Earthfall: Retribution (4 page)

‘We are approaching the landing site,’ the Servant reported. ‘Touchdown in fifteen seconds. Extinguishing interior illumination.’

Sam felt the same shift in gravity as the drop-ship began its descent and the cabin was plunged into darkness. Just a few seconds later they landed with a soft thud. Sam snapped his night-vision goggles down into place and the passenger compartment was suddenly visible again, illuminated in a lurid green. The hatch hissed open and the four scouts quickly jogged down the ramp, spreading out across the field that the Servant had selected as their landing site. Sam dropped to one knee once he was twenty metres from the drop-ship, raising his weapon and scanning the silent snow-covered field for any sign of the Voidborn. The other three scouts followed suit, each checking their own quadrant of the surrounding countryside for any potential threat.

‘Clear,’ Rachel reported, her voice crackling over his earpiece.

‘Ditto,’ Jay said, ‘I got nothing.’

‘Clear here too,’ Jack said.

‘OK,’ Sam said quietly into his throat mic. ‘Looks like we’ve avoided a welcoming party. Pull back another fifty kilometres, but stay on station. No telling when we might need a fast pick-up.’

‘Understood,’ the Servant replied.

A moment later the alien drop-ship rose silently into the starry sky before accelerating away into the distance.

‘Let’s just hope that our arrival went unnoticed,’ Rachel said as the four of them crossed the field, heading for the country lane on the far side, their boots crunching through the undisturbed snow.

‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough if it didn’t,’ Jay said, opening the gate leading to the road. ‘Keep your eyes open, guys. We have no idea what we’re walking into here.’

Over the next couple of hours they picked their way through the deserted outskirts of Edinburgh, the snow-covered fields giving way to long-abandoned suburbs. It quickly became clear that the Voidborn Mothership that they had expected to find hovering above the city was nowhere to be seen. Sam couldn’t help but feel slightly relieved, even if it did now present them with the equally troubling question of where it actually was, if not here.

‘So where the hell are the Voidborn?’ Jack asked as they walked through the deserted back streets, heading for the centre of the city. ‘Stirling seemed pretty sure that this was where we’d find them.’

‘No idea,’ Rachel said, pushing her night-vision goggles up on to her forehead and squinting into the gloom. ‘We need to find somewhere to hole up for the day. Just because we haven’t found any Voidborn yet doesn’t mean they’re not here and, if they are, I don’t want to get caught out in the open in daylight.’

‘Agreed,’ Sam said, checking his watch. The first light of dawn was appearing on the horizon. ‘Let’s find a good bolthole and keep watch for a few hours. If there’s still no sign of Voidborn activity, we can concentrate on trying to find any trace of whoever made that transmission.’

‘That looks good,’ Jack said, pointing to a hotel, one of the tallest buildings nearby. ‘We could set up a nice discreet little observation post on the top floor and keep an eye out for any visitors.’

The others nodded their agreement and hurried over to the entrance of the building. The once grand marble floor of the lobby was now half covered in snow. Suitcases and bags lay on the floor where their enslaved owners had mindlessly abandoned them nearly two years ago. Jay pointed to a door on the other side of the lobby marked ‘Stairs’.

‘You guys head up and check out the upper floors,’ Jay said. ‘I’ll keep watch on the street.’

Rachel nodded, gesturing for Sam and Jack to cover her. She opened the door and stepped into the stairwell beyond, weapon raised, scanning for any sign of a threat. The two boys followed her quietly up the stairs as they began a systematic sweep of the building. Sam would never have admitted it, but there was something exciting about the feeling of once again being in hostile territory.

‘OK,’ Rachel said when they’d completed their sweep of the top floor, ‘looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves.’

‘Jay, we’ve checked the building, looks clear,’ Sam said into his throat mic.

‘Roger that,’ Jay replied. ‘I’ll take first watch down here for now.’

‘OK, I’ll take over in a couple of hours,’ Sam said. ‘Stay sharp.’

‘Will do.’

Jack made his way over to a window, peering down on to the streets below. ‘I’ll set up here. I can cover this side of the building,’ he said, unslinging the massive rifle from his back and resting its long barrel on the back of a chair. He sat down on the bed and pressed his eye to the scope, scanning the empty street below.

‘We might as well get some rest for a couple of hours,’ Rachel said. ‘Until we have a better idea of what’s going on here, it’s too risky to travel any further into the city during the day.’

‘I suppose,’ Sam said, placing his assault rifle on the bed. ‘It really doesn’t look like anyone’s home, though. Remember what it was like in London before we took the Mothership? The Hunters were everywhere. From what we’ve seen so far there’s no sign they were ever even here.’

‘No sign of Sleepers either,’ Jack said, his eye still pressed to the scope. ‘Place is a ghost town.’

‘Maybe Stirling and the Servant got the calculations wrong on the source of that signal,’ Rachel said with a shrug.

‘Let’s just keep watch for a while and see,’ Sam said.

‘Starting to think we might be on a wild goose chase here,’ Jack said. ‘If there’s no Voidborn, then who exactly was whoever made that transmission fighting with?’

‘Too many questions, not enough answers,’ Rachel said with a sigh, removing her pack and sitting down in the armchair in the corner of the room.

‘No change there, then,’ Sam said.

Sam dozed fitfully for the next couple of hours, until finally it was his turn on watch. He headed back down the stairs to the hotel lobby, where Jay sat in the shadows near the plate-glass windows that looked out on to the street beyond. It was starting to snow again.

‘My turn,’ Sam said as his friend stood up and stretched.

‘Nothing out there,’ Jay said with a slight frown.

‘That’s supposed to be a good thing,’ Sam replied. ‘So why do you look so worried?’

‘Because I mean there is
literally
nothing out there,’ Jay said, looking back towards the street outside. ‘No birds, no dogs, nothing. You know what it’s like in London with the strays.’

Sam knew exactly what he meant; one of the consequences of the Voidborn attack had been huge numbers of abandoned pet dogs that soon formed large feral packs, a phenomenon that was just one of the reasons that they all still carried weapons when on patrol in London.

‘Could just be the weather,’ Sam said as the snowfall began to intensify outside. ‘They’re probably taking shelter somewhere and waiting for it to pass.’

‘I suppose,’ Jay said, ‘but I can’t shake the feeling that something about this just seems off. Gives me the creeps.’

‘Well, we’ll check the centre of town later and see what we can find,’ Sam said. ‘If it’s as dead there as it is here, we’ll head back to the pick-up point. Maybe Stirling and the Servant will have a better idea of where we should be looking by then. In the meantime, go and try to get a couple of hours’ sleep. We’ll head in as soon as it gets dark.’

‘OK, keep your eyes peeled,’ Jay said with a nod, picking up his pack and slinging his rifle over his shoulder. ‘You see anything you call, OK?’

‘Yes, Mother,’ Sam replied.

‘Hey, if my mum was here, the Voidborn would be the least of your worries,’ Jay replied with a crooked smile.

Sam watched as Jay crossed the lobby, before turning his attention back to the street outside. After he had been watching for nearly half an hour, he started to feel some of the prickling unease that Jay had been talking about. The street outside was as quiet as the grave, a feeling enhanced by the gently falling snow that covered everything in its sound-deadening blanket. There was also this vague whisper at the back of his skull. It was nothing like the strange sensation that he felt when his implant reacted to the presence of the Voidborn – this was different, more like a nagging sense that there was something they’d missed.

Sam shivered. The temperature in the lobby couldn’t have been much above freezing and the wind was beginning to blow in through the front doors, bringing with it flurries of fresh snow. He huddled up inside his heavy coat and tried to focus on what they still had to do. The vague sense of excitement that he had felt earlier at finally being back in action had gone, replaced by a feeling that he had not wanted to experience ever again. The feeling that they were being hunted.

Sam heard the familiar high-pitched whine as his night-vision goggles activated, illuminating the darkened street outside the hotel in shades of green. They had watched and waited all day, but there had been no sign of life, human or otherwise.

‘OK, let’s go,’ Sam said, heading out of the door and into the street. The wind had dropped but the fresh snowfall had already blown into thick drifts that concealed all sorts of obstacles, and at times the four of them were slowed to a crawl. As they made their way closer to the centre, the buildings around them grew taller, their looming shapes making the ice-bound streets feel almost like valleys in some high mountain range.

A few minutes later Rachel held a clenched fist aloft and the others quickly spread out across the street, taking up cover positions as she pulled a map from her coat pocket.

‘OK, we’re at the west end of Princes Street,’ Rachel said as she looked up from the map at the surrounding buildings. ‘There’s no mistaking that thing.’ In the distance, just visible atop its ancient volcanic crag, outlined against the night sky, was the imposing shape of Edinburgh Castle.

‘There’s nothing here, man,’ Jay said, shaking his head.

‘Even if there was, we’d never find it buried under all this snow,’ Jack said with a sigh.

‘We’ve got a few more hours before we need to head back to the pick-up point,’ Sam said. ‘Let’s take advantage of the time we’ve got and make sure that we don’t miss anything. If there are other people awake here, we have to try to find them. At least we haven’t run into any Voidborn yet.’

‘Starting to wish that we would,’ Jay said, scanning their surroundings. ‘Never thought I’d say that.’

‘Let’s work our way up to the castle and then head back out of the centre,’ Sam said. ‘We need to be out of here before it starts to get light.’

The others fell into line behind him as he walked slowly down the broad road that had once been the busiest street in the city. The abandoned cars were barely visible beneath the snow drifts. The tattered shopfronts looked like cave entrances, their frozen interiors hidden in blackness that even night-vision systems struggled to penetrate. The wind was starting to pick up again and what had once been a persistent but gentle snowfall rapidly transformed into swirling eddies of ice that stung any exposed skin they found. Sam flexed the fingers of his left hand, trying to convince his numb fingers that they wanted to maintain their grip on his rifle. His other, less human hand felt perfectly warm, but then he supposed that now it always would, whatever the conditions.

Sam was peering into the increasingly dense cloud of snow that lay ahead of them, when a hideous, unearthly howl came from nearby. It was like nothing he had ever heard before, somewhere between agony and terror, and it made his gut tense in pure, instinctive fear.