Aftershock (29 page)

‘What’s happened?’

‘Let’s just say that a ghost from mine and Max’s past has come back to haunt us.’

Raven walked up the ramp and into the Shroud, Francisco just behind her. The Colonel closed the loading ramp and the Shroud’s turbine engines roared into life, lifting it into the air and up through the shattered remains of the glass dome overhead. As it climbed out of the cavern its cloaking systems engaged. It shimmered for a moment in the fading autumn light and then vanished.

chapter twelve

‘How you doing?’ Shelby asked Otto as she sat down next to him. They had been in flight for more than an hour and he had barely said a word to anyone.

‘I feel like an idiot,’ Otto said, staring at the deck. ‘How could I have not seen what was happening?’

‘Come on,’ Shelby whispered, shaking her head. ‘There was no way that any of us could have known what Laura was being forced to do.’

‘I don’t know why she didn’t just tell us.’

‘Because she was frightened,’ Shelby replied, taking Otto’s hand. ‘She couldn’t do anything that might endanger her parents and her baby brother. If she’d told us or even Nero, how could she know that the Disciples wouldn’t find out.’

‘Oh, I’m pretty sure that they’d have found out,’ Otto said with a sigh. He had told no one about Laura’s final words to him. There was only one person he was going to give that information to and he was going to deliver the message in person.

Dr Nero watched as the assault Shroud touched down on the crater landing pad. The loading ramp whirred into place and Otto, Wing, Shelby and Franz walked down it, closely followed by Raven.

‘Welcome back,’ Nero said. ‘I am truly sorry that you have all had to endure such an ordeal. Rest assured that the people involved will suffer for what they have done. Our retaliation will be swift and decisive. I will also not give up on all of the students who have been captured by these people. I cannot tell you how long it might take but I can tell you that we will not rest until they are returned.’

‘Doctor Nero, I need to speak to you in private,’ Otto said. ‘It’s extremely important.’

‘Of course,’ Nero replied with a slight frown. ‘Please wait outside my office, Mr Malpense, I shall be there shortly. The rest of you should return to your quarters and get some rest. I think it’s fair to say that you’ve earned it.’

‘What do you need to see Nero about?’ Shelby whispered as the four of them climbed the stairs leading up from the landing pad.

‘I need to tell him about Laura,’ Otto replied.

‘I thought we weren’t going to tell anyone,’ Shelby said.

‘I have to,’ Otto said firmly, ‘because it’s the only way he’ll believe what else I’m going to tell him.’

‘Which is?’ Wing asked.

‘I promise I’ll fill you in later,’ Otto replied. ‘I know what I’m doing, trust me.’

Back in the hangar Nero walked over to a quiet corner with Raven.

‘You said on the radio that there was something we needed to talk about,’ Nero said, ‘though I still don’t understand why you couldn’t have just told me then.’

‘Too many ears open nearby on-board the Shroud,’ Raven explained. ‘Max, I know who’s running the Disciples. I met her a few hours ago in Siberia, or, to be more precise, I met her
again.
’

‘What is it, Natalya?’ Nero asked with a frown, noticing her worried expression. ‘Who is she?’

‘Anastasia Furan,’ Raven said, looking Nero straight in the eye. ‘She’s alive.’

‘But that’s not possible,’ Nero replied, his eyes widening in shock. ‘We both saw her die, Natalya.’

‘She survived. God only knows how but somehow she survived.’

‘As if this situation wasn’t bad enough already,’ Nero said, shaking his head.

‘I want to go after her, Max,’ Raven said. ‘This is unfinished business and I intend to be the one to finish it.’

‘I understand how you feel, Natalya, you know I feel the same way,’ Nero said, ‘but this is no longer an isolated skirmish between G.L.O.V.E. and the Disciples. This situation has escalated and we need to consider our next move carefully. I need you here for now. There is a war to be fought and you are one of G.L.O.V.E.’s most powerful weapons. I promise you that when the time comes, when the axe drops on Anastasia Furan, you will be her executioner but for now I cannot afford to lose you to a personally motivated mission of revenge. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ Raven said with a nod, ‘but, you are right, this is personal for me, in ways that you cannot even begin to imagine. I cannot . . . I
will
not wait for ever. I want blood, her blood, and I want it soon.’

She turned and walked away. Under other circumstances he might have felt a vague sense of pity for anyone that Raven hated with such a passion but Anastasia Furan was someone he too would never be able to feel anything but hatred for. She had murdered the one woman that he had ever truly loved and for that he could never forgive her.

The helicopter touched down on the ice sheet with a bump, its twin rotors slowing as the rear boarding ramp descended. A pair of Disciple soldiers shoved Laura, Tom and Penny down the ramp. The icy wind cut through even the insulation of their environmental suits, their exposed hands and faces stinging with the cold. They trudged towards a concrete block, shrouded in ice with a heavy metal slab set into it. As they approached the slab slowly rumbled down into the ice to reveal a steel-lined lift carriage beyond. They were followed into the elevator by Anastasia Furan and two more Disciple troops who were carrying Nigel’s stretcher. Once they were all inside, a set of internal doors closed and the lift began to descend. After a minute or so the lift stopped and the internal doors slid open once again. Suddenly they were hit by the noise of hundreds of voices as they walked out on to a concrete walkway that ran all the way round the outside of the massive circular chamber in front of them. A man in a white coat ran up to Nigel’s stretcher and began to examine him.

‘We need to get him to medical immediately,’ the man said.

‘Will he survive?’ Anastasia asked.

‘I don’t know,’ the medic replied. ‘It looks like he’s bleeding internally. We’ll do our best.’

‘See that you do,’ she replied with a frown. ‘This boy is strategically valuable and he’s no use to me dead.’

‘You need to get that hand looked at too,’ the doctor said.

‘I am quite aware of that, doctor,’ she snapped.

As Anastasia and the doctor talked, Laura walked forward and peered over the waist-high concrete wall and down into the vast chamber below. The drop to the large open area at the bottom must have been at least a hundred metres and down there, far below, she could see tiny figures running assault courses and sparring. Every floor of the structure was ringed by an identical walkway, all lined with doors and regularly patrolled by armed guards. Hanging from the centre of the ceiling above them was a multi-storey glass structure that was occupied by what looked like a high-tech control centre. From where Laura was standing the whole place looked very much like a prison.

‘What is this place?’ Tom asked as he and Penny looked down into the pit.

‘This is the Glasshouse,’ Anastasia said with a cold smile, ‘the most sophisticated operative training facility on Earth and also your new home. Here you will be honed into weapons, those of you that are strong enough at least. Those who are weak, those who fail, will perish, as they should.’ She turned towards the waiting soldiers. ‘Guards, take the girl with the leg wound to the medical centre and escort Miss Brand and the boy to their new accommodations.’

The soldiers stepped forward and grabbed Laura, Tom and Penny and marched them away. Anastasia looked down into the training area of the Glasshouse and found herself thinking about the previous facility that had gone by that name. She thought of the flames consuming the building around her and unconsciously she reached up and touched the scars that covered her face. Seeing Raven had brought back many unpleasant memories. Natalya had been both her greatest success and her most disappointing failure. The next time that they met she would be made to pay for everything she had done, that much was certain. This was, after all, just the first stage of a much larger plan and by the time she was finished G.L.O.V.E. would lie in ruins and the world would be hers for the taking.

Several floors below a guard shoved Laura in the back, pushing her inside a tiny, cramped cell with a toilet, a sink and a thin mattress on a concrete slab.

‘Get changed into these,’ the guard said, pointing to the boots, grey combat trousers and white T-shirt that lay on the bed inside the cell. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes to take whatever clothes you’re wearing now for disposal.’

The door to the cell slammed shut and locked with a click. Laura slowly stripped out of her Alpha jumpsuit and put on her new uniform. When she had changed, she sat down on the bed and picked up her H.I.V.E. uniform, staring at the silver fist and globe badge on the chest. As she looked at the badge she began to cry, feeling for all the world like she might never stop.

‘Now what was it that you wanted to discuss, Mr Malpense,’ Nero said as he sat down behind the desk in his office. He gestured to the seat on the other side of the desk.

‘No, thank you, I’d rather stand,’ Otto said. ‘I need to talk to you about how the Disciples discovered the location of the Hunt.’

‘We have been investigating precisely that in your absence,’ Nero replied. ‘It appears that Cole Harrington may have been working for the Disciples and that after he stole the information from H.I.V.E.mind he transmitted it to them. We subsequently found a hidden covert transmitter in his quarters but before we could question him any further about what he had done he took his own life.’

‘There’s only one problem with that story,’ Otto said with a frown.

‘And what might that be?’

‘It’s complete rubbish,’ Otto replied calmly. ‘Harrington never transmitted that information. He never even saw the location of the Hunt. He didn’t even steal the data from H.I.V.E.mind.’

‘Then who did?’

‘I did,’ Otto replied. ‘I stole H.I.V.E.mind’s source code but only because a core dump was the only way to get a copy of the examination papers. We were all tired of the hard time that we were getting from Chief Dekker and Laura suggested that we get our own back on her by stealing the examination papers. We knew that she had been placed in charge of security for the exams and we figured that getting the questions and giving them to everyone would make her look stupid.’