DRTRRTRTRTR! DRTRRTRTRTR!
“I can hear gunfire!” Finn reported back to the Vitalis. “They’re closing in!”
“We can’t risk letting him escape, Finn. We’ve got to do this and get out before it’s too late!” said Carla from the bridge.
“Hit it!” cried Finn. “Reel me in!” Immediately, the tether line tightened at his belt and – this time more gently – he was dragged back down the narrow blood vessel and away from the bone cluster of the inner ear, back towards the Vitalis.
Heart thumping, Al slid after the troops down the monorail tunnel on his backside, the flashes and bangs of the battle ahead echoing up, turning the descent into a ride down hell’s own helter-skelter.
DRTRRTRTRTR! DRTRRTRTRTR!
The Great Cavern was a sound-and-light show too, the crack of gunfire echoing off the walls, muzzle flash shimmering through the stalactites as the invaders fought their way along the end of the tunnel.
It was time for the final showdown. It was time to get Finn back. And Al was ready.
“Do it now, buddy,” he prayed to Finn. “Whatever it is, do it now …”
In the centre of the henge, Kaparis was bent over the Primo, dribbling with furious anger.
The Primo had been lashed to one of the great stones. By killing the Primo, he would take revenge. He would kill the very idea that he might have ever had a child.
“Pretender! Vilest scourge! SLAVE!” he ranted. “You will die!”
DRTRRTRTRTR! DRTRRTRTRTR!
The barbarians were at the gates. It was time to blow the house down.
“Set the final charge!” he ordered the last of the Siguri, as he staggered out of the henge.
The Siguri switched on laser sensors. The accelerators would remain intact until the moment anyone stepped into the circle, then the sensors would trip and the whole thing would blow, Primo and all.
The voice in Kaparis’s head seemed to have stopped. He should never have listened. If Infinity Drake had not already drowned in his blood, he would soon meet some grimly fitting end. He would eventually run out of air, or they would retrieve the craft first. One way or another, Infinity Drake was finished.
Kaparis stumbled towards the last remaining exit. To the river.
Ondine had escaped all those years ago by leaping into the underground torrent. She was carried along through the mountain until she emerged a few minutes later in a spring in the valley below. She had relied on her supernatural lung capacity, on a knowledge of flow dynamics, and on stupendous luck. After Kaparis had finally worked out what she’d done, he’d taken the precaution of having a grenade-sized scuba device planted just below the waterline. Much more civilised.
Now it was his turn to take the same leap. He reached the precipice and looked down into the thrashing waters – DRTRTRT! – then he looked back. An enemy soldier had almost managed to reach the henge before being cut down. The Siguri were about to execute him. Then Kaparis realised who it was.
“STOP!” Kaparis boomed over the sound of battle. “Bring him to me.”
The Siguri dutifully grabbed a limb each, and carried Kelly, groaning, to Kaparis at the river.
Deep inside Kaparis’s head, in the network of blood vessels that fed the ear, Infinity Drake had re-entered the Vitalis.
The great submarine was already powering down the external carotid artery, impeller arms thrust forward, drawing itself up the flow of blood towards the neck.
Finn tore off his tanks and helmet and ran up to the bridge. Nico was calling the shots at the arterial map while Carla drove.
“Get ready to hit the brakes and twist hard right when we reach the junction!” ordered Nico.
Carla sent the craft surging forward, ready to curl back into the flow of the internal carotid artery back up into the brain.
“How far down are we?” said Finn.
“We should get there any moment now,” said Nico.
WOOOOSHH – the Vitalis hit the wide-open, red blizzard of the carotid artery and took the internal branch back into the deep brain. Carla swivelled the impellers to break their ride.
“Keep her steady in the flow and drift right across! Find the opposite wall!” called Nico over the noise of the engines.
“Find the wall, Carla!” Finn added helpfully as – THUMP – they hit the other side of the artery and bounced back.
“That’s it! Now keep her steady … keep her steady …” called Nico as she traced their progress up to the back of the eye.
“There!” shouted Nico, at a fast-approaching tributary. “Hit it!”
Carla fired the anchor lines – Tzoot!–Tzoot!–Tzoot!–Tzoot!
The Vitalis had taken them as far as she could go.
If Nico’s reading of the anatomy was correct, they had wedged the submarine into the internal carotid artery at the back of the eye, just off the ophthalmic artery. A big enough explosion here would, with any luck, cause a frontal lobotomy23, but more importantly it offered them their quickest way out of the bone cage of the skull.
“The eyes have it,” Finn had concluded earlier. “If they find him with a brain injury, and assume we’ve caused it, the first place they’re going to look in is the eyes.”
Carla turned the power sliders to the max and the impeller arms went crazy trying to drag the anchors from the flesh, but the anchors held and the blood and plasma were whisked into a frothy goo. The heat indicators from the nuclear reactor began to rise.
“GO!” shouted Finn above the screaming of the engines, and they descended to the open airlocks where Nico was waiting with their subaqua gear.
They had full tanks, they had a laser scalpel, they had their scoots – and who knew how much or how little time. Clinging to each other, they swam out of the open hold and scooted clear of the chaos the mighty Vitalis was leaving in its wake.
Nico led them shooting down the ophthalmic artery, then they turned to surf into the retinal supply. Before they joined the new flow, she touched them to explain: “This is the main artery to the retina. It will take us straight along the optic nerve. If we just stick to the main branch and follow it all the way to the end, we’ll hit the back of the eye.”
“Great, let’s do it!” said Carla.
“Go!” said Finn.
All three powered forward on the scoots.
Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu.
The flow caught them and they surfed its turbulence, staying as close to the centre of the current as they could as they were carried upwards in a twist to join the darker mass of the optic nerve just beyond the artery wall – then arrow straight along it.
If they could reach the retina and cut their way through the back of the eyeball, they’d arrive at the conjunctiva, which would be lubricated by the saltwater sea of Kaparis’s tears. And from there they could swim all the way round to the front of his eye, where surely Al would want to look …
All they could do was swim, and hope.
“Well, well, well … Captain Kelly, you can be my messenger. Wake him!”
A bucket was dipped into the rushing water and the ice-cold contents emptied over Kelly’s head. His eyes briefly snapped open. Instantly he wished they hadn’t. His body was shot up along one side and bleeding hard. Before he could pass out again, Kaparis grabbed his jaw to insist he hear him out.
On the empty bridge of the Vitalis, the engines screamed and the reactor alarm sounded – NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu- NEEW-eu.
The yellow radiation hazard symbol flashed and flashed – WARNING MELTDOWN! CORE HEAT CRITICAL! WARNING MELTDOWN!
In the retina at the back of Kaparis’s eye, forward momentum had been lost, but for Finn at least, the spectacle was dazzling.
The main artery had split into dozens of smaller blood vessels at the retina, and Finn, Carla and Nico found themselves having to squeeze their way along a narrow arterial tube.
Lights – reds, yellows, blues – were rippling through the layers of light-receptor cells all around them, like the aurora borealis.
“How far?” Finn demanded of Nico.
Nico knew they couldn’t go much further and that anywhere at the back of the eye would do.
“Go for it!” said Nico.
Finn took the laser scalpel off his back and pulled the trigger. A lightsaber shaft of perfect blue light burst from its end and immediately divided the artery wall and the flesh of the retina above it. The gap cleaved open and they were able to push through a thick duvet of nerve cells and on into the light, into the infinite pool of clear gel beyond …
And there, to Finn’s utter astonishment, the light resolved itself to became a coherent image, a face …
He gasped and his own eyes filled with tears. “KELLY!”
“Listen to me,” said Kaparis, eyeballing Kelly. “I want you to take a message back to the G&T. Tell Allenby he’s finished, that he’ll never catch me. But be sure to thank him: I’ve learned so much. It is a great pity we never got to work together, but then the strong must always defeat the weak. Tell the world I am ready to parlay, ready to receive their offers and trade my forgiveness in return. But there’s only one Master now, and there always only will be while I have breath left in my body.”
Back in the Vitalis, the siren stopped.
ASSSTSTSTSTSTSTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS …
The reactor did not explode in the first vital moment as planned. Instead, its fuel began to burn and it dropped like a white-hot diamond, through its housing in the craft, then through the hull, then on and down, as hot as the core of the sun, through blood and brain tissue, as it built towards critical mass …
The first thing Kaparis noticed was an irresistible urge to twitch his left eye.
The first thing Kelly noticed was that Kaparis had suddenly stopped talking.
The first thing Finn, Carla and Nico noticed, at the back of the eye, was the sudden orange glow behind them. Instinctively they clung to each other.
The second thing Kaparis noticed was the worst pain any human had ever felt.
At nano-scale, the explosion was huge. At normal scale, it was just enough. Enough of the nuclear fuel in the reactor had reached critical mass and detonated – not as planned beneath the frontal lobes, but directly behind the left eye, gravity having taken it burning through the optic canal and out of the skull because Kaparis was leaning over Kelly. So although the eye socket protected the brain, nothing, sadly, could be done for the eye.
The energy released naturally took the path of least resistance out. SSSSSSKAAAAAABAAABBABAAAALOOOOOOSH!
Kaparis’s eye literally exploded.
“ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRHGGGHHHH!”
Finn sensed a moment of perfect noise and blinding light as they became instant nothingness.
“ARRRRHGGGHHHH!” Kaparis screamed as his eye spattered across Kelly’s face.
Kelly had seen many horrors, had caused a few. But he’d never experienced anything as revolting as this. He passed out.
“ARRRRHGGGHHHH!” Kaparis clutched his burning empty eye socket. “INFAMY!” The pain. The frustration. The shattered remnants of his eye all over Kelly. “ARRRRHGGGHHHH!”
BOOM! BOOM! DRTRTRTRT!
The enemy closing in.
The indignity!
Kaparis did not linger – SPLASH!
Into the blackness and the maelstrom, into the gaping yaw of hell he dived, the freezing, rushing water possessing him, spinning and sending him down, down into the ice-cold deep …
“ARRRRHGGGHHHH!”