The crick in Carla’s neck was on the move, the pain running all the way down her right-hand side. The way her hands were tied meant she was sat in a perpetual slouch. Agony. Her efforts to chew through the leather belt had nearly worn away her teeth and she was no nearer coherent speech. All she could do, every now and then, was sound a warning. Because one thing was certain – if Finn was out there in the vast machine, he would undoubtedly be stupid enough to try and save her.
“Urnnnnngh!” Carla tried to shout out, to warn him again to stay away.
At home she had hungered for ‘Difference’, for ‘Experience’, but they had been hard to come by in the suburb with the highest recycling rate in North America. Finn was undoubtedly ‘Different’; the most unsuitable and exciting friend she’d ever had. On the other hand, the trouble with ‘Experience’ was you grew close to those you shared it with, and she did not want either of them to die at the hands of some teenage-terror goon.
She could hear a Tyro now, moving about on the other side of the hall. She tried to gird herself for their approach but her courage was fading. She was tired, she was hungry, she had been bitten by several mosquitoes and, to cap it all, a great black cockroach was now crawling across the floor towards her and there was nothing in the world that gave her the heebie-jeebies like a cockroach. As it raised itself on its back legs like an evil little cobra, she stretched to stamp her heel down on it: “Urnnnnngh!”
WHAM!
Missed.
Making the costume was easier than Finn had expected.
He thought he’d have to hollow the dead cockroach out, splitting it open to scoop out all the guts, but in fact he’d been able to prise the exoskeleton straight off its soft body and had ended up with a cockroach cape that dangled two useless legs. He pinned his spike through the top section to act as a bar to keep it in place and put it on over his shoulders. Although it had no head, the disguise worked like a dream and, as long as he hit the deck when the bots came too close, they soon flew on. It was a little big, but it wasn’t too heavy and he’d travelled six server blocks towards the sound of Carla’s grunting in no time.
His unbridled joy as he finally reached her was blighted only by …
WHAM.
… her desperate attempts to crush him to death with her massive bus-sized sneakers.
He stood and lifted the cape to try and show himself again. “STOP! IT’S ME! IT’S ME!”
WHAM.
The heel of the giant sneaker caught the edge of the cockroach cape and crunched off a trailing leg.
“You nearly killed me!” he cried from beneath the shell.
She couldn’t see him. He had to find a way to get in closer …
Then he heard something.
A distant ripple at first. Then a rushing, a continual roar.
He turned to look back under the server stacks. There, sweeping fast across the floor towards him, was a black, head-high slick – an unstoppable wall of water.
Instinct screamed in Finn’s brain – RUN.
His legs were way ahead of him, already sprinting. He heard Carla squeal as the water hit her then – WHAM – the leading edge of the tsunami, laden with dirt and flotsam, smashed into him.
Raging water engulfed him, dragging him under and along the floor at incredible speed.
He struggled against the force, spinning 360 degrees. When he broke the surface, gasping for air, he found himself being washed down the hyper-server canyon away from Carla. He reached out for the server wall and grabbed for anything. His fingertips just managed to hook a single wire. He held on tight and jolted to a halt in the current, the force nearly taking his arm from its socket. The weight of water pushing against his cockroach cape was enormous, but he managed to haul himself to the side and finally pulled himself out.
He clung to the side of the server, getting his bearings as the river raged beneath him.
Stubbs! he thought immediately. What the hell would happen to Stubbs in this? The water must have drowned him in his sick bed … For a moment Finn didn’t want to get hold of himself. Didn’t want to go on. He just watched the water rushing by and wanted to cry.
Venice, Finn thought absurdly as he looked down at the water. My father might be in Venice, I’ve got to at least find out about that before I die …
The thought brought Finn back to life. He’d been washed halfway down the length of the server canyon, a great distance at his scale, but he could also see a clear route to Carla.
Bots were buzzing over the water like excited midges. The Tyros must have figured he was hiding in the trenches and flooded them. How long before they figured out he could hide beneath an insect?
Finn turned his cockroach-back on them and began to climb the component-clustered cliff.
THUMP.
“Yo-yo?”
Uh-oh, thought Hudson.
The idea of Yo-yo as saviour and furry fortress had grown as things had got worse.
A junior technician going off shift had provided the latest grim breakthrough. She found her car clamped. She was about to assault the parking meter when she noticed it had a solar cell on top. Analysis showed that the Forbidden City was thick with solar panels, and while the authorities could remotely isolate them from the power supply, there was nothing they could do to stop the solar cells themselves generating power.
If the bots could power up and multiply then they were finished, was King’s secret prognosis.
Now their last hope was that Yo-yo could get inside the Forbidden City and provide some kind of breakthrough intelligence.
Yo-yo had maintained a fever pitch of excitement for more than an hour after his toilet break, making lots of new friends and getting to know the Roof of the World operations room. He’d been good as gold when fitted with his harness and collar, and yapped obligingly when Delta had been clipped on in the nDen. Fully attired, he looked less like the world’s stupidest mongrel and more like some kind of robot space dog.
All was going well until, after a snack, Yo-yo decided to see what would happen if he closed his eyes for a second, just one second …
Never has a dog hit the floor, and deepest sleep, with such finality.
“Is this normal?” one of the technicians asked Hudson.
“Um … I think he’s having one of his snoozes …” said Hudson. He felt guilty – how would it look if he’d brought Yo-yo all this way just for him to take a dump on a helipad and fall asleep?
Delta switched on the amplifier in the nDen.
“Yo-yo? Wake up! Wake up, Yo-yo!”
Nothing.
“Well, don’t just stand there! Call a vet or something!” she demanded of Al. “Give him an injection to wake him up!”
“No!” said Al. He squatted down and tried to explain. “The drugs from the flight must still be in his system. Let’s just give him ten minutes’ sleep to burn a little off.”
Delta swore. Knowing Carla was trapped was grinding her usually steely nerves.
“We don’t have ten minutes!” she yelled at Al.
“We need him at his natural peak, not loaded with every kind of drug. We also need you at your peak so try and calm down.”
“Oh, I’m calm …” she insisted, shoving up the release bar of the nDen door to let herself out. Clunk. It didn’t open.
“Hey!” she said, rattling the bar.
“Ah …” said Al, looking wary. “I told them to lock you in. I don’t want any heroics.”
“WHAT?!”
“Everyone I hold dear is now hostage to this, even my mother,” Al started.
“Get me the hell out of here, right now!” yelled Delta.
“You’re not going to complete the set. This ensures that if the dog has to turn back, you have to turn back with him and not go AWOL on some suicide mission.”
Delta, who finally knew with absolute certainty that no man more utterly infuriating had ever existed, lost all verbal and emotional control and let out a primal roar.
“ARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
It only strengthened his resolve. Ignoring her screams, Al instructed the technicians. “Lift the dog carefully into the chopper and fly them both to the launch site before he wakes up. Or she explodes.”