The Complete Ruby Redfort Collection

by Lauren Child

  ‘Welcome to extreme elements survival,’ said Sam.

  ‘Boy, do I not like the sound of that,’ said Ruby.

  ‘That’s kind of the point, no one does,’ said Sam. ‘But with the weather and the storms coming, Hitch here thought it would be a good idea if you took part.’

  ‘Gee, thanks Hitch,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ said Hitch.

  There were seven other trainees there, and Ruby was glad to see Kip Holbrook was one of them. The location was up at Big Sky Lake, which was frozen solid.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ muttered Holbrook.

  ‘Not unless you’re thinking about finding the first bus out of here,’ hissed Ruby.

  The first part of the training was easy. Sam Colt taught them some key cold-weather concepts and none of them involved taking a dip in an icy lake. But quite a lot of what he said involved making sure to keep dry.

  ‘Hypothermia is the number one killer of people in the outdoors,’ said Colt. ‘As the old saying goes, “Stay Dry and Stay Alive”. So seeing as how I’m urging you to keep dry, you’re probably wondering where the lake comes in, right?’

  Ruby wasn’t actually wondering this; she was pretty sure she knew how the lake was going to fit into this scenario.

  ‘Well, let’s go take a look,’ he said, and the eight trainees all followed him out onto the ice.

  Two twenty-four-inch holes had been cut in the lake’s surface, approximately twelve yards apart.

  ‘First of all, we’re going to practise getting a feel for the temperature of the water.’

  ‘I don’t like where this is going,’ whispered Kip Holbrook.

  ‘To begin with,’ said Sam, ‘you’re all going to have a go at swimming from point A to B, under the ice, but with a line secured around you so there’s no chance of you losing your way.’

  Ruby was faintly reassured by this news. She might end up frozen to death, but at least they would find her body.

  ‘When you hit cold water, your body’s going to do something very unhelpful,’ continued Colt. ‘It’s called the “torso reflex”. Basically, the shock of the cold is going to make you breathe in. That’s bad. That will get you drowned. So brace, and hold your chest still.’

  He went through the rest of the principles of surviving a fall through the ice:

  ‘RELAX your body. Conserve energy. Cold shock will set in quicker if you move around too much.

  ‘FOCUS on getting out as quickly as possible without too much splashing around. The longer you stay in the water, the more likely you are to die.’

  It was as unpleasant as Ruby had feared, but she did it and that was something. The next exercise made the previous one seem easy. This time it was all about finding one’s way out of the ice without there being any pre-cut hole.

  ‘OK, so the ideal thing to do if you fall through ice is to look for the hole that landed you in this situation. If you can climb out of the same hole you originally fell in through, you can be reasonably sure that the edges are likely to support your weight while you climb on out. But what I am going to teach you is how to find your way out of an ice-covered lake or river if you cannot find your original entry point. LOOK for changes of colour in the ice to find a weaker point. These will show up as lighter in colour. When you find one, you need to smash through it. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a suitable tool provided by Spectrum, but if not, you’ll need to use your initiative. Once you have broken through the surface, you need to GET HORIZONTAL: slide your arms full length onto the ice then kick your legs like a seal to propel yourself out. Then you need to ROLL until you get to firmer ice or ground. The key is to get out of the water ASAP.’

  Ruby was relieved to see both Hitch and Kekoa clad in wetsuits and in the water.

  ‘At least there’s some chance I might get out of this lake alive,’ she muttered.

  She let her body sink in through the hole.

  The cold felt like a punch to the chest.

  Relax, she thought.

  She swam away from the entry point and began searching for a place to break through.

  Focus, she thought.

  Around her was all blue and white, and for a moment she had no idea where was up and where was down.

  Don’t panic, she thought. RULE 19: PANIC WILL FREEZE YOUR BRAIN.

  Holding her breath, she turned in the water, and saw a rounder, lighter patch to the left and above. Amazed by how hard it was to move with her clothes soaked and the cold in her bones, she made it through and without help from Hitch or Kekoa.

  There was a welcome interval where the recruits dried off and warmed up and every single one of them hoped that that would be it as far as cold water survival was concerned. But as it turned out they were just getting started.

  The second half of the training took place at the aptly named Desolate Cove, a windy curve of grey pebble beach.

  Here they were faced with a whole new set of problems.

  Survival in the ocean was a very different challenge: a vast expanse of moving water, crashing waves, currents and rip tides.

  As the day was coming to a close, Ruby saw a figure picking his way across the beach. It was Froghorn. He didn’t look too happy to be there. He was trundling a small cart about the size of a wheelbarrow. He was wrapped up warm against the chill; he had really gone to town on the cold weather gear.

  ‘What a drip,’ muttered Ruby.

  ‘Hey kid,’ called Hitch. ‘I have to get back to HQ. So when training’s over you can get a lift back with the other trainees. Can I trust you to do the right thing and get home safe?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ruby.

  ‘See you later then,’ he said. She watched as Hitch walked over to speak to Froghorn. They talked together for a few minutes, all perfectly fine until Hitch appeared to notice something – perhaps it was to do with Froghorn’s attire, it was hard to say from this distance but Ruby recognised the subtle change in Hitch’s body language and knew he was not happy, not happy at all. He walked off to the Spectrum tailer while Kekoa briefed the trainees on the equipment they were about to be issued.

  Froghorn’s job was to sign out the kit to each of the trainees.

  Today’s items came in a neat little bag, light in weight.

  The first was a breathing band, not unlike the breathing buckle Ruby had once acquired from the gadget room, though this device looked a little more up-to-date than that one. It was worn around the wrist and when one needed air it could be pressed to the mouth so you could draw in oxygen. It was intended for emergencies – the hope was that it would buy you just enough time to get you out of a bad situation.

  ‘Use it only when you really, really have to,’ warned Kekoa. ‘Once the five minutes are through, that’s it.’

  The second item got everyone talking.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Lowe.

  ‘That,’ said Kekoa, ‘is a Superskin. It keeps you warm in cold water and aids swimming. You’ll find you move significantly faster, particularly under the surface. The suit will keep you totally dry, but the truly remarkable thing about it is that once you step from the water it will shed every drop within a matter of seconds. You need to take it back home with you and practise getting into it – it’s not easy.’

  Ruby looked inside the little zip-lock bag. ‘So that’s a Superskin.’

  As they trooped back up the beach a quarter-mile on from Desolate Cove, Ruby noticed something written there in the sand. Four words:

  The stars were indeed beginning to twinkle and as she gazed on them so she caught sight of the Observatory, perched as it was on Meteor Island. Stars were so often used to point the way, to navigate. Could it be, thought Ruby, that the stars hold an even bigger secret? Musca, she thought, the fly constellation.

  If she looked for those stars then would she find her way?

  Two months after the

  letter was mailed …

  … the kid from Colwin City received a reply in the f
orm of a single line of gibberish. Once deciphered it told of a location. So, wasting no time, a ticket was purchased for the nine hundred and twenty mile bus ride to reach not an address, but a manhole cover. One thing this kid knew for a definite was that even crawling down a drain was preferable to living one more day in the suburbs of Colwin City, and so down the kid went.

  The ninety-nine-second test completed, the kid from Colwin City was inducted into the Spectrum 8 JSRP.

  No one doubted this kid’s brain. ‘A phenomenal mind,’ they all agreed. ‘Aced every one of the junior agent tests.’ ‘The smartest of them all.’ Well, almost.

  They said, ‘You pass the big one and there’s no looking back – make the top eight and your future’s Spectrum.’

  That sounded good. The life of a secret agent made sense like no other life could.

  The Colwin City kid felt good, good enough to raise a smile, a rare occurrence indeed.

  ‘You know,’ said the test agent, ‘I think one day you might even be up there with Bradley Baker.’

  The kid from Colwin City felt a sudden jolt, an inexplicable pain.

  Who was Bradley Baker?

  The training officer continued to drone on about this agent rival.

  ‘Baker was our first junior recruit, joined when he was just seven, but now look at him, thirteen and going places. If you get close to being as good as him, we’ll give you a medal.’

  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest of them all?

  Not you, not the kid from Colwin City, some other kid’s got that badge.

  So how to wipe the smile off this Bradley Baker kid’s face?

  Chapter 20.

  Hold your breath

  SHE DIDN’T EXACTLY WANT TO HANG AROUND out there once everyone had gone home – she wasn’t even sure that she was right about all this, she could have got the whole thing back to front and the wrong way up – but the way Ruby saw it, if there was a chance she was right, then it was a chance worth taking.

  Getting herself into the Superskin was no small challenge. Neither Blacker nor Kekoa had been exaggerating: it was near impossible to put on and uncomfortable to wear. It sort of suckered to the skin, covering fingers, toes, neck and head. Only a small oval of the face was visible.

  ‘Weird,’ said Ruby, as she looked down at her feet, ‘very weird.’

  To make the vision stranger, the material the Superskin was made from resembled fish scales and the effect was not unlike a costume from the well-known B movie, Return of the Fish-people.

  She hid her snow parka, boots and other clothing, concealing them behind a large rock. The water was black and uninviting, there was no moon tonight and all in all the cove was living up to its name.

  Ruby walked to the water’s edge and let the waves lap over her feet, and was surprised when she felt no chill at all. She stepped in farther – no, not cold.

  ‘Pretty super,’ she said, pulling down her facemask and diving into the slick black water. The Superskin seemed to aid swimming too, and she cut through the water with ease.

  When she arrived at Meteor Island, she dived down under the water and searched for the hidden door. She was looking for a series of marks, or points, which might represent the constellation Musca – the sign of the fly.

  It took her a few dives to spot it because she had been looking for something tiny, but the fly constellation was marked in fossils and spanned four feet across.

  Now it was just a matter of getting in. She felt around, moving her palms along the rock.

  At last she found what she was looking for: a panel of glass.

  When she put her hand on it, a word flashed up: Capricorn.

  Ruby pressed in the star points.

  The screen flashed violet and a new message appeared:

  ACCESS APPROVED.

  The door slid open and in she swam. Now she found herself in a sort of twelve foot by twelve foot indoor pool, only it wasn’t a pool, because pools don’t have lids. What this was, was a cube full of water, and as she watched the door to the ocean slide shut, she realised she wasn’t entirely sure how she was meant to get out. She swam carefully round and round the cube, searching for a clue which might lead to her release.

  Previously, Ruby had only been able to hold her breath for just a second over one minute. Now she was able to do three times that – it wasn’t exactly outstanding but it was enough. She found it just in time – a tiny, tiny image of a fly. Once it felt the pressure of her fingertip, the water drained out of the cube and a hatch in the lid slid open, allowing Ruby to climb up a metal ladder and out of the tank into another chamber. By the time she did so the Superskin had shed every drop of water and she was completely dry.

  The space she was now in was not so different from the one she had just emerged from. It was the same shape, same size, same colour, but this time the door was in front of her, with an entry panel to one side.

  HIGHLY SENSITIVE, RESTRICTED AUTHORITY.

  There was one violet button next to it. This she pressed and up came a grid. She pictured the books on Froghorn’s desk, the ones about error-correcting codes and data transmission.

  What she was looking at was an error-correcting code, she could see that. But what kind? Ruby peered more closely at the black and white dots, counting them.

  It didn’t take her long to realise: it was a parity bit system and the final row and final column of each grid held the parity bits relating to the black dots, saying whether there was an even or odd number in the row or column.

  But how to get a code from that …?

  Then she saw it: one row and one column in each grid had the wrong parity bit. The fourth row and ninth column in the first, and in the second …*

  She typed four numbers into the keypad:

  4912

  A green light came on. And with a hiss, the door opened …

  ACCESS APPROVED.

  33 MINUTES GRANTED.

  The whole room at first glance appeared to be plain white, white floor, white ceiling, white walls; another shiny white cube containing nothing. She ran her hand across the wall and as she did so the wall became colour.

  Lots of colours, each one a narrow vertical oblong.

  She held her hand on one – a dark red. There was a pneumatic hiss and the red oblong slid out from the wall. The file was labelled: THE NEW DELHI AFFAIR. She tried another, an olive green: THE ITALIAN CONUNDRUM.

  Ruby looked around the room. So where to find information on Baker?

  There were no letters, no numbers. She trailed her hand along part of the wall and watched the files turn from shades of green through yellow, through orange, and to red. They glowed for a few seconds before fading back to white wall.

  A colour code?

  On Froghorn’s diagram was written FC1 = the spectrum.

  File Code One is the colour spectrum.

  So how did this colour code work?

  Froghorn had said something about Mondays not being good because they were ‘viridian days’. So viridian was a bad thing. The question was, did Miles Froghorn see everything in terms of colour?

  Ruby knew that certain people mixed their senses up: the composer Messiaen perceived musical notes as different colours, and the author Nabokov saw letters as colours.

  What if Froghorn is one of those people? she thought. A synaesthete? What if he associates colours with ideas? Like days, or people?

  It would be another layer of code, and a clever one: anyone wanting to find a particular file would either need to have Froghorn with them, or to know what colour he had assigned to a file … The trick, Ruby realised, was to figure out which colour applied to which mission, or which agent: in this case, Baker. Or LB.

  The files on Bradley Baker would be … where? What colour would be associated with him? First of all, one had to think what he was. Dead, yes, but then no doubt a lot of people in these files had long since slipped away, so looking for colours associated with death or deadness was probably the wrong way to go.
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  To Ruby his name suggested brown – it was probably something to do with his name ‘Baker’ conjuring up bread. Dumb, Redfort, super dumb. This felt like entirely the wrong avenue to explore – after all, she wasn’t the code maker here, was she … Froghorn was. So think like Froghorn.

  She thought about Baker. Froghorn had said he was like a ‘sun ray’. So it was just possible that to Froghorn, Baker would be represented by gold or sunshine yellow. It took her a few goes to find the right shade, but it seemed she was correct in her thinking – Baker was filed under a golden yellow.

  When she opened it she saw there was a pattern of dots next to his name – a logo perhaps?

  She took out the mini copier and snapped a picture of it.

  Then she leafed through the file.

  Everything in it seemed to relate to Baker’s last flight. It seemed he was in training for some particular mission, though it was unclear exactly what that was. Most of the content was encrypted, and if she wanted to read it she would need to decode it and that could take hours.

  She looked at the clock. Twenty-nine and counting … no time.

  She would have to copy the file so she could come back to this later.

  Baker had been returning from when his craft had got into ‘difficulty’ – it said nothing about his being shot down by friendly fire.

  Come on, thought Ruby, someone had to know about it. She read on and saw that the destination Baker was flying to was also blanked.

  There were some details about the crash; not a huge amount. It covered the weather conditions that night; it was October, cold but not stormy. It seemed Bradley Baker had been alone when his craft experienced what was thought to be a malfunction. This was the way it was written up anyway.

  There were several pictures of the crash site, all taken at night. Ruby was not surprised that Baker’s body had not been recovered – the craft was just a mangled heap of steel, the fire had consumed everything it could.