Aftershock (13 page)

‘Thank you, Otto,’ Wing frowned, ‘for putting a calming mental image in my head just moments before we are to embark on such a perilous enterprise.’

‘All part of the service,’ Otto said with a grin as his Blackbox emitted a single soft beep. ‘OK, it’s time.’

Wing hit the light switch, plunging the room into darkness as Otto picked up the device that he and Laura had secretly been working on for the last couple of weeks. Once upon a time it had been a Blackbox belonging to Colonel Francisco that Shelby had ‘borrowed’, but now it was barely recognisable. Just about the only thing that remained the same was the high-resolution touch-screen display. The rest of the device was covered in wiring and pieces of exposed circuit board. Otto and Laura had even given it a new nickname, the Hackbox. Otto touched a command on the screen and it began to display a series of status messages.

SECURE COMMUNICATIONS PROTOCOL ESTABLISHED

MOBILE NETWORK ESTABLISHED

CONNECTING TO SLAVE DEVICES

MALPENSE, O CONNECTED

BRAND, L CONNECTED

FANCHU, W CONNECTED

TRINITY, S CONNECTED

DARKDOOM, N CONNECTED

ARGENTBLUM, F CONNECTED

RANSOM, T CONNECTED

RICHARDS, P CONNECTED

ALL SLAVE DEVICES SUCCESSFULLY CONNECTED

SURVEILLANCE LOOP ACTIVATED

OPENING ACCOMMODATION BLOCK 7 DOORS 23, 38, 42, 72

AND 75.

The door to Otto and Wing’s room hissed open.

‘Come on,’ Otto said as he hurried out of their quarters.

They ran down the landing and met Shelby and Laura coming the other way.

‘So far so good,’ Shelby whispered.

‘If you mean that we’ve just successfully passed the first of four hundred and seventy-three separate potential failure points in this plan, then yeah, so far so good,’ Otto replied.

‘Thanks for the morale boost, Roboto,’ Shelby said.

‘Hush up, you two,’ Laura sighed. ‘I’m as much of a fan of snarky banter as the next girl but we’ve only got an hour until the surveillance loop expires. Come on.’

They hurried along the landing to Franz and Nigel’s room where they found only Nigel waiting.

‘Where’s Franz?’ Otto asked with a frown.

‘He’s “scouting ahead” apparently,’ Nigel said, shaking his head. ‘I told him to wait here but he said, and I quote, “That danger lurks round every corner and that he was on point”.’

‘Oh no,’ Otto cringed. ‘Really?’

‘Don’t blame me,’ Nigel said. ‘I wasn’t the one at the planning meeting who told him to “channel his inner ninja”.’

‘I was only kidding,’ Shelby said defensively.

‘OK, let’s get Tom and Penny and round Franz up before he attacks any security guards,’ Otto sighed.

They all hurried down the stairs to the next landing where Tom and Penny were waiting.

‘You managed to get out without waking up your new room-mates then?’

‘Yeah,’ Penny replied, ‘though I think it might have had something to do with the sedative drops on their pillows. You sure that one drop will be enough to keep them under?’

‘Should be more than enough,’ Otto replied, as they continued down the stairs to the atrium.?We’re not going to be gone that long.’

‘Where exactly did you get that stuff from anyway?’ Laura asked.

‘It was something that I’d been . . . working on,’ Otto replied slightly uncomfortably.

‘Why were you working on a new form of sedative?’ Nigel asked.

‘It wasn’t really supposed to be a sedative, it was just supposed to relax the airways and . . . erm . . . control snoring.’

‘Otto, is there something you would like to tell me?’ Wing said with a slight frown.

‘Look, there’s Franz,’ Otto said quickly.

Franz was dashing from shadow to shadow, slowly making his way towards the huge steel doors that sealed off the accommodation block at night.

‘What’s he got on his face?’ Shelby asked.

‘Don’t ask,’ Nigel said.

As they approached they could all see that Franz’s entire face was black.

‘Franz, what have you done?’ Laura asked, stifling a giggle.

‘I am ensuring that I am blending with the shadows,’ Franz said. ‘It is increasing my stealthiness.’

‘What did you use?’ Otto asked, staring at him in mild disbelief.

‘I am using the marker pen but I am being very careful not to get any in my mouth because the label on the pen is saying that it is inedible,’ Franz said with a serious expression.

‘Indelible, Franz, indelible,’ Otto said.

‘Oh no,’ Nigel said, putting his hand over his eyes.

‘What is this indelible meaning?’ Franz said as he noticed the mixture of amusement and horror on the other Alphas’ faces.

‘Never mind,’ Otto said. ‘We’ll deal with it later. We need to keep moving. Laura, get the door.’ Otto handed the Hackbox to Laura and she walked over to the numeric keypad that served as a lock for the massive door. She touched a series of buttons on the device’s screen and a couple of seconds later the doors began to slowly rumble apart.

‘OK, no alarms going off, so I’m going to assume that the ghost interface is working,’ Laura said.

‘I never doubted you for a moment,’ Otto said, smiling at Laura. ‘Right. Everyone knows where they need to be. We have . . .’ Otto looked at his Blackbox, ‘fifty-three minutes. Good luck.’

Otto, Wing, Laura and Shelby jogged away down the corridor ahead while Nigel and Franz headed off down another corridor with Tom and Penny. Otto reached out with his mind and his own strange ability to control electronic devices allowed him to hook up directly to the Hackbox. It was safe for him to connect with it as long as he didn’t go a stage further and connect directly to H.I.V.E.’s network.

‘Right, give me a second,’ Otto said, as he visualised a three-dimensional image of the layout of H.I.V.E., ‘let’s see what we can see.’ On the map in Otto’s head, small points of moving light began to appear. There were bright blue dots that represented the locations of his friends’ Blackboxes and a scattering of red dots throughout the complex that showed the current positions of the security patrols. He tilted his head to one side slightly and sent a live feed of that information to the Hackbox which then passed it on to the other Blackboxes.

‘Got it,’ Laura said, checking the screen of her own device. ‘The Hackbox is transmitting.’

‘OK, that should help us avoid any patrols,’ Otto said. ‘Now we just need some new outfits.’

The four of them ran through the twisting maze of corridors, stopping only briefly to let security patrols pass by ahead of them. They quickly made their way deeper into the bowels of the volcano that housed the school. The lower levels were more dimly lit, with uniform grey concrete walls and floors.

‘It’d be real easy to get lost down here,’ Shelby said as they ran down yet another featureless corridor.

‘Don’t worry, we’re nearly there,’ Laura said, looking at the Hackbox. ‘Next left.’

They took the next branch in the tunnel and the corridor ended at a steel door with the words ‘Storage Area Four’ etched into its surface.

‘Right, here we are,’ Otto said. ‘Open sesame.’

Laura tapped at the Hackbox and the door slid open. As the four of them stepped into the storage area, lights started to flicker on overhead.

‘Woah,’ Laura said, pointing at the opposite wall, ‘are they what I think they are?’

Standing against the wall were three of the hulking assault droids that Cypher had used in his assault on H.I.V.E. a couple of years before.

‘I had wondered if they’d kept any of these,’ Otto said as he examined one of the giant machines more closely. ‘Do you think they’re still functional?’

‘I suppose it would depend on the condition of the servos and the musculature interlinks,’ Laura replied, tracing her finger through the dust that covered one of the huge machines.

‘Tick tock, guys,’ Shelby said as she looked around the room. ‘We need to stay on schedule. Anybody see what we’re here for?’

‘Over here,’ Wing said, beckoning the others.

Hanging on a rack were a dozen thermoptic camouflage bodysuits.

‘Get changed,’ Otto said. ‘The other four should be in position any minute.’

‘I’m having a bit of trouble here,’ Laura said, frowning at the display on the Hackbox.

‘What is it?’ Otto asked.

‘They need to get closer to the door to the CPC or else I can’t get a link to the locking mechanism from their Blackboxes,’ Laura said.

Otto looked at the display of his own Blackbox. The security patrols around that area were tight. Nigel and the others had a window of forty-five seconds, a minute at the outside, before another patrol arrived. He watched as the dots on the display representing their friends moved closer to their target.

‘Laura,’ Otto said, frowning, ‘they need that door open now.’

‘I know, I know,’ Laura said, chewing her bottom lip nervously.

‘Wait,’ Nigel whispered to Franz, Tom and Penny, holding up his hand. At the far end of the corridor a pair of security guards walked past. Nigel waited, studying the display of his Blackbox. ‘Go,’ he said and the four of them hurried down the corridor. Ahead was a large double door that looked like it would be more at home in a bank vault.‘OK,’ Nigel said, ‘let’s hope this works.’

‘It had better,’ Tom said, placing a hand on the massive door, ‘because we’re not getting through these doors any other way. Not without enough explosives to bring this whole place down around our ears anyway.’

Nigel looked nervously at his Blackbox. There was another security patrol heading their way. They only had a few more seconds.

‘Come on, guys,’ Nigel muttered to himself.

Suddenly the thick steel rods that crossed the door slid back and they began to open. Nigel and the others hurried through the gap and almost immediately the doors began to close again. Nigel watched the position of the security patrol on his Blackbox, praying that the doors would shut and lock before the patrol came round the corner outside. All four of them held their breaths as the red dot moved down the corridor on the screen, followed by a collective sigh of relief as the guards continued along their assigned patrol route.

‘Thank you, Laura,’ Nigel said, ‘even if you did cut it a little close.’ He thumbed the comms button on his Blackbox and a second later Otto connected.

‘We’re in,’ Nigel said. ‘Over to you.’

‘Roger that,’ Otto replied. ‘See you on the other side.’

Nigel turned round and tried to take in the scale of the room they were standing in. Six massive circular turbines, each several storeys high and thrumming with power, took up the majority of the floor. Surrounding the turbines were huge towers with giant metal balls on top of them that discharged arcing bolts of man-made lightning from one to another. The room was only dimly lit and the flashes of bright blue-white light from the thunderous electrical discharges threw odd shadows on to the walls. This was the Central Power Core, where the heat gathered by the school’s geothermal plant was converted into raw power that was then distributed throughout H.I.V.E. If H.I.V.E.mind was the school’s brain, then this place was its beating heart.

‘OK, Penny, you come with me to the control room. You two go down to the main floor and get ready by those breakers. Remember that you have to trip them at the precise moment I say or Otto and the others are going to have a really unpleasant evening.’

‘You can be counting on us,’ Franz said, giving Nigel a thumbs up before climbing down the ladder to the generator floor.

Nigel and Penny ran along the gantry accessway to the elevated control room on the other side of the chamber.

‘If this place is so important, why is there nobody here?’ Penny asked as they entered the deserted control room.

‘It’s all fully automated,’ Nigel replied, searching for the right controls. ‘H.I.V.E.mind runs it all. The manual controls are only here in case the computer systems go down for any reason. At least that’s what Otto told me.’

Nigel found the correct panel and quickly identified the controls that Otto and Laura had briefed him on.