“What’s happening? Why aren’t they attacking?!” cawed Kaparis as he watched the cockroach tunnelling away, and his technical team tried to track it from bot-cam to bot-cam.
Li Jun was silent.
“Repeat the order for the bots to attack any organic life form!”
Again Li Jun remained immobile.
She did not want them to die. She would not issue the order.
In her mind, she was elsewhere. She was walking by a lake. Her parents were holding her hands. Her sister was playing …
A technician beside her, terrified, checked her screen. “Master! Something is wrong!”
“Li Jun!” Kaparis barked. “Li Jun!”
She did not reply. She looked out across the ocean at the horizon.
“LI JUN!”
She spoke very quietly in reply, but the words cut through Kaparis like a knife. “I want to live. I want to be free.”
Grandma stopped knitting and her eyes filled with tears of joy. “Oh, how lovely!”
Kaparis spat and choked. Within his steel sarcophagus, his lifeless body sweated rage.
“INFAMY! INFAMY!”
Over the ancient temple, the storm was about to break.
With a terrible clap of thunder the signal from Kaparis finally arrived with the XE. bots in the cluster. The standing order to ignore insects was changed to a doomsday order: to destroy all organic life forms.
Kill. Everything.
Deep beneath the surface of the super cluster Finn and Kelly were doomed.
Outside, there was a downrush of wind and a black rain descended.
An LCD clock on the dashboard of the ice-cream van flipped to 11:55.
“THERE!” shouted Hudson.
Two sets of faint black dots had appeared on the very edge of the world.
Al raised his arm. “ON MY SIGNAL! Three … two … one …”
The Flying Leopards skimmed the satellite towns west of Shanghai.
They were sixty-four seconds away from target.
Group Captain Bingxin saw the outline of the Nine Harmonies Pagoda on the horizon. He looked at the fire permission indicator.
It turned from amber to green.
They were on track to destroy a part of China’s heritage. To the pilot it seemed crazy, but there had to be a reason. “Duty. Action. Delivery,” was what it was all about.
“Go to green,” he said.
“Green confirmed,” came the response from both attack wings.
BEEEEEEEEPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!
Suddenly everything was flashing at once, on the HUD, all over the cockpit. Screens were whiting out.
“Control, this is Red Leader. We are blind. We are blind. We are blind.”
On the Roof of the World, Bo demanded a report.
“The radar is jammed, sir. We can’t fire the missiles without it.”
“How?! Who is doing this?” he asked, and the moment the words left his mouth, he knew the answer. “Allenby …”
You were there …
Images and thoughts and memories spun in Finn’s mind like the reels of a fruit machine.
You were there …
How could it be true? It couldn’t be – no one just disappeared … and yet it felt true. It was perfectly unscientific and perfectly true at the same time. It was … his family.
Out of one mystery had come an even bigger mystery and Finn knew he could never rest on such an absurd answer, whatever time he had left he must find the truth about his father.
“How could I possibly have been there? I’d only just been born,” said Finn.
“I don’t know,” said Kelly, “but your dad said he saw you, he started yelling that he had to save you and then the whole thing blew.”
“Save me? From what?” said Finn.
SMASH! A tentacle suddenly snapped through the exoskeleton of the cockroach, its hook a millimetre away from Finn’s bleeding face.
“GO!” Kelly yelled.
And as they rose to drive forward again, the exoskeleton was ripped from their backs by several talons at once, and they were blinded by the light … blown by the winds.
They were no longer in the pit of the cluster but in the open, in the black rain, in the most extraordinary melee. Tentacles grabbed them from all sides, then let go, then grabbed hold again. Finn and Kelly reeled and fought, Finn ripping away with his spike, trying to make sense of what was happening. Then he saw something he recognised being torn apart – a wriggling insect, a thrip, a simple, ugly, stormfly that Finn considered – in this extraordinary moment – to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seenfn1.
They were everywhere, a black rain. Countless thousands driven by the downrush of air ahead of the storm.
The testudo of bots had collapsed under the onslaught. Ordered to attack all organic life forms, they were faced with thousands, and as the dispersed cluster writhed to slaughter the harmless thrips, a multi-coloured slick of bots and insect innards began slipping down the pagoda roof.
Still at war in the centre of it all, Finn saw something even more beautiful than the thrips.
“HAAAAA!” Finn cried out in joy as he beat aside a bot.
“Leave me!” said Kelly. “I’ll slow you down!”
“No – LOOK!” said Finn, grabbing Kelly and pointing to what Kelly saw only as a blue plastic bag.
BANG … POWACRACKAZINGSZZZT!
A shot. A magnum. Two-dozen bots in the path of the speeding bullet exploded and sent a golden spasm through the slick, parting it like the Red Sea and revealing Stubbs, rocking from the counterblast and still attached to the white line that had seen him and his balloon dragged out from the Shen Yu to the kite and then into the cluster.
“STUBBS!” Finn yelled, laughing with joy as he hauled the injured Kelly, disbelieving, through the gap. “Keep firing!”
Stubbs steadied himself. BANG … POWACRACKAZINGACSHSHSHSZZZT! He fired again before the bots could close in over them, Finn using all his strength to drag Kelly the last few nano-metres to Stubbs.
Finn and Stubbs then pulled in the white line to bring the balloon and its basket towards them just as –
SMACK … SMACK … The first heavy raindrops began to hit.
Finn took the Magnum and – BANG … POWACRACKAZINGACSHSHSHSZZZT! – fired a third shot as Stubbs and Kelly climbed in the basket.
SMACK … Finn copped a raindrop and was instantly soaked.
From the basket Stubbs yelled, “HANG ON TO THE LINE!”
Finn gripped it – Stubbs kicked out the counterweight – and the next thing Finn knew he was being yanked upwards on the line, rising like a rocket …
The bots fell away. The jettisoned dragon charm counterweight tumbled past. Lucky after all.
Kelly reached down the foam edge of the basket and grabbed Finn’s arm, pulling him up.
Euphoria surged through Finn as the world suddenly expanded around him. After so long trapped inside the Shen Yu, trapped inside the cluster, it felt amazing to suddenly be able to see the temple, the river, the city, the sky …
The storm. A terrible clap of thunder boomed. The clouds burst and fat rain hammered the balloon. They instantly lost height.
Beneath, the slick of bots reformed in the tumult on the pagoda rooftop, sucking itself back into a testudo, leaving the flood to wash away the corpses of a thousand thrips … exposing something that had lain hidden at the heart of the cluster …
“THE BUG!” Finn screamed as the rain drove them down towards it. “IT’S THE UGLY BUG!”
It was lying on its side, beached by the chaos. Washed and waiting. A prisoner of the bots since it had been seized in midair the day before.
Finn felt strength surge within him, and for a moment he dared to hope that they were saved.
Then the deafening roar of twelve advanced fighter-bombers screamed overhead at attack height, like angels of death.