The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  Only the Voice stopped him from running back to try and pick up Finn’s scent again.

  “JUMP!”

  Yo-yo jumped.

  YAAAOOOWL! Splash!

  Yuk, thought Delta as the foul water flew up around them from the pit of the giant sewer pipe. But it didn’t matter. The only thing that did matter was finding Carla.

  Yap! Yo-yo yelped in shock at his own survival.

  Delta could barely see beyond the light filtering in from the manhole above. But she could hear a distant engine of a motorbike and Yo-yo had the scent again.

  Yap! He galloped after it into the pitch darkness.

  King escorted Al and Hudson into the extraordinary glass elevator to see them off the premises and to ask as soon as the doors closed, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Wake Hook Hall,” said Al. “Tell them to fire up the accelerator. It’s Boldklub. I think I’ve got it. I think I know how to bring everyone back to size, alive. You have to reach the ‘n-point’ – you have to be shrunk to the theoretical limit, where all dark matter is eliminated, where life meets death. You have to reach the end to find the beginning. It’s pure Ethan Drake – take yourself to the very limit to find out who you are!”

  “Is this you losing your mind?” King asked, genuinely lost and concerned.

  “No?” said Al, not sounding completely sure. “Oh – and we’ve also got to stop this airstrike. You need to be my point man in the operations room – whatever you do, stay on the line!”

  The elevator hit the ground floor and the doors opened. A police captain was waiting for them. Al grabbed him and, with Hudson, hurried him out of the hotel and across the street to requisition the ice-cream van.

  King watched them go. Hudson waved.

  DAY FIVE 11:43 (Local GMT+8). Dachang Airbase, China.

  Group Captain, Bingxin, fed the new coordinates into his targeting computer and watched an instant simulation of the new attack run on his HUDfn3 display.

  The twelve Flying Leopard fighter bombers would streak in towards the Nine Harmonies Pagoda from the northwest at 550mph and at just 3000 feet. Air would be unstable as they would be flying into the heart of an electrical storm.

  Flight time to target would be fourteen minutes.

  DAY FIVE 11:46 (Local GMT+8). Nine Harmonies Pagoda, Shanghai.

  Over and over Finn went, like a boy in a barrel over Niagara Falls.

  He was sinking to the bottom of a metal sea, daylight blotted out, only the dim, orange glow of the bots around him. He had returned to a nightmare.

  He tried to guess how far he’d descended – forty, fifty, even ninety bots deep?

  “KELLY!” he yelled – desperately hoping for a response to prove Kelly was alive and trapped somewhere in the cluster. None came.

  Everywhere the flat dumb eye-panels of the bots were pressed up against the cracks in the cage to stare at him. Kaparis, he thought. Watching me fail.

  The thought stung him. Doubled his resolve. He focused his body and mind. He would do this, he would stay calm, he would find a way out.

  Just keep going …

  “KELLY!” he called out … Still no response came, just the steady chatter of the nano-botmass.

  Finn’s cockroach-cape contained one last chance. The mosquito spike that he’d used as a bar to hold the cape in place, was still folded inside it.

  The spinning slowed and then halted. Had they hit bottom? Finn opened the cape and slid out the spike. He drove the end of the spike into the bots around his feet to see what would happen. Nothing. He tried to force a gap between the bots and lever them apart. The bots twisted away from the force of the lever but their mutual hold did not break. The air, cycled through so many turbines, tasted warm and stale. He was sweating.

  Whack! Whack! Whack! Eventually he annoyed one of them enough for a single angry antenna to twist and probe into the cell, feeling for him in the gloom.

  It was all he needed.

  Finn hit it with the spike. The bot antenna snatched at it, wound round it and gripped it. Finn twisted the spike fast to wind the antenna around and around it before it could withdraw. It worked. After a few turns the prehensile probe was tight to the end of the sword.

  Bracing himself, Finn gave the spike a kick to stretch the antenna further and with a great hiss of protest the bot it belonged to broke formation at the bottom of the cell and turned to face him, mad as hell, guts first, grippers and cutters snapping.

  Finn reeled back just out of its reach, twisting the mosquito spike loose as he went. Then driving it into its guts. Three grippers seized it.

  Finn saw his chance and twisted again. He just had to break it somewhere, once, to get the charge stored in the layers of carbon to short circuit. Would he be strong enough? He gripped and turned the spike with everything he had and – BANG!

  The blast smacked him back. He was winded and blinded by the flash, but he was alive. He groped around, senses struggling to recover. Beneath him there was a gaping hole where three or four bots must have been caught in the blast and shorted themselves.

  His hands found the roach-cape. Pulling it over his back Finn crawled out into the cluster. All was movement, a soup of metal maggots. The bots were in some kind of collective panic. But not one lifted or looked at him. He blessed the cockroach as he heard –

  “Kid!”

  It was distant. It was plaintive. But it was him.

  “KELLY!” Finn powered through the morass, heaving the bots aside, heading towards the sound of Kelly’s voice as it shouted, “Over here!”

  He found Kelly’s cell at the very base of the super-cluster, wedged against a terracotta roof tile. He peered inside. Kelly was slumped, curled and injured.

  “Kelly, hold tight! I’m going to get you out of there!”

  DAY FIVE 11:49 (Local GMT+8). Huangpu River Crossing, Shanghai.

  Lights flashed and sirens wailed. Six squad cars seemed a little excessive as an escort for an ice-cream van but six squad cars were what Dr Allenby had asked for.

  When the convoy reached the middle of the bridge over the Huangpu, Al stopped the ice-cream van, got out and started to spool out some wire he’d taken from the operations room. They were just outside the city centre now, with a great view south and west.

  “Come on! We haven’t got much time!” he yelled at the police captain. “Get your men to line up the cars and pop their hoods!”

  The cop in charge of the six-car escort was perplexed, but he’d been told by Bo Zhang himself to be of ‘every assistance’ to the foreigner, so he ordered his men to line up and open their bonnets, then watched as Al spent the next couple of minutes joining up all the amplifier units on the police sirens.

  Hudson held things when asked and watched as traffic backed up behind them. “What are you doing?”

  “Delaying matters,” said Al, working rapidly and constantly glancing up towards the western horizon. “In a war, what are the three most valuable commodities?”

  “Um … guns?” said Hudson.

  “Blood, treasure and time,” Al said, more to himself than Hudson. “How many human beings are you willing to sacrifice? How much money can you spend? How much time have you got? Clever people buy time. King taught me that in the desert. Long storyfn1.”

  Al joined up the last of the siren amps. “We need to delay the airstrike till after noon,” he explained, then broke the radio aerial off the front of the ice-cream van and climbed back into the cab to attach the wires from the police car up to the van’s crude loudspeaker.

  “Have you ever jammed a radar before?” Al asked Hudson.

  “No,” Hudson answered.

  “Well, it’s pretty straightforward really …” Using a screwdriver, Al ripped the ordinary radio out of its housing in the van’s dashboard. “You don’t need much. Radar sends out a strong radio signal and then reads the teeny tiny echoes that come back. To confuse it, all you need to do is send stronger signal back on the same wavelength – and voila! – the radar is
blind.”

  “Cute,” said Hudson.

  Al finished making adjustments to the radio set and then yelled out of the window at the police captain. “OK, get them to turn their sirens right up to max!”

  The captain, who was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t call someone about this, indicated to his men to turn their sirens up to max all the same. This they did.

  Lastly, to Hudson’s alarm, Al lay back and kicked a hole through the windscreen of the ice-cream van, shattering it in the process. Through which he then poked the aerial he’d broken off, attaching the other end of it to the radio.

  Al looked down at his watch and then fixed on the western horizon, radio set in hand, aerial poking out the windscreen.

  “This is a radio with a variable wavelength tuner, a receiver that I’ve turned into a sender,” Al explained. “The amplifiers I’ve connected in series, if they can boost one type of electro-magnetic signal, they can boost them all. And now we’re waiting.”

  “What for?” asked Hudson.

  “Direct line of sight. It’s very important you get direct line of sight with this type of jamming – it’s called main-lobe jamming. If you don’t have direct line of sight, it won’t work.”

  Nothing stirred but the engines and horns of motorists stuck on the bridge.

  “Are you sure you’re pointing it in the right direction?” asked Hudson.

  Al looked at him in a way that suggested he might like to withdraw the question or end up in the river.

  DAY FIVE 11:51 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).

  On Song Island, Kaparis was trying to stay in control as he watched the writhing clueless mass of bots on the screen array. To lose a prisoner guarded by so many was something of a rare feat.

  “Where … the hell … is he?” he asked for the third time in his cold fury voice.

  “We don’t know as yet, Master,” answered Li Jun warily.

  “How could he possibly have disappeared?! Go to the other prisoner again!”

  Li Jun flipped through hundreds of bot-feeds until she found the cell containing Kelly.

  “There!” shouted Kaparis. “Search there!”

  But all the bots could come up with was a dead cockroach.

  DAY FIVE 11:51 (Local GMT+8). Nine Harmonies Pagoda, Shanghai.

  “Kid! You have about ten minutes before these things go kaboom! Save yourself!”

  Finn ignored him.

  “You’re coming with me. Cover yourself – I’m going to have to blow one of these up.”

  “How?”

  Finn took the mosquito spike and jammed it into the guts of the nearest bot, tentacles whipped out, one cutting into the flesh of his cheek. Finn flinched and tears sprang to his eyes, but he twisted the spike.

  “Good work …” said Kelly, scrunching himself up into a ball.

  Finn grunted and wrenched the spike round in a single jerk – BANG!

  Kaparis saw the flash. Saw the cockroach turn. Saw the boy.

  “There! Order them to attack any organic life form!”

  “Yes, Master.”

  DAY FIVE 11:52 (Local GMT+8). Shanghai UFH Hospital.

  Hospital doors swung open in rapid order as the prisoner was rushed into an isolation room. Medics and machines pounced on her.

  Scar lay on the gurney, a red-black mess. Her face was covered in the red welts of the rash that covered her body, leaving only patches of the palest skin. Her extremities – fingertips and lips – were already black.

  She could have been a disinterred mummy but for the occasional movement or breath.

  The medics barked jargon.

  She had septic shock. A failing heart. Renal failure.

  They were feeding drugs into her, connecting her to every kind of machine.

  As the prisoner entered the main operating theatre, King was able to watch live hospital CCTV of events from the Roof of the World. Scar was barely a teenager. If there was any lingering doubt of the evil in Kaparis, this would surely snuff it out, King thought.

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep …

  Suddenly the heart rate monitor flat-lined.

  “Save her!” snapped King down the line.

  DAY FIVE 11:52 (Local GMT+8). Nine Harmonies Pagoda, Shanghai.

  Finn waited for his head to clear after the explosion.

  He was getting the hang of opening up the bots now. He had been blown back, away from Kelly’s cell. He needed to locate it again, fast.

  “KELLY!” he started to shout.

  “GO!” said Kelly, crawling out of the smoke and chaos, eyes blazing, an old warhorse stirring at the sounds of battle.

  “Get under here!” said Finn, pulling him under the cockroach-cape.

  Kelly hooked a mighty arm around his shoulders. It wore a watch.

  “How long have we got?” asked Finn.

  “Eight minutes till noon,” said Kelly. “How do you rate our chances of survival?”

  “Nil,” said Finn. “Just the way you like it.”

  Kelly looked at him and winked. “Very considerate. You ready?”

  Shoulder to shoulder, they drove forward under the cape – pushing through anything that got in their way, pushing against the grimy surface of the ancient clay roof tiles, pushing at the sea of metal maggots.

  But the nano-bots were many and they were just two. And the harder they fought forward, the harder the bots seemed to resist and it was quickly, exhaustingly clear they were never going to get out.

  Nothing was said, but after a few more desperate drives they came to a halt beneath the cover of the cockroach-cape, exhausted.

  Finn felt an anger, an urgency. “This is all my fault. If I’d kept the gun, we could have shot out a tunnel …”

  “It’s nobody’s fault. There’s just nothing we can do. We don’t have the power. We stay here and when the blast comes … we pray,” said Kelly.

  They took a moment.

  “What happened to Stubbs?” Kelly asked.

  “He should be alive,” said Finn.

  Kelly gave a nod of satisfaction.

  “What happened to my father, Kelly?” Finn asked. “He’s alive, isn’t he? You said you’d tell me when all this was over. Well, it’s nearly over.”

  Kelly took Finn’s head in his mighty hand, cradled it and spoke the truth.

  “He disappeared … I only know it the way Al told it. They were doing some crazy experiments to do with the edge of time and physics and I don’t know what – teleportation and dark matter and … just, crazy stuff. They fired up this accelerator that Ethan was rigged up to, somehow …”

  “My dad was connected to it?”

  “Yeah. He was nuts – half the time he worked in his pyjamas – and in the middle of it powering up, it exploded. Al said that Ethan just disappeared, I mean literally popped out of existence …”

  “What? How is that possible?” Finn’s mind was racing. His heart aching. None of this made sense.

  “Everybody thought Al was confused after the blast, but that’s what Al said. They put him in hospital for a while and thought he had lost his mind, but they never found a trace of your dad and … well, that’s what happened as far as anybody knows, or will ever know.”

  “But why didn’t they tell me that? Why’s everybody so ashamed and secretive and—”

  “There was one other thing …” Kelly hesitated. Finn could barely see his face in the darkness.

  “You were there.”

  DAY FIVE 11:54 (Local GMT+8). Song Island, Taiwan (disputed).

  “What’s happening? Why aren’t they attacking?!” cawed Kaparis as he watched the cockroach tunnelling away, and his technical team tried to track it from bot-cam to bot-cam.

  Li Jun was silent.

  “Repeat the order for the bots to attack any organic life form!”

  Again Li Jun remained immobile.

  She did not want them to die. She would not issue the order.

  In her mind, she was elsewhere. She was walking by a la
ke. Her parents were holding her hands. Her sister was playing …

  A technician beside her, terrified, checked her screen. “Master! Something is wrong!”

  “Li Jun!” Kaparis barked. “Li Jun!”

  She did not reply. She looked out across the ocean at the horizon.

  “LI JUN!”

  She spoke very quietly in reply, but the words cut through Kaparis like a knife. “I want to live. I want to be free.”

  Grandma stopped knitting and her eyes filled with tears of joy. “Oh, how lovely!”

  Kaparis spat and choked. Within his steel sarcophagus, his lifeless body sweated rage.

  “INFAMY! INFAMY!”

  DAY FIVE 11:55 (Local GMT+8). Nine Harmonies Pagoda, Shanghai.

  Over the ancient temple, the storm was about to break.

  With a terrible clap of thunder the signal from Kaparis finally arrived with the XE. bots in the cluster. The standing order to ignore insects was changed to a doomsday order: to destroy all organic life forms.

  Kill. Everything.

  Deep beneath the surface of the super cluster Finn and Kelly were doomed.

  Outside, there was a downrush of wind and a black rain descended.

  DAY FIVE 11:55 (Local GMT+8). Huangpu River Crossing, Shanghai.

  An LCD clock on the dashboard of the ice-cream van flipped to 11:55.

  “THERE!” shouted Hudson.

  Two sets of faint black dots had appeared on the very edge of the world.

  Al raised his arm. “ON MY SIGNAL! Three … two … one …”

  The Flying Leopards skimmed the satellite towns west of Shanghai.

  They were sixty-four seconds away from target.

  Group Captain Bingxin saw the outline of the Nine Harmonies Pagoda on the horizon. He looked at the fire permission indicator.

  It turned from amber to green.