by John McNally
“Now what?” said Nico, emerging as the Vitalis shot away up the artery.
“We kill the giant,” said Finn.
TWENTY-EIGHT
FEBRUARY 22 06:22 (GMT+3). Great Cavern, Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki
Kaparis writhed and twitched like bacon frying in a pan. Every attempt at movement was trial and error, but he was getting a grip.
In addition, his perfect, cooling mind was putting together the events of the past few hours. Logical actions and solutions were presenting themselves.
If Hudson was here, the G&T would not be far behind. That said, it would be suicide on their part to attack this fortress: the terrain alone would defeat them. Although, it would be a delight to witness … But then the world, which had till recently been a clam, was now his oyster. He intended to skip through every meadow, splash in every puddle … He must escape. Now. They must not get any closer.
“Heywood! Prepare the escape vehicle.”
“Yes, Master,” said Heywood, and he immediately left the operating theatre.
With great effort, and to general astonishment, Kaparis rolled onto his side, then raised his head.
The surgical team stood round in awe. Hudson and Santiago rightly cowered.
He would take the Hudson boy with him. A hostage. Keep him alive until he was well clear.
Outside the operating theatre, Heywood hit a red button and a panel opened in the rock wall of the Great Cavern. Behind it was a Polaris ballistic missile, adapted as an escape vehicle. Kaparis had bought a dozen of them at the end of the Cold War and they had proved invaluable. The missile slid out on tramlines while a launch ramp was hurriedly assembled.
Inside the theatre, Kaparis braced an arm against the operating table and pushed. Too hard – he was propelled from the bed. But before he could hit the floor, his arms and legs fired reflexively outwards and he clung on … He hung for a moment, half on half off the apparatus, like an orang-utan.
Instinct. Another breakthrough. Don’t try, he told himself, just be. Your brilliant subconscious mind will unscramble the signals.
The surgical team helped him into a sitting position.
“I can sit!” he said, looking down at his dangling legs like a delighted toddler. He even managed to bring his hands together for a single clap, provoking nervous laughter.
“Heywood!” called Kaparis.
The dutiful butler returned and, eyes shining, extended a splendidly tailored arm towards his Master. Kaparis gripped it and slid off the operating table onto his feet. Balance sensors in his inner ear fired signals down his new spine and he tipped his weight forward … to stand.
Kaparis, giddy with new sensation, lifted one leg, swung his hips, and put the leg down. A step! Two!
“AHAHA!” he exclaimed. He could walk! He would run! He would drink a waterfall and eat a horse! He would dance across mountains like a singing nun!
But not just yet.
“Sir …” said the assistant surgeon, noticing a blip on a monitor.
Kaparis was still connected to a dozen machines, trailing wires.
“What?”
A particle scanner was held over his neck.
“They’re on the move.”
On screen, Kaparis saw the green Vitalis marker travelling down his neck. Then his eye was caught by bright white specks that began to appear at the old injury site.
“Distress flares!” snapped the Big Swiss Cheese.
What were they doing?
“Get them out!” ordered Kaparis.
The team sprang into action and laid him down.
Something had gone wrong. What? He could not let this happen – he would not, not after all he’d been through. He must act. Now.
“And fire up the hot area!”
FEBRUARY 22 06:27 (GMT+3). Body of D.A.P. Kaparis
“Kill the giant?” said Carla.
“As soon as we leave Kaparis’s body, he’s going to kill us, one way or another,” reasoned Finn. “If we can stay down here, we can keep him occupied until the G&T gets here – or maybe we can even stop him altogether.”
“And live in his rotting corpse till the cavalry show up?” said Carla.
“You got any better ideas?”
“How are we going to do it?” Nico asked.
“I don’t know – you’re the doctor. You must kill people all the time?”
Nico turned to take in the blizzard of blood cells hitting the dome.
Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.
After only a moment’s thought, she came up with a plan.
“The pacemaker.”
“The what?”
She located the Vitalis on a 3D arterial map and then shifted the view to zoom in on different areas of the beating heart.
“We’re halfway down the main vertebral artery,” she explained, “the blood supply to the spine. If we follow the flow, we’ll get back to the heart – an organ so important it has a little brain of its own, the pacemaker, a nerve bundle that tells it when to beat. If we can get close enough to it via the coronary arteries, we could swim out and cut through the nerves with a laser scalpel to shut it down.”
“Genius!” said Finn.
“Simple,” said Nico.
Carla, at the controls, put her foot down.
Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.
In the Great Cavern power began to throb around the henge of particle accelerators.
The Big Swiss Cheese had plunged a hypodermic needle deep into Kaparis’s neck, guiding it expertly into position before slowly drawing out the white flecks he could see on screen.
Kaparis had to remain absolutely still. Though he wanted to scream.
The Swiss Cheese removed the needle, chock-full of blood.
“Gotcha!” he congratulated himself, and handed it over to be rushed to the centre of the henge. But the green dot on the screen just kept on moving.
“What’s it doing!” barked Kaparis.
“Vitalis approaching the subclavian artery!” shouted the surgeon’s assistant.
“It’s heading for the heart!” the Swiss Cheese realised. “Work!” he shouted at Kaparis.
“What?” spat Kaparis.
“Your heart! Work, sir! We need to get it pumping …”
Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.
As it swung into the subclavian artery, the Vitalis shook. The force of the flow was tremendous.
Carla gripped the joysticks and tried to keep a steady course, tried to ride the storm.
Finn and Nico held on and watched their progress on screen. They were barely moving against the flow.
“Can we go any faster?” asked Finn.
“We’re almost at maximum,” said Carla.
A nuclear power indicator showed they were about to tip off the green scale into the red.
“Increase the power. Take us into the red,” Finn said.
Nico looked at the map. “He’s right. We’ve got no choice.”
“OK, taking it up,” said Carla and pushed a power slide all the way up – WOOOOOOOOOM!
Power bloomed through the craft, the impeller blades becoming a blur as the craft surged forward into the river of blood, heading for its source.
DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, the heart seemed to hammer back.
Nico watched the power indicator climb into the red.
“It’s working!” said Finn, following the progress of the flashing dot as it moved down the chest towards the next major turning point …
“They’re nearly at the aorta!” the assistant surgeon reported as an oxygen tank rose and fell.
When ordered to “work” to increase his heart rate, Kaparis had grabbed the nearest thing to hand, and was now repeatedly bench-pressing the tank above his head.
Kaparis began to sweat.
The aorta. The main road out of the heart. Highway number one.
“Faster, sir!”
DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU.
The ao
rtal flow hit them like a hurricane, like being pummelled by a million fists. The blood cells were no longer distinct, but a blur, a red glow. Finn clung to the pilot’s chair for dear life.
Every fibre of the ship’s being was straining. What would go first? Would the engines fail? Would the glass canopy shatter?
Carla kept her eyes fixed front and drove them on into the abyss. Nico held on and prayed.
The aorta was miles wide at their scale. But if they could stand it, if they could just make the turn into the coronary artery at the mouth of the heart …
Beep beep beep beep beep beep …
Danger lights started flashing on the screens. Overheating lights.
“What’s that?” screamed Carla.
“The engines! They’re hot as hell!” yelled Finn.
Then came another siren.
NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu …
Carla looked down. A yellow radiation hazard symbol. Flashing up at her.
WARNING MELTDOWN! WARNING MELTDOWN!
Nico took one last look at the map. They were stuck halfway down the aorta and nothing was going to drive them further through the flow.
“That’s it!” she shouted. “We’re not going to make it!”
Carla killed the power and raised the impeller arms, as if in surrender, and the ship was instantly blown back by the flow, the blur of red becoming a billion cells again.
DHU-DHU-DHU-DHU-DHU-DHU-DHU-DHU.
And they became part of it. The endless remorseless flow.
“You’ve done it, sir! You’ve done it!”
Kaparis was exhausted.
The increased heart rate had flushed the craft back around his body. Currently it was travelling down his left arm. The Big Swiss Cheese was hurriedly preparing a large hypodermic needle.
Kaparis flicked his beady eyes from the position of the Vitalis on the 3D map of his body to the henge outside.
WOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!
The crazy energy in the core resolved into a perfect throbbing white orb of pure light. Boldklub had been achieved. The hot area. Now it was only a matter of time and quantum physics. No one had even been reduced to a one hundred thousandth of their actual size before. And certainly no one had ever been brought back.
In a few seconds, the Boldklub cycle ended and power was cut to the henge.
The orb dissolved into a billion sparkles. And there, at the centre of the core, he saw it. A pile of bodies in fluorescent green and yellow wetsuits, slithering and steaming, full-sized and … alive!
“Leopold!” he barked, as he saw him lift off his helmet.
The technicians ran in and pulled an exhausted Dr Leopold from the wet heap.
“Master …” he managed to say. “It’s Drake, Master! Infinity Drake!”
“There’s no way we’re going to get into the heart against that kind of flow,” said Finn.
They were listening to the ticking, cooling engines, letting the blood flow take them, giving the Vitalis a rest.
“Wouldn’t we go back round through the veins? Don’t they go back round to the heart?” asked Carla.
“Yes, but on the wrong side,” said Nico. “To get back to the red half, we need to go once through the heart on the blue21 side, round to the lungs, then back again to the red half, trying to make an impossible turn as we get spat out, praying the heart doesn’t crush us in the ventricles along the way …”
KDOOOOOSH!
Suddenly a wall of silver slammed straight into the flow ahead of them, the force of the arrival sending a shockwave through the ship as – CLANG! – the Vitalis bounced off it.
“What the hell …?” yelled Carla, pumping the controls.
“Get us out of here!” said Finn, getting there first. “It’s a needle! They’re trying to suck us out!”
Carla fired the impellers to turn 360 and thrust back up the flow, but suddenly they were being sucked down the steel cliff, backwards, into the black mouth of the tip of the hypodermic.
“GO!” cried Nico.
Carla slammed the joysticks forward and gave the engines everything she’d got, the ship again shuddering against the force of the flow, being dragged ever faster back into the void until, just as suddenly as it started … it stopped.
“It must be full!” realised Nico, as the massive steel shaft completely withdrew.
“They missed! GET OUT OF HERE!” yelled Finn.
Carla reeled the Vitalis round and sped off in the direction of the flow.
“Which way?”
“Any way!”
“Damn. Missed,” said the Swiss Cheese, holding the full phial of blood.
“Incompetent!” snapped Kaparis.
The Swiss Cheese took up another needle.
Damn that Drake, thought Kaparis.
“Wait!” shouted Finn as they sped away through the arteries. “Kill the engines! Kill the reactor! They can only trace us because of the atomic signal. Shut down the reactor, or we’re sitting ducks!”
Carla killed the engines and began to slap everything off on the control screens.
Nico saw it first – REACTOR SAFETY SHUTDOWN – and hit it.
Instantly the lights died.
The world around them flicked from red to black. Inside the bridge there was total darkness and silence for a moment—
Just dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.
The Swiss Cheese paused before he broke the skin.
“Where has it gone?” demanded Kaparis.
“They must have switched off the reactor.”
“FIND THEM!” yelled Kaparis.
The Swiss Cheese plunged the needle in anyway.
KDOOOOOSH!
The Vitalis shook again as the needle burst into the flow. Again they felt a change of direction, but as the auxiliary power units kicked in and dim emergency lighting returned, they could see no steel.
“Missed!” said Finn.
In a few seconds, the flow returned to normal.
KDOOOOOSH! went another needle, but this time further away.
“I think it worked,” Finn dared to suggest, as they drifted on down the artery.
Kaparis examined the pincushion that his lower arm had become.
“You butcher!” he yelled at the Big Swiss Cheese.
Drake, Drake, ghastly Drake! How had the impossible been allowed to happen?
TWENTY-NINE
FEBRUARY 22 06:36 (GMT+3). Body of D.A.P. Kaparis
Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.
Blood ran over the bridge of the Vitalis like lifeless mud, a sea of dead jellyfish.
They had been tossed and turned back through narrowing blood vessels until, somewhere in the flexor carpi ulnaris muscle, they had bounced off oxygen-hungry tissue and drained into a vein.
“What happens now?” asked Carla.
“We’re in the veins, deoxygenated, being pumped back round to the heart and lungs,” said Nico.
“Will we make it through the heart?” asked Finn.
“Depends how much the craft will take,” said Nico.
“Options,” said Finn. “Can we make it to the pacemaker?”
“No. We’ll never make the turn. We’ll be spat out on the red side like a bullet from a gun,” said Nico. “Right now, we don’t have much control, but we can keep drifting round the entire system, as long as we don’t fire up the reactor.”
Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu … DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU.
The three of them gripped the pilot seat harder as the turbulence increased.
“Hang on tight! This must be the heart!” said Nico.
DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU.
All at once, thunder seemed to break around them, blackness and violence and noise. Everything shook and Finn was thrown up against the glass canopy, but in a heartbeat – literally – they were through it.
Finn ended up winded on the deck, but the jolt had given him an idea …
“The reactor,” he said, “it was overheating …”
“So?”
“So what happens when a nuclear reactor overheats?”
“It explodes?” said Nico.
“Right,” said Finn.
“Like a nuclear bomb?” said Carla.
“Something like that … It’s got to do some damage anyway,” said Finn. “We could trap the craft somewhere, run it on full throttle till it explodes, while we get away.”
Above, their world was changing again. The cells rushing past were springing back to bright red life as they pushed through the lungs, picking up oxygen.
“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” said Carla.
“But it could just kill him! If we pick the right place to do it …” said Finn, thinking hard.
“The brain!” said Nico, slapping the console. “We’ll head for the brain. We can hide there anyway – and we can switch all the systems back on, as no one’s going to go slamming needles through the brain. As long as we stay inside his skull, we’re safe. And if we do blow the craft up, then we can do some real damage there too.”
“Great! Let’s go!” said Finn. “What are we waiting for?”
“We’re waiting for this …” said Carla.
DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU.
“Hold on tight – we’re going through the heart again. On the red side,” said Nico, as the Vitalis raced down the pulmonary vein back towards the heart. They had to act fast.
“Switch on the reactor and fire the engines!” Nico shouted over to Carla. “Slow us down as we exit!”
“COPY!” shouted Carla, and she gripped the controls as they hit the heart.
DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU, DHU-DHU …
The engines screamed and the impellers were a blur as Carla did everything possible to hold the Vitalis in the manic aortal blood flow.
“Hold fast!” yelled Nico, focused on the map, as the green dot was forced up the aorta. “Any second … NOW!”
“They’re back!” yelled the Swiss Cheese as the green light flashed to life on the circulatory hologram, the green dot swinging out of the aorta into the subclavian artery, riding the curves and currents like a spacecraft sling-shotting around a planet.
