by Hammond, Ray
‘A PIU is on it’s way to you, wait for them before you attempt entry,’ said a voice from Control.
Sergeant Kevin Knowles turned back to look at the shuttered front of the arch again. When it arrived, The Penetrative Imaging Unit would scan through the steel and brick to show them precisely what was going on inside the old warehouse.
*
Eighteen miles to the west, Dr Sergy Larov sat in his room in a hotel near Heathrow airport and gazed at the picture his communicator was projecting onto the wall screen. The image was an interior view of the vaulted cargo storage area beneath London Bridge station that was being transmitted by one of the wireless web cams Larov’s team had installed. The hotel room was darkened, the heavy curtains drawn.
Larov switched to another camera which showed the interior of the container which housed the miniaturized particle accelerator. Then he switched to a view that showed him the real-time read-outs of the instruments controlling the accelerator. As planned, over the last two hours he had run the system up to almost full power.
His communicator rang, momentarily startling the Russian-born physicist. Larov did not use a virtual assistant to run his communications, but he knew who was calling.
‘Yes Alexander,’ he said through the encryption filter.
‘Switch on BBC World news,’ said Makowski in his ear.
‘Larov divided the wall display and selected the BBC channel. An image of the United Nations building in New York appeared. The caption at the bottom of the image read, U.S. and U.K. Veto Venezuelan-Sponsored Resolution To Ban Transhuman Technologies.
‘I see it,’ said Larov. Part of him was genuinely sad it had come to this.
‘Do it, Sergy,’ said Makowski, and he was gone.
Larov returned to his full-screen view of the warehouse and its containers. He touched an icon which displayed the signal from the CCTV camera mounted outside the warehouse. Two British policemen were gazing up at the shutters. Even as he watched Larov saw one of the officers bang on the steel with his fist as the other man spoke into his radio.
Pulling up the interior view of the main container and the replicas of the accelerator controls, Larov increased the settings to full power.
Inside the vaulted warehouse the whine of the generators rose to a higher pitch and then leveled off.
Now the control read-outs in Larov’s darkened bedroom showed the accelerator was running at full power. He set a ten second countdown running and then stood up, walked to the window and opened the heavy curtains. His hotel room faced east.
*
Deep within the tangle of sophisticated electro-mechanical technology installed under London Bridge Station, the countdown arrived at zero. A valve on the compressor unit opened and a jet of xenon gas and electrically suspended Zilerium 336 anti-matter nuclei was fired directly into the path of the speeding Zilerium real-matter nuclei, causing countless millions of head-on collisions – collisions at the enormous centre-of-mass energies and at the exact speed and quantity required to generate a miniature, but controllable, black hole.
In the 100,000 billion billionths of a second as the first collisions took place the protons and neutrons and their anti-particles in the respective nuclei and anti-nuclei were broken down into their constituent components – just as had happened in the first, fateful test in Arizona.
As before, quarks of all varieties emerged – up and down, strange and charmed – as did bosons in all their strange manifestations; photons, gluons and the Ws and Zs. In this primal fireball of extreme energy-density space-time itself become plastic. Then it fractured, opening the portal to new dimensions. Immense gravity rushed in to form a ten-dimensional energy-object.
Under this intense, sustained and irresistible gravitational attraction, the atoms and molecules of the collider itself, and the surrounding machinery, the containers, and the brick arches which had enclosed them, and matter from all around, broke down and collapsed into the event horizon of the minute man-made black hole – releasing vast amounts of thermonuclear energy.
The River Thames and its ancient clay bed were instantly sucked into the gravitational maw along with Tower Bridge and five other bridges to the east. The Tower of London itself – and all the buildings of the old City of London and those on the north and south bank of the river collapsed into a growing crater.
On board a police helicopter that was just lifting into the air from its base eleven miles to the west, Pilot Officer Phil Dawson saw a sudden blinding flash which, despite the protection offered by his sun glasses, made him turn his head away from the direction of central London. Then light seemed to be draining out of the sky from all around him.
Dawson looked back towards the centre of the city and he saw the sky turning red and light seeming to be pulling away from him at high speed. His helicopter bucked as a shockwave hit him and he struggled helplessly with the controls as the chopper was suddenly flipped onto its side and was blown back down to the ground. It’s recently refilled fuel tanks exploded on impact.
From Sergy Larov’s sixth floor bedroom window eighteen miles to the west, the HFDA physicist saw the results of his technological development explode into the sky above London like the white dome of a thermonuclear explosion and then, almost immediately, begin to collapse into a red funnel as light moved into the red shift.
Despite being so far away, Larov stepped back from the window as the power released by the weapon that he and Makowski had built sucked light and matter into its gravitational portal.
From much higher up, weather observation satellites recorded a flash of light followed by a pool of redness, then blackness, in the very centre of London. Then there was a blinding flash as the black hole released all of the energy and light it had captured, turning for a moment into a sibling sun.
Seventeen
Other than rushing to offer expressions of appalled shock, horror, condemnation and sympathy, the world’s freely-elected governments did not know at first how best to react to the news of the destruction of a large part of inner London – the heart of the world’s first ever modern democratic state.
The single implosion had devastated an area from Waterloo in the west to Wapping in the east and from Finsbury in the north to Newington in the south. At the centre of the blast zone the crater itself was only a mile-and-a-half across but the destruction around its perimeter was extensive. During the twenty-first century there had never been urban man-made destruction on such a scale and the media was reduced to making comparisons with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of Second World War.
Allowing for the fact that Central London had been evacuated, initial estimates put the probable London death toll at between 2,000 and 4,000 people, almost all of them members of the emergency services and the military who had remained bravely at their duties. But in the centre of the damage zone there were no actual bodies to count. Everything had been vaporized.
NUCLEAR BOMB DESTROYS CENTRAL LONDON was a headline typical of the early media coverage.
The implosion-explosion – a grossly inadequate phrase for the new multi-dimensional energy force that had been harnessed and unleashed – had scooped a crater out of the oldest part of the capital city, destroying tthe financial district, St. Paul’s Cathedral and what remained of the old walled City of London.
A circular lake had appeared in the River Thames between Southwark and Wapping as the river had rushed in to fill completely the neatly symmetrical crater that had been scooped out of the London clay.
The mainstream media had proved remarkably slow at reporting the full details of the terrible, unprecedented blast to the world. Amateur videos and still images of the destruction were quickly posted onto the networks by members of the London public who had survived the explosion but news editors did not immediately dispatch their own crews. From what they were seeing and hearing they suspected that a nuclear device had been exploded with all the attendant dangers of lingering radioactivity. None had been prepared to
dispatch unprotected reporters and news teams to the site.
It was a BBC reporter and camera crew who eventually gave the world its first professional assessment of the devastation.
The first live TV shots, taken from a specially chartered helicopter approaching the city centre, showed a round lake swirling in the middle of a darkened city.
Tony Loynes, the normally loquacious chief news reporter for BBC News 24, almost ran out of words as the helicopter flew up the Thames towards what had formerly been the capital’s heart. By now it was late evening and the light was fading.
‘There is a large lake in central London,’ he told his viewers in a tone of appalled wonderment. ‘We’re just coming up to Waterloo Bridge but there is nothing but water ahead for as far as I can see – no buildings at all. The Thames has spread out to form a lake. But there seems to be no trace of any nuclear radioactivity in the atmosphere.’
At the insistence of the BBC’s Health and Safety director, a large Geiger counter was now mounted in the nose of the helicopter – an installation that had delayed take off for almost two hours. But the radioactivity meter was silent, its display indicating a complete absence of hazardous emissions.
The helicopter flew on, over the new lake. There was no smoke in the air and no debris to be seen on the dark surface below them. The broken and tangled metropolis around the water’s edge was in darkness – all power had failed.
Loynes did not have the words to describe the terrifying scene. He repeated, ‘There’s a lake in the middle of London,’ then he allowed the camera to do the talking for him.
From his retreat in a Somerset bunker, the Prime Minister watched the images coming in and then quickly went on national television to demonstrate his own survival. He announced that the royal family was safe, the government of the nation was still intact and that Members of the House of Commons would soon be meeting at emergency back-up facilities at a country house in Hampshire.
‘This terrible attack on London will not alter our way of life,’ he told the British people. ‘But we will find the people who planned this abomination against all humanity and ensure they can never do such a thing again.’
*
In the open-plan media centre of the Anti-Terrorism Agency in Langley, Nicole Sanderson stood with Alain Nagourney and a half-dozen other agency staffers watching the terrible news being reported from London. A score of other ATA analysts were seated mutely at their desks staring at their screens, their VAs providing samples of alternative news channels. The humans in the room felt the need to be together as they struggled to come to terms with the horror of the attack on London. Nicole herself felt an enormous sense of guilt, as if it were her fault that the massive atrocity had not been prevented. Carl was insisting over and over again that she should not blame herself in any way.
The large wall displays were mostly showing citizen-journalist videos that had been taken of the City of London immediately after the gigantic explosion. Some pictures had been captured by passengers in aircraft that had been circling the city at a safe distance in holding patterns prior to landing. Others had been taken by those on the ground who were outside of the zone of singularity but who, despite their fears of radiation, had managed to get close to the devastated fringes within minutes of the explosion.
Images of horror and destruction were filling the displays in quick succession but the main wall screen now switched from a helicopter view of the new lake of central London to reveal the face of a grave-looking American news anchorman. The media centre supervisor turned up the volume.
‘The old walled City of London, the ancient and traditional heart of the UK capital, appears to have been destroyed by a single nuclear-scale explosion that occurred a little over five hours ago,’ he read solemnly from his internal autocue. ‘Where the Tower of London and Saint Paul’s Cathedral once stood pictures received from the BBC show only a water-filled crater one-and-a-half miles wide. In recent days the British government had evacuated the centre of London and it is clear that had it not been for this fortuitous precaution the death toll would have been enormous. It is not yet known whether this was indeed a nuclear explosion, although early reports suggest that no radioactivity has been detected.’
‘At least they managed to get most of the people out of London,’ Nagourney whispered to Nicole, trying to focus on the one positive aspect of the situation.
Suddenly one of the agency’s media analysts stood up from his desk.
‘People,’ he called, addressing the entire room, ‘Makowski has uploaded a webcast.’
There were several flickers, then a face known to everybody in the agency appeared. He was standing in what appeared to be a sunlit garden.
‘It is with great sadness that, on behalf of the Humans First Party, I claim responsibility for the attack on central London,’ said Makowski slowly and evenly. ‘Our weapon was placed close to Guys Hospital and to the London Bridge Hospital, both leading centres which provided transhuman life-extension and implant therapies to patients who could afford to pay for them. Both transhuman technology complexes have been totally destroyed.’
The image cut away from Makowski and the viewers saw an aerial shot of central London – taken before the explosion had occurred. Suddenly a pin-point of white light erupted in the heart of the sprawling metropolis, a brilliance which grew into an enormous white dome, an ellipsis reaching high into the sky. Then the energy bubble abruptly turned red and crashed back in on itself releasing a blinding flash of light.
As the luminance died away all present in the agency could see only a circle of black in the centre of the city – a circle that within seconds was being filled by billions of gallons of water pouring in on a high tide from the ruptured Thames estuary and the sea beyond.
‘They filmed it for us! The assholes,’ exclaimed Nagourney. ‘The fucking assholes actually filmed it for us! They wanted to show us what they’d done.’
There was now frantic activity inside the monitoring centre. A dozen technical analysts were working furiously at their computer terminals, trying to trace the source of the webcast upload – even though their chance of success was vanishingly small.
The image switched back to show Makowski in his peaceful, sunlit garden. After a moment he started speaking again. His severe face almost seemed to be smiling now
‘I am prepared to wait seven more days before we strike again at a North American transhuman technology centre,’ he continued. ‘Venezuela and a dozen other nations have sponsored a responsible and moral resolution at the United Nations to outlaw further development of transhuman technologies. The technocratic governments of the United States and Great Britain must withdraw their veto to the Venezuelan resolution, they must also shut down and dissolve those companies we have listed which develop transhuman therapies and technologies. Failure to comply will result in the detonation of a second weapon in the United States homeland.’
‘It’s bouncing around the networks from a large number of proxies,’ one of the technical analysts reported, turning to face the senior agent. ‘But it’s probably originating somewhere in South America.’
We don’t know when he recorded that, Carl said as Nicole peered intently at the leafy, sun-dappled garden in which Makowski stood. But it looks as though he was in a temperate zone.
*
In three separate groups, Harry Floyd, the other HFDA volunteers and a few FARC mercenaries were loading sack after sack of refined cocaine into an old Airbus A300 cargo plane. The plane had landed on the highway tarmac highway only minutes before – right on schedule, shortly before eight a.m.
Before the loading had started each soldier had been given a bottle of water and a packed meal; provisions for a long journey. Each man had also been supplied with one of the latest American military-issue stealth-technology coverall suits and with a stealth-parachute pack, a Perspex eye mask and a pair of night-vision goggles.
When the loading was eventually finished the men began boarding the
plane. Floyd had no idea of where the company was heading and without any form of communication he had been unable to let London know his present whereabouts. He knew only that he was weighed down by an almost unbearable sense of personal failure.
The news of the massive explosion in central London had been received jubilantly by the large group of HFDA volunteers. The British deep-cover agent had been forced to mask his own personal despair as he pretended to join in with the celebrations.
All the HFDA trainees had been gathered in the large main living area of the hill-top villa to witness live the attack on London. Although the building was still unfinished, large screens had been set up for this event.
The HFDA web-cam must have been located on a tall building to the west of the old city centre of London and it provided a perfect view of the ball of brilliant light and the white dome that had appeared suddenly in the middle of the city. The image was silent and it seemed all the more awful for having no sound. Floyd had been thrown around in glee, his back slapped and he had been forced to return the high-fives and congratulatory punches bestowed by his HFDA comrades as the centre of his home city was destroyed. Then over the following days, in the few hours when they had not been training, Floyd and the men had watched the detailed images of the destruction their organization had caused as they streamed in from the world’s news media. The only crumb of potential private comfort that Floyd could glean from the situation was that his advance warning had triggered an evacuation and had greatly reduced the death toll.
