Tooth and Nail

by Chris Bonnello

  He smiled as the gravity of his actions dawned on him. The AME files would be left to starve in cyberspace, never to be found again. And after a visit to Floor B, Pearce would be naked of knowledge altogether. All McCormick needed was to find a way out of the HPFC alive, before his adrenalin ran out and he remembered how afraid he was.

  ‘He’s down here!’ came a raging young voice. ‘Follow the explosions!’

  It was a human’s voice, of course, but one which McCormick did not recognise. Whoever it was, he was coming along McCormick’s escape route, leaving him with a choice between running for his life or finding a good place to hide.

  He would lose a running race. But he remembered Shannon’s words about a Central Power Generator. It was one door away, and the best hiding place he could hope to find.

  McCormick stumbled through the entrance to the neighbouring room, and closed the door moments before the angry soldier could storm around the corner. He switched off the lights and ran to the generator, a cylindrical casing filled with a mess of turbines and loud noises, and positioned himself behind it for his last stand.

  A set of loud footsteps came to a halt outside the door. McCormick’s sense of adventure began to falter, and he finally admitted that he was alone in the dark, trapped and terrified.

  ‘You’re finished, you sad coffin-dodger!’ came a scream. ‘Come out and get yourself a peaceful death before I come in there and make it slow!’

  An all-or-nothing strike had felt like such a good idea at the time. But there was no way out for McCormick anymore. His rational mathematician’s mind kept him from panic for just long enough to reach for his radio. It was time to play his last, most desperate move.

  ‘Kate!’ he yelled. ‘The code to the detonator is one-nine-two, double-three-seven!’

  He scrambled for the acid grenades in his pockets, lay them on the top of the generator, and began to pull pins. After he had finished, he ran to cower in the furthest corner of the room.

  ‘McCormick?’ came Kate’s quivering voice.

  ‘One-nine-two, double-three-seven! Set it off at exactly half past ten, no questions asked, and phone comms the moment you’ve done it! And if I don’t get out of this… I love all three of you. So, so much.’

  ‘No—’

  The door was booted open to reveal the soldier’s silhouette, and he pointed his rifle straight at McCormick’s face. With tears falling from his eyes, McCormick spoke his final words into the radio.

  ‘They got me. But the data server’s gone. You know what you need to do. One-nine-two,double-three-seven, at half past ten. Win this war, my friends.’

  The human switched on the light. He was younger than McCormick had imagined. He signalled for McCormick to drop his assault rifle and radio, an order which he obeyed. The assassin shot the radio to the sound of Kate’s screams, breathed in to bark a command, but his voice was lost in the following explosions. The three acid grenades spilled their fizzling payload over the hull of the generator. Before his captor knew what had happened, the room around them, the whole of Floor P, and the entire Citadel were plunged into darkness.

  ‘Bonus points…’ McCormick whispered to himself.

  In the dark, it was easier for him to imagine the scene across the rest of New London. Everything from their munitions factories to their clone training facilities would have shut down in an instant. The vehicle port they had entered through would only have been lit by the dim sky outside. Clones in computer rooms might have watched their screens go blank a split-second before the lightbulbs followed. High-ranking human officers on Floor A would have felt under threat for the first time in a year.

  The fizzling noises stopped at McCormick’s side. The acid had burned itself out.

  ‘You know,’ the boy hissed, coming into view again as he flicked the switch on his rifle torch. ‘I was going to kill you, doctor. I was going to spread the guts of the great Joseph McCormick all across this room, and stick your miserable head on the spike of an electric fence for all your pansy little friends to see.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll get your chance.’

  ‘You’re damned right I will. Make no mistake, you old fart – the only reason you’re still breathing is that code I heard you mention. I want answers.’

  Of course that’s why I’m alive. Why do you think I shouted it loud enough for you to hear?

  An angry voice yelled through the soldier’s battery-powered radio.

  ‘Oliver! The whole of Floor A just lost its electricity! What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘Good news and bad news, Nick… the data servers and the power room have gone to hardware heaven. But I’ve got you a prize that’ll make it more than worth it.’

  ‘You killed McCormick.’

  McCormick took the optimism in Nicholas Grant’s voice as a huge compliment.

  ‘Not yet. He was shouting a code into his radio for some kind of detonator. He doesn’t get to die until I know what it means.’

  ‘Outstanding. Bring him to me so I can extract the answers myself.’

  The assassin gasped in fury, like a child denied a packet of sweets.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy snarled. ‘Will be there in ten.’

  Grant called him ‘ Oliver ’ . And while the lights were on, I noticed he wa s a young redhead.

  T he others are in grave danger and they don’t even know it .

  With the assassin’s rifle barrel pointed to his face, McCormick raised his arms and let out a surprised gasp.

  ‘You’re Oliver Roth,’ he breathed.

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Alive and well.’

  Chapter 23

  In one short radio conversation, Ewan had lost five years’ worth of behaviour management lessons. He screamed and swore at the top of his voice, not caring how many clones heard and came running, thrusting his assault rifle through every window he passed in the darkness. He hit the tears away from his face instead of wiping them, and kicked against the walls as if trying to tear New London to the ground piece by piece.

  He had wasted his second-to-last clip of ammunition on a dead clone, who lay at his feet with eight handgun bullets to his chest.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ shouted Alex through his radio.

  ‘What the hell do you think?’ Ewan spat in response. ‘McCormick took out the backup place and died anyway! He came to New London to babysit us and got himself bloody killed!’

  The words sounded unbelievable, even though they came from his own mouth. The great Joseph McCormick, father of the Underdogs, the head of Britain’s last army, and Ewan’s surrogate grandfather, was almost certain to be dead.

  If felt so wrong, the thought of outliving McCormick. He was supposed to survive the longest. He deserved to.

  Out of the thousand thoughts that raced through Ewan’s head, there was one that made him inconsolably guilty: the hope that McCormick really had died rather than get himself captured. If Grant made McCormick talk, the war was over.

  The corridor around him was pitch black. How McCormick had thought a power cut would help them reach Floor B, he would never know. He had been halfway to a stairwell up to Floor D when the lights had gone out and rendered the map in his head useless.

  ‘I shouldn’t have left him alone,’ Kate wailed through the radio, ‘it’s my fault! This all happened because of me!’

  Ewan wanted to tell her she was right. He wanted Kate to blame herself, but he knew it would only be to reduce his own guilt. Besides, he only had three quarters of his team left. And one way or another, a computer still needed destroying.

  ‘Kate,’ he snarled reluctantly, ‘you left him so you could kill a border point and buy us more time. If you’d stayed with McCormick we’d have lost the war already.’

  There was no response through the radio, except the faint crackle of sobbing.

  ‘I… I just wish we could push the reset button… go back to before he collapsed and do things differently…’

  Ewan shivered. His m
entor’s collapse at Spitfire’s Rise felt like a month ago.

  ‘We screwed up the whole week!’ Kate wailed. ‘Raj is dead, Alex has been cloned, Lorraine’s almost worked herself to death and now we’ve lost McCormick! And unless we get to Floor B, it’ll all be for nothing!’

  ‘All the more reason to get up there and finish this,’ came Alex’s voice, both through the radio and somewhere in the audible distance. He was close. ‘By all rights we should be dead by now. And if Raj were here, he’d say there’s a God-given reason we’re still alive. Let’s prove him right, OK?’

  ‘Alex,’ Ewan called out across the corridor. Stumbling noises came from a small distance away, and they spent the next thirty seconds ignoring Kate’s cries and bringing themselves towards each other, using their voices to navigate through the dark.

  ‘Good to see you again, mate,’ said Alex once he came close.

  ‘Alex, you can’t even see me.’

  Alex dared to laugh, and tried to pat Ewan on the shoulder. Instead, he hit Ewan’s head.

  ‘Missing your helmet?’

  ‘Lost it in the Experiment Chamber. Traded it for a gas mask.’

  ‘Huh, well done. Whereabouts is K—’

  Alex was interrupted by a message that echoed through every radio in the Citadel, including the bodies spread across their Floor E corridor.

  ‘Calling all soldiers,’ said Iain Marshall, ‘there is a special guard priority in place for the next fifteen minutes, along the stairwell from 58F to 58P. All nearby units must abandon their posts and guard all stairwell entrances and exits. That’s 58F to 58P. Do so now.’

  Alex let out a delighted laugh.

  ‘McCormick’s alive!’

  ‘That’s a bloody quick conclusion to jump to.’

  ‘No, think about it. What’s so special about Floors F and P? The stairwells go up to F, and McCormick was captured on P!’

  It sounded realistic enough. Ewan nodded, although Alex would not see it in the dark.

  ‘And if you don’t believe me,’ Alex finished, ‘call Lorraine and Shannon. I bet Stairwell 58 is right next to that place he was attacking! He’s being taken up to the big guns… probably because of Kate’s detonator.’

  *

  McCormick – helpless, unarmed, and exhausted after the long climb – was half a storey away from Floor F. His only consolation had been enjoyment at keeping Oliver Roth behind him like a car stuck behind a tractor.

  At the top of the stairwell, waiting for the prisoner who had led a war against them for a year, wiped out every scrap of AME research and reduced New London to torchlight, stood Iain Marshall and Nathaniel Pearce. Their faces were difficult to read in the shallow light beams, but they weren’t happy.

  Back in the days of television, McCormick had seen Marshall and Pearce on the news once or twice. Not quite as often as Nicholas Grant, but he still remembered what they had looked like with their posh suits and professional haircuts. The casual clothes and bitter scowls had not been part of their onscreen personas.

  ‘This is him?’ sneered Marshall.

  ‘Yeah,’ answered Roth. ‘Disappointing, right?’

  McCormick wasn’t insulted. He knew what he looked like. But it was quite a compliment that they had expected him to be something more.

  ‘Don’t underestimate him,’ said Pearce. ‘Before he takes one more step towards Floor B, he’s getting a full search.’

  ‘Volunteering, are you?’

  ‘You’re performing the search, sunshine,’ Marshall growled towards Roth with fierce eyes, ‘because this is your fault. If you’d got to him three secondsearlier you’d have saved the Citadel’s power, and we could have just marched him through the X-ray on Floor D! Cover every millimetre from head to toe, because there’s no way he’s coming to my office without a full search for weapons.’

  ‘Your office?’ laughed Roth. ‘The one with the computer he’s trying to destroy?’

  ‘Trust me, there’s a plan. You know about the bomb, don’t you?’

  Roth threw a glare towards his prisoner. McCormick could not see it in the darkness, but felt it.

  ‘Actually, yeah,’ Roth answered. ‘I believe it was me who called it in.’

  McCormick held his firmest poker face, amused that he had been right. The people at the top of Grant’s empire really did hate each other. He had predicted as much: power-hungry people never truly liked their colleagues.

  ‘Good,’ finished Marshall. ‘Now McCormick, there’s a spare storage room over there. Would you kindly go inside and strip down?’

  The exhausted McCormick ambled away towards the spare room, Roth’s assault rifle poking his back. He walked inside, and Roth closed the door behind him rather than follow.

  It always made McCormick smile, how people assumed they could not be heard on the other side of a closed door. Especially people with Roth’s level of overconfidence.

  ‘You mentioned a plan?’ he asked. ‘One that involves moving a live prisoner to Iain’s office?’

  ‘Nick’s orders,’ answered Marshall’s voice. ‘Until we know where the bomb is, he doesn’t want us spread out.’

  ‘We’ll be one big target.’

  ‘That’s right – one big target, right next to a man who knows exactly where the bomb is. My office is almost certainly outside the blast radius, but if it’s not, we’ll wait for McCormick to start sweating. Then we’ll evacuate to the other end of the Citadel and get someone to find and defuse it.’

  ‘You don’t get it, Iain. Tonight I saw that man storm his way through the HPFC, blowing up rooms and slaughtering clones, and even when I had him at gunpoint he kept talking over his radio! This guy’s not afraid to die.’

  ‘Everyone’s afraid to die, Oliver,’ laughed Pearce, ‘even you.’

  ‘Some people love victory more than their own lives. I give you my word, if that man had to choose between survival and victory, he’d choose victory.’

  That’s not admiration in his voice, is it?

  ‘And he’d still be afraid, and it’d still show,’ finished Marshall. ‘You don’t survive as a face-to-face arms dealer without learning how to read people, my boy. Now go, your prisoner’s waiting.’

  McCormick heard the sound of Roth’s assault rifle clattering to the floor, almost as if it had been thrown down in frustration. Then the door opened, and Roth readied his hands for work.

  Oliver Roth and Joseph McCormick – two titans of the Great British Civil War – found themselves alone in a small room, lit with the glow of two portable lights. And for the first time that evening, McCormick was able to take a proper look at the assassin, without the distraction of a firearm being pointed at his face.

  The fourteen-year-old boy in front of him looked just like that: a fourteen-year-old boy, except in military uniform. There was even a handsomeness to Oliver Roth that McCormick had not imagined before meeting him: an endearing spread of freckles and a rusty, deepened shade of red in his hair – the type of shade that protected boys from ginger jokes, and gave them Norse warrior-like appeal once they grew up. McCormick also noticed a keen, inquisitive default expression on the boy’s face, as if once upon a time he had been enthusiastic about learning for learning’s sake, and a pair of eyes beneath stern eyebrows that held an expression of confidence usually reserved for those wiser than their years.

  McCormick had seen the same expressions, mannerisms and character in several young people he had once known and loved – teenagers who had never been corrupted like the person before him. In another world, or a world inhabited by fewer negative role models, Oliver Roth could have made a fine young man.

  McCormick interlocked his fingers behind the back of his head, and failed to suppress his nervous hiccups.

  ‘Clothes off,’ commanded Roth, ‘down to your underwear.’

  ‘You’re not afraid of seeing an old man’s body?’

  ‘I’ve seen messier sights. And this is your own fault, you know. You could have just wandered through a frien
dly X-ray machine, like one of those old airport scanners, and then been on your way. But now you’re getting humiliated.’

  McCormick checked his watch as he removed it. It was almost five past ten.

  I only need to go twenty-five minutes without breaking and telling them . I can do this.

  McCormick took off his helmet, then began to remove his clothes. Layer by layer he shivered a little more, and item by item the expression on Roth’s face grew more and more disgusted. Clothes disguised a lot, and McCormick must have looked surprisingly fat.

  ‘What the hell happened to your stomach?’ Roth barked as McCormick reached his underwear.

  McCormick glanced downward at the cauterised wounds across his abdomen. The cyst that kept him out of combat was gone forever, but the procedure hadn’t been without cost. Third degree burns were spread across his body, like a scale model of the Grand Canyon made from human flesh.

  ‘Let’s just say I’ve had a very difficult life lately,’ he said with a pensive voice, ‘especially these last few years.’

  ‘Well it’s not far from over now.’

  McCormick sealed his eyes shut as Roth poked around his feet and gradually up his shins.

  ‘So besides the obvious,’ Roth continued, ‘what’s made your life so tough? Did your cat die or something?’

  ‘No, my wife. I thought you’d know that, with Grant’s background research.’

  ‘I’m only interested in my enemies once I’ve killed them.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ replied McCormick, daring to smile. ‘We’re an interesting bunch. But to answer your question… when you get to my age, your whole generation starts to fall apart. There are the unlucky ones who get cancer in their forties, followed by those with unhealthy lifestyles who barely make it past sixty. By then you start wondering whether you’ll be the next to go, or whether you’ll have the pleasure of living the longest. The best case scenario is living long enough to watch all your friends drop off the perch before you.’