by John McNally
Shall feel the Spider’s enmity.”
A shiver shot down his spine in unhappy remembrance – but then happily the bell went.
“Thank God that’s over,” said Finn, waking up a bit.
Hudson, who had been accused too many times of talking to himself ‘like a weirdo’, waited till he was safely out of the classroom crush before responding, “I hate her. She’s so rubbish. I’m going to get some lunch. Over and out.”
Hudson was often busy at lunch now that he’d become ‘normal’ again. He’d come over some evenings and at weekends to mess about too, but Finn’s closest friends right now – whether he liked it or not – were Stubbs, Kelly and Delta.
They were quartered in a glass cube, two macro-metres square, in Lab One. It was actually an isolation unit from Biohazard Defence, but served just as well as a controlled environment for four miniature musketeers. At first they had been given a doll’s house to live in. It looked absolutely perfect, but was full of sharp edges, hard plastic and static electricity – besides which it was way, way too twee for Delta.
Other vessels were tried, mainly variations on the cardboard box, but it was Grandma who had hit upon the solution one Sunday afternoon in her potting shed. Plant-fibre seed trays: a grid of forty five-centimetre-square cells laid in rows of eight by five with a translucent plastic cover. Two had been fixed back to back to form a kind of tower block. Each crew member had a five-cell apartment to themself with bigger communal knocked-through cells on the lower levels. The fibre meant they were easy to climb through, soft to the touch and easy to push through and remodel – with wiring and plumbing, etc. particularly easy to install.
A hand-painted sign read THE SONS OF SCARLATTI, for that’s what they’d christened themselves in the days after their rescue, when they’d learned they were going to be stuck with each other for a while longer yet.
At dinner one night (they lived mainly on distilled sugar water and a disgusting refined soya pulp which they could absorb about 30 per cent of), they realised they were all, one way or another, orphans, so Kelly had proposed, “The beast brought us together, the struggle against it made us. Let’s call ourselves ‘The Sons of Scarlatti’.” Naturally this had started a fight, but Delta had later compromised by adding a second sign declaring: INCLUDING THE ONE AND ONLY DAUGHTER OF SCARLATTI. It all sort of made sense – though Al and the team called them ‘Snow White and the three dwarfs’.
Maybe he’d take a trip down and hang out with Al. Maybe he’d watch a movie. Though one of Finn’s favourite things to do at lunchtime – if she was awake yet and not too flustered about a test or anything – was to play transatlantic Rummikub with Carla, the infuriating and addictive game she and Delta had introduced him to on their first meeting.
Because Delta would regularly text, call or Skype her sister, a miniature fake ‘barrack room’ had been built by model makers to fool Carla into believing they were regular-sized when onscreen. Through this, Delta got in touch as normal with Carla, claiming to be on some long boring mission in Europe. Finn was introduced in passing as ‘just some English kid from the base’.
“‘Just some English kid’?” Finn complained after. “Not ‘co-warrior’ or ‘Top-secret Special Agent’ or even ‘my friend’?”
“Keep it simple,” said Delta. “If she starts cross-examining us, we’re toast.”
Carla, amused that her spiky big sister had made a new pal, asked, “And does he play, your young friend?”
“Play what?” asked Finn.
It had become an addiction, and their App sessions could sometimes last hours.
He liked Carla. They got on. She was as sparky as her big sister, laughed way more, and she was as interested in art and life as Finn was in science and technology. He didn’t get what she was on about all the time, but he enjoyed trying to catch up – and he hoped he’d taught her a thing or two about the physical world in turn.
He went into the ‘barrack room’ set and skipped across the inbuilt touch pad to see if she was online. The wall-sized screen before him lit up (five centimetres square) and Carla was indeed online, hurrying about her room and getting ready for school.
“Hey,” said Finn.
“Hey, you on a break?” she asked.
“You want a game?”
“I haven’t got time. I missed the bus yesterday and I have a test. Do you know much about Brazil?”
“Great footballers.”
“Oh great, that’s a pass.”
“We had poetry…”
“Which one?”
“I dunno. But it was sort of about me, it was about ‘infinity something something’.”
“‘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…’?”
“That’s it! How did you know that?”
“My God! How could you not know? William Blake! How can you call yourself an Englishman and not know who William Blake is? In fact, how dare you! He was every kind of genius. You guys don’t even deserve to speak English…” She tailed off, looking for a calculator as Al walked into Lab One and called.
“Gotta go. My uncle’s here,” said Finn.
“When am I going to meet him? You know Delta talks about him a lot.” She rolled her eyes in an exasperated kind of way.
“Yuk,” Finn agreed.
“Gotta go!” Carla called, heading out with her bag.
Finn came out of the block to see Al towering above the isolation unit, carrying a fiendishly complicated chunk of metal dotted with microelectronics.
“Hey. What is it?” Finn asked.
“I call this ‘a sherbet whizz’, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is Grandma’s coming this afternoon. I forgot to tell you – we’ve got to go to the opera.”
“What?”
“It’s a local am-dram production in the village hall, you’re going to love it.”
“No way!”
“Yes way. If I have to go, you have to go,” said Al, wandering off with the whizzer.
Kelly laughed from the bench press in his outdoor gym.
Just what I need, thought Finn, a couple of hours on Grandma’s shoulders listening to opera interspersed with deafening chat with other old ladies concerning the medical peculiarities of people they once knew, or know now, or who were distantly related to people they didn’t know particularly well, or Prince Philip.
And he thought the poetry was bad. Finn had to admit that sometimes… he missed having to save the world.
Still, he couldn’t live in the past. Just keep going. Next week was the end of term. Carla was going on tour with her orchestra, but when she returned Delta and Finn would join her at their cabin in the woods (after dinner at the White House with everyone, including Grandma, which they were going to spring on Carla as a surprise), then there was the whole long holiday to look forward to.
He watched Delta circle above. He took in the giant figure of Al lolloping off out of the lab. Maybe he’d just lie down and wonder at the wonder of it all until Grandma got here.
Only twelve days left. Then his whole life ahead of him.
He couldn’t wait to be big.
* * *
Having spent some time in a French jail, then a mental institution, then intensive care – Spiro turned up in the desert of northern Niger at point 104024e 234982n.
He could see nothing but sand.
Somewhere beneath his feet, and at four other sites across the world, the finest minds that money could buy laboured over the snatch of poetry scratched out by Andrew Marvell some 400 years before.
And a lung breathed in…
And breathed out…
Footnotes
Chapter One
1. The others being: Shenyang, China, and Brookhaven, USA.
2. Following incidents of nuclear disaster in Japan, chemical blackmail in Iraq and terrorism aboard the International Space Station.
Chapter Two
&nb
sp; 1. From the Latin for ‘novice’, or for ‘one who is young and who learns’.
Chapter Three
1. A negative pressure ventilator, a chamber into which pumps periodically increase and decrease air pressure in order to expand and contract the chest cavity.
Chapter Eight
1. A piece of software designed to fix problems or update a computer program or its supporting data.
2. Aka the M249 – the world’s favourite light machine gun, fire rate and reliability first class.
3. A new US weapon between a sub and light machine gun.
Chapter Nine
1. Although nano-humans theoretically could consume normal food and water, their digestive systems would be able to process and absorb less than 10 per cent of it.
2. Modern studies suggest the sense of smell works via the detection of ‘quantum vibration’ rather than direct molecular interaction, thus nano-scents can be detected at macro level and vice versa.
Chapter Twelve
1. See citation (i) Queen’s Gallantry Medal (civilian), Appendix A.
2. A decarbonising maintenance procedure for use ONLY when the engine is unlit otherwise it ignites unburnt fuel and gas in the rear turbines causing an unstable turbo effect.
Chapter Thirteen
1. A tiny – but macro-scale – radio transmitter had been attached to the miniaturised helicopter’s underside in order for it to communicate via normal radio waves with circling macro-search aircraft. Its broadcast range was extremely limited.
2. .357 Magnum.
Chapter Fourteen
1. Neuro-Retinal Programming – an accelerated learning and personality control process whereby a probe, inserted directly through the eye, connects to the optic nerve and delivers information (specialist knowledge, emotional association, ideology, etc.) straight to the brain’s cerebral cortex, and therefore the subconscious mind.
Chapter Sixteen
1. In gaming slang, a new, naive, easy-to-kill player.
Chapter Seventeen
1. [REDACTED]
2. [REDACTED]
3. [REDACTED]
Chapter Eighteen
1. The crab spider does not spin a web, although it will produce silk to wrap up its prey or to act as a safety line. It is a hunter. It relies on stealth, camouflage and, above all, ambush. The two front legs are overdeveloped and are held aloft, either side of the head, ready to spring together and seize prey. Poisonous fangs then deliver a bite before mouthparts suck the victim dry. There are almost as many subspecies and variants of the crab spider as there are colours in nature. The Philodromidae is an active variant able to change colour to blend in with its background: in this case, common oak bark.
2. Beretta 9mm.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1. A cone-like structure rarely more than twenty-five millimetres in diameter that acts as both incubator and playpen to 200 or so newborn young.
2. Auxilliary Power Unit
Chapter Twenty-Eight
1. Lepisma saccharina, a small wingless insect in the order Thysanura.
2. Plasticised cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine.
Chapter Thirty
1.
2. A post-mortem revealed a tiny compressed air vessel planted in his brain that had been set off via sensors on his scalp. All he needed to do to end his life was scratch his head.
3. Russian special forces.
Chapter Thirty-Four
1. Boeing CH-47 Chinook, twin-engine, tandem rotor, heavy-lift helicopter.
Chapter Forty-One
1. See citation (ii) Appendix A, PDSA Dickin Medal for Animal Gallantry, 1st Class.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Copyright © John McNally 2014
Jacket design by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014
John McNally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007521586
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007521609
Version: 2014-01-25
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