Terminal (35 page)

‘On your feet,' the Limiter with the scythe growled at Danforth.

Danforth knew that when the young New Germanian arrived, they'd both be executed just as the Old Styx had instructed.

‘What is going on?' Captain Franz demanded, trying to straighten his chauffeur's hat as the Limiter prodded him in the back again. ‘Where is my Rebecca?'

Captain Franz stopped in front of Danforth.

‘She's not going to be able to help you now,' Danforth told him.

The New Germanian had that slightly befuddled expression that came of too many Darklighting sessions.

‘Fetch Rebecca! Right now!' Captain Franz ordered the Limiters. ‘This is all a mistake.'

Danforth took a deep breath before he spoke. ‘Save it. You won't get anywhere,' he said to the New Germanian. ‘These two pathetic excuses for troops can't think for themselves.' He smiled sourly at the Limiter nearest him, who had the scythe ready at his side. ‘You're nothing more than robots. I've known many professional soldiers in my time, and you don't come close.'

Danforth was silent for a beat, trying to gauge what effect his jibes were having, but the Limiter was impossible to read. The sunken eyes in the scarred face were simply watching him. ‘What's the matter? Need your bug lady to tell you what to do next?'

The Limiter with the scythe struck him across the face. Danforth dropped to the pavement, and although his glasses had been broken and there were flashes of light in his eyes, he couldn't believe his luck. The Limiter hadn't used his scythe.

Not yet, anyway.

‘You broke my tooth,' Danforth said, adopting a whining voice but cheering inside. He reached into his mouth and detached the false molar, palming it.

‘On your feet,' the Limiter with the scythe rumbled.

Although it was slippery with his blood and saliva, Danforth had just managed to press his thumbnail into the radio to activate it when the Limiter lashed out at him again.

The radio went flying.

Blast it!
Danforth thought.

The Limiter pointed at him with the blade. ‘Little man,
you've earned the right to die first.'

The Styx soldier took hold of Danforth's lapels and hoisted him to his feet with the one hand, the scythe poised in the other.

Captain Franz was mumbling something incomprehensible in German. It may have been a prayer.

The Limiter plunged his knife hand towards Danforth.

It happened so fast it was as though the Limiter had simply disappeared.

Danforth tottered on his feet and, squinting through his bloodied eyes, met Captain Franz's even more befuddled gaze. ‘Where'd he go?' he mumbled.

Then they both saw the Limiter.

He was stretched out on the far side of the road, without his head, his body mangled.

Despite Danforth's taunts to the contrary, Limiters were consummate professionals, and the other soldier wasn't fazed by the death of his comrade. He wasn't going to wait around for any explanations before he reacted. Moving on pure instinct, he swooped at Danforth and seized hold of him.

He may have been of thinking of using Danforth as a shield instead of killing him right away, but the Bright still struck, biting off a good part of the Limiter's face and neck. His head lolled to one side, a fountain of red spurting from his severed jugular. Then he simply folded to the ground at Danforth's feet.

‘
Was war das
?' Captain Franz cried, gaping up at the sky, although the Bright was now nowhere to be seen.

‘I have absolutely no idea,' Danforth said, retrieving his glasses. One lens was missing, but the other was still held in the frame, despite it being cracked. ‘And I'm not about to stick around to find out.'

There was a yelp from the corner. ‘Johan! What are you doing here?' Rebecca Two had come sprinting down the main road, but now slid to a halt as she spotted her beloved New Germanian.

‘Oh, Rebecca,' the New Germanian replied, looking shell-shocked as he held a limp hand out to her.

‘I thought something was wrong … I sensed it,' she said.

Danforth wasn't in the mood for any sentimentality.

For a small man, he still knew how to handle himself. Throwing his arm around Captain Franz's neck so he had him in a lock, Danforth pressed the Limiter scythe to the man's throat. Thinking it might come in useful, he'd retrieved the weapon at the same time as his spectacles. ‘Hold it!' he ordered Rebecca Two.

‘Okay – just please don't hurt him,' she implored Danforth, then spotted the Limiter's blood on Captain Franz's face. She went to take a step. ‘But what happened to you, Johan? You're bleeding.'

‘I'm warning you! Stay put!' Danforth said.

‘What did this man do to you?' she asked, throwing a furious glance at Danforth.

‘It's not my blood,' Captain Franz replied, before Danforth increased the stranglehold to stop the New Germanian from saying more.

‘You killed these Limiters,' Rebecca Two accused Danforth, but she didn't sound very sure of herself as she made out the headless body of the soldier across the road, and the other's lethal wounds.

‘Your men had orders to execute both of us,' Danforth told her.

‘Why?' she cried.

‘Isn't that a bit obvious? We're both superfluous humans,' Danforth replied. ‘Now I want you to keep your voice down, because you're coming with me.'

‘I am not,' Rebecca Two retorted.

‘You are if you want your boyfriend to live,' Danforth threatened. He dug the tip of the scythe into Captain Franz's throat.

‘No, don't! Please don't hurt him,' Rebecca Two implored Danforth. ‘I'll do what you say.'

‘And before we go, I need you to find something for me,' Danforth said. He peered at the middle of the road. ‘It looks like a tooth.'

‘A tooth?' Rebecca Two had just asked, when the ground under their feet shook and there was a cranium-rattling bang. The Rebecca twin was knocked from her feet by the blast, a huge cloud of dust billowing down the street towards her.

‘Dammit!' Danforth swore, glancing at Rebecca Two where she had fallen. ‘Looks like it's just you and me then, blondie,' he whispered into Captain Franz's ear.

‘Nein,
Rebecca,
nein, nein,'
the New Germanian was mumbling.

‘Don't get your knickers in a twist; I doubt that she's dead,' Danforth said, as he pushed Captain Franz into the road where he'd spotted his miniature radio. Once he'd retrieved it, Danforth gave Rebecca Two another glance. ‘Shame I can't take her with me. She'd have been an interesting subject for interrogation,' he said with regret.

Captain Franz was also looking at her with regret.
‘Nein, nein, nein,'
he was still mumbling, as Danforth frogmarched him quickly away.

‘There she blows,' Parry said, as the pictures from the cameras flickered from the explosion. As they settled down, the views
of what was left of GCHQ were obscured by palls of dust and smoke. The detonation had been timed for the moment the stream of Armagi finished their aerial entry and were inside the installation, and searching in vain for anyone to kill.

‘So zero fatalities on our side?' Eddie asked.

‘I sincerely hope so. It was evacuated some weeks ago, except of course for the skeleton staff needed to keep up the appearance that it was business as usual,' Parry replied. ‘And they should have escaped through the underground evacuation tunnels – there are several of th—'

‘Sir,' one of the soldiers manning a laptop cut in. ‘We've just received a burp from Danforth. He's asking to be extracted. And he says he's got a hostage with him.'

‘The rest of you pack up your kit! We're moving out now!' Parry ordered, as he went over to the soldier. ‘Okay, where did Danforth say he was?' he asked.

Hermione and the Old Styx had been fortunate. They'd been tucked well into the side of the street when the blast hit, but it had still thrown both of them to the ground.

Hermione was laughing as the air began to clear and she saw what little remained of GCHQ. The Doughnut had been reduced to a pile of rubble, the few parts of it still standing enveloped in flames. ‘So they planted charges and waited for us to turn up, then blew the whole place … is that the best that the poor little flesh bags can come up with?' she said.

‘They saved us the effort of demolishing it,' the Old Styx said, gazing at what was left.

Hermione had stopped laughing and was instead making a clucking sound as she noticed how much dust had settled on her coat. ‘Although it pains me to lose some of my children,
they're Armagi, and there are just so very many of them now,' she said, as she began to pat her coat down, using her human limbs for the front and her insect ones for the back. ‘It's not the same as when they took my Warriors from me. The humans only made things worse for themselves when they changed the game.'

‘Yes, and they haven't quite realised that anything they attempt now is futile,' the Old Styx agreed, nodding. ‘It's too late for them.'

But Hermione wasn't listening. She'd stopped brushing her coat, and there was a sadness in her eyes. ‘But I will never
ever
forgive Will Burrows and the rest of them for slaughtering my Warrior Class – my true children – in that warehouse,' she said in a low, smouldering voice.

The Old Styx had his mind on more pressing matters. Now the smoke and dust was clearing, he'd been glancing at the street around them, and a frown had appeared on his normally expressionless face. ‘But where did Rebecca go?' he asked.

 

 

 

Chapter Sixteen

^‘
W
hoop! – there we go again,' Chester said, switching on the window wipers as pieces of Armagi and the liquid that coursed through their veins splattered the windscreen for the umpteenth time.

He'd been driving like a lunatic, not easing off on the speed even when the motorway was full of obstacles. On several occasions he'd clipped discarded vehicles in the way, almost losing control of the four-by-four and weaving all over the road because he'd been going so fast. And each time there had been a collision, he'd laughed it off, although Martha looked petrified as, sitting beside him, she hung on to her seatbelt for dear life. And Stephanie didn't allow herself a moment's rest, because if they were about to crash, she wanted to be ready for it.

They'd had a welcome respite from the journey when they'd stopped to heat up some cans of food. But before they'd eaten, Martha had wandered off. Stephanie spotted her at the top of a small hill, where she seemed to be simply staring at the sky. When Martha finally returned, she told Chester that she'd learnt from the Brights that ‘nasty man' was on the move, but they were still going in the right direction to reach
him. And she said that a Bright would be remaining with him at all times, to continue to track his movements.

Despite what she'd told Chester, Stephanie had no idea how Martha could learn this from these large moth-like creatures that rarely seemed to stop zipping around the place. Chester didn't seem to be very interested in this piece of news, instead keeping a whole can of baked beans with cocktail sausages to himself, while Stephanie had to share the second can with Martha.

And then, after Chester had topped up the tank with diesel, they were off again. For once the stretch of motorway ahead was relatively clear, so it didn't matter that Chester had his foot down.

But after more pieces of Armagi had showered down over them, Martha kept craning her neck to peer up at the sky through the front windscreen. ‘They're getting tired,' she said eventually.

Chester didn't reply, instead rocking his head from side-to-side as if he was listening to a piece of music that only he could hear. And he made no effort to slow the car. ‘You know, dearie, they can't keep this up all day,' Martha tried again. ‘They need to rest just like us.'

Chester began to fiddle with the controls of the air conditioning, turning it up and angling the vent so that the breeze was blowing full in his face and ruffling his air. ‘Getting a bit hot in here,' he said.

What he didn't say was that the combination of the warm fug in the vehicle and Martha's lack of hygiene was particularly unpleasant. Stephanie had been shouted at by Chester and Martha when she'd opened her window in the back because they said it was too dangerous. And any benefit from the air conditioning was minimal where she was sitting. So
instead, she'd fished out her bottle of perfume from the wash bag in her Bergen and had been taking the top off to sniff it from time to time, to give herself a momentary relief from the smell. She'd gone so far as to pour a drop or two on her scarf, but this elicited such scathing looks from Martha that she didn't dare do it again.

‘If we don't slow down and take it more gently, one of my fairies will be killed by those Armagi,' Martha said. There was no answer from Chester, who wobbled his head again, his mouth puckered as if in a silent whistle.