‘I’m going outside,’ Liz said, shaking her head. ‘It’s horrible. I can’t see them like this.’
The floor of the warehouse below was covered with the bodies of hundreds of people lying in neatly ordered rows, all writhing in agony. The only noise was the soft scraping of their clothes against the ground, the horrified expressions on their open-mouthed faces made all the more terrible by their complete silence.
‘I know what she means,’ Jay said as Liz walked out of the building. ‘I thought I’d seen some pretty nasty stuff over the past couple of years, but this . . . this is grim. You’re saying they’re like this everywhere?’
‘Indeed. This is happening all over the city,’ Stirling said. ‘I’ve asked the Servant to dispatch drones to some of the other dormitories further out, but I suspect they will find exactly the same thing there. I fear this could be a global phenomenon.’
‘Liz is right, this is horrible. I mean, it was bad enough when they were just lying there,’ Nat said. ‘God, these poor people.’
‘We can’t really be sure if they’re suffering or not; there’s no scientific way of knowing what they’re experiencing,’ Stirling said.
‘Oh, come on, Doc,’ Jack snapped. ‘Look at them! You don’t need PhDs coming out of your ears to see what they’re going through.’
‘I understand the frustration you feel, but there’s a reason I brought you all here. Unfortunately, the situation might be worse than we first thought,’ Stirling said with a sigh.
‘Worse than this?’ Anne said. ‘Seriously?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Stirling replied. ‘As you’re aware, the Sleepers are fed and hydrated intravenously on a daily basis by the Voidborn drones.’ He gestured towards the machine at the far end of the warehouse that would normally have had a line of mute people waiting to place their arm inside and receive their precise daily requirement of nutrients and fluids. ‘However, the Servant is reporting that the Sleepers have stopped responding to even the simple mental commands that the Motherships under our control can give. Simply put, two weeks from now, every single one of these people will have died from dehydration.’
The others all turned and looked at Stirling as the enormity of what he had just told them began to sink in.
‘There must be something we can do,’ Nat said. ‘If this is happening everywhere then that means . . . Oh God.’
‘There were at least nine million people in London at the time of the invasion,’ Stirling said. ‘Even with the resources of both Motherships under our control there’s no way we could administer the feeding solution manually to that many people, and if this is happening globally . . . well, I’m sure I don’t need to paint a more detailed picture for you.’
‘How can you stay so calm about this?’ Jay snapped angrily. ‘We could be talking about extinction here. Why would the Voidborn do this now? Why keep all these people alive for two years and then just suddenly decide they’re going to let them die like this? Why would they do that? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t have answers to those questions, Jacob,’ Stirling replied. ‘And since you ask, I’m staying calm because we may be the only chance these people have, so we really can’t afford to panic. I am working with the Servant to try to isolate the reason for this change in the Sleepers’ behaviour, but the truth is we’re struggling to find an explanation.’
‘And you think this has something to do with whatever’s happened to Sam?’ Anne asked.
‘It may just be a coincidence,’ Stirling replied, ‘but the fact that both events were concurrent suggest that, yes, there may indeed be a link. The statistical chances of them being unrelated events are slim.’
They had left Sam under the watchful eye of the Servant while they had visited the Sleeper dormitory. It had been several hours since he’d been encased in the energy field and there had, as yet, been no signs of any change in his condition.
‘I’m going to find Liz,’ Jay said. ‘I’ve had enough of unanswered questions for one day, thanks.’
He stalked away down the raised gantry and out through the fire exit that Liz had gone through a couple of minutes earlier. His head was telling him that Stirling was right and they had to stay calm, but his gut was telling him to go and find something to shoot. He saw Liz sitting on a low brick wall on the far side of the roof.
‘Sorry, couldn’t handle that,’ Liz said, giving Jay a weak smile as he approached.
‘Yeah, well, ’fraid it got worse,’ he said, sitting down beside her. He quickly explained the situation that Stirling had described and what it meant for the Sleepers.
‘Are we ever going to catch a break?’ Liz asked with a sigh. ‘Sometimes I just want to give up. Between this and what’s happened to Sam . . .’
‘Yeah, know what you mean,’ Jay said, running his hand across his dreadlocks. ‘Every time I think we’re finally getting somewhere and that maybe we can take the fight to the Voidborn, something like this happens. It’s as if someone’s trying to remind us how insignificant we are, even with those things under our control.’ He pointed up at the two massive Voidborn Motherships floating above them. ‘I’m still trying to get my head around it. In a couple of weeks we could be the last nine people on Earth, and I don’t know about you, but I can’t see any way to stop it.’ He put his head in his hands.
‘Stirling and the Servant will come up with something,’ Liz said, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘They always do.’
‘Maybe, but what if they don’t and the whole planet just ends up becoming a mass grave? What then?’
‘I don’t really want to think about that at the moment, Jay,’ Liz said.
‘Hey, you two,’ Nat yelled as she stuck her head out of the doorway on the other side of the roof. ‘Drop-ship’s taking us back to the compound in two minutes.’
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Liz said.
‘Sure, just give me a minute,’ Jay replied, staring up at the Motherships.
‘OK, see you down there.’ Liz ran across the roof and disappeared through the door.
Jay stood there for a moment, watching as Voidborn drop-ships buzzed around the massive vessels far above, like insects around some kind of giant animal. They were lit with the yellow lights that indicated they were under the control of the Servant and therefore ultimately answered to Sam’s commands. He thought back to the first desperate days after the initial invasion, before he’d met Stirling and the others. He’d just been a scared kid back then, not the soldier he’d become, the guy who liked to make out that nothing scared him. He thought about the prospect of standing in that very same spot two weeks from now, humanity all but extinct if what Stirling was telling them was right, the city around him little more than a mausoleum. In that instant, he could feel the kid that he had buried deep inside a long time ago trying to fight its way back to the surface again. The boy who’d lost his family, the boy who watched the world go to hell, the boy who’d spent so many weeks desperately fighting simply to survive.
‘Come on, Sam, wake up,’ Jay whispered to the air. ‘We need you, buddy.’
The drop-ship touched down in the centre of the compound, its boarding ramp slowly lowering to the ground. Jay was first out of the hatch and he quickly made his way to the accommodation block, eager to get an update on Sam’s condition from the Servant. He entered the common room and was disappointed to see that the force field surrounding his friend was still very much in place.
‘Any change?’ he asked the Servant as he walked across the room towards her.
‘There has been no change in the Illuminate’s condition,’ the Servant replied. ‘I have conducted further tests of the field surrounding him, but I am still unable to discern its energetic architecture or point of origin.’
‘You mean it may not be generated locally?’ Stirling asked as he came and stood next to Jay. ‘I assumed that Sam was generating it himself somehow.’
‘That was my initial assumption too, but I cannot determine how the Illuminate would be able to generate the level of power necessary.’
‘Seems like there’s quite a lot we don’t understand about Sam at the moment,’ Jay said, watching his friend’s chest slowly rise and fall on the other side of the impenetrable barrier.
‘Indeed,’ Stirling replied. ‘And have you made any progress in determining what’s blocking your control of the Sleepers?’
‘No. It would appear that whatever signal is being used to cause the change in their condition is vastly more powerful than the one the Motherships can produce. The origin point of that signal is impossible to determine precisely, but its strength would indicate that it is being broadcast across the planet.’
‘So whatever’s happening to the Sleepers is global,’ Jay said.
‘As far as I can determine, yes,’ the Servant replied.
‘So what the hell do we do about it?’ Jay asked, his frustration clear.
‘The first priority has to be working out where this new signal is being broadcast from,’ Stirling replied. ‘The only way we can hope to stop whatever’s happening to the Sleepers is if we cut it off at the source.’
‘I believe that it may be possible if we were to relocate the second Mothership and more accurately attempt to –’
The Servant was cut off by a loud crackle from behind her as the bubble of energy that surrounded Sam vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared. Sam slowly rose to his feet, his eyes closed and his chin resting on his chest.
‘Sam,’ Jay said, approaching his friend. ‘Are you OK?’
Sam didn’t reply, he simply lifted his head and opened his eyes, eyes that now burnt with a bright blue energy that pulsed through the glowing trails running back over his skull. Jay frowned and took another step forward, raising a hand towards Sam’s shoulder. Sam moved impossibly quickly, his closed fist whipping through the air and connecting with Jay’s chin with a crack, sending him flying across the room. The Servant glanced at the fallen boy and then back at Sam as he began to walk towards her.
‘Illuminate, I do not –’
That was all she had time to say before Sam reached out and placed a hand against the side of her head. The Servant’s mouth flew open in a silent scream and then she disintegrated into a cloud of glowing yellow particles that drifted slowly to the ground.
‘What are you doing, Sam?’ Stirling demanded as he backed away. He looked hard for any trace of the boy he knew, but there was no emotion in Sam’s face; his weirdly glowing eyes were impossible to read. He did not reply; he simply stared at Stirling for a moment and then turned and strode purposefully towards the door leading outside.
Stirling hurried over to Jay and rolled him on to his back. There was a bright red mark on his jaw and blood trickled from a split in his lip. He was out cold. Stirling felt a chill run down his spine. Whoever that boy was now, he wasn’t the Sam they all knew, that much was obvious. He got up and ran after him, following him out into the compound.
‘Sam!’ Mag shouted from the other side of the yard, seeing her friend walking towards her. Her grin of delight quickly faded when she saw the panicked look on Stirling’s face as he burst out of the door behind Sam. Nat and Jack looked up from the scavenged supplies they were sorting into piles on the ground and saw Sam draw to a halt in the centre of the open area, tip his head back and stare intensely at the Mothership hovering overhead.
‘Don’t go near him!’ Stirling yelled as Sam’s friends started towards him. ‘Stay back!’
Stirling made his way over to where Mag was standing, giving Sam a wide berth.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ Mag asked, staring at Sam as he stood motionless and silent twenty metres away.
‘I don’t know,’ Stirling replied, ‘but he just knocked Jacob unconscious and did something to the Servant. I don’t think he has any control over his actions.’
‘Is Jay OK?’ Nat asked.
‘As far as I can tell,’ Stirling replied. ‘Go and find Will and tell him what’s happened. He has the most medical training.’
Nat gave a quick nod and ran to the laboratory building.
‘Sam! Can you hear me?’ Mag yelled, taking a couple of steps closer to him. Suddenly, Sam’s whole body seemed to flare with searing blue light and a bolt of lightning shot into the air, striking the Mothership far overhead and sending waves of energy rippling across its underside. Moments later, a drop-ship swooped down towards the compound, its hull glowing with the same strange blue light that pulsed across Sam’s skin. It landed in the middle of the courtyard, kicking up clouds of dust, its hatch sliding open and boarding ramp descending as Sam approached it, his expression blank.
‘Sam!’ Mag yelled again. ‘What are you doing?’
He offered no response as he strode up the ramp and into the drop-ship. Mag ran towards it, watching helplessly as the ramp retracted, the hatch slid shut and the aircraft rose into the air, beyond her reach. It banked and accelerated into the clear blue sky, disappearing from view in seconds. And just like that, Sam was gone.
Nat walked over to the sofa, where Anne was shining a pen-sized torch into each of Jay’s eyes in turn.
‘Is he OK?’ Nat asked, as the rest of the group filed into the common room.
‘Yeah, he’ll live,’ Anne said. ‘Just a bit of wounded pride, I reckon.’
‘Feel like I got sucker-punched by a Grendel,’ Jay groaned, rubbing his aching jaw.
‘I can’t believe Sam did that to you,’ Nat said, shaking her head and sitting down next to him on the sofa.
‘Whoever that was, it wasn’t Sam,’ Jay replied. ‘Because, quite aside from anything else, he punches like a girl.’
‘Hey!’ Liz said, frowning. ‘Want me to come over there and show you how hard a girl can really punch?’
‘Sorry, no offence,’ Jay replied with a crooked half-smile, ‘but you know what I mean.’
‘I think the whole glowing blue head thing and firing off lightning bolts everywhere might be a clue that he wasn’t quite himself too,’ Jack said. ‘You know?’
‘Our most pressing concern is trying to work out exactly where he’s gone,’ Stirling said, rubbing his eyes. ‘I don’t believe for a moment that he was in control of his actions here today. If we accept that’s true, the next most pressing question must be: who is controlling him?’
‘Out in the courtyard, he looked like . . . well . . . he looked like a Walker,’ Jack said. Before their victory over the Voidborn, enslaved humans had wandered the streets of London doing their alien masters’ bidding. There was no denying the similarities between their blank-faced obedience and Sam’s recent behaviour.
‘You don’t think something went wrong with his implant, do you?’ Anne asked nervously. ‘That somehow the Voidborn have regained control of him?’ All of them had been subjected to the same experiments when they were infants, implanted with devices that used hybrid Voidborn and human technology to block the signal that had enslaved the rest of the planet. Stirling had worked alongside Sam’s father on the technology and the implants were the only reason Sam and his friends had been able to resist and fight back. If those implants were now failing for some reason, Sam wouldn’t be the only one affected. Who would be next?
‘I don’t think so,’ Stirling said, pacing back and forth across the room as he often did when his brain was distracted with solving a particularly vexing problem. ‘If that were the case, then it’s reasonable to assume we would all have fallen under their control. Sam’s implant is, however, quite unique. His father built the prototype – my input was limited because, quite frankly, I had only a basic understanding of the nanotechnology he was using. I thought at the time it was simply because he was a genius, but now of course I understand that he was using Illuminate technology without my knowledge. It could be that there was something different about Sam’s implant, something that Daniel didn’t tell me. It would be just one more lie to add to the long list of those he told me.’
‘So, if it’s not the Voidborn controlling him, who is?’ Jay asked with a frown.
‘That, Jacob,’ Stirling replied, ‘is what I believe they call “the million dollar question”.’
Sam woke with a start, standing bolt upright in a darkened room, his head spinning. His last memory was of standing in front of his friends in the resistance compound, and now he was somewhere else entirely, with no memory of how on earth he’d got there.
‘Where the hell am I?’ Sam said to himself, taking in his surroundings. The room was filled with desks and dead workstations, and at the far end was a large window that filled almost the entire wall and through which came a dim, grey light. Sam’s nose wrinkled as he sniffed the air; the unmistakeable sickly sweet stench of death and decay hung heavily. It was a smell that he had got all too used to over the past couple of years. Not everyone who had been enslaved by the Voidborn control signal had been able to make their way to one of the dormitories, and Sam had found enough bodies around London to know what this odour meant. People had died here and not that long ago by the smell of it. He headed for the window and looked through the glass into the cavernous space beyond.
Light was pouring in through a huge opening at the far side of a vast chamber; below him a submarine was floating in a long channel of water that led out to the sea beyond. It sat at an awkward angle in the water, listing heavily to one side. The five other docks that filled the huge room beyond were empty. Sam had seen this place before: it was the submarine base at Faslane that Talon had used as his base of operations when he had been going by the name of Mason, his true Illuminate identity hidden by his people’s shape-shifting abilities. At the time the facility had bustled with activity, filled with Mason’s men, all carrying implants that supposedly protected them from the Voidborn control signal. They had later discovered that it didn’t block the control signal, merely adjusted it to put the men under Talon’s control instead. Now the place was deserted, the foul smell hanging in the air suggesting that whoever was left here was not going to be coming to meet him.
‘How on earth did I get to Scotland?’ Sam asked the dust-filled air around him. A flare of blue light was reflected in the glass of the window as the veins of energy running back over his skull began to pulse. Sam stared at his reflection, willing his face back into its more human form, but nothing happened; the boy staring back at him was still very much the Illuminate–human hybrid that he had gone to such lengths to conceal from his friends. He had wanted them to see this, his real face now, but he had also wanted to explain what had happened to him, something he had clearly not been able to do.
Sam.
The voice seemed to come from nowhere, but he wasn’t hearing it: it was inside his head, like a whispered thought. Sam turned around quickly, scanning the room, but there was no one there, just the dark shapes of the dormant equipment that filled the room.
Sam, it’s me.
‘Dad?’ Sam said, his eyes widening in surprise. It couldn’t be; his father had died in front of him.
In a sense, yes, the voice replied, its whisper like an itch inside his skull that he couldn’t scratch. We don’t have much time. I . . . we need your help.
‘My father is dead,’ Sam said, still scanning the room for any clue as to where the voice might be coming from.
I know I am, the voice replied, and now I need your help or billions more will die, just like me.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ Sam replied, ‘but whoever you are, you’re not him. What do you want? Why have you brought me here? More to the point, how did I get here?’
You were summoned here.
‘Summoned here? What’s that supposed to mean?’
I was forced to subvert your will; you were given an irresistible mental imperative to come to this place. How exactly you did that I do not know, other than the fact that you arrived here in a Voidborn vessel.
‘So you kidnapped me?’ Sam asked, feeling a creeping sense of unease.
It would be more accurate to say that you kidnapped yourself, the voice replied.
This is a trap, Sam thought.
This is not a trap, the voice replied, Sam’s bewilderment increasing as he realised that whoever it was he’d been talking to had just plucked that thought straight from his head. If I had wished to harm you, I could have done so at any point during your journey to this place.
‘Well, you didn’t give me much choice about coming here,’ Sam said, ‘so why not just force me to help you?’
What I have to show you, I need you to see with your own eyes and with an open mind, the voice replied.
‘OK then, show me,’ Sam said. ‘Let’s see what’s so important you had to drag me up here.’
Head down to the submarine pens, the voice replied. I’ll tell you what you need to do when you get there.
Sam went over to the door and made his way down the stairs. He opened the door at the bottom and winced at the putrid smell in the room beyond. Over a dozen bodies lay on the cots of the makeshift dormitory next to the pens: Talon’s men who had been left in Faslane when the bulk of his forces had travelled to London with him and Sam. Once Talon had died, the men he had left here would have received no further orders, including the ones to eat and drink. Sam was just glad that they wouldn’t have known what was happening to them. It was a stark reminder of what would happen to the Sleepers if the Voidborn were to stop caring for them.
Sam put his hand over his nose and mouth in a futile effort to protect his newly enhanced senses from the stench. He hurried through the room, grateful to pass through the heavy steel doors on the other side and step out into the cool, relatively fresh air of an enormous maintenance workshop. Suspended from a massive supporting framework was the black bulk of a partially disassembled submarine, hanging in the middle of the space like some kind of huge disembowelled beast.
Sam made his way across the workshop towards the massive doors that led to the submarine pen, the noisy echoes of his footsteps bouncing off the bare concrete walls and ceiling. He was approaching the suspended submarine, when he heard a clang. He froze in place, his ears straining, listening for any other sound. Now he could hear nothing but silence. He sniffed. The smell of death hung in the air, but here there was something else, layered beneath the stench of decay. Something about it was horribly familiar.
There was a sudden scratching sound from the other side of the workshop, as if something was running across the concrete floor. Sam dropped low behind one of the pieces of heavy machinery that were scattered around the floor of the maintenance section. He held his breath, trying to make as little noise as possible, but again silence had returned. There was definitely something else here, something alive.
Sam crept slowly forward, moving carefully and quietly from hiding spot to hiding spot, staying low, checking the shadows nearby, his ears still straining for any sign of whatever had made the noise just a minute earlier, before making a dash across the open floor into the shadows beneath the giant machine. He looked up at the gutted warship; masses of cables that would have once formed the vessel’s electronic nervous system now dangled uselessly from holes in its belly. As he passed underneath, the odd smell he had noticed before began to get stronger. Suddenly, like a switch flicking inside his head, Sam remembered where he had smelt it before. It wasn’t here that he’d encountered that scent, but it was in a nearby city . . .
A creature dropped from the hole in the hull of the submarine directly above Sam’s head. He barely had time to react, diving to his left as the Vore fell towards him, striking a glancing blow on his shoulder and carving a chunk out of the white Illuminate armour that now covered it. Sam felt a surge of strength as the nanites inside him responded to the adrenalin pumping through his system. At the same instant, his right arm began to flow and shift, morphing into a half-metre-long golden blade. The tiny machines that made up that arm were similar to the Illuminate ones that coursed through him, but they were Voidborn in origin, a relic of his first battle with the Voidborn in the skies above London. The Voidborn and the Illuminate may have been enemies for millennia, but at that precise moment their technologies were combining to protect Sam from the monstrous creature that was itself a twisted by-product of corrupt Illuminate technology. Sam didn’t really have time to appreciate the irony; he was too busy trying not to get killed.
The Vore circled Sam warily, its dripping jaws opening wide as it hissed at him, the tiny black eyes in the sides of its elongated, misshapen skull blinking slowly as the slime-covered slits of its nose twitched, sniffing the air. It crawled on all floors, its razor-sharp claws scratching on the concrete. Sam raised his arm, holding the golden blade in front of him as he backed away from the slavering once-human monster. The Vore lunged at him with a roar and Sam swung the blade, the hideous creature screaming as the golden weapon struck home. Black blood flew through the air, spraying across the concrete floor, and the Vore tumbled away, thrashing wildly, mortally wounded.
Sam heard another roar from somewhere nearby, his blood suddenly running cold. The Vore they had encountered in Edinburgh never hunted alone; where there was one there were bound to be more. Sam sprinted towards the doors leading to the submarine pen, but when he was less than twenty metres from them a pair of Vore came running around the corner, barring his route. He raised his weapon, unsure whether or not the physical advantages that the nanites within his body gave him would be enough to face a pair of the mutated creatures. As he was weighing up his odds, three more Vore came charging across the floor of the workshop, joining their brothers in the hissing pack. The group crept towards Sam, sniffing at the still-twitching corpse of his first victim as they passed. Sam slowly backed away, knowing that he probably only had a matter of seconds before the creatures attacked.
He heard a clatter behind him and whirled around to see half a dozen more Vore heading his way. He was surrounded. He looked quickly between the two groups of Vore, his head flicking back and forth as he tried to keep them all in view at once. He made a sudden dash to his left and the Vore reacted instantly, sprinting towards him at inhuman speed. He grabbed a chain dangling from the ceiling, the blade of his right arm morphing back into the shape of a human hand, and the temporary boost of strength to his limbs allowed him to haul his body up towards the metal walkway overhead just as the nearest Vore leapt in his direction. Its claws slashed through the empty air where his dangling legs had been a fraction of a second before, and Sam pulled himself up on to the walkway.
He sprinted along the gantry, heading for a ladder that led up to the top of the curved body of the submarine. The Vore were just seconds behind him, vaulting up into the walkways surrounding the submarine with superhuman agility. Sam didn’t dare to look back, he just ran. He reached the bottom of the ladder and scaled it as quickly as possible, taking three rungs at a time. As he stepped on to the curved upper hull of the submarine, the Vore were already scrambling up the massive vessel’s curved flanks, their razor-sharp crystalline claws tearing into the steel hull as they climbed.
Sam turned and ran for the conning tower sticking up from the deck twenty metres away. He clambered up the access ladder on its side, the Vore now only a few metres behind him. He reached the top and realised with horror that there were Vore on the walkway above him too. There was nowhere to go. He spun around as the Vore scrambled towards him and stared into the hole leading down through the conning tower and into the darkness of the submarine below. For all he knew the interior of the giant vessel could be swarming with Vore, but at the moment it was his only escape route. He hurried through the hatch, slamming it shut behind him as the first of the pursuing Vore climbed over the railing and on to the top of the tower. Sam grabbed hold of the wheel on the underside of the hatch, spinning it in the darkness, sealing the heavy steel door shut. Almost immediately he heard muffled roars of frustration as the Vore started to claw violently at the other side of the hatch.
‘Great escape plan, Riley,’ Sam said to himself, sitting in the pitch black. He heard an ominous crunch from above him and a tiny chink of light appeared as the metal that was the only thing separating him from the Vore started to buckle and tear. He felt a sudden sense of panic as he realised that the hatch was not going to hold the Vore back for long. He took a long, deep breath and forced himself to focus past the fear he was feeling. ‘Calm people live,’ he said quietly, repeating one of the mantras that Robert Jackson, the ex-Royal Marine that had taught Sam and all of the other members of the resistance to fight, had drilled into him during his training.
He reached out in the blackness, using his sense of touch to build up as accurate a mental map of his surroundings as possible. After a few long seconds of desperate blind searching, he found another hatch in the floor and he lifted it up with a protesting screech from its unlubricated hinges. Another ladder led still further into the darkened depths of the vessel. Sam climbed down and quickly descended into a larger space, at least judging by the fact that he couldn’t immediately reach out and touch all four walls. He walked into some sort of waist-high counter, swearing under his breath as the corner dug into his thigh. Running his hands along the top of it, he found a large metal object, which felt like a toolbox. He opened the lid and put his hand inside, carefully feeling for anything that might be useful. His fingers closed on a rubberised, cylindrical object and he lifted it out of the box, mouthing a silent prayer to whatever gods might be looking down on him at that precise moment. Sam pressed the stud on the side of the cylinder and the torch he was holding flickered into a feeble half-life. He banged the torch with his other hand, as a thousand pre-invasion movies had taught him to do, but disappointingly it refused to get any brighter. In fact it just seemed to make it flicker more. Given that it must have been at least two years since the torch was last turned on, Sam supposed he should just be thankful that it worked at all.
He cast the feeble beam around the room, its weak light illuminating the dust-covered bridge of the vessel. There were no obvious signs of Vore here at least, though judging by the cacophonous sounds of banging from the main hatch above, they were only seconds away from breaking through. Sam moved quickly through the cramped spaces within the submarine, running down corridors that were barely tall enough for a man to stand upright in and past row after row of bunks built into the bulkheads in three-bed stacks. It would have been an oppressive environment at the best of times, but now, in the flickering light of his torch and with two years’ worth of dust hanging in the air, it was beyond unsettling.
Again Sam felt a flutter of panic in his belly as he heard the screech of tearing metal from somewhere behind him. He sprinted between the bunks, his heart pounding in his ears so hard that it was making it hard to think. He did his best to push all thoughts of getting trapped with the Vore in that dark, confined space towards the back of his mind and pressed onwards, heading towards the prow of the vessel.
There was a sudden loud bang and then the sound of heavy things moving through the darkened compartments somewhere behind him. The Vore were inside. Sam picked up speed, running faster through the gloom and trying to ignore the hissing sounds of the Vore as they raced through the chambers. He came to the final compartment and quickly waved his light around the room, spotting a row of hatches on the far side. He took a deep breath and swung the door behind him closed, spinning the wheel to lock its latches. He shone his torch through the ten-centimetre-wide toughened glass porthole and leapt backwards, his eyes suddenly wide with fear as slavering jaws slammed into the glass. A moment later the Vore began their assault on the door, setting it rattling under their superhumanly strong blows.
Sam hurried over to a hatch at the end of one of the long torpedo tubes that ran the length of the chamber and pointed towards the prow of the submarine. He opened it and shone his torch down the polished barrel within. The far end of the torpedo tube was still sealed by its outer waterproofed hatch. There was no way out through there. He checked the second tube, finding exactly the same thing. Behind him, the top corner of the door sealing the compartment from the Vore began to buckle inwards as huge claws forced themselves into the gap, ripping and tearing at the metal.
‘You’re not dying in here, Riley,’ Sam muttered to himself, trying to suppress the rising tide of panic building in his chest. He moved to the third and last torpedo tube and grabbed the wheel sealing the hatch. He pulled with all his might, but the handle refused to budge. He paused for a moment, took a deep breath and then tried again, willing the nanites in his hands and arms to boost his strength as far as possible. He felt the wheel move a fraction with a pained screech of corroded metal on metal. Behind him the door almost gave way completely, half hanging off its hinges; the Vore would be inside in seconds. He heaved at the wheel again, yelling out with the exertion as he felt it begin to move, slowly at first, with grinding reluctance, but then more quickly as the metal surfaces separated. He wrenched the tube open and shone his torch inside. The hatch at the far end was sealed.
‘Oh God,’ Sam whispered. There was no way out.
Behind him, the door finally gave way and Sam scrambled into the tube as the Vore smashed their way inside the chamber. He crawled desperately forward, claws scratching at the lining of the tube just centimetres from his feet as the Vore tried to squeeze into the narrow space behind him. Sam crawled further forward, feeling the tips of the claws brushing against his feet as he scrambled for grip on the smooth, polished walls of the tube. He pressed his weight against the sealed hatch at the far end and, to his surprise, fell headlong through it, landing hard on the concrete five metres below and knocking the wind out of his lungs.
Sam lay there for a second, fighting for breath, before he hauled himself painfully to his feet and looked up at the torpedo tube above him. What he had mistaken for the heavy waterproof hatch that normally sealed the tube was actually just a light plastic dust cover taped in place from the outside. He ran towards the heavy armoured doors that led to the submarine pen and slapped the large, red, mushroom-shaped switch mounted on the wall next to them. Somewhere far below his feet, emergency generators coughed into life, and a blaring klaxon sounded as an orange warning light flashed above the door, which slowly began to inch upwards.
‘Shut up, shut up, shut up,’ Sam whispered at the door, glancing over his shoulder at the submarine. Just seconds later the Vore pack poured out of the conning tower, half leaping and half falling to the ground below, before springing to their feet and charging across the room towards him. Sam dropped to his belly and scrambled under the door with barely a centimetre to spare before leaping to his feet and slapping the identical door switch on the other side. The door juddered back down, hitting the ground with a satisfying thud. Sam leant back against it and slid to the floor, sitting there for a moment or two and catching his breath, waiting for his heart rate to return to something like normal as the Vore pounded pointlessly on the other side of the fifteen-centimetre-thick armour.
He looked around the vast space, taking in the scale of the chamber. Once upon a time it would have been a wartime shelter for the UK’s fleet of nuclear submarines, buried dozens of metres below the rugged rock of the Scottish coast. Now it felt like a tomb.
‘OK, I’m here,’ Sam said. ‘Tell me you didn’t know about the Vore.’
I do not understand, the voice in his head replied.
‘Never mind, I’m here now,’ Sam said, climbing to his feet. ‘What do you need me to do?’
Go to the furthest dock from the entrance, the voice replied.
Sam walked the length of the pen, past the listing hulk of the one sub that had been in the pen at the time of the Voidborn invasion. He looked at the name painted on the concrete at the end of the dock: HMS Victorious. It represented the pinnacle of human weapon technology and now it sat here rusting, rendered irrelevant in the blink of an eye when the Voidborn arrived. Every movie he’d watched about alien invasions when he was younger had implied that humanity would fight back somehow, even if it ultimately proved futile. The reality had proven far worse.
Sam reached the empty dock at the far end of the room, the black water within still and deep.
‘What now?’ Sam asked.
In the wall you will see a pair of yellow doors, the voice replied. Open them.
Sam walked over to the brightly painted doors and pulled them open. Inside was a bewildering array of switches.
Now I need you to listen very carefully and follow my instructions.
For the next five minutes the voice inside his head that Sam was still reluctant to believe was his father talked him through a complicated procedure of throwing switches and setting dials to the correct position.
Now hit the large red button in the bottom right-hand corner of the panel, the voice instructed.
Sam did as he was told and somewhere below him he heard a rumble, and one by one the floodlights in the roof of the chamber far above lit up and bathed the dock with light.
Now do you see the switch labelled ‘Evac Pump DD1’?
‘Yeah, I see it,’ Sam said, after scanning the control panel for a few seconds.
Press it.
Sam hit the button. The place was suddenly filled with the sound of blaring klaxons, and yellow warning lights began to flash at the end of the nearest dock. Slowly, a huge metal panel slid up out of the water, locking into position when it was a metre clear of the surface. This was followed by a roaring sound, and the previously calm water of the dock began to churn as it was slowly drained away. As the water level dropped, something began to emerge. At first it looked like the curved white fin of some sort of sea monster rising from the ocean, but a few seconds later it became clear that it was a smooth, curved pylon and Sam could start to make out the pale shape of something large beneath the surface of the churning water. The giant pumps continued their work, draining the dry dock, and slowly, centimetre by centimetre, a huge, gleaming white vessel was revealed, the elegant lines of its dagger-like hull flaring into the curved pylons at the rear of the ship.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Sam said. ‘What is it?’
This is the vessel that brought Talon and myself to your planet many millions of years ago. In our native language she is called Naruun Pash Tanakk – the nearest English translation is Scythe of the Stars.
‘Mind if we just go with Scythe, instead of Naruun . . . uhh . . . whatever it was called?’ Sam said, walking along the deck, admiring the sweeping lines of its hull. It couldn’t have been more different to the sharp, angular shapes of the Voidborn ships.
Of course, the voice replied. The Scythe was not the most powerful ship in the Illuminate fleet, but she was the fastest and most manoeuvrable. That is why she was chosen to bear the last remnant of our people to this planet when we fled the Voidborn. It was this vessel that brought the Heart to Earth and it is this vessel that may now be the only way to protect it and every other living thing on this planet.
‘Just this one ship can destroy the Voidborn?’ Sam asked with a frown. ‘If that were true, why haven’t you done it already?’
It is not the Scythe that will destroy the Voidborn; it is where it will allow us to go.
‘Which is where exactly?’ Sam asked. ‘I’m not a big fan of cryptic.’
If you board the Scythe, the voice replied, I will explain.
Sam felt a moment of doubt; he had no idea whether or not he could trust this mysterious voice inside his head and there was no way of knowing what might happen if he did as it asked. But what it had told him a few minutes ago was true: if it did mean to harm him, there had been ample opportunity to do so on the journey up here.
‘OK, if it’s going to get me some answers,’ Sam said. ‘How do I get on board?’
The ship is keyed to the implant inside your head, the voice replied. All you need do is touch the hull.
Sam climbed down the nearby ladder that led to the bottom of the dry dock and walked towards the ship, stretching out his hand and placing it on the hull, which, despite the fact it had just emerged from the water, felt dry and warm. As his skin made contact with the Scythe, he watched patterns of blue light radiate out from his hand and ripple across the ship’s hull. A moment later there was a solid clunk and a hiss, and a hatch that had been invisible just before opened in the side of the vessel, a few metres away. Sam walked towards the hatch as glowing blue blocks of energy materialised in front of it, forming a staircase that led inside. He climbed up the steps and into the brightly illuminated interior of the Scythe, the clean lines of its hull echoed in the smooth, white internal walls that pulsed with the same blue lights that had lit up on the exterior hull at Sam’s touch.
Follow the corridor to your right, the voice said. It will take you to the bridge.
Sam followed the voice’s directions and soon came to a hatch that silently slid open as he approached. The chamber beyond was dominated by a central dais upon which was a curved reclining seat. Arranged around the central seat were half a dozen more seats in a semi-circle. There was no sign of anything that Sam might have recognised as controls or instruments. In fact, its bare walls and simple shapes reminded him more than anything else of the spartan interior of the Voidborn drop-ships.
Please sit, the voice said, as the raised seat in the centre silently lowered.
Sam walked over and sat down, feeling the warm, soft lining meld itself to his body as he leant back. A moment later the seat rose back into its elevated position and the air in front of Sam’s face was filled with a glowing holographic screen displaying an array of strange icons and what looked like words in an unintelligible angular script. He watched as the display shifted, the readouts moving to the edges of the screen and a face appearing in the centre of it. Sam felt a shiver run through his body as he stared into the eyes of his dead father. It was not the human face that Sam had grown up with, but his father’s true face, that of the Illuminate scientist Suran.
‘Hello, Sam,’ the holographic image said. ‘I am sorry to have brought you here like this, but there is much to do and little time to explain.’
‘What are you?’ Sam asked, relieved to be able to hear his father’s voice normally at last, instead of as a whisper in his skull. ‘Whatever you are, you’re not my dad. I watched him die.’
‘You are correct,’ the hologram replied with a nod. ‘I am an engram construct.’
‘Which is?’
‘It is a concept that is difficult to express in your language,’ the Construct replied. ‘I am an artificial recreation of your father’s personality that is based upon centuries of his recorded experience. Your father is indeed dead, but he left me here as an echo of himself so that he could warn you of the danger that you face.’
‘So you’re some kind of digital ghost of my father?’ Sam asked.
‘An over-simplification, but yes,’ the Construct replied. ‘That would be one way of putting it.’
‘How did you get me here?’ Sam asked.
‘The implant that your father placed in your cerebral cortex effectively blocks the Voidborn control signal by overlaying it with a separate, stronger signal that it generates itself. That signal usually does nothing but block the commands sent by the Voidborn, but it can, if necessary, be used to control the individual who carries the implant. That was how I was able to bring you here.’
‘You could’ve just asked,’ Sam said with a frown.
‘No, I could not,’ the Construct replied. ‘I was pre-programmed by your father to summon you only in certain, very specific circumstances. One of those circumstances has arisen and so I was forced to bring you here like this. You, your planet and what remains of both our species are in mortal danger and we must act now before it is too late.’
‘I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but we’ve been in mortal danger for a couple of years now. It’s not exactly breaking news.’
‘No,’ the Construct replied. ‘There is a new threat, something that neither you nor the Illuminate have seen before. Observe.’
The display shifted and an image appeared of the Earth and the moon hanging in space. A point halfway between the two was highlighted by a pulsing red light.
‘What’s that?’ Sam asked.
‘I am not entirely certain,’ the Construct replied, ‘but I fear that it may be the vessel that was controlling the Voidborn fleet when they first attacked the Illuminate. Our fleet was never able to get near enough to observe it directly, but we were able to detect power emissions on a scale quite unlike anything we had ever seen before. Whenever we encountered the Voidborn, we detected those emissions, but we could not determine exactly what it was that was creating them. The object that you see in front of you matches that emission signal perfectly.’
‘When did it appear?’ Sam asked.
‘Within the last twenty-four hours,’ the Construct replied. ‘It is also transmitting an extremely powerful signal to the Voidborn vessels within the Earth’s atmosphere, a signal that is then being relayed to the other members of your species.’
Sam thought back to the Sleepers writhing in agony in Stirling’s laboratory. It couldn’t be just a coincidence that their change in behaviour coincided perfectly with the arrival of this thing, whatever it was.
‘We have to stop that signal,’ Sam said. ‘It’s doing something to everyone without an implant, something awful.’
‘That is why I brought you here,’ the Construct replied. ‘You are the last of the Illuminate and so you are the only one who may access the Heart.’
‘My father told me about that,’ Sam said. ‘Some sort of archive that stored the personalities of the Illuminate.’
‘That is correct,’ the Construct replied. ‘It was our last hope for escaping the Voidborn after we suffered our final crushing defeat in the war. Billions of Illuminate consciousnesses, digitised, compressed and stored within a near-indestructible data crystal. Our last desperate gambit when the only option that was left for us was to run and hide. It rests within the molten core of your planet, somewhere we thought it would never be found. We were wrong.’
‘And that’s what the Voidborn have been searching for; that’s why they came here and built those drilling rigs like the one we disabled in London.’
‘Yes, and now we must assume they have finally retrieved it or are at least very close to doing so,’ the Construct said. ‘I do not understand exactly what the Voidborn intend to do at that point. If they had wished simply to destroy it, they could have forced your star to explode into a supernova, but the lengths to which they have gone to preserve the lives of the inhabitants of this planet while seeking to retrieve it suggest that they have other motives of which we are, as yet, unaware.’
‘So whatever they’re planning has something to do with the Heart,’ Sam said, ‘which means we’ve got to stop them from getting their hands on it.’
‘Yes, I believe so,’ the Construct replied.
‘Then I need to get back to London as soon as possible,’ Sam said. ‘Is this thing ready to fly?’
‘All of the Scythe’s systems are fully operational,’ the Construct replied.
‘Then let’s go,’ Sam said. ‘If we’re going to stand any chance of stopping the Voidborn from retrieving the Heart, we’re going to need all the help we can get.’