Rogue (13 page)

‘I need to get to the computer core,’ Laura said quietly. ‘The Professor might need my help.’

As if to reinforce Laura’s gut instinct, the lights in the ceiling flickered and went out. A few seconds later they came back on, but they were dimmer than before.

‘Wouldn’t we be better just waiting here?’ Shelby asked with a frown. ‘At least until we’ve got a better idea what’s going on.’

‘Have you noticed how warm it is in here?’ Laura asked.

‘Now that you mention it, it is getting a bit stuffy,’ Lucy said.

Laura walked across the dimly lit classroom and held her hand up to one of the vents mounted in the wall. There was nothing, not even the slightest breeze.

‘The ventilation system’s down,’ she said, now starting to get genuinely worried.

‘So we have to do without air-conditioning for a few hours,’ Shelby said. ‘No biggy.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Laura said quickly. ‘The ventilation system is part of the school’s low-level systems. It can’t be shut down just like that. If it’s failed, we could be looking at a cascade failure.’

‘And that’s a problem because . . .’ Lucy asked.

‘That’s a problem because the geothermal power plant is part of the same systems layer. If that fails, the volcano that we’re all sitting on top of might erupt. Things might be getting warm right now, but I have a horrible feeling that if someone can’t fix this, it’s going to get a whole lot hotter.’

Nero pounded on the heavy metal doors that sealed them inside Cypher’s cell. There was no response from the other side. He pulled his Blackbox from his pocket and looked at it again, hoping against hope that it might have come back to life since he’d last looked at it less than a minute before. The Overlord AI was trying to rebuild itself within the school’s computer system and he – the head of H.I.V.E. – was caught in this room like a rat in a trap.

‘Can you hack these doors?’ Nero asked the Professor.

‘No,’ the Professor said, finishing his examination of the walls surrounding the entrance. ‘It would hardly be an effective prison for someone like our guest over there if I could.’

Cypher sat on the bed, a deep frown on his face, as he continued to study the code that had been retrieved from H.I.V.E.’s network.

‘This is worse than I thought,’ he said eventually. ‘The pace of reconstruction on this code has increased exponentially over the last couple of days. No wonder you’ve been experiencing more system errors – Overlord could be just hours from activating. I’ve tried to trace the problem back to its source, but all I can determine is that the system was infiltrated by the seed code on this date.’ He handed the display to Nero.

‘This is just a couple of days after we returned to the school following our confrontation with Number . . . with Overlord,’ Nero said. ‘You mean to tell me that this code has been running on our network since then?’

‘Yes,’ Cypher replied with a sigh. ‘It would have been undetectable for months though. It is only during the final stages of the reconstruction that the code would have required a large enough portion of your processing resources to cause the systems problems you’ve been experiencing. I fear that it is no coincidence that we find ourselves trapped like this.’ Cypher gestured at the rocky walls that surrounded them. ‘Someone – or more accurately something – is trying to keep us from stopping the final stages of the reconstruction.’

‘We have to get out of here,’ Nero said angrily. ‘We’re the only ones who know what’s happening out there. Only we can stop this.’

‘Agreed,’ Cypher said, ‘but unless you happen to have heavy cutting equipment concealed somewhere about your person, it would seem that we are stuck here for the duration.’

‘Oh my goodness!’ the Professor said suddenly. ‘How stupid of me to forget. I have a key to this door.’

‘A key?’ Nero asked, sounding bemused. ‘What do you mean?’ The only way to unlock the door was via the retinal scanner, and that was out of action.

‘Well, not a key as such . . .’ the Professor said, reaching into one of the many pockets on his lab coat. He pulled out the block of plastic explosive that he had extracted from Nazim Khan’s laptop.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ Nero asked, staring at the small grey block in the Professor’s hand.

‘Yes, and it should be enough to get us out of here,’ the Professor said with a broad smile.

‘Do you make a habit of walking around with high explosives in your pocket?’ Nero asked, sounding slightly bemused.

‘Oh no . . . well, not very often anyway. I was planning to drop this off in one of the secure storage lockers, but I got rather distracted by our trip down here,’ the Professor replied.

‘Do I really need to point out that this is a rather small room?’ Cypher said, eyeing the block of C4 in the Professor’s hand warily.

‘Oh, we shouldn’t need to use all of it,’ the Professor said, frowning slightly. ‘The problem is that we don’t have a detonator.’

‘We could rig something with this,’ Cypher said, holding up the display panel he’d been studying.

‘Yes, of course, the battery should produce enough voltage to trigger a detonation,’ the Professor said happily. ‘And if I shape the explosive charge carefully enough, the blast should be largely directed at the door.’

‘Largely?’ Nero asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘Oh, it should be quite safe . . . erm . . . I think,’ said the Professor with a slightly nervous smile.

‘Do it,’ Nero said. ‘We have to get out of here now, and this looks like the only way.’

He watched as the Professor broke off half the block of plastic explosive and started to mould it by hand into a semi-cylindrical shape. He then placed the long tube along the seam down the middle of the steel doors, their weakest structural point.

Meanwhile Cypher ripped the back panel off the tablet display and pulled the long narrow battery free of the casing. Then he pulled the cable that led to the light beside his bed away from the wall and handed one end of it to the Professor, who inserted it into the charge on the door.

‘Help me with this,’ the Professor said to Nero, pointing to one of the heavy bookcases that lined the walls. Between them they clumsily manoeuvred it across the room and placed it in front of the door. With luck it would shield them from some of the blowback when detonation occurred.

‘Good,’ the Professor said, assessing their hurried handiwork. ‘Now I suggest we all take cover behind the bed.’ Nero and Cypher tipped the bed on to its side, and the three men all crouched down behind the limited protection that the mattress and bed frame provided.

‘Cover your ears and take a deep breath,’ the Professor said, holding the two exposed copper ends of the electrical cable over the battery terminals. Cypher and Nero did as instructed, and the Professor touched the cable to the terminals.

It felt like a giant hand had swatted the mattress they were hiding behind against the wall as the concussion wave from the explosion hit it. Nero was momentarily stunned, but quickly regained his composure and pushed the mattress off the three of them as the room filled with the smell of burnt paper. On the other side of the room there was nothing left of the bookcase except large jagged pieces of the dark wood embedded in the scorched mattress that had shielded them. Burning pages from the books that had filled it drifted slowly towards the floor. As the smoke slowly cleared Nero saw that the steel doors that had sealed them inside the room were twisted outwards, the blackened metal sufficiently deformed to make a hole just big enough for a man to crawl through.

‘Good job, Professor,’ Nero said, helping the older man up from the floor. ‘Are you all right?’

‘YES, IT WAS BRIGHT, WASN’T IT?’ the Professor shouted. ‘AND QUITE LOUD!’

Nero realised that detonating the device had not allowed the Professor time to protect his ears as he and Cypher had been able to.

‘We don’t have much time,’ Cypher said, coughing as he got slowly to his feet. ‘I suggest we get moving.’

Wing’s eyes opened as the Shroud’s landing gear hit the ground with a soft thud. He had not been sleeping, only meditating, and he was instantly alert to the sounds around him. He heard Raven come down the ladder and then move around the cabin for a minute or two. He could not decide whether he should reveal himself to her, now that they had apparently reached their destination, or if it would be best to follow her discreetly. But the choice had already been made for him.

‘You can come out now,’ Raven said. ‘Slowly, and keep your hands where I can see them.’

Wing stood up from his hiding place behind the equipment crates, his hands in the air. Raven had discarded her normal black leather outfit in favour of grey urban-camouflage combat trousers that were tucked into black military boots and a black vest. He was secretly rather pleased by the astonished look on her face.

‘What on earth are you doing here, Wing?’ Raven asked with a mixture of surprise and anger. She lowered the black-bladed sword, deactivating the purple energy field that surrounded it.

‘How did you know I was here?’ Wing asked, lowering his hands.

‘Elevated CO2 levels in the hold,’ Raven said, holding up the Blackbox in her other hand. ‘You can be as quiet as you like, but you still have to breathe. Now I’m going to ask you again – what are you doing here?’

‘I wish to offer my assistance,’ Wing replied. ‘And I did not believe that my offer would have been accepted while we were still at H.I.V.E.’

‘You were right about that,’ Raven said with a sigh. ‘I can’t take you with me. My . . . mission is much too dangerous.’

‘I know you are going after Otto,’ Wing said calmly, ‘and you know that I can help you.’

Raven stared back at him for a few long seconds and then sighed.

‘It’s going to be completely pointless arguing with you about this, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes,’ Wing replied with a tiny smile, ‘quite pointless.’

‘And if I leave you here, you’re only going to get into more trouble. I suppose I could just render you unconscious and handcuff you to a bulkhead,’ she said, raising an eyebrow.

‘You are welcome to
try
,’ Wing said calmly.

Raven considered her options. Nero would probably be furious with her if he knew that she was even contemplating taking the boy with her, but there was something in Wing’s eyes that told her he would not take no for an answer. Besides which, she had been personally responsible for much of his tactical training since he had arrived at H.I.V.E., and she knew that he was exceptionally capable for someone so young. For a moment she thought back to what she had been doing when she had been the same age as Wing, and she realised that there was really very little difference.

‘OK, you can come with me,’ Raven said with a slight frown, ‘but if you slow me down, I’m leaving you behind.’

‘I shall try not to be a burden,’ Wing said, bowing his head graciously.

‘We have to do something about that uniform though,’ she said. ‘You’ll stick out like a sore thumb.’ She looked him up and down for a moment, then reached into one of the kitbags on the floor and pulled out a pair of trousers identical to the ones she wore. She threw them to him.

‘Lucky for you I carry spares,’ she said, with a slight smile.

Wing unzipped his H.I.V.E. jumpsuit and placed it on one of the nearby seats, pulling on the trousers and putting his black uniform trainers back on. It was fortunate that he was almost as tall as Raven – the trousers were slightly too long on him, but otherwise they were a perfect fit. They were now dressed almost identically, the only difference being that the vest he had been wearing under his uniform was white. Raven picked up her twin swords and placed them carefully into a long kitbag, which she then slung over her shoulder. She picked up another identical bag from the floor and threw it to Wing.