by Talbot, Luke
She cringed at the thought of it, and took another step back, moving past the Xynutian statue. “You’re crazy,” she said. “After all this all you can think about is raping me!”
“Rape!” he laughed. “I’m not that kind of guy.” He levelled the gun at her chest and his smile disappeared. “But I don’t see why you need to be here any longer taking my air.”
She closed her eyes and raised her arms defensively in front of her.
The cacophony of gunshots that followed made her eardrums feel like they were exploding, and she fell backwards. The Xynutian staff clattered to the floor beside her.
But the pain she had been expecting never came.
She waited for a moment before opening her eyes to see Walker lying on the floor in front of her; blood covered his face and the wall behind him. The angle of his head told her instantly that he was dead. She looked beyond the Xynutian statue and her whole body started to tremble. Her heart pounded in her chest and her breath shortened. Tears streamed down her face, and while she was still unable to hear following the gunshots, she knew she was uncontrollably repeating his name over and over out loud.
Because there, standing in the airlock with a gun held to his shoulder like the last action hero, was George.
Chapter 80
George lifted Gail up and spun her around the room, and as her feet finally touched the ground they kissed, melting into each other with unrestrained abandon.
“Gail, I –” George didn’t know where to begin, as he broke from their embrace and looked her in the eyes. “I thought I’d lost you, I –”
Gail cut him off, wiping the tears from her cheeks. “I know, George, me too. But first we need to see to Ben and Henry.”
He was about to ask who Henry was when Zahra pushed past him and made her way to Ben’s side. She knelt down beside him and located the entry point of the bullet in his left shoulder through a hole in his shirt. She asked him a series of short questions in Arabic, and after each response nodded matter-of-factly. Finally, she repositioned herself so that she was kneeling behind his head and propped him up against her.
“I need some saline,” she told George. “And blood for him,” she nodded at Patterson, whose breathing had turned into a pant. Gail had gone to his side, and was trying to comfort him as best she could.
Tariq had followed them in through the airlock, and Zahra quickly gave him his orders in Arabic. Gail panicked for a moment as she wondered whether the airlock would let them out as easily as it let them in, but as soon as Tariq entered the brightly lit corridor the door closed behind him.
Probing the back of Ben’s shoulder, Zahra found the exit hole directly opposite the entry point on his front. It looked like a clean pass through the shoulder, and some tentative movement of the arm suggested that none of the bones or joints had been hit on the way through.
Using her knife, she cut his shirt open and cleaned the small hole with water from a plastic bottle she got from her backpack. Her medical training in the Army reminded her that there was one major artery and a major vein in the left shoulder, which supplied the left arm and the top of the neck. But the slow rate at which this wound was bleeding and the colour of the blood told her instantly that the bullet hadn’t severed either of them.
“Get me some bandages,” she asked George.
George ferreted in her backpack and came out with two rolls, which he ripped the cellophane from and passed to her one by one. She held the first roll over the hole in his front and used the second bandage to wrap over his shoulder and under his arm. Within a few moments the dressing was secure. She lay him back down on the floor and, standing at his feet, lifted his legs up so they rested against her groin.
“He’s a bit light headed, but the wound itself is not serious,” she said. “This will push some blood back to his head. But he still needs a saline drip to be sure – he could go into shock if we don’t treat him.”
When the colour started to return to Ben’s face and he smiled at her, she put his legs back down on the floor and got him to bend them at the knees.
She moved on to Patterson, and her face dropped. He had started to splutter drops of blood. She gave him a quick inspection and shook her head at Gail and George.
Patterson was drowning in his own blood. He needed emergency treatment, blood, saline and invasive surgery now to stand a chance of living, and they were capable of delivering none of it.
Gail mopped his brow with her sleeve.
“It’ll be fine, Henry,” she said comfortingly. He started to say something, but she hushed him. “No, don’t try to talk.”
He shook his head as best he could, spitting out a mouthful of blood and saliva. “No,” he insisted. “We failed; Mallus thinks he’s Aniquilus. He’s going to plan B.”
“Who’s Aniquilus? What’s plan B?” George asked.
Patterson looked him in the eyes. “Nuclear war,” he coughed and held his chest as he gasped desperately for air. His eyes widened as he realised he was unable to breath.
“Today.” he managed to say as the last breath left his body. He sagged limply against the wall and his chin fell to his chest.
They reached the surface carrying Ben between them, emerging into the evening chill to the welcoming arms of the al-Minya emergency services. George wasted no time in taking advantage of his phone, which had been useless underground.
Martín answered after the fourth ring. “George?”
“Martín, it’s me, we’re OK, and Gail is safe,” George summarised. He cut Martín’s joyous reply off. “DEFCOMM are launching an attack, Martín. They’re going to try and start World War III!” On their way to the surface, Gail had told him about DEFCOMM’s hangers full of missiles being assembled. There was no doubt that if Seth Mallus wanted to kick things off, he had the muscle to do so.
He said as much to Martín, and after wishing him luck, hung up.
They could only hope that Martín was able to get the message through to the Americans quickly enough, and that they would take it seriously.
As Ben was being looked over by two paramedics, Gail slipped her hand round George’s waist, pulled him close and kissed him softly on the lips.
Chapter 81
Martín was immediately on the phone to Larue, as Jacqueline tried to figure out what had got him out of bed in such a hurry: it was barely seven o’clock in the evening. They were still in the earliest stages of their relationship, where love had no timetable and the world revolved around the bedroom. Plus, he’d been away in Egypt for days and they had spent most of Saturday making up for lost time.
She clung to his neck passionately, and he managed to untangle himself tactfully in order to concentrate on the conversation with Larue. Once she heard his tone of voice, all thoughts of love-making left her head, and she pulled a pillow to her chest for comfort.
Martín explained the situation in Egypt and what Patterson had told Gail and George before dying. He’d expected to make a full report to his boss after the weekend, but this new information couldn’t wait that long.
Jacqueline got dressed while he listened to Larue’s response.
“I’ve already told you,” he said desperately, cutting him off mid-sentence. “DEFCOMM, in Florida. Yes I know it sounds crazy, but think about it: they control the defence satellites for the United States, which includes all of the early warning systems for nuclear attack. If they want to, they can simulate an attack on the United States from anywhere on Earth. We need to warn the Americans!”
By the time he put the phone down Jacqueline had been to heat up some coffee. She passed him his mug.
“What did he say?”
He looked her in the eyes. “I’ve done what I can. I’m not sure he really believes it, but he’s going to talk to his counterpart at NASA.”
“Do you think it’s true, what they said about them wanting to start a nuclear war?”
He looked into the thick-black liquid. To Martín, coffee was one of the world’s great paradox
es; it would certainly put him on edge and make him nervous later, but when he was actually drinking it he felt a smooth calm descend on his mind. Its heat and bitterness could lift any doubt and confusion, allowing him to focus effectively.
“Think about it,” he said eventually, “remember what they did to the crew of the Clarke? What did we think at the time? That there must be something pretty incredible worth hiding to go to all the trouble of disrupting all transmissions from the spaceship, and then from Mars, too. And now, God only knows what’s happened up there, since we haven’t had any news from the planet for days.
“Not since Apollo 11 have the eyes of the world been so firmly rooted on a space mission, and never in the course of history has technology made it so easy for people to follow it. And yet they tried. Imagine the risk!” He took a gulp of coffee. “If they were prepared to do that, then they either had a lot to gain, or nothing to lose. It’s inevitable that they would be found out eventually, because –”
He froze. Jacqueline stared at him wide-eyed, and pushed him to talk. “Because what?”
“Because the mission was never coming home. That’s the only way they would have been able to ensure that no-one found out. But Gail Turner’s free now, she’s talked.”
He didn’t know half the story, didn’t know where Gail had been for the past week or even what she had seen, but he was convinced that DEFCOMM was about to do exactly what George had said.
Chapter 82
Seth Mallus went over the final lines of the programming script on his computer display and inserted a missing semi-colon. It was horribly manual work, no high-level software had ever been written to do what he was about to do. The thousands of lines of code had been tested and re-tested several dozen times on his simulator; now, with this final adjustment, it would run perfectly.
He hit a key and the code executed, running through the simulation one last time. It really took him back, seeing the scripts run, right back to the early days of the nanotech boom, when he would still get involved in the programming; before the money, the empire, the power. It was an old-fashioned and usually unnecessary way of doing things. The only reason he had used the arcane method was that it was only in this way, by communicating directly with the machine, that all of the ghosts introduced by decades of amended programming sitting between the user and the processors could be eradicated. The last thing he wanted was some obscure security protocol getting in the way at the last minute and ruining so much hard work.
It was the language that the DEFCOMM Satellite Defence Network, or SDN, talked, and its beauty was that almost no human being alive was able to interpret it. Above ground level, outside the hermetically-sealed bunker in which he was now placed, the team of primary coders lay dead, gassed in their labs by the new air-conditioning system. It would be at least an hour before they were discovered, but by that time it would already be too late to stop him.
He finished running the simulation and checked the logs: no errors and the output was perfect. The paranoia of the world in trying to defend itself from an enemy that didn’t exist would now be exploited to the maximum by a simple computer program.
The code was packaged, uploaded to the SDN mainframe, and executed.
The United States of America was about to come under attack.
Twelve hundred miles away in New York, Frank Bartolini kicked open the side-door to the Lafayette Grill kitchen and strode out, a leaking garbage bag held at arm’s length and a disgusted look on his face.
“Jesus, Harry, how many times have I told you not to throw drinks in the waste?” he shouted over his shoulder.
He’d just thrown the bag into the dumpster and was wiping his hand on his apron when the white utility vehicle caught his attention. It was worthy of his attention because it was parked in the chief’s spot, and the chief was due to arrive any minute now.
He went back in, cursing. “Anyone know what idiot’s parked here?” he shouted through the swing doors and into the bar area; the restaurant was emptying after the lunchtime rush, but the bar was always held up by a handful of regulars.
A quick roll call established that nobody within was responsible, and Frank cursed some more as he dialled the tow company. It was free parking by law, but in practice, it was the chief’s spot, and even the tow company knew that, the owner being the chief’s brother.
Better still, he’d go out and make sure that on top of the tow fine, it would never occur to the utility vehicle’s owner to park there again. Armed with a rolling pin, he quickly checked that nobody was passing by before attacking the van’s headlamps. He then broke the tail lights, and took a final swing at the rear window. After two hits, the glass shattered, leaving a gaping hole in one half of the split rear doors.
He was about to leave it at that when curiosity overcame him. The van had blacked out windows, so maybe there was something inside worth hiding. He peered in.
A tarpaulin covered something about the size and shape of a fridge lying on its back. On one corner the tarpaulin had slipped off, and he bent his head round through the broken window to get a better look.
Whatever the object was, it was smooth and painted glossy white.
It looked just like his fridge at home.
He pulled his head out, no longer interested in the contents of the van, and was about to go back to the kitchen when he heard a click behind him.
“Stop!” the female voice cried. “Stop right there, or I fire!” He stopped. “Now, turn around, slowly, and drop the weapon on the floor!”
He obeyed, the rolling-pin bouncing on the pavement and into the gutter, and he found himself facing a female cop, a good foot shorter than him, holding her Taser up with both hands and pointed directly at his chest.
Chapter 83
“One of my researchers is convinced,” Larue breathed in deeply, he couldn’t believe he was actually going to say it, “that DEFCOMM is planning to start World War III this afternoon by simulating an attack on the United States of America.”
There was silence at the other end of the line. Larue decided it was best not to interrupt it.
“DEFCOMM?” the reply came, incredulous. “The guys who design and make our defence satellites?”
“And are also responsible for the video feeds from the Mars missions.” The story was still wafer thin.
More silence, but somehow this time more pensive. “How?”
Larue didn’t know; neither had Martín, nor his source. All they had was speculation. They could speculate that they could somehow override the USA’s missile launch codes and start the war automatically, but that was incredibly unlikely – if anything could be less likely! – given the safeguards in place. The best theory was that the attack would be a ghost, fabricated by the network of sensors placed in orbit and around the country, in the hope that the USA would respond in kind.
“But we will know it’s a fake,” the reply came, “it’s happened before, both here and in Russia! Once a visual confirmation cannot be made, the assumption is that there is a bug somewhere. That’s why we retain human control.”
A reply he’d been expecting.
“Remember that DEFCOMM don’t only make defence satellites,” he said. “But also a large part of your next generation nuclear weapon deployment systems,”
A short pause. “But, why would they want to do such a thing?”
To this question, Larue didn’t know what to say. If it were all true, if it was all about to begin and they had so little time left, then finding a motive could wait.
He’d made the call thinking he would be laughed at, and had only picked up the courage to do so because of Martín’s insistence. That, and a niggle in the back of his mind that there might actually be something to the crazy story.
But by the time he’d put the phone back on the hook he hadn’t been laughed at. They hadn’t hung up on him, and they had even thanked him, sincerely, for his information. This meant that there were people on the other side of the Atlantic who at least h
alf-believed him.
And he found that deeply unsettling. Because the odds of Martín being right had just dramatically shortened.
Chapter 84
Martín looked sideways at Jacqueline, who forced a smile. The lights of the city flickered across her face as the TGV picked up speed on its way out of Paris. He was awestruck by her beauty, which almost made him forget why they had run to get the train.
And yet his mind did stray back to that rush, and also to the young family they had bumped into in the Gare de Montparnasse. The couple, with two small children aged no more than one and three, were just off the train from northern Spain and had been looking at their Metro guide. They had stopped Martín in his tracks, asking for directions in broken French.
He had greeted them in Spanish, and they had laughed enthusiastically; the eldest of the two children was tired but excited on this adventure to a foreign country, while her young brother slept in a sling on the father’s chest. The mother had turned to share her map with him, pointing to where they intended to go.
Martín had looked across at Jacqueline in despair; what could he tell them that would possibly help? If someone had stopped him in the street a week ago with the same information he had now, how would he have reacted? If he told them to flee Paris, they would think he was mad, and yet if he told them how to get to their hotel, he may live to regret it for the rest of his life. He’d sent messages to any family member or friend he could think of: simple and short, it had advised them to get away from any large cities. To people you knew that was an easy thing to do. It was something else entirely to stop random people on the streets and spread panic.
He remembered looking down at the little girl, twisting on her heels and humming a tune to herself as she gazed around the brightly-lit train station, her eyes wide with anticipation.