Rogue (21 page)

The three of them made their way quietly along the tree line until they reached a point near the dirt road leading to the camp that was out of sight of the main gate.

‘I hope you’re right about this,’ Shelby said as she watched the road.

‘If I’m not, we’ll find out when they start shooting us,’ Lucy replied.

‘That’s not terribly reassuring,’ Laura remarked, slightly nervously.

‘Shh,’ Shelby interrupted. ‘Here they come.’

Four guards were walking along the road towards them, heading back to base having finished their patrol. When they were just twenty metres or so from where the girls were hiding, the three of them stepped out of the bushes, hands raised in surrender.

‘All three of you, on your knees, hands behind your head,’ the lead guard barked, his rifle pointed straight at them. The girls did as they were instructed.

‘This is who we’ve been looking for?’ one of the other soldiers asked. ‘Three teenage girls?’

‘I’m calling it in,’ the lead guard said. ‘Cover them.’

One of the others levelled his rifle at them as the leader raised his radio.

Lucy took a deep breath. ‘
Don’t use the radio
,’ she said, her voice filled with sinister echoes and whispers. ‘
Your commander told you to
just take us to the detention area
.’

The four soldiers looked confused for a second, and then the leader lowered his radio and began to walk off along the road leading to the base.

‘Come on,’ Shelby said, as the four soldiers walked away. ‘Time to make like prisoners.’

‘Are you all right?’ Laura asked as Lucy got unsteadily to her feet.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Lucy said with a weak smile. ‘I’m not going to be able to do much more of that though. I’ve never tried using the voice on more than one person before.’

‘Now she tells us,’ Shelby said as the three girls caught up with the guards, taking up position just in front of them and doing their best to look like recently captured intruders.

‘I was
reasonably
sure that it would work,’ Lucy said. ‘I just hope that we don’t run into anyone too smart.’

‘What happens if we do?’ Shelby asked as they approached the main gate.

‘I have no idea,’ Lucy replied.

‘Next time,’ Shelby muttered, ‘we’re going with the ventilation shafts.’

Otto placed his hand on the security console and felt for the network nodes that would connect him to the internal surveillance system. Two dead guards had been found outside the base’s secondary entrance, and the fact that one of the men had been missing his access card suggested that whoever had taken it must already be somewhere within the facility. It was not difficult to connect to the system and he felt a strangely comforting sense of familiarity as the feeds from the cameras all over the base flooded into his mind. For a normal human the sudden influx of muddled imagery would have been overwhelming, but for him it simply coalesced into a three-dimensional model, with all of the people that were searching for the intruder moving around it in real time. He focused on the faces, comparing them one by one to the facility’s personnel records, looking for a face that did not fit. It would have been an impossibly painstaking task for anyone else, but Otto worked quickly, narrowing down his search. In just a few seconds he isolated a figure hurrying down the corridor towards the detention area and realised that it was a face that did not fit. Otto felt another tingle at the base of his skull as he studied the unknown man’s face, as if there was something familiar about him that he could not put his finger on.

Wu Zhang

Otto recoiled from the security console, unnerved by the sinister voice he had heard inside his head, a voice filled with hatred and rage. He shook his head as he felt a bizarre sensation, almost like something was bursting inside his skull. It passed after a moment or two and he took a long, deep breath. These glitches were becoming tiresome, he thought to himself. He would need to speak to Dr Creed about getting them stopped permanently.

He picked up his pistol and radio from the table nearby, sliding the gun into the holster on his hip and raising the walkie-talkie to his mouth.

‘This is Otto,’ he said. ‘Our intruder is on the detention level. All squads move to intercept.’

Cypher ran into the detention area.

‘I think I just saw the intruder!’ he yelled at the guard sitting at the desk inside. ‘Come on!’

The guard leapt up out of his chair and followed Cypher out of the room.

‘Where?’ he asked, looking up and down the corridor.

‘Here,’ Cypher said calmly, and put his pistol to the back of the other man’s head. ‘Where’s Wing?’

‘Wing?’ echoed the guard, his eyes suddenly wide.

‘The boy who was brought in earlier – where is he?’ Cypher asked.

‘Cell four,’ the guard replied nervously.

‘Show me,’ Cypher demanded.

He followed the guard down the short row of cell doors until they reached the final one.

‘Open it,’ Cypher said, keeping his gun trained on the nervous soldier as he unlocked the door.

‘Thank you,’ Cypher said with a smile, and knocked the guard out with the butt of his gun. He stepped over the unconscious man and opened the cell door. Wing looked up as the door opened, the frown on his face replaced almost instantly by an expression of utter astonishment.

‘Father?’ he gasped in disbelief.

‘Wing,’ Cypher said with a smile, ‘it is good to see you again.’

‘But you’re . . .’

‘Dead, yes, I know. Surely by now you have realised that in this line of work that is rarely a permanent state of affairs,’ Cypher said. ‘Nero lied to you. He thought it better that you did not know that I had survived.’

‘Perhaps he was right,’ Wing said, the look of astonishment suddenly replaced by an angry frown. ‘I did not mourn you.’

‘Nor would I have expected you to,’ Cypher replied. ‘I know that you have every reason to hate me, but I never wanted this life for you.’ He gestured at the walls around them. ‘Running from one battle to the next, never knowing who you can and can’t trust. Your mother would have given anything to keep you away from this world of treachery and death.’

‘What right do you have to speak of what she would have wanted,’ Wing asked angrily, ‘after everything you have done? She would have hated Cypher. I am only glad that she never saw what you have become.’

‘As am I,’ Cypher said sadly. ‘You will never know how much I loved your mother. That is why I have to save you from this life that Nero would have you lead. You are all I have left of Xiu Mei, and I will not let you be another sacrifice on G.L.O.V.E.’s altar.’

‘That is my choice to make, not yours.’

‘Perhaps,’ Cypher said, ‘but that is a conversation for another time. For now we should be focusing on getting out of here without getting killed.’

‘You may do as you wish. I am not leaving without Otto,’ Wing said firmly.

‘Oh, we’re going to take care of Mr Malpense too,’ Cypher said. ‘Don’t you worry about that. Whether you like it or not, we have a better chance of getting out of this place alive if we work together.’

Wing said nothing for a moment or two, weighing up his options before giving a small nod.

Cypher gestured towards the open door and he and Wing hurried out of the detention centre. They were halfway down the corridor when a familiar figure rounded the corner ahead of them.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Otto said, pointing his pistol straight at them. ‘Drop the gun.’

Cypher hesitated for just a moment, but then several more armed guards ran into the corridor behind them and he had to accept that they had nowhere to run. He let his pistol fall to the floor. Otto kept the pair of them covered as he lifted the radio in his left hand.

‘I’m on the detention level,’ Otto said calmly. ‘We have our intruder.’

The H.O.P.E. security technician opened the door and just had time to gasp before the butt of his comrade’s rifle smacked into his face and he toppled backwards unconscious.

‘Good boy,’ Shelby said with a grin, patting the mind-controlled guard on the shoulder. The girls hurried into the security facility and Lucy opened the door to the storage room inside.

‘
Get in there and sleep
,’ Lucy said, and the four guards who had led them in through the concealed door behind the waterfall walked obediently into the cramped space and collapsed to the floor. Lucy took a long deep breath, reaching out for the wall to steady herself, her face pale. Shelby quickly closed the door on the tiny room in which the four men were now taking their involuntary unscheduled nap.

‘You did great,’ Laura said, putting her hand on Lucy’s shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ Shelby said with a grin. ‘Your grandma would have been proud.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing,’ Lucy said with a weak smile. The truth was that if there was one person she did not want to end up like it was the Contessa. Her grandmother may have ultimately given her life to save H.I.V.E., but her actions prior to that were a catalogue of betrayal and deceit. It was not a path that Lucy wanted to follow.

‘Let’s see what we can find out about this place,’ Laura said, sitting down in front of one of the terminals in the room. She cracked her fingers and started typing rapidly on the keyboard. ‘Better lock the door,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I’m just going to give a friend a quick call.’

Shelby gave Lucy a puzzled look, but she just shrugged; they’d both known Laura long enough to realise she knew exactly what she was doing when it came to computers.

‘Come on, pick up,’ Laura said under her breath. A few seconds later the monitor lit up with the glowing blue face of H.I.V.E.mind.

‘Good morning, Miss Brand,’ H.I.V.E.mind said calmly. ‘I am pleased to see you are unharmed. May I enquire as to your precise location?’

‘Honestly?’ Laura said. ‘I have no idea. We were stuck inside the passenger compartment of a Shroud the whole way here. We’re in the middle of a rainforest somewhere, but that’s as much as I can tell you.’

‘I am running a network back-trace,’ H.I.V.E.mind reported, ‘attempting to isolate your current position.’

The AI fell silent for a moment as he tracked the path that the connection was taking through the impossible maze of international data transmission.