Rogue (2 page)

‘Stay behind me, ma’am,’ the guard said, placing himself between her and the elevator doors as they reached the penthouse level. He raised his pistol, aiming it at the crack in the doors as they slowly opened.

Standing in the hallway between them and the safety of the penthouse was a small figure in black jeans and a black hooded top that concealed its wearer’s face.

‘Hands in the air!’ the guard barked, levelling his pistol at the mysterious intruder.

The small figure raised one hand to his hood and pulled it back to reveal a head of spiky white hair. The boy’s skin was pale and his eyes seemed bloodshot, but they were clouded black instead of red.

‘I know you,’ Madame Mortis hissed.

‘No, you
knew
me,’ Otto replied. He tilted his head slightly to one side and reached out with his unique mental abilities, interfacing effortlessly with the safety systems that controlled the elevator’s brakes. The elevator suddenly jerked downwards a metre or so, sending Madame Mortis and her bodyguard staggering.

‘Going down?’ Otto asked with a vicious grin.

Down in the parking garage, the woman called Ghost took a single step backwards when the elevator doors exploded in a shower of dust and debris as the carriage smashed into the bottom of the elevator shaft at terminal velocity.

‘Have the chopper pick our operative up from the roof,’ she said calmly as the dust settled around her. ‘Target eliminated.’

‘Argentblum, you are going to complete this course even if it kills you,’ Colonel Francisco yelled.

Ten metres above the rest of the class, Franz clung to the climbing wall for dear life.

‘I am trying to be making my arms move,’ Franz wailed plaintively, ‘but I am experiencing the paralysing fear, yes?’

‘What are you more afraid of?’ Colonel Francisco snarled back. ‘Falling or me?’

‘This is being the good point,’ Franz said, swallowing nervously and slowly reaching for the next handhold.

‘How long has he been up there now?’ Shelby whispered to Laura as they sat on the ground watching Franz’s excruciatingly slow ascent.

‘Twenty-five minutes,’ Laura said with a sigh, ‘and counting.’

‘I’m not entirely convinced by the safety rigging either,’ Lucy said, nodding towards the other end of the line that was attached to Franz, where Nigel was standing holding it very, very tightly indeed.

‘Perhaps not the ideal arrangement,’ Wing said with a slight frown.

Suddenly the lights in the training cavern flickered and then went out, plunging the entire chamber into pitch blackness.

‘Not again,’ Laura said.

‘OK!’ Colonel Francisco shouted over the sudden confused mutterings of the assembled Alpha students. ‘Nobody move! I’m sure the lights will come back on in a moment.’

There was a sudden startled yelp from the direction of the climbing wall and then a pair of simultaneous screams. Moments later the lights in the cavern flickered back into life and the assembled students were treated to the sight of Franz and Nigel dangling in mid-air, Franz clinging desperately to Nigel, who was in turn struggling to hang on to the safety line.

‘We are needing some help here,’ Franz said nervously.

‘Soon, please,’ Nigel groaned.

Colonel Francisco pulled out his Blackbox communicator and spoke into it.

‘This is Colonel Francisco in the physical training cavern,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Please bring me a step-ladder . . . quickly.’

‘What is it with all these power failures?’ Lucy said as she, Shelby, Laura and Wing walked down the corridor towards the school dining hall.

‘I guess the old place is just falling apart,’ Shelby said with a shrug.

‘It
is
unusual,’ Laura said, frowning. ‘It never used to fail – ever – and suddenly over the past couple of months it’s started happening more and more often.’

‘It’s not just the lights either,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s getting so I don’t want to take a shower in the morning.’

‘Yes, the water temperature in the accommodation blocks has been somewhat . . . variable,’ Wing said, raising an eyebrow.

‘Yeah, it varies between ice cold and skin-blisteringly hot,’ Laura said, ‘sometimes in the course of a single shower.’

‘Hey, welcome to life at H.I.V.E.,’ Shelby said with a grin, ‘where even the bathroom is filled with mystery and danger.’

‘And what was that music that started playing over the tannoy system at three o’clock this morning?’ Lucy asked.

‘I believe it was the “1812 Overture”,’ Wing said matter-of-factly.

‘Everything electronic’s going haywire, and we can’t even blame Ott—’ Shelby said, stopping herself when she saw the look on Laura’s face. ‘Sorry, I forgot, no mentioning the
O
word.’

The last few months had been hard for them all. After the initial excitement of discovering that Otto was still alive, they had heard precisely nothing concerning the whereabouts of their friend. Most of the time they tried not to think about the fact that he had vanished without trace after the events on board the Dreadnought, but every so often one of them would say something, or something would happen, to suddenly remind them all that he wasn’t there. After a while they’d come to an unspoken agreement not to mention Otto unless they had some actual news. Unfortunately there had been precious little of that.

‘I assume no one’s heard anything new,’ Laura said.

‘Doctor Nero assured me last week that they continue to search,’ Wing said, ‘but there was, unfortunately, nothing else to report.’

‘Why can’t they find him?’ Laura asked sadly. ‘With all the resources G.L.O.V.E. has, they still can’t track him down. They won’t even let us help.’

‘Perhaps it is time we took matters into our own hands,’ Wing said quietly.

They all knew what Wing meant, but since Otto’s disappearance Nero had had the four of them on an extremely short leash. He had guessed that they might try to mount a rescue mission of their own and had made it abundantly clear to them that not only were they all being watched but that any attempt to leave the island would be met with the harshest of penalties. The irony was that the one person they really needed in order to put together a solid plan for any sort of escape attempt was currently AWOL.

‘Guys, you know I’m as keen as anyone to find Otto, but what could we do that G.L.O.V.E. couldn’t?’ Shelby asked with a sigh.

‘There’s got to be something,’ Laura said angrily. ‘Anything’s better than just sitting around here and hoping for the best.’

‘Hey,’ Shelby said, holding her hands up, ‘I’m not suggesting we give up. We just need to come up with a plan that doesn’t require an albino genius to make it work.’

‘This is most troublesome, Professor,’ Dr Nero said, placing the tablet display listing the series of bizarre technical malfunctions that had recently afflicted the school down on the desk in front of him. ‘I would like an explanation.’

‘As would I,’ Professor Pike replied, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘We have been struggling to keep the school’s systems running properly without the assistance of H.I.V.E.mind since the Overlord incident, but I thought that we had managed to iron out most of the problems. Then out of the blue things seem to have gone haywire. My first assumption was that it might be some sort of virus or that one of the pupils might have hacked into the system somehow – our network defences are formidable, but we have too many inventively devious minds within these walls to eliminate the possibility altogether.’

‘I assume that was not the problem,’ Nero said quickly, cutting the Professor off before he could enter into one of his famously long-winded explanations.

‘No, quite the contrary. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any intrusion into our systems,’ the Professor agreed.

‘Could we have been hacked without the intruder leaving any trace?’ Nero asked.

‘No,’ the Professor replied, shaking his head, ‘certainly not from the outside, and though we have some extremely capable hackers within the student body, there is only one pupil who could have done it without leaving any virtual fingerprints, and I think it’s safe to assume that
he
was not responsible.’

‘Indeed,’ Nero replied. ‘So what is causing these disruptions? I am as much of a fan of Tchaikovsky as the next man, but not at three o’clock in the morning.’

‘Well, I did discover something rather strange during my investigations,’ the Professor said with a frown. ‘Something is diverting large quantities of processing power away from the school’s central computer core. It’s subtle and intermittent, but there seems to be some sort of rogue process chewing up our computational resources. I’ve done everything I can to track down the source, but at the moment I’m drawing a complete blank.’

‘Surely it should be easy to trace?’ Nero asked.

‘Normally, yes, but whatever is causing the drain almost seems to be actively concealing itself,’ the Professor replied. ‘It is most puzzling.’

‘Keep working on it, please, Professor,’ Nero said. ‘So far this has been an inconvenience, but I fear that it’s only a matter of time before one of these incidents causes serious harm to a student or a member of staff.’

‘Of course.’ The Professor nodded.

Nero turned back to the tablet display on his desk as the Professor left his office. He closed the list of reports of the school’s technical gremlins and opened the file containing updates on the ongoing search for Otto Malpense. There was a frustrating lack of concrete information, and much of what they had discovered was little more than rumour and hearsay. All the indications seemed to be that H.O.P.E., the Hostile Operative Prosecution Executive, were likely to be holding him somewhere, but there was, unfortunately, a gulf between knowing that and finding precisely where he was being held. Nero could not help but worry about what might befall Otto at the hands of Sebastian Trent, the commanding officer of H.O.P.E. and thorn in G.L.O.V.E.’s and Nero’s side for far too long. The only consolation was that Raven was on Trent’s trail and if there was anyone who could track him down, it was her. He closed the file with a small sigh and placed it on his desk just as his communications console started to bleep insistently.

‘Yes, what is it?’ Nero said sharply.

‘I have an urgent communication from Diabolus Darkdoom,’ came the voice on the other end.

‘Put him through,’ Nero said, and a slim video screen slid up out of his desk, which lit up first with the G.L.O.V.E. symbol of a fist smashing down on a cracked globe and then with the face of Diabolus Darkdoom, head of G.L.O.V.E.’s ruling council and one of the few men in the world who Nero considered a friend.