The Sons of Scarlatti

by John McNally

  Finn felt himself drop from consciousness like a stone.

  Good. Now get rid of the body. The refrigerated supply container is just the other side of the loading-bay doors.

  And as Finn fell – and felt himself being dragged away – he thought no matter how hard you tried to understand things, no matter how old you got or how clever or how wise, there was always another layer of mystery.

  And then all was black.

  In the Large Accelerator cockpit Al, delighted with all he had created, took a simple blue memory stick from his pocket and inserted it into a USB slot in the control terminal. A new window flashed up before him. It was time to enter the crucial sequencing code, known to him alone. He rattled it into the keyboard, whispering to himself the snatch of poetry that he used as a mnemonic to recall it. It did its work. The flashes of spun lightning now became a continuous arc.

  00:00:10

  00:00:09

  00:00:08

  00:00:07

  00:00:06

  00:00:05

  00:00:04

  00:00:03

  00:00:02

  The accelerator was at squealing pitch.

  00:00:01

  Everybody was at the glass.

  00:00:00

  The CFAC became an extraordinary, blinding white light…

  …that formed into a huge ball of solid spinning whiteness that consumed the centre of the accelerator and swallowed whole the Apache helicopter.

  One and all looked on in awe.

  The conveyor started up, the loading-bay doors opened and a supply crew ran into the CFAC in protective suits.

  First to be fed into the light was Stubbs’s truck, jerking as it slid forward and breached the vortex, six square metres and more than three tonnes of steel swallowed whole. One by one other items followed, ammunition, fuel tanker… the crew.

  The conveyor was reloaded, the vortex kept spinning and items kept feeding in. The supply pallets. A jeep. The food supply container.

  The accelerator began to power down and the ball of white lightning suddenly faded.

  The assembled scientists and personages pressed their faces against the glass, trying to see.

  The lockdown lifted. The control gallery doors automatically unbolted.

  Al descended the cockpit ladder four rungs at a time and hit the CFAC.

  In a moment he was inside the accelerator – the apparently empty accelerator – but there in the middle was what looked like a collection of children’s toys.

  A specially assigned nano-dimensional evac team immediately moved in to pack the tiny objects into their transport containers – adapted aluminium camera cases – and carry them out to the full-sized Merlin transport helicopter that chackachacka-ed in preparation for take-off outside the hangar, ready to fly north.

  And, as Al backed away to let them work, he could hear something above the sound of the helicopter, something muffled and emanating from the control gallery and labs.

  Applause.

  ELEVEN

  The ten-tonne Merlin transport helicopter was halfway through its flight at GO plus 00:15.12.77 at an altitude of a thousand feet and with a speed just approaching 110 knots when a 250g charge of fifth-generation plastic explosive – equivalent to 10lbs of TNT – detonated at a point just inside loading-bay door 2.

  The bomb ripped open the fuselage and whiplashed the substructure and airframe such that centrifugal rotor force could no longer be contained. Within 0.789 seconds, the airframe failed, the main rotor bearings sheared and the aircraft disintegrated, its component parts falling to earth in a cloud of aviation fuel which quickly ignited.

  Local radio received a call from a resident of Little Downs, Surrey, a vicar. The vicar, in shock and using the language of the Six O’Clock News, reported a “huge explosion” and “wreckage strewn over a wide area” and then was suddenly, and inexplicably, cut off.

  * * *

  Please God, no, thought Al.

  The implications and possibilities ricocheted round his mind.

  The control gallery was still in stunned silence. Triumph had turned in an instant to disaster.

  What fools they had been, thought Commander King beside him.

  “Got visual. Crash site in flames,” issued a radio comms from the first chase team to get a decent view of the crash site. “Edge of woodland about two kilometres northwest of the B235. No road access.”

  “It’s over…” muttered General Mount. “It’s all over.”

  “Let’s wait till the recovery teams have reported, General,” ordered King, with clipped sang-froid, trying to regroup.

  Professor Lomax reported shortly after take-off that he’d found the atomiser unit in the entomology lab. He had raised the alarm. They should have grounded the flight immediately. Instead they asked Lomax to double-check that the unit he’d found was definitely the one that was supposed to be onboard the Merlin.

  By the time he’d confirmed this, it was too late.

  A team had scoured the surveillance AV and found nothing but obviously doctored ‘vanilla’ images of an empty CFAC complex. The last recorded ‘real’ images showed Finn leaving Lab One and heading towards Lab Four. It was at the same time the accelerator was at its most spectacular and distracting. Why had Finn left? What had happened? No one could find out.

  Because no one could find Finn.

  The CCTV effectively went blank for seven minutes, until Dr Spiro suddenly popped up onscreen with the trolley to help attach the miniaturised tracking device to the Beta Scarlatti.

  Now it seemed Dr Spiro was missing too. As a frantic search got under way, Al tried to put it all together, fighting a losing battle with his worst fears. He remembered asking Spiro, “Is Finn still in the lab?” while they were watching the sleeping nano-crew, their equipment, plus the Beta Scarlatti locked in its trolley, being packed into aluminium transport cases and loaded on to the full-sized Merlin helicopter for the short flight to the release site. He had expected him to be by Spiro’s side. “He’s with the Commander,” Spiro had said. He had lied.

  The last image that could be found of Spiro on CCTV showed him swiping himself out of the lab complex just before the transport chopper took off.

  “That door should not be open to anyone,” said King. “Whoever our enemy is, they’re in the system, they’re in the CCTV, they’re even in the coding for the door locks.”

  * * *

  Finn wanted to wake. He felt hot, urgent pain.

  He wondered what kind of nightmare he was in and tried to tip himself out of it, to force his eyes open as he had as a young child when he had realised he was dreaming. But back and back it came. Pain at the back of his head. Blackness. A shaky otherworldly feeling that he was floating outside of life, but not part of it. He drifted in and out of this, semi-conscious, for… seconds…? Minutes…?

  Then suddenly he wanted to be sick. He retched but produced nothing but a blinding intensification of pain. He finally opened his eyes properly and realised that this was it – this was awake – and it really did hurt this much.

  As Finn came fully to – as fully as the pain would allow – all he knew for sure was that he must get up.

  He was buried under something. His head trapped by… rocks? But he was wet too, and he could smell… tomatoes? He shifted and pushed at whatever it was. Tin cans gave way and tumbled around him. Food. He was buried under tins of food.

  He breathed air – cool, yes, better than the stifling air he had been breathing, but corrupt. Smoke. He pushed back the mess of tins and leaking ration packs and found himself upside down in what he realised must be the refrigerated shipping container, the food store.

  It all came back to him at once, like water sloshing back into an empty vessel: Al… the holiday… Scarlatti… Boldklub… Spiro…

  His ears were ringing and his mouth felt dumb and numb, blocked, as if full of grit. He retched again. In the distance he could hear… voices? Burning?

  For a microsecond he though
t, Fire… warm… and could have laid back down and accepted it. But something stirred in him, something deep inside, and he knew he must try and get out even if it felt hopeless.

  Just keep going.

  He shifted. The shipping container was upside down and at an angle and it took him a few moments to orient himself.

  He tried to take in the half-light ahead. He could smell smoke, sick oil smoke. Blocking the entrance to the container was a heavy curtain of green canvas. He wobbled towards the thick curtain. He pushed and it gave way to reveal more smoke and the crackling sound of fire, but also a flash of daylight. Finn squinted into the smoke and light until he got used to it and opened his eyes further. The whole area above the container seemed to be covered in green canvas, like a collapsed circus tent. The container lay in the dirt on its side, he could see now. He staggered on, heading for the light.

  The sound of burning and the smoke were becoming more intense. The canvas ended at a point where it had been sewn into a massive seam. As he finally made it out into daylight, out from under the canvas, he saw it.

  A bloodied thing the size of a beached whale. Flesh but not flesh. Too vast and fantastic for flesh. Great rolls and creases of it. Pale and lined and pitted. Curved. Cupped. As Finn stepped back and his senses fought to make some kind of sense of it, some kind of form, his heart pounded… and he realised what it was.

  A hand. A human hand. Finn stood stunned before it for a moment, his rebooting brain unable to process the scale. He tried to blink and wake himself up all over again. But still it was there. Filling the void. A hundred and fifty times the size it should be. Fingernails strangest of all, like slabs of stone, stratified and textured and several centimetres thick, their edges and cuticles pitted and jagged with dinner plates of flaking scale and skin hanging here and there. Dirt too. Clumps of dirt and drying blood in the grooves and swirls of the mattress-thick skin on the fingertips. He turned…

  …and realised that the great mound – the mountain – behind him, above him was a body, the circus tent of canvas his clothing. His uniform. It was the body of one of the airmen, one of the crew of the full-size Merlin transport helicopter.

  Finn’s mind spun, his heart thumped, the world expanding, exploding around him.

  I am me and I am not me…

  A noise came out of him. A primal exclamation. It had happened – the most extraordinary, unimaginable, ridiculous thing had happened. He had never felt more helpless, more nothing… or more new. He felt shock itself, and a change of being, as great in sense as when his mum died – the difference between her being there and not being there, between her presence and absence.

  I am me and I am not me, Finn thought, looking around in awe at the massive, macro world around him. After their fight Spiro must have shoved him, unconscious, into the food store in the loading bay…

  I am me and I am not me… I am nano…

  BANG!

  A cinder popped nearby, shooting over his head, a live red spit.

  He moved away from the hand and staggered on. Trying to take in everything. Trying to make sense of it. There was dirt underfoot. Fresh and flat. He was in a clearing – gouged out by the impact? – but surrounding it were towers of meadow grass as thick and lush as rainforest, some of it burning. Far above were trees – the edge of a wood, he guessed – debris burning in the branches.

  The further he backed away from the hand, the body, the more certain Finn was that the airman was still alive, if badly injured. There was no movement in the hand, but Finn could see the great mass of the abdomen rise and fall as he breathed. But Finn could not save him. He needed to get away. He must get away. The smoke was getting thicker. He could only see a few centimetres ahead.

  For a minute or so he was swamped in smoke again, then a breeze fanned the fires, but cleared the smoke briefly and he saw – lying smashed open in the jungle of grasses – the top of what could have been a large aluminium house of what must be…

  …the transport container for the crew.

  He looked back. The refrigerated shipping container he had been in was trapped beneath the airman. It must have been flung loose from its box on impact. How had he survived?

  His head was still fogged. Never mind. Just keep going.

  If he was alive, maybe the others were alive too, especially if they were in the padded container.

  He tried to scramble through the jungle of lush, thick grasses to reach it, but soon found them impassable. Instead he scrambled up and on top of the thicker stems – stronger and more substantial that he expected, like densely planted saplings – collapsing them across each other as he progressed, forming a scramble net of sorts to the edge of the box.

  The flames were getting nearer now, the fire in the grasses taking hold, starting to suck in oxygen and feed itself.

  Finn looked down into the box and could see the top layer of protective padding had been lost, as had his food store container and two pallets of ammunition and supplies – now scattered like confetti…

  …but there, still lashed in place in the foam, were the Apache helicopter, fuel truck and… the crew, all lined up.

  None of them moving a muscle.

  TWELVE

  CRACKACRACKACRACKA – scattered ammunition started to cook in the burning grass.

  Finn, perched on the edge of the container, had a choice. He could try and make it through the undergrowth and outrun the fire, or risk seeing if the crew were alive and if they could get out together. This would be his last chance.

  Finn jumped down into the foam container.1

  He landed awkwardly, his body jolting on impact, but at least the foam was easy to scramble over. Soft play. As soon as he got close enough to the crew, he realised they were alive, and Kelly and Stubbs were already coming round. From the briefings, Finn knew that each carried a hypodermic on their chest filled with an antidote to the anaesthetic they’d been given.

  He went to Kelly first, plucked the hypo pack off his chest and ripped it open. He hesitated. He had no idea what he should be doing with it, but he guessed he’d better jab it in Kelly’s arm and press the plunger. He did so.

  Kelly snapped awake, cried out and threw Finn off.

  “Yaaaaahhhghhh!”

  Wild-eyed and panicked, Kelly ripped up through his strapping with a knife. He was flipped out of his foam niche and about to throw the knife before Finn yelled, “STOP!”

  Kelly paused. In the smoke. In the foam. Looking at the boy. The boy with a bloodied face… Things started to flood back.

  “Finn…?”

  Stubbs groaned behind him. Kelly snapped his head round to take in the others. Finn said, “You’re nano! You’ve got to wake up! We’ve got to go! It’s on fire! Something’s gone wrong!”

  Kelly looked through the smoke at the impossible, exploded, expanded scene – going through all that Finn had said – realising that the hill beyond was not a hill at all, but the injured airman. A colossus.

  “What the hell!?” was all Kelly could think to say through his shock.

  “I know…” was all Finn could think of saying back.

  The fire was getting more intense.

  “We’ve got to wake them!” said Finn, pushing back past him to rip open the hypodermic pack on Delta. Kelly followed suit on Stubbs. Delta snarled and struggled as she came to, but then sat there and took it all in with them… the bewildering, cosmic shift in scale. The nano-shock. And the burning.

  Kelly realised something more as he came to. He grabbed Finn, alarmed. “Finn, what are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here!”

  “I don’t know. I think Dr Spiro pushed me in with the food. He was putting a bomb on the trolley…”

  Kelly fought to understand. Finn hardly did himself. The crew were bewildered and still in nano-shock. They needed time to take everything in, time for the drugs to wear off – time they didn’t have.

  “It’s burning! We’ve got to get out!” Finn yelled at Kelly to snap him out of it. Kelly sta
red.

  So Finn slapped his massive face. For a moment he thought Kelly would hit him back, but instead he finally shook his head and exploded into life.

  “Get up! UP! STUBBS – check the kit and comms! SALAZAR – pre-flight!”

  “KK!” shouted Delta.

  Pre-flight?

  Kelly ran towards the helicopter and started to cut through the rubberised ties that anchored it in place – those that had held after the box broke open on impact.

  Delta came back to life as she plugged herself into the cabin of the Apache, senses returning to optimum as she fired it up. She loved these machines. Helicopters were ‘dynamically unstable’ by design. Nothing could suit her more perfectly.

  “Bring it on,” she ordered the engines.

  “Bother,” said Stubbs, wobbling to his feet to take in the wreck of his mobile workshop. “Hell.” He picked out a toolbox and motioned for Finn to help him with it. Together they tried to drag it across the foam to the chopper, but it was so heavy it was hopeless. Kelly ran over and picked it up like it was nothing.

  Stubbs handed Finn some smaller tools and he staggered to the Apache with them instead. Choking. The smoke was thick and black now.

  The Apache’s engines had already started to whine, its rotors to turn.

  “We know what we’re here for! Let’s get this thing in the air!” ordered Kelly.

  Finn helped grab ammo and other supplies from the remaining pallet, but when Kelly kicked open the stow holds there clearly wasn’t going to be room for everything alongside their weapons and water supply.

  Kelly threw Stubbs into the cab then shouted to Finn, “Grab a couple of handfuls of food, ammo and meds, and that’s it!”

  Finn did so while Kelly hacked away at the foam embedding the Apache’s three wheels.

  Sweat was pouring off them in the heat. The noise of the chopper was deafening, its increasing downdraught attracting and feeding the flames creeping towards them.