Earthfall (27 page)

BOOK: Earthfall

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‘I’d just like to point out this was all his idea,’ Adam said, rolling his eyes. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘I kind of assumed that was the case,’ Sam said. ‘It has the feel of a Jay plan.’

‘What you trying to say?’ Jay said with mock indignation.

‘How are you two healing up?’ Sam asked. Jay’s wrist was in plaster and Adam’s arm was in a sling while his shoulder wound healed.

‘I’m getting there. It’s still sore, but Stirling says it’s getting better,’ Adam said.

‘Good.’ Sam had been worried about Adam. Kate’s death had hit him particularly hard. That was part of the reason he’d asked Jay to hang out with him and try to cheer him up a bit.

‘We’ll both be back fighting fit before you know it, and then we are gonna kick some Void ass,’ Jay said with a grin.

‘Good to know,’ Sam said. ‘I’m just going to see Stirling. I’ll run your . . . erm . . . accommodation plans past him and see what he thinks.’

‘Cool,’ Jay said. ‘Say “Hi” to the Doc and your girlfriend for us, yeah?

‘She’s not my girlf—’ Sam trailed off as the other two boys walked away, laughing. He walked inside the Voidborn structure towards Fletcher’s old office at the machine’s heart. Stirling looked up from the printouts he was examining and smiled.

‘Hello, Sam,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I just wanted to check in and see if you’d made any progress in working out what that thing in there was doing,’ Sam said, gesturing to the door that led to the giant cavern housing the mysterious machine.

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ Stirling said. ‘Obviously, it was a drilling rig of some sort, but why the Voidborn needed one on quite such a massive scale is still something of a mystery. We have made one interesting discovery, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’

Stirling walked through the door into the drilling chamber with Sam right behind him. The Servant was standing on the platform next to the giant machine, inspecting an open panel.

‘Hello,’ Sam said as he joined her on the platform.

‘Greetings, Illuminate,’ the Servant said with a nod. ‘How may I be of service to you?’

‘I was just coming to see what progress you and Doctor Stirling have made in working out what this thing is,’ Sam said.

‘Our analysis remains incomplete, Illuminate,’ the Servant replied.

‘So I hear,’ Sam said, turning to Stirling. ‘So what
have
you found?’

‘Up there,’ Stirling said, pointing at a long tube on top of the main drilling machine. ‘At first I thought it was just part of the drill, but on closer inspection it appears to be some form of launcher.’

‘They were planning to fire something into the hole?’ Sam asked.

‘It looks like it, but I have no idea what. There’s nothing loaded in the launcher and the Servant’s inventory of the Mothership has not turned up anything that looks like it might be a suitable projectile. It’s rather puzzling.’

‘Worrying, I’d say.’ Sam walked back down the stairs and along the walkway. He looked into the giant hole that the beam had bored into the Earth’s crust. At the very bottom, hundreds of metres below him, he could just make out rocks still glowing red, despite the fact that the beam had been deactivated several days ago. It looked like an angry wound, which he supposed was exactly what it was.

‘How are you feeling?’ Stirling asked, as he came and stood alongside Sam. He gestured at Sam’s metallic hand. ‘Any side effects I should be worried about?’

‘No, I’m fine,’ Sam said. ‘It’s a bit weird being able to do this, of course.’ He held up his hand and his fingertips extended into razor-sharp claws before smoothly returning to normal.

‘Yes, I can see how that might take some getting used to,’ Stirling said with a smile.

‘Have you made any progress with working out what exactly the Servant is?’

‘Not as much as I would like,’ Stirling replied. ‘She doesn’t know herself. She knows her name and that she is to obey the Illuminate, and she knows that’s you, but that’s the limit of her knowledge when it comes to her background. We all saw the Voidborn’s reaction to the nanites in your blood. Whoever or whatever the Illuminate is, it is frightened of it. As far as I can tell, she’s identical to the Voidborn; she’s a sentient non-organic life form that is made up of billions of nano-particles that form a distributed consciousness. Like the Voidborn she is as much the Mothership above us as she is the figure you see standing before you; they are indivisible. It’s hard to believe that at the same time as examining the machine over there she is also controlling the Mothership and the actions of all of the Hunters and Grendels in the city. Distributed digital consciousness. That’s how the Voidborn can travel between the stars – to a digital being the vast timescales involved are meaningless. They’re not like us fragile organics with our fleeting lives. She is fundamentally identical to a Voidborn but for the fact that she obeys you without question. It is ironic that the Voidborn enslaved humanity and that now perhaps our greatest chance of fighting back against them lies with one of their own who has in turn been in some ways enslaved. How and why the nanites in your bloodstream had that effect on the Voidborn, I have no idea. I fear that the only person who can answer that question is your father. If there truly was something alien, something neither human nor Voidborn built into the nanites, then I have no idea what it was or where he got it from.’

‘More unanswered questions,’ Sam said. ‘Just what I need. Listen, I’m going to go and give Jack and Liz a hand with getting this dormitory ready. Let me know if you make any progress.’

‘I will,’ Stirling said. He watched Sam leave and suddenly realised how right Robert Jackson had been in his assessment of the boy. He might be young, but there could be no doubt he was a born leader and that was something the world desperately needed right now.

Sam walked out of the Voidborn facility and saw the sun rising over the rooftops to the east. This victory might be short-lived, the Voidborn might sweep down upon them at any moment and retake London, but at least now they had a fighting chance. He looked across the compound at the dormitory that was nearing completion and then up at the giant Mothership hovering far above him.

‘Let them come,’ Sam said to himself as he watched the sun climb into the sky. ‘We’ll be waiting.’

By Mark Walden

In the H.I.V.E. series

Higher Institute of Villainous Education

Overlord Protocol

Escape Velocity

Dreadnought

Rogue

Zero Hour

Aftershock

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in June 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc