Blinding blue sparks lit the track rushing beneath, as the metro train’s contact-shoe rode the live rail, surfing the current.
Just reach the Forbidden City, Finn told himself as he rode the carriage. Reach the Forbidden City and you’ll show up on the G&T’s nano-radar and they’ll come and find you.
Splitting up with Carla in the Metro hadn’t been easy. He was her wingman, her shotgun. They’d been through a lot in a few short hours, their friendship tempered by events. But they were also in the race of their lives and he figured they doubled their chances of winning if they split up.
“Beat me to it. Winner takes all.”
“All what?”
“All the grief your sister and my uncle are going to give us for abandoning each other.”
He’d emptied the extra fuel into the Bug and given her the empty cans to take with her. “Any kind of nano-material will show up on nano-radar. Take it. If they catch you, it may help us find you.”
Beneath the metro train the blue sparks died and brakes bit against the wheels. Light whooshed in as they pulled into the station, signs whipping by –
The Forbidden City.
It wasn’t a decision he wanted to make. It wasn’t even a decision he had to make. But it was a decision he made in a split second. Because it was for the best, and he always knew what was for the best.
Drake was not with the girl. They’d been fooled by a couple of empty fuel cans. It meant he was likely to make contact now with the G&T.
And The Forbidden City was shutting down. Some kind of evacuation was underway.
So it seemed that once again the boy and his uncle had forced his hand.
They must die.
Slowly.
“Order the open dispersal,” he said. “Then blind them. Destroy the nano-radar.”
The boy could run but he couldn’t hide. Just like his uncle. Just like his grandmother. Soon there would be no more secrets, no more hiding places. Not from Kaparis. He would soon be inside every machine in the world.
What’s more he would be inside Hook Hall.
Inside Boldklub itself. The code would be revealed. Complete.
And then he, Kaparis, would be complete. Time would begin again. And he would rise.
Impatience made his cheek twitch.
“Give me as many bot-feeds as possible.”
Scratchy in-flight bot-video started to pop open on his screen array. This wasn’t just any old take down. This was a wonder of the world that was to come.
“I want to see this.”
The PRIME XE.CUTE was on the assembly line of Sony Plant 9, a 220,000m2 games console facility in Sector 5 of the Forbidden City, when the emergency order came through.
>>KAPCOMMS>>XE.CUTE: RISE – DESTROY RADAR AND COMMS 23429784 2398308 78087907 65870568 856787348 3493497 945973649 98400 …
Of the 6,784,398 bots produced to that point 1,560,104 were packed and dormant within 30,002 completed consumer products, ready to be shipped. 189,454 were engaged as scout bots, harvesting carbon from multiple sources to feed the 1,173,952 bots engaged in production in 22,576 Vector Suites hidden in plants throughout the Forbidden City. The remainder were concealed awaiting assignment.
The PRIME XE.CUTE nano-bot halted production and gave the executive order:
KAPCOMM SAY RISE = VECTOR RISE
Immediately it began. In ninety-four factories and research facilities across the city, Vector Suites began to break up as bots took to the air. Rising.
SEE XE.CUTE RISE
From laptops, tablets and phones; from printers, cameras and servers the size of small cars; from devices of every conceivable kind … the bots rose, heading for the wide open spaces, as natural and inevitable as a great migration, like millions of starlings heading South for the winter.
SEE BOTS RISE
Kelly was flying the Skimmer from radar site to radar site, Stubbs beside him as they changed the nano-radar set up in the central zone.
Beneath them traffic was flowing out of the city.
They’d completed six sites already when Stubbs began adjusting the Skimmer’s own radar. There seemed to be insects everywhere all of a sudden … in every square foot of air, flying random arcs, up and downing, to-ing and fro-ing, a mad scribble of life.
“It’s like there’s a storm coming,” Stubbs said aloud, trying to figure it through.
Carbon bots would have a similar nano-radar signature to an insect. Maybe they had found what they were looking for?
Then he blinked.
At the centre of it all, as bright as the Star of Bethlehem, a single darker dot was rising fast.
Suddenly the faint dots around it moved as one. Like a shoal of fish. Small neat groups formed, then headed off in a dozen directions at once.
“Something is happening,” stated Stubbs.
The PRIME XE.CUTE achieved command altitude then gave the signal to start the attack.
BOT9aBGR.1623 was the first to fire.
Angle of approach 36.74 degrees west on a flat trajectory, altitude 1600mm, speed 22kmph.
It discharged 1047ma into its integral rail gun and fired at a range of 600mm. A bolt was successfully discharged and remained coherent during its path to target: a nano-radar dish in Sector 2. Combustion was instantaneous and compounded by strikes from BOT11BGR.772 and BOT26aBGR.199 in the same formation.
Stubbs watched the dot formations on his radar screen shoot streaks along their trajectories.
“Do you know … I think… they’re firing?” Stubbs said, but Kelly wasn’t listening, his eyes fixed on two incoming thunderbolts –
ZWOOOOSHSHHHHH! ZWOOOOSHSHHHHH!
Beep.
King heard the first fault alarm. An interruption in one of the radar feeds, not a particular cause for concern.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeep …
But several? Instantaneously?
Al appeared from the helipad with Bo Zhang and Delta, as Kelly yelled over the radio. “The nano-bots – they’re everywhere! Thousands of them! We’re under attack!”
Technicians hurried to keyboards as screen after screen feeding in data from the Forbidden City was suddenly wiped out.
“Kelly, give us numbers, patterns, what can you see – talk to me!” shouted Al. “Kelly!”
Nothing.
“They must have taken out the nano-comms as well,” said King.
“A breakout …” said Al, digesting the implications. “We need to stall this or we’re going to be overrun.”
“Signals! Surely the nano-bots must be communicating with each other?”
A technician looked up from a screen. “Nothing.”
“Never mind the signals! Let me out!” yelled Delta from the Skimmer.
She shot towards the sealed doors, waiting for them to open them.
Al jumped across the table to stop her.
“If the guys survived, they’ll already be on their way back. Your sister has enough on her plate without losing you in a suicide mission!”
Delta dipped the Skimmer and – DRRRRT – fired nano-50mm rounds at his feet, full of impotent rage. Al duly danced back as the tiny rounds thudded into the carpet.
“Doctor Allenby! Flight Lieutenant Salazar!” Bo roared. Al and Delta turned, astonished to see his perfect facade had cracked.
King translated his intended meaning. “We need to grow up. We need options.”
“There are no options,” said Al. “We need to shut the Forbidden City down. We need to cut the power and put it in quarantine. We need to get some live bots up here so we can take a closer look. But more than anything, we need to get every last person out of there and into the quarantine zone – now!”
Bo Zhang took a moment.
Until twenty-four hours ago his entire life had run along neat lines. He took ruthless, rational decisions which he implemented with 100 per cent efficiency. And now a bizarre English eccentric was asking him to believe his country would soon be crawling with microscopic agents of Armageddon … and he was taking him seriously.
Delta flew right up. “You heard him. Make the call.”
Bo took in the blank screens. He took in the faces turned to him. He took in Delta, 10mm tall on a flying fingernail and in a state of some distress.
Anything was possible. He turned to his staff.
“Announce a terror alert. Order a total evacuation. Shut down the Forbidden City.”
Finn flew high over the main perimeter and got a magnificent perspective view of the great crop circle of the Forbidden City and thought … Yes.
He was on the home straight.
He cruised over white factory blocks, vast app-campuses, blue-crystal corporate headquarters and immaculately tended green spaces, heading straight for the dead centre.
Then he glanced down at his nano-radar.
At the edge of the screen – not one bright dot, but two! Two flying objects that must be made of nano-material, the two Skimmers. One seemed to be dead still. The other moving fast, first in a straight line, then erratic. He couldn’t believe his luck.
He grabbed the radio, praying they would be in nano-comms range.
“Skimmer One – Skimmer Two. Do you read me? This is Infinity Drake – over?”
He expected, if anything, an expression of surprise, delight, maybe even a swearword. Instead, blitzing out of his speaker Kelly screamed –
“INCOMING!”
“Kelly?”
Stubbs’s voice came on the line as static ripped away at the signal.
“Control?”
“This is not Control. It’s Finn!” Finn repeated.
“WHAT?” said Kelly. More static. Or … firing? Finn could still only see the dot on his screen. He adjusted the frequency to pick out less dense objects and suddenly – there they were. Everywhere. Insects?
“GET OUT! WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!” ordered Kelly.
DRTRRTRTRTR! DRTRTRTRTRRT!
Adrenalin shot through every cell in Finn’s body – GO! He checked the ammo clip on the Minimi – still good. “HANG ON! I’M COMING!”
“NO!”
Finn ignored him, jabbing the sticks forward, leaning into the harness to resist the Gs as the acceleration tried to rip him from the Bug’s back, making its heart and turbines roar.
Kaparis glanced at the feed from K-SAT – a personal spy satellite hovering 277 miles above the earth – and watched the Forbidden City change colour. Each bot was mapped as a tiny point of red light and the city looked like a great angry spot, infection spreading outwards, the bots clinging to the hair of 100,000 fleeing workers, or flying free, with scout bots already powering way beyond the perimeter.
The bots were inevitable now. Unstoppable. You might just as easily try and catch the wind.
“We have a second craft approaching from the north,” Li Jun reported.
Kaparis’s eyes flicked back to the radar feed and his life support stats exploded on the ECG monitor.
“THAT’S HIM!”