‘That’s been there all this time?’ Anne asked.
‘Yes,’ Stirling replied, ‘and it’s currently the only way out of here so if everyone could make their way down into the tunnel as quickly as possible it would be extremely helpful.’
‘I’ll go first,’ Rachel said, switching on the torch that was attached to the underside of the barrel of her rifle and shining it down into the hatch. ‘Just in case there’s anything down there waiting for us.’ She climbed down the ladder one-handed, her free hand aiming her gun into the darkness below.
Thirty seconds later, her voice came echoing back up through the escape hatch.
‘All clear,’ Rachel shouted. ‘Come on down.’
Anne and Liz went down next, quickly followed by Kate and Jack. Stirling walked quickly over to where Will was finishing applying the new bandage to Adam’s shoulder.
‘How are you feeling?’ Stirling asked.
‘I’ve felt better,’ Adam said, his face pale.
‘I can imagine,’ Stirling said. ‘We have to leave. Do you think you can manage climbing down a fifteen-metre ladder?’
‘I don’t suppose I have much choice, do I?’ Adam said with a pained smile.
‘Not really, no,’ Stirling said. He turned to Will. ‘Have you given him any pain relief?’
‘Yes, but only what was in that first-aid kit,’ Will said. ‘Really, he needs something more powerful, but it’s all I’ve got here.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Adam said, climbing slowly to his feet. ‘Let’s go.’
Stirling watched as Will helped Adam over to the hatch and down on to the ladder.
‘We’ve got company!’ Sam yelled from the door and a moment later there was the sound of gunfire. Stirling dashed over to the door, where Sam and Jay were both firing at the first few Hunters to have broken through the collapsed stairway, fifty metres down the main corridor.
‘Both of you get down the escape hatch now!’ Stirling barked over the sound of their rifles.
‘What about Jackson!’ Jay yelled. ‘We can’t just leave him behind.’
‘He’s made alternative arrangements,’ Stirling said, frowning.
‘What do you mean?’ Sam shouted as he brought down another Hunter and then ducked back behind the door frame as several bolts of crackling green energy sizzled past.
‘I don’t have time to explain!’ Stirling shouted. ‘Now both of you get down that hatch!’
Neither of them had ever heard Stirling raise his voice in anger before and they both suddenly realised that Jackson wasn’t coming with them. Jay gave a single nod, his face grim and the two boys turned and ran towards the hatch. Stirling followed immediately and they all hurriedly climbed through the hatch. He pulled it shut behind him and spun the wheel that locked the huge bolts on its underside in place.
‘Get down into the tunnel quickly and go as far down it as you can,’ Stirling said. From above him he heard the sound of something scraping at the hatch and then a Hunter’s energy weapon firing. The hatch shook and tiny particles of rust showered down on to Stirling’s head. The hatch would not withstand that kind of punishment for long. Stirling realised with a sudden sadness that it wouldn’t have to.
In the bunker’s laboratory, Jackson sat on the bench next to the battery, staring at the exposed copper at the end of the wire he held in his hand. The first Hunter flew through the door and Jackson raised the pistol he was holding in his other hand and emptied the clip into the silver creature, sending it spinning backwards into the wall. Seconds later, two more Hunters burst through the door, turning towards him with a screech. Jackson dropped the empty pistol on the ground.
‘Would’ve been nice to see the sky just one more time,’ he said.
He pressed the end of the wire to the terminal.
Even a hundred metres down the tunnel below the facility the explosion was deafening. The tunnel shook and dust cascaded from the ceiling. There was a sound like thunder that lasted for several seconds as the facility was utterly destroyed and the building above it collapsed, burying it beneath thousands of tonnes of rubble.
‘Thank you, Robert,’ Stirling said under his breath. ‘We’ll make them pay, I swear.’
Stirling sat and listened in silence as Sam recounted exactly what he had seen inside the Voidborn facility beneath the Mothership. They had arrived at the safe house an hour earlier after a long, miserable walk along the escape tunnel and then a short but risky dash across an abandoned industrial complex in broad daylight. Stirling had led them down into one of the building’s sub-basements and then through a hidden door into an area that was similar to the base they had just left, but on a much smaller scale. After the deaths of Jackson and Toby and the destruction of the place that had become their home, nobody had seemed to want to talk very much on the journey. Now Sam stood in the small room that Stirling had taken as an office as he sat behind his desk listening to Sam’s report. The others were outside, busily trying to make the little space they now had to live in as comfortable as possible.
‘And then we returned to base,’ Sam said, completing his recounting of the previous night’s events. ‘Obviously we had no idea that the Voidborn had tracked us back there. I can’t help but think that if we’d just –’
‘Thank you, Sam. That will be all for now,’ Stirling said, cutting him off. ‘I’m going to need to think and plan our next move. I’ll speak to you all in a while.’
‘I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers,’ Sam said. ‘I want to know why Fletcher knew who you were and I want to know now. I’ve had enough of being kept in the dark. You know far more than you’re telling, and if you expect us to do anything for you ever again you’d better explain what’s going on right now.’
Stirling turned angrily to Sam; he stared at him in silence for a few seconds before his frown gradually softened. ‘You really want to know?’ he said, sitting back in his chair with a sigh. ‘Well, I suppose you deserve that much after everything you’ve been through. I should warn you that some of what I’m about to tell you might be upsetting to you personally. Are you sure you want to hear it?’
‘I’m sure,’ Sam said. ‘Tell me.’
‘The simple answer is that once upon a time Fletcher and I were colleagues,’ Stirling began, looking up at the ceiling. ‘We worked for the same organisation, a group that calls itself the Foundation. Both Oliver and I were recruited by this organisation straight out of Oxford University. I was a biochemist and Oliver was a brilliant young computer scientist and a good friend. The offer the Foundation made us was one that would be impossible to resist for any young research scientist. Unlimited funding, limitless resources, the very best facilities and all the equipment that money could buy. There were only two conditions attached: we were never allowed to know where the technology or samples we were given to study came from, and we were not allowed to discuss our findings with anyone.
‘Now, there are many young scientists who would say that it would be totally unacceptable to work under such conditions, that it goes against the fundamental scientific ideals of freely sharing knowledge. I wish I could say to you that that was how we felt, but it would be a lie. It’s always disappointing, I suppose, what a man will do out of greed. It wasn’t that we were greedy for the money, though it was exceptionally good; it was greed for more knowledge of the things we were being given to work on. It was more advanced than anything we had thought possible. Years, decades, even centuries ahead of its time. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, computer technology, you name it, we were given it.
‘After we had worked for them for several years we were told that we had been selected for promotion within the Foundation and that as a result we would be told more about the source of the technology we had been researching. We had of course both discussed this before and I think we both had an inkling about what the truth might be. We were just reluctant to admit it, even to ourselves.’
‘It was the Voidborn,’ Sam said.
‘Yes,’ Stirling said with a nod, ‘though we had no idea then that was what they were called. We were simply told that the technology was extraterrestrial in origin. They also told us that, if we wanted to truly become involved in communicating with these beings who provided the technology, we would need to have a device implanted in our heads that would allow us to communicate with them non-verbally. It seems hard to believe in hindsight, but both of us submitted to the procedure voluntarily, even eagerly – so blinded were we by our curiosity.’
‘So you had spoken to the Voidborn before they arrived here on Earth,’ Sam said, looking astonished, but still struggling to see how this had any bearing on him.
‘The implants allowed them to communicate with us, but it was a one-way street,’ Stirling replied. ‘We were not permitted to initiate communication. They would contact us and then we would hear their thoughts in our head. We only spoke with the Voidborn on two occasions, but it was enough to convince both of us that they were real and that it was not just some elaborate conspiracy. The way they communicated with us was far beyond anything that anyone on this planet was capable of. It was the most bizarre sensation; feeling a thought and knowing that you did not create it, that it was an idea formed in an alien being’s mind. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it.
‘However, there were clearly some members of the Foundation who were unhappy about the fact that, though we had all acquiesced to having these devices implanted inside our heads, no one really knew how they worked. They wanted to know how we might be able to construct and implant our own devices that would not transmit our thoughts to the Voidborn. I very much doubt that the Voidborn had any idea that Oliver and I were tasked with reverse engineering the implants, but as it turned out they need not have worried, at least initially. We were getting nowhere; the device was just too far ahead of anything that we had ever seen.
‘That was when a third member was added to our team. His name was Daniel Shaw and he was a nano-engineer of unparalleled skill. He was younger than Oliver and myself, but he was cleverer than both of us put together. It is not often that one encounters true genius, but that’s what he was. It was humbling to work with him. Within weeks we had made more progress than we had in the previous two years. What we discovered was surprising at first and then it slowly became more disturbing. The devices were more than just a way to communicate; they were capable of changing, growing, developing. We had no way of knowing what they might become, but it was enough to make us suspicious of what the Voidborn were planning.
‘Daniel developed a nanotechnological bug that would bond to the Voidborn implant without being detected and then retransmit any conversation that took place via that implant. In effect, it would allow us to eavesdrop on discussions we were not supposed to be privy to. The Foundation was arranged into cells, much like a terrorist organisation, so the only person who had any direct contact with the higher ranks of the group was our cell director. He would make periodic inspections of our lab, in order to review our work and ensure we were making progress. It was during the course of one of those inspections that we used a nano-injector to transfer one of the bugs into his bloodstream. One should always be wary of shaking hands with a nano-engineer,’ Stirling said with a wry smile.
‘And so you could listen in to everything the cell director was talking to the Voidborn about?’ Sam asked.
‘Yes, and within only a few days we heard the first reference to “the Plan” as they called it. It took us a while to work out what that meant, but suffice to say that “the Plan” is what you see unfolding on the surface now; the mass enslavement of humanity and the willing surrender of our planet to the Voidborn.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Sam said, shaking his head. ‘Why did the Voidborn need the Foundation’s help at all? They took the planet without resistance anyway.’
‘You’re not seeing the big picture here, Sam,’ Stirling said. ‘The Foundation is not a few years old – it’s not even centuries old – they’ve existed for
millenia
.’
‘That’s impossible!’ Sam said. ‘You’re telling me that mankind has been in contact with the Voidborn for thousands of years and no one outside of the Foundation organisation has ever known anything about it?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you,’ Stirling replied. ‘They’ve been silently guiding the path of humanity’s development since prehistory, all on behalf of the Voidborn.’
Sam stared at Stirling with an expression of stunned disbelief.
‘Never obviously, never ruling from on high, just manipulating our evolution from behind the scenes, artificially accelerating the pace of our development,’ Stirling said, rubbing his forehead. ‘That’s how they operate. In recent times they have been the Foundation, but before that they went by other names. Numerous secret societies throughout history have merely been fronts for the activities of the Voidborn’s representatives on Earth. Before that they were holy men or oracles who spoke to the gods, since the birth of human civilisation. We’ve been steered, controlled, for all that time, all at the will of the Voidborn.’
‘But I still don’t understand why the Voidborn needed them to do it at all,’ Sam said. ‘What’s the point of
accelerating
our development? Surely that just makes the planet harder to conquer?’
‘They weren’t worried about that,’ Stirling said. ‘I suspect they view us as little more than insects. To understand their reasoning you have to try to think like they do, which is almost impossible for us. We have no idea what the Voidborn look like physically, but I suspect they are a non-biological life form since they think of time in astronomical terms. To them, planning an event a thousand years, ten thousand years from now is the same as planning a year ahead for us. They have been preparing the Earth for their arrival for hundreds of thousands of years. For a species capable of interstellar travel these kinds of time spans become trivial. When they arrive, they want to find a large workforce that can be easily enslaved.’