother and a mangled predictive text:
whoro6 areyou? All in commune ocado. Alldya.
Furryus. Call.
Al and Finn had established a ‘call anytime’ relationship as part of their coping strategy. At first, when Finn was still at junior school, there would be tears and anger, nearly always at teatime. Over time this had evolved into long talks about nothing in particular. Then, as wounds began to heal, it became more infrequent. How Al wished he could call him now.
He opened the keypad, and proceeded to lie to his mother.
All OK. Al has lost phone. At Harvester in Cookham.
Going into cinema now. Knit for Britain. Fxxx
Al pressed Send. His heart squeezed again and he felt he was beginning to tip over some kind of edge when, “Commander King?”
King and Al looked up to see a nervous-looking intelligence officer standing before them.
“We think we may have something.”
Thirty seconds later, King and Al were back in the control gallery staring at the main screen.
“We think it’s Dr Cooper-Hastings, sir. Just posted on an obscure Chinese social network. Our search algorithms picked it up.”
Finally they’re breaking cover, thought King.
A poor quality still of Dr Cooper-Hastings appeared on the screen, grainy, and in the grimly familiar style of a terrorist martyrdom video.
Professor Channing was shocked.
“Is that Cooper-Hastings?” said Al.
“It’s him…” Channing said sadly.
“Play it,” ordered King.
Cooper-Hastings looked into the camera. He was determined, disgusted even, as he spoke. He rocked back and forth, his voice rough from lack of sleep.
“You will know by now what we have done. The organism is quite safe and breeding fast.”
Cooper-Hastings’ face was replaced by a video feed from a static camera. It showed a dead badger in light undergrowth, slowly zooming in on its belly to reveal the Alpha Scarlatti moving this way and that, tending its eggs.
“We will provide you with its location should you meet our demands.
“First, pack the Cambridge Fat Doughnut Accelerator into two shipping containers and have them placed freestanding on the deck of the container ship Oceania Express which has just unloaded at Felixstowe.
“Second, by 06:00 hours have said ship steam towards the tip of the Jutland peninsular, there to await further instruction. Its cargo must remain unaltered, the ship unmonitored and unmanned by security personnel. We shall know from within your operation if you deviate from this one iota.
“Third, Dr Allenby will provide us with the Boldklub sequencing codes which we strongly suspect exist on a small blue USB storage device kept on his person.
“Our intentions are entirely peaceful and benign. We believe such technology cannot be trusted to nation states or mediocrities in public employment; it is much better in the hands of trusted, exceptional individuals.
“Post your official response as a comment on this blog. The Scarlatti nymphs will reach maturation at some time between 06:00 hours and 12:00 tomorrow. If you have not fully acceded to our demands by then…
“…we will let nature take its course.”
In the shock and then the brief hubbub that followed – as heads of state were informed, as Security Service staff rushed to get the host site blocked and to find out whatever they could about how, where and when the video was uploaded, as the general level of panic rose – Al felt at least one iota of anxiety drain away.
At last they had something to go on.
“I’m going to find you,” he said to his unseen foe.
He clutched the small rock of spharelite around his neck. He scratched it with his nail. It glowed.
“I’m going to find you,” he promised Finn.
* * *
DAY TWO 15:39 (BST). Siberia
Down in his lair Kaparis listened to the Brodsky play Beethoven’s String Quartet in C sharp minor and awaited events.
He raised an eyebrow at Heywood.
Instinctively the butler moved forward and dripped Château Valandraud St-Émilion ’95 by pipette on to his fat silver-grey tongue.
Kaparis liked the finer things in life, very much. Indeed, he considered himself one of the finer things in life, so much so he had constructed a general theory round the very notion.
A theory he now felt absolutely certain would be demonstrated.
* * *
Not wishing to take their chances on the forest floor, they landed the Apache carefully on the horizontal branch of a common oak that was a good 200 years old, Delta putting down close to the trunk where there was no chance of movement in the breeze. The insect flying circus still buzzed round them, but at least it felt like they had a private box and wouldn’t get dragged into the show.
As Finn jumped from the cab, he felt a professional sense of excitement taking hold of the crew.
Delta turned off the Apache engines to preserve their remaining fuel and they set about finalising the assault plan.
They got out maps and nailed their position in the southeast quadrant of Willard’s Copse, 1,000 macro-metres outside the village of Willingham, 100 macro-metres downwind of the nest site.
Stubbs did some calculations. They had enough fuel to complete three attack runs and comfortably reach the village, “But if we get stuck in a lengthy dogfight that would be seriously reduced.”
“The miracle is,” Kelly said, and they all agreed, “that despite everything we’ve got a shot at this, and there’s no way we’re going to screw it up.”
The attack on the nest would be pretty much as they’d prepared for back at the CFAC. The primary aim was to kill the two mature Scarlattis, then to destroy the nest, along with any nymphs or eggs. Their secondary objective was to report the position of the nest site.
It was agreed that Delta and Stubbs in the Apache would make
multiple attack runs at maximum speed, firing off everything they had: twelve Hellfire missiles, a full load of Hydra rockets, a 30mm chain gun with 1,200 rounds and even, if necessary, four air-to-air Stinger missiles. A lot of bang.
“That should put their asses on ice,” said Delta.
Kelly, it was decided, would be landed ahead of the first attack run to establish a ground fire position: to provide ‘mopping up’ fire (finishing off any eggs or nymphs that escaped the bombardment) and to prevent the Scarlattis escaping the nest. This was now even more important as the greatest threat to the mission was that one or both of the Scarlattis would pursue and attack the Apache in the air.
“As long as I go in at max speed, I’ll have time to turn and waste it with the chain gun. And we can always load Stubbs up with an M27,” said Delta.
Kelly shook his head.
Stubbs stated, matter of fact, “Been refused small arms access since 1994. Lost a thumb on the range. Not mine. Fellow next to me.”
“Never mind. Are we good to go?” said Kelly.
“Spot of supper first?” suggested Stubbs.
“Eat? There’s only an hour of good daylight left!” said Delta.
“What about me?” asked Finn.
They all turned to look at him. And then –
WHACK!
A chaffinch hopped out of nowhere to land on a branch directly alongside. Less than a macro-metre away. A tower of colour. A blur of speed. The size and build of a T-Rex.
“Kelly!” snapped Delta.
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()! sang the curious bird, a crystal-clear scream in B minor, snapping its head round to get another look at them.
As one, the crew ducked to cover their ears, Kelly failing to fire. There was a sudden, violent wingbeat, and in a microsecond’s blur the bird was upon them.
It screamed again and Kelly finally got his finger on the trigger.
DRRRRRRRRRRRRT!
The bullets missed, but the harsh, alien sound threw the massive bird into a blind panic. It burst into a furious flap in its desperation to escape, wings clattering the branch and almost taking out the entire crew.