After Life (Power Reads Book 2) Page 19

‘The screening will take at least an hour,’ Dr Reed pointed out. ‘Those Wasps will get through within minutes.’

  Marcus looked up at the interior vents, large enough that the Wasps could easily crawl through. The wire–fabric mesh inside the conduit, designed to prevent airborne insects from entering the station, would not stop them.

  ‘The troops will be here too,’ Dr Reed added, ‘in about ten minutes I’d imagine. If the Wasps aren’t through by then, the troops will just blow open the front door and let them in. There’s really nothing that you can do, Marcus.’

  The fear in Marcus’s gullet twisted into rage as he whirled and swung his fist through Dr Reed’s face. The holosap’s image flickered briefly and he smiled that infuriating, casual smile.

  ‘Temper, temper young Marcus. It’s all futile. My image is appearing at the same time in two different places. The speed of light and all that. I’ve briefed the troops on what you’re doing and I can assure you they’re fully prepared.’

  Marcus whirled away from the holosap and looked at the front door for a moment, the bolts still in place. They were safely locked inside by the only means of escape.

  A crack sounded from above him and he saw a Wasp land on the skylight and begin chewing on the plastic, the inch–long diamond tipped mandibles scratching and scraping. Two more Wasps joined it and began likewise chewing. As he stared up at them he saw one of the Wasps tilt its head to peer down at him with its large and soul–less black eyes.

  Marcus shivered and turned away. He tore off his shirt and reached up to pin it over the skylight, preventing the Wasps from looking inside.

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to save you,’ Dr Reed chortled. ‘Feel like hiding under your duvet, Marcus?’

  Marcus looked across at Kerry, who had stopped twirling the test tube and was now typing frantically with both hands.

  ‘Whatever you’re doing, hurry it up!’ he yelled at her.

  Kerry kept typing as from within the air conditioning conduit Marcus heard the vents collapse and a loud buzzing noise echo toward them. The sound of the mandibles chewing on the skylight vanished as the Wasps there abandoned their position and headed for the breached vent.

  ‘They’re coming through!’ Marcus yelled.

  ‘Time,’ Dr Reed said, ‘for you both to die.’

  Marcus leaped across the station and yanked at the main door’s bolts, hoping to beat the Wasps out and make a run for it. Behind him, he heard Kerry still typing.

  ‘Come on, run!’ he yelled.

  The air conditioning vent inside the building rattled as the Wasps slammed against it in their haste, and Marcus saw shiny black legs and mandibles poke through between the slats as they fought to crawl through the gaps.

  Marcus ran back across the station and grabbed a chair. He swung the chair up and smashed the metal leg across the matchbox sized head of a Wasp. The drone’s head cracked to one side and a beady black eyeball dented inward, but the Wasp’s legs kept scraping as it crawled through the gap.

  Marcus’s heart fluttered in panic in his chest as he staggered away from the vent as the gigantic Wasp heaved itself through and beat its wings as it headed straight for Kerry. Marcus screamed and swung the chair again and batted the Wasp out of the air above her head. The Wasp hit the wall with a metallic clang and dropped down to land on its legs.

  Two more Wasps burst through the vent and with a loud buzzing shot straight toward Marcus as the damaged Wasp took off again and zoomed toward him. Marcus tumbled backward toward the door in terror as he swung the chair one more time.

  One Wasp took the blow directly and flew across the station, but the other two avoided the strike and collided with Marcus as he shrieked in disgust and horror. He grabbed one of them in one hand, its body hard and cold and its sinewy plastic wings beating against his hand as he hurled it away. It turned over in mid–air and hovered before darting back toward him, its huge stinger catching the light as it rushed in.

  The station filled with Wasps as Marcus screamed and collapsed and threw his hands and arms over his head in a last ditch attempt to protect himself as the Wasps collided with him and crawled across his body, their legs hard metal spikes that dug into his skin. He heard Kerry scream nearby, and then silence.

  ‘Kerry!’

  The Wasps hung onto his body with their pincer–like mandibles, but Marcus felt no stingers impaled into his flesh as he lay crawled up into a foetal ball in the corner of the station. Then, suddenly, the Wasps took off again and flew to the opposite corner of the station and landed together in a big, black metallic ball, their legs tucked beneath themselves as the sound of their beating wings fell silent.

  Marcus stared at Kerry, who was sitting staring at the computer screen, her chest heaving with panic and her hair in disarray where a Wasp had evidently landed on her head. She turned her head slowly and looked at him.

  ‘Wasps deactivated,’ she gasped.

  ‘Deactivated?’ Dr Reed almost shouted in disbelief.

  ‘Hibernation mode,’ Kerry muttered as she focused back on her screen. ‘Priorities, Doctor Reed. I’m good at prioritising. You said that they tracked your holosap signal, so logically there had to be a signal I could hack. I thought I’d handle the Wasps before you.’

  ‘It’s futile,’ Dr Reed insisted, ‘the troops will be here any moment!’

  Marcus clambered to his feet, his skin still tingling at the horror of what had almost occurred. He rubbed at the indentations in his skin from where the Wasps had clung to him.

  ‘You hacked them?’ he uttered at Kerry.

  ‘I call it reprogramming,’ she replied without looking at him. ‘You’re welcome.’

  Marcus almost laughed out loud as he threw his arms around her. ‘You’re a genius.’

  ‘Get off me,’ she urged without rancour. ‘I’ve got the rest of the day to save too y’know.’

  Marcus released her with a grin as he turned to Dr Reed. The holosap tried to move closer to the computer but was stopped at the edge of the projection platform.

  ‘What’s up, Dr Reed?’ Marcus asked. ‘Feeling a tad inadequate? You’re not half the man you used to be, remember?’

  ‘It’s over,’ Dr Reed insisted. ‘The troops are almost here.’

  ‘Can we shut him down from here?’ Marcus asked Kerry over his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ Kerry replied as she worked, ‘but we can shut him up.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dr Reed snapped at her.

  Kerry did not reply as Marcus joined her. The Doctor continued to demand to know what was happening, but Marcus found that he enjoyed infuriating Reed by pretending that he wasn’t there at all. Which in many ways, he wasn’t.

  Kerry finished typing and looked not at Dr Reed but at the screen. ‘Goodbye,’ she smiled.

  She tapped a key and moments later the relay station’s computers shut down one after the other. Marcus saw rage flare briefly in Dr Reed’s expression, his mouth working as he shouted, but no sounds came forth and then the holosap flickered and vanished as the transmission was broken.

  ‘He’ll have told the troops that we’ve deactivated the Wasps,’ Kerry said, ‘but by now he’ll be back in New York or maybe the airport hub, completely unable to watch us.’

  ‘Good,’ Marcus said, ‘so what do we do now?’

  Kerry tapped a few more commands into the computer, hit “Enter”, and then leaped up out of her seat.

  ‘We run!’

  Marcus barely had time to think when he heard the buzz of the Wasp’s wings beating the air once more. He whirled and followed Kerry out of the station, helping her slide the locks through the door behind her but noting that she did not use the padlocks this time. Instead, she hurled them into the bushes as they slammed the doors behind them and fled.

  Marcus ran with her for a hundred yards into the cover of the forest before they ducked down and looked back as the sound of a distant engine growled through the bayou.

  Within minutes a troop transporter f
ought its way to the station and twelve armed men jumped from the rear, all wearing HazMat suits.

  ‘What did you do to the Wasps?’ he whispered to Kerry.

  ‘They can’t be reprogrammed to target individuals without the proper access codes,’ Kerry whispered back, ‘but in an emergency you can set them to something called melee.’

  ‘As in battle?’ Marcus asked.

  Kerry looked at him as the soldiers opened the station doors and smiled as they heard sudden screams drift their way on the hot air. Marcus saw the soldiers stumbling and falling away from the station, heard panicked gunfire as the Wasps burst from within the station and attacked with blind fury anyone within sight, their cruel stingers easily piercing the troop’s suits.

  Marcus looked at Kerry and shook his head in wonder. ‘You really are a genius,’ he said finally. ‘I mean it.’

  Kerry winked at him. ‘I’m a woman,’ she said. ‘Come on, before those Wasps start looking for anybody else to kill.’

  Marcus got up and crept away after her, the city of New Orleans looming through the distant haze.

  ***

  28

  Re–Volution Headquarters

  Centre Point Tower

  London

  ‘Welcome, Prime Minister.’

  Tarquin St John shook Kieran Beck’s hand, the former investment banker’s grip not as strong as St John’s and far briefer. Beck was a man used to living behind the scenes, rarely appearing on television or in public, probably because of the weight of public animosity toward Re–Volution.

  Beck’s forehead was patched with a small surgical dressing, mild lesions just visible marking his skin.

  ‘I appreciate the invite, Kieran,’ St John replied.

  ‘Not at all, especially after your performance of this morning.’

  ‘It was nothing more than my duty,’ St John said, and glanced again at Beck’s injury. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Fell,’ Beck replied. ‘Hit my head on the wall. Lucky there’s nothing much up there to damage. Come, please sit down.’

  St John joined Beck on two sumptuous leather seats arranged around a painfully expensive smoked glass coffee table. Beck had made tens of millions of dollars trading in commodities before investing heavily into the early research efforts of Re–Volution. A shrewd and quick–thinking businessman, Beck had seen the huge potential of Holonomic Brain Theory and its revolutionary mating with quantum storage in producing the first viable holographic human entity while the technology was still in its infancy. The rest, quite literally, was human history.

  St John looked around the simple office that was Kieran Beck’s inner sanctum. Virtually nobody visited the top floor of Re–Volution, so dense was the security surrounding the company’s innermost workings. Due to the threat from terrorist groups, many of the company’s board of director’s identities were a state secret, and it was rumoured that they used body–doubles as a fail safe and entered the headquarters building through underground tunnels to protect their identity and safety from those who would wish them harm.

  St John, for his part, could not fathom why anybody would want to maim or murder the very people that represented the likely salvation of what was left of the human race.

  The view from the top of the Centre Point Tower was panoramic, and looked out to the south over the Thames toward the derelict city beyond. St John could see the jumble of London’s city blocks stretching away toward the river, beyond which were the remains of the London Eye, only the lower half of the huge Ferris Wheel still standing and entombed in vines and green mosses. Beyond, the city was a geometric pattern of tower blocks consumed by nature’s random canvass of forest and foliage that stretched out into the now untamed wilderness of dense woodland that had once been the Home Counties.

  The view to the north, he knew, was much the same, but this time the barrier to the wilderness was not a river but the railway line that ran through Islington. On the far side of the tracks was a sixty–foot high fence that ran for miles and encased Greater London to the east and west, patrolled by police and carefully trained dogs for any sign of a breach. It was rumoured that the guards often heard the sounds of people living beyond the fence, and the calls of strange creatures that had never been identified. St John put the stories down to legends started by concerned mothers afraid that their children would venture outside the security fences.

  ‘The board and I were greatly impressed and relieved to hear of your support for Re–Volution in Parliament,’ Beck said.

  St John smiled. ‘It was no effort on my part, Kieran. The future of mankind rests with your company, of that I have no doubt. Decades of research into The Falling have failed to find a cure and we are but one step away from utter annihilation.’

  ‘I agree,’ Kieran said. ‘If there was another way, we and no doubt every other human being on Earth would take it, but right now we are in danger of losing everything that we have fought to protect. We cannot wait much longer.’

  ‘How so?’ St John asked.

  Kieran Beck clasped his hands before him on his desk and studied them before speaking.

  ‘There have been further tragedies in the field,’ Beck reported. ‘Our friends in America lost a research station down in Louisiana.’

  St John sighed. ‘The losses are becoming unacceptable. How many research stations have gone down?’

  ‘Twelve,’ Beck replied, ‘four in the USA, six in Europe and two in the Far East. We only have eight remaining and maintaining communication links and extraction protocols is becoming increasingly difficult. Fuel is almost depleted and we have no resources left to continue expansion here in London in any direction. Farmland, what we have of it, is at capacity and even a single poor harvest will trigger a famine in the city. The situation is much the same in New York and far worse in Tokyo.’

  St John considered the predicament once again. He had done little else in eight months as the tide of obstacles facing mankind’s beleaguered survivors flowed ever closer to drowning them.

  ‘Do you intend to accelerate the program?’

  Beck’s shoulders gave a tiny shrug. ‘I don’t see what alternative we have, Prime Minister.’

  ‘Parliament will almost certainly pass the bill I have proposed, passing control of parliament to the holosap community, but I do not believe that they will in good conscience condone a complete abandonment of the human colonies.’

  ‘Before long they won’t have to,’ Beck pointed out. ‘A single breach of our quarantine conditions and the whole city will descend into panic and chaos, and even with Re–Volution’s security supporting the police force law and order continues to collapse. We just don’t have the manpower to control this many people and maintain a secure city border, or security at all for that matter. I don’t have to tell you what will happen should the population realise just how precarious the situation has become on all fronts.’

  St John sighed again. The populace hated holosaps, hated Re–Volution and hated the politicians that supported transferring political control to the holosap community. The price of uploading, of achieving immortality and security against disease, starvation and aging was far too high for all but the elite to afford. Despite lobbying, Re–Volution maintained its pricing structure because it was providing not a one–off service but essentially eternal maintenance and support for all holosaps. To calls and complaints that the company should offer uploads to all of humanity, the company replied that even if it did so it would take decades to upload everybody, and then who would physically maintain the databases if there was a problem?

  These entirely understandable policies were ignored by the people, who yearned for the discovery of a cure for The Falling. There was a world waiting out there, full of life and food, if only they could get to it. But if they discovered that the city had been breached by the infection, they would doubtless run riot. The police would be overcome, the laws holding society together spat upon with the ferocity of years of anguish, and politicians like St John…
He shuddered.

  ‘We have little choice,’ Beck urged him. ‘If parliament passes the bill of rights then we must immediately endeavour to upload as many of us as we can before it’s too late. New York is on its last legs. Another failed harvest and it will fall and the governor knows it. Tokyo may already be collapsing – we haven’t heard anything from them for two weeks now. It’s too late, Prime Minister. We’ve done everything we can, waited longer than we ever should have.’

  St John glanced out of the windows at the city.

  ‘What of the terrorists?’ he asked. ‘They have become bolder, more desperate. What if the databases cannot be kept safe? It’s no good if we all upload ourselves and they then destroy everything. And what about power? How will you maintain power to the site and….’

  ‘We have everything under control,’ Beck promised. ‘The solar arrays are already under construction on every tower block in the city. It’s ironic, that if previous governments had funded a power program of this kind on this scale we would never have needed bloody fossil fuels in the first place. By the time the array is complete this city will never need to worry about energy generation again, and we have plenty of machines under construction both here and in the USA designed for maintenance purposes. With only holosaps left, food will no longer be required, or heat. We will need no hospitals, no housing, nothing but the power sources and the machines we’re building to maintain them. Terrorists will be but a memory, Tarquin.’

  St John nodded slowly. ‘How many robots have you constructed?’

  ‘Here, just a few hundred at the moment. Far more in the United States,’ Beck said. ‘We have to build their components in separate factories, otherwise the workers might realise what we’re doing. So far, the program has not raised any suspicions. The cover story of machines able to run farms outside the city walls has held up well.’

  ‘Parliament is nervous,’ St John said. ‘A step such as this is unprecedented in human history and can never be undone. I have muted the possibility in private with other ministers from time to time and received rebuttal after rebuttal.’