inn was close to his friends. Maybe it was the lack of living family. For him friends were up there with insects and daydreaming. Hudson. Christabel. Stubbs, Kelly and Delta … and the one who he had just heard cry out: Carla.
Finn had convinced himself she was safe – that she was with Al and Delta. That she would have told the world where he was. Now he had to accept that maybe no one knew where either of them were. And it was all his fault. He never should have freaked her out in Hong Kong in the first place.
Hearing her voice had come like a stab through the heart. He had to respond. He knew it was trap. She knew it was a trap. The lead Tyro certainly knew it was a trap. But there was nothing on earth that was going to stop him walking right into it.
He had to get to her, he had to save her.
How he’d achieve this he had no idea, he’d figure it out on the way. It was, after all, a long way. Maybe 30 macro-metres southeast across the hall.
So he’d started running south from rail trench to rail trench, sliding east along the polished steel pit on his back to keep an eye out for patrolling bots, keeping dead still if any came near and waiting until the coast was clear before leaping out to sprint fifty nano-metres or so to the next trench.
He made progress at first, but the closer he got the thicker the bot patrols became, the air full of the hiss of the thrusters and the constant tick and slap of their antennae. Not that they were the only threat, for as the morning wore on he’d repeatedly had to use his spike to cut down more and more inquisitive mosquitoes too. After just an hour he was running out of energy and ideas.
Which is when he heard it—
tick-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-hssss …
Close by. So close that if he tried to run for it, he was sure to get blasted. He froze on his back in the rail trench, playing dead and praying it would pass.
tick-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-hssss …
Closer. Not flying. Dragging itself along.
Finn held his breath. Clutched the spike.
tick-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-scratch-tick-hssss …
Suddenly, two great hairy bullwhip antennae flicked over the trench. Before he could react, a black tank-turret of a head was looming over him, two great mouth parts twitching and tasting, void-black eyes sucking up his terror. A cockroach the size of a croc and five times as hungry.
Finn’s guts turned. He almost expected saliva to drip from its bone-hard lips.
With remarkable speed, the roach jammed two spiked legs into the trench to force Finn up towards its jaws. Every cell in Finn’s body screamed – fight!
WHAM. Finn smashed the mosquito spike across the ghastly face, caning it. The roach hissed and stretched its jaws a mile wide to strike back, but Finn frantically wriggled from the lethal grip and scrambled back along the trench beneath its articulated bulk.
Leaping up behind the roach, he raised the spike. The beast flicked around to face him. With two hands and all his strength Finn brought the aluminium spike down like a mighty hammer right between the great shields of the insect’s eyes – WHAM.
Absolutely nothing.
The vast creature threw itself forward. Finn turned and ran like hell along the trench, the roach literally snapping at his heels to try and snaffle up a trailing leg. Again and again he span with the spike and brought it down – WHAM WHAM WHAM – against its head, eyes, antennae, anything to slow it, the blows only making it rear and charge like a great angry bear.
Still Finn ran. There was a reason why cockroaches had survived since the dawn of time, he thought – they didn’t mess around.
The end of the trench approached in the form of a server stack wheel. Soon Finn would be wedged in between the curve of it and the rail – he would have to act now, or die. There was nowhere else to go.
Finn spun round, raised the spike and ran back at the charging roach.
As the great creature hit him, Finn jabbed the spike down hard between its eyes, leaning into it, using its momentum and its reflexive buck to pole-vault up over its head to land on its back. The beast’s antennae flailed and wheeled. It bucked and writhed, trying to get a fix on its tormentor, but Finn – a rodeo ace now thanks to his time on the Bug – held fast to the armoured edge of the creature’s thorax where it met and moved against its thick cellulose head plate.
Finn took the mosquito spike and drove the blunt point of it between the two plates – just hard enough to force a gap. The roach wheeled and rolled over. Every ounce of air was knocked out of Finn as he was crushed beneath it. But still he held on.
As the beast righted itself it, the spike sank a fraction deeper into the armoured gap. Finn seized his chance. With all his might he heaved the spike forward like an engineer changing points on a rail track. Stubbs would have been proud. With a great crack, Finn felt some of the neck ligaments give way.
The creature gave a mighty buck. But it was a last gasp. The cockroach was crippled.
Finn never wanted any living thing to die, but the bots were circling. He drove the spike to the hilt down into the soft open gap at the roach’s neck. Goo oozed out and the creature shook. With another sinking of the spike, Finn levered forward again and – with a wet POP – the cockroach’s head fell forward off its body, antennae still whipping and twitching.
The commotion brought the bots zooming in, but before the first one could tip itself up to focus its eye on the corpse, Finn was hidden beneath it. The bots hissed and searched in vain.
A few nano-feet away the severed cockroach head, still alive, watched Finn’s game of hide-and-seek play outfn1.
Finn lay there, heart thumping, euphoric.
He knew how to reach Carla.
Via a grainy bot-cam Kaparis regarded Kelly, unconscious within his cluster cell. He had passed out during a long-distance interrogation with Hans.
But he hadn’t talked.
And nor had Drake taken the live bait in the Shen Yu. He was obviously hiding somewhere in the floor rails, but even a systematic search could be fooled and time was running out.
Soon the great bot dispersal, the Exodus, would begin.
The domed screen array showed endless close-ups of mosquitos and roaches and any other carbon life form picked up by the bot-radar. They needed to narrow down the search and flush Finn out, to reduce the number of variables and—
Of course. The answer was so obvious he scolded himself.