Francine's gore was all over him. He shook himself and let
the mess slither away. A sound from behind made him spin
round. A young girl of about eleven was standing next to
him and smiling.
'Tom.'
He simply stared at her, uncomprehending.
'It's Sybil.'
Tommy Boy ran a hand over his forehead. Then broke
into a grin.
'We have to move fast. Everything's falling apart,' Sybil
added. 'Follow me.'
They were in a tunnel, lights running overhead, tarmac
underfoot. The end appeared as a silver disk that grew bigger
and brighter. Emerging from the exit, they were in a street of
old cottages. The cottages had thatched roofs, rose gardens.
It was a chocolate-box English village. The street was merely
a muddy track pitted with the marks of horses, piles of
steaming dung here and there. It stank – a rich country
smell of grass and animal odours.
Sybil walked ahead of him. 'This way,' she called back,
heading along a narrow garden path. On each side lay
flowerbeds filled with psychedelic arrays of exotic plants
that were quite alien to a real English country garden.
The door to the cottage swung open and Sybil walked in.
The hall was dimly lit by sunlight filtering through leaded
windows. A wooden staircase ascended to the first floor.
Sybil immediately headed towards a lounge. Low oak beams
ran over the ceiling, and the walls were whitewashed. There
were more leadlight windows in deep recesses. Dried flowers
stood in a vase inside an empty fireplace. Incongruously, the
floor was scattered with small metal boxes. The closest one
had a label that read '
Operating system
'.
'Quick, open it,' Sybil snapped.
Tom twisted the key and the lid lifted.
Sybil let out a deep sigh and walked over to another metal
box. This one was marked '
Programmes A1–C4
'. Opening the
lid, she let the contents flow over her. 'Whoa! That feels
good,' she laughed, and scrambled to the next box.
Tom left her to it and walked through a low doorway
into a dining room. A long, narrow teak table and six chairs
took up most of the floor space. The table was stacked with
more boxes.
He looked at the nearest one: '
Francine
'. He opened it and
the information soaked into him. Francine had been freelance
for a year. This project was for a mysterious organisation,
a group calling itself the Four Horsemen. She had known very
little about them. They had their protocols cleverly guarded
and resisted even her most determined efforts to break them.
She had only seen the face of one of the four and knew no
names other than their aliases – Death, Pestilence, War and
Conquest.
Tommy Boy glanced along the table and read the labels
on the boxes. '
The Dragon
', '
The CCC
', '
Money
', '
Plans and
layouts
'. There were dozens of them. Then he noticed one
marked '
The Four Horsemen
', and at last he realised where
Sybil had taken him. He wasn't inside Francine's computer,
he was in the mainframe of the Four Horsemen. Sybil had
broken through into a system that had resisted Francine. He
grabbed the box and put it in his pocket.
'Sybil?' he called through to the lounge.
There was no reply.
He lifted a couple of boxes. One was marked '
Political
assassinations
'. Another was labeled: '
Foreman
'. Underneath
this was another box. It was larger than the others, and
as Tommy Boy read the two words on the lid a surge of
excitement and fear rippled through him. '
Third Bomb
'.
He felt a rush of air behind him and spun around. A
horribly corrupted version of Francine's avatar stood three
feet away. She had been pieced together from the slivers
and shards of the body that had been blown asunder by
the bazooka. She was a hideous sight, dripping blood and
oozing some obscenely pungent pus. An oily liquid dribbled
from Francine's eyes and ran down the remnants of her face.
She had a huge knife in her hand. It caught the light from
the window in the dining room.
Francine lunged forward so fast that Tommy Boy had no
time to defend himself. But then, an inch from his throat, the
blade slipped from Francine's twisted, wet fingers. He threw
himself to one side as her body collapsed in a squelching
heap. There was a huge black hole a foot wide in her back.
Tommy Boy looked from the ruined form of Francine's
avatar to see Sybil, now standing erect, a beautiful young
woman in a business suit. A freshly discharged radiation
weapon was in her hand.
'Thanks,' he said simply.
'You're welcome.'
Tom shook his head and tried to focus as the starlit sky over
Tintara replaced the inside of the cottage. He glanced at his
laptop, which was displaying the screensaver he always used
– the Rolling Stones mouth with its red lascivious tongue
poking out. Then, like a train speeding out of the night,
reality hit him – along with the memory of what he had
seen just before Sybil had saved his avatar existence. Two
words reverberated around his brain – '
Third bomb
'.
'Sybil?' he snapped.
'Tom.'
'Status, please.'
'System is functioning at 45 per cent. I've diagnosed
the operating network, backup systems, external feeds and
comms. We've sustained serious damage to a number of key
components. They'll take time to repair.'
'Details, please, Syb. How long? You saw that box too,
yeah?'
'I did see it, Tom, and I'm doing everything I can. Processing
systems here at Base One are coming back online
now. The satellite network is functioning at 30 per cent of
normal levels, but most of the damaged systems will be self-diagnosed
and repaired within three minutes. Comms are
down completely.'
'When will they be up?'
'Insufficient data for an accurate evaluation.'
'Sybil, please. Ballpark.'
'An hour.'
'Shit – can you open the box, the file?'
'It's on your screen.'
A schematic appeared on Tom's screen. It was a low-grade,
2D representation of the CCC. A light flashed close to the
ramp on B6. It was the bomb. To one side of the screen Tom
could see a digital timer – minutes, seconds. On the far right,
tenths of seconds flashing past faster than he could follow
them. It was obviously the countdown for the detonation.
As he stared, the first number clicked down.
The bomb would go off in seven minutes.
Mai lifted the roller-door and stared at Josh in horror. He
had taken his helmet off and his face was covered with sweat
and dirt. Blood was running from his nose. Senator Foreman
looked far worse. His shirt was in shreds, the oxygen mask
was splattered with blood and oil, and his hair was slick with
mess. He was clutching a piece of rag to his left arm, which
was red raw. They limped in and collapsed against the wall.
Mai knelt beside Foreman and gently removed the rag.
His arm was a swathe of red and yellow, the skin blistered.
Pieces of shirt material and rag clung to the sticky wounds.
Mai opened her med-kit and found a small plastic bottle.
She wetted a ball of cotton wool and gently wiped at the
acid burns on the senator's arm. He winced and she stopped
for a moment.
'Hold still,' she said, and she plucked a small metal
cylinder from a holder inside the med kit.
'What's that?'
'It's a Vasjet.' She pushed one end against a clear patch
of flesh on his arm and depressed a small button at the
other end of the cylinder. 'A needle-less injection. It sends a
narrow beam of atomised liquid through your skin and the
wall of the nearest blood vessel.'
'That's fantastic,' Foreman replied.
A second later, a blend of anaesthetic and antibiotic began
to circulate around the senator's body. A few moments more
and the anaesthetic kicked in, numbing the agony in his
arm. Mai returned to cleaning the wounds.
'I can feel it working already,' Foreman added in
astonishment.
'Mai, is your suit up?' Josh asked.
'Negative. Went off about two minutes ago.'
'Mine too. Comms?'
She shook her head.
'Marvellous. How's Mr Gardiner?'
'Not good,' Mai replied. 'I've made him as comfortable as
possible, but I can't do a lot with just this med-kit.'
'So what's the situation out there?' Dave asked.
Foreman glanced up. 'Useless. No chance of getting out
that way.'
Dave looked down, his eyes screwed up tight.
'What about the assassin?' Mai asked, dabbing at Foreman's
blistered skin.
'Oh, we had a little tête-à-tête with the Dragon,' the
senator said, looking up.
'Yeah, really nice guy,' Josh added. He walked over to the
roller-door and pulled it down. 'I think the only chance we
have is to get out the way we came in. We'll have to get into
the tunnel and try to find a way through the obstruction.'
'Mark said it was at least 30 feet thick.'
'Yes, but he also said he was taking a Mole down there.
We won't last five minutes out in the car park. If the fumes
don't get us, the fires will.'
'What about Pete?'
'We have no idea where he is, Mai,' Josh said, a tint of
desperation in his voice. 'With the comms down . . .'
'Yeah, you're right.'
'What about Marty?' Dave asked, looking up.
Josh strode to the back corner of the room, where there
was still a pile of unused tablecloths. 'Dave, look in the
corridor for a couple of lengths of metal, about so long.' He
stretched his arms out. 'Failing that, look in the next open
room. Make it quick.'
'Josh, you need those wounds looked at,' Mai said.
He waved her away. 'I'll live,' he said. He tossed the
tablecloths onto the floor.
Pete eyed the flames beyond the window. It was starting
to warm up in the Bullet. He glanced at his watch. Two
minutes and the air would be burning his throat. Thirty
seconds more and he'd be dead. He sat as still as possible,
conserving his energy. 'Well, this is not the way I thought it
would end,' he said aloud, laughing bitterly.
He thought back to all the dangerous situations he
had been in during his career. He remembered GWII, the
minefield a mile outside Basra. The armoured car ahead of
his had hit a mine, sending the vehicle ten feet off the road,
then they had come under attack from snipers. Four of his
men had died in the blast and another had an arm blown
off by shrapnel, but Pete had walked away untouched. Then
there was Afghanistan and the incident that had seen him
and the army go their separate ways. He should have died
then, but he hadn't.
Tom hit the control panel of his laptop and winced at
the ripple of pain that shot along his arm. 'Sybil, we need
comms.
Now
!'
'I understand, Tom, but that's a negative. I can't repair the
network any faster than it's doing itself.'
Tom looked away from the holoscreen and stared at the
wall. He suddenly felt completely useless. Back there in that
alternate reality he had been empowered. He had functioning
legs again, he could walk, he could run. Now, here in this
dense, clumsy world of solid matter and the more prosaic
laws of physics, he could do nothing. He couldn't even use
his phenomenal intelligence. Every avenue was blocked.
I
might as well be living twenty years in the past
, he thought,
not twenty years in the future
. All this wonderful technology
at their fingertips and yet they were no better off than they
had been before the invention of the internet – before
radio, even.
'That's it!' Tom exclaimed. He looked back at the holoscreen,
his face alight with hope. 'I'm a freakin' genius!'
Out in the corridor the fumes were far worse than they had
been even a few minutes earlier. Dave had an E-Force oxygen
mask clamped to his face. He was breathing deeply, but the
acrid gases settling on his skin were burning and itching.
There was no sign of anything like the metal poles he was
looking for on the floor of the corridor. He ran on ten yards
and reached a roller-door. He pulled at it but realised it was
locked. Crossing the corridor, he tried the first door on that
side, but it was locked too. Then he saw a narrow cupboard
door next to the shutter. Trying the handle, he found that it
too was locked. He stood back and ran at the door, crashing
into it with his shoulder. It shook but held fast. Then he
kicked the lock with the flat of his boot. The wood shattered.
One more kick and it swung inwards.
Dave had got lucky. Propped against the wall, he could
see what looked like lengths of scaffolding for a lighting
rig. Four of the poles were at least ten feet long, but after
moving these to one side with his good arm, he found what
he was looking for, a set of cross pieces about five feet long.
He grabbed the first two, tucked them under his arm and
headed back to the corridor.
Mai opened the roller-door and pulled it closed as soon
as Dave was inside. She had been binding Josh's dislocated
fingers with tape, and returned to finish the job and give him
a shot of painkiller. Dave and Foreman set to work knotting
together tablecloths. Dave laid the two poles on the floor
and the two of them tied the cloth to the metal struts to
create a makeshift stretcher.
'We'd better get going,' Dave said. 'The air out there is
really nasty.'
Foreman and Mai lifted Marty onto the stretcher while
Dave held up his drip. Then Mai clamped the last of the
oxygen masks to her face and checked Marty's vital signs.
Josh pulled up the shutter and led the way out. They made
slow progress. The floor of the corridor was slippery and
strewn with detritus. From the car park came the omnipresent
orange glow of fire.
At the end of the passage they turned right, the beams from
Mai's and Josh's torches scything through the cloying air.
The fabric of their suits protected them from the condensing
fumes, but the strips of skin between the edge of the oxygen
masks and the necks of their suits tingled from the burning
acid.
The main corridor was black with smoke. The torch beams
fought the dark but it was impossible to see more than a few
feet ahead. A dozen paces along the corridor they turned
right. Ahead they could see closed shutters on each side of
the passageway. Close to the end, on the right, was the roller-door
to B63. Dave put the drip onto the stretcher beside
Marty and knelt down. Using his good arm, he tugged on
the shutter rim and pulled it up. Mai backed into the room
and they lowered the stretcher to the floor.
In the far wall they could see the hole they had come
through earlier. Taking deep breaths from their oxygen
reservoirs, they made for the opening.