скачать книгу бесплатно
In each egg a primitive nymph was forming. In less than six hours, such was the furious rate of growth, the first of them would begin to consume the remaining contents of its egg sac before bursting out to feast upon the corpse in turn.
Someone whispered something in the US President’s ear. He made his decision and nodded.
“You want our Scarlatti, you got it,” he said simply.
“And further accelerator capacity from CERN, Monsieur le Président? Frau Chancellor?”
“Oui.”
“Ja.”
Commander James Clayton-King loved it when a plan came together.
Then the American President raised a finger. “One condition. We supply the pilot. I want a man onboard.”
King raised an eyebrow in protest.
There was another whisper in the President’s ear.
“Make that a woman.”
DAY ONE 15:17 (BST). Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, USA
A Variant T Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor taxied out of the restricted M3 hangar.
Delta Salazar knew nothing yet of the mission she was being asked to undertake, only that it was priority number one: transit to RAF Northolt outside London at maximum speed, refuelling in mid-air twice over the Atlantic. With afterburners engaged and almost no payload, her cruising speed would be well in excess of Mach 2. Deep in the heart of the $150-million fifth-generation stealth fighter, in the empty weapons bay, wrapped in an ‘indestructible’ transport crate, was a single small frozen phial.
Control had cleared the skies.
Delta loved Aviator shades, beating men at anything and strafing ground targets with 44mm cannon. She also love loveloved to fly.
In fact, the only thing she loved more was her little sister Carla, but that was not the sort of thing that she would say out loud in the (Classified) M3 Wing of the US Air Force.
“Clear for take-off,” said Control.
With an easy touch, Delta fully engaged the twin F119-PW-100 turbofan engines producing 35,000lbs of thrust that shot the aircraft off the runway and into a steep climb.
Her mother had been an alcoholic and she’d spent most of her childhood neglected, finding escape only in video games (starting with Splinter Cell back in 2002). In 2004 the USAF had started looking for recruits with exceptional hand-eye coordination in the online gaming community. They noticed the data spike around Delta’s tag and traced it to a state children’s home in Philadelphia where they found a fierce, scruffy, skinny thirteen-year-old who intensely distrusted authority, having been separated from her baby sister when taken into care. She tested off the scale.
The USAF put her into a top-secret training programme, arranged an appropriate adoption for Carla, with visitation rights, and gave Delta the chance to excel. She was triple-A rated on six different aircraft and had won two Air Force Distinguised Service Medals and a Medal of Honour. She was twenty-three years old – even if she looked an Indie rock nineteen.
At 20,000 feet she banked east off the American continent. She could never get used to how great this felt.
“Badass…” she sighed.
“I heard that, Salazar,” snapped Control.
She laughed and rocketed off across the Atlantic.
EIGHT (#ulink_0eb82945-d53d-5c7d-95fb-80b6a66ec55b)
DAY TWO 02:46 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
Just over eleven hours later, at the climax of what must have been an astonishing briefing, and in the midst of the organised chaos of all that was going on in and around the CFAC, Finn witnessed the moment Flight Lieutenant Salazar finally stopped chewing her gum.
Her eyes were still hidden behind her Aviator shades (despite it being the middle of the night), her boots were still on the desk and she still carried an air of youthful insouciance, but… the chewing had stopped. This was the biggest reaction they’d had from her since her arrival.
“We need your decision in the next hour. Lieutenant? Do you understand the proposition?” Al said.
Nothing.
Finn looked at Al. He’s not handling this very well, he thought. The Lieutenant seemed to have unsettled Al somehow. He was trying to be clipped and cool, but was coming across as nervous and edgy. The silence crackled.
“They’re going to shrink you!” said Finn, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
Still nothing.
Using his thumb and forefinger to illustrate actual size, Kelly tried to translate into militarese.
“Listen up! You’re going to be shrunk to 12 millimetres, put in a 110-millimetre Apache chopper, then pursue and terminate an apocalyptic bug with extreme prejudice. You copy?”
“I copy… Just let me suck it up,” Delta responded.
(She could have been more specific and told them what it felt like: that the idea was so crazy it had caused a temporary gap in the game code of her reality and that she needed to download a patch,
but she had learned never to discuss her feelings with fellow soldiers. Besides which, where was she supposed to find the patch?)
Al blinked. Finn smiled. Kelly laughed.
“She’ll be fine,” said Kelly. “Move on.”
With the main briefings out of the way, Kelly, Stubbs and Salazar were handed over to a medical team itching to study the ‘before and after’ effects of ‘atomic collapse’ on the human body (they could smell a Nobel Prize).
Al expected them to be poked, prodded and drained of various fluids in the usual manner, but when he was recalled to the crew area, he was informed that the process had ground to a halt during a ‘psychiatric evaluation’.
Each crew member had been asked to construct a solid sphere out of a number of irregular-shaped blocks. Delta had just sat there (evidently still hanging with the concept). Stubbs had got started, but then fell asleep like a granddad doing a Christmas jigsaw, and Kelly got a member of the medical team in a headlock and forced him to eat one of the pieces.
“You have a voluntary mute, an old man suffering from depression and an idiot alpha male with the emotional sophistication of an earthworm,” said the lady chief psychologist.
Al said, “The young woman is just seriously cool, Stubbs just needs tea and biscuits and Kelly was at Cambridge with me – he’s only part Neanderthal. They’re all perfectly normal.”
“Dr Allenby, there’s no way I can pass any of these people fit for active service.”
“Fit for service?” laughed Al as he was dragged away to a crisis in Array Engineering. “They ride at dawn. Just make sure the pilot signs up – do whatever you have to do.”
By the time Al and Finn returned, the psychologist had the crew members sitting in a circle.
“If you could take one special personal item with you, what would that be?” the psychologist asked Delta. “Flight Lieutenant?”
Delta chewed her gum.
“OK. How about we move on to you, Leonard?” said the psychologist.
“I’ll need my tablets,” said Stubbs.
The psychologist gave him a hard stare.
“No, Leonard, we’re talking about a special personal item that…”
Finn, having spent a lot of time with grief counsellors, knew the drill and decided to be helpful to hurry things along.
“She means like a teddy bear or a wedding ring or something.”
“I never married,” Stubbs said glumly. “Who would want me? Married to the job. Not much of a looker. And I haven’t seen Teddy since the orphanage burnt down in 1962.”
There was a moment of silence as Captain Kelly fought to suppress a snigger, but failed, setting Al off. They were soon hysterical. Stubbs glared and shook his head. Not for the first time Finn wondered what the little old man was doing on such a mission.
“Ignore them,” Stubbs advised the psychologist. “Rise above it.”
“Captain Kelly!” the psychologist snapped in a tone of admonishment. “When you’ve quite finished… what item would you like to take?”
Kelly stopped himself laughing and gave Stubbs a playful squeeze on the knee to show there were no hard feelings.
“Ow!”
“Apologies. I just want my Minimi
and maybe a couple of M27s
,” the technicalities of which he then explained at length to the confused psychologist, the confusion added to by Stubbs explaining at the same time that he really had to take his mobile workshop with him (a Pinzgauer all-terrain truck adapted to his own specifications), otherwise, frankly, what was the point in him bothering to come at all?
In the meantime, behind her shades, Delta constructed her own patch:
0382*<this mission was about the craziest most suicidal thing she’d ever heard**<beyond combat***<beyond major league gaming****<beyond weird
0383*<awesome
0384*<but what about Carla*<<? **<She must be briefed before every combat mission
0385*<not possible. *<<operational security too tight **<concept too incredible
0386*<breach of Sisters’ Pact of Truth
0387*<bummer**<[Nil]*<<[Nil]*<<<[Nil]...
0388*<on the other hand*<<[Nil]*<<<[Nil] **<Carla was now twelve*<<?*<<?
0389*<they had less and less in common *<<she wasn’t a gamer *<<<she was no longer interested in mission briefings but only::***<> "Tell me a story"<>
0390*<all she wanted was <>"stories"<> *<<stories to read *<<< to watch *<<<< to believe
0391*<whatever else **<<this would be one hell of a story
0392*<breach pact**<accept mission***<QED
0393C*<Reboot>*C.)
Delta shot forward, lifted her shades, picked up the pieces of the sphere puzzle that had been abandoned earlier and snapped it together in two seconds flat. With a flick of her wrist, she then set it spinning like a planet, and they all watched as it described a perfect orbit of the tabletop.
“I think we’re done here, ma’am,” Delta told the psychologist.
Kelly started laughing again. The psychologist walked out of the room. Al just stared at Delta, entranced. Finn prodded him.
“Can… can we take it you accept the mission, Flight Lieutenant… Ms Salazar?” asked Al (in that upper-class Brit way, as if he might be asking someone to marry him, thought Delta).
“You point. I’ll shoot. Let’s roll,” she said, flipping down her shades and putting her feet up again.
Cool, thought Finn.
Al tripped over as he was led off to the next meeting and couldn’t help staring back at her.
Embarrassing, thought Finn.
NINE (#ulink_6ee3d784-a6a2-53f9-8191-a818d5edcb93)
DAY TWO 05:32 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
It was nearing dawn as King watched the fully armed Apache helicopter being lowered by crane into the centre of the accelerator.
In the time lapse of his memory, the chaos had peaked at around 4am and was ebbing fast. The lifting gear and forklifts had cleared, and the new Large Accelerator looked as if it had always been there.
The original pieces of Al’s Fat Doughnut had been repositioned and adapted to form four equidistant parts of a much bigger ring of particle accelerators. The nano-dimensional field – or ‘hot area’ – at the centre would be about the size of a classroom and demand so much power it would draw on the national grids of both the UK and France.
Allenby would be controlling it all from a specially constructed command pod – his cockpit – on the floor of the CFAC.
A formidable range of military hardware was lined up on a conveyor system that ran the length of the CFAC, with more supplies in the loading bay waiting to go on – all of which would have to be fed into the hot area in three minutes flat.
Speed was of the essence. As soon as reduction was complete, the nano-dimensional crew and their nano-equipment would be transported, along with the Beta Scarlatti (the new American Scarlatti being named this to distinguish it from the original Alpha Scarlatti), to the release site thirty-six miles north in a full-scale Merlin transport helicopter – which currently waited on the tarmac outside the CFAC.
Given that a minimum of twenty-four hours would be needed to evacuate the population at large should the mission fail, the team would have a mission window of less than twelve hours before the authorities had to go public and declare a state of emergency. As no one could say for certain if the Large Accelerator would be ready to rescale the crew immediately the mission was complete, a refrigerated container with a two-week supply of food and water also waited in the loading bay to be reduced as a precaution.
Worryingly little progress had been made in the search for Dr Cooper-Hastings. Every contact had been questioned and every possible lead followed up; every international security organisation was on alert. But they’d turned up nothing. Dr Cooper-Hastings was an unremarkable scientist who lived alone. The assumption had to be that he had gone quietly bananas and released the Scarlatti during some kind of breakdown. For King this was too simple. As zero hour approached, he had doubled the security presence onsite as well as tripled all electronic surveillance.
King looked down from the gantry and saw young Finn hurry to and fro, busy and integral, now joining the entomologists making their way to the reanimation suite.
It had become his opinion over the course of the night that Finn was the most important person on the project, not just as kin and comfort for Allenby, but as sounding board, test bed and “asker of bloody awkward questions” throughout – his tireless good humour and sense of adventure a tonic to all.
His plea to join the entomology team had been something of a classic. When Professor Lomax had pointed out his lack of correct qualifications, Finn had said, “Yeah, but there’s this friend of mine at school, Hudson, who can’t go on school trips over, say, twelve hours because he can’t go for a poo on any toilet but his own – he doesn’t say so, but there’s a note from his mum in the register – so he’s always left behind, and yet he’s the only kid really interested in glacial geology or the Horrible Histories show or stuff like that. Instead everyone else goes and all they do is mess about.”
