The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  She glared back, acid in her eyes.

  To cause such hatred delighted Baptiste. He actually smiled. Then he let go of her face and walked out, leaving the bots swirling around her, waiting to catch Drake. Meanwhile, he had an exodus to attend to.

  He slammed the great south doors behind him with a BOOM.

  inn was close to his friends. Maybe it was the lack of living family. For him friends were up there with insects and daydreaming. Hudson. Christabel. Stubbs, Kelly and Delta … and the one who he had just heard cry out: Carla.

  Finn had convinced himself she was safe – that she was with Al and Delta. That she would have told the world where he was. Now he had to accept that maybe no one knew where either of them were. And it was all his fault. He never should have freaked her out in Hong Kong in the first place.

  Hearing her voice had come like a stab through the heart. He had to respond. He knew it was trap. She knew it was a trap. The lead Tyro certainly knew it was a trap. But there was nothing on earth that was going to stop him walking right into it.

  He had to get to her, he had to save her.

  How he’d achieve this he had no idea, he’d figure it out on the way. It was, after all, a long way. Maybe 30 macro-metres southeast across the hall.

  So he’d started running south from rail trench to rail trench, sliding east along the polished steel pit on his back to keep an eye out for patrolling bots, keeping dead still if any came near and waiting until the coast was clear before leaping out to sprint fifty nano-metres or so to the next trench.

  He made progress at first, but the closer he got the thicker the bot patrols became, the air full of the hiss of the thrusters and the constant tick and slap of their antennae. Not that they were the only threat, for as the morning wore on he’d repeatedly had to use his spike to cut down more and more inquisitive mosquitoes too. After just an hour he was running out of energy and ideas.

  Which is when he heard it—

  tick-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-hssss …

  Close by. So close that if he tried to run for it, he was sure to get blasted. He froze on his back in the rail trench, playing dead and praying it would pass.

  tick-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-hssss …

  Closer. Not flying. Dragging itself along.

  Finn held his breath. Clutched the spike.

  tick-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-hssss …

  Suddenly, two great hairy bullwhip antennae flicked over the trench. Before he could react, a black tank-turret of a head was looming over him, two great mouth parts twitching and tasting, void-black eyes sucking up his terror. A cockroach the size of a croc and five times as hungry.

  Finn’s guts turned. He almost expected saliva to drip from its bone-hard lips.

  With remarkable speed, the roach jammed two spiked legs into the trench to force Finn up towards its jaws. Every cell in Finn’s body screamed – fight!

  WHAM. Finn smashed the mosquito spike across the ghastly face, caning it. The roach hissed and stretched its jaws a mile wide to strike back, but Finn frantically wriggled from the lethal grip and scrambled back along the trench beneath its articulated bulk.

  Leaping up behind the roach, he raised the spike. The beast flicked around to face him. With two hands and all his strength Finn brought the aluminium spike down like a mighty hammer right between the great shields of the insect’s eyes – WHAM.

  Absolutely nothing.

  The vast creature threw itself forward. Finn turned and ran like hell along the trench, the roach literally snapping at his heels to try and snaffle up a trailing leg. Again and again he span with the spike and brought it down – WHAM WHAM WHAM – against its head, eyes, antennae, anything to slow it, the blows only making it rear and charge like a great angry bear.

  Still Finn ran. There was a reason why cockroaches had survived since the dawn of time, he thought – they didn’t mess around.

  The end of the trench approached in the form of a server stack wheel. Soon Finn would be wedged in between the curve of it and the rail – he would have to act now, or die. There was nowhere else to go.

  Finn spun round, raised the spike and ran back at the charging roach.

  As the great creature hit him, Finn jabbed the spike down hard between its eyes, leaning into it, using its momentum and its reflexive buck to pole-vault up over its head to land on its back. The beast’s antennae flailed and wheeled. It bucked and writhed, trying to get a fix on its tormentor, but Finn – a rodeo ace now thanks to his time on the Bug – held fast to the armoured edge of the creature’s thorax where it met and moved against its thick cellulose head plate.

  Finn took the mosquito spike and drove the blunt point of it between the two plates – just hard enough to force a gap. The roach wheeled and rolled over. Every ounce of air was knocked out of Finn as he was crushed beneath it. But still he held on.

  As the beast righted itself it, the spike sank a fraction deeper into the armoured gap. Finn seized his chance. With all his might he heaved the spike forward like an engineer changing points on a rail track. Stubbs would have been proud. With a great crack, Finn felt some of the neck ligaments give way.

  The creature gave a mighty buck. But it was a last gasp. The cockroach was crippled.

  Finn never wanted any living thing to die, but the bots were circling. He drove the spike to the hilt down into the soft open gap at the roach’s neck. Goo oozed out and the creature shook. With another sinking of the spike, Finn levered forward again and – with a wet POP – the cockroach’s head fell forward off its body, antennae still whipping and twitching.

  The commotion brought the bots zooming in, but before the first one could tip itself up to focus its eye on the corpse, Finn was hidden beneath it. The bots hissed and searched in vain.

  A few nano-feet away the severed cockroach head, still alive, watched Finn’s game of hide-and-seek play outfn1.

  Finn lay there, heart thumping, euphoric.

  He knew how to reach Carla.

  DAY FIVE 09:58 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).

  Via a grainy bot-cam Kaparis regarded Kelly, unconscious within his cluster cell. He had passed out during a long-distance interrogation with Hans.

  But he hadn’t talked.

  And nor had Drake taken the live bait in the Shen Yu. He was obviously hiding somewhere in the floor rails, but even a systematic search could be fooled and time was running out.

  Soon the great bot dispersal, the Exodus, would begin.

  The domed screen array showed endless close-ups of mosquitos and roaches and any other carbon life form picked up by the bot-radar. They needed to narrow down the search and flush Finn out, to reduce the number of variables and—

  Of course. The answer was so obvious he scolded himself.

  DAY FIVE 10:10 (Local GMT+8). Shen Yu Hall, The Forbidden City, Shanghai.

  The crick in Carla’s neck was on the move, the pain running all the way down her right-hand side. The way her hands were tied meant she was sat in a perpetual slouch. Agony. Her efforts to chew through the leather belt had nearly worn away her teeth and she was no nearer coherent speech. All she could do, every now and then, was sound a warning. Because one thing was certain – if Finn was out there in the vast machine, he would undoubtedly be stupid enough to try and save her.

  “Urnnnnngh!” Carla tried to shout out, to warn him again to stay away.

  At home she had hungered for ‘Difference’, for ‘Experience’, but they had been hard to come by in the suburb with the highest recycling rate in North America. Finn was undoubtedly ‘Different’; the most unsuitable and exciting friend she’d ever had. On the other hand, the trouble with ‘Experience’ was you grew close to those you shared it with, and she did not want either of them to die at the hands of some teenage-terror goon.

  She could hear a Tyro now, moving about on the other side of the hall. She tried to gird herself for their approach but her courage was fading. She was
tired, she was hungry, she had been bitten by several mosquitoes and, to cap it all, a great black cockroach was now crawling across the floor towards her and there was nothing in the world that gave her the heebie-jeebies like a cockroach. As it raised itself on its back legs like an evil little cobra, she stretched to stamp her heel down on it: “Urnnnnngh!”

  WHAM!

  Missed.

  Making the costume was easier than Finn had expected.

  He thought he’d have to hollow the dead cockroach out, splitting it open to scoop out all the guts, but in fact he’d been able to prise the exoskeleton straight off its soft body and had ended up with a cockroach cape that dangled two useless legs. He pinned his spike through the top section to act as a bar to keep it in place and put it on over his shoulders. Although it had no head, the disguise worked like a dream and, as long as he hit the deck when the bots came too close, they soon flew on. It was a little big, but it wasn’t too heavy and he’d travelled six server blocks towards the sound of Carla’s grunting in no time.

  His unbridled joy as he finally reached her was blighted only by …

  WHAM.

  … her desperate attempts to crush him to death with her massive bus-sized sneakers.

  He stood and lifted the cape to try and show himself again. “STOP! IT’S ME! IT’S ME!”

  WHAM.

  The heel of the giant sneaker caught the edge of the cockroach cape and crunched off a trailing leg.

  “You nearly killed me!” he cried from beneath the shell.

  She couldn’t see him. He had to find a way to get in closer …

  Then he heard something.

  A distant ripple at first. Then a rushing, a continual roar.

  He turned to look back under the server stacks. There, sweeping fast across the floor towards him, was a black, head-high slick – an unstoppable wall of water.

  Instinct screamed in Finn’s brain – RUN.

  His legs were way ahead of him, already sprinting. He heard Carla squeal as the water hit her then – WHAM – the leading edge of the tsunami, laden with dirt and flotsam, smashed into him.

  Raging water engulfed him, dragging him under and along the floor at incredible speed.

  He struggled against the force, spinning 360 degrees. When he broke the surface, gasping for air, he found himself being washed down the hyper-server canyon away from Carla. He reached out for the server wall and grabbed for anything. His fingertips just managed to hook a single wire. He held on tight and jolted to a halt in the current, the force nearly taking his arm from its socket. The weight of water pushing against his cockroach cape was enormous, but he managed to haul himself to the side and finally pulled himself out.

  He clung to the side of the server, getting his bearings as the river raged beneath him.

  Stubbs! he thought immediately. What the hell would happen to Stubbs in this? The water must have drowned him in his sick bed … For a moment Finn didn’t want to get hold of himself. Didn’t want to go on. He just watched the water rushing by and wanted to cry.

  Venice, Finn thought absurdly as he looked down at the water. My father might be in Venice, I’ve got to at least find out about that before I die …

  The thought brought Finn back to life. He’d been washed halfway down the length of the server canyon, a great distance at his scale, but he could also see a clear route to Carla.

  Bots were buzzing over the water like excited midges. The Tyros must have figured he was hiding in the trenches and flooded them. How long before they figured out he could hide beneath an insect?

  Finn turned his cockroach-back on them and began to climb the component-clustered cliff.

  DAY FIVE 10:30 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.

  THUMP.

  “Yo-yo?”

  Uh-oh, thought Hudson.

  The idea of Yo-yo as saviour and furry fortress had grown as things had got worse.

  A junior technician going off shift had provided the latest grim breakthrough. She found her car clamped. She was about to assault the parking meter when she noticed it had a solar cell on top. Analysis showed that the Forbidden City was thick with solar panels, and while the authorities could remotely isolate them from the power supply, there was nothing they could do to stop the solar cells themselves generating power.

  If the bots could power up and multiply then they were finished, was King’s secret prognosis.

  Now their last hope was that Yo-yo could get inside the Forbidden City and provide some kind of breakthrough intelligence.

  Yo-yo had maintained a fever pitch of excitement for more than an hour after his toilet break, making lots of new friends and getting to know the Roof of the World operations room. He’d been good as gold when fitted with his harness and collar, and yapped obligingly when Delta had been clipped on in the nDen. Fully attired, he looked less like the world’s stupidest mongrel and more like some kind of robot space dog.

  All was going well until, after a snack, Yo-yo decided to see what would happen if he closed his eyes for a second, just one second …

  Never has a dog hit the floor, and deepest sleep, with such finality.

  “Is this normal?” one of the technicians asked Hudson.

  “Um … I think he’s having one of his snoozes …” said Hudson. He felt guilty – how would it look if he’d brought Yo-yo all this way just for him to take a dump on a helipad and fall asleep?

  Delta switched on the amplifier in the nDen.

  “Yo-yo? Wake up! Wake up, Yo-yo!”

  Nothing.

  “Well, don’t just stand there! Call a vet or something!” she demanded of Al. “Give him an injection to wake him up!”

  “No!” said Al. He squatted down and tried to explain. “The drugs from the flight must still be in his system. Let’s just give him ten minutes’ sleep to burn a little off.”

  Delta swore. Knowing Carla was trapped was grinding her usually steely nerves.

  “We don’t have ten minutes!” she yelled at Al.

  “We need him at his natural peak, not loaded with every kind of drug. We also need you at your peak so try and calm down.”

  “Oh, I’m calm …” she insisted, shoving up the release bar of the nDen door to let herself out. Clunk. It didn’t open.

  “Hey!” she said, rattling the bar.

  “Ah …” said Al, looking wary. “I told them to lock you in. I don’t want any heroics.”

  “WHAT?!”

  “Everyone I hold dear is now hostage to this, even my mother,” Al started.

  “Get me the hell out of here, right now!” yelled Delta.

  “You’re not going to complete the set. This ensures that if the dog has to turn back, you have to turn back with him and not go AWOL on some suicide mission.”

  Delta, who finally knew with absolute certainty that no man more utterly infuriating had ever existed, lost all verbal and emotional control and let out a primal roar.

  “ARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  It only strengthened his resolve. Ignoring her screams, Al instructed the technicians. “Lift the dog carefully into the chopper and fly them both to the launch site before he wakes up. Or she explodes.”

  rnnnnngh!” Carla grunted.

  For Finn it had been a tough climb across an obstacle-strewn cliff face.

  For Carla, watching her little black nemesis slowly approach, it was worse than water torture.

  Finn’s idea was to reach her from above, out of range of her stomping, but by the time he was halfway towards her, he felt her eyes fix upon him. Water was running past, a few macro-centimetres deep and she was fighting against the ties, trying to twist her head round to see where he was.

  “Urnnnnngh!”

  Finn had tried shouting. He had tried waving. But he was just too small for her to see, so he was forced to do the only thing he could think of.

  He threw himself from a great height. Into her hair.

  BOING!

  “URRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNGH!”
<
br />   It was like landing on a thousand feather beds and he had to grab great thickets of it to stop from bouncing straight back up. As she screamed he had to fill his lungs and scream back as hard he could –

  “IT’S ME! IT’S ME! SOMETHING FELL IN YOUR HAIR – BUT IT’S ME! I’M NOT A COCKROACH! IT’S A DISGUISE! I’M FINN! INFINITY DRAKE!!”

  There was a sudden frozen silence. Finn lay on his back in the cockroach-cape, surrounded by thick curls. Carla’s curls.

  “Thnn?”

  “You wait six months to meet me, then freak out twice in a row,” said Finn.

  Carla gulped back a bolt of emotion and issued a muffled laugh. Tears stung her eyes. It was her first moment of relief in twenty-four exhausting, exhilarating, terrifying hours.

  Six minutes later Finn was attaching Kelly’s last lump of C4 plastic explosive to the plastic tie that cuffed Carla’s hands. It was barely bigger than a grain of sand but the power to mass ratio of the nano-material meant it packed a much bigger punch. At least that’s what Finn hoped. He didn’t really know. All he could do was copy the rough size of the charge Kelly had used to crack the glass of the control booth. He fused it, set it, then scrambled back off her wrists and ran up her arm. As he reached her shoulder he called, “Brace yourself! It’ll go off in the next few sec—” CRACK!

  Carla jumped, it was as if someone had pulled a cracker behind her back and given her a kick at the same time. But her hands were still tied.

  “No good?” asked Finn.

  She felt heat. Smelt burning. She began to panic but hauled at the cuffs and – SNAP! – they split at the smoking weak point and her hands were free.

  Groaning with relief as blood and movement returned to her joints, Carla pulled herself up the server side until she was standing. Finally, she pulled off the leather belt that had gagged her for so long.

  “Urrrghhh …” She reached down and splashed some water into her mouth and over her face. “Thank God.”