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  ‘E-Force?’

  The others stared at Michael in astonishment.

  ‘Sir, we don’t have any time to waste. May I have your name?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. My name is Michael Xavier. Some of my family are here – my wife Hilary and daughter Emily. There are two others in the party Miguel Bandonis and Sigmund de Silva.’

  ‘Right. The satellite tells me you’re on the lower ground level of Gamma.’

  ‘How can you...? No, it doesn’t matter. Yes, we’ve just got down from the casino.’

  ‘Mr Xavier, there’s another group of survivors who’ve just reached Gamma and are close to you. Your son is with them.’

  ‘Nick? Oh, thank God.’

  Hilary was at his side. ‘What’s happened?’

  Michael turned from the radio. ‘Nick’s safe. He’s close by.’ Xavier turned back to the radio. ‘They came through the linkway?’

  ‘No. It’s been destroyed.’

  ‘Oh, Christ! That means we only have one chance...’

  BOOM.

  The sound was like a low note on a bass guitar played at excruciating volume. Michael felt Hilary grab his arm. ‘What was that?’ he exclaimed.

  There was a silence from the radio. ‘Hello, er ... Tom?’

  ‘Mr Xavier,’ Tom said calmly. ‘You have auto-isolation systems in the hotel, yes?’

  ‘Yes, we do ... Oh my God! No!’

  ‘What? What is it, Michael?’ Hilary tightened her grip on his arm. He could feel her nails digging into him. Her face was millimetres away from his, panic in her eyes. He stared at her, speechless. He opened his mouth to reply but was cut off. The stairwell shook, sending them all sprawling across the floor. The radio flew from Michael’s fingers and clattered across the concrete. Hilary and Emily screamed.

  The shaking stopped abruptly. Crumbled concrete cascaded from the roof, pellets falling to the floor.

  They picked themselves up. ‘Everyone okay?’ Michael asked. He looked round and saw they were all standing, shaken, but no more harm had been done. He could hear Tom’s voice and walked over to the radio, plucked it from the floor and brought it to his ear. ‘The top of the dome has gone, hasn’t it?’

  There was a long pause, then Tom said, ‘I’m afraid so, Mr Xavier.’

  Michael lowered the radio and stared at the others, his face drained of blood. Hilary’s hands flew to her face. Tears began to stream down Emily’s cheeks.

  ‘All those people,’ Miguel said, almost to himself.

  ‘Mr Xavier? Come in please. Mr Xavier?’

  Michael lifted the radio back to his ear.

  ‘Sir, you have to keep moving.’

  Michael was staring into space, barely able to register where he was or what was happening. His brother was dead. Johnny was dead. He glanced at Hilary, catching her eye. She stared straight back at him, distraught. In that moment, she suddenly realised that her husband knew all about her and Johnny.

  Michael looked away and felt his daughter Emily beside him. She clasped his hand and leaned against him. He glanced down at her filthy, tear-streaked face. Her dark hair was tangled and matted with dirt and dust, her silk gown smeared with grime and spatters of blood. ‘Okay, Tom,’ Michael said into the radio. ‘We’re heading for the emergency subs.’

  ‘That’s a good plan.’ Tom replied. ‘Sir, could you flick on the speaker, please?’

  Michael depressed the switch.

  ‘The other party are almost at the dock.’ Tom’s voice echoed around the stairwell. ‘From where you are, there are two possible routes. One’s blocked.’

  ‘Right. So, which way?’

  ‘Leave the stairwell straight ahead and take a left.’

  Michael glanced at the others and they followed him across the landing. The door opened onto a corridor. The walls ran with water, the carpet was sodden. They sped past closed doors to left and right, the carpet squelching under their feet. The corridor curved right. They took the corner and almost fell over a cleaner’s trolley blocking the way. It was on its side. The floor was strewn with toilet rolls, bars of soap, cleaning fluids and linen. The cleaner lay on her back close to the trolley, crushed by a large lump of plaster. Pieces of masonry and crumbs of light blue plaster lay scattered all around. In the ceiling, a gaping hole exposed pipe work and cabling. Michael crouched down to check that the woman was dead. He found no pulse and her skin was cold.

  They edged their way around the obstruction and headed on down the passageway to a lobby. An empty desk stood to one side. A small table lay smashed on the carpet, pieces of broken vase and bits of flowers scattered in an arc about it.

  They all stopped suddenly as a door opened on the other side of the lobby. A head came round the edge. Pete Sherringham stepped forward. Behind him, a bedraggled group stumbled into the reception area.

  ‘Nick!’ Hilary Xavier screamed and ran towards her son.

  60

  ‘Pete? Mai?’ It was Tom’s voice in their comms. They were standing to one side of the civilians gathered in Dome Gamma, checking their equipment. ‘We have a problem.’

  Pete and Mai looked at each other and wandered further away from the others, towards the lobby desk.

  ‘What is it?’ Pete said quietly into his comms.

  ‘I’ve lost Mark.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘He called in 10 minutes ago to say he’d hit a bureaucratic problem. There’s been some political trouble on Fiji. The administration that gave us clearance has been ... superseded.’

  ‘Oh wonderful!’ Mai exclaimed.

  ‘Mark said he had agreed to go aboard a ship called the Lambasa that had dropped anchor close to the Big Mac.’

  ‘And he went?’ Pete said in disbelief.

  ‘I told him I thought it was a bad idea. But he pointed out that until he sorted things out he could do nothing to help with the mission. He was about to launch the Drebbel. I think he had a plan for getting you all out of Gamma.’

  ‘Yes, he did. And, of course, he would have gone over there without any E-Force equipment, just in case,’ Pete said, half to himself.

  ‘Precisely. He had a radio, but that’s now dead.’

  ‘Well, we can only assume the worst, Tom. You have to call on some political muscle. Contact Mark’s old buddy, Senator Mitchell.’

  ‘I was just about to,’ Tom replied. ‘And er ... there’s something else.’

  Pete and Mai said nothing.

  ‘Josh and Steph have vanished.’

  ‘Vanished!’ Pete stated.

  ‘They took off from Polar Base on schedule. The last communication we had with them was 18 minutes into the flight.’

  ‘Mark knows about this?’ Mai said.

  ‘Yes, of course he does,’ Tom retorted. ‘We’ve known for a few hours. I guess Mark didn’t want to add to your troubles. I’m doing everything I can to trace them. I’ve narrowed the site to the eastern region of the Gobi Desert, but it’s a pretty big area.’

  ‘Anything from BigEye?’

  ‘Well that’s the odd thing. I’ve just had an update from BigEye 17.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing but interference.’

  ‘Interference? In the Gobi Desert?’

  ‘I know. I don’t get it either. I’ve tried everything to clean up the image, but without any luck. I don’t think there’s a problem with our equipment.’

  ‘What else can it be?’

  ‘There’s obviously an external source. Something down there jamming signals across a very wide frequency range.’

  ‘So there’s nothing you can do?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Tom replied. ‘Do please remember who you’re dealing with, people.’

  Pete couldn’t help smiling. ‘Of course. Sorry!’

  ‘I accept your apology, Peter. And I’ll commence reprogramming the BigEye to sweep the interference and get an analysis. I hope to have something in a few minutes.’

  ‘Well okay, Tom. I guess there’s nothing we can do
from down here. Keep us posted, yeah?’

  Tom flicked off the comms and Pete turned to Mai. ‘God, this operation is turning into a night out in Newcastle gone wrong!’

  61

  Base One, Tintara Island

  Tom was in Cyber Control studying the machine code flashing down the screen. ‘Syb,’ he said to the base computer, ‘can you run a Level One diagnostic on this?’

  Sybil’s quantum processors worked silently and took less than a millisecond to run the required analysis on the 3 terabytes of code from BigEye 17. ‘Diagnostic complete.’

  ‘So what’s happenin’?’ Tom declared.

  ‘Please rephrase, Tom.’

  Tom smiled to himself. ‘Sorry, Syb. What’s the frequency range of the interference?’

  ‘35.45 to 36.12 hertz.’

  Tom whistled. ‘No kidding? That’s very low. Okay, remodulate the signal for the satellite. I want to go over and under their range simultaneously, see what’s most effective.’

  ‘Processing,’ Sybil responded.

  Tom studied the big screen as it started to clear. ‘Excellent, Sybil,’ he said. ‘Right. Now let’s get down to business.’ He span in his chair and wheeled over to a control panel where two technicians were working.

  ‘Jeff,’ Tom said to the nearest of the pair. ‘I want a signal sent out across this range.’ He showed him the figures on the holoscreen of his laptop. ‘The message is the standard E-Force call, encoded to Level Four, please. If they’re there and have some sort of receiver, they should pick it up.’ He turned to the other tech. ‘Maddie. I want BigEye to sweep this part of the desert.’ He sent over to her computer a set of parameters – the area the size of New Jersey he had reported to Pete and Mai. ‘Do the analysis across the entire range, and over every level of magnification. If there’s a thread of a cybersuit or a crumb of emergency rations down there I want to see it. You got that?’

  The tech nodded and Tom wheeled back towards the screen.

  ‘Sybil,’ Tom said to the air. ‘Put a call through to Senator Evan Mitchell, priority red. And patch it through to my room, please.’

  62

  Dome Gamma

  ‘I hate to spoil the party,’ Pete said, ‘but we have to go.’ He’d wandered over to the group on the other side of the lobby.

  Michael turned from hugging his son and stared at the ID patch on Pete’s cybersuit. ‘Quite right, Mr ... Sherringham.’

  ‘You know the way from here, I take it?’

  Michael nodded. ‘There’s only one route. Straight through there and down.’ He pointed to an archway on the other side of the lobby.

  ‘Tom?’ Pete said into his comms. ‘There’s only one way from here to the dock. I hope it’s not blocked.’

  ‘No. All clear,’ Tom responded.

  ‘Well that’s something.’ Pete turned to Mai, who was standing close by. ‘Same arrangement, Mai. You come up behind the others, yeah?’

  She nodded, and Pete edged past Miguel Bandonis and headed towards a pair of doors close to the empty lobby desk. A staircase descended into shadow. All the lights were out. Pete and Mai flicked on their helmet beams and Bandonis held back to take up a place in the middle of the group, using his torch to cut through the gloom.

  There were only two short flights, but they had to be careful of loose cables or other obstructions. A door at the foot of the stairs opened out onto a hallway. Ahead they could see a wall of glass. It was similar to the emergency submarine dock in Dome Beta.

  They ran over to the window. Two subs lay close to the side of the hotel. They looked unscathed. Flexitubes connected the hatches of the subs to doors in the Neptune, and to the right of the huge windows was a locked door that opened onto a short set of stairs down to the flexitube. On the wall was a control panel to unlock the door in case of emergency. The code worked in conjunction with a plastic pass carried by every member of staff.

  Michael stepped forward and removed the card from his trouser pocket. He slid the plastic along a groove on the edge of the control panel. Then, pausing for a second to gather his thoughts, he leaned in towards the panel and tapped at the keypad.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried the card again and retyped the numbers.

  Nothing.

  ‘Hell!’

  ‘What is it?’ Pete asked.

  ‘The control panel isn’t responding.’ He stepped back, trying to remain calm and stared at the keypad.

  ‘Tom?’ Pete called into his comms. ‘We have a problem here. The control panel for the doors isn’t responding. Can you check the network?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he replied. ‘But the hotel’s system is pretty shot.’

  Miguel Bandonis stepped up. ‘Let me have a go,’ he said, and slid his own card through the groove, then keyed in the code.

  Again, nothing.

  Bandonis pushed ‘cancel’, then typed in an alphanumeric sequence.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Running a diagnostic, sir,’ he replied. ‘This smells bad.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ A line of type appeared on a small screen above the control panel: ‘DOORS NOT RESPONDING’.

  ‘Well, we know that!’ Bandonis exclaimed and screwed up his mouth. He tapped in more numbers and letters. A second later, the screen changed: ‘LINK TO MAINFRAME LOST’.

  ‘Christ!’ Bandonis spat.

  Michael Xavier grabbed the engineer’s shoulder. ‘Miguel. What is it?’

  ‘These doors will never open again, sir,’ he said.

  63

  The Lambasa

  The room stank ... old fish, and damp. Mark opened his eyes. He was in a tiny space, little more than a cupboard. He tried to move and realised his arms were tied behind his back. He sat up and cracked his head on a pipe. Cursing, he shuffled towards a chink of light that came from under the door. He listened, straining his cochlear implants, but all he could hear was the ship’s engine ticking over.

  He felt completely powerless, and he hated it. In fact, it was just about the sensation he detested most. But his military training was deeply ingrained – rather than getting angry, he got analytical. This was time given to him by his captors, he reasoned. It was valuable and must not be squandered. He had no way of telling the hour or how long he had been there, far less what this whole thing was about, but he had to formulate some sort of plan. There could be people dying 100 metres beneath this ship, and there were two members of his team down there.

  Mark concentrated on the binding around his wrists. They had used plastic ties, the sort gardeners employed to keep saplings attached to supports. They were impossible to snap with bare hands. His eyes were gradually growing used to the dark and he could see the room was a featureless rectangle. No windows, one door, a low ceiling. Pipes hung low and traversed the ceiling in parallel lines. The walls and floor were old steel, and water ran down the wall close to his back. His jumpsuit was soaked through. He shivered suddenly, and became aware of just how cold he was.

  There was a sound at the end of the corridor. Two distinct footfalls – boots on steel, coming towards the door. Mark heard one of the men speak to the other but he could not understand what he said. Then he heard the sound of keys rattling on a metal chain. The door swung inward and the room was flooded with light from the corridor. Mark squinted. He was grabbed roughly under each arm and dragged to his feet. He did not try to resist. There was no point. Best to conserve energy.

  The two men said nothing. They were in the same black uniforms as the ones Mark had seen earlier. Both were short and stocky, good in a fight, he imagined.

  ‘Where’re you taking me?’ Mark asked.

  They said nothing, just pushed him through the opening into the corridor. One of them nudged the barrel of an AK47 into Mark’s ribs as he walked ahead, his arms still tied behind his back. They guided him along a narrow passage towards an open door. He was led into another featureless room about 4 metres square �
� probably the biggest room on the boat, he thought. Naivalurua sat in a metal chair close to the centre.

  ‘Mr Harrison. I take it you had a nice rest,’ the Acting Admiral said, eyeing him. Mark stared back at the man in silence.

  ‘We have been busy,’ Naivalurua went on. ‘Making a very close study of your remarkable vehicles. Quite unsporting of you to put those defence shields up, though. Gave a couple of my men quite a shock.’

  ‘That’s their purpose,’ Mark replied evenly.

  Naivalurua produced a faint, humourless smile and interlinked his fingers on his lap as he studied Mark Harrison. The Fijian played the silence for a few moments, fixing Mark with cold, intent eyes. ‘So, let me explain the situation,’ the Acting Admiral began. ‘I have limited time to achieve my goal. I’m sure you have realised by now that I want access to your vehicles. Immediate, unrestricted access. I have analysed E-Force technology and I know that you control the defence shields with alphanumeric codes and that there are other codes to activate the vehicles. I want those codes. There are two ways I can obtain them quickly. The first way, which I think would make us all a lot happier, is by you giving them to me. In return, I will leave you with a launch and you can make your way to Fiji. The other path is altogether messier. I will be forced to torture you.’

  Mark was stunned. A part of him wanted to laugh, but a stronger voice in his head was telling him that this was far more serious than he had realised. This was no joke.

  ‘Who do you work for?’ he said after a long pause. ‘I cannot believe the Fijian government would sanction this.’

  ‘It’s not for you to ask questions, Mr Harrison. That’s my job. Now, the question uppermost in my mind is this. What are the code sequences I require?’

  Mark shook his head and looked down at the floor. He could feel the plastic ties about his wrists biting into him, but pushed the pain away. ‘You know it’s impossible for me to give you that information.’

  ‘Impossible? Nothing is impossible, Mr Harrison.’ Naivalurua stood up quickly, not once taking his eyes from Mark’s face. ‘I am a fair man,’ he said. ‘I will give you another chance. You know, Mr Harrison, I realise Fiji is a tiny country, a mere pinprick on the map. And as a consequence, you may doubt that I would have acquired the skills necessary to make a man such as yourself divulge any information he would not want to divulge. But I feel duty bound to assure you that this is certainly not the case. I was born here on Fiji, but I have had some of the best instructors in many areas of learning, not all of which are sanctioned by the United Nations or fall within the limitations of international law. You understand me?’