Inkers (28 page)

“Annie!”, she shouted, but she knew that she was gone, her body smothered in rubble amidst the blackened ruin of the vats. She remembered Brian and rolled over to look where he had been, her body aching. The computers were all knocked off the desks and there was a hole where the back wall had been too. She pushed herself to her feet, looking around warily. He was gone. She turned back towards the soldiers. A second jeep was slowly backing over towards the barn. There were several guns sticking out of it, pointed at her. She raised her hands. She looked at the ground. Everything except a circle around her about a metre wide was covered in rubble, ink, and blood. Only she was untouched. She looked at her clothes; there was no ink or dust on her at all.

If the soldiers knew what was in her they would kill her.

“Lie on the ground!” one screamed.

Lily closed her eyes. They would find out and they would kill her. They would kill Tia.

“No,” she said.

They opened fire.

Voices were muttering on the edge of
hearing. Amber woke and did not want to open her eyes. Her chest was tight with pain.

“Em,” she managed, inside.

There was no response.

“Emily!”

Nothing.

She opened her eyes. The ceiling was white, blotted with grey stains. Thin cracks ran over it. She moved her head. Her neck was stiff. There was a thin fluorescent strip buzzing gently and giving off a weak light. The air smelled like anti–septic. She turned her head to the side. There was a large white medbot sat next to her bed, its long arms plugged into her own with wires and tubes.

She looked towards the door. It was open a crack. That was where the muttering was coming from – there were people talking outside. It was two men having a conversation.

“…always miss out on the action,” one said, his voice quite gruff, Scottish accent.

“Psh,” the other growled. “I get paid as much stood here as I do being shot at.”

“They’ll be done by now,” the first said, sounding unconvinced. “The world’s ending and you’re thinking about your paycheque.”

“I’ve seen apocalypses before.”

“You’re crazy. If they don’t destroy the ink tonight, we’re done,” the younger said.

“How do you know?” the older said. “You’ve got no idea what it’s thinking. You were a kid when it went up, but I wasn’t, I remember what they were talking about before the GSE happened. They were talking about building a god, changing the world for the better, ending hunger. For all we know it’s coming back to help.”

“Yeah, well,” the younger said, annoyed. “Haven’t heard you say that to any of the higher–ups.”

“That’s “cause they have to toe the line. That’s what ITSA’s for, people are scared so they want ITSA, and the governments are scared of people so they spend everyone’s money on ITSA. And what I get paid for is not saying stuff like that to the higher–ups.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t get paid to say it to me either.” He sounded angry.

“That’s true. But I enjoy it.”

The younger didn’t reply to that. They were silent. Amber’s mind raced.

ITSA were on the island. They knew about the source of the signal. They would find the girl, scan her, realise what had happened, and eradicate her, and, if Amber was right, destroy the entire universe in the process.

Amber wondered suddenly if the GSE knew. Maybe that was why it was coming here, to protect the girl and save itself.

She wondered if they would believe her if she told them. All she had to base it on was what she had learned on the darknet. In their eyes she was a traitor, a Chinese operative even, who would say anything to confuse ITSA or harm their cause. But she had to do something. She might be the only person who could.

They must have deactivated her implants. She realised with a shock that they might even have erased Emily. For a moment that hurt more than the physical pain.

With considerable effort she raised her head and looked down at her body. There were thick bandages around her chest but her limbs were free and, apart from her left arm, the older injury from Kathmandu bandaged neatly, her body at least looked like it should work. She was alive. But her implants were deactivated or destroyed and she had a chest injury of unknown severity. She heard movement outside and quickly shut her eyes and dropped her head. Footsteps clumped over to her.

“Still out?”

“Uh… yup. Plenty more ECG activity though, she should be coming round pretty soon. Then we get to talk to the traitor.”

“Thank Christ. Can’t we shake her about a bit to wake her up?”

“You’re joking. We can’t lay a hand on her unless she’s resisting. Her implants could still be recording.”

“They’re switched off, right?”

“You trust the techs with that?”

“Pretty sure they’re on our side.”

The other man just grunted.

The boots clumped away again. The door closed. Amber didn’t open her eyes immediately. It gave her a moment to think.

Her body was functioning, to some extent.

They thought she was unconscious. But they also thought she was a traitor, so they probably would not hesitate to kill her if she tried to escape. And yet she did not want to hurt them. She still thought of them as her colleagues, though it was not a courtesy they returned.

Tentatively, Amber began to move her arms and legs a little from side to side, half–expecting the medbot to scream for the guards. The pain in her chest continued to be intense, but her limbs, even the one she’d been shot in, seemed to be serviceable.

She sat up, slowly, pushing herself up with her elbows. She almost cried out with the pain. She looked around at the medbot.

“Don’t make any noise,” Amber whispered to it. “Silent mode activated,” flashed up on the screen. “Retract everything from my arm,” she whispered. The various probes and needles slipped out of her skin without a noise. The pain was sharp.

She slid her feet off the bed. There was a window looking out over an area of grass. She was on the second floor. It was night but the strange light of the GSE was over everything. Amber could see Goat Fell towering above, creepy in the weird light. She was in Brodick Hospital, then. There was an analogue clock on the wall. It read 1:55 but had no date. She was wearing a hospital gown and nothing else, but her clothes were folded on a chair in the corner. She padded over, grabbed them, slipped into her underwear and trousers, pulled her t–shirt and jacket over the gown. Her boots were nowhere to be seen. Her clothes stank of filth against the antiseptic hospital air.

“Em?” she tried once more, for good luck. Nothing. She was on her own.

She pushed open the window, peered out. There was a trellis: climbable. She let herself down as far as she could and then dropped onto the grass and rolled.

Amber ignored the pain, scrambled to her feet and ran. Her chest felt like it was tearing itself apart.

She was halfway across the grass, sprinting towards a high fence, when the shout came. It had not taken them long to notice. She put on a burst of speed, not bothering to try to be quiet any more, half expecting a well–aimed bullet to enter the rear of her skull and bounce around in her cranial cavity at any moment.

Amber ran.

She smashed into the wire fence with her whole body and began to climb, footsteps hammering across the grass behind her. This was her only chance. They would not be so stupid ever again. She clawed and pulled with everything she had, trying to compensate for her injury–weakness and her hunger–weakness with a disregard to pain, willing suddenly to destroy any part of her body if it meant the world could continue to exist for at least a little while after her death.

She rolled over the top and fell two metres clean to the ground, landing prone in a bush. When she was up there was already a man in black ITSA body–armour scrambling up the fence, another older man just catching him. The fence was buckling under the younger man’s weight but he kept coming.

“Stop!” the older man shouted at her, panting. “You’ll die without the medbot!”

Amber was already running, but she heard the thump as the younger man landed on the ground. He was younger, fitter, stronger, better fed, and in a heroic, violent mood.

It didn’t matter. When he jumped on her, he was jumping on an injured, escaping woman. He forgot that he was jumping on a trained immune, an experienced ink–hunter with one goal. She knew exactly what was jumping on her. She did not want to hurt him but if she did not leave now she never would. She let him slide over the top of her to the ground, used all her remaining leg–strength to lift him up and ran with him upside–down, shoving him with all her might at a shard of wood sticking off a tree trunk. The sharp end went straight through his chest. His strong hands immediately stopped clawing at her, his legs stopped scrabbling for purchase. She leapt back and he stayed there for a second, legs hanging forward, hands brushing the ground, impaled on the branch. He slipped off to the ground with a thump. As he gasped, clutching at his chest, Amber bent, gently gripped his wrist and ripped the watch off. She scrabbled through his pockets, the noise of the older man trying to climb the chain fence rattling in her ears. She found a small plastic pack of grenades and took it and ran so she didn’t have to hurt the older man too.

Amber ran through the trees and then across fields, orienting herself by the mountain to her right, heading south towards the smaller island. That was where the girl was, where she had always been. At any moment she expected the drones to swoop and eviscerate her, but none came. There were many in the sky, mainly ahead of her, a swarm of lights, sometimes flashing as they fought each other, as massed drones always did. Occasionally they exploded in blooms of spreading fire.

The GSE was massive in the sky, the ring of light huge. Orion’s belt was blocked. She would never see it again now. Somehow the sadness of that threatened to overwhelm her, so she crushed the thought down and pushed on.

There was a much larger flash of light and a faint crump of sound somewhere ahead of her across the weirdly lit landscape. An explosion. She guessed that was why they were not on her already: what was left of ITSA was focusing everything on the island.

She ran until she couldn’t. She walked until she couldn’t. She collapsed. She remembered the watch. It was quite a simple one, with no AI, but it was tuned into the feeds. Without her implants she had to learn how to use the screen, but she figured it out and soon had a live feed of ITSA’s communications in the area.

What she could see and hear confirmed it all. They had cornered a pregnant girl with apparent nanotechnological abilities. They were attempting to destroy her using anti–singularity weaponry. That blast had been the first serious attempt. The girl had apparently survived it. They were going to try nanites next. Then the nukes.

Amber wrote a message.

To every member of ITSA who was receiving in the area:
Do not destroy the girl: the universe is inside her. Ask Robert Vicks in ITSA US. Protect the girl.
Once the message had gone, she switched the watch off, snapped it back onto her wrist, and, grimacing, got back to her feet.

Amber was crawling when she crested the final hill. Blood was pouring from her bandages and she was on the edge of passing out. The sky above the island was black with swarming drones. A large area on the hillside appeared to be on fire, and she could see flashes of gunfire, hear the cracks of weaponry firing and explosives going off.

Was the girl
fighting back
?

Amber crawled down the hill towards the wide channel of water between Arran and the island, leaving behind her a trail of blood.

The three men stood huddled together amongst
the trees. The burning farmhouse was sending a pillar of smoke towards the swarming, writhing drones overhead. The massive pool of yellow ink was just visible on the courtyard, and Hardwick didn’t want to know how many bodies were down there with it.

There was a crater filled with rubble where the barn had been. ITSA drones had hurled the stones on top after their anti–singularity weaponry had apparently failed to destroy the girl. The girl was in there somewhere, buried beneath it all. Watching on his watch via a soldier’s implants, Hardwick had seen a bubble form around her, black as death, just before the whole barn exploded.

Hardwick, Lwazi and Ret had been brought across in the second wave of boats. They had watched the whole thing from amid the trees, a little way up the hill overlooking the farmhouse. Hardwick and Lwazi had crouched down behind a rock when the shooting started, but Ret had stood, peering down with a fierce grin on his face, flinching at the explosions but looking like he wished he was in there blowing up with them, his hangover apparently driven away. It was clearly back now, though. He was lying in the foetal position on a pile of leaves, moaning occasionally. Hardwick and Lwazi were both sat on stones, shivering despite their heavy coats, unused to the northern temperatures.

Mary approached, clambering up steadily between the trunks, looking haggard, a long black rifle strapped to her back. She slipped a little but grabbed at a bunch of ferns and hauled herself onwards. She reached the three men and nodded at the two of them who were still conscious. She rested against a tree to catch her breath for a moment, adjusting her body armour and brushing mud off her thighs.