by John McNally
An almost detectable ripple of pride ran through the eighty-eight staff at the bunker.
Kaparis didn’t share it.
The one thing he could never fully understand was the irrational, emotional impulse in weak people and its often chaotic effects. Clearly some such had caused the Drake child to behave the way he had in ignoring the accelerator and returning to Lab Four like that.
Spiro at least had acted ruthlessly according to instruction and the operation had been saved, with the considerable bonus that the Drake boy had been destroyed.
It should have been an unexpected joy and yet… Kaparis felt a vague dissatisfaction. It was a rushed death. There had been no time to savour it. Worst of all, the boy didn’t know it was happening, and what was sweetest about revenge was its demonstrative execution.
There would be more, of course. The operation was still on track.
The only negative consequence of the morning’s events was that they were locked out of the Hook Hall surveillance apparatus for the time being, and Spiro was no longer in position.
Kaparis considered this potential loss.
Spiro was a protégé from Kaparis’s Zurich days. He had turned out well under careful tutelage. After proving his worth in the development of NRP1, he had become the inspiration for the whole Tyro programme.
Spiro had performed brilliantly at extreme distance and over a protracted period, and had attained his primary objective. He would never allow himself to be captured alive. He was an exemplar. A direct expression of the Will of Kaparis…
…and because of the Drake boy he might be lost.
“Massage!” he ordered, to calm himself down. Heywood obliged and flicked a switch.
Within the iron lung, electrical impulses fired through Kaparis’s paralysed body, keeping his nerveless musculature in peak condition. Although he could not feel the clenching and twitching, he was able to experience the consequent flow of ‘feel–good’ exercise endorphins – one of the many tiny pieces of evidence that suggested the nerve damage from his catastrophic spinal injury had not been as complete as first feared.
Which gave him, together with the riches and ‘human resources’ at his disposal, a godlike sense of boundless possibility.
Maybe things weren’t that bad after all, Kaparis thought.
“What news from the Atlantic Front?” he asked.
* * *
Cooper-Hastings watched the red LED light blink off.
He hung his head.
“Again?” asked the small guard.
The taller guard with the scar took the camera off the tripod and presented it to the blond-haired, ice-hearted teenage boy who’d been Cooper-Hastings’ tormenter.
The boy watched the video playback.
Through his shame and pain, Cooper-Hastings could hear himself begin to speak the ridiculous words.
The smaller guard waited for the verdict from the teenager on the latest performance. He got it in a clipped German accent.
“The cut above the eye is still visible. Lower resolution. AGAIN, Herr Doktor,” the blond boy ordered, and handed the camera back.
The red LED came on. Cooper-Hastings looked into the lens.
FIFTEEN
The Apache rose and, despite it all, despite the carnage and the shock, despite the loss of contact and the thought of what Al must be going through…
Finn’s heart filled with pure excitement.
They took off, banking again over the crash site and heading off into the morning sun across the meadow, whizzing surreally over carpets of opening wildflowers and strong, succulent grasses, the colours blinding on such a scale, skirting the edge of the wood, dipping to track the Scarlatti signal along a hedgerow, swinging back and forth through the tallest clumps of wild grasses and weeds, seed heads puffing open in their wake, rising to hurdle occasional knots of barbed wire and hedgerow, and even a startled mink.
It was simply breathtaking. A tidal wave of astonishing detail revealed at the equivalent of 135mph; too much to take in and make sense of, so that all but pure sensation was suspended.
As they cut low across the next meadow, skimming over a gigantic hippie blanket of daisies and buttercups, silence and wonder possessed them. Finn couldn’t have spoken even if he’d wanted to. There was a lump in his throat. The further they skimmed, it seemed to Finn, the further they entered a fantastic new world, a dimension always present yet unrevealed, of nature and colour and extraordinary detail.
Whenever he had asked his mum about his dad, she had told Finn to think of him not in heaven or in a grave, but as a part of everything, every ray of sunshine, every breeze and every birdsong. This is the way he tried to think of them both, and he’d never felt closer to that everything than he did now.
“This is… unreal,” he heard himself say eventually, regretting it. But the others, too, were pinned to their seats.
“Drunks and children tell the truth,” said Kelly.
“Man, this is uber,” said Delta, slaloming the aircraft through the unfolding pasture.
Only Stubbs remained immune, glued to the tracking screen.
Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep…
“Still heading west-northwest, 750 macro…”
“Thing’s fast,” said Delta.
“Why aren’t we closing?” asked Kelly.
“Crosswinds. Headwinds. Only takes the slightest breeze – that’s why we’re hugging the ground,” said Delta.
“There’s a stream – would that be more sheltered?” Finn asked.
Instead of ignoring a suggestion from a child, Delta simply assessed it and nodded.
She took the Apache further down the meadow to sweep along the course of the stream – a dappled black sunshine highway, the rotor wash whipping up a spray in their wake, spooked sticklebacks leaping like dolphins, and then – to a collective gasp – a kingfisher darting into the water ahead of them with such speed and grace, such a blaze of beauty and colour, on such a scale it made even Stubbs’s heart leap.
Disturbed, he looked straight back down at his screen.
Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep…
“720 macro-metres…”
* * *
The Alpha Scarlatti took flight for the first time since the sun had risen. The decaying badger was generating enough heat now to have allowed the Alpha to take to the air even during the night – which had been mild anyway.
It had spent the first hour of morning nurturing and farming, crawling among its eggs, tasting the outer membrane of each one to check the health of the developing nymph within.
Thirteen of the eggs had been stillborn, were unfertilised, or had been too weak to survive the night. The Scarlatti consumed them.
Now it patrolled. The smell of the dead badger was attracting scavengers, large and small. There was a chance they would disturb or even consume the eggs themselves before they had fully incubated.
Crows were the boldest, and those that had reached the site had been stung, three of their shiny black-sack corpses surrounding the site, serving as a warning to others – crows, foxes, rats.
Now the wicked buzz of its wings, as it patrolled in a thirty-metre radius around the site, would sound further warning.
Airborne it was safe. Airborne it could better bring death.
It gained height and emitted a gush of poisonous musk and pheromone.
* * *
The swarm instinct had filled the senses of the Beta for more than two hours, tracing a pheromone trail so slight it teased and enflamed. But then this instinct was overtaken by another.
To feed.
The Beta had suffered in the heat, in the trap, burning half of its stored energy in its mad attempts to escape. The initial flight had all but exhausted it.
It landed on a week-old lamb, whipped at it three or four times with its lethal stings and felt the little creature skitter then sink beneath it. It nosed through the soft wool to seek out the warm skin beneath, then san
k its razor-barbed jaws deep into the flesh.
Hot, sugary blood gushed out.
Feeeeeeeed…
* * *
“We’re closing! Take her down slowly. We’re right on it.”
“How close?”
“Less than thirty macro.”
“Anybody getting visual?”
“Not you, Stubbs! You watch the screen and the moment you see that dot move – scream,” said Kelly.
“There!” said Finn, spotting the lamb on its side.
Delta let the Apache drift in closer in ‘whisper’ mode and they zoomed in with the scope and got a visual of the back end of the Scarlatti nuzzling the dead creature’s neck.
“How long will it feed, Finn?” asked Kelly.
“Up to twenty minutes, then it’ll rest for the same,” said Finn, who’d not only paid attention during the Lomax briefings, but had read a summary of one of the research papers.
They flew further up the field and Delta chose the base of an electricity pylon to land on. The grasses around the concrete slab were like tall, swaying trees and, as they came in to land, Finn thought the aluminium pylon – which sank into the concrete at an angle, covered in white oxides and yellow lichens – looked like an ancient temple in a jungle clearing.
They powered down. The Scarlatti wouldn’t be able to fly more than 400 macro-metres in the time it would take them to restart the aircraft and get airborne.
“Come in, Ronaldo. Come in, Ronaldo. This is Messi, do you read me, Ronaldo? Over…”
Kelly got out to check the small arms in the stow holds while Delta checked the Apache for damage with a series of carefully aimed kicks and made a fuel assessment. Stubbs opened a map and took out a compass.
“What are you doing?” said Finn.
“Don’t you know how to use a map and compass? Aren’t you related to Sir Francis Drake, the great explorer?”
“Don’t think so.”
Stubbs rolled his eyes. Then, using the compass to represent the chopper, he flew their path across the map, the needle never wavering from north.
“GPS won’t work down here, but… nothing can budge the earth’s magnetic field. Once you have that and a simple magnetised needle, you can conquer the world. The Phoenicians had the stars, the Chinese had the needle, the Greeks had the maths, but it was the Portuguese who put it all together and they had the entire planet,” Stubbs said in a trance, holding up an imaginary planet. He would have rambled on all day, as happily as Finn would have listened, but Delta and Kelly returned to confer.
“We got through a lot of juice with the aerobatics, but we’ve got maybe six hours left. If there’s any weight we can dump, let’s dump it,” said Delta.
“In the hold we’ve got two Minimis, three M27s and a heap of ammo,” said Kelly. “Let’s keep one of each and dump half the amm—”
His hindbrain suddenly registered movement in the rocks behind Delta and he shouted, “Salazar! Six o’clock!”
She ducked. Kelly snatched up an M27 and fired.
DRRRRRRRRT! DRRRRT!
Finn hit the ground in shock, ears ringing.
The bullets split clean in two what looked like a bright red beach ball.
Too loud! was all Finn could think at first.
As Kelly was processing what had just happened, a great grey creature the size of a walrus rose from behind the foot of the pylon. Again he fired.
DRRRRRRRT!
Armoured sections shattered and scattered, and yellow insect mush filled the air.
“Hold your fire!” shouted Finn, jumping up and waving his arms as another slow grey form rose over the edge of the concrete.
As the last scraps of grey shell floated to earth, Finn wanted to grab Kelly. Why would anyone fire at such amazing creatures? Didn’t he realise how special this was? How outstanding? How awesome?
Instead he spluttered, “What! What did… did you do?”
“We’re operational. We’re here for one bug and one bug only. Everything else is an environmental threat,” said Kelly.
“They wouldn’t do anything! They didn’t attack! The big grey things are only woodlice – they’re vegetarians! They’ll run a mile! And the red things are just velvet mites: they’ll never catch you! You can just kick them away. Al would want us to photograph and document and…”
Kelly raised a finger to stop him.
“Your uncle is a friend of mine. He wants you back asap and in one piece. If you want to Save the Whale, you’ve got to make the call – otherwise I shoot first, ask questions later,” he said, casually restowing the gun.
“I… I will!” Finn tried to say. Obligingly a velvet mite the size of a cushion sidled up, bright red, furry and stupid all over. Finn side-footed it – poomf – and they watched it curl up and bounce away.
“OK…” said Kelly, rethinking and turning back to Delta. “Let’s keep most of the ammo and just dump one of the Minimis.”
Finn followed the bouncing velvet mite across the concrete slab to cool off, though he could hardly stay sore for long. Ahead of him in the rocks – in fact in the grit and chippings – he could see half a dozen other mites, plus springtail bugs, all about knee-high, basking on the surface. They were motionless, like plastic sculptures, but as he walked towards them they shifted as one: the springtails, sensing danger, pinged away in series, propelled six or seven nano-metres into the air, while the dumber mites shuffled aside or curled into protective balls.
Wow, thought Finn.
Clinging to the top of the grasses at the edge of the slab, like monkeys up a tree, Finn could also see forest bugs and lacewings. And when he looked up further into the blue sky he saw any number of flying insects criss-crossing the air above him – mostly too fast to identify. He wanted to reach out and touch them all. He wanted to catch them, he wanted to explore and connect with this unconsidered wilderness.
“Kid? Anything dangerous?”
“Not yet. There’s just so much of it. Look at those forest bugs.”
Kelly took in the little shield-backed critters jumping from grass tip to grass tip and had to admit they were, “Kind of freaky.”
Finn held out his arm and whistled.
“What are you doing?”
“Just wondering…” said Finn.
Kelly watched, stunned, as a lacewing dropped from the jungle to land heavily upon Finn’s arm. It was the size of a peacock and shot out a tongue to taste Kelly, just like a dog, before flicking open its wings and hopping off again, obviously displeased.
“Do I taste that bad?” said Kelly.
Finn laughed and Kelly clapped him on the back, knocking the air from his lungs.
“About before, Stubbs said I was an ‘ignoramus’, and maybe I am too hard sometimes. But I’ve got to do right by you, and the mission. You understand?”
Finn realised he was trying to apologise, to be friends. He looked at Kelly. The man was the size of a monster and probably wasn’t used to kids. Just danger. And he was trying.
“Course,” said Finn.
They turned to walk back to the aircraft. More at ease.
“Can you imagine what Al would do to you if you left me behind?” said Finn.
“He’d torture me with acid and razor blades,” said Kelly.
“Or cook you in one of his curries. Have you ever had one of those?”
“I wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Finn and the crew shared out brown mealy slabs from a single ration pack and scoffed the lot with plenty of water, as per instructions. The diet was designed for combat operations, to provide high energy and hydration. It tasted like the most boring cereal bar ever created, but Finn’s body told him to eat.
“We’ve got ten more ration packs. Thirty litres of drinking water. Six hours’ flight on an economy setting,” Kelly summarised.
“And we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with a lethal organism and an average height of twelve millimetres,” Stubbs pointed out. “It might be rational at this point to go hom
e.”
He would have gone on, but in the blink of an eye – less – a black and vile-looking fly-like critter, skinny and armoured, snapped down out of the sky a few nano-metres in front of them.
Everybody turned to Finn, waiting for him to make the call.
But he couldn’t. The moment he’d seen it, a lump of high-energy bar had lodged in his trachea. Alarms were going off in his ears and lights were flashing in his brain: hunting wasp – a little over two nano-metres tall with a wicked wingspan double that and a sting the size of a carving knife.
The wasp tasted the air. Interested. Very interested. Finn went purple as he struggled to gesture and speak.
“Finn?” Kelly asked, then saw the colour of his face and slapped him on the back.
Finn expelled the lump. “Fire!” he gasped in an exaggerated falsetto.
DRRRRRRRRT! fired Kelly, in lightning response. The insect shattered.
“Sorry. Hunting wasp,” Finn explained as he recovered and what was left of the creature fell to earth. “Very, very dangerous.”
“Precisely,” said Stubbs. “It might be rational at this point to return to the crash site and alert the authorities. We could plot the current course of the Beta, establish contact, then return to pick up the trail again.”
“In time for your nap?” accused Kelly.
“Forty years’ experience… ignore me,” sighed Stubbs.
“We got ownage. We can’t let up,” said Delta.
“‘Ownage’?” said Stubbs.
“It’s gamer speak for we’re in a good position,” translated Finn. Delta glanced at him. Impressed.
“She’s right,” said Kelly. “All that matters is the mission. We track the Scarlatti, we find the nest and we annihilate it. Then we worry about making contact with a patrol.”
“If they set up patrols…” said Stubbs.
“Al will set up something,” said Finn, certain of that at least.
“They don’t always do what your Uncle Al wants them to do, in our experience,” said Stubbs.
