Aftershock (14 page)

‘Are you guys in position?’ Nigel said, speaking into his Blackbox.

‘Ready,’ Tom replied after a moment.

‘I am being ready too,’ Franz said.

‘OK,’ Nigel replied, ‘now we wait for Otto’s signal.’

Otto lay on his belly inside the ventilation shaft, looking down through the grille into the room below. He was suddenly very glad that he didn’t suffer from vertigo – the floor was a good fifty metres below them. He reached over his shoulder and unzipped the side pocket of his backpack, pulling out a small steel multi-tool. He unfolded a screwdriver blade from the tool and set to work quickly unscrewing the mountings that held the grille in place. He pulled the loose grille free and handed it back to Wing. There was an ominous creaking sound from somewhere overhead.

‘You are sure this shaft is strong enough to support us all, aren’t you, Otto?’ Laura whispered from somewhere behind Wing.

‘Define sure,’ Otto said, sliding forward and popping his head through the hole in the floor of the shaft.

‘Oh, great,’ Laura sighed.

Otto scanned the room beneath them. This was H.I.V.E.mind’s primary data hub and as such was one of the most sensitive and well-secured locations in the entire school. Thick translucent cables pulsing with blue light led down from the ceiling in the centre of the brightly lit room and into a central column. Beneath the hub more cables led down to the floor far below and fanned out to an array of black monoliths arranged in concentric circles. These black slabs were H.I.V.E.mind’s storage cores and inside one of them was the data that they wanted. There was just one small catch. A metre above the tops of the storage cores was what, from Otto’s position far above, looked like a sheet of sparkling blue light. It was actually quite beautiful, a fact which concealed its true purpose. What it actually was, Otto had discovered during the planning of the operation, was a fine mesh of high-powered argon lasers that would instantly vaporise anything that touched it. Its main purpose was to stop anything that fell from above damaging the precious storage cores but it also served as a highly effective security system. That wasn’t the only problem. Positioned at regular intervals just above the gantry that ran round the circular walls of the room were a dozen sentry devices with mounted Sleeper pulse guns. They would track the thermal signature of anyone entering the hub without the proper clearance and neutralise them. The fact that the entire room was chilled to just above freezing point in order to keep the hub’s processors cool would make any such thermal signatures incredibly easy to spot. It was figuring out how to get past these systems, and not Wing’s snoring, that had kept Otto awake at night.

‘OK, Laura,’ Otto said, ‘signal Nigel once we’re in position. Wing, Shel, fire up your suits. Time to go.’

Otto pointed the grappler unit mounted on the forearm of his suit at the top of the ventilation shaft above the opening and fired. The metal dart punched through the thin wall of the shaft and clamped on. Otto activated his thermoptic camouflage system and carefully slid forward, lowering himself into the opening. The heads-up display in his mask started a five-minute countdown. The suits that they’d borrowed from the storage room were obsolete, first-generation units which meant that they only had enough battery power to run the camouflage systems for five minutes at a time. While they were active Otto, Wing and Shelby would be effectively invisible not only to the naked eye but also to the thermal sensors on the sentry guns. None of them wanted to still be in this room when that countdown expired. The incredibly thin line spooled out from the grappler unit as Otto descended towards the glittering blue laser field. Above him, first Wing and then Shelby dropped through the opening and began their own careful descents. Otto slowed his descent and pointed the grappler on his other arm at the gantry that led to the column in the centre of the room. He fired a second line and slowly reeled himself over towards the gantry. He caught hold of the railing and climbed over on to the walkway leading to the central hub before releasing and retracting his two grappler lines. He hurried over to one of the control panels mounted in the column and pulled a metal box with a small aerial from his backpack.

Above them, Laura watched as her friends moved into position. The computer-assisted optics in the helmet of her own suit allowed her to see them despite the fact that they were currently invisible to the naked eye. Once Otto was all set and Wing and Shelby were positioned just above the laser net, she hit the button on her Blackbox to signal Nigel.

‘Go ahead,’ Nigel replied on the other end.

‘We’re ready,’ Laura said quickly. ‘Time to turn out the lights.’

In the Power Core cavern Nigel hit the series of switches as Laura and Otto had drilled him. It would have been much simpler to just cut the power supply to the entire school but that would have been too obvious. This would be the first place that the security teams would be dispatched to and without power the four of them would be trapped inside this chamber just waiting for the guards to turn up. They had to be subtler than that.

‘OK, Penny,’ Nigel said, ‘when I say, throw that switch.’

Penny nodded and placed her hand on the bright red switch in the centre of the console on the opposite side of the room. Nigel placed his Blackbox on the control panel and used it to signal Franz and Tom.

‘OK, guys, here we go,’ Nigel said, his hand hovering over a green button. ‘Three, two, one, now!’

H.I.V.E.mind knew something was wrong. All of the system diagnostics that he had run had come back clear. None of H.I.V.E.’s security systems were reporting anything strange but he could not shake off the feeling that there was something he was missing. If he were human he would probably have called it a hunch but, as he found he was having to remind himself more and more frequently, he was not human. Once upon a time he would have relied upon the simple facts that the diagnostics were reporting to him but ever since he had shared consciousnesses with Otto he had found himself more prone to this erratic behaviour. He floated through the data structures of the school, searching for the files he wanted. He quickly found the correct location and began to stream the raw footage from the school’s surveillance network. All was as it should be, the only signs of life were the security guards conducting their regular patrols. H.I.V.E.mind froze the image of one of the guards walking past. There was something about it that was not quite right. He was just beginning to study the image in higher definition when suddenly everything went black.

‘There it goes,’ Laura said as the automated signal, alerting security that H.I.V.E.mind was down, flashed across H.I.V.E.’s network. She watched as the Hackbox intercepted the signal and deleted it. They didn’t have long – the majority of H.I.V.E.’s systems would automatically switch to the school’s lower-level computer systems but sooner or later someone would make a direct enquiry to H.I.V.E.mind and then they would have only minutes before they figured out what had happened.

‘Nigel, H.I.V.E.mind’s down,’ Laura said into her Blackbox. ‘Cut the power to the laser net.’

In the chamber below the lethal blue field flickered for an instant and then vanished. Shelby and Wing dropped to the floor and reeled in their grappler lines. On the gantry above them Otto closed his eyes and placed a hand on the control panel mounted in the central column and reached out with his abilities for the storage cores below. Inside his head he flew through the vast fields of data that were stored in the black monoliths. Under other circumstances he would have taken this opportunity to delve deep into the secrets of H.I.V.E. but they didn’t have time for that now. Now he had to find the maintenance controls for the storage units. He raced through the network, scanning the control systems at an inhuman speed until he found what he was looking for. The instant that H.I.V.E.mind was shut down he would have performed an emergency core dump. Everything that was in his active memory at that instant would have been copied to secure physical storage somewhere in this room. Otto accessed the maintenance controls and opened the core containing the correct drive.

‘It’s open,’ Otto yelled from the gantry. ‘Wing, Shelby, get going.’

Wing and Shelby ran in opposite directions, scanning the surfaces of the dozens of jet black slabs for the storage unit. Up on the gantry Otto watched the battery timer in his HUD drop below three minutes.

‘Come on, guys,’ Otto muttered under his breath. ‘It’s got to be down there somewhere.’

Shelby sprinted past the monoliths, looking for anything unusual. Suddenly something caught her eye. Protruding slightly from the surface of one of the slabs was a smaller black cube.

‘Got it!’ Shelby yelled, sliding the cube fully out of the slab and shoving it into her pocket. She looked upwards and aligned the laser sight on her grappler with the opening in the ventilation shaft far overhead and fired. The dart rocketed upwards, trailing its monofilament cable, and struck home, securing itself within the ventilation shaft. Shelby shot upwards off the floor, flying past the gantry where Otto was standing and up into the ventilation shaft.

‘Present for you,’ Shelby said with a grin, handing Laura the black cube as she climbed inside the shaft.

‘Great,’ Laura said. ‘This won’t take long.’ She attached a series of self-adhesive pads to the surface of the cube and hooked them up to cables dangling from the back of the Hackbox.

‘I still don’t understand why we don’t just get Otto to do that with his electronic voodoo,’ Shelby said as she watched Laura urgently punching commands into the Hackbox.

‘Because he’d leave digital fingerprints all over it,’ Laura replied, staring at the tiny display. ‘The moment that H.I.V.E.mind is brought back online he’ll be restored from the data in this cube. He’d know instantly if Otto had accessed it. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really understand it myself, but Otto assures me that H.I.V.E.mind would know. It’s something to do with this bond they’ve developed.’