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The Forbidden City
John McNally
Get shrunk! Humour and high-stakes combine in the action-packed Infinity Drake series. A BIG adventure with a tiny hero!Infinity Drake – Finn for short – is STILL only 9mm tall. But before his crazy scientist uncle can figure out a way to return him to his normal size, a new threat emerges on the other side of the world.Supreme villain, Kaparis, plans to release an army of self-replicating nano-bots – a hardware virus that will give him total control of global communications.Finn and his gang of bullet-sized heroes find themselves on a deadly mission: to stop the bot infection before it conquers mankind…Nano-bots: prepare to be cut down to size.
Copyright (#u6979ecb6-e348-5f95-9619-23eb60dc6081)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Copyright © John McNally 2015
Cover illustration © Paul Young
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2015
John McNally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007521654
Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780007521647
Version: 2015-05-27
To my mother and father, with love
and thanks for all the books.
And the Lord said unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt. And they did so; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt.
Exodus 8:16-19
Carbon will take over.
Mildred Dresselhaus
Contents
Cover (#ua2e97ef6-2480-5eb6-8201-454582a10bde)
Title Page (#u21e26d1a-e18a-56e1-9fb4-a9179ea9bea0)
Copyright
Dedication (#u1c5e2c4b-8566-5937-b460-ce9029f56757)
Epigraph (#ud05e61eb-d6d4-5972-ab2e-72500c934ba2)
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Two
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Footnotes
Books by John McNally
About the Publisher
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(#u6979ecb6-e348-5f95-9619-23eb60dc6081)
September 28 23:58 (GMT+1). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK.
Midnight in the heart of England. The witching hour. In the woods an owl screeched, then ripped through a mouse, beak blood-wet in the moonlight.
The great old house of Hook Hall stood empty. It had not been used as a home since the day it had been requisitioned by Her Majesty’s Government to become the top secret headquarters of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee
. It lay now at the heart of a complex of modern laboratories and military installations that spread around it in the darkness like the still, silent courtiers of a grand old lady.
The silence did not last. A low hum penetrated the dark and along the great drive the largest of the buildings began to glow.
Inside the cathedral-like space, the massive Central Field Analysis Chamber (CFAC), power surged and a great stone circle of particle accelerators, each the size of a shipping container, came to life.
“My Henge,” as Dr Al Allenby, the dishevelled genius behind the machine, called it. “Everyone should have a Henge.”
From the windows of a laboratory overlooking the henge a very small boy sent up a mad private prayer.
Finn (full name Infinity Drake) was about to turn thirteen. He had sand-coloured hair that grew in several directions at once (like his father’s) and deep blue eyes (like his mother’s). He had been orphaned two years before. He was into gaming, mad science and most lethal pastimes, like any other boy. But unlike any other boy, thanks to getting caught up in Operation Scarlatti
the previous spring, Finn was now only 9. 8mm tall.
With a deafening electrostatic crack and hum, white lightning began to spin like candyfloss around the core, the hoop of accelerators whipping up a cyclone of pure energy. With one last push they would form a perfect subatomic magnetic field.
Perched above the Henge, crammed into his cockpit command pod, Dr Allenby (known to all as Al), recited the snatch of poetry he used to remember the crucial sequencing equations he kept secret from the world –
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity …”
