Delta slapped Finn on the back.
“Happy nearly-birthday!” grinned Kelly.
“Thought we’d cheer you up,” said Stubbs, deadpan.
They stood back and let Finn take in the Thing.
The others had been testing it for the last month. He’d glimpsed parts of it before, designs on-screen, but he’d never seen the whole thing.
“The nCraft?” said Finn.
“I see you’ve been paying attention,” said Kelly.
“Say hello to the X1 Experimental Nano-thruster,” murmured Stubbs, reverentially.
Delta bit her lip excitedly, like they had pulled off the best birthday surprise ever.
“Guy’s a genius,” said Kelly, roughing Stubbs’s remaining hair.
“It’s fast as a whip and can turn on a pin!” said Delta.
“It’s –” Finn tried to put it into words – “a little ugly.”
Three faces fell at once. He thought Kelly would cry or hit him. “This isn’t a beauty contest!” he yelled.
It was, thought Finn, like one of those weird deep-sea fish that had evolved in the perpetual gloom of an ocean trench. Roughly the size of a limousine at their scale, it had a gawping front grill like a great mouth and two headlamp eyes. It had multiple stubby wings and rudders that looked like fins, and a tail section with a scorched and nasty-looking exhaust, and its underside was regularly pockmarked with clusters of small thruster units.
“I’m not being mean,” said Finn, apologetically. “I’m just saying it looks like an ugly bug and when you go into production—”
“It’s the prototype!” shouted Kelly. “You think we’d let you near one of the new X2 models?”
“So shallow,” sighed Delta.
“Hey, I’m still twelve –” Finn checked his watch – “just. I’m meant to be shallow!”
“Well then I don’t suppose for one moment,” said Stubbs, “you’ll be wanting a go.”
And with that he flicked a switch on the outside of the craft. Computers and gyroscopes woke within, turbines turned over and the Bug came alive. Lights blazed all over its body and it floated off the ground, suspended on a cushion of air, flexing its tail and wings to keep absolutely steady.
“Wow,” said Finn, gobsmacked.
“We’ve ‘borrowed’ it for one night only. Not a word to anyone, especially not to Al,” warned Kelly.
“Note the extraordinary stability,” Stubbs began, gearing up to explain the technicalities. “A central jet runs a compressor that feeds cold gas rockets all over the body controlled by an intelligent thrust-vectoring syst—”
“OK, OK, I want a go!” said Finn.
With a high-pitched hum from the jet engine beneath them and the hiss of collective thrusters, they rose steadily towards the roof of the Central Field Analysis Chamber. On top of the Bug was an open cab with four seats, a roll cage, a windscreen and some crude controls. It was like sitting in a fat flying sports car, thought Finn, yet with a ride so gentle they might have been in a bubble. There was also a mount for an M249 Minimi light machine gun, to defend themselves against insects and any other threat they might face in the outside world.
They had to be careful, the craft was supposedly strictly out of bounds in Lab Three, but the Duty Techs were in Lab Two and Stubbs and Kelly had nobbled some of their monitoring equipment, smuggling the Bug out through the model rail network, first to the nano-compound in Lab One, then into the vast, empty spaces of the CFAC.
Finn was just admiring the view as they rose above the stone circle of particle accelerators when Delta said, “OK, brace,” and punched her arms forward against the dual joysticks.
Finn’s head snapped back and the roof rushed by, his insides galloping hopelessly to catch up with his skeleton, as Delta turned hard to avoid hitting the far wall of the hangar. They shot back across the CFAC at roof level, then dived and … SLAM! Halfway to the ground Delta made the Bug turn 90 degrees without bothering to slow down, the nCraft morphing to deliver thrust at all the right angles at once. Finn was left gasping.
Delta then plunged towards the rows of benches crammed with computers surrounding the accelerator array. Down they went, skimming along the desks, slaloming the accelerators and monitors, whipping up paperwork, then down again to rollercoaster beneath benches and between chair legs, then up again into empty space.
Finn’s mind was spinning. They were not flying: they were motion itself. Pure euphoria battled memories of his terror-flight, trapped on the back of the Scarlatti wasp the previous spring, till – SLAM! – Delta opened up the reverse thrusters and stopped the Bug dead. Finn was thrown forward so hard he thought he was going to bring up his lungs, never mind his dinner.
In sudden stillness, he took a gulp of air and looked at the clock on the lab wall. It was midnight, his birthday: his turn. He grinned.
Finn climbed across and took the controls, and for one minute and forty-nine seconds he had the best birthday ever.
Delta ordered him not to think too much. “Just point and shoot.”
He took hold of the twin sticks, looked at the far wall of the CFAC and pushed them forward.
The Bug shot forward, so he eased back, getting a feel for the power as he coasted the entire length of the building, rising all the time. He felt a surging joy and remembered sitting on his mother’s knee steering her old Citroën 2CV around a beach car park in the rain.
He accelerated and made a turn, arcing back around, just below the roof, then more turns.
Then he began to throw the Bug around like rodeo horse. It was easy. The speed and distance you could cover was awesome and the handling was amazing – it felt as though you had thrust from a thousand places at once.
It felt alive. This was almost better than being big.
He flew up towards the Control Gallery that overlooked the CFAC, then dived and curled to fly around the circle of accelerators like Ben Hur around the circus maximus, laughing and loving it, until …
POP! POP! POP!
For the second time that night he was dazzled by sudden bright lights.
Delta leapt across and snatched the controls from him, pulling the Bug to a halt and leaving them hanging in mid-air, staring down at a group of incoming officials, hurrying across the CFAC towards the gantry steps of the Control Gallery.
“What’s happening?” asked Finn.
“Oh no …” said Stubbs. “King.”
Finn looked over. The great hanger doors of the CFAC were whirring open and Commander King was crossing the chamber, trailing aides and flanked by General Mount of the British High Command on one side and the head of British Intelligence on the other. Then, even more remarkably – VROOOOM! SCREEEEECH! – in roared a 1969 De Tomaso Mangusta, and out hopped Al.
“Good evening, Dr Allenby,” uttered King, trying to ignore the showy entrance.
“Peter. Wendy. Tink,” Al said to the trio. All three, used to his odd sense of humour, ignored it and carried on up the steps.
Finn’s heart was in his mouth, he looked at the others and they were already grinning.
“It’s the G&T. It’s meeting.”
They should have been afraid, they were absent without leave in the Bug. But suddenly the normal rules didn’t seem to apply any more.
After the months of tedium and frustration something was happening.
Nine miles away, Grandma was finding it difficult to sleep. She had been on her way to bed with her cocoa when she’d heard Al’s car pull up in front of the house, only to take off again immediately. Perhaps he’d forgotten something and gone back for it? Perhaps he’d decided to go back to his bed in London for the night? Perhaps anything, really. She’d got into bed and tried to put it out of her mind, but the moment she closed her eyes a maternal sixth sense had kicked in. What if something was wrong?
She called Al. Straight to voicemail. She called Commander King. Straight to voicemail.
She smelt a rat.