by Mark Walden
‘And why did his men follow his orders?’ Mag said. ‘I know that they’re soldiers but . . .’
‘They don’t have a choice,’ Shaw said. ‘The devices attached to their skulls don’t block the Voidborn control signal – they intercept and subtly alter it so that the soldiers are under his control instead. They’re no more responsible for their actions than the rest of the Sleepers.’
‘You seem to know an awful lot about it,’ Jay said with a slight frown.
‘I should do,’ Shaw replied. ‘I designed the control devices.’
‘Why would you do that?’ Mag asked, sounding surprised. ‘Why give someone like that his own private army?’
‘I didn’t realise at the time how dangerous he was becoming,’ Shaw replied. ‘It was only later when –’
Jay suddenly held his hand up as a Hunter floated out of one of the columns of light just ahead of them, slowly rotating as the segmented metallic tentacles dangling beneath its body twitched and writhed. The Hunter turned towards them and advanced. Jay raised his rifle, his finger curling inside the trigger guard.
‘Wait,’ Shaw said, watching the Hunter carefully. The Voidborn creature drifted towards them and then went straight past as they parted to make way for it, eventually floating away down the tunnel from which they had just come.
‘That was risky,’ Jay said, lowering his rifle as the Hunter disappeared from view.
‘Not really,’ Shaw said. ‘I’ve spent long enough studying those things to know that if they’re going to attack they’ll do so without any hesitation whatsoever. That one didn’t even seem to notice we were here.’
‘Can we get out of here?’ Mag asked. ‘These things give me the creeps. The only ones I ever saw in Edinburgh were already dead, ripped to pieces by the Vore. Think I prefer them that way, to be honest.’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ Jay said. They had no idea how long the Hunter’s apparent lack of interest in them would last. ‘So how are we going to find the others?’
‘Simple,’ Mag said, sniffing the air with a slight smile, ‘just follow my nose.’
8
Rachel sat in the windowless room with Sam’s head resting in her lap. His eyes slowly opened and he raised his hand to his forehead with a wince.
‘Ow,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
‘Whatever that Talon creature did to you knocked you out cold,’ Rachel said as Sam gingerly sat up, rubbing his temples.
‘We’ve been locked in here ever since,’ Stirling said, gesturing at the bare, black walls that surrounded them, the only light coming from a dimly glowing panel in the ceiling.
‘Don’t suppose either of you have any paracetamol,’ Sam said.
‘’Fraid not,’ Rachel replied with a crooked smile.
‘I think we’re moving,’ Sam said. He could feel the rumble of the Mothership’s massive anti-gravity engines through the soles of his feet. The last time he’d felt that was when the Servant had first appeared and saved the Mothership from dropping on to central London.
‘It would appear so,’ Stirling said with a frown, ‘though we have no idea where we’re going or why.’
‘There’s something you need to know,’ Rachel said, her expression suddenly serious. ‘Mason released the Vore in London.’
‘But he said that . . .’
‘I know,’ Rachel said with a sigh. ‘He did it anyway.’
‘Oh my God,’ Sam said, struggling to absorb the enormity of what Rachel had just told him. ‘The others, we have to . . .’ He trailed off. He’d seen what had happened in Edinburgh. There would be nothing they could do. London was lost and, in all likelihood, so were the lives of his friends. ‘I’m going to kill him.’
‘It may not be quite as straightforward as that, I’m afraid,’ Stirling replied. ‘You saw his true face. I have no idea how long the man I knew as Mason has actually been this Talon creature. He clearly has access to technology far beyond our understanding; the ability to change his appearance at will is probably just a fraction of his true power. He claimed to be the last of the Illuminate and I strongly suspect that they must have been the original builders of the Motherships. If he understands the technology on board this vessel properly, and has the experience necessary to use it properly, he may prove almost impossible to stop.’
‘We have to try,’ Rachel said. ‘If he’s prepared to release those monsters in London, God only knows what he’ll do with the Mothership.’
‘Well, we can’t do much about it from in here,’ Sam said, looking over at the firmly sealed door at the other end of the room. He could still sense the Mothership around him, just as he had been able to since his first encounter with the Voidborn consciousness, but his direct connection to it was severed. ‘Where’s the Servant?’
‘She’s gone,’ Stirling said. ‘Talon deactivated her nanite swarm.’
‘So we’re stuck here,’ Sam said, still trying to ignore the pain in his head.
‘I rather fear we are,’ Stirling replied.
Sam sat staring at the floor for a couple of minutes, trying to make sense of what was happening.
‘It’s not your fault, you know,’ Rachel said.
‘I should never have given up control of the Mothership. It didn’t save anyone anyway,’ Sam said.
‘You couldn’t have known that at the time,’ Rachel replied, shaking her head. ‘None of us knew –’
She was interrupted as the door at the other end of the room hissed open to reveal one of Talon’s soldiers.
‘You,’ the soldier said, pointing at Sam, ‘come with me.’
‘Where are you taking him?’ Rachel said, standing up. The soldier raised his rifle and Sam put his hand on Rachel’s arm.
‘It’s OK, Rachel,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll be fine – don’t worry.’
Sam raised his hands when the soldier motioned with his gun for him to step outside. As he passed the man, he felt the same odd scratching noise inside his skull that he’d felt when he’d first been near the soldiers on the helicopter that had brought them down to London.
He glanced up at the soldier’s impassive face, and the implant on the side of his skull flickered with green light. Sam suddenly realised that it was flashing in perfect unison with the scratching noise. He instinctively reached for the device with his mind, just as he had done with the Mothership’s Voidborn tech. The device responded and he felt the instantaneous bond between his own mind and the alien technology as the implant inside his own skull connected to it. He sent it the quickest and simplest command he could.
Deactivate.
The soldier collapsed in a heap on the floor, his protection from the Voidborn control signal instantly gone. He was just another Sleeper now. Sam bent down and picked up the fallen man’s rifle, throwing it to Rachel.
‘You’re a better shot than me,’ he said, pulling the soldier’s pistol from the holster on his hip. ‘I have no idea if anyone will have noticed me doing that. We’d better get moving.’
‘What did you do to him?’ Rachel asked, looking down at the fallen man and then back towards Sam.
‘I think I found his off switch,’ Sam said, tapping the side of his own head.
‘I still don’t understand why they would help Talon,’ she said. ‘They’ve seen what the Vore can do – why would they willingly help him after he ordered them released in London?’
‘I think there’s more to those things than meets the eye,’ Sam said, pointing at the implant on the side of the soldier’s head. ‘It wasn’t just blocking the control signal, it was as if it was receiving another signal from somewhere else – not Voidborn, something different.’
‘Talon,’ Stirling replied. ‘That would make sense, I suppose. He would need to be sure that his men’s loyalty was beyond question.’
‘Well, let’s hope he’s too distracted at the moment to notice that one of his puppets has just had his strings cut,’ Rachel said, looking both ways along the empty corridor. ‘Do either of you kno
w where we are? These corridors all look the same to me.’
‘I tried to keep track of where we were being taken when the Hunters brought us here,’ Stirling said. ‘I think we’re not far from the central hangar deck.’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Sam said, pulling the spare clips for the pistol from the soldier’s belt. ‘I just followed the Servant around whenever I was up here. It’s a maze.’
‘We need to get to the control room,’ Rachel said, ‘if we’re going to stop Talon.’
‘I think we’re going to need more than two guns to do that,’ Stirling said.
‘We have to try,’ Rachel said. ‘If he’s prepared to release the Vore in London, God only knows what he’ll do with a Mothership. He clearly doesn’t care how many of us have to die so he can win his war.’
‘Rachel’s right,’ Sam said. ‘We have to do something.’
‘I don’t disagree with you,’ Stirling said, ‘but we need a plan. We know nothing about this Talon creature or his connection to the Illuminate, whoever or whatever that is.’
Suddenly, the unconscious soldier’s radio crackled into life.
‘Operative seven report status,’ the voice on the other end said.
‘Let’s go,’ Rachel said, looking nervously down the corridor. In the distance they could hear the sound of marching boots.
‘This way,’ Stirling said, gesturing for them to follow him in the opposite direction. The three of them ran down the gently curving corridor, the sudden shouts from behind suggesting that the guards had found their unconscious companion.
‘Why isn’t he sending the Hunters after us?’ Rachel asked as they sprinted out into the cavernous expanse of one of the Mothership’s several hangar bays. All around them Hunters floated next to the drop-ships lining the floor of the bay, performing routine maintenance. None of the hovering bio-mechanical creatures paid them the slightest bit of attention – they simply continued about their appointed tasks, apparently unconcerned by the arrival of these unexpected humans.
‘I have no idea,’ Stirling said. ‘I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies.’
‘Maybe he can’t,’ Sam said, scanning the room for a place where they could take cover. ‘I never really controlled them either. I just asked the Servant and she carried out the commands herself. Maybe without her Talon can’t access all of the Mothership’s systems.’
Sam ducked behind a large black cube that was throbbing with blue light, long glowing cables running from it to the belly of a nearby drop-ship. Rachel and Stirling joined him, crouching down, listening carefully for signs of their pursuers. It didn’t take long. Half a dozen of Talon’s enslaved soldiers jogged into the hangar, fanning out across the deck, weapons raised.
‘We can’t just stay here,’ Rachel whispered urgently. ‘They’re going to find us.’
Sam looked around desperately. The nearest exit from the hanger bay was fifty metres away, across the open deck. They wouldn’t make it halfway before they were spotted and then they’d be sitting ducks. He popped his head round the corner of the generator and took a quick headcount of the men he could see. He didn’t need to be a military genius to see that they were out-gunned. He tried to reach out and connect to their implants, but they were too far away. If he was going to pull off the same trick he’d used on the guard a few minutes earlier, he needed to get closer.
‘You’re going to have to make a break for it,’ Sam said, clicking the safety on his pistol off with his thumb and handing it to Stirling. ‘Don’t open fire until they spot us, you’ll need as much of a lead as we can get.’
Rachel frowned, looking confused for a moment, her expression changing to one of shock as Sam stood up and came out from behind the generator, hands raised. It was a desperate gamble, but the only other option was for them all to give themselves up.
‘I surrender,’ Sam said, walking towards the lead soldier, twenty metres away from him.
‘The boy has been located,’ the soldier said into his throat mic, nodding as he received an inaudible reply in his earpiece. ‘Understood, proceeding with termination.’ The soldier raised his rifle, levelling it at Sam’s head.
‘No!’ Rachel screamed, standing up and bringing her own weapon to bear on the advancing soldier.
Sam turned towards her, flinching when he heard the soldier’s gunfire. He felt a searing pain as the soldier’s bullet creased his skull, leaving a long gash in his forehead and sending him spinning to the floor. Rachel fired twice, hitting the soldier squarely in the chest, his flak jacket stopping the rounds, but the impact knocking him off his feet with a grunt. Rachel ducked back down into cover as the other soldiers opened fire, bullets pinging off the solid block of the generator and the floor around them. There was nowhere to run.
Suddenly there was a flash and the roar of automatic gunfire from the other side of the hangar. Sam saw Jay and a second figure, partially obscured by the doorway, laying down a withering field of fire that cut down one of the soldiers and forced his squad mates to run for cover. One of the retreating soldiers pointed his rifle at Sam as he forced himself to standing, blood running down over his eyes. Mag leapt from the top of the nearby drop-ship with a snarl, her claws extended and her razor-sharp teeth bared. The soldier half turned as she knocked him off his feet and pinned him to the ground, her glinting claws flashing through the air and driving deep into the man’s shoulder. Her other hand bunched into a fist and she punched the soldier hard in the nose, knocking him out cold.
Sam staggered, wiping the blood from his eyes with the back of his arm as Mag threw the fallen soldier’s rifle to him. He caught it as two more of the soldiers turned towards him and Mag, opening fire as they both dived for cover behind the landing skids of one of the nearby drop-ships.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Sam shouted over the thunderous sounds of gunfire that were coming from all around them.
‘You mean you’re not pleased to see me?’ Mag said with a grim smile as a bullet pinged off the landing gear, just centimetres from her head. ‘We can catch up later. For now I think we should probably just concentrate on getting out of here, don’t you?’
‘Point,’ Sam said, shouldering the rifle and firing a short burst at one of the soldiers who had Rachel and Stirling pinned down. They took advantage of the momentary break in gunfire and sprinted out from behind the cover of the generator towards Sam and Mag. The soldiers began a fighting retreat, pulling back towards the entrance from which they had just come.
‘Come on,’ Mag said, gesturing for them to follow her towards the other doorway.
‘Who are you?’ Rachel said, looking slightly startled by Mag’s appearance.
‘She’s a friend,’ Sam said. ‘We can trust her.’
‘OK,’ Rachel replied, ‘if you say so.’
The four of them made their way carefully back round the drop-ship towards the exit from the hangar. A couple of seconds later the last of the soldiers retreated from the hangar and the massive doors slid shut, closing with a solid thud.
‘Looks like we’ve got them on the run,’ Mag said.
‘Yeah,’ Sam said with a frown. The soldiers had fallen back too quickly – something was wrong.
Suddenly, Jay and Shaw sprinted out of the doorway on the other side of the hangar, turning and firing at something behind them. Sam felt a moment of dizzying bewilderment as he recognised the man running alongside Jay.
‘Dad?’ Sam whispered, hardly daring to believe what his own eyes were telling him.
‘What?’ Mag said, looking startled.
But before Sam could shout over to his father, the massive bulk of a Grendel filled the doorway behind them. It gave a bellowing roar as Jay and Shaw kept firing, their bullets little more than irritating pin pricks. A moment later, Sam felt a cold chill in the pit of his stomach as a second Grendel followed the first through the doorway, its head swinging from side to side, searching for prey.
‘I fear that Talon may have rather more control over
these creatures than we thought,’ Stirling said. He glanced up, but the worker Drones still seemed entirely unconcerned by what was happening down below them.
The Grendels stomped across the hangar deck in pursuit of Jay and Shaw. Sam and Rachel opened fire on the second Grendel, trying to attract its attention, and a few seconds later it turned towards them with a growl. Sam knew they didn’t have anything with enough firepower to take out one Grendel, let alone two.
‘Sam!’ Jay shouted from the other side of the hangar. ‘Get over here – we need you!’
‘You two, go head for Jay,’ Sam said to Mag and Stirling. ‘We’ll cover you.’
He glanced at Rachel and she gave a quick nod.
Mag and Stirling sprinted out of cover, heading for the drop-ship on the other side of the bay under which Jay was standing. At the same instant, Sam and Rachel popped up from cover and opened fire.
‘Go for the eyes,’ Rachel yelled as they emptied the clips of their rifles into the advancing behemoth’s face. The Grendel staggered, blinded for an instant, bellowing in rage. The other Grendel turned, no longer advancing on the drop-ship beneath which Jay was standing, but instead pounding across the deck towards Sam and Rachel.
‘OK, we got their attention,’ Rachel yelled as she tossed the empty rifle to one side. ‘What now?’
‘Run!’ Sam yelled back.
Rachel took off instantly, and Sam sprinted after her, turning just in time to see the generator spinning through the air towards him. He dived to one side as it smashed into the ground where he had been standing moments before, exploding in a shower of bright blue sparks. He climbed to his feet and again set off after Rachel, who was heading along the wall of the hangar towards Jay’s position.
Sam only managed a couple of paces before he felt something incredibly strong wrap round his ankle, squeezing it tightly and yanking him off his feet. He clawed desperately at the smooth surface of the hangar deck as the tentacle protruding from the Grendel’s wrist began to pull him in. As the Grendel opened its mouth to reveal row after row of dagger-like teeth, Sam felt a moment of panic. He reached out with his implant, trying to somehow connect with the hideous creature and order it to release him, but it was useless. The Grendel was silent to him.