Aftershock (23 page)

The following morning Otto woke with a start. What little sleep he’d managed to get had been plagued by nightmares. Raven was still watching the entrance to the cave through which the grey light of dawn was now visible.

‘Good morning,’ she said quietly.

‘How’s the weather?’ Otto asked, slowly getting to his feet. He felt stiff and uncomfortable after the night spent on the rocky floor of the cave.

‘Much improved,’ Raven replied. ‘We should be able to set out for the abandoned facility shortly.’

‘I’ll wake up the others,’ Otto said.

A few minutes later the Alphas were all awake and getting ready for the trek that lay ahead of them.

‘I’m starving,’ Tom moaned. ‘I suppose it was too much to ask that one of those Disciple soldiers might have been carrying some rations.’

‘I believe that part of the challenge of the Hunt was that we were to find our own sources of food,’ Wing said, ‘though I concede that foraging probably isn’t very wise under the circumstances.’

‘I am thinking that I am actually being too frightened to be hungry,’ Franz sighed.

‘OK, that’s it, we’re doomed,’ Shelby whispered to Laura.

‘There are five rifles left,’ Raven said, slinging one of the salvaged weapons over her shoulder. ‘So three of you will have to remain unarmed. Wing, I know you won’t take one even if I tell you to so I need two more volunteers.’

‘I’ll pass,’ Penny said. ‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I’d probably only end up shooting myself.’

‘I don’t need one either,’ Laura said. ‘I’m no good with the damn things anyway.’

The other five Alphas all took one of the rifles. Tom picked one up and gave Otto an embarrassed look.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a minute to . . . erm . . . show me the basics have you?’ he asked quietly.

‘Sure,’ Otto said, ‘it’s a piece of cake really. Safety’s here, white dot means that the safety’s on, red dot means it’s off. Best to leave it on until you’re ready to shoot. Sights are here – just make sure that you keep whatever you want to hit in the middle of them but never point your weapon at anything you don’t want to kill. Keep your finger outside the trigger guard until you want to pull the trigger. I’ve been chewed out too many times by Colonel Francisco for bad trigger discipline to forget that. Right, OK, pull the stock tight into your shoulder. That’s it. It will kick a bit so lean into the rifle as you squeeze the trigger. Squeeze, not pull, gently does it. Try to use short controlled bursts of fire – you haven’t got enough ammo for spray and pray. OK?’

‘How do you know all this?’ Tom asked, looking at Otto with a slightly bemused expression.

‘Benefits of a good education,’ Otto replied with a smile.

‘OK, time to go,’ Raven said. ‘Keep together and keep up.’

Nero stared at the satellite image of the Hunt base camp as Francisco’s assault Shroud touched down. Two more hovered nearby, scanning the area for any sign of hostile forces. Nero watched the Colonel’s men move around the wreckage-strewn site.

‘It’s bad, Max,’ Francisco said over the comms system. ‘There are a lot of bodies. All the pilots and security personnel are dead and we’ve found nearly twenty dead students. The others are all missing. Raven’s Shroud seems to have escaped the initial attack at least. We’re going to sweep the area and see if we can find any sign of it.’

‘Damn it!’ Nero shouted, slamming his palm down on the display. ‘Colonel, I want you to find the people responsible for this atrocity and I want you to make sure they suffer before they die. Do I make myself clear?’

‘It will be my pleasure,’ Francisco replied. ‘We’re going to start our search immediately but it’s going to take some time. There’s a lot of territory to cover.’

‘Report anything you find,’ Nero said angrily.

‘Understood, Francisco out.’

‘H.I.V.E.mind, begin scanning the satellite imagery of the surrounding area,’ Nero snapped. ‘Look for something that might give us an idea where these people are or where they may have taken any survivors.’

Nero stood in the middle of the control room and felt pure rage welling up inside him.

‘Summon the ruling council,’ Nero barked at a nearby communications technician. ‘Tell them I will be sending Shrouds to pick them up immediately for an emergency meeting at H.I.V.E.’

If it was war that the Disciples wanted, it was war they were going to get.

chapter ten

Otto tried to ignore the freezing wind as he pulled himself up towards the next handhold. He was also trying very hard to ignore the fact that there were no safety lines protecting him from the increasingly long drop to the jagged rocks below. In fact, Otto thought, there were all sorts of things that he would rather ignore at the moment, given the choice. Above him Raven, Wing and Shelby were picking their way up the rock face with an ease and grace that made the rest of them look clumsy.

‘I suppose it’s pointless to ask them to slow down,’ Penny said as she hauled herself up alongside Otto.

‘I think the idea is that we go faster,’ Otto replied.

‘Oh, I could go much faster,’ Laura said. ‘All I have to do is let go. OK, I’d be travelling in the wrong direction but I’d be going really, really fast.’

‘Not for very long though,’ Otto replied with a grin. ‘In fact, I think you might find that eventually you’ll come to a rather sudden stop.’

‘I am being glad that everyone is finding the idea of us being plummeting to our doom so highly amusing,’ Franz moaned.

‘Franz, I thought we agreed not to use the word “plummeting” again until we reached the top,’ Nigel said.

‘Ah, yes, sorry.’

Otto looked upwards and saw Shelby pulling herself on to a wide ledge beside Wing and Raven.

‘Come on, guys,’ Otto said. ‘Just a few metres then we can rest.’

A minute later Otto pulled himself over the edge of the outcropping and stood up. They were now a couple of hundred metres above the cave they had sheltered in overnight and the view back down into the valley was impressive. Raven stood silently looking out across the valley.

‘See anyth—’ Otto began to ask before Raven raised a single finger to her lips.

‘Listen,’ she whispered.

At first Otto couldn’t hear anything over the wind but then very faintly he began to pick up another sound – the distant, regular thump of rotor blades.

‘Everybody on to the ledge quickly,’ Raven shouted as the last stragglers scaled the final few metres. ‘Get down.’

They all lay down as the sound of the helicopter got louder and louder. A minute later they watched as a helicopter flew into the valley below at low altitude. The helicopter landed on the valley floor and a dozen men in white poured out of its rear hatch. The Alphas all knew who it was they were trying to find.

‘Well, that can’t be good,’ Shelby said quietly.

‘We have to keep climbing,’ Raven said, watching the Disciple troops fanning out across the valley floor below. ‘It won’t take them long to find our trail and I don’t want to get caught halfway up the side of a mountain by that helicopter. Let’s go.’

‘I’ve got a really bad feeling about this,’ Laura whispered to Otto as Raven stepped up to the rock face and began to climb again.

‘Well, you know what they say about being at your lowest point,’ Otto replied.

‘What?’

Otto looked at her and then up the mountainside.

‘The only way is up.’

The squad leader of the Disciple search team walked up the steep slope to the cave that one of his men had found a few minutes earlier. Still clearly visible in the snow around the cave mouth were several sets of footprints. He followed the trail for a few hundred metres and it ended at the base of a steep rock face. He looked upwards and for an instant thought he saw something moving. He pulled the binoculars from his belt and looked through them, scanning the rock face. There, clearly visible now, were several figures dressed in black climbing up the mountainside.

‘Tell our sniper that I want him back on the transport chopper and in the air,’ he said to one of his men. ‘I have some target practice for him.’

Raven pulled herself over the edge of the plateau and looked back down into the valley. She could barely make out the shapes of the men searching for them far below but what she could see were the rotors on the transport helicopter starting to spin. Within just a few seconds the chopper began to slowly lift into the air.

‘Quickly,’ she said, taking Shelby’s hand and pulling her up. Wing climbed up beside them as the helicopter started to ascend rapidly towards them. ‘They’ve spotted us.’

‘Guys, come on,’ Shelby yelled down to the others, who were twenty metres below and still climbing. ‘We’ve got company!’

Otto glanced over his shoulder and immediately wished he hadn’t. There was a helicopter a couple of hundred metres away at the same height as them. He began to climb again, as quickly as he could. Above him Raven unslung the assault rifle from her back and aimed at the helicopter’s cockpit. She fired a three-round burst that left a series of spiderweb cracks across the curved plexiglas and the pilot tipped the transport away from the mountainside. Raven lowered her rifle as Shelby raised hers.

‘Don’t bother,’ Raven said as the helicopter dropped back into a stationary hover a thousand metres away. ‘That pilot knows what he’s doing, they’re out of range.’

The side door of the transport chopper slid open and a few seconds later there was a flash from inside. A moment later there was a buzzing sound and a tiny cloud of dirt was kicked up at Shelby’s feet.

‘Get down,’ Raven snapped as there was another muzzle flash inside the distant helicopter and a bullet whined past Wing’s ear. The three of them dropped to the ground as it struck the edge of the plateau.

‘I thought you said they were out of range,’ Shelby yelled as a shot hit the ground just a few centimetres in front of her.

‘They are,’ Raven said. ‘Unfortunately we’re not.’

Whoever was firing at them from the helicopter was obviously armed with a high-powered sniper rifle with a much greater effective range than the assault rifles they were carrying. They were far enough out that it would still be hard for the sniper to hit anything with real precision, especially from a moving platform, but they would get lucky eventually.

Otto reached for his next handhold. The rock just to his right splintered with a crack as a bullet smacked into it.