1.4 (22 page)

‘You really should have questioned this one, Mrs Vincent.

I suspect that this time he’s gone one better than killing off the bees. This time he might just have killed us all.’

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My mother looked at Alpha like she was genuinely seeing her for the first time. Her belief in what she was doing had suddenly melted away. Then her face hardened.

‘How do we stop it?’ I demanded.

‘Stop it?’ my mother looked aghast. ‘Peter, you can’t.’ ‘What I can’t do is trust that things will turn out the way you
hope
they will,’ I told her.

‘It’s too late.’

‘It hasn’t happened yet, Mrs Vincent,’ Alpha said. ‘So it CAN’T be too late. How do we stop it?’

My mother looked dazed, and I felt a moment’s pity for her.

‘The computers . . .’ she said, ‘. . . the neural forest . . . it’s a big circuit . . .’

‘How do we disrupt it?’

‘There’s no time . . .’

‘HOW DO WE DISRUPT IT?’

‘The computers . . .’

‘We destroy them?’

My mother stared back at me. I shook my head in frustration.

‘If we destroy the computer, will it stop this from happening?’ I demanded.

‘I – I don’t know.’ she looked lost. ‘David is controlling the whole thing . . . the neural interface . . .’

Alpha said: ‘She must mean the squid-like wires that he was applying to his head.’

I nodded.

Guess it meant that we had to stop HIM; we had to stop my father.

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We ran back down the tunnel, Alpha and I, leaving my mother standing in the glow of the neural forest, looking lost.

A week ago I would have given anything to see her again, now I was relieved to be leaving her. Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.

We reached the first crater and the countdown had already reached 12.42. Just seeing it up there on the clock made me feel sick.

‘Do we have a plan?’ Alpha asked, out of breath and puffing hard.

‘Stop him,’ I said. ‘That’s a goal,’ Alpha said. ‘Not a plan. A plan would tell us how we were going to achieve it.’ She was right, of course.

I looked around me. ‘These wires,’ I said. ‘These wires and cables. They’re everywhere.’

‘If you’re thinking about pulling them all out,’ Alpha said, ‘then we have ourselves a bona fide plan.’ She gave a huge smile, leaned in and kissed me.

‘For luck,’ she whispered.

‘See you on the other side,’ I said, and then we got to work.

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I grabbed a handful of the cables nearest me and pulled. They were connected to the back of one of the computer banks, and looked pretty important.

There was a horrible second where I felt no give at all, but then I put more shoulder into it and they tore loose of their housings with such ease that I fell over, clutching the wires to my chest.

That’s done it
, I thought. I dropped the cables, got to my feet and moved to the next computer. I heard Alpha tearing wires free from somewhere nearby and grinned.

I was pulling a second bunch free when an alert sounded somewhere close by, loud and metallic.
That’s REALLY done it
, I thought. I yanked the wires, but these ones really didn’t feel like they wanted to be torn out. I pulled and pulled, but was getting nowhere.

I wrapped them around my arms to brace them, leaned back until all of my weight was concentrated on the wires, and finally they started to tear away from the computer.

‘COME ON!’ I said through gritted teeth. In desperation I threw myself backwards, and then I was on the floor again, with another bunch of useless wires in my hands.

‘YES!’ I cried triumphantly, feeling like maybe we DID have a chance of stopping this mad plan of my father’s; and it was then that I saw the white-coated technician standing above me, looking down with anger in his eyes.

I recognised him, of course.

It was Perry Knight’s dad.

Parents.

Again with the parents.

Was there anyone’s dad who
wasn’t
involved in this? ‘What are you doing here, Peter?’ Mr Knight asked me, although it was obvious from his voice that he already knew the answer; he started edging closer to me.

‘You’re in on this lunacy, too?’ I asked him, and was about to get up but he moved too quickly, bringing his foot up and bringing it down again on my right arm. He kept it there, putting his weight behind it, and for a moment there was a red flash behind my eyes, as the pain hit home.

Hard.

And then he ground his heel into my arm for good measure.

It was madness! This was Perry’s dad, who’d bounced me on his knee when I was still small enough to be bounced; who’d taken me out on family trips when Perry begged him hard enough; who’d baby-sat me when my father was called away.

A man who was now trying to break my arm.

My eyes were half-closed in pain but I could just see Alpha out of the corner of my eye, creeping towards Mr Knight until she was directly behind him. I let out a primal roar and rolled my body so that it smacked right into his shins. The pain was intense, but I kept pushing and eventually he stepped backwards. It released my arm – after he ground it underfoot once more – and then the backs of his legs made contact with Alpha’s hunched frame and he toppled over her, going down like he’d just been shot.

I tried my best to ignore the pain, but something in my arm had been badly hurt and I made a pretty poor show of getting to my feet. Mr Knight was already half up, and he was going to beat me to it, there was no doubt.

But he hadn’t counted on Alpha.

She turned her body and swung her elbow back, fast and hard, until it connected with Mr Knight’s rising face. The force of the blow sent blood spraying out of his nose and his eyes rolled back into his head.

He was out cold.

Alpha moved quickly, grabbing a skein of wires and wrapping them around Mr Knight’s ankles.

‘You OK?’ she barked as she pulled the wires tight and knotted them, before passing them up his back and using them to secure his hands.

‘He almost broke my arm,’ I said, getting slowly to my feet. ‘That was one hex of a rescue. Thank you.’

Alpha inspected her handiwork, gave the wires a good hard pull for luck, then dusted her hands off.

‘No one beats up on my Kyle paradigm without answering to me,’ she said, and then nodded towards the geodesic dome. ‘What say we go and break up your father’s little control centre?’

I just nodded in reply and raced after her.

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The length of metal tubing was right where I’d dropped it, just outside the dome. The pain in my arm had developed into a grinding, throbbing sensation and there was no way I could pick up anything so I pointed to it and Alpha bent down and retrieved it for me.

‘I’ll keep him busy,’ I said. ‘You . . . you just smash up everything in sight. The more expensive looking, the better.’

‘Was that a plan?’ Alpha joked. ‘Did you just formulate another actual PLAN?’

I tried to smile but it probably looked more like a grimace.

Then we headed to the entrance of the dome.

My father hadn’t thought he needed to close it up again, and we walked straight in through the opening. Another piece of evidence, if more was needed, of his poor judgment.

He had his back to us, and his head was festooned with wires. He was studying the screens and didn’t hear us coming in. Alien code flowed across one screen, always in motion.

I approached my father, holding my right arm crossed across my chest, the hand resting on my left shoulder. I heard the first of Alpha’s blows with the pipe, and so did he.

He turned, a look of surprise on his face. When he saw me and Alpha, surprise quickly changed to fury.

‘What the . . .?’ he began, but I was already bending at the waist, aiming my left shoulder at his midriff charging straight at him.

He raised a feeble hand to fend me off but my momentum was good enough that I connected with him. Hard. He had a computer console behind him and his spine hit the edge with quite some force.

He let out a dull ‘oof’ and then my good hand was reaching up and I got a handful of the wires that were attached to his head.

The side of his hand hit me between the eyes, making my vision go starry, but the wires finally came loose.

He let out a scream of anger, and then his defence mechanisms must have kicked in because he suddenly managed to get the meat of his hand under my chin and started pushing.

My head went back sharply before his other hand found my wounded arm and started to squeeze.

‘You stupid fool,’ he growled, ‘You’ll ruin everything.’

I felt the pain starting to overwhelm me, felt the raw redness threaten to consume me.

‘I really hope so, Dad,’ I said.

I could hear that Alpha was making the most of the distraction to really lay into the equipment around her. Glass was breaking and metal clanging. My father pushed me aside and lurched towards her, his hands outstretched into rigid claws of rage. It looked like he had murder in his eyes.

I clenched my teeth, let out a roar of my own, threw my arms out to grab his legs.

And missed.

I fell heavily on my injured arm and felt a terrible flash of pain through my entire body.

I saw my father reaching Alpha.

My mind screamed at my body to get up and help her out, but my body just wouldn’t obey.

We haven’t done enough
, I thought, and knew then that all was lost.

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I was utterly helpless and could only watch on as my father grabbed hold of Alpha’s shoulders and threw her aside. She bounced off some machinery and hit the ground, letting out a little whimper of pain.

I think if I could have, I would have killed him.

‘You can’t stop this,’ my father said, and the expression on his face was both crazed and euphoric. ‘No one can stop it. Least of all a pair of stupid children.’

‘Please don’t do this!’ Alpha yelled. ‘What if you’re wrong?’

My father glared down at her with contempt.

‘The last thing I need is advice from you,’ he snarled. ‘Stay down there, where you belong, and watch the future dawn.’

I didn’t even know that I had deployed my filaments until I felt them connect with the input panel on the computer I was lying next to. I looked up and saw them extended further than I had ever extended them before, at least a metre.

My father spotted them as they interfaced with the computer panel.

‘What are you doing, Peter?’ he asked, a mocking tone in his voice.

I didn’t know. I mean I didn’t consciously send them out of my hand, and I had absolutely no idea what to do now that they were there.

And then it happened.

The Link was suddenly alive in my head, but not like it ever had been before.

Millions of voices suddenly invaded my head, the Link turned up to extreme, overwhelming me with its chatter. I heard music and traffic reports, news stories and diary entries, secrets and lies and hopes and dreams and fears. And I heard them all at the same time, bruising my mind with their sheer volume. I felt them building up like a mad pressure inside my skull, a skull that was surely going to burst from all that information.

I opened my mouth to scream, just to let some of the pressure out, but no sound came out. Instead I felt that pressure converted into data; felt the data pass through my body into my hand; and then I felt it disperse outwards through my filaments.

I unloaded the Link into the computer.

‘Take that!’ I shouted.

And nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

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I lay there, trembling and drained, with a head that felt like it was about to explode, and still the countdown to our extinction ticked away second by terrible second.

‘Well?’ my father asked, ‘What was that about?’

I didn’t have a clue. For a moment or two then it had been as if I was
channelling
some energy, or something, and I had allowed myself to feel hope.

But nothing was going to save us.

My father started laughing.

Laughing at me. I looked over at Alpha. She started to give me a wan smile, and then stopped halfway through it.

Her head moved from side to side and then I saw the smile develop into a massive grin. And she started laughing too.

I thought she had lost her mind, and it even stopped my father. He looked down at her, puzzled.

Alpha pulled herself together, but was still grinning.

‘Listen,’ she said triumphantly.

So I did.

Then I retracted my filaments.

And started laughing myself.

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‘What’s that?’ my father asked, although he of all people should have recognised the sound.

It got closer – and louder, of course – I saw a look of panic settle on to my father’s face.