Aftershock Read online

  ‘Steph?’ It was Josh. She pulled herself up and he was leaning down to help her out. Howard was behind him. The three of them crouched close together. They were covered in sand and dust, their faces almost black. The sand had found its way into their mouths and up their noses. Their eyes stung.

  ‘It’s the Hummingbird,’ Josh cried above the noise.

  A voice came through the comms. ‘Hummingbird here. Guys, you ready to move out?’

  ‘Where have you put down?’

  ‘We’re approximately 30 metres directly east of your position. We couldn’t get any closer because we thought it would destabilise the wreckage.’

  ‘But the choppers–’

  ‘Dimitri is doing his best to distract them,’ Omar replied. ‘But we have to move ... now.’

  ‘Steph. I’ll go first. Then Howard. You okay with that?’ Josh looked from one to the other. They both nodded and scrambled to the edge of the fuselage. Josh looked out. He could see two of the choppers in the distance. Dimitri was playing with them, swooping close then ducking away at phenomenal speed. The helicopter crews could not have any clue what the hell was going on. He turned to Steph and Howard, took a deep breath and ran as fast as he could into the open.

  It felt as though he was running for hours. His knee had been repaired, but he was still stiff and sore. The sand rushed past. He could see the ramp of the Hummingbird descending from the underbelly of the enormous aircraft. At the top of the slope stood a figure in black fatigues encouraging him on. The new morning seemed superbright. Colours streamed past. Sounds bounced around. He felt the sand giving way under his boots. He made it to the ramp, the hard Maxinium floor so very different to the sand. He almost stumbled, but managed to stay on his feet.

  Then he was running up the slope into the safety of the plane. He stopped and turned. Howard was halfway across the stretch of sand, his greatcoat flapping about him, his long, grey hair flying around his face.

  A chopper lowered itself into view no more than 20 metres beyond the fuselage, directly behind Howard. Steph had dashed out from the wreckage to follow Howard. Josh watched, horrified, as the machine rose up a few metres and sped forward, directly toward the Hummingbird. Steph and Howard were caught in the open.

  Steph saw the chopper, but kept going. Howard was running as fast as he could, gasping for breath as he went. He was a dozen metres from the ramp when the rattle of machine gun fire split the air. Josh could see the end of the 12.7mm barrel flare orange and yellow. The bullets thudded into Howard’s back, exiting through his abdomen and sending a fountain of blood in front of him.

  Josh dashed out into the open again. The man at the top of the ramp cried out, but Josh ignored him. Steph was there first, almost falling over Howard and sliding to one side in the sand. The chopper roared overhead. Bullets spat from the machine gun, thumping into the sand. A few more hit the fuselage of the Hummingbird, not even denting the Maxinium.

  Josh and Steph grabbed an arm each and dragged Howard towards the ramp. The man in the black fatigues ran down the ramp towards them. He helped them up onto the metal slope and yelled into his comms.

  They had just reached the top of the ramp when they all felt the Hummingbird start to rise up from the desert. The ramp came up, slithering into its recess with a loud hiss. Another door opened in front of them and they all fell into a corridor as a pair of E-Force paramedics rounded the corner directly ahead and dashed towards them.

  79

  ‘I’m fine. It’s okay,’ Steph said, as one of the paramedics helped her to her feet.

  Josh was standing, one hand gripping a rail running along the wall.

  ‘Josh, you go and help up top,’ Steph said. ‘Here.’ She snatched a mobile comms set from one of the paramedics and tossed it over to him. He caught it, stood up and raced along the corridor.

  Steph crouched down beside Howard. He was lying on his back, unconscious, a pool of blood spreading out from under him across the metal floor. Steph checked for a pulse. It was weak. She ripped open Howard’s shirt and started performing CPR. There were gaping wounds in his chest and abdomen, exit wounds caked with splinters of bone and blobs of tissue. One of the medics ran a scanner over the injured man’s body.

  ‘Roll him over ... gently,’ Steph snapped.

  Suddenly, the plane shuddered and dropped altitude. The paramedics were thrown across the corridor. Steph managed to grasp the handrail just in time. Howard rolled forward and then onto his back again. It lasted only a second or two, and then the plane’s stabilisers kicked in. But in those moments, Steph could see the extent of Howard’s injuries. His back was completely ripped open, his spine shredded.

  ‘Heart’s stopped,’ the paramedic said.

  ‘All right, step back,’ Steph said. ‘Give me the defrib pads.’ She snatched at two plastic discs and slapped them onto Howard’s exposed chest. Unlike the old-style machines, these worked by sending an infrared pulse from a small box in the paramedic’s belt to activate the pads and zap the patient’s heart with an automatically adjusted electric shock.

  ‘Clear.’

  Howard convulsed, his back arching. He slumped onto the metal floor and Steph leaned in to give him mouth to mouth. ‘Clear,’ she yelled again pulling back and pushing down on the pads. Howard convulsed a second time.

  ‘Still no rhythm,’ the paramedic said.

  ‘Damn it! ... Clear.’

  Howard’s body arched up a third time, then slumped to the floor. Steph pushed the pads aside and went back to pumping the man’s chest with her hands, bending forward to administer mouth to mouth. After a few seconds, she paused and looked at the paramedic. The man shook his head.

  Steph thumped Howard’s chest as hard as she could. His body bounced on the metal. She hit him again, and again. Paused. Took a deep breath and began pumping again, getting oxygen into his lungs, desperately trying to kickstart his heart.

  ‘Howard!’

  ‘Steph.’ The other paramedic had crouched down next to her.

  She ignored him. ‘Howard! Howard!’ Steph shouted at the prone body. ‘Come on, Howard!’

  ‘Steph.’

  She stopped and sobbed into her palms. Howard’s head lolled to one side.

  80

  Josh was halfway along the main corridor leading to the elevator when the plane shuddered and dropped altitude suddenly. He was sent tumbling forward. He managed to roll with the fall and came up against a support column, bashing his left cheek against the metal.

  The plane stabilised before he could pull himself up. Ignoring the pain in his face, he ran for the elevator and opened a channel on the mobile comms set. ‘Omar. This is Josh. Come in.’

  ‘Josh. You okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. Listen. The Chinese have some sort of disruptor weapon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look. I’m on my way to the flight deck. Watch your flight guidance systems. And, Omar. Call Dimitri. Now. Tell him.’

  ‘Will do. Out.’

  Josh ran into the elevator and punched in a call to Base One. ‘Tom.’

  ‘Josh. What’s...?’

  ‘Tom, this is priority red. The Chinese brought Paul down with some sort of interference beam. It was way down in the low frequency end of the spectrum. Cut right through the shields as though they weren’t there. It attacked the guidance systems and then disrupted almost every part of the plane. I think they’ll try to do the same here, now, with the Hummingbird and Mick.’

  ‘Yeah, I know they’re experimenting with ELF radiation,’ Tom said. ‘What was the exact time of the attack? Do you know?’

  ‘Engraved in my memory, Tom. We felt the first shock precisely 21 minutes and six seconds after takeoff.’

  ‘Okay. Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do to block it ... somehow.’

  The elevator shot up three floors, the doors parted and Josh dashed out into another corridor that curved gently to the left. He ran as fast as he could. As he reached the door to the flightdeck, it opened au
tomatically and he sped over to the bank of control panels where Omar and his copilot, Gillian Fernandez, sat.

  He had just reached them when the plane shuddered again. A computer voice broke in over the comms system.

  ‘Warning. Unidentified object. One point nine kilometres north-north-east.’

  ‘On screen,’ Fernandez commanded.

  ‘Not possible at this time.’

  ‘What!’

  Josh reached the control station and stepped between the two pilots. ‘It’s happening again,’ he said.

  81

  A high-pitched whistle burst through the comm speakers.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Omar yelled.

  ‘Warning. Warning,’ the onboard computer cut through the shrill noise.

  ‘It’s a low frequency energy burst,’ Josh shouted. ‘It’s the same thing that brought us down. Omar, take us up. We’ll have to try to get out of range.’ The copilot offered Josh her seat and strode over to a secondary control console the other side of the flight deck.

  Josh yanked on a helmet and his fingers flew over the control panel.

  ‘What about the shields?’ Omar said.

  The plane shuddered.

  Josh did not reply for a moment, he was concentrating on the holodisplay before his eyes. ‘Cuts through them,’ he said after a moment, and punched in a set of parameters for the computer. The plane banked to port and they could feel it start to gain altitude. Josh flicked his eyes over the 3D display. They were climbing fast. Ten thousand metres, 20,000, 25,000.

  ‘Warning. Engine One efficiency down to 63 per cent.’

  Josh cursed and glanced over to Omar, who was focusing all his attention on helping to control the plane.

  ‘We have to get out of range or cut the engines, Omar,’ Josh declared.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get outta here or cut them. The ELF radiation will completely fuse them.’

  ‘Yes, but we might not be able to bring them back online.’

  ‘Omar, if we don’t shut them down now, there’ll be nothing to bring back online.’

  ‘I’ll get us out of range.’

  A voice came over the comms. ‘Hummingbird, this is Silverback Mick. Come in.’

  ‘Dimitri,’ Omar said, trying to keep calm. ‘What’s your status?’

  ‘I caught a faint trace of an unidentified object in my remote scanner a few moments ago. I saw you pick up Josh and Steph, so I took off. I’ve climbed to 33,000 metres and I’m 94 kilometres from the crash site, bearing 74.6 degrees. The object has fallen out of range.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I have to get back there to get rid of the wreckage with the ultrasound emitter.’

  ‘It’ll have to wait.’

  ‘Afraid not, Omar. The computer’s just intercepted comms from the base and translated for me. The three choppers are returning to base, but the Chinese have sent a transport jet to parachute in a salvage team. Their ETA is under three minutes. I’m going to have to go down ... now.’

  82

  Base One, Tintara Island

  Tom’s holoscreen was ablaze with colour. He moved his fingers over the keyboard and the colours were replaced with text.

  Without taking his eyes from the screen, he said, ‘Sybil, go back over the monitor records from BigEye 17. Time scale: 20 to 22 minutes after the Silverback took off from Semja Alexandry. Full spectrum analysis.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘What sort of emission was it?’

  ‘Extremely Low Frequency. 35.45 to 36.12 hertz.’

  ‘Yes!’ Tom exclaimed and hit his palm on the armrest of his chair. ‘I knew it. Okay, Sybil, how was the disruption controlled? Was it from the missile, the jet or the base?’

  ‘No information available. It was all under the interference.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Tom remarked and let out a deep sigh. ‘Okay,’ he said to the air. ‘Have to work on a hunch. My guess would be that the disruptor beam is generated at the base and the jet simply launches a missile that acts as a relay. The Florida Bridge attack wasn’t so long ago. I can’t believe the Chinese would have perfected the equipment to the point where they can miniaturise it to fit in a missile. Sybil, I’ll need instantaneous Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation for all visual and audio.’

  ‘Ready.’

  Five seconds later, Tom was into the military mainframe in Beijing. He had been there many times before, and he knew the protocols inside out. The passwords had changed a hundred times since his last visit, but he knew how the Chinese computer designers thought. It had been a simple matter to shift a few of the parameters, to substitute key cultural terms for others and to outwit his opponent. That was his special skill, the skill that had landed him in goal two years before. The skill that had earned him a place in E-Force.

  Getting into the mainframe was one step on the way, but there were plenty more doors to open before he could have a chance of finding what it was he was after. What did he need to track down? He had to pause for a second to remind himself. He gazed past his holoscreen, out towards the sparkling expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese had obviously developed a way of using Extremely Low Frequency radiation as an effective weapon. Or at least they were a long way along the road to developing one. It may have been the Chinese who had been responsible for the bridge collapse in Florida, or that may just have been a coincidence. Tom hated the crackpot amateurs who smothered the internet with their ridiculous conspiracy theories, but it was extremely odd that there had been a burst of ELF radiation originating in the Gobi Desert, at the precise coordinates of Hang Cheng immediately before a bridge plunged into the water in Florida. And, there had never been any form of official reason given for the collapse.

  ‘But,’ Tom said aloud, ‘if they’re building this weapon in the Gobi, why are we getting bursts off Fiji? Has that just been chosen randomly as their latest target?’

  He turned back to the screen and typed in ‘ELF research’.

  A data stream flowed down the holoscreen.

  ‘Sybil,’ he said to the air. ‘How many files are there in this folder?’

  ‘Two thousand, three hundred and nineteen.’

  ‘Please extricate anything mentioning Hang Cheng.’

  ‘There are no files mentioning that name in this folder.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are...’

  ‘Okay, Syb, babe. I get it.’ Tom paused for a moment and looked out to the ocean again. ‘That can only mean one of two things,’ he said aloud. ‘Either Hang Cheng is so secret there are no records or files on it. Which I find pretty unlikely. Or...’ And he tapped at the rim of his laptop absent-mindedly. ‘That base is not an official Chinese military centre.’ He span his electric wheelchair around and sped over to the door and the passageway leading back to Cyber Control. ‘Sybil,’ he said as he accelerated along the corridor. ‘I think it’s time we rolled out the CyberLink.’

  83

  Tom had just turned into Cyber Control when Josh’s face appeared in the holoscreen floating above the laptop on his electric wheelchair.

  ‘Josh.’

  ‘Tom, things are worse than I thought here. The Chinese have just launched a transport plane. We’re pretty sure they’re going to drop troops into the crash site and we haven’t been able to USAM the area.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Dimitri is about to make a low run over the site. He reckons we have less than three minutes before there’re men on the ground.’

  ‘Okay. What’s your status? The ELF radiation?’

  ‘We managed to pull out of range ... just. We’re headed south-south-east to get out of Chinese airspace and we’re at...’ There was a momentary pause, ‘32,000 metres. The sensors show we’re outrunning the beam, and it’s weakening. But it’s not us I’m worried about, it’s Dimitri. You have to cut the link from the base to the missile.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, Josh.
I’m going to use the CyberLink.’

  ‘But you’ve only had it up and running for a short time...’

  ‘You got any better ideas?’

  A pause. ‘No.’

  ‘Right, well I gotta go,’ Tom snapped, cutting the comms and spinning his chair around, easing his head back as a tech fitted him with a tight plastic headset. The tech tapped a sensor on the side of the cap then walked back to one of the control panels. ‘Ready.’

  ‘Go,’ Tom commanded.

  It was nothing like the ‘real world’. At least not in any aesthetic sense. Tom’s senses were limited. He could see, but only outlines, some patches coloured in, some not. He could hear, but couldn’t smell anything. Although he could interact with the outlines around him, he had no sense of touch as he had in the ‘solid world’.

  ‘I’m in,’ he said, his voice spilling from the speakers in Cyber Control.

  He looked down at himself. He was Tommy Boy, his avatar. In this cyber world Tom had legs that worked. He could walk and run and do everything he could do before his accident. He had adopted the cyber persona of Tommy Boy years earlier when he was a teenage computer geek obsessed with games. During the mission to save Senator Kyle Foreman, he had used his avatar to defend Base One against a cyber attack from an old gaming adversary, Francine Gygax. Now, he had only minutes to save this mission.

  He looked around. Colours, bright tubes of light. They formed the outlines of a corridor. There were patches of light on the floor. He knew they were parcels of data. They shot past him, away along the corridors and through the walls before disappearing just as a new batch arrived at his feet.

  Then he heard a crack, like a whip. He span around and a black amorphous shape appeared at the end of the corridor. It morphed before his eyes, taking on the shape of a sword, slicing the air. The sword sped towards him.