Earthfall: Retribution (11 page)

A few minutes later they were walking across the large open area outside the garage towards a gate guarded by a pair of armed guards in a watchtower.

‘Be careful with that man,’ Mag said quietly as they approached, ‘the tall one.’

‘You mean Mason?’ Sam asked.

‘Yes, the one in charge,’ Mag said. ‘There’s something off about him.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sam asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Mag said with a shake of the head. ‘Just something not quite right.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Sam said. ‘Once we get to London we’ll be fine. I don’t think he really believes what I’m telling him. When he see the Mothership and that it is actually under our control, I think he’ll relax a little.’

‘Maybe,’ Mag replied, ‘just keep an eye on him.’

‘I will,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll be careful.’

The soldier who had been leading them waved to the guards in the tower and a couple of seconds later the heavy gates began to roll apart. Mag turned towards Sam and surprised him by giving him a quick hug.

‘Thanks,’ she said as she pulled away.

‘For what?’ Sam asked with a smile.

‘For not treating me like a monster.’

‘You’re not a monster, Mag,’ Sam said, shaking his head.

‘I’m not sure everyone would agree with you,’ she replied with a sad smile. ‘Goodbye, Sam.’

Sam watched as Mag walked away down the road, the gates rumbling closed again as she vanished from view.

‘How many men have you got?’ Sam asked as he looked down into the submarine pen.

‘Nearly forty combat troops and a handful of scientific staff,’ Mason replied. ‘They’re still working on a way to reverse the effects of whatever it is that the Voidborn have done in Edinburgh. They’re doing the best they can, but without your father’s help progress has been slow. He may have been difficult to work with at times, but he was a brilliant man.’

Sam had always known that his father had been engaged in some kind of secretive work for the government, but it was only recently that he had discovered how closely he had been involved with the ongoing fight against the Voidborn and their human representatives on Earth, the Foundation.

‘Do you really have absolutely no idea where he went?’ Sam asked. It was unbelievably frustrating to have missed him by a matter of weeks. At the very least he had the consolation of knowing that he was still alive. That was more than could be said for his mother and sister, who he had not seen since the day of the Voidborn invasion. He told himself that they were safe somewhere in London under the care of the Voidborn that were now under Sam’s control, but he had no real proof. For a long time he’d tried hard not to think about his family, instead focusing on the fight against the Voidborn, but suddenly learning that his father was alive and awake brought a lot of those suppressed emotions bubbling up to the surface.

The truth of it was that he wasn’t sure what he would say to his father, a man who, after all, had lied to him for as long as he could remember. A man who had implanted Sam and numerous other children with unproven alien technology. For Sam, though, the hardest lie to accept was the fact that his mother and father were not his biological parents and that he’d had to learn that from someone else. He still thought of Andrew Riley as his father, not Daniel Shaw, even though they were, of course, one and the same person.

‘No, I’m afraid not, Sam,’ Mason replied with a sad expression on his face. ‘He walked out of the main gate with a rifle and a month’s supplies. I wish he could have stayed, but our differences became irreconcilable.’

‘So was it him that designed those things?’ Sam asked, pointing at the glowing green implant on the side of Mason’s head.

‘Yes,’ Mason replied, touching the device, ‘it took him months working with the tiny amount of Voidborn tech that we had managed to smuggle out of the Foundation before the invasion. This facility was constructed under Faslane by the government and was one of only two in the country. The other, as you’re no doubt aware, was in London and had served as the research hub where Shaw and Stirling carried out their work to protect us against the Voidborn. This facility was designed to serve as a permanent garrison that would be immune to Voidborn control in the event of a Voidborn invasion and from which we might be able to mount some form of concerted resistance.

‘Unfortunately, as you probably already know, the Voidborn caught us off-guard. They arrived far earlier than even our most pessimistic projections had suggested. This place was supposed to have at least one fully trained submarine crew and a nuclear submarine with a full complement of Trident missiles. As it was, we had a pair of pilots, two squads of marines and a handful of scientists when the Voidborn arrived. We were hopelessly unprepared, trapped in the shielded bunker below us with no way of leaving without falling victim to the enemy’s control signal.

‘That was when your father arrived. He had been unable to reach the London facility on the day of the invasion due to the sheer number of Voidborn units there and so he headed for the only other place he knew where there might be humans who had not been enslaved. Here.’

‘That’s a hell of a walk,’ Sam said with a frown.

‘It was,’ Mason replied, ‘but your father is a remarkable man, Sam. There aren’t many people who could have made a journey like that, especially through occupied territory. Nevertheless, it took him weeks. I have to confess that by the time he arrived I had almost given up hope. As soon as he got here, he took control of the scientific team and, after a year of painful trial and error, he had developed these.’ Mason tapped the device attached to his skull. ‘For the first time, we could leave the facility to assess exactly how dire the situation was. We don’t need the devices while we’re inside the bunker, but if we want to go topside we have to use them or we’d be just as vulnerable to the control signal as anyone else. Until you arrived we had no idea that anyone had escaped the Voidborn in London. It was assumed to be a total loss. We didn’t know there was anyone there mounting a concerted resistance, much less that they would be able to take control of a Voidborn Mothership – something which, frankly, I still find hard to believe.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ll get to see it for yourself soon enough,’ Sam replied, looking down at the soldiers who were busily packing their kit into backpacks and checking their weapons.

‘I hope so,’ Mason said, his expression suddenly turning cold, ‘because if you’re lying to me and I find out that you’re leading us into a Voidborn trap I’ll kill you myself. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ Sam said, swallowing nervously. He tried very hard not to think about the number of bodies that undoubtedly littered Mason’s past.

‘We leave as soon as it gets dark,’ Mason said. ‘We’re reasonably certain that the Motherships over Edinburgh and London were the only ones stationed over the UK mainland, but I’d rather not bump into any unexpected visitors in daylight.’ Mason turned and looked down at the men preparing their equipment below. ‘I need to brief my men. If I were you, I’d take the opportunity to clean yourself up and grab something to eat.’

Sam watched as Mason walked away. He knew it was a risk taking Mason and his men into London, given how little he actually knew about him, but, at some point at least, his father had trusted him and that counted for something. They may have fallen out over what to do about the Vore, but they were all on the same side in this. They had to be. Despite all that, as he turned back to look at the men in the room below, Mag’s parting words still nagged at him.

Keep an eye on him.

Sam intended to do exactly that.

6

Sam walked towards the Chinook helicopter, its huge double rotors already slicing through the air. Mason strode up the ramp to the interior, which was lit with blood-red light, swiftly followed by a dozen of his men who quickly stowed their gear and took their seats along the bulkheads. Sam followed, past the soldier manning the mounted heavy machine gun, and found himself a spare seat. The men moved with the practised efficiency of professional soldiers, barely glancing at Sam as he watched them finish their final preparations for take-off. A minute or so later, Mason finished talking to the pilots and turned to address his men.

‘Gentlemen, you should consider this a combat drop,’ Mason said. ‘Until we have firm evidence to the contrary we are going to work on the assumption that London is still in the hands of the enemy. You all conducted scouting missions into Edinburgh while the enemy Mothership was stationed there so I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the dangers we may face. We have plotted a course to avoid the Voidborn control nodes that may still be active en route, which should mean we don’t run into any of their airborne units, but you should still be ready for an emergency landing at any time.’

Sam and the others had done exactly the same thing on their way north. The Voidborn Motherships may have gone, but the automated control nodes that allowed the Hunter Drones to operate semi-autonomously and continue to care for the millions of Sleepers up and down the country were still active. Sam thought back to the first time he had seen one of the nodes in the middle of the pitch in Wembley Stadium surrounded by thousands of dormant Sleepers. They had learned the hard way that the Hunters would aggressively defend a node if it were attacked, turning from nursemaids to savage killers in the blink of an eye.

‘Any questions?’ Mason asked. ‘No? Good. Flight time should be just over two hours.’

Mason walked through the cabin to where Sam was sitting and looked down at him.

‘Once we arrive these two gentlemen will be taking care of you.’ Mason gestured to the two grim-faced soldiers that sat on either side of him. ‘You are not to leave their sight. Understood?’

For a fleeting second Sam wanted to tell Mason that he was more than capable of looking after himself, given everything he’d been through since the invasion, but he decided that it probably wasn’t worth it at that precise moment. From Mason’s perspective he was just a kid after all, and Sam tried very hard not to smile at the thought of his face when he realised that ‘kid’ had command of an army of tame Voidborn.

‘Don’t worry,’ Sam replied, ‘I won’t go wandering off.’

Mason walked back to the front of the compartment and took a seat next to the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the passenger compartment. A few seconds later the thumping rumble of the rotors increased in intensity and the massive machine slowly lifted into the air. Sam watched as the lights of the base disappeared from view to be replaced by the pitch blackness of the post-invasion night. The next time his feet touched the ground he would be home.

Mag squatted on the corner of the roof of one of the darkened buildings that surrounded the landing pad. It had not been difficult to evade the guards patrolling the perimeter. Over the last couple of months she had become extremely adept at avoiding detection by anyone or anything. She watched as the helicopter with Sam on board lifted into the air and disappeared over the horizon. She had wanted to make sure that he had departed safely. He had been the only person that she had spent any time with since she had awoken to find herself transformed. The fact was he had made her feel human again and she realised now that she had almost forgotten how that felt.

She’d been more than a kilometre away from the base before she’d turned back. The nagging memory of Mason’s scent had made her return. He didn’t smell right, she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what was wrong about him, but she had learned to trust her heightened senses. They had saved her life on more than one occasion.