by Jaspre Bark
He swung the stool and smashed it into the side of Joe's head. Joe yelped with pain and let go.
Greaves rushed from the lab and closed the door behind him. Joe didn't attempt to follow, instead he lunged for a button under a bench top. An alarm began to blare.
No, this couldn't be happening. Not now. Not after everything he'd been through. Not when he was so close to saving the world. He was cleverer than them, he'd proved that.
Wait, all this could be turned to his advantage. He wasn't beaten yet. He still had the whole place on lock down.
Cortez charged into the room with the caged animals as three armed guards ran up to the door and began banging on the glass. "What happened? Why are their guards here?"
Greaves pointed to the virology farm. "We had company. I only saw him at the last minute and I managed to lock him in that room. Unfortunately he set off the alarm."
"Do you want me to kill him?"
"No. We can use him as a hostage. In fact, I've just had a better idea." Greaves hobbled past the cages and out into the rest of the lab. Beyond the far door six glass walled rooms were laid out in a hexagonal grid. In the centre was a long thin booth with six walls.
Anna was pressed up against the glass of one wall. She looked like a starving child gazing through a window onto a feast. Inside the booth were six titanium containers. They looked like huge metal eggs with LCD displays monitoring their temperature and large tubes pumping liquid nitrogen into each.
Even at sub-zero temperatures, when most other organic matter would have no energy to move, Greaves knew that inside the containers the Doomsday Virus would be frenetic with excitement. Bursting with longing for its last surviving host, a longing that was about to be fulfilled.
Greaves shuffled past Anna into a room filled with consoles and keyboards. He booted up a mainframe and hacked straight into the complex's intranet. He was home again. There was nothing he couldn't do in this space. It didn't matter how many guards the complex had, or how well armed they were, all the hi-tech equipment they'd managed to maintain wouldn't help them. Greaves was untouchable.
As Cortez joined him in the room the polymer coating on one of the glass walls became a large screen. Doctor Joseph Sinnot stared down at them. He wore a stern expression and looked like he had just had just woken and dressed hastily.
Sinnot hadn't changed much since Greaves had last seen him. The chestnut hair that fringed his bald pate was flecked with more grey and the furrows on his brow were deeper, aside from that he was the same old smug asshole.
Smug, but shocked enough by the sight of Greaves to lose his composure for a second. "Matthew Greaves! We thought you were dead."
"Very much alive I'm afraid Sinnot."
"Not from the look of you and not for much longer when we get to you. What are you doing in my complex?"
"I'm concluding our research. Putting our discoveries to the correct use."
Sinnot laughed with derision. "Our research? I think you flatter yourself. I seem to recall you worked as a lab assistant on the project. It was your job to wash the flasks, tidy the draws and sweep the floor. I imagine you told your cohorts you were an important scientist. But the truth is you were paid less than the janitors and your duties were practically the same."
"I was responsible for more breakthroughs in the development of the virus than any other person you employed," said Greaves, who hadn't stopped typing throughout the whole conversation. "You couldn't even have started without the papers I published in the first place."
"Ah yes. The papers you published when you were only twenty-three. The last time you did anything of merit. Six months after gaining your third PHD and less than a year before you were institutionalised. It was your father who had you sectioned wasn't it? Just after your mother died. As I recall, the judge agreed you were a danger to yourself. Sad little Matthew Greaves, such a promising start you had, such a pathetic waste of potential your life has been ever since."
Greaves knew what Sinnot was trying to do. He wasn't going to be distracted though. He wouldn't rise to the taunts. He was under pressure to turn this situation to his advantage. He wouldn't buckle this time. He was stronger now.
Things had been different back then. There had been so much expectation about his work. So many job offers. His peers were envious and in awe of him. Everyone was waiting to see when he was going to trip and fall. The tension was too great. Rather than trip he dived head first over the edge. His mother died, then his nerve went and for a short while so did his mind.
"A whole decade and nothing to show for it," said Sinnot. "Three PHDs and you couldn't even get a job flipping burgers. Then one of my colleagues recognised your name on a job application. She took pity on you and convinced me to take you on. We threw you a few tiny crumbs of research to occupy you while you did your menial chores and suddenly you think you're leading the project. Such pathetic delusions of grandeur."
Sinnot was twisting the truth. But then he always had. They'd thrown him more than a few crumbs of research. They were getting nowhere when they hired him as a lab assistant. The researchers had all read his papers, so they began discussing theories and problems with him in the canteen.
After a while he was attending weekly debriefings. He went over their findings with meticulous care and suggested new lines of enquiry. Suggestions that led to breakthroughs and the project's first real successes. He hadn't done this alone, but they had been struggling until he joined the project.
The whole time this was happening Sinnot had been promising Greaves a full time research fellowship. Dangling it in front of him like a carrot. But the fellowship never materialised and they kept paying him the tiny pittance he got as a lab assistant.
Sinnot never ran out of excuses as to why Greaves hadn't been made a fellow on the project. It was always just around the corner, it was only a matter of funding, or bureaucratic procedure, or a company policy hurdle that needed to be overcome.
Finally Sinnot realised that Greaves knew far too much about a project his shadowy pay masters wanted to keep secret. He probably figured it was cheaper to get rid of Greaves than to buy him off with a fellowship and tie him into the project. Whatever the case, Greaves narrowly escaped with his life and went underground.
He'd spent the year leading up to The Cull hiding under an assumed identity, learning as much as he could about the shadow government funding the Doomsday Virus. The hidden cabal of power brokers who make all the real decisions about how the world is run. Most of them were ultra-right wing trillionaires who'd gotten rich raiding the funds of the world's military industrial complex. There wasn't a scrap of information about them in the public domain. But no political ruling was made without their sanction.
"Don't think your amateurish attempt to disable our locks will buy you any time," said Sinnot. "And your inadequate effort to hack into our intranet has already failed."
"That's what I want you to think," said Greaves. He was now seconds from finishing. This would wipe the smug look off Sinnot's face. "The second you realised I was hacking the intranet, you naturally attempted to isolate the mainframe I was working on and disable it. The first thing I did was install a programme that would make you think you had done just that. It was simply a matter of distracting you while I finished what I was actually doing. Which, in case you're wondering, is this." Greaves typed in the last bit of executive sub-coding and pressed the Enter key.
"What have you done Greaves?" said Sinnot. He suddenly looked worried.
"It's a rather superior bit of viral software I've been working on," said Greaves. "It compresses every bit of information in your whole system by half every sixty seconds. Every single bit of research, every equation, every memo, folded in half and half again, every minute on an infinite cycle. The longer you leave it working the longer it will take to decompress and retrieve the information. Any attempt to stop this happening will result in every bit of information you have, years and years of research, being wiped without trace. If you
try and retrieve the information from back up sources this will simply activate the virus all over again. The only way to reverse this is by inputting a variable code."
"What do you want for the code?" Sinnot said.
"I and my colleagues are going to leave here with the Doomsday virus. You are going to give us safe passage to the edge of the plateau. We've taken a hostage, Joe Black Feather, who was working in the Virology Farm. He will accompany us across the plateau to prevent you attacking us. When we're far enough away, we'll send Joe back with the code."
"How do we know you won't just kill him?"
"You don't. You'll just have to trust us."
Sinnot leaned to one side, talking to someone off-screen. He leaned back into shot and smiled. "I've got a better idea. How about you give yourselves up right now and we'll let you live long enough to give us the code to retrieve all our files?"
"And what makes you think we'd do that?"
"Well, our little conversation has been somewhat diverting, if a tad tedious, but then you always had that failing I'm afraid Greaves. You see I'm also capable of distracting you while I finish what I'm actually doing. Which, in case you might be wondering is this."
A high pitched cacophony of screams came from the room full of caged animals. Greaves rushed into the room. All the creatures in the cages were writhing and twitching with pain. Blood was running from the eyeballs and noses of those who weren't shrieking with agony. Giant welts and blisters were appearing on the skin of others.
"What have you done?" Greaves shouted.
"It's a fast-acting mutant strain of the Ebola virus, designed to be airborne. We introduced it into the air supply of those labs, right after we hermetically sealed them. We'll have to sterilise the area afterwards, but you'll be dead by then. Unless of course you surrender this instant and give us the code to decompress all our files. Oh and you only have a few minutes to decide. After that the virus will start to take effect on you and the antidote won't work. You'll die a death a thousand times worse than these vermin."
Many of the animals lay dead now, their insides eaten away by the virus.
"What about Joe?" said Greaves. "You're not going to let him die. He's too useful to the project."
"Joe is sealed in the virology farm, in a bio-hazard suit. You saw to that for us."
"What about Anna then? You must know who she is. Surely she's too valuable to allow her to die?"
"We know exactly who she is. Thank you for finding her for us. Though she's not as valuable as you think. We have been growing new hosts in her absence. Her DNA will be useful to our studies, but we can extract that from her corpse." Sinnot was lying, Greaves could tell. It didn't help him any though.
Nearly all the animals were dead now. Greaves coughed and put his hand to his mouth. It was flecked with blood and phlegm. He didn't have much time. None of them did. Suddenly he was a million miles from being 'home again' and Thomas Wolfe was right after all.
He hung his head. "Alright. You win."
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was the largest army of Native Americans that had ever marched. There were braves and squaws from every tribe in the land. Never had Hiamovi seen his people so united.
Since the motion to raise an army and march on Little Bighorn had been passed, growing bands of warriors had made the perilous journey to Montana from every part of the country.
The fact that they were marching to a showdown with the white man at the site of the greatest Native American victory was seen as an incredible omen by most of those assembled. There was a high sense of purpose among all the volunteers who had gathered to fight. A spiritual fervour was in the air. The Fifth Age of Man was nearly upon them.
For some it was a fight to ensure the freedom and autonomy of everyone left alive in the former United States, while for others it was a chance to settle old scores after so many years of oppression.
The Neo-Clergy were building their own army in Colorado. Their crazed leader Colt had used his lies and propaganda to terrify his own people into forming an army to strike at the Native Americans, although he was going to find them ready and waiting for him.
Hiamovi's standing as a spiritual and political leader was now greater than ever. Many in the UTN spoke of him as a saviour of the Native American race. Everything was coming to pass, just as the Great Spirit had shown him in the vision he'd recounted to so many of his people.
What the Great Spirit hadn't told him was how empty it would leave him and how far he would feel from the source of all his inspiration - the Great Spirit himself. He hadn't felt the Great Spirit's presence for more moons than he cared to admit. Not since he'd promoted Ahiga to the inner council. Ahiga who brought him so much power but put his soul in such jeopardy.
As Hiamovi sat brooding in his saddle, Ahiga rode over as though he could read his leader's thoughts. They rode at the front of around two hundred and fifty braves and squaws all mounted on horseback. Behind them in excess of two thousand more volunteers marched on foot. Most of them were armed with whatever weapons they had scavenged or made along the way.
The journey had been harsh but their Crow guides knew the best routes through the devastated terrain. Now they approached the plateau. It was about half a mile in the distance. Hiamovi could see it through the heat haze that came off the lava.
The horses did not like the heat or the uneven ground. They were whinnying and difficult to control. Ahiga dismounted, as did Hiamovi.
"Great Chief," said Ahiga. "The way ahead is hazardous but that could be used to our advantage."
"Go on."
"There is a narrow pass between two steep hills. Beyond that is a small bridge over the lava to the plateau. The bridge is only big enough for a few people to cross at a time. We could take the pass and defend it against Colt's whole army with five or six hundred braves."
"Okay. And what about our horses?"
"I don't think the horses will be able to cross to the plateau. The heat from the lava is too great and they're likely to panic. It would probably take too long to lead them all across anyway. We'd have to take them one at a time because of the size of the bridge."
"Very well. We'll corral the horses out of sight behind the hills. Detail six hundred braves to hold the pass. Make certain we have at least a hundred of our best sharp shooters among them. I'll lead the rest of the troops across the bridge and onto the plateau. I want you to take up the rear to oversee the fortification of the pass and the safe passage of the troops."
"As you wish."
Hiamovi knew Ahiga was displeased with this order. The Navajo saw himself leading the whole army to victory while Hiamovi remained a remote figurehead, watching the battle from a safe position. Hiamovi needed his expertise in the rearguard action though. He also wanted to keep the young buck in his place. Hiamovi was coming to trust Ahiga less and less. He suspected the Navajo of working to his own agenda and wanted to diminish his growing influence within the UTN. If Ahiga was to fall victim to his own heroism in the coming bloodshed then Hiamovi would not be too upset. He would make a useful martyr.
As he handed his steed over to another brave and led the army on foot towards the pass, Hiamovi realised, to his shame, that he was thinking just like Ahiga. Perhaps that was the Navajo's great legacy to the UTN.
"We've just had some more news," said Bennet. He pushed his horn rimmed glasses back up his beak of a nose in a way that never failed to irritate Sinnot. "It gets worse."
"We've got over two thousand Native Americans camped outside our complex looking for a way to break in," said Sinnot. "How could it possibly get any worse?"
Sinnot hadn't slept in twenty-four hours. Not since he had been woken with the news that the complex's security had been breached. Since then he'd been forced to initiate a complete overhaul of the security protocols. He'd had to instigate the retrieval and reclassification of every bit of data stored in the complex, and personally oversee the detainment of Greaves and the two other intruders. He was in no mood
for one of Bennet's reports. He wanted Bennet and Roth out of his office and the debriefing finished as quickly as possible so he could go and grovel to his masters in the patron's suite.
"Reports have confirmed that the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn have also raised an army," said Bennet. "They're marching here and will arrive in less than twenty-four hours."
"The Apostolic...?" said Sinnot. "You mean the Neo-Clergy. I thought they'd disbanded."
"They've been undergoing a bit of a resurgence of late," said Roth, his pudgy moon face always wore an 'eager to please' expression.
"Why on earth are they marching out here?" said Sinnot. "Why don't they choose somewhere else to have their big showdown?"
"I would have thought that was rather obvious," said Bennet. "Like the intruders we just captured, they want to get their hands on all the biological weaponry we've been developing. Just like our patrons, they probably think it will allow them to take over what's left of the world."
"Quite," said Sinnot. "Frankly, I'm still more afraid of our patrons than an army of Native Americans or mad born-again Christians. Still this is something we're going to have to overcome, or we'll be in serious trouble."
Sinnot and all his colleagues referred to their paymasters as 'patrons', but they all knew it was a euphemism. They were their masters plain and simple. Men who were used to wielding untold power and using unlimited resources to do so. They'd been raised to do it since birth. It was bred into their bones. Even though Sinnot and his colleagues had once faced them down back before The Cull, had taken the Doomsday virus and bartered for their lives, the patrons still terrified him.
Sinnot knew it was only the plague that had killed so many that had paradoxically saved him and his associates. It hadn't taken them long to determine that the plague killed according to blood group. So Sinnot and his colleagues had developed a way to change their blood group. This was how over half of them had survived The Cull.
