Earthfall (15 page)
‘It’s all right,’ Jay said. ‘I’ve got a key.’ He took his backpack off and rummaged around inside before pulling out a pair of heavy bolt cutters. A couple of seconds later the padlock clattered to the ground and Jay pulled the gate open, its hinges squeaking in protest. They passed through the gate and found themselves in a circular chamber with other tunnels leading off from it in all directions.
‘Where now?’ Sam asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Jay said, looking around the room. ‘The maps we’ve got cover most of the tunnel system under the city, but there are no maps for some places, especially high-security locations like this.’
Sam looked around the chamber and spotted the security cameras and motion sensors mounted on the walls. They reminded him that the Parliament building above them would have once had some of the heaviest security in the country. Long dead and useless now, of course.
‘Well, I guess we just follow our noses, then,’ Sam said, and set off down the tunnel straight in front of him. They passed numerous doors set in the walls, all labelled with the titles of various high-ranking government officials. Doubtless these offices would have once served as a secure location for ministers and their aides during times of crisis or threat. Nobody had considered the possibility that the whole mechanism of government would be rendered irrelevant in the blink of an eye, that all these ‘powerful’ men and women could be reduced to mindless slaves in the space of a heartbeat, no different to anyone else. They rounded a corner and Sam was relieved to see that at the far end there was a metal spiral staircase leading upwards.
‘Up we go,’ Sam whispered. ‘Keep your eyes open. Remember, we have no idea what’s waiting for us up there.’
They crept up the stairs, which led up to a solid-looking wooden door that was closed but thankfully unlocked. Sam opened the door a crack and looked through. There was no sign of anyone or, more importantly, any
thing
on the other side of the door and he pushed it open and headed through. They found themselves in a grand corridor with a tiled floor and ornately carved stonework on the ceiling and walls. Perhaps more than any other place that he had been since the arrival of the Threat, these echoing empty corridors in all their grandeur gave him the sense of how completely the alien invaders had stripped humanity of its power to determine its own future.
‘Came here on a tour with my school once,’ Jay said. ‘Never imagined I’d be wandering around the place with a gun one day.’
‘Well, unfortunately, this isn’t really the time for sightseeing,’ Sam said. ‘If we’re going to get a really good look at what the Threat are doing around here, then we need to get up high.’ He glanced at a sign on the wall that had arrows pointing to various locations within the building. ‘Come on, follow me.’
They ran through the empty corridors, the sound of their boots on the tiled floor echoing off the walls. The rumbling noise coming from outside was now even louder.
‘There,’ Sam said, pointing at an unassuming wood and glass door set in the wall. Next to it was a sign that read ‘Clock Tower’.
‘You know, I can still remember the first time that I realised that this thing had stopped chiming,’ Jay said as they hurried up the stairs inside the tower. ‘I couldn’t tell you exactly when it stopped, just when I noticed it had. Made me kinda sad to be honest.’
They continued up the tower until they reached a door marked ‘Mechanism Room’. Walking inside, they saw the mass of black cogs, flywheels and springs that formed the mechanism for the giant clock at the ticking heart of Big Ben. It sat motionless now beneath the crossed spindles that passed through the walls of the room and out to each of the four clock faces. There were no windows in the room that would give them a view of what was going on outside.
‘Looks like we need to keep going up,’ Sam said. They climbed another flight of stairs, towards the belfry, feeling the cold night air on their faces as they stepped outside. The giant bells that had once chimed the famous tune that was so familiar to all Londoners hung inside a wire cage and Sam could only imagine how loud they would sound if you were this close to them when they rang. Assuming that actually ever happens again, he reminded himself. They passed by the bells and reached a final spiral staircase leading to the highest point of the tower, where a view of the dark city stretched out beneath them in all directions. Sam walked over to the wire mesh that surrounded the lantern and peered down at the scene directly below.
‘Oh my God,’ Jay said as he came and stood next to Sam and saw what was left of a broad swathe of central London. Where St James’s Park had once been there was now a charred crater. Within that crater tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people were working under bright floodlights to build
something
. It looked a lot like an impossibly large version of the transmission spire that they’d discovered at Wembley. It was the source of the deafening rumbling sound that filled the air, its central sections lit by a pulsing green light that matched the rhythm of the sound precisely. Sam pulled off his night-vision googles and retrieved the binoculars from his backpack. The construction was made up of hundreds of giant matt black slabs, with large sections missing from the outer skin allowing Sam to see the people who were working within the brightly lit interior of the structure.
He turned his attention to the crater and saw that the steep rock walls at its edges were also covered with people who were hacking away at the rock with hand tools, slowly, but relentlessly making it ever larger. Beyond the crater huge teams of Walkers were working to systematically demolish even the largest buildings, clearing a path for the expansion of the crater. Sam tried very hard not to think about the fact that any one of the countless slaves labouring to complete whatever the Threat were building might have been his sister, or one of his parents. He had never given up hope of finding them. He turned his attention back to the centre of the structure where a single black spire, taller than any of the surrounding structures, reached up towards the sky. No, not the sky, Sam thought, as he looked up for the first time. Where the sky should have been was the underside of the Threat Mothership, its surface illuminated by waves of pulsing green light. He could see dozens of the black triangular drop-ships buzzing around the giant vessel, looking like gnats in comparison to the vast scale of the Mothership. He had never stood directly beneath it before and he suddenly realised that up close like this it made him feel very small and insignificant.
‘There must be hundreds of Hunters mixed in amongst the humans,’ Jay said, taking the binoculars and scanning the city below. ‘Not to mention what looks like twenty or thirty Grendels patrolling the outer perimeter.’
‘So how do we get inside?’ Sam asked. ‘We need to find out what that thing is.’
‘Well, we’re not fighting our way in, that’s for sure,’ Jay said, shaking his head. ‘Besides which, how exactly do you plan to work out what that thing is? It’s not like we’re just going to be able to walk up and ask one of the Grendels to give us a guided tour, and somehow I doubt that they’re going to have left a set of blueprints, helpfully labelled in English, lying around anywhere.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘I was just thinking that if we could get a closer look and some pictures maybe it’ll give Stirling something to go on.’
‘All right,’ Jay said, holding his hands up, ‘but if this goes pear-shaped I’m throwing you at the nearest Grendel and running, OK?’
‘Sounds reasonable,’ Sam said with a smile.
Jackson walked into Dr Stirling’s lab and closed the door behind him. He crossed over to the bench and watched as Stirling carefully placed a tiny circuit board into the top of the foot long silver cylinder. He closed the hatch and it sealed with a tiny hiss of escaping air.
‘Is it ready?’ Jackson asked.
‘Yes,’ Stirling replied, removing his glasses and rubbing at his tired eyes. ‘The more important question, though, is will it work?’
‘Let’s hope so, for all our sakes,’ Jackson said, ‘because we don’t have many more cards to play. Unless, of course, you’ve found a new group of kids that you’re not telling me about.’
‘No, no new subjects, I’m afraid,’ Stirling replied. ‘None of the towers have picked up a new implant signal for months. Apart from Mr Riley, of course. I fear we must assume that the others were lost to the Threat. If only we’d had more warning. We were supposed to have had time to prepare.’
‘We’ve had this conversation a hundred times, Iain,’ Jackson said, shaking his head. ‘This was nobody’s fault.’
‘We both know that’s not entirely true,’ Stirling said. ‘Indeed, if things had worked out slightly differently, I might have been part of the problem. Instead of which I’m now the one who’s trying desperately to find a solution.’
‘That was a long time ago. If you’d known then what we know now about the Foundation, there’s no way you would have been involved. Iain, once we knew the truth, we did the right thing. You, me, we did everything we could to stop them with the resources we had. It just all happened too soon. Who knows, maybe this thing,’ he nodded towards the silver cylinder, ‘can make it right again.’
‘I just wish Daniel could have been here to see how important his work has been in making this possible, Robert,’ Stirling said. ‘Whether he intended it or not, in that boy he’s given us our best hope. It may not be enough to take back the planet, but at least it’s enough to give us hope that one day that might at least be possible.’
‘And at this point,’ Jackson said, ‘that’s really all we can ask for.’
‘Are you serious?’ Jay said, looking at Sam with an expression of disbelief, pacing back and forth across the office on the edge of St James’s Park that they had broken into a few minutes earlier.
‘It’s the only way,’ Sam said, handing Jay his rifle and taking off his backpack. He slid the compact digital camera that Stirling had given them into the pocket of his trousers and removed his shoulder holster, placing it on the desk next to him.
‘Look, I hear what you’re saying,’ Jay said, ‘but this is insane. You’re going to get yourself killed.’
‘You saw how many people there are down there,’ Sam said, pointing through the window at the glow from the nearby Threat construction site. ‘Do you really think they’re going to notice one more mindless zombie wandering around the place?’
‘Yeah, actually, I do,’ Jay replied, ‘and when they find you they’re either going to throw you to the Grendels or brain-wipe you.’
‘I think we’ve probably established by now that we’re immune to the Threat control signal,’ Sam said.
‘Great, so it’ll be the Grendel stomping, then,’ Jay said, sounding irritated. ‘At least let me go and find a bucket so that I’ll be able to take you home with me.’
Sam heard a noise in his head, a low guttural growling sound.
‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.
‘Hear what?’
‘Like a growling sound.’
‘All I can hear is the racket that the Threat building is making,’ Jay said. ‘No growl . . .’
They both ducked as they felt a rhythmic thud through the floor and a few seconds later a Grendel walked down the street outside, just a few metres from where they were hiding. The growling got louder as it passed and then diminished as it walked away. Sam realised that whatever the sound that the Threat creatures made inside his head was, he was the only one who could hear it. It had started happening after he had recovered from the Hunter sting and he decided that when they got back he would have to discuss it with Stirling.
‘This is such a bad idea,’ Jay whispered. ‘Really, really deep down, one-of-a-kind, has-no-equal, dumb.’
‘Now you’re just being negative,’ Sam said with a grin as he stood up and unbolted the sash window.
‘OK, if you’re insisting on going in there, then I’m coming with you,’ Jay said, placing his rifle on the desk.
‘No, you’re not,’ Sam said, shaking his head. ‘If I don’t make it out of there, you’re the only person who can report back and tell Stirling what the Threat are up to here. If we both get caught, then all this will have been for nothing. Besides two of us are much more likely to get spotted than one.’
Jay stared at him for a moment or two before letting out a long sigh.
‘OK, you’re right, but I still think it’s a bad idea, especially without back-up. At least take this with you,’ Jay said, taking Sam’s pistol from the holster on the desk and handing it to him.