by Mark Walden
‘Doable?’ Shelby asked.
‘Cake,’ Laura said with a chuckle. ‘Government IT contractors, gotta love them.’
That was slightly unfair, Laura realised, but she had spent the last year trying to hack H.I.V.E.’s network with varying degrees of success. That network was secured by a neurally networked artificial intelligence who she suspected rather enjoyed matching wits with her, and getting round him had been like playing a dozen simultaneous games of three-dimensional chess. This, by comparison, was noughts and crosses.
‘OK, here we go,’ Laura said after barely a minute. ‘Elevator control subsystems. We’re ready.’
‘Roger that,’ Raven replied in her ear.
Up on the roof the hatch whirred open and Raven peered inside. Otto finished clamping a second metal box from his pack on to the framework and clipped the end of the line that trailed from it to his harness. Raven moved to the first box on the other side of the hatch and followed suit. She slowly lowered herself through the opening and let herself swing free in the pitch darkness of the seemingly bottomless lift shaft. Otto followed her through, praying that the impossibly thin cable he hung from was as strong as Darkdoom’s technicians had insisted it was.
Raven tipped forward, her head pointing straight down the shaft, her legs straight and her arms tight against her sides. Otto did the same, swallowing nervously. Even with his night-vision system active, the shaft appeared to simply vanish into a black void far below.
‘Ready to commence descent,’ Raven whispered, flipping the hinged top off the tiny cylindrical control unit she held in one hand.
‘Copy that,’ Laura replied. ‘Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark!’
Raven hit the switch and the brakes holding the cable reels in both boxes up on the roof released simultaneously. To Otto what happened next was indistinguishable from free fall as they shot down the shaft at over fifty metres per second. The speed was terrifying but it was only by travelling this fast that they would be ignored by the motion sensors dotted along the length of the lift shaft. Their camouflage may fool the human eye but those sensors would detect them, visible or not. Speed was the only answer.
In the deserted office Laura watched the timer on her computer’s display. There was no margin for error. The shaft leading to Deepcore that Otto and Raven were now plummeting down was sealed near its base by security shutters. The only way to open them without triggering the security alarms was to convince the security system that this was a maintenance test, which would quickly cycle the shutters open and then closed again, but the shutters had to open at exactly the right moment: too soon and the shutters would close again before Raven and Otto passed through, too late and they wouldn’t have time to open before they reached them. The timing was too fine for a human; they had to trust her computer and, despite all the precautions they had taken, that made her nervous.
Back in the lift shaft Otto could now make out the shutters as he raced towards them. He closed his eyes, knowing that if they hit them at this speed at least it would be painless. Just twenty metres below them there was a quick hiss and the shutters shot apart, Raven and Otto passing through with just inches of clearance on either side. Just as quickly the shutters began to close again and Otto felt his stomach shoot into his mouth as the brakes on the cable reels, that were now several hundred metres above them, engaged and brought them to a stop as quickly as was physically safe, moments before the cables got trapped by the shutters. As soon as they stopped the clips on both their harnesses automatically released and they dropped the last couple of metres on to the top of the lift carriage at the bottom of the shaft. Raven landed with the grace of a ballerina, flipping and alighting squarely on her feet in almost total silence. Otto landed with slightly less dignity, on all fours, with a thud.
Raven barely even paused for breath as Otto slowly stood up. She moved quickly to the hatch in the top of the lift carriage, pulled it open and dropped inside. Otto would have liked to stop and catch his breath, but the clock was still ticking and there was no time for him to dawdle. He lowered himself slowly through the hatch and dropped to the floor of the lift behind Raven. She was inspecting a numerical keypad on the wall next to the door.
‘Need the code,’ Raven said, and up in the deserted office Laura, Shelby and Wing gave a collective sigh of relief.
‘You are both OK?’ Wing asked.
‘We’re fine, as you can tell by the fact that you’re talking to us,’ Raven replied impatiently. ‘The code?’
‘Coming up,’ Laura replied as her custom-written intrusion routines cut through the network’s protection like a knife. ‘Got it: two, four, zero, six, zero, five.’
In the carriage Raven punched the string of numbers into the keypad and the lift doors hissed apart.
‘We’re in,’ Raven said quickly, stepping through the doors and into the corridor beyond. The corridor was lined with stainless steel and at the far end, just thirty metres away, was a door above which the word DEEPCORE could be seen, etched into the metal.
Otto went to walk down the corridor, but Raven’s hand shot out, pressing against his chest and holding him in place.
‘Stop,’ she whispered. ‘Too easy.’
The plans that Darkdoom had acquired of the building had extended as far as the lift shaft which they had just plummeted down. They had no way of knowing what might lie ahead of them at this point. Under the circumstances, Otto was prepared to trust Raven’s very finely tuned survival instincts.
Raven pressed a small stud on the side of the goggles mounted to the front of her helmet, switching between an array of different visual modes. There was nothing out of the ordinary but the hairs on the back of her neck prickled and she had learnt long ago to trust them more than any electronic device. She reached over her shoulders and pulled the twin blades from the sheaths on her back, thumbing the controls on the hilts of the swords to make them as sharp as she possibly could, then slowly and cautiously she began to walk down the corridor.
There was a sudden almost inaudible click and with a whoosh four lethally sharp spikes shot forward from the walls surrounding her. Raven moved in a blur, her blades whining through the air impossibly fast, neatly severing the spikes before they could impale her. She moved more quickly now, dancing down the corridor, her blades swinging as more and more of the lethal spears shot out of the walls towards her. Otto had never seen anyone move with such grace and speed; it was like watching a deadly ballet.
Raven was nearing the end of the corridor, the floor behind her littered with the severed tips of the spikes, when she made her first mistake. There were just too many spikes shooting from all around her and one sliced across her shoulder, tearing apart her armour and leaving a deep gash in her shoulder. She spun and sliced at the spike, now dripping with her blood, before it could retract back into the wall. It clattered to the ground, its tip stained red. Raven cursed in Russian and fell against the door at the end of the corridor, breathing heavily. Otto slowly made his way down the corridor, avoiding the scattered remains of the lethal anti-intrusion system. Who knew what ID tag or transmitter you had to be wearing to make your way safely down this corridor under normal circumstances, but he was sure that its designers could never have imagined anyone being able to do what Raven had just done.
‘How bad?’ Raven said as Otto approached, tipping her head back towards the long cut in her shoulder.
‘It’s not pretty but you’ll live,’ Otto said. The cut was deep but the bleeding wasn’t too bad; she had been lucky.
‘Guys, you need to move,’ Laura’s voice whispered in both their ears. ‘I don’t know what just happened down there but every alarm in the building has just gone off up here.’
Raven didn’t reply; she just made four quick cuts at the metal door in front of them with her swords and kicked it. It fell slowly backwards into the room beyond and landed with a loud metallic clang.
‘So much for subtle,’ Raven muttered and stepped inside.
&nbs
p; The monitor on Sebastian Trent’s desk flickered into life, filled with the anxious-looking face of a H.O.P.E. surveillance operative.
‘What is it?’ Trent said impatiently.
‘Sir, we’ve just been informed that someone has penetrated the Deepcore server room under the Vauxhall Cross building,’ the man reported.
‘Do we have positive identification?’ Trent asked quickly.
‘No, sir, but that server contains a full copy of all H.O.P.E.’s operational files,’ the man on the screen replied. ‘If they fell into the wrong hands the consequences would be catastrophic.’
Trent took a long deep breath. It could be anyone doing this but every instinct told him that there was only one person skilled enough to attempt such an audacious operation. He cut the connection to the surveillance operative, picked up his phone and punched in a number. After a couple of seconds a female voice answered.
‘Hello.’
‘How quickly can you get to MI6 headquarters?’
‘Fifteen minutes,’ the voice replied.
‘It’s Raven, go now.’
‘Understood,’ the voice answered efficiently and the line went dead.
A mirthless smile spread across Trent’s face as he put the phone down. They would not have to track Raven down after all; she had delivered herself to them.
Otto followed Raven through the shattered remains of the door into the Deepcore server room. The room was filled with row after row of server racks, their blinking lights creating an almost hypnotic display as data flowed in and out of the room. Otto could feel that the room was bitterly cold, even through the insulated skin of his thermoptic camo suit. It was clearly designed for machines rather than humans.
‘So what now?’ Raven said quickly.
‘Give me a minute,’ Otto replied.
‘We don’t have a minute,’ Raven replied impatiently.
‘OK, OK,’ Otto shot back, quickly scanning the server racks. He walked towards the nearest one and slowly knelt down in front of it. He closed his eyes, trying to ignore the time pressure that they were suddenly under and achieve the quiet concentration that he needed for the task ahead. Raven stood and watched as Otto’s head dropped on to his chest.
Otto wasn’t in the room any more; now he raced through the labyrinthine channels of the network, trying to stay focused on the specific information that he needed to retrieve. It seemed an almost impossible task: there were endless glowing fields of data all around him, swarming with the pulses of information that kept Britain’s security forces connected. He felt a twinge of panic. There was just too much data to sort through. If he’d had time he might have been able to find what he needed, but time was the one thing they did not have. He’d led his friends into this lethal situation and now he couldn’t find the one piece of information they were here for. Otto stopped, hovering amid the torrents of data. He forced himself to calm down; he had to stay focused.
He thought back to the encounter with H.I.V.E.mind in the school library. He could almost hear the calm reassuring tone of the AI’s voice.
‘This is simply a construct that your mind has created to rationalise an experience that would otherwise be impossible to comprehend to a human consciousness,’ Otto said to himself, recalling H.I.V.E.mind’s definition of what he was now experiencing. He had to remember that this was all just in his head, that this was exactly how he imagined the search for the data would be. He had to stop thinking like a human and think like a machine. He could spend for ever frantically hunting for the data they needed; what he had to do instead was make it come to him. He visualised the information, willing it to find him. For a long moment, nothing happened, and then suddenly there, hanging in the air before him, was a glowing cube. He slowly reached out and touched the surface of the cube, unsure what to expect. The data streamed into him from the cube like a lightning strike. Otto gasped with pain, his head felt like it would explode. He struggled to maintain his focus, fighting to remind himself that this was all just a construct of his own imagination, but the pain felt all too real.
Back in the server room, Otto’s body stiffened and then began to convulse. Raven ran to his side, dropping down and catching him before he fell backwards on to the floor. She quickly pulled his helmet off and was dismayed to see how deathly pale his face was, the only colour coming from the twin trails of crimson blood that trickled from his nose. Suddenly his eyes flew open and for a long moment he stared into nothingness, unblinking.
‘Otto!’ Raven said sharply, cradling his head.
Then suddenly he was back, blinking rapidly, looking confused and disorientated.
‘Nero,’ he said croakily, his voice weak. ‘Switzerland, the Alps – he’s in the mountains.’
‘Where are they?’ Shelby said, sounding worried as Laura tapped away at the keyboard of her computer.
‘I don’t know, but I do know that we can’t stay here much longer,’ Laura replied nervously.
She tried to ignore the wailing of alarms coming from outside as she fought to stay one step ahead of the hound programs that had been released on to the network to determine the precise location of her intrusion.
Wing said nothing, crouched in front of the door, peering through the eyepiece of the snake-cam at the image of the corridor beyond. Suddenly a familiar and extremely welcome voice filled their earpieces.
‘Raven to team two, we need an exit,’ she whispered urgently.
‘Working on it,’ Laura said quietly, her fingers flying over the keyboard.
‘Did you get it?’ Shelby asked quickly.
‘Yes, but it’s no use if we can’t get out of here,’ Raven replied.
‘Right,’ Laura said, studying the display on her computer. ‘The only way in or out of there is the lift, but if I grant access to that they’re going to detect the hack and get a location on us. You won’t have much time.’
‘I wasn’t planning to hang around,’ Raven replied. ‘Do it.’
Laura tapped away at the tiny keyboard for a few seconds and then hit return.
‘OK, the lift is unlocked – move.’
‘Roger that,’ Raven replied and the line went dead.
Wing pulled the flexible tube from under the door and stood up.
‘We have company,’ he whispered. He pressed the stud on his helmet and vanished as the thermoptic camouflage system came back online. Shelby and Laura followed suit just seconds before the door swung open and a guard in full body armour stepped in, sweeping the sub-machine gun that he carried across the room in slow, careful arcs. Every breath Laura took sounded impossibly loud to her, as she stood perfectly still, the guard just a few feet away. She winced when he spotted the tiny notebook computer that sat on the desk.
‘Bravo Three to control, I’ve found the source of the network intrusion. No sign of anybody here.’
‘Understood, Bravo Three,’ a voice answered over his radio. ‘Please disable the device.’
‘Wilco,’ the guard said and fired a short three-round burst into the computer, instantly destroying it. Satisfied, he turned to leave, but then something odd caught his eye. There, in the middle of the pattern of shadow cast by the window, was a human form. Laura felt her blood run cold as she realised that standing in front of the window had been a big mistake. He spun around, levelling his weapon at the apparently empty air in front of him. He reached to his belt and unclipped a small cylindrical device, popping the cap off with his thumb and pressing the button underneath. There was a high-pitched whine like a camera flash charging and then a sharp electrical crackle. Instantly the thermoptic camouflage on all three suits failed and Laura was left fully visible, perfectly outlined by the night-time glow of London that poured in from outside.
‘Gotcha,’ the guard said and squeezed the trigger.
Wing moved like a cat, swatting the guard’s weapon upwards, sending a burst of fire harmlessly into the ceiling tiles. His other hand lashed out like a striking cobra, hitting the man with a flat palm to the chin. The
guard’s head snapped back and he staggered away, Wing wrenching the gun from his hands and tossing it into the corner of the room. He advanced on the dazed guard, delivering a solid straight-legged kick to his gut that knocked all the wind from him and doubled him over. Wing pivoted and brought his knee up sharply under the man’s chin, sending him sailing backwards on to the desk, where he landed with a crash, out cold.
‘Everyone OK?’ Wing said quietly, watching the guard for any sign of movement.
‘Aye,’ Laura said shakily, putting her hand on Wing’s arm, ‘thank you.’
‘You are welcome,’ Wing said calmly. ‘We should go.’
‘Nothing more we can do here,’ Laura said, gesturing at the remains of the shattered computer.
‘Suits are fried too. Looks like they were ready for that particular trick,’ Shelby said, pressing fruitlessly at the activation stud on her helmet.
‘Remember what Ms Leon taught us,’ Wing said as he headed for the door. ‘When stealth fails, one must rely on evasion. Come on.’
‘How are you feeling?’ Raven said, looking at Otto with obvious concern.
‘I’ve felt better,’ Otto said honestly. He leant against the wall of the lift, not entirely sure if his legs would support him for very much longer. He was finding it hard to concentrate, his head filled with the confusing muddle of data that he had absorbed from the network. He fought to keep the coordinates of the facility that was holding Nero from becoming lost in the swirling mass of information rattling around inside his skull. In truth, he felt like all he wanted to do was curl up in a ball in the corner and sleep for a week.
Suddenly the lift jerked to a stop; the doors stayed firmly closed. Raven pulled them apart slightly with a grunt, only to be met with the featureless concrete wall of the lift shaft. She let the doors go and they closed with a thud.