Rogue (8 page)

‘I’m not sure he has that long.’ She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood.’

‘He’s strong, Natalya,’ Nero said, placing a hand on her arm. ‘If anyone has the sheer will to survive, it’s him. How are you?’ Nero asked, gesturing at the deep gash in her shoulder.

‘I’ll live,’ Raven replied. ‘Whoever that woman was, she is as capable as anyone I’ve ever encountered. I don’t think I could have stopped her without your help. Her armour was immune to my blades and . . . well . . . I just wasn’t strong enough.’

‘You have been on a tough assignment for weeks and just survived an assassination attempt,’ Nero said, shaking his head. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself.’

‘That is no excuse,’ Raven said, frowning. ‘Next time I will be better prepared.’

‘Regardless, that is not our most serious problem,’ Nero said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The failure of the security system, the hijacking of the Shroud’s flight control systems, the very fact that H.O.P.E. knew exactly when and where to hit us . . . I’m afraid it all points to one thing.’

‘Otto,’ Raven said quietly. ‘You think he was there.’

‘I’m sure of it,’ Nero said, sounding suddenly tired. ‘I’m afraid it just highlights what a danger to us he has become.’

‘It still does not justify what Diabolus did,’ Raven replied. ‘You know as well as I do that the order he gave cannot be countermanded. Every G.L.O.V.E. kill team on the planet will be looking for him now.’

‘Which is why we have to find him first,’ Nero said with a sigh.

.

Chapter Four

Laura stared at the display on the desk. Shelby had gone to bed an hour ago, but Laura knew she’d find it impossible to sleep with the mystery of what was causing the systems malfunctions rattling around inside her head. It made no sense that the network’s storage capacity was dropping but that no new data was taking up that space. She tapped at the keyboard, pulling up another screen of diagnostics. She knew that the strange events had started a few months ago, so she started to run a byte by byte comparison of all the files on the system from that approximate date forward. She was not surprised to find that many of the file sizes had changed over that period, but suddenly something struck her as odd. Of the huge numbers of archived files that she did not have the right permissions to access, at least some were showing file size mismatches that made no sense. These were old files, files that had apparently not been called up in years, and yet some of them were showing tiny increases in size. These were the ones that caught her attention. All she could do was pull the dates on which they’d last been modified. Almost immediately she started to see a pattern emerge. The tiny increases in file size had happened at the exact same times as the system glitches. She checked again, wanting to be sure of what she’d found.

Laura got up and hit the button to leave the room, but the buzz from the door quickly reminded her that the accommodation blocks were in night-time lockdown. She pulled her Blackbox communicator from the pocket of her jumpsuit and placed a call to Professor Pike. The screen flashed the single word ‘connecting’ for a few seconds and then the Professor’s face appeared on the screen. From what she could see of the background, he was still in the computer core.

‘It’s very late, Miss Brand. I hope this is something important,’ the Professor said.

‘Aye, Professor, I think it might be,’ Laura said. ‘I think I know where our phantom data is hiding.’

The Shroud touched down in H.I.V.E.’s crater landing bay, and the medical team that had been waiting at the edge of the pad rushed forward as the engines spun to a halt. Nero hurried down the landing ramp at the rear of the aircraft and ushered the team inside. Barely a minute later the medics wheeled a gurney back down the ramp with Darkdoom’s pale, unconscious body on it. Dr Scott, H.I.V.E.’s chief medical officer, walked alongside the stretcher, looking at a portable screen which was displaying the wounded man’s vitals. Judging by his face, the doctor was not happy with what he saw.

‘Prep him for immediate surgery,’ he said.

Nero walked back down the Shroud’s ramp and watched the medical team leave, knowing that now was not the time to interfere.

‘He’s in good hands, Max,’ Raven said.

‘I know,’ Nero replied, ‘but that’s not all I’m worried about.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Word of the attack on Diabolus is bound to leak out. You saw what the atmosphere was like in the council meeting. The one thing that G.L.O.V.E. does not need now is a power vacuum, and I fear that Trent is perfectly aware of that.’

‘You think that the council will move to replace him?’

‘It is not beyond the realms of possibility,’ Nero said with a sigh. ‘They are a group of people not known for their patience, and I fear that some among the council will see this as a perfect opportunity to stake their claim.’

Raven did not want to believe that was true, but then she had never been particularly interested in the politics and power games that the senior members of G.L.O.V.E. got up to behind the scenes. She was more the practical, problem-solving or, more accurately, problem-eliminating type.

Nero saw Professor Pike and Laura Brand hurrying across the landing pad towards them, and he tried to put concerns over Diabolus’s condition and what it meant for G.L.O.V.E. to one side. He had a school to run too.

‘Professor, Miss Brand,’ Nero said with a nod of acknowledgement as they approached, ‘is there something I can do for you?’

‘I believe Laura has made a breakthrough in solving what is going wrong with the school’s systems,’ the Professor said quickly.

‘I see,’ Nero said. ‘Is it something that can wait until the morning?’ Nero would never admit it in front of one of his pupils, but it had been a very long day and he needed to get at least a few hours’ sleep. An aura of inhuman endurance could be a difficult thing to maintain at times.

‘No, I don’t think it can,’ Professor Pike said, shaking his head. ‘We may be running out of time.’

‘What happened?’ Trent said angrily, looking through the thick glass at the technicians and medics gathered around Otto’s unconscious body.

‘We’re not sure,’ Dr Creed replied nervously. ‘His biometric readings looked fine and then suddenly his neural activity went off the charts. A few moments later the Animus fluid became temporarily inert, almost as if it was shut down.’

‘You assured me that Animus was immune to these sorts of problems,’ Trent replied, sounding impatient.

‘It is – well, it should be,’ Creed replied. ‘We know that Animus was probably conceived as an organic computer system that would be immune to any form of electronic disruption, specifically the electromagnetic pulse that accompanies a nuclear detonation. That’s the beauty of an organic supercomputer – it is self-replicating and self-repairing. In theory, even if only a tiny amount of the fluid survives an attempt to destroy it, the whole system will be able to rebuild itself. I would love to meet its original designer.’

‘I’m afraid that will not be possible. He died some time ago,’ Trent replied.

‘The nano-technology alone is a quantum leap ahead of anything anyone else has been able to achieve. We are still years away from being able to create nanites that allow even limited movement or such rapid replication. With it as fully integrated and in the boy’s nervous system as it is now, he should be entirely subject to our control . . . programmable.’

‘I know all of this, Doctor, and none of it explains what happened today,’ Trent said. ‘The boy is too valuable an asset for this sort of failure. I need to be sure that he is reliable.’

‘I understand,’ Creed replied. ‘Rest assured that my team and I will be working around the clock to fix this.’

‘See that you do,’ Trent said coldly. ‘No mistakes, Creed. You would be a difficult, but not impossible, man to replace.’

‘Yes . . . sir,’ Creed replied, swallowing nervously.

Trent walked out of the medical bay with an irritated scowl on his face. The Malpense boy had to be operating at full efficiency. It was essential if he was going to continue with his mission to eliminate G.L.O.V.E. Without him they lost their penetration of G.L.O.V.E.’s communication network, which would make locating their targets next to impossible, given that they were a group of people who had made careers out of being difficult to find.

Ghost was waiting just outside the door and fell into step alongside Trent as he stalked away down the corridor.

‘Do they know what caused the boy to go off-mission yet?’ she asked as they walked.

‘No, but Creed assures me that it’s only a matter of time until they do,’ Trent said. ‘I take it that you experienced no such problems.’

‘My implants functioned perfectly,’ she replied, ‘but it would not have mattered that Malpense did not carry out his mission correctly if I had succeeded in mine.’

‘Nero was never going to be an easy target, especially with his trained attack dog in tow,’ Trent pointed out.

‘I had her,’ Ghost said, the frustration clear in her voice. ‘I would have finished her if it had not been for Nero’s intervention.’

‘Of course you would,’ Trent agreed. ‘That is, after all, what you were designed to do.’

‘She will not be so lucky next time,’ said Ghost, her hands clenching into fists.

‘I need to make a call,’ Trent said as they approached the door to his office. ‘You should start preparations for your next mission. I want to move as soon as Malpense has located our next target.’

Ghost gave a quick nod and strode away down the corridor. Trent smiled slightly. The truth of the matter was that he had been extremely pleased with her performance in Sydney. Despite the enhancements to her body, he had still had his doubts about whether it would be enough when she confronted someone as lethal and ruthless as Raven. As it was, she had exceeded his expectations, which was considerably more than he could say for Malpense.

He walked into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no decoration, in accordance with his usual tastes – just plain concrete walls and a single metal desk with a secure terminal. It was all he needed. He keyed in his encryption code and connected to the secure comms line. After a few seconds three digitally distorted faces appeared on the screen in front of him.

‘We have studied your report on the operation in Australia,’ the man on the left said. ‘A disappointing result.’

‘Yes,’ Trent replied, ‘but if Darkdoom isn’t already dead, he will at least be out of action for some time. His condition should serve to further increase the chaos within G.L.O.V.E. This is just a temporary setback. We should not lose sight of our long-term goals.’

‘That may well be,’ the woman on the right said, ‘but those long-term goals are dependent on the Malpense boy being a reliable asset. His failure on this mission is . . . troubling.’

‘You may assure the rest of the Disciples that we are urgently investigating the causes of his current condition. Doctor Creed assures me that he will soon have answers.’

‘The project depends on that,’ the man in the centre of the screen said. ‘If we truly are to honour the legacy of this group’s founder, we cannot afford any mistakes.’

‘I understand,’ Trent replied. ‘I will keep you apprised of the boy’s condition. In the meantime I will divert all H.O.P.E.’s resources to finding whatever rock Nero and Darkdoom have crawled under.’

‘It is somewhat frustrating that we have not yet been able to determine the precise location of the school,’ the woman on the screen said.

‘Nero has gone to an extraordinary amount of trouble to keep that facility hidden,’ Trent replied. ‘It is his greatest vulnerability, so it is perhaps not surprising that he has gone to such lengths. From what we have been able to determine, it would appear that not even the members of G.L.O.V.E.’s ruling council know exactly where it is.’

‘Surely Malpense must have some clue as to its location,’ the man on the left said.

‘Perhaps, but the Animus fluid keeps his conscious personality suppressed. To interrogate him I would have to reverse the process that allows us to control him. Doing that would be traumatic, perhaps even lethal. We all know he is too valuable for that.’

‘So what is the next step?’ the woman asked.

‘We continue with the disassembly of G.L.O.V.E. until Nero or Darkdoom breaks cover,’ Trent replied.

‘Agreed,’ the man on the left said.

‘Of course,’ the woman on the right agreed.

‘Let us hope we do not suffer any more unforeseen setbacks,’ the man in the centre said.

‘Do not worry,’ Trent said with a smile. ‘G.L.O.V.E. is finished. It’s only a matter of time.’