Aftershock (27 page)

‘I'm fine. It's okay,' Steph said, as one of the paramedics helped her to her feet.

Josh was standing, one hand gripping a rail running along the wall.

‘Josh, you go and help up top,' Steph said. ‘Here.' She snatched a mobile comms set from one of the paramedics and tossed it over to him. He caught it, stood up and raced along the corridor.

Steph crouched down beside Howard. He was lying on his back, unconscious, a pool of blood spreading out from under him across the metal floor. Steph checked for a pulse. It was weak. She ripped open Howard's shirt and started performing CPR. There were gaping wounds in his chest and abdomen, exit wounds caked with splinters of bone and blobs of tissue. One of the medics ran a scanner over the injured man's body.

‘Roll him over ... gently,' Steph snapped.

Suddenly, the plane shuddered and dropped altitude. The paramedics were thrown across the corridor. Steph managed to grasp the handrail just in time. Howard rolled forward and then onto his back again. It lasted only a second or two, and then the plane's stabilisers kicked in. But in those moments, Steph could see the extent of Howard's injuries. His back was completely ripped open, his spine shredded.

‘Heart's stopped,' the paramedic said.

‘All right, step back,' Steph said. ‘Give me the defrib pads.' She snatched at two plastic discs and slapped them onto Howard's exposed chest. Unlike the old-style machines, these worked by sending an infrared pulse from a small box in the paramedic's belt to activate the pads and zap the patient's heart with an automatically adjusted electric shock.

‘Clear.'

Howard convulsed, his back arching. He slumped onto the metal floor and Steph leaned in to give him mouth to mouth. ‘Clear,' she yelled again pulling back and pushing down on the pads. Howard convulsed a second time.

‘Still no rhythm,' the paramedic said.

‘Damn it! ... Clear.'

Howard's body arched up a third time, then slumped to the floor. Steph pushed the pads aside and went back to pumping the man's chest with her hands, bending forward to administer mouth to mouth. After a few seconds, she paused and looked at the paramedic. The man shook his head.

Steph thumped Howard's chest as hard as she could. His body bounced on the metal. She hit him again, and again. Paused. Took a deep breath and began pumping again, getting oxygen into his lungs, desperately trying to kickstart his heart.

‘Howard!'

‘Steph.' The other paramedic had crouched down next to her.

She ignored him. ‘Howard! Howard!' Steph shouted at the prone body. ‘Come on, Howard!'

‘Steph.'

She stopped and sobbed into her palms. Howard's head lolled to one side.

Josh was halfway along the main corridor leading to the elevator when the plane shuddered and dropped altitude suddenly. He was sent tumbling forward. He managed to roll with the fall and came up against a support column, bashing his left cheek against the metal.

The plane stabilised before he could pull himself up. Ignoring the pain in his face, he ran for the elevator and opened a channel on the mobile comms set. ‘Omar. This is Josh. Come in.'

‘Josh. You okay?'

‘I'm fine. Listen. The Chinese have some sort of disruptor weapon.'

‘What?'

‘Look. I'm on my way to the flight deck. Watch your flight guidance systems. And, Omar. Call Dimitri. Now. Tell him.'

‘Will do. Out.'

Josh ran into the elevator and punched in a call to Base One. ‘Tom.'

‘Josh. What's...?'

‘Tom, this is priority red. The Chinese brought
Paul
down with some sort of interference beam. It was way down in the low frequency end of the spectrum. Cut right through the shields as though they weren't there. It attacked the guidance systems and then disrupted almost every part of the plane. I think they'll try to do the same here, now, with the Hummingbird and
Mick
.'

‘Yeah, I know they're experimenting with ELF radiation,' Tom said. ‘What was the exact time of the attack? Do you know?'

‘Engraved in my memory, Tom. We felt the first shock precisely 21 minutes and six seconds after takeoff.'

‘Okay. Leave it with me. I'll see what I can do to block it ... somehow.'

The elevator shot up three floors, the doors parted and Josh dashed out into another corridor that curved gently to the left. He ran as fast as he could. As he reached the door to the flightdeck, it opened automatically and he sped over to the bank of control panels where Omar and his copilot, Gillian Fernandez, sat.

He had just reached them when the plane shuddered again. A computer voice broke in over the comms system.

‘Warning. Unidentified object. One point nine kilometres north-north-east.'

‘On screen,' Fernandez commanded.

‘Not possible at this time.'

‘What!'

Josh reached the control station and stepped between the two pilots. ‘It's happening again,' he said.

A high-pitched whistle burst through the comm speakers.

‘What's happening?' Omar yelled.

‘Warning. Warning,' the onboard computer cut through the shrill noise.

‘It's a low frequency energy burst,' Josh shouted. ‘It's the same thing that brought us down. Omar, take us up. We'll have to try to get out of range.' The copilot offered Josh her seat and strode over to a secondary control console the other side of the flight deck.

Josh yanked on a helmet and his fingers flew over the control panel.

‘What about the shields?' Omar said.

The plane shuddered.

Josh did not reply for a moment, he was concentrating on the holodisplay before his eyes. ‘Cuts through them,' he said after a moment, and punched in a set of parameters for the computer. The plane banked to port and they could feel it start to gain altitude. Josh flicked his eyes over the 3D display. They were climbing fast. Ten thousand metres, 20,000, 25,000.

‘Warning. Engine One efficiency down to 63 per cent.'

Josh cursed and glanced over to Omar, who was focusing all his attention on helping to control the plane.

‘We have to get out of range or cut the engines, Omar,' Josh declared.

‘What?'

‘Get outta here or cut them. The ELF radiation will completely fuse them.'

‘Yes, but we might not be able to bring them back online.'

‘Omar, if we don't shut them down now, there'll be nothing to bring back online.'

‘I'll get us out of range.'

A voice came over the comms. ‘Hummingbird, this is Silverback
Mick
. Come in.'

‘Dimitri,' Omar said, trying to keep calm. ‘What's your status?'

‘I caught a faint trace of an unidentified object in my remote scanner a few moments ago. I saw you pick up Josh and Steph, so I took off. I've climbed to 33,000 metres and I'm 94 kilometres from the crash site, bearing 74.6 degrees. The object has fallen out of range.'

‘Good!'

‘Kind of.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I have to get back there to get rid of the wreckage with the ultrasound emitter.'

‘It'll have to wait.'

‘Afraid not, Omar. The computer's just intercepted comms from the base and translated for me. The three choppers are returning to base, but the Chinese have sent a transport jet to parachute in a salvage team. Their ETA is under three minutes. I'm going to have to go down ... now.'

Tom's holoscreen was ablaze with colour. He moved his fingers over the keyboard and the colours were replaced with text.

Without taking his eyes from the screen, he said, ‘Sybil, go back over the monitor records from BigEye 17. Time scale: 20 to 22 minutes after the Silverback took off from Semja Alexandry. Full spectrum analysis.'

‘Done.'

‘What sort of emission was it?'

‘Extremely Low Frequency. 35.45 to 36.12 hertz.'

‘Yes!' Tom exclaimed and hit his palm on the armrest of his chair. ‘I knew it. Okay, Sybil, how was the disruption controlled? Was it from the missile, the jet or the base?'

‘No information available. It was all under the interference.'

‘Yes, of course,' Tom remarked and let out a deep sigh. ‘Okay,' he said to the air. ‘Have to work on a hunch. My guess would be that the disruptor beam is generated at the base and the jet simply launches a missile that acts as a relay. The Florida Bridge attack wasn't so long ago. I can't believe the Chinese would have perfected the equipment to the point where they can miniaturise it to fit in a missile. Sybil, I'll need instantaneous Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation for all visual and audio.'

‘Ready.'

Five seconds later, Tom was into the military mainframe in Beijing. He had been there many times before, and he knew the protocols inside out. The passwords had changed a hundred times since his last visit, but he knew how the Chinese computer designers thought. It had been a simple matter to shift a few of the parameters, to substitute key cultural terms for others and to outwit his opponent. That was his special skill, the skill that had landed him in goal two years before. The skill that had earned him a place in E-Force.

Getting into the mainframe was one step on the way, but there were plenty more doors to open before he could have a chance of finding what it was he was after. What did he need to track down? He had to pause for a second to remind himself. He gazed past his holoscreen, out towards the sparkling expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese had obviously developed a way of using Extremely Low Frequency radiation as an effective weapon. Or at least they were a long way along the road to developing one. It may have been the Chinese who had been responsible for the bridge collapse in Florida, or that may just have been a coincidence. Tom hated the crackpot amateurs who smothered the internet with their ridiculous conspiracy theories, but it was extremely odd that there had been a burst of ELF radiation originating in the Gobi Desert, at the precise coordinates of Hang Cheng immediately before a bridge plunged into the water in Florida. And, there had never been any form of official reason given for the collapse.

‘But,' Tom said aloud, ‘if they're building this weapon in the Gobi, why are we getting bursts off Fiji? Has that just been chosen randomly as their latest target?'

He turned back to the screen and typed in ‘ELF research'.

A data stream flowed down the holoscreen.

‘Sybil,' he said to the air. ‘How many files are there in this folder?'

‘Two thousand, three hundred and nineteen.'

‘Please extricate anything mentioning Hang Cheng.'

‘There are no files mentioning that name in this folder.'

‘What?'

‘There are...'

‘Okay, Syb, babe. I get it.' Tom paused for a moment and looked out to the ocean again. ‘That can only mean one of two things,' he said aloud. ‘Either Hang Cheng is so secret there are no records or files on it. Which I find pretty unlikely. Or...' And he tapped at the rim of his laptop absent-mindedly. ‘That base is not an official Chinese military centre.' He span his electric wheelchair around and sped over to the door and the passageway leading back to Cyber Control. ‘Sybil,' he said as he accelerated along the corridor. ‘I think it's time we rolled out the CyberLink.'

Tom had just turned into Cyber Control when Josh's face appeared in the holoscreen floating above the laptop on his electric wheelchair.

‘Josh.'

‘Tom, things are worse than I thought here. The Chinese have just launched a transport plane. We're pretty sure they're going to drop troops into the crash site and we haven't been able to USAM the area.'

‘How long?'

‘Dimitri is about to make a low run over the site. He reckons we have less than three minutes before there're men on the ground.'

‘Okay. What's your status? The ELF radiation?'

‘We managed to pull out of range ... just. We're headed south-south-east to get out of Chinese airspace and we're at...' There was a momentary pause, ‘32,000 metres. The sensors show we're outrunning the beam, and it's weakening. But it's not us I'm worried about, it's Dimitri. You have to cut the link from the base to the missile.'

‘Yeah, I know, Josh. I'm going to use the CyberLink.'

‘But you've only had it up and running for a short time...'

‘You got any better ideas?'

A pause. ‘No.'

‘Right, well I gotta go,' Tom snapped, cutting the comms and spinning his chair around, easing his head back as a tech fitted him with a tight plastic headset. The tech tapped a sensor on the side of the cap then walked back to one of the control panels. ‘Ready.'

‘Go,' Tom commanded.

It was nothing like the ‘real world'. At least not in any aesthetic sense. Tom's senses were limited. He could see, but only outlines, some patches coloured in, some not. He could hear, but couldn't smell anything. Although he could interact with the outlines around him, he had no sense of touch as he had in the ‘solid world'.

‘I'm in,' he said, his voice spilling from the speakers in Cyber Control.

He looked down at himself. He was Tommy Boy, his avatar. In this cyber world Tom had legs that worked. He could walk and run and do everything he could do before his accident. He had adopted the cyber persona of Tommy Boy years earlier when he was a teenage computer geek obsessed with games. During the mission to save Senator Kyle Foreman, he had used his avatar to defend Base One against a cyber attack from an old gaming adversary, Francine Gygax. Now, he had only minutes to save this mission.

He looked around. Colours, bright tubes of light. They formed the outlines of a corridor. There were patches of light on the floor. He knew they were parcels of data. They shot past him, away along the corridors and through the walls before disappearing just as a new batch arrived at his feet.

Then he heard a crack, like a whip. He span around and a black amorphous shape appeared at the end of the corridor. It morphed before his eyes, taking on the shape of a sword, slicing the air. The sword sped towards him.

‘Okay, the first layer of defence,' Tom said to himself. The sword somersaulted along the corridor as though it had been thrown by a giant hand. Tommy Boy lifted his arm and saw he was brandishing a large metal shield. The sword struck the shield and with lightning reflexes, he grabbed the hilt before it could flip away. It tried to slip through his fingers, but he held it tight and brought it down, flat to his thigh. It snapped in two and he threw the shards to the illuminated floor. He laughed. ‘Bring it on, baby.'

‘Tom? You okay?' It was the voice of a tech, Noel Brannigan, on Tintara.

‘Everything's cool, Noel. Just met the welcoming committee ... Shit!'

‘What?'

Tommy Boy ignored him. The floor ahead of him had vanished. He was sliding over patches of light. There was nothing to grip on to. He began to accelerate. Colours rushed past, and he plummeted into blackness.

The panic hit, but at the same time he could not deny it felt really good. He had not known such freedom since his last sojourn in the cyber world. This universe of bits and bytes was a place out of time and space and so different to the physical world in which he was confined to a wheelchair.

He was tumbling head-over-heels through the void. Bright bands of colour shot up to meet him. He saw outlines of components, wires. He was inside a chip, weightless. He had no size, no mass. He was barely there, just a shadow, an intelligence. Then he landed in liquid. He had not experienced such a thing since he was a young boy. At first, he could not quite understand what had happened. Then instinct took over and he started to tread water.

The place lay in semi-darkness. He could see curved metal walls, a domed roof. Wall-to-wall water. There was nothing to swim towards. It was as though he were a flea that had landed in a cup of coffee. He started to swim, regardless. There was nothing else he could do. That's when the fear started to grow. What was under the water? What unspeakable thing could be lurking there, ready to attack?

He swam faster and faster, but the rim of the liquid kept moving away, as though the room was growing, the edge forever receding beyond his grasp. He kicked his legs and felt a tiny flash of relief, almost pleasure, at the fact he could do such a thing.

Snap.

The unmistakable sound of jaws slamming together, teeth grating.

He did not stop to look, did not stop to think. Just moved, thrusting forward, thrashing through the water and into the air.

Snap.

His fingertips brushed something solid. Some sort of platform. He grasped at it and felt a rail. He shook his head, letting the liquid fly off him. He could see the rail ... and steps. He swung his legs through the air, pulling himself up with all his strength. A huge black shape soared out of the liquid.

Snap.

He felt the air rush past his legs as the jaws closed centimetres from his ankles, then a loud splash as the creature fell back into the water.

Tommy Boy pulled himself to his feet and flung himself as far from the edge of the lake as he could. He stumbled and, as he caught himself, he twisted, his legs almost buckling under him. He just managed to keep his balance, and straightened.

The barrel of a machine gun was poised 3 centimetres from his nose.

He turned very slowly. Three more guns were pointing at his head.

‘Don't move!'

He swivelled his eyes, made a slight turn of the head.

‘DON'T MOVE!'

He obeyed.

‘You are not welcome here.'

‘You don't say!'

He heard the click of a trigger release.

‘Now look...'

‘Silence!'

Tommy Boy closed his eyes. He could not die here, but his avatar would be destroyed and he would be instantly snapped back to the ‘real' world, his efforts wasted.

But there was no gunfire. He heard a strange sound. Heavy weights hitting metal.

He opened his eyes.

The four Chinese soldiers lay on the floor in a crumpled heap.

‘Tom? What's happening?' It was Cyber Control.

He did not answer immediately. He crouched down and inspected the closest body, rolling the man over. His face was contorted in pain. Green lines had spread along his cheeks, a latticework that grew as Tom watched. Then the soldier's face caved in like a soufflé gone wrong.

Tom pulled himself up. ‘A virus,' he said to the air.

‘What?'

‘A virus,' Tom repeated. ‘I must have brought something in with me.'

‘Well that's fantastic!'

‘Yes, it is,' Tom replied thoughtfully and stared round at the other three collapsed bodies, now mere piles of rags. A sound came from the lake of liquid. A huge black shape rose to the surface. It bobbed for a second and emitted a low growl. Then it rolled over and dissolved.

‘The virus is spreading,' Tom said.

‘That should do it,' Noel Brannigan said. ‘Shouldn't it?'

‘Maybe, maybe not,' Tom replied. ‘I've still got to make sure.' He turned at a sound from behind him. A flight of stone stairs had appeared in the wall close to the edge of the lake. Without a second thought, he dashed towards them.