by John McNally
“Now do forgive Li Jun, or you’ll ruin her life too.”
Kaparis made a hissing sound. Grandma thought for one fraction of a second he was crying. But no. It was contempt.
“Her life? What life?”
And without further ado, Kaparis – beaten, bitter – called up a violent choral section from a disturbing Shostacovich opera to play on his screen array as Heywood replaced the gag on Grandma.
Kaparis let the discordant music wash over him for a few moments, then said, “NOW!”
A portal opened in the seabed and a narrow, struggling, slip of a girl floated out towards the circling sharks. Li Jun.
Grandma wailed. They’d even gone to the trouble of pinning on the front panel of the blue tank top she’d knitted for her.
Grandma had known inhuman evil. Had worked with it. Had even cured it. But she had never known anyone quite as wilfully cruel as Kaparis. Effect. It was all for effect …
She wailed again.
Li Jun struggled for air and waited for the first shark to strike. She had not lived long, she considered, perhaps only for a few blissful moments, but she had once felt free, had tasted her own actions, as she now tasted their consequence. It would never be worth it, nothing justifies death, but it was something. A great grey form accelerated towards her through the water.
BOOOOOOSH!
And was instantly frightened away.
BOOOOOSH! BOOOOOOSH!
Columns of bubbles exploded around her, to protect her, to save her. As she began to pass out, she saw a beautiful creature approach her – a warrior mermaid with long floaty hair. The mermaid was wearing a mask that she pulled off and thrust over Li Jun’s face. Compressed air forced open her lungs, with glorious, life-giving effect. Her mind refocused and she saw the mermaid was a woman in a designer wetsuit carrying a submachine gun and an oxygen tank.
Li Jun had been spotted from the air by the equipe bleu of the Commando Hubert in their radar-cloaked NH90 helicopter.
Four of them immediately dropped 120 feet into the sea around Li Jun. The remaining seven members of the team continued to the primary target. Appearing around the Kaparis underwater command chamber, as Grandma said later, “like those films of penguins all diving off the rocks at once.”
Heywood had raised the alarm the moment the first commando had hit the water and he and Kaparis were well on their way to their two-stage escape vehicle (a compressed air-rocket system developed from an old Polaris ballistic missile).
While it blasted off from its launch hub below the waves, the commandos entered the complex by blowing open the primary airlock. They entered the main bunker and shot or detained nearly sixteen members of Kaparis’s staff during the initial fire fight, though it was estimated a further forty-five escaped in a nuclear powered submarine.
Grandma was found in the principle chamber moments before it flooded. The lead commando, Henri Clement (Grandma immediately knew he was French, “I could smell the cologne”) removed her gag, clicked his heels and said, “Madame Allenby. Enchanté.”
He then presented his cardfn1 before throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her out.
Finn dropped out of the white-water hyperspace after four minutes – as long as he dared to fly virtually blind.
The cone of white water collapsed around him and the world was revealed in all its storm-lashed majesty. Not only had he found the river, he was almost in it. He pulled the Bug up and – SSSHHHSHRRRRROOOOOOT! – soared higher to better search for the circus.
The downpour was easing and beyond a bridge in front of him he made out something hovering, like him, above the water. He blasted forward – SSSHHHSHRRRRROOOOOOT!
It was a cable car. A chain of them ran across the Huangpu river, halted for the duration of the storm. He followed the line to the bank and made out the top of a Ferris wheel. Bingo.
SSSHHHSHSHSHSHSHHRRRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOT!
Twenty seconds later he was descending into the carnival site, searching desperately.
He hit buttons and the nano-radar screen lit up. He hoped with all his being that Carla was still carrying Kelly’s pack in her hair. If she was, the contents might just be big enough and dense enough for the nano-radar to pick up.
Nothing.
He hauled the sticks and pulled the Bug round 360 to sweep the entire circus.
There! The tiniest flash …
Finn shot down towards the carnival to chase the signal, then slowed again as it got stronger. It pointed back towards the river. He looked.
The cable car had started up …
Baptiste left the operator dead in his booth, a neat bullet hole in his forehead.
The machinery of the wheelhouse clanked and the cables ran. The cars jerked and rocked and restarted their endless journey back and forth across the river.
As each car arrived in the wheelhouse, its doors automatically opened.
Baptiste watched the river traffic for a few moments, then pulled the semi-conscious Carla off the floor and walked her into an open car. The doors closed and the car swung out over the river.
No one had noticed the couple struggling through the rain under the tarpaulin cape. No one saw her hands were tied with wire or her single shoe. No one had even looked.
The car rose rapidly and began its 800m transport across the Huangpu. Mighty industrial barges floated serenely beneath. Baptiste looked back to the shore.
A white wisp seemed to be cutting through the rain, heading straight towards him …
Finn aimed the Bug at the roof of the bobbing, moving, rain-battered cable car and tried to land – no chance. The Bug was washed straight off.
Finn thrust directly against the window to stop the Bug’s slide. He just had time to register Carla slumped on a wooden bench inside when – WHAM! – Baptiste struck the window with a caveman’s club of a fist. The shockwave threw the Bug back. Finn let it drop through free air, then flew beneath the car.
In the relative shelter he spotted a possible way in.
He angled the Bug and flew to the very bottom of the car’s overlapping doors. Where the two rubber door seals met was a neat square-centimetre gap. He forced and thrust the Bug forward into it.
POP. The Bug arrived on the floor of the car.
WHAM! Down came Baptiste’s stamping foot – WHAM! WHAM!
Finn scooted and span.
WHAM! Baptiste was lightning fast, EVE. accurately calculating the Bug’s crazed trajectories, but in the dry stable air Finn could better control the craft and dodge the feet and fists.
He shot the Bug up into the roof and tucked it into a gap behind a light fitting, too slim for Baptiste to be able to jam his fingers in.
He tried to think. His heart hammered. In his urgency to find Carla, he had formed no plan as to what he was actually going to do to save her.
SNAP! Baptiste kicked a splintered cane length of wood from the bench and jammed the end of it into the light fitting gap, nearly pulverising Finn and the Bug. Finn had to move. He shot the Bug back out into the open and Baptiste swung for it, just missing.
WHHHHIP!
The cane made Baptiste twice as deadly – his reach twice as long. The schoolbook phrase “Early man learned to multiply force using simple tools” flashed absurdly through Finn’s mind.
WHHHHIP!
He’d never outrun Baptiste. He had to be cleverer than early man. So he stopped. Mid-air.
WHHHHIP!
He dodged.
WHHHHIP!
He dodged again.
WHHHHIP!
Against clearing skies and the extraordinary background of Shanghai, they were having a dance-off in a cable car. A bullfight in a bubble.
But the bull was a good 150 times the matador’s size and getting ever faster, EVE. processing and feeding the coordinates of each dodge and blow, learning from each mistake. Finn knew the blow would soon land …
WHHHHIP!
Close.
WHHHHIP!
Closer …
> But then, remarkably, Baptiste stopped. He seemed to forget about Finn altogether and turned to the doors, pulling up the safety bar and starting to smash the door release with the butt of his pistol.
Finn had no idea what he was doing.
The doors parted. Wind and rain rushed into the cab. The car rocked and Finn looked down.
Sand. For a moment he thought a desert was passing beneath them … but in a blink it became an industrial barge, 200 metres long and travelling directly below full of sand and gravel aggregate destined for the construction of a new mega-structure somewhere inside China.
Baptiste grabbed Carla and Finn’s heart seized.
He’s going to jump … He’s going to kill her …
Finn had to stop him.
He hit full power – SSSHHHSHRROOOOOT! – and the Bug hit Baptiste’s left eyeball with huge force.
Finn was bucked clean out of his harness and sent spinning through the air as Baptiste screamed and brought a hand up to his eye – dropping Carla. She fell – half-in, half-out of the open door – just in time to catch Finn in her thick curly hair.
He grabbed at the strands and came to a bouncing halt.
Physics, he thought. Not luck.
He scrambled towards her ear. “CARLA! CARLA! WAKE UP!”
The barge slid by beneath. The hard steel helm section approaching fast. Too late to drop now. Surely too late.
But through the forest of Carla’s curls Finn saw what Baptiste was thinking.
“NO!” he cried.
Baptiste looked down upon the waters as EVE. made a risk calculation, then leapt.
Half blind, he skewed his jump. Down he fell, pulling Carla with him.
WHAM!
99 per cent of Baptiste hit the sand.
Everything went black.
The Chief Mate of the aggregate barge Min Ho heard a thud and slowed. Had they struck a small craft in the low visibility? A crew-member was sent out. He saw a log floating past. They must have hit that. The Chief Mate breathed a sigh of relief.
On the banks of the river, bleeding and shaking in the rain, a filthy dog picked out the scent of its young master and howled.
Christmas Eve 08:14 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.
Power surged.
The great hoop of particle accelerators came to life.
White lightning span around the core.
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near …”
Al tapped his control terminal and – WHOOOOOOOM! With a flash, the Hot Area was created, remarkable forces only he understood.
Delta Salazar was fed in on the conveyor belt and taken to the very limit of physics, the very limit of human knowledge, the very limit of life itself.
Then Al brought her back.
Grandma watched, standing next to Commander King in the Control Gallery. At her insistence Christmas decorations had been added to “brighten the place up” though in truth there was little mood of celebration. The technical team barely noticed the turning of the seasons, so focused had they been on reaching this point.
Despite extensive and ongoing search operations, not a trace had been found of the third Tyro. Nor of his hostage, Carla. Nor of Infinity Drake.
Grandma let tears run down her cheeks, unafraid to have a “good cry” at the drop of any given hat. She, more than anybody in that most technical place, had absolute faith that Finn and Carla would eventually be found alive. Just as she had absolute faith they would one day find out what happened to Finn’s father, Ethan. She didn’t know how anybody could live without faith. Commander King was a realist and above such things. He thought only of Kaparis. Day and night.
Down on the floor of the CFAC, Al cut the power to the Hot Area and it evaporated into a million specks of light.
The select audience blinked away the image left on their retinas and saw that the body of a full-sized young woman had appeared in the middle of the Henge. She woke as if from a long sleep, like a princess in a fairy-tale. She sat up, looked at her limbs and felt her face, as if they were new to her. Then she stood and looked around the vast hall with big sad eyes. Amazed at the new scale of things after eight months nano.
Kelly and Stubbs had been first in. They’d been restored to full-size for more than two weeks now while Delta had insisted on staying on in China to aid the search effort. Kelly offered her his fist to bump. She bumped it, then hugged him. A hug of need. Of loss. Stubbs shook her hand because that’s all he could cope with.
Al watched from the foot of his Command Pod. Delta was frightening enough at 10mm. At true scale, he found her spellbinding. But it killed him to think it was his fault her sister and his nephew, so beloved, were missing, presumed dead. She had never blamed him, but he carried the guilt anyway.
Delta looked at him, then Al turned away.
Up in the Gallery, Commander King did the same.
Down of the floor of the CFAC the sons of Scarlatti stowed their emotions.
One of their number was still missing. There was work to be done.
But at least Delta was back.
Grandma mentally added another place around the table for Christmas dinner.
Christmas Eve 16:14 (Local GMT+8). Taklamakan Desert, NW China.
Odd flakes of snow raced each other through the frozen wind, chased along the contoured sand, and hurried through the garish, extraordinary Uyghur shrines – coloured flags and banners on stick sculptures left scattered across the desert, restless riotous monuments to the dead.
Baptiste did not see them. He slogged on. The brain injury he’d suffered after catching his head on the edge of the barge had left him a brute zombie. EVE. had little control. It had taken him three days to stand, thereafter instinct took over and he was drawn northeast, towards the place where he had been formed by the Master. The seminary in the mountains far, far away. Homing in, he had been pushing his prisoner in a handcart for twelve weeks across the never-ending Eurasian landmass.
Finn watched the Uyghur shrines in a starving-trance from Carla’s hair.
The colours reminded him of the praying mantis. He had finally seen one in a barn in Gansu, when it appeared on Carla’s forearm, tasting the salts that seeped through her fevered skin. It was magnificent. It blazed colour like a stained-glass window and had the bearing of an alien bishop. It had turned and looked straight at him and made him – briefly – deeply happy. Made him dare to hope he might survive.
Hope finds you he thought afterwards, and reminded himself to tell Christabel.
He had not seen it again.
The freezing wind blew. Baptiste slogged on. The wheel squeaked.
A little way behind a broken, filthy, exhausted dog chewed moisture from a pathetic drift of snow. He could smell new humans some miles away. Food. Fires. He wanted to eat, drink, sleep. He wanted the pain in his gut and his paws and his infected jaw to go away. He wanted not to hop along, not to scavenge for rats, not to run cowering from the bad man whenever he saw him …
But he had the scent of Finn.
And of the good girl.
And on he went.
Footnotes
Part One
Chapter One
fn1 Aka the G&T, formed by an alliance of international powers in 2002 to deal with extraordinary threats to global civilisation.
fn2 See FILE NO: GNTRC 9437549-OP/BLAKE~∞ TOP SECRET: an attempt by transnational terror czar D.A.P Kaparis to blackmail the G&T into handing over the secrets of the Boldklub process by releasing a doomsday bioweapon, the Scarlatti Wasp, and threatening Armageddon. The attempt was thwarted by a military kill team shrunk to hunt down the wasp, and by the heroic actions of Infinity Drake.
fn3 Named after the Danish football club Akademisk Boldklub, who Nils Bohr, the father of subatomic physics, used to play for.
Chapter Two
fn1 Neuro-Retinal Programming aka NRP – an accelerated learning and personality control process whereby a probe, inserted directly thro
ugh the eye, connects to the optic nerve and delivers information (specialist knowledge, emotional association, ideology, etc.) straight to the brain’s cerebral cortex.
fn2 In computing an executable file contains actionable program code rather than just data. It’s the bit that says Do This, Do That, and Stop Complaining.
Chapter Three
fn1 Hudson had won a Hertfordshire Schools anti-bullying poetry prize for ‘Willow: Bowed, Yet Ye Stand’.
fn2 Reducing matter collapses the electro-magnetic spectrum in such a way that nano radio transmissions cannot be picked up on macro radio receivers and vice versa. An nPhone is a tiny macro phone carried in a backpack with a keypad that allows texting on the regular phone network. It also allows constant tracking.
fn3 “The greatest thing to come out of 1969, after the moon landings by NASA and Abbey Road by the Beatles” – Al.
fn4 Sphalerite possesses a quality called triboluminesence, which means it glows when scratched.
Chapter Five
fn1 G&T official history, Forbidden City operational timeline starts: DAY ONE Sep 30th 00:00 (GMT+1).
fn2 See Operation Scarlatti.
fn3 Nano-radar is limited in range but because nano-material is so dense even the tiniest objects shrunk by the Boldklub process are easily detectable in flight.
Chapter Six
fn1 An unbreakable radio-signal-fracturing program that allows Kaparis’s operatives to communicate securely across the globe.
fn2 Boolean logic, the system of logic that allows binary computers to process information, does not accept paradox (e.g. two different right answers to the same problem) thus computers can never choose between answers of equal value (I mustn’t eat the chocolate it will make me fat vs I must eat the chocolate I will feel good): therefore computers can never be independently intelligent. Only humans can pull this trick off (mostly they eat the chocolate). And quantum computers (mostly they don’t).
Chapter Seven