The Secret Bunker Trilogy

by Paul Teague

  Quadrant 4: Dixia Cheng, Beijing (Unification: T-minus 17 minutes)

  Xiang had left her Quadrant in the capable hands of her deputy. As the drones continued to fire their missiles into the city above them, Xiang wept a silent tear for the people who were losing their lives because of their inability to stop these missile strikes. She knew that each time the bunker shook to its core, more people were losing their lives in the city above her, which was gradually being reduced to rubble each time one of the evil weapons found its target.

  Several teams had been deployed to the surface to blow up the mobile masts. The drones had done some of that work for them, but in a city serving several million citizens, the mobile infrastructure was extensive.

  Each team was equipped with resources that they’d located in the levels beneath the main bunker. With visors and breathing equipment to help them avoid the effects of the darkness, they moved over the rubble like a post-apocalyptic army – a hint of what was to come if they were unable to stop the current sabotage of the planet.

  Xiang knew that the information she held on her E-Pad was far more important than this. It was greater than any discovery she’d made to date and its effects more far-reaching for humanity. She tried to wipe thoughts of her burning city from her mind. The teams would do their work on the surface, they would disable the masts. She must focus on the bigger picture.

  Xiang had waited a short time before transportation to Quadrant 3, taking a few minutes to think things through, to pay her respects to her countrymen who were losing their lives in the city above her.

  She’d seen things in the last twenty-four hours which even as a scientist she struggled to comprehend. Now she had to deliver this terrible information to the twins – and their parents.

  Xiang placed her hand on the activation panel. The SymNode did its job, and transported her across the world to Quadrant 3. Ten minutes after she left her bunker, using the very same Transporter in which she’d made her exit, the first contingent of Troopers arrived from Quadrant 1.

  The small security team which had been assigned to monitor the Transporter were annihilated within seconds. They were simply no match for these war machines.

  With control of Quadrants 2 and 4 now secured, there was only Quadrant 3 to go and Kate’s takeover would be absolute.

  Chapter Seven

  Quadrant 3: White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia (Unification: T-minus 12 minutes)

  We’re all back in a briefing room on Level 1, only this time all essential personnel are here, and James and Simon are on live feeds via their Comms-Tabs. Xiang wants to see me, Nat, Mum and Dad in a separate room before the main briefing begins. Dad is clearly excited with his own news, but Xiang makes it clear that this is about her agenda.

  ‘I’m so sorry that I have to tell you this information like this, Amy and Mike. I know you would have wanted to do this more gently. I’m afraid that we have no time, I must share this information with you now, and it will be difficult for you to hear.’

  Xiang’s voice softens. ‘Dan and Nat, do you know that you are adopted?’

  For a moment I’m relieved. If this is all she’s going to tell us it will be fine. Mum and Dad are very open about these things and we know that Mum can’t have children of her own – they told us when they decided to bring David into the family. David was told that he was adopted when Harriet joined us.

  ‘They know that already,’ Mum says. ‘Is that what this is about?’

  Xiang puts her hand up.

  ‘One moment,’ she continues. ‘Amy and Mike, did you ever meet Dan and Nat’s natural parents?’

  ‘No,’ says Dad. ‘All we knew is that their mother had died in childbirth and their father was unknown.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ says Xiang.

  Okay, I’m beginning to learn things now. Mum and Dad had always told us that we could meet our parents if we wanted to when we were older. They don’t appear to have been telling us the whole truth.

  ‘Please prepare for what I’m about to tell you. There is no easy way to break this news,’ Xiang continues.

  She looks nervous about what she is about to say: it’s not the first time I’ve seen a face like that in the past forty-eight hours.

  ‘Dan and Nat, your DNA is only part human … One of your parents must have been human, but your DNA strands, they are like nothing I have ever seen before.’

  Nobody speaks. We just look at each other. Xiang breaks the silence.

  ‘I’m sorry to tell you in this way, but there’s more information I need to share with you.’

  I’m not sure if any of us are capable of taking more information on board, but Xiang continues regardless.

  ‘I sent my teams back to check this again, we had to be sure that it was correct. When Nat and Dan were reunited again, it triggered something between them.’

  ‘We know,’ says Nat. ‘We’ve always known that we were hooked up in some way.’

  ‘We’ve observed already how you seem to experience enhanced brain function as part of your unique biological makeup Nat, but this is more serious I’m afraid.’

  Once again, I don’t like the sound of this. Nat and I knew that something had happened once we were reunited, but Xiang’s face is showing us all we need to know about this latest news.

  ‘When you met again, it triggered a NanoVirus that had been implanted in Nat. The toxicity levels in Nat’s samples are 90 percent higher than in yours Dan. It seems that you coming together has triggered a viral process that has been implanted in Nat.

  ‘It has spread from Nat to you Dan, and it will reach a critical mass across your two bodies. When it hits that critical point, your bodies will cease to function, your lives will be unsustainable.

  ‘I estimate that you have approximately three hours until that happens.’

  There is no silence this time. Nat is furious. I think she’s ahead of us, but she just made a connection that the rest of us have been unable to make.

  ‘It’s Pierce again!’ she says. ‘I told you he was evil. This is what those experiments were for, I’ll bet!

  ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to take that man down.’

  Quadrant 1: Troywood, Fife (Unification: T-minus 9 minutes)

  Simon now knew that there was no chance James was getting back into the bunker. From the minute the alarms sounded, the Troopers were swarming around the bunker’s blast doors. He’d have to wait it out on the surface above – Plan B. If the operation was a success, and all was restored to normality in this Quadrant, he would soon be back inside.

  But Simon was troubled by these Troopers and the black, pulsating lights in their necks. He hoped that blowing up the mast would disable these devices as well. He knew that James wasn’t getting back in time, within that twenty minute window. He hoped that he’d be okay out there. But this had to be done.

  ‘Ready to detonate!’ announced James over the Comms-Tab.

  ‘Make sure you’re clear,’ Simon replied. ‘Then get out of there, take cover away from the bunker.’

  ‘Why not in the cottage?’ asked James, thrown by the change of plan.

  ‘Just blow the mast then get away from the cottage!’ Simon shouted.

  Simon heard the blast over the Comms-Tab. He heard James running. He hoped that he’d get away in time because Simon knew that there were four Troopers out there now hunting him down. They’d left the bunker shortly after the alarm had been sounded.

  James was on his own.

  Quadrant 3: White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia (Unification: T-minus 7 minutes)

  After Xiang’s last announcement, none of us knows what to say, so when Magnus ushers us all into the larger meeting room, it’s actually a welcome relief. We need a few minutes to make sense of this latest information.

  Dad is desperate to report his news. ‘We can stop the drones,’ he says. ‘We have the codes.’ The bunker shakes once again as a missile strikes the surface high above us. This time the lights flicker mome
ntarily, but they don’t fail.

  Magnus brings up a screen on the main monitor, Dad sends the codes to his E-Pad, and we all watch the drones on a world map, each one steadily heading towards its target. There are still many of them in the air. Magnus enters the codes, his fingers adept at using digital keypads at speed. It happens in an instant. One second each drone icon has a red light in the middle of it, then the next they’re gone. There is a round of applause, and for a split second me, Mum, Nat and Dad forget the news that we’ve just received from Xiang.

  ‘Congratulations Mike,’ says Magnus. ‘Excellent work!’

  Next we patch into James’s Comms-Tab. He’ll be the first to bring down the most important mast above Quadrant 1. We listen in to an exchange between him and Simon. We hear the explosion as he runs off away from the mast. We’re about to applaud once again, expecting any moment now that the mast will fall and disable the devices which are currently controlling Kate and her team in Quadrant 1. But instead we hear shots being fired over the Comms-Tab feed. At first it’s not clear who’s shooting. But there is more than one weapon being fired here, and James is running fast – we can hear his breathing. He’s running for his life. There’s another shot fired. Then there is a thud on the ground and James’s breathing stops.

  Unification: T-minus zero minutes

  The Karman line is the place where the Earth’s atmosphere and the beginning of space meet. In a spherical space station orbiting in space, a middle-aged man is struck in anger by his twin brother as he pushes him away from the control desk where he has been orchestrating events on the planet below.

  Almost two hundred shocked faces watch these events. These are the faces of the world’s leaders. They cannot intervene because their bodies are currently in stasis on the planet below. But they are conscious of everything that is happening here and they are acutely aware of its gravity, but they are just hologram images and are helpless in this scenario.

  These leaders once banished this man from the project which he now controls. He is accompanied by another who they offended, this one even more unpredictable, because he is of a species which does not live on Earth. Under the control of this vitriolic partnership, the Shards which are pulsating away in the Earth, the sea, and the air, have begun to inject their poison into the planet below. They were there to heal, now they will change the planet beyond recognition, to a place that cannot be inhabited by the life forms which have existed there for millions of years.

  The Earth has begun to burn.

  In the skies, clusters of drones head towards their final destination. They are unarmed now. They will simply drop out of the clouds as they run out of fuel, neutered of the power they once wielded. But hidden deep beneath the Black Sea, known only to one man, are fifty nuclear submarines, already activated and simply awaiting a set of coordinates.

  There are four Quadrants positioned around the globe. Their inhabitants were supposed to be the Custodians of the terraforming process, watching on as the world healed. A powerful army of cybernetically enhanced Troopers now has full control over three of the Quadrants. They have just begun to prepare for transportation to the fourth and final Quadrant.

  A short distance away from the burning phone mast at Troywood, a man lies in the grass. The mast is destroyed, but he has been shot whilst trying to secure this small victory.

  Within the heart of Quadrant 3, a viral time bomb is ticking deep inside the bodies of the twins in whose hands the safety of the planet resides. They are pivotal in this mission, but they have only hours left before their lives are terminated, taken away by an evil, vindictive scientist.

  A countdown process reaches its end on the doctor’s console in space, seen too late by his twin brother who is shouting instructions to his army of Troopers. There is a deep and steady rumble within the lower two levels of each of the four Quadrants. This is not an attack from the drones. They have been stopped. Something unexpected is happening beneath the bunkers. There is a massive surge of power and they begin to move from their location deep within the ground. The lower Quadrant sections start to separate from the levels above them and begin to rise.

  One at a time, the lower two levels of each bunker erupt through the ground which contains them, casting aside rocks, trees and grass as they do so. The upper two levels of the bunkers remain completely intact, each one was built to accommodate these sleeping giants in a vast underground frame. This is Unification.

  It was never supposed to happen, but The Global Consortium has ordered this. As the Earth begins to die below the four hovering Quadrants, they move towards a central destination high above Europe. There they will merge to create a massive, circular ship. This ship will become an ark for humanity, but also the source of its protection. It will join with a spherical space station currently forming the hub of a vast matrix above the Earth and known as The Nexus. It is here that Earth’s final battle will be fought, in space, hundreds of kilometres above the surface of the planet.

  As the lower levels of Quadrant 1 start to rise above the bunker in Scotland, a woman by the name of Kate briefly touches her neck. The red light which pulsed there only minutes ago has now stopped. She feels strangely different and she’s not entirely sure what’s going on. She knows it’s not good, she can feel the tense atmosphere among the Control Room staff, but as she focuses on the half-human, half-robot figures around her, she’s very sure of one thing.

  Whatever is going on here, she’s going to fix it.

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  The Secret Bunker: Regeneration

  Part One: The Nexus

  Chapter One

  Nemesis

  The severed hand flew across the wet, dark mine shaft leaving a streak of blood on the rocky floor where it came to rest at the feet of the protesting miners. As the sword-like weapon had struck his wrist, he’d stifled a scream, instantly burying the horror and pain of what had happened, for fear of losing his head as well.

  This was the Helyion way, but in spite of the terror of what they’d seen, these miners had just witnessed a defining moment in their planet’s history.

  Working deep underground, the Helyion miners had begun to protest about the long hours that they were being forced to work. The planet was dying, mineral sources severely depleted and their people at risk of extinction. They understood that it was paramount to increase working hours and endure extended shift times to create the materials that would help to progress off-world exploration. Their one hope lay among the planets beyond Helyios 4, the entire population understood that.

  But a young commander, hungry to make a name for himself, had taken things too far. He’d seen opportunity in the present crisis, a chance to rise above his humble beginnings, living in poverty, with a father too drunk to even work.

  His perfectly honed sense of timing and strategy had told him that in this potential disaster lay the chance to get ahead fast, by making a name for himself.

  The Helyion Congress required raw materials and they didn’t want to wait. Of course, they made the right noises about looking after the interests of their people and wanting the best outcomes for them. But they knew the stark truth too, that this planet would soon be dead. That end might come within this or the next generation. So, although it was crucial to maintain consensus and discipline, there was also work to be done.

  When the young Helyion had taken charge of the most important mine in the sector, after a mysterious and unfortunate accident resulting in the sudden death of his predecessor, productivity had soared. He’d immediately come to the attention of the most senior members of the Helyion Congress because here was a commander, finally, who understood the need for results. Fast results, at any cost.

  When his team of miners had protested about w
orking practices and safety issues, he’d had two choices. Either he could listen to their concerns, show them that he’d taken them into account and make the changes that they were requesting. Or, with a sudden outburst of fury and violence, he could forever quash any further challenges to his authority, and in an instant show the decisiveness and leadership qualities that would cause this particular Helyion to soar rapidly through the ranks of commanders.

  So the young Zadra Nurmeen sliced off the hand of the protesting miner, thus securing total dominance over the workers under his cruel leadership. The sudden, ruthless swipe of that weapon, drawn rapidly from a concealed sheath slung across his back, secured his meteoric rise through the Helyion ranks.

  He would eventually become a feared, respected and influential leader, yet always he would carry that concealed weapon. It was the same sword that many years later would be violently swung at the neck of a young human called Dan Tracy in the final moments which would define the fate of another planet called Earth.

  Deal

  The deal was done. It was sealed by a handshake. They had been disowned by the leaders who once celebrated their wisdom. Both harboured hateful grudges against the very people who had previously been their friends and colleagues. Deep inside, they incubated a contempt of humanity, an unstoppable urge to destroy and dominate.

  There were many buyers interested in the planet known as ‘Earth’.