by John McNally
WKKKDSKDDWKKK!
It was surely just a matter of moments. They had only been airborne a few seconds, but it felt a lifetime. It must end. Finn dragged himself up the twisting creature’s fuselage until he was again at its neck. It must end.
WKKKDSKDDWKKK!
He snatched hard at, grabbed at, wrenched at the Scarlatti’s left antenna. Its fury reached its zenith and it bucked and spun and fizzed…
WKKKDSKDDWKKKWKKKDSKDDWKKK!
…veering wildly off course. This was it, thought Finn, as he closed his eyes and spun and clung. This was the very edge of life. And then at tremendous speed…
POP!
…they struck the single dangling light bulb.
Dust and glass and sound filled time, space and Finn’s lungs in the same instant as the bulb imploded.
He had the sensation of falling, still clinging to the beast, and then – BOOOF! – being blasted off it, as they bounced off a pile of magazines on the workbench, both the Scarlatti’s body and the direction of the pile’s collapse breaking Finn’s fall until he came to a stop at the foot of the slope.
Then he saw the Scarlatti. There it lay. Centimetres away. Twitching in shock itself. One set of wings sliced through by the shattered bulb, now hanging from its body by a gangrenous thread.
A thousand optical cells burnt into Finn.
Finn thought, Kill.
And in that instant – using its good wing as a crutch – the Scarlatti flicked forward.
SLAM!
Finn flew back into darkness, for a moment unconscious – as much from exhaustion as from the impact – as much from the challenge that was somehow always there. Why him? he’d thought when his mum had died. Why did these things have to happen to him? All he knew was that he must be strong enough to survive. Consciousness snapped back.
The Scarlatti’s head again filled his view. Ink-black, feelers first, dipping its antennae towards him, tasting his fear, savouring the moment. It was across him. It crushed him as it wriggled round, and he felt the stab of the barbed-wire hairs that covered it.
But at his back he also felt… a rod. He twisted as the beast turned to bring up its stings, and grabbed the rod. It was a single thin nail. A panel pin, dropped by cold fingers months before during the home manufacture of a botched Christmas gift… a compliment of the season.
To Finn it was a metre-long spike. Excalibur.
He pointed it at the massive writhing Scarlatti, right on him now and so close Finn could feel the plates of its thorax slide. As it brought its three gleaming, twitching stings round to finish him off, Finn jammed the spike in the tiniest space between the plates – hard.
The Scarlatti reflexively clamped the spike with its chest plates – but the nail held. The plates bit too hard and their ligaments buckled beneath. The beast became rigid.
Fear…
And Finn – with all the might and anger and sadness and fight at his disposal – heaved upward on the spike and drove it deep, deep into the insect’s soft core, with everything he had… up into the vital organs, up until he felt the final kick and struggle, up into the heart of death itself.
Its insides burst beneath its armour and its glistening mouthparts gaped in infinite, silent agony.
And then… nothing.
A terrible stillness.
And Finn. The noise of his lungs and the thump of his heart. Just Finn.
Outside, Kane – attuned to the Scarlatti in every cell of his being – inhaled a few microns of the Beta’s death musk… smelt death… felt the end of the swarm.
Feeling pain. Feeling grief. He collapsed in the hallway and vomited.
At the coal hatch Hudson still struggled, but his head and shoulders were already out. He braced his right leg ready for the final push and launched himself up and over the edge.
As he did so, Kane staggered out of the house and appeared over him. A nightmare of burnt skin and bitter rage. An extendable metal cosh flicked open in his hand. THUK.
“WATCH OUT!” Finn yelled, hopeless.
Kane raised his arm to bring the cosh down hard on the boy’s soft skull. The boy could not move, could not bring a hand up to deflect the blow.
Kane would club him unconscious, or better still… Kill… Kill… He savoured the moment.
He shouldn’t have.
Yo-yo arrived.
Yo-yo had first heard the high-pitched whistle when snapping at the Scarlatti. Though distant, it lit up the one part of his small brain loaded with even more significance than ‘Finn’ or even ‘food’ – Grandma! Six minutes later, he had seen her on her moped and bit her tyres with joy. She had nearly crashed. He had been instructed. “Find Finn, where’s Finn?” Which was the easiest thing in the world. He just followed his nose.
With perfect timing, he sank his teeth deep, deep into Kane’s raised arm, hitting exactly the same point he’d hit before, already wounded, infected and heavily inflamed, causing an off-the-scale magnification of pain.
“ARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHH!”
Kane reeled back. Hudson rolled away across the driveway – almost into the path of the swerving moped.
Grandma – arriving at exactly twelve miles an hour, losing control of 106.4 kilograms of metal and momentum – BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! – fractionally avoiding Hudson but crashing with a sickening force – WHUMP! – into Kane.
“OH!” she shrieked, as she toppled slowly to the tarmac. “Oh, my dear boy! I’m so terribly sorry! Oh, that was my fault! Stop it, Yo-yo! What on earth are you doing? Oh, you poor thing! ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? Stop biting, Yo-yo! Bad dog!”
Helicopters were landing nearby, as King’s men finally closed in.
“Don’t just lie there!” she implored the prone Hudson. “I think he’s unconscious! Al! Help! I’ve crushed a youth!”
Al drew up in the Mangusta.
“WHAT ON EARTH HAS HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE?” Grandma bellowed at Kane.
“What is he, deaf? Stop yelling,” Al said, as he came over from the car.
Hudson got to his feet and looked at the man who’d got out of the incredible car to crouch over Kane. He reached towards him, gripped his arm. Al turned. Saw the wide-eyed fear in Hudson’s eyes. Saw he was pointing, wordlessly, desperately, inside.
“They… there are these little peop—” he managed.
Al followed his pointing arm to the open cellar. He made a wish.
“DO YOU KNOW YOUR BLOOD GROUP? NOD ONCE FOR TYPE A, TWICE FOR TYPE B, THREE TIMES FOR…”
FORTY-SEVEN
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Three huge explosions deep in its hull ripped through the gut of the Oceania Express and caused it to reel and spasm with a mighty rending of metal. Immediately it fell on to one side.
Within two minutes, 110,000 tonnes of steel and oil had slipped remorselessly under, sucking acres of ocean in after it, churning and spinning the surface waters.
Both containers floated briefly, before sinking below the waterline.
* * *
The explosive charges had been planted below the waterline three months before. It was an act of spite and fury. But also a demonstration to any doubters, Kaparis thought.
He had arrived. He would not rest. He would be back. And he had been able to get at least part of the Boldklub sequencing codes, he was convinced of that at least.
Even as he was being rolled through his now dormant bunker, Kaparis ordered, “Have work start on that mnemonic. Search through everything Allenby has ever produced and look for precedence, a crossword puzzle he set for a school magazine, anything. We will see how his mind works and crack him. And tell Switzerland to redouble work on the accelerator and delve into the rest of the equations. We can adjust the alignment to suit…”
His voice died away as Heywood pushed him down the concrete corridor to the fully primed escape vehicle.
* * *
Super-organism: organism consisting of many organisms where be
haviour is selfless and division of labour specialised and where many act in concert to achieve a collective goal beyond the capabilities of individuals; e.g. ants’ nest, coral reef, human society.
It all started with an innocuous question – why does grass grow in clumps? There were many boring explanations, but brilliant young David Kaparis had come up with a startling new one.
Grass clumps were super-organisms formed to serve the selfish instincts of a ‘super-few’ individual blades of grass. These ‘super-few’ sucked in the best nutrients, etc. from the weaker, dying grasses around them, constantly strengthening their own position.
The implication was that all super-organisms did the same – ants’ nests, coral reefs, human society. They were merely support structures for the ‘super-few’. Taken further, super-organisms could become more efficient if these super-few were identified and super-served.
He was irritated when the university and his fellow students attacked his theory. So he set out to prove it. Over nine months, he grew and measured millions of individual grass stems to identify those which exceeded the normal range of hydroponic gel consumption.
The research was tedious, but as the data started to come in it clearly showed that 0.06 per cent of the grass was greedier and more acquisitive than the rest. There could be no question.
Why Does Grass Grow In Clumps?
A General Theory on the Development of Super-organisms
A lecture by D.A.P. Kaparis
St Stephen’s Hall, 10am, Wed 4th May 1993
The hall was full. His voice rang true; his theory was simple and elegant. He imagined Maria Allenby, the most beautiful and talented student of their generation, would immediately join him, not only in his future work, but in their lives together.
At the climax of the lecture there was silence…
…and then came the crunch of an apple. And the first question. From Ethan Drake, a scruffy young man with chaotic hair and round glasses sitting next to – of all people – Maria Allenby. He said with his mouth still full of apple that he thought there was “a mistake in the mathematics”.
Pointing at the blackboard, he explained. “Your equation doesn’t balance. You’ve got X2Y+3Xyz when it should surely be X2Y+3xyZ. No? Which would spread the bell curve and put your 0.06 per cent back in normal range. So no super-sorts at all, just lots of nobodies trying their best to get on, variously happy or sad, subject to chance and occasionally bumping into one another.”
Silence.
“Unless I’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” he’d added, before casually abandoning his apple and walking out of the hall to find something more interesting to do.
Maria Allenby watched him go, her face a picture of amusement and admiration. They had sat by each other for the first time that day… quite by chance.
It had mattered. That. For some time.
Until one lonely Christmas in a jail cell, Kaparis had suddenly realised. If there was no ‘magic’ in the data then the magic must be inside himself. He had proved he was one of the few simply by coming up with the theory.
The rest of his life had been a rather more successful experiment.
* * *
At Hook Hall there was no immediate burst of applause.
No sudden release of tension or crowning moment for those huddled over their monitors at the CFAC, or linked in around the world.
Just a checking and rechecking of facts and information as it flowed in. And a growing sense of fatigue for, as the tension drifted, King and others became dizzily aware of the sleep they’d missed out on, the food, the need to fall unconscious.
King fought it, naturally. He wasn’t going to miss this.
Slowly but surely, his bets were coming in.
The Kaparis operative captured at the Hudson house by Violet Allenby died in custody of a massive brain haemorrhage – just like the other Kaparis teen, Stefan. (His death was concealed from Mrs Allenby.)
After some confusion, the remarkable survival of the crew, and of Infinity Drake, was confirmed.
News came through that the nest site in Willard’s Copse had been located – verifying Infinity Drake’s narrative – and totally destroyed by the biohazard team. The entire wood was destroyed by fire over the next four hours. Perhaps even more unfortunately, the Hudson house where the body of the Beta Scarlatti had been found was extensively disinfected – rendering it uninhabitable and unusable for at least six months.
The tension in the CFAC only really broke when Dr Allenby walked in carrying a case of wine from Hudson’s cellar, followed by his confused mother, Hudson and a Security Service Officer carrying an unfinished Airfix model of a Heinkel He 111 on a cushion. It contained Infinity Drake and the crew members in various states of exhaustion.
The Heinkel was placed on its cushion at the centre of the command gallery and Finn, Delta, Kelly and Stubbs staggered out of the plastic fuselage for all to see.
“For God’s sake, don’t try and shoot it down,” Al warned the RAF liaison officer.
Laughter like a wave had broken across the gallery. Laughter that turned to applause and rang round the world. A very un-British foot-stamping endorsement of the strategy, actions and decisions of Dr Al Allenby and Commander James Clayton-King.
King ignored it, leaning on his knuckles and refusing to get carried away. Thinking forward.
They had been to the very brink. They had looked over the edge. They had returned. How much of the sequencing code had he given away? What possible consequences would there be? Would divers be able to locate the Fat Doughnut containers? What damage would seawater do to its components? They had not caught or stopped the perpetrator. Not even begun to understand him.
An official announcement was made that the ‘poison gas crisis’ was over and the evacuation order was officially rescinded. The population was urged to return home over the next forty-eight hours in an orderly fashion.
Eleven days of comment, criticism, panel-show satire and general opprobrium would follow before the affair was blown off the front pages by a romance between a princess and a footballer.
* * *
When the central node of all the Kaparis communications had finally been identified three days later, elite Spetsnaz forces moved on the Siberian bunker.
They found nothing but smoking ruins.
Fourteen metres above, an injured Arctic fox, alarmed by the explosions and stung by the smell of burning, had dragged himself out of his lair on the day of the blasts.
Half a mile away, he was found by another, a young male. A son of his from two summers past, set now to claim a territory of his own.
Instinct dictated that the young fox must kill his father. But his heart wanted to lick his wounds and warm him. The young male could not decide. The old male could not tell him he would love him either way.
They stared at each other on the ice.
FORTY-EIGHT
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour…”
“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” At least someone’s having a laugh, thought Finn.
The worst thing was the poetry. It was Miss Jones’s English class and she always did ‘voices’ and ‘feeling’. It was mentally embarrassing.
“A Rrrobin Rrredbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rrrage…” she trilled.
It was a hot day near the end of summer term. Part of the deal with Grandma of staying in the CFAC with the others was that he had to attend school and lead as normal a life as possible – a tough call given that he was 9mm tall. So he attended remotely, watching the lessons unfold onscreen via a camera hidden on Hudson’s lapel.
Unbelievable. Here he was in one of the most advanced laboratories in the world, surrounded by the world’s finest scientific minds and shedloads of equipment, and he was grinding through poetry. Poetry!
“He who shall hurt t
he little Wren
Shall never be belov’d by Men.”
At least this one was zoological. He drifted off to think what he would do this afternoon (he was excused games).
He could go down to the collection. ‘The Collection: Live!’ as he liked to call it – his very own bestiary in an adapted aquarium where he spent a lot of free time playing with, and only occasionally fighting off, some of his favourite bugs. He was even trying to teach the beetles to perform tricks.
He wondered what the others might be doing and looked out of the ‘classroom’ window. Delta was flying about the quarters in one of the nano-microlights the USAF had specially constructed for her. Kelly was out front doing push-ups. Stubbs must be down in the CFAC with Al and the team, helping to reconstruct the Fat Doughnut Accelerator which was being slowly dried out and rebuilt. The latest estimate to completion was twelve days, but Al had recently revised this to a less precise, “Yeah, twelve-ish…”
Maybe Finn would take a trip down to see how they were getting on. He’d take the train. A four-track Z-gauge rail network ran round the entire CFAC and each crew member had a personal locomotive to ride on top of (Z gauge being 1:220 in scale). Delta and Kelly just had engines to get from A to B, but Finn had added an open trailer to carry stuff and a couple of unusual carriages for show. Stubbs had gone to town and ordered a bespoke Flying Scotsman Express that boasted fourteen luxury carriages, a buffet car, realistic fake steam puffer and pulled into his very own ‘snow-effect’ highland railway station, where he would often pass the time of day chatting to the plastic passengers waiting on the platform. What did they talk about? Finn wondered.
He yawned and might have dozed off, but the next line snapped him out of his reverie.
“The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
