The Forbidden City

by John McNally

  Finn lowered his voice so Stubbs couldn’t hear.

  “We can’t leave! I have a problem with just leaving people to die. There’s only a half chance this thing will work anyway. Let’s get him out of here …” Finn pleaded.

  “Come here,” Stubbs muttered to him.

  Finn went right up and the woozy old man rested a gentle arm on him.

  “Got to save you, young prince … don’t worry about me.”

  This was almost too much for Finn. He was taken back two years to his mum and her last days, either sparking with life, fast asleep, or drug-addled and sentimental. Her eyes as gooey as Stubbs’s were now.

  “Come on. Leave him,” said Kelly.

  “I met your father … Genius,” Stubbs slurred, mind surfing the morphine.

  Finn was pulled straight back. The other thing he knew was that there were truths at the edge of life. His mum told him she would love him forever and be with him always. And she was, he felt it every day. With a twist of his heart Finn asked –

  “What happened to my father, Stubbs? Did he walk out on us?”

  “Not a trace … Your uncle looked everywhere. High and low. Venice, of course …”

  Venice?

  “Did he end up in Venice?”

  “It’s the morphine. He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” said Kelly, breaking in.

  Finn stared hard at Kelly, he could see the same look he got from so many others, the look of something unsaid.

  What kind of man walks out like that? Yet his mother loved that man, so did Al, and Grandma too …

  Finn turned and pressed Stubbs further. “Where is he, Stubbs?”

  Kelly stepped in. “Nobody knows! That’s the problem.”

  “What? What happened!” Finn demanded.

  Kelly’s face hardened.

  “Kid, we’ve got to deal with this – right now. Bedtime stories can wait. No one can prove what happened to your old man. When this is over we can go through every detail and, I assure you, you’ll end up as confused as everyone else. The past is a trap, a drug. There are never any straight answers. What matters is you, not him. Right now – we go forward. Point by point. Strictly operational. We get the bot. We plant the new brain. We get Stubbs. We get out. Agreed?”

  Venice? Finn thought …

  “Kid!” Kelly snapped. “Let’s go!”

  DAY FIVE 08:53 (Local GMT+8). Roof of the World, Shanghai.

  YAPYAPYAPYAPYAP!

  The main doors swung open, all eyes turned and in bounded Yo-yo, dragging Hudson along the floor after him.

  “Down boy!” said Hudson, trying to hold on to both the dog and his glasses.

  Having been drugged and cooped-up in the footwell of a fighter jet for nearly six hours then transferred to the back of a screaming, flashing police car and driven at high-speed through an exotic smell-and-light show that he couldn’t hope to comprehend, Yo-yo was now near mental with over-stimulation.

  Bo Zhang and most of the other Chinese officials present looked on in shock as Hudson struggled to get the leaping, barking beast under control.

  “Good boy, Yo-yo!” said Al, the dog going crazy to see him again, licking and jumping and dancing around.

  YAPYAPYAAPP!

  “Good job, Hudson!” he added as Hudson struggled to his feet.

  “I think he’s a bit over-excited, Dr Allen—”

  Yo-yo suddenly stopped dead. His eyes almost crossed and he made a special whining noise, his haunches shaking.

  “Uh-oh,” said Hudson.

  It was a sign that Al and Hudson knew only too well. Suddenly Yo-yo – and it was always suddenly with Yo-yo – needed to Go.

  “Where’s the nearest park?” asked Hudson, dreading the journey back down in the elevator.

  “The helipad! Get him up on the helipad!” shouted Commander King.

  Hudson and Yo-yo were whisked off by staff to see if they could make it to the toilet on top of the world before Yo-yo lost control.

  “Did you bring the dog for luck?” Bo Zhang asked Al, genuinely interested, for he’d been wondering for some time how Al could be both crazy and a scientist at the same time. Bo had assumed ‘Yo-yo’ was the codename of some kind of top-secret weapon or vehicle.

  “Luck? No. I brought it for Flight Lieutenant Salazar. That mutt might just be our ticket out of this whole mess.”

  He took Bo over to where Delta and a group of technicians were already working on the proposed mission, and explained. Delta would be in an nDen clipped to Yo-yo’s collar from where she would issue instructions to the dog. A harness was being constructed for Yo-yo to wear, packed with cameras and high technology that would allow real-time tracking and surveillance and also carry a handgun simple enough for Carla to use. Lastly, Yo-yo’s collar was full of nano-supplies of every kind, should they be needed when Delta located other members of the n-crew.

  “She’s going to ride the dog into the Forbidden City?” asked Bo, incredulous.

  “She’s going to pilot him,” confirmed Al.

  “That’s it? That’s the plan? You put your trust … in a dog?” said Bo, for the first time losing some faith in his remarkable new colleague.

  “This dog. He just needs a few atoms of Finn’s scent in his nostrils to zero straight in on him. If he’s in the Forbidden City with Carla, he’ll find them. Of course, if the bots attack dogs we’re done for, but when there are no other options on the table, sometimes you’ve just got to mix things up, Bo, get creative and—”

  “Sir!” A technician interrupted them all.

  “We’ve got a standby signal from Infinity Drake’s nPhone – it’s on the southern shore of Penghu Island.”

  “What?” Al’s heart almost stopped.

  Penghu Island was off the coast of Taiwan and the signal was triangulated to a spot on the southernmost tip of its main island. Satellite images of the spot showed cliffs and a scrub of beach.

  “Can we contact it?” said Al.

  “It’s too weak to operate – but while we’ve got a standby signal, we’ve got a location,” said the technician.

  “We need to get someone there before we lose it,” said King.

  Bo snapped out orders in Mandarin.

  Commander King stared at the patch of coastline. How could it possibly be Drake if he was somewhere in the Forbidden City with the Salazar girl? Had they split up? If so what was he – what was anybody – doing, miles from anywhere on the coast of an obscure island …

  “It’s drifted there. It’ll be some kind of message in a bottle,” said King. “Someone is trying to tell us something …”

  A grin split Al’s face.

  “My mum.”

  DAY FIVE 09:09 (Local GMT+8). The Forbidden City, Shanghai. Nano-Botmass:*12,873,377

  Baptiste took the tip of the knife and pressed it against Spike’s flesh. His hands shook slightly at the sweet thrill of it. The temptation, the instinct, to drive his entire weight against the hilt of the weapon and kill was so strong his mouth watered and saliva ran down his stubbled chin.

  But his programmed desire to obey orders was far sweeter, far greater. He pushed the knife just hard enough for the tip of the blade to suddenly pierce the skin of Spike’s belly to the depth of a centimetre, then stopped. Blood bloomed and flowed from the small wound. Perfect.

  Spike hissed where she lay inside the Greenharbour Inc. building. In pain. Baptiste repeated the cut a few centimetres further across the tight skin.

  After six more cuts to both Spike and Scar, he reported back to Kaparis –

  “Done.”

  “Good,” said Kaparis.

  Immediately Li Jun tapped out the order.

  >>KAPCOMMS>>EVE. KAPARIS ORDER>>

  >>COMMENCE “EXODUS” BOT GROUPS 1 AND 2.

  Across the Forbidden City, nearly two million bots, those assigned to Exodus Groups 1 and 2, received new orders.

  Kaparis watched the bot-feeds until he was satisfied the process had begun, then he ordered Baptiste.
r />   “Now get the girl.”

  here the hell is everybody?”

  Kelly and Finn jogged down a canyon towards the core, looking for bots, finding nothing, just the great empty hall. The cast of millions had melted away.

  Daylight filtered into the abandoned space and, with it, the warm wet air of a tropical morning. The great blinking, futuristic cityscape presented during the hours of darkness had been supplanted by the ruined city of some lost civilisation, the dormant quantum hub its altar for sacrifice.

  And with the warm wet air came nature.

  ..zzztztz..ztzztrztztzz.zzzzztzttzz…zzyztztztzz.zzyzyztztzyzz..zzzzzzzz..zz..z.zttzzzz.zzzz..

  “At last,” Kelly said, dropping the Minimi and untying the nano-line and improvised grappling hook he’d made. Ready to go fishing.

  “That’s a mozzie, not a bot!” said Finn, and to prove his point one of the vile kites drifted towards them, legs dangling, scalpel-sharp proboscis twitching for a kill – ZZTZT-ZZZTZTZT-ZTZTZT!

  Kelly snatched up the Minimi, braced the stock and squeezed – DRTDRTDRT!

  The mosquito’s-scowl exploded into a cloud of matter that rained splatily around them.

  Kelly checked the ammo. “Let’s hope they don’t come in battalions.”

  “You don’t need a gun, you just have to break the proboscis. I used a pin on the Bug,” said Finn.

  Kelly said, “Good call,” and looked round. Above them on the circuit board there were dish-shaped capacitors with long pin-thick legs. Kelly stood back and with two neat bursts – DRTRT! DRTRT! – he severed the pins at their base and the component clattered to the floor. Moments later the pins were pried out of the capacitor and Finn and Kelly ended up with, if not swords, then a mosquito spike each.

  “Let’s go,” said Kelly, grabbing the fishing line.

  “What about Stubbs? They’ll smell his blood.”

  “He’s tougher than you think.”

  ..zzztztz..ztzztrztztzz.zzzzztzttzz …

  Another mozzie careered in at speed. Finn planted his feet and raised his spike like a baseball bat and, just as the evil gnat was about to run him through, he swung – smashing the harpoon snout of the thing, snapping it off right between the eyes. It twitched in agony and began a frantic cartoon-like backpedalling.

  “Good job,” said Kelly, impressed, then took out his own spike and added, “Now it’s my turn,” as he heard –

  zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …

  “That’s not a mosquito!” said Finn.

  Kelly followed Finn’s pointing finger. Above, caught in a shaft of daylight, he could see a stream of bots running back into the hall.

  “They’re back …” said Finn.

  Kelly looked at the crippled mosquito. Finn read his mind. “They’ll pick it up on their radar?”

  “Live bait,” Kelly confirmed and grabbed its legs. Finn grabbed its skinny body and they hauled the struggling beast under the nearest server stack.

  Finn lay across it, its skin reptilian, while Kelly wound round the grappling hook and line he’d fashioned around its thorax.

  When it was done, they let the mosquito struggle and kick and flap its way back out across the canyon floor.

  Finn and Kelly jumped down into the metal rail trench and hid behind one of the wheels of the great stack. Not only did the steel rails allow the stacks to move, they provided excellent cover for nano-warriors.

  zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …

  The injured mosquito on the end of the line obligingly fitted and struggled into flight. Straightaway a blue nano-bot swooped to investigate, hovering tight alongside, its tools and talons dangling beneath its body shell, angling itself to get the beast fixed in its simple photocell eye.

  Kelly pulled in the line to draw the bot closer, but before it got close enough for them to jump it, it had identified the mosquito and disregarded it. It banked and flew off. Kelly looked at Finn, and shrugged.

  “It was a bite,” he said, letting the line play out again.

  “How are we actually going to do this?” whispered Finn, looking at the grey brain box on his lap.

  “I don’t know,” said Kelly.

  “And if that doesn’t work?” asked Finn.

  “We hit it as hard as we can.”

  A few seconds later a blood-red bot appeared. This time Kelly didn’t bother toying with the creature – he just yelled, “Strike!” and yanked the line hard towards them.

  The mozzie shot their way and the bot followed, jetting along after it to get a visual fix.

  The moment the bot reached the wheel, Kelly abandoned the line and leapt on top of it like a rugby player, covering its entire lawnmower-sized body with his own, driving it – tentacles first – into the cleft between the great wheel and the rail.

  It hissed in alarm as it tried to jet backwards out of Kelly’s grasp. “Rip it open!” he yelled at Finn, as he struggled to contain it.

  Finn tried to pry the shell off but couldn’t get a grip on the edge.

  “Come on, kid!”

  Desperate, Finn stuck the end of his mosquito spike between the shell and the carcass and heaved. There was a SNAP and the bot shucked open like an oyster.

  The bot screamed through its compressors, organs exposed. Finn saw its lump of grey brain and hauled. It was plugged in tight but he worked it back and forth till – POP – the brain gave way and the bot collapsed beneath Kelly, suddenly still.

  zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …

  Finn took the doctored Frankenstein brain box off his back. There were eight terminal spikes on the underside. He located the same holes in the bot carcass and shoved it in …

  Nothing happened.

  Kelly drove the brain in harder.

  Still nothing.

  Other bots hissed past. Kelly slid back down into the trench beside Finn. It wasn’t working.

  “We’ll have to take it back to Stubbs,” Finn said.

  Kelly scowled. It would be impossible to drag a dead weight that far unnoticed.

  He fixed the bot with a beady eye and drew his leg back to deliver an almighty kick.

  Straightaway the Frankenstein bot hopped to life.

  Finn and Kelly jumped for cover.

  But the bot didn’t see them … the bot didn’t seem to see anything. It just hovered there a few nano-feet away, alive but inert.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know, but something’s working and if it’s working it must have the disease.”

  Kelly crept out to kick it again, this time out into the path of the patrolling bots. As he did so –

  ZWOOOOSHSHHHHH! BANG!

  A railgun bolt of white-hot carbon exploded at Kelly’s feet, blowing him head over heels and sending the Frankenstein bot zipping off, like an air hockey puck beneath the stacks of servers. Kelly hit the floor and lay still. Three hunter bots spotted him and closed in whip-crack fast.

  Without thinking, Finn braced the Minimi and – DTRRTDRRRTRTRTRTTRTR! – raked the air above Kelly. The bots exploded as bullets cut through their shells.

  More bots arced in. Finn leapt from the rail trench, dragging Kelly’s enormous collapsed form back down into it. Six bots arrived and swung back and forth over the area, tilting and searching.

  Finn turned to Kelly. He was lifeless. A great hunk of meat. The thought he might be dead froze Finn’s soul. Panicked him. He couldn’t be. He mustn’t be.

  “Kelly!” Finn kicked him, just as Kelly had kicked the Frankenstein bot.

  Kelly groaned.

  Finn felt his own heart start again.

  zssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzssszssssszssszssszszzsss …

  The hunters were closing in.

  “We’ve got to make a run to the next trench!” said Finn, trying to pull Kelly up.

  “Can’t,” said Kelly. Restricted to gasps. “Ribs broken … Get out. Get Al.”

 
“How?!” yelled Finn, angry at the bots, angry Kelly was injured, angry Stubbs was dying, angry he was going to have to leave them both, angry at Al and King and at Kaparis and at his dad who’d disappeared – angry at the whole thing.

  “Find a way!” Kelly yelled back.

  More bots were hissing in.

  “Take the pack and the Minimi!”

  Finn knew he had no choice. He slung Kelly’s pack over his shoulder then hauled up the huge Minimi. There was only a handful of rounds left.

  “You take this,” said Finn. “It’ll slow me down.” He stuck it in Kelly’s arms, biting back a lump in his throat.

  BOOM. They were interrupted by the slam of a door, the squeak of sneakers.

  Kelly grabbed the back of Finn’s head. “Tyros … Go …”

  Finn made a promise. “Wherever they take you – I’ll find you.”

  Kelly stared at Finn with a cruel steel in his eyes that said – Do Your Job. It was how Kelly had lived his life and he wasn’t about to get sentimental about existence now.

  “Save yourself.”

  Bots closed in again and Kelly fired over Finn’s shoulder – DRTRTRT! – two more bots exploding.

  “GO!” Kelly ordered. He punched Finn to get him going and Finn fled, scrambling along the pit of the trench like some kind of lizard boy as, behind him, Kelly fired his last rounds – DRTRTRRT!

  Then silence.

  As Finn reached the end of the trench he looked back. A group of bots were clustered above Kelly, drawing him up into their tentacled web.

  Finn’s heart beat hard. Half a dozen more bots were already tilting to scan the area.

  Then as he leapt out to sprint to the next trench, he finally heard a cry.

  But not from Kelly.

  “COME AND GET HER, DRAKE!” Baptiste roared from one of the server blocks on the south side of the hall, announcing Carla’s presence so loudly it made her ears ring.

  “NO!” she tried to warn in turn, which was just what he wanted. Baptiste shoved the gag back over her mouth and between her teeth. “MMGHGH!”

  Carla was on her knees, hands security-zip-tied to the steel frame end of one of the blocks, gagged by a leather belt.

  Live bait.

  Baptiste yanked on the zip-ties so that they bit into her wrists, then grabbed her face and warned her: “When I come back. If he’s not here? You die.”