by John Lilley
‘It looks like we have two options:’ said Tony. ‘Take the kids at the Kensington nursery school, or wait until they go on their backwoods trip to the Welsh Forest? As you can all see the success weighting for the Welsh Forest is only marginally higher, mainly due to the complex issues raised by the MT security gates. However, it moves the final conflict point to a less secure area which is further west and therefore nearer to the dropship. I really don’t like the idea of the dropship flying in over the City, even with the cloaking it would be difficult to hide it from all the sensors along the way. Extracting the kids from the school in full pubic view would also be much more difficult.’
They all agreed with Tony’s analysis.
‘So let's just run through the security gate issues,’ continued Tony. ‘We know from Paul’s experiments that our cloned id-tags do work so no problems with non-human travellers. The big issue though, is that the system may well be able to detect duplicates. All it would take would be for one of our cloned tags to be used in the City while we are on the train to Wales, and we would be done for. Cycling to Wales would be possible, but we would still have to get over the forest wall, for which we have no solution. So this brings us to the Llangollen fishermen. We know that the party of six will be leaving for the forests in two days’ time, the same day as the Kensington kids. They are going on a three-day fishing holiday on the Welsh rivers. One of them is a teacher at the nursery, so that’s how we found them. They are all single guys, and they all live in the same Britannia City dorm. We know their room numbers, so the plan will be that we call at their rooms posing as one of the others from the group. Then once in their room; put them under and clone their tag. For the rest of the day, we are the fishing party until the dropship arrives. Any questions?’
‘No real problem Tony, it’s just that Gwen and I will be a bit on the short-side to pose as the fishermen, and besides that, we have both enjoyed being women on this trip.’ said Linda with a smile.
‘We thought of that,’ said Paul. ‘I tested the gates at different heights, and they are only interested in your face, so you could just face-morph as you go through the gate and stay as you are for the rest of the time. We can do the calls on the fishermen at their dorms for you.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Gwen and Linda in Chorus.
Two days later the group were heading out of the city on the MT system towards Wales. At 150 mph the journey did not take long. They were all still apprehensive about going through the security gates at the MT station and the forest wall, but the cloned tags and face-morphing worked well. At the Llangollen terminus, they took community-bikes out into the Welsh forest park. The nursery school party would be arriving later, but there was no need to be there when they did. Tony and his team knew exactly where they were going. Three miles from the campsite they dismounted and hid the bikes in the undergrowth to continue on foot and off-road. By mid-afternoon, they were in position crouched in the bushes 100 yards from the already pitched tents of plot 450.
‘OK, you all know the plan. Once the kids are in bed and asleep we’ll knock out their teachers and gas the kids ready for their journey. The dropship will take five minutes to get here from where it’s hiding. Then it’s all aboard and away as quickly as possible. Any questions?’ said Tony.
‘How many teachers do you think there will be?’ asked Gwen.
‘Dave reckoned that there would be a one-to-five ratio so for 30 kids we’re looking at six teaching staff. However, sometimes one or two parents tag along. So perhaps ten people to deal with tops,’ said Tony.
‘OK so one or two each, probably; I don’t have a problem with that. They won’t be expecting it, so we have a significant advantage there. Perhaps we could pick them off as they go to the toilet?’ said Gwen nodding towards the nearby block.
‘Well, it all depends on how they group up. If they all sit around the campfire, all’s well, but if some of them wander off or go to bed early, we’ll have to be more flexible. They all carry links, and we know that those devices have some form of biometric monitoring function. Even if they don’t have time to make an alarm call, their links might do it for them once we put them under?’ said Tony, ‘Hopefully their links will just report that they’ve gone to sleep.’
Back at the MT terminus, the kids were disembarking. In an orderly, but noisy line, they queued at the bike rack to pick their rides. Setting off with their teachers riding in out-rider formation they made rapid progress up the forest track. As with all five-year-olds, there was a large range of cycling ability, some had been riding on two wheels for two years while others had just managed to pass the mandatory qualifying test a week before the trip. After only one kilometre the line of kids had spread out significantly with a bunch at the front, one 200 metres further back and the stragglers bringing up the rear. There were a few tumbles that resulted in more wounded pride than grazed knees, but they eventually all regrouped at the racks just inside the camp’s entrance. The entire camp covering some 30 hectares was protected by a mesh bear-fence. The Welsh forest was one of two remaining habitats for these fearsome creatures. They were the largest remaining land predator on the planet, kings of their domain and completely fearless if approached. But despite this, they were generally wary of man and had little interest in his activities. Even so, they needed to be kept out of the camp. The wolves (Canis Lupus), were actually more of a problem. With their pack instinct and great tactical skills, they were not a creature to mess with. Unaware of what was lurking outside the camp’s fence, the kids were still hyper and wide-eyed, on this their first big adventure away from their parents. The teachers registered the party at the lodge and herded their charges along to the campsite, following the huge bearded ranger guide.
Four hours later, just after dusk, Tony stood in the middle of the camp. One by one his colleagues came out of the tents and reported their success. When all the staff and kids had been put under Tony sent the radio signal to the sub. It had been slowly cruising along the creeks of the Irish archipelago for the past two weeks. All changed when the signal went out. The sub surfaced and immediately launched the drop- ship. The huge cloaked vehicle accelerated invisibly to supersonic speed within seconds. Two minutes later it was over the Welsh forest, and in four minutes it had landed at the camp.
Tony and his team carried the limp bodies of the kids out, one under each arm and strapped them carefully into the dropship's acceleration seats. Three minutes later they were all strapped in themselves, and the dropship was sealed and ready for take-off. Back over in Ireland, the sea water ascended in a 50-metre plume as the coastal patrol vessel’s depth charges detonated. The subs main hull was fatally compromised, and internal explosions convulsed the boat as it started its death dive to the bottom. Some yellow insulation material was all that made it to the surface. The patrol ship remained in a holding pattern over the wreck awaiting the arrival of a specialised salvage ship.
At it rose above the canopy of the Welsh forest the dropship was hit by a heavy barrage from four drones which had flashed into existence from the west. They were firing blind, but the ship’s cloaking flickered, briefly revealing its black beetle-like form. Its morph-alloy skin buckled but held and instantly self-repaired. Sonic defence screens screamed into overdrive and deflected further incoming projectiles while the ship scorched the treetop as it accelerated towards Britannia City. Ideally, it would have preferred to fly back across the Irish Sea and then make the jump to air-breathing rocket speed, but the drones had forced it into probably the worst route home. Tony, in deep symbiosis with the ship’s systems, assessed the navigation data.
April in Paris, he liked the sound of that, for a reason he could not figure.
23 THE TOWER
The two 10,000 tonne floating cranes slowly approached each other in the oily waters of the sunken city of Paris. Their computer-driven proximity guidance systems were in full control, but this didn’t stop the helmsmen of each vessel from nervously watching the manoeuvre. Both vessels’ thr
usters were carefully positioning them into a parallel formation 100 metres apart. The helmsmen watched as their graphic displays showed the present and final positions in flashing amber and green. With ten seconds to go, they simultaneously initiated the link-up. Deep inside each vessel heavy current crackled through 200-millimetre thick bus-bars as the three-phase winding-gear kicked into action. The four-metre diameter connecting spars, one from each vessel, began to be lowered. In the calm waters over Paris, there was little doubt that the locating pins would engage the first time. On both decks, the docking managers were watching the descending arms as they homed in on their universally mounted joints. With a resounding clang and the screech of torn high-modulus metal the two arms slotted into place. The computers immediately fired the hydraulic locking pins, and the two vessels became one.
The computer on the John Dory, the senior vessel, had already assumed command of the combined vessel and while the Manxman’s computer went into sleep mode, the Dory’s powered the vessel towards new coordinates. There were no remaining tall buildings between the vessel and its target and twenty minutes later they were immediately above what was left of the Eiffel Tower. This ancient structure now consisted of a collapsed mound of wreckage some 20 metres below the surface. The Dory-Manxman came to rest floating above the tower, and its anchors were deployed.
Several large islands of plastic waste coalesced around the stationary vessel, each carrying their attendant flock of cormorants (Phalacrocorax Carbo) and shags (Phalacrocorax Aristotelis). Attempts had been made to develop bacteria to dissolve these noxious products of ancient landfills. However, it was decided that the waste islands were less harmful than the dissolving bacteria they were going to release, so no action was taken. Once the rotting corpses and decaying food had all been consumed, the plastic islands no longer smelt so bad and they did afford a reasonable habitat for the birds. Floating booms between the hulls of the Dory-Manxman kept the plastic out of the operational space where the cranes would be doing their work.
As a testament to Eiffel’s engineering brilliance, the 10,000 tonne 325-metre tower from 1889 had only completely collapsed five years earlier. It had endured over 100 years of seawater around its four supporting legs. The tower had finally broken off at its knees in a severe storm. The remains of its four legs were initially still visible above the water, but further battering by the waves meant that they had also collapsed in on themselves. The main trunk of the tower was now laying east-north-east of its original position and had fractured into three pieces as it hit the water. The Dory-Manxman was only interested in the part containing the observation deck, the “third level”. The plan was that this would be installed on one of the South Downs islands and become a French museum as a final tribute to Britain’s now absent neighbour. The pile of puddle iron construction could have been recovered by any of the salvage vessels operating in the area, but only the Dory-Manxman had the lift capacity to bring up the observation section intact.
Beneath the vessel, the released submersible salvage drones swam down to the old pavement level and surrounded the stricken observation section. Aboard the Dory-Manxman the submersible pilots surveyed the wreckage on their monitors. The first piece of the wrecked tower consisted of the observation deck and the top 30 metres of the tower, but the elevator cars dating from the 1980s were all at the bottom of the third piece of the wreck. Presumably, they’d been there since their last ride down when the tower was finally evacuated. During the eventual restoration, the electronic 20th-century control gear would be removed and replaced by a hand-operated copy of the Victorian brass and copper mechanism from the World Exhibition. Ironically, it would be operated by a simulant, but that was something that the master engineer Gustave Eiffel would probably have approved.
One team of drones tackled the elevator cars while the remainder set about separating the observation deck section from the rest of the wreckage. It worked well because the 30 metres of tower beneath the deck would give the lifts some travel time in their new location. Calculations showed that this section would be well within the lifting capabilities of the Dory-Manxman. Oxy-acetylene torches burned beneath the waves through most of the night. By daybreak, the top section of the tower and the elevator cars were free from the remaining iron. Four of the drones carried the elevator cars to the surface where they were carefully winched onto the main deck. The Dory-Manxman then upped anchors and moved so that its main cranes were directly over the now separated top section. Down below the drones had attached a network of steel hawsers around the structure. The lifting cables from the Dory-Manxman were then lowered and connected to the prepared harness. Finally, after several checks that everything was secure, the Dory-Manxman began to winch in the lifting cables. In the control room, visual displays showed the increasing strain on the cables. At 2,000 tonnes of tension, the winching was stopped, and the harness rechecked to ensure that it wasn’t damaging the old structure. The winches stayed silent for another hour to allow the tension in the cables to do its work.
Six drones were dispatched with water jets to disperse some of the many tonnes of debris and sediment that had welded the tower to the ancient Parisian walkways. Clouds of black sediment billowed up from the seabed beneath the tower, and it began to move slowly upwards. Within minutes the cable tension dropped to 1,500 tonnes. Some of the smaller spars on the tower managed to detach themselves and fell to the seabed but were quickly retrieved by the drones. There was now quite a stream of mud coming out of the broken windows of the observation deck. Patience was the name of the game with this type of operation, and they waited two more hours until the water had cleared. At the surface, the cormorants seemed to be enjoying the action and were continuously diving into the lifting area.
After further checks on the harness, the winches began a continuous lifting cycle at a rate of six centimetres per minute. As more mud slipped off the structure, the cable tension dropped even further. Five hours later the first parts of the ancient structure broke the surface. On the Dory-Manxman’s decks the water hoses were turned on and played onto the emerging metal, and the ascent rate was slowed to two centimetres per minute. The plan was to lift the tower section until it was five metres out of the water. A submersible barge, the Charles Darwin, would then be slipped in underneath it. This barge was fitted with specially made supports designed to take the weight of the tower and minimise the stresses on the structure. The Charles Darwin was currently entering the outskirts of Paris, manoeuvring through the remaining taller building around the island of Montmartre.
With perfect timing, the Darwin approached the Dory-Manxman just as the lifting had stopped. Both vessels sounded their horns as the Darwin approached. In the conning tower of the Darwin, a three-dimensional, false-colour image of the Dory-Manxman was being rotated by the skipper on his monitor. His biggest problem with this job was the limited depth beneath the tower segment. He would need enough room to clear the structure with the special cradles on the Darwin’s deck. Anyway, there was no point in waiting, so he began to pump water into the ship’s ballast tanks. Within minutes only the Darwin’s bridge was above the waves as it moved slowly beneath the suspended ancient ironwork. Once in position between the Dory-Manxman hulls, the Darwin began to blow its ballast and resurface. As the Darwin’s supports took the weight of the tower the tension on the lifting cables decreased and they began to sag. Within thirty minutes the operation was complete, and the entire tower section was now secured on the deck of the Darwin. A dirty deluge of water continued to empty from the observation section and pour across the giant barge’s decks. As the crews secured the Darwin to the Dory-Manxman all three ships sounded their horns in celebration. Although their crews now faced many hours of work before the tower could be on its way back to Britain, their Captains all felt that they deserved some sort of celebration and the beer was soon in full flow from their engine rooms to their bridges. It was a major salvage achievement. Perhaps as a result of a bit too much beer or perhaps because they were al
l exhausted, the Captains decided to leave the final strapping down activities until the next day. This decision was well received by all the crews with of course another round of beer.
Down on deck one of the Manxman Philippe Bertillon had been waiting for this opportunity for some time, in fact far too long if he cared to admit it. He was one of only a few hundred fluent French speakers left in Britain and by that definition, probably the world. His family had vigorously maintained the dead language long after its country of origin had been burnt to a crisp, then overrun with climate migrants before finally perishing beneath the waves. The French language was not the only thing to have been passed down the line of Philippe's family, there was, of course, the mysterious notebook that was currently deep inside the chest pocket of Philippe’s overalls. It was a rather tatty old red & black A3 tome, looking all the worse for 150 years of wear and tear. The key to the book’s importance was that none of the information inside it had been recorded electronically anywhere. This had been the deliberate intention of Louis Bertillon, Philippe’s great-great-great grandfather. He knew that once the information was written to disk that it would become available very quickly to the first non-human intelligence that came along. Louis was in Paris during the city’s final death-throws. The vicious break-up of the EDR had left the newly independent countries with little in the way of law and order. They had not had to govern themselves for so long and consequently struggled to keep the lid on civil wars amongst their different ethnic groups. Most of their food and fresh water had run out under the incessant waves of increasingly violent migrants, and the rapid sea level rises had destroyed much of their infrastructure and taken away vast areas of productive farmland. What remained of their armed forces had started to fight amongst themselves to control what was left of dwindling warehouse stocks. The British coastal defences pre-empted a final attack from what remained of the EDR fleet by extensively mining the new channel ports. Ship after ship went down until every route out was blocked. Everyone who was anyone had been on that fleet, hoping to make it to the relative safety of Britain’s already overcrowded shores.
