One Life Remaining (Portal Book 2)

by Mark J Maxwell

  London’s sharp fall in recorded criminal activity had masked a worrying national trend. The capital’s criminal elements were all too aware of the MET’s operational dependence on Portal. Following Victor Korehkov’s arrest the major gangs had relocated their bases of operation from London to small towns and remote rural locations. To combat this, Portal had worked with the MET and the other UK police forces to provide officers with a means of accessing police subnets outside of major cities and larger towns. The MIR’s booster would be powerful enough to extend subnet coverage over the entirety of Tilbury Power Station. Louisa hadn’t activated it yet because criminal gangs kept a careful watch for Portal networks springing up where they shouldn’t exist. Even if access wasn’t available to Fletcher, Portal networks operated over a distinct wireless frequency range. Similarly with the sense strips―it was possible to scan for the wavelength employed by the strips’ micro-pulses.

  ‘We now have full coverage,’ Sloan said.

  Louisa activated her optical implants. She felt the familiar warmth behind the eyes as a tiny red P within a circle flashed in her periphery. She glanced over at the icon and the MET Subnet’s interface expanded. She brought up the case file and confirmed each of the four detectives on the ground had linked their optical and cochlear feeds. ‘Activate the sense grid,’ she said.

  A blank section of the MIR’s wall screen exploded into a sense representation of the depot’s interior. Louisa accepted the offering of an enhanced view and the building morphed into a three-dimensional structure. The sense representation was initially of low resolution, with the interior constructed from large and flat triangular faces, but immediately they split and subdivided in an exponential sharpening.

  Ulvis Dukurs and a man Louisa didn’t recognise were removing long, narrow black boxes from a wooden crate and transferring them to the van, its rear doors open. Styrofoam packing peanuts lay strewn across the floor. Surrounding the crate were five wooden pallets upon which rested cement mixers, dehumidifiers, and other equipment, each secured to the pallets by thick plastic sheeting. Worrell’s Land Rover and Fletcher’s Mercedes were parked in the opposite corner, near the outside door. A passageway behind the vehicles led deeper into the station, but the roaches had failed to map its length.

  CADET had gone to work as soon as the grid spun up. It focussed on movement and highlighted anyone it identified, surrounding them in a glowing red aura. The man unloading the boxes was a Latvian national too. Oliver Vanags. He’d served time for crimes linked to Korehkov’s now defunct gang. She ignored the rest of the CADET report and returned to the sense grid. She found Fletcher standing on a raised iron-mesh gangway running flush against the inside wall. He leaned on a rail as he surveyed the men below.

  ‘Where’s Worrell?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘I’ve got him,’ Sloan said.

  Louisa glanced over at Sloan’s screen. Inside a room off the gangway directly behind Fletcher, CADET had tagged a glowing figure. She studied the grid for a moment to make sure there was no other way out of the room. ‘Okay Bolton, you’re clear to go.’

  The detective leaned forward and depressed the black semi-spherical device he’d fitted over the door’s lock. It took less than a second before the thermite core within the key ignited to over two thousand degrees centigrade. A small charge within the device ignited, blowing molten metal straight through the lock. Burning shards sprayed out into the building’s interior like a Roman candle. Allen kicked open the door and Bolton rushed through, Allen and Hargreaves tight on his heels.

  ‘Armed police!’ Bolton shouted. ‘Down on the ground!’

  Vanags froze, a box wedged under each arm. Dukurs climbed out of the van, hands in the air.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Sloan said, ‘you need to see this.’ There was a frantic edge to the detective’s voice that made Louisa tear her eyes from the grid. Sloan had shifted her sense view to the room off the gangway. Worrell was shouting at Fletcher, who stood over one of the boxes the men had been unloading.

  Sloan panned around to show the contents. Inside, fitted snugly into a padded interior, lay a submachine gun. A Heckler and Koch UMP, if Louisa had to guess. Beside it were three magazines. Fletcher snatched up the weapon and slotted in a magazine. Worrell grabbed Fletcher’s arm, his face stricken. The heavyset man brushed him off with ease.

  ‘Bolton, Fletcher’s armed himself,’ Louisa warned. ‘He’s coming your way.’

  Her officers barely had time to react before Fletcher appeared above them and opened fire. He hadn’t bothered trying to aim his weapon. Set to fully-automatic, he sprayed it over the edge of the gangway in a wide arc, apparently not caring if he hit friend or foe. Vanags fell, clutching his leg. Dukurs ran for the relative safety of the van and jumped inside.

  Bolton and the two detectives had scrambled behind the Land Rover, but now Fletcher, his finger still firmly on the trigger, angled his weapon toward them, riddling the vehicle with bullets. Vanags’ cries were drowned by the thunder of automatic gunfire. Glass shattered around the three detectives as they cowered before the onslaught.

  ‘Ma’am!’ Sloan pointed at her screen. Dukurs knelt before one of the cases. He flipped open the lid.

  Louisa scanned the grid, trying to find a way out for her officers. Fletcher had them pinned. If they made a break for the door he’d surely cut them down. Apart from Jenkins there was no-one close enough to help, and he could do little on his own.

  Louisa stood. ‘Coates, get onto Essex Constabulary. They have a firearms unit on standby. Sloan, you’re with me.’ The MIR held a small equipment store. She headed for it now.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Drew called after her.

  Louisa slid open the lockup’s door revealing racks of body armour and Glock pistols. She handed a Glock to Sloan. ‘We’re taking the MIR’s cab. We’ll break through the shutters if we have to.’

  ‘DI Bennett.’ DCI Lenihan’s voice was relayed via her cochlear implants. He’d used a private channel. ‘Under no circumstances are you to proceed without backup.’

  ‘Sir,’ Louisa whispered, ‘there’s no way they’ll get here in time.’

  ‘Boss,’ Coates called, ‘something is happening.’

  She returned to the screen. Dukurs was out of the van and firing at the Land Rover. Controlled bursts. Fletcher had retreated back to the room containing Worrell. His magazine must have run dry. But Coates wasn’t pointing at the Latvian. CADET had highlighted movement around a crate. It looked like a sea of black packing pellets was spilling from it, but they were much smaller. Coates zoomed in. They were tiny cubes. Hundreds of them.

  ‘Are those...roaches?’ Drew asked.

  Coates shook his head. ‘They’re the wrong shape, and roaches don’t behave like that.’

  The cubes had flattened out in a gleaming black mass across the concrete. Its center rose up, as if a balloon was slowly inflating underneath. Dukurs stopped firing. Vanags had noticed the mass too, his pain temporarily forgotten as he watched it expand.

  Louisa moved to stand behind Coates. ‘What is that thing?’

  Before Coates could answer a thick tendril shot out from its center, cracking like a whip. It caught Dukurs on the side of the head and he dropped to the floor. It happened so fast Louisa had trouble comprehending what she’d seen.

  Vanags screamed and dragged himself toward the open container, leaving a trail of blood.

  The mass didn’t appear to be interested in him. It retracted the tendril and rolled with a wave-like motion toward the metal stairs leading up to the gangway. Fletcher cradled his weapon loosely, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ Vanags shouted. ‘Shoot the bloody thing!’

  The mass had reached the bottom of the steps. Fletcher snapped out of his reverie and opened fire. Where his bullets hit, black fragments tore free and immediately fell apart, individual cubes spraying across the floor like fistfuls of flung dice.

  ‘Ma’am?’ Bolton’s voice sounded in Louisa’s
ear.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Louisa said.

  Bolton had likely hooked into the sense grid, so he could see what was happening as well as they could.

  Another tendril extruded and latched onto the metal rail of the stairway. With a lurch the main body of the mass propelled upwards. More tendrils snaked out. It gathered speed, lurching up the steps even as Fletcher’s bullets tore chunks away. By the time the mass reached the top of the steps it was half its original size.

  Fletcher backed up, gun held high, the stock tight against his shoulder. The mass had lost some of its mobility. It reared up again, then shuddered before completely disintegrating. Cubes tumbled down the stairs and rained through the mesh.

  Bolton came out from behind the Land Rover, his Glock pointed up at Fletcher. ‘Drop your weapon!’ Fletcher didn’t move. His chest heaved, still facing the remains of the thing he’d destroyed.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid. Place the weapon on the ground.’

  Fletcher lowered the gun from his shoulder. He remained staring straight ahead, his face blank. Bolton slowly approached the bottom of the stairs.

  Fletcher’s weapon jerked up.

  A single crack echoed in the room.

  Fletcher’s hand shot out and gripped the rail, a look of surprise crossing his face. He took a ragged step, and another. The gun fell limply from his grasp, clattering onto the gangway. His hand slid from the rail and he toppled forward.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Police tape stretched across the loading bay door. DS Bolton stared at the gangway where Fletcher’s body remained, prone and uncovered, awaiting Forensics.

  Louisa joined him. ‘How are you doing, Sergeant?’

  Bolton flinched. ‘Good, ma’am.’ He took a drag from a cigarette held between thumb and forefinger. The glowing ember twitched as his hand shook. He glanced at it for a second, then flicked away the half-finished cigarette and wedged his hands under his Kevlar vest.

  ‘I’ll need your report by the end of day tomorrow.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She hadn’t offered words of comfort, or tried to reassure Bolton, telling him he had to take the shot. It would only have embarrassed the man. The report would keep him occupied and his thoughts averted from the inevitable DPS grilling. Of course the outcome was a formality. The case file contained full sense coverage of the shooting along with audio and visual streams from Bolton’s own implants. She wondered if he’d reviewed the footage yet. He could be watching right now for all she knew. For his sake she hoped he wasn’t.

  She’d considered telling Bolton to take some personal time at first. Then she thought about how her old boss, DI Fuller, would have treated Bolton, had he been under the DI’s command. At the very least Fuller would have suspended Bolton from active duty, or stuck him behind a desk. If there was one thing she’d learned from DI Fuller, it was how not to treat her officers.

  Louisa placed a hand on the doorframe and leaned inside the depot. Fletcher’s lifeblood had drained through the gangway, forming a wide carmine pool on the concrete floor. The sense grid always proved unerringly accurate but a crime scene never felt real until she saw it with her own eyes. Forensics would still manually document every bullet hole, spent shell casing and drop of blood. The crime scene lacked none of each.

  Then there were the cubes scattered everywhere. There were even a few at her feet. Whatever force had bound them together was gone. They hadn’t so much as twitched from the moment they lost cohesion.

  She hesitated only briefly before picking one up, curiosity overriding any need for crime scene preservation. The cubes had been trampled and kicked about by both her own officers and the ambulance crews who’d carted off the two Latvians.

  It seemed so innocuous. Like a charcoal sugar cube. And light. She tossed it in her palm. Why did Fletcher and Worrell bring them into the country? And what for? Coates found them fascinating. He theorised they were an experimental weapon, painting a picture where millions of the cubes could be dropped into a war zone as a first strike tactic to disable entrenched enemy soldiers. It sounded far-fetched to her but they’d certainly been effective in subduing the Latvian. Perhaps Forensics would come up with a theory, although given their technological nature, SIU might offer a better analysis.

  Louisa turned back to the MIR. Two armed response squads now manned the security gate and officers from Essex Constabulary patrolled the site’s perimeter. Coates had returned to base, keen to start analysing the sense footage. Jenkins and Hargreaves followed the ambulance to the hospital. Worrell was en route back to HQ, accompanied by Allen. He’d degenerated into a gibbering wreck upon arrest. Sheet white and shaking, he’d almost fainted when they frog-marched him past Fletcher’s corpse. A fluttering noise sounded above; Louisa craned her neck. A spinner descended out of the night sky and hovered above her head. It wasn’t one of hers. They were all still anchored, the wind deemed too strong to relaunch them. The device belonged to a newscast crew or guerrilla caster. They’d appeared soon after the ambulance. Someone in the local force had blabbed. Louisa trusted her own officers not to talk to the press. Loyalty aside, they knew she’d have their hides if they did. Essex Constabulary had managed to keep the guerrilla casters out of the site so far, but they were spread thin. It was only a matter of time before one of them scaled the fence and found their way inside. Hence why she had Bolton standing guard.

  The night sky had lightened to a murky indigo. Louisa’s children, Jess and Charlie, would have to make their own way to school, again. It had been easier to manage the late nights before her foster son Ben left for college. She could trust him to keep an eye on the kids. She needed to make it up to them. Jess especially; her seventeenth birthday was only two days away. No…one day. It’s tomorrow.

  The fluttering rose in pitch and volume as a blast of wind slammed against the spinner. Wings strained to keep it level. Abruptly the noise died and it dropped out of the sky, landing directly in her path. The spinner crunched when she stepped on it.

  Oops.

  *

  ‘You said Fletcher tripped your selectors. I want to know what they were.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Drew said, not sounding the least bit sorry, ‘even if DCI Lenihan pulls rank, I can’t tell you where our intelligence came from. It’s—’

  ‘Classified. Yes. So you keep saying.’

  Louisa struggled to stay calm. She glanced at Sloan. The detective was wisely pretending to ignore the escalating conversation. She lowered her voice all the same. ‘Did you know Worrell was bringing in military grade weapons?’

  Drew hesitated. ‘I didn’t know for sure what was inside the shipment.’

  ‘But you knew it didn’t contain drugs.’

  ‘I can’t say any more.’

  Louisa’s voice took on a dangerous edge. ‘My team nearly died in there. If I find out you―’

  ‘Ma’am,’ Sloan said, ‘sorry to interrupt, but Coates found something you need to see.’

  ‘We’ll finish this later,’ Louisa said. No matter how hard a time she gave Drew, he remained calm and polite. She’d hoped to provoke him into giving something away, but instead she ended up losing her temper. The man was utterly infuriating.

  Sloan had wound the power station’s sense grid back to the moment it first spun up. The two Latvians and Fletcher were caught in freeze frame. Their spinners had originally attempted to drop roaches on the depot’s roof in the west corner of the station, but the high winds scattered the bugs across the site. They finally gained entry through narrow crevices under the eaves where mortar had crumbled away.

  Coates appeared in a window. ‘It’s probably nothing, but…does this look like a face to you?’ He focussed the sense window on the edge of the grid.

  Louisa squinted. She saw something. What might be a nose, a chin, and an ocular cavity. But with the loss of definition, the facets making up the rendered image were enlarged and jagged, like a poor attempt at origami. She closed them tight,
then blinked them open, seeking relief that refused to come. She’d been using her implants on and off for hours now, and her eyes burned like she’d made the mistake of touching them while chopping chillies.

  ‘And here also.’ Coates moved the view down. ‘This could be someone’s arm.’

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ Drew said.

  ‘Let’s not take the chance,’ Louisa said. ‘Sloan, the MIR carries roaches, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Sloan replied.

  ‘Send them in.’

  Sloan released the bugs from a hatch under the MIR. Thousands of the tiny machines scuttled along the tarmac toward the station. Louisa tapped a console screen and zoomed out the sense map. A consequence of the original batch of roaches’ wide dispersal pattern was that she now possessed a rough outline of the station’s exterior.

  ‘There.’ Louisa pointed at the screen. ‘The coal chute on the south side. There’s a hole in the wall.’

  Sloan painted a target. The grid sharpened as roaches started climbing the walls. Once through the hole they flowed down a sheer shaft. At the bottom metal hoppers materialised, followed by the towering bulk of coal pulverising machines, all long abandoned and left to rust in pools of water.

  Sloan urged the roaches onward. They passed under an arch, along a wide shallow tunnel, and emerged into the plant’s boiler room. Although the boilers were gone the steam pipes still dangled from the ceiling. One had fallen, leaving a gap for which the roaches made a beeline. A vast hall spanning several storeys unfolded before them. Pipes sprouting from the floor joined electrical conduits and steel beams in forming a seemingly random tangle. ‘This room brought the steam through to the plant’s turbines, according to the plans,’ Coates said. He’d spotted his ‘face’ here, at the bottom of a set of iron stairs that corkscrewed upwards. The roaches diverged and climbed.

  ‘What’s up there?’ Louisa pointed at a row of windows covered in sheets of newspaper. The roaches had made it to the top of the structure.