TIM, Defender of the Earth

  ‘What?’ Tim asked.

  ‘I foresaw my time coming to an end,’ the Kraken replied. ‘I foresaw the new threats facing this world: I foresaw you. After that, I changed my mind. I decided to nudge the tectonic plates again. I caused an eruption: Krakatoa, the humans called it. It brought Arachne’s device back to the surface. And in due course, as I had intended . . . it was found.’

  Tim said nothing. He was beginning to see where all this was going.

  ‘There is . . . a boy,’ said the Kraken. ‘He wears the device. I believe you saw him once.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tim.

  ‘Tonight he granted you your power when you needed it. But you cannot be certain that he will do so again. He is . . . hesitant. You will have to convince him. For without him, you – and all the Earth – are lost.

  ‘That is your path,’ the Kraken concluded. ‘Now you know everything: I cannot help you any more. So now . . . it’s time for you to let me go.’

  ‘Why, though?’ Tim whined again, though he already knew the answer. ‘Why’ve you got to leave me all alone like this?’

  ‘Because I’m old, Tim,’ the Kraken told him frankly. ‘Old and very tired. I’ve done my time, and now I’m ready to stop. The fact is, I’ve earned it – despite,’ it added, ‘what you seem to think.’

  ‘I didn’t really—’ said Tim.

  ‘I know you didn’t,’ said the Kraken. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Well, so long, little one. I hate long goodbyes, so now I’m going to head on my way.’

  ‘But—’ Tim pleaded.

  ‘I’ve got a heavy date! Soon some human scientists are going to find parts of me washed up on a beach somewhere, and it’s really going to mess with their heads!’

  The voice was beginning to fade.

  ‘You know,’ it said, ‘the last time they discovered something remotely like me, they had to invent a new species name for it. They already had a “giant squid”, but this guy they found was about twice the size. So what did they call him? A “colossal” squid! And the best part is, he was only fifteen metres long! HEE HEE HEE HEE!’

  Tim opened his eyes in the endless dark and listened to the laughter in his mind. He listened for as long as he could.

  But then it was gone.

  The sun rose over London’s shattered skyline. Hazy light crept feebly over the ruins of the Houses of Parliament, filtered as it was by the awesome and unnatural formation of black cloud that still hung in the air over the whole of the city.

  Those of the city’s inhabitants who came under that shadow just waited, quaking in their homes. Those who lay outside its reach made plans to escape further, clogging the roads in a continuing and hopeless rush to get away from the city that had become a battleground for monsters.

  Tickled by breezes, revolving his swarm slowly, Mallahide . . . pondered.

  Mallahide’s mind was now vastly powerful. With the combined processing power of his trillion-strong army of nanomachines, he could calculate at speeds that made the fastest computers in the world look like they were counting on their fingers. Yet for the past few hours since the battle had ended, Mallahide had found himself swamped by a question that he – even he, the God of Small Things – was entirely unable to answer.

  What, he wondered, am I going to do about Anna?

  The night before, everything had seemed simple. He’d had enough of letting people decide whether to join him or not. He was going to take the decision for her, take the decision for the whole human race in fact, and as soon as she and they saw how wonderful what he was offering really was, then they’d thank him.

  But now . . .

  He was confused. Somehow, despite all his knowledge and power, he had lost his way.

  Anna had fought him as he’d tried to assimilate her: she’d pleaded with him, cried and begged. He had told her it was for the best, but Anna had not believed him. She saw him as a threat. She hates me, he realized. His own daughter, his only child, hated him. Here he was, at what should have been the summit of his achievements – the fruition of years of planning and research, years that had prevented him from being a better father than he was – and all he’d managed to do was hurt the person he loved most.

  His work had been supposed to advance humanity, to take the human race to the next level of its continuing evolution. But to them and to his daughter (Mallahide realized) it was exactly as he’d been told: perhaps he had become a monster.

  How had it happened? And what was he going to do now?

  The situation in London had not gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. While Mr Sinclair and the rest of Britain’s leaders dithered, the other nations of the globe – especially those nearest the UK – had begun to act.

  One of the first things that happened was that the Channel Tunnel closed down. The Eurostar trains were held at their stations; those already en route were turned back. Then the tunnel itself, a direct link between St Pancras Station (in central London) and the Gare du Nord (in Paris) under the narrow sea between the British and French coasts – and as such one of the finest single feats of engineering in Europe – was suddenly and permanently sealed off by a series of controlled explosions on the French side.

  Flights too were abruptly cancelled. All aircraft entering and leaving British airspace were grounded without explanation until further notice. To the dismay of the flood of panic-stricken passengers already trying to flee the country, any planes or helicopters that ignored the warnings and did make it into the air were immediately forced back to earth again under threat of being shot down.

  All ships leaving British ports – hovercraft, ferries, tankers, everything down to the smallest yacht – found themselves turned back to port by an international blockade of destroyers (and no less than seven aircraft carriers) that seemed to have mysteriously appeared, forming a ring of steel that surrounded the British coast.

  Telecommunications were cut, crippling British Internet access even further since most of the Web’s major hosts were on foreign soil. Satellite feeds were firewalled. Pipelines were sealed. All British exported goods that had recently arrived at their destinations were taken offshore again and destroyed. Even migratory birds fell prey to the guns of paranoid governments.

  The UK was cut off. Nothing could get in or out.

  Of course, this was just a temporary measure. As the rest of the world’s leaders were acutely aware, if Mallahide took it into his seething hive mind to spread his influence beyond the British Isles, then even an entire globe’s worth of conventional armed forces might not be enough to stop him. So naturally, the rest of the world had made other plans.

  Not quite all Britain’s international lines of communication had been cut. One remained: the hotline between the Crisis Room and a certain exclusive piece of real estate in downtown Washington, DC.

  ‘Sir,’ said Wythenshawe, ‘I have the White House on line one. The president wishes to speak to you.’

  ‘Er . . . right,’ said Mr Sinclair. ‘Put him on. Quickly!’ he added. ‘We wouldn’t want to keep him waiting!’

  Wythenshawe did as he was told.

  ‘Mr President . . .’ said Mr Sinclair, sitting back in his leather chair with the phone against his ear, ‘what can I do for you?’ Pasting a hideous, glib grin on his face that was all the more pointless for the fact that his counterpart was unable to see it, the prime minister then waited for whatever the president had to say.

  It wasn’t good.

  ‘Well, no, Mr President,’ the prime minister tried, frowning. ‘That’s true, but—’

  He fell silent.

  ‘Of course I remember signing the Nanotech Non-Proliferation Treaty,’ he said after a moment. ‘It was us who drafted it, if you recall. But—’

  Again Mr Sinclair’s efforts were met by a flood of crackling invective from the other end of the line.

  ‘But . . . honestly, Mr President. It’s not like you tell us everything you’re up to w
ith your military research.’

  This was a bold sally from Mr Sinclair, and he instantly regretted it. The volume of the president’s voice, already pretty loud, rose considerably, then suddenly turned icy quiet as he said what he said next.

  ‘No,’ the prime minister answered, ‘I don’t really know why the tyrannosaur came back either. But I can assure you, Mr President, we’re doing absolutely everything we—’

  Once more the president’s voice cut him off, and Mr Sinclair turned suddenly pale.

  ‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘only one thing to do?’

  Then he fell silent. Over the next few minutes, as the president continued to talk, Mr Sinclair’s mouth fell gradually open as his jaw involuntarily dropped.

  ‘But . . . you can’t!’ he squeaked finally.

  The president could.

  ‘Not the whole country, though,’ said Mr Sinclair, ‘surely! I mean, I could understand London – though I wouldn’t like it, obviously. But really, Mr President! You can’t seriously mean—’

  He did. In fact, the decision had already been taken, at an emergency meeting of the United Nations. The only delegates who had opposed it were the ones who were worried that perhaps – catastrophic though it was – it just might still not be enough to counteract the threat that Mallahide now posed to the human race.

  ‘How . . .?’ began Mr Sinclair, then stopped again, but this time it wasn’t because the president interrupted; it was because, for a moment, Mr Sinclair didn’t know how to say it. ‘How much time do we have?’ he asked brokenly.

  The president told him. He told the prime minister how sorry he was. Then he ended the call.

  Mr Sinclair sat back in his chair, stunned by what he had heard. He could barely take it in. In fact, he’d forgotten he was still holding the telephone, wrapped in his white-knuckled fingers. But he forced himself to go through it all, one bit at a time, to make sure he’d heard it correctly.

  Mallahide was simply too dangerous to exist, the president had explained. The way he was, he could spread all across the globe, converting everything he touched into more of himself. And if that happened – and with Mallahide behaving the way he had been, there was no reason to suppose it wouldn’t – then there was only a limited window of time in which the rest of the world could react to his presence.

  It was brutally simple. The longer Mallahide was active, the more powerful he might become. It might not be possible to fight him later – and that was a risk nobody was prepared to take. Action had to be taken: Mallahide had to be stopped now, before the swarm grew any bigger.

  To this end, a global operation had been set in motion. It would take time, of course, as these things do, but the clock was ticking and preparations were already well under way: they had begun soon after the news of Mallahide’s appearance had first been broadcast.

  Mallahide had to be destroyed: utterly destroyed. Ideally, not a single nanomachine could be permitted to escape, or – the fear was – the swarm would eventually simply reconstruct itself. Achieving this ‘best-case scenario’ would require an extraordinary amount of destructive power, so the deployment of the world’s most powerful weapons was the only possible option. The use of nuclear missiles had been unanimously agreed to almost instantly. Where the nations of the world had debated was over the size of the attack.

  If the attack failed, if Mallahide somehow survived, then the world’s leaders and generals and thinkers would need time to work out their next move. Some way to hinder the swarm’s ability to recover itself was required, so a ‘scorched earth’ policy – a tactic of destroying anything that could be useful to an enemy – had finally been settled upon.

  The entire nuclear arsenal, of every nation of the globe that had one, was going to be launched at once in a combined surprise assault. The primary target was Mallahide’s current location, London. But the secondary target was the rest of the British Isles.

  As was inevitable in any large military operation (the president explained), there would be some collateral damage. Much of northern Europe would be radically altered. Even if the attack was a success, its side effects would be felt for hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years to come. But, as he’d told Mr Sinclair with genuine regret, it is the only way to be sure.

  In just twenty-four hours, Britain would simply cease to exist. There would be nothing left but a smudge on the globe – a blot of cooling slag and radioactive ashes.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Mr Sinclair.

  Nobody answered.

  Hours had passed, but Chris’s condition had not changed. His chest continued to rise and fall with his breathing as if he was soundly asleep, but his eyes rolled back and forth at high speed under his eyelids: he was dreaming, hard and constantly.

  There was nothing Anna could do for him, she realized. She stood up from the chair at his bedside, stretched, and went out into the passageway.

  She was in the medical wing of the bunker, where she’d been ever since Chris’s collapse. His parents had not been informed – in the current crisis there was no way to contact them – so Anna, as the only person who even really knew who Chris was, had found herself taking their place, sitting at his side, watching over him. She’d done it willingly enough: though she wasn’t quite ready to admit this to herself, she had become quite fond of Chris. But in the silence and waiting, her thoughts had been preying on her.

  Anna was thinking about her father – about what he’d tried to do to her, about what he’d become. She was thinking about the way the whole world seemed to be running scared of him. An idea had started to form.

  She started walking.

  ‘Hi,’ she said to the first person she came across in the passageway – a harassed-looking black-clad man running somewhere with a briefcase. ‘Can you tell me where the exit is, please?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m in a hurry—’

  ‘I’ll hurry along with you,’ said Anna, matching his pace. ‘Now, where’s the way out?’

  ‘Young lady,’ said the man, the corners of his mouth tightening in a humourless smile, ‘I’m afraid you don’t understand. We have a crisis situation.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna.

  ‘The skies of London are filled with airborne contaminants. Deadly ones.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna. She didn’t exactly like her father being described in this way, but she let it pass this time in the hope the man would reach his point sometime soon.

  ‘The bunker has been hermetically sealed,’ said the man with great emphasis. ‘I don’t know how you got in here, but right now, to all intents and purposes, there is no way out.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ said Anna, ‘I need to get outside. There are answers out there, and I’m the only one who can find them. Now, who knows how I can do it? You? Or someone in charge?’

  THE EMPTY CITY

  MR WYTHENSHAWE’S BACKGROUND was in counter-terrorism. Before his promotion, he’d spent six years as a field agent: he’d seen plenty of dangerous situations in his time, but this . . .

  ‘Miss Mallahide,’ he said, ‘I think you’re making a dreadful mistake.’

  The lift they were standing in was military issue: no fancy chrome or mirrors here, just steel plate walls with a studded metal floor. Anna and Wythenshawe were its only occupants. There was no readout by the sliding doors to show what floor they were on – with only two choices, the bunker or the surface, there was no need for one. But Anna could tell from the way her feet seemed to be pressing into the floor that they were heading up at great speed.

  ‘It’s an awful risk to take – don’t you think?’ Wythenshawe prompted when Anna didn’t answer him. ‘If the prime minister himself hadn’t given his agreement, then I’m sure we wouldn’t be letting you do this. I mean, Mallahide attacked you before. What makes you think he won’t attack you now?’

  ‘He won’t,’ said Anna quietly.

  ‘You can’t be sure of that,’ said Wythenshawe.

  ‘No,’ said Anna. She looked at him coolly.
‘You’re right. I can’t.’

  Seeing the expression on her face, Wythenshawe didn’t press her any further. For another moment the two of them stood there without talking. Then the hydraulic whine of the lift’s motor died away into silence. The doors slid open.

  ‘Well,’ said Wythenshawe, ‘this is as far as I go. Head straight on through the decontamination chambers and you’ll find exit seven, like I told you.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Anna. She looked out into the empty corridor. But before stepping out, she looked back at Wythenshawe.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if Dad was here before . . .’ The word ‘Dad’ felt strange coming out of her mouth. Forcing herself to ignore the feeling, she pressed on:‘. . . then that means he knows how to get through your defences. He could come back anytime, so you’d better start thinking about how to get everyone to another shelter. This place just isn’t safe, not any more.’

  ‘Where is?’ asked Wythenshawe bleakly.

  ‘And . . .’ Anna paused. ‘Look after Chris, OK? I rather think he just might be very important.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Wythenshawe. He frowned. ‘Do take care of yourself, Miss Mallahide.’

  Anna nodded and stepped out of the lift.

  Wythenshawe pressed a button. The doors slid shut.

  She was alone. Quickly, before she could think about this too much, Anna turned and set off down the corridor.

  The decontamination chambers were fully automated. However, since she was heading out of the bunker rather than in, the machines remained silent, making no effort to stop her. She reached the bank-vault-style door that Wythenshawe had instructed her would be there; she entered the seven-digit code she’d been given into the keypad. The locking bolts slid back. The foot-thick steel slab swung ponderously forward to reveal a surprisingly small room with an ordinary wooden door at the end. This door was painted grey, with an old brass door handle. Anna grasped this, turned it, stepped out – and had a surprise.