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“Your working methods are your own. I am responsible for your personal safety!” snapped Bo Zhang.
From his phone, Commander King cut across them both.
“Gentlemen –” he looked grave – “we have a problem.”
DAY TWO 23:59 (Local GMT+8). Kung Fu Noodles, The Forbidden City, Shanghai. Nano-Botmass:*249994
*249995 …
*249996 …
*249997 …
*249998 …
*249999 …
*250000: NANO-BOTMASS = DISTRIBUTION MASS
Production continued while the datum was transmitted to Song Island.
A response code was received.
Immediately the PRIME XE.CUTE gave the order.
SEE VECTOR DESPATCH.
Bot group by bot group, the tiny army, packed so tightly into the three Casio QT6600 cash registers that they were in danger of overheating, began to come to life.
Miniature turbines turned in earnest.
Over the next few hours the bots left their electronic hives. They proceeded to the maximum altitude allowed by the food hall ceiling then drifted down to land on the heads of the workers, crawling down through their hair to hide.
The unwitting workers then carried them back to factories across the Forbidden City. There the bots crawled out of the hair, cut their way through protective hairnets, and flew off in search of fresh electronic circuitry. Having located one another through a simple signal and colour-coding system they formed fifty-two new bot production suites. And began again.
SEE VECTOR MULTIPLY
*250001 …
*250012 …
*250019 …
*250034 …
*250041 …
*250056 …
*250077 …
DAY THREE 11:28 (Local GMT+1). Altitude 30,000 feet, speed 560mph.
Finn was sweating and running – he was lost in a supermarket, he was little, he was calling out, but no one could hear him, and—
A scream woke him. An everlasting dull scream.
Panic shot him to life – darkness, suffocating heat, his weight piled on his shoulders, thick cloth walls pressing in on him – a sack? He gasped in panic and kicked himself around, as he did so the cloth gave way and he got a lungful of fresher air – not a sack. He was in the folds of something …
He breathed some more. Let his panic drain. Still he heard the scream. An engine. A jet engine.
His eyes adjusted to a dim light and detected LED pulses of red and green. He pulled himself up the wall of woollen cloth, Grandma cloth … He could smell home. He had been caught in the hem of her ‘smart-but-not-evening’ skirt.
He reached her knee. She was laid out and strapped into some kind of white crate. Tubes and wires came off her chest and connected to a small life support unit, its LEDs blinking.
Finn ran up her prone body and scrambled over the hissing, humming medical apparatus clustered over her head until he reached her ear.
“GRANDMA!”
Nothing. He yanked on some of the downy hair on her lobe, scaled her soft splendid face and tried to haul open her eyes. She was out cold. Drugged.
Kaparis. The kidnappers had been Tyros, no question. But what did Kaparis want with Grandma? Finn knew the answer; it was in his heart. We love her. Blackmail … The thought of her being hostage to such a man made him sick.
Finn could feel pressure growing in his ears. They popped. The jet was descending. He had to do something.
Down the side of the white crate he could just make out something – a ziplock polythene bag.
Finn headed for it, unclasping Grandma’s RHS visitor badge on the way. He used the pin to puncture the bag, then put both hands in the hole and forced it to split.
Inside were the crazed contents of Grandma’s handbag – notes, nuts, make-up, coins, elastic bands, stamps, dog treats, a small china bell, a Cambridge University snow globe, a cheap string of pearls, an emergency sewing kit, a single cufflink and also everything they needed for their nano-day out – six nRation packsfn1, his nPhone backpack (battery dead) and, crucially, Hudson’s inhaler.
Finn kicked open the cover on the inhaler’s mouthpiece.
There was the concealed Bug, its pockmark thrusters showing through the cotton wool wadding.
Finn pulled away the wadding and climbed on to the Bug. He snapped on the ignition switches and, with a sudden suck, the turbines turned over and the Bug lit up – rising to suspend itself, headlights alive.
He eased it out of the mouthpiece and loaded up the nRations and the nPhone. Instinct told him to haul a pin from the sewing kit too, just in case.
He climbed back aboard and was pulling on the harness when he felt a sudden jolt as the aircraft they were in touched down. There was a fierce braking and rumbling of wheels, loud enough to wake—
“Aaaaaaaargh!”
“Grandma!”
The giant old woman woke in a panic, trying to lash out but constrained by the straps. The whole crate shook.
Finn turned the lights up and shoved the controls forward. The Bug forced its way through the split in the polythene bag, then, thrusters hissing as automatic systems fought to keep it stable, it rose over Grandma’s struggling legs, each the size of a blue whale, and flew up towards her head.
All Grandma saw was a glowing fiend approaching fast.
“Aaaaaaaargh!”
“GRANDMA! It’s ME!” Finn yelled.
Grandma’s terrified, giant eyes fixed upon the Bug.
“Infinity?” she demanded, words muffled by the mask.
He flew nearer to her ear. “We’ve been kidnapped. By Kaparis. But I don’t know where he’s taking us.”
Grandma let out a yodel of distress.
“We’re all right. I’m all right. I don’t even know if he knows I’m here.”
The engine noise wound down and they felt the aircraft stop completely.
“We have to decide what to do,” said Finn. “We need a plan.”
“Don’t do anything!” insisted Grandma.
Metallic clunks were heard as doors were opened. Voices. East Asian.
“Grandma, if they lift the lid on this thing I’ve got to go and get help.”
Footsteps began to draw closer.
Finn put the Bug into whisper mode and probed Grandma’s soft grey hair until he found a hairgrip just behind her ear. “Grandma, keep your eyes closed and play dead. I have to escape and find Al – he’ll rescue you!” he said quietly.
Grandma groaned as if in a deep sleep – a moan of protest.
Finn grabbed the nPhone pack off the back seat of the Bug.
“I’m going to leave the nPhone on your hairgrip. It’s out of battery, but all you need to do is put it by any live wire to charge. Just by being on, it will send a signal so Al will know exactly where you are.”
CLACK! CLACK! The clips holding shut the crate were sprung open.
Finn twisted the Bug out of sight and Grandma snapped her eyes shut in terror.
The lid of the crate lifted and a highway of light opened up down one side of it. Two pale, identical teen heads appeared.
Spike and Scar.
Scar took out a powerful torch and Spike took out a smart phone, studying the screen intently. Nano-radar of some kind? The searchlight started at Grandma’s feet and crept up her body, towards her head.
They’re looking for me, thought Finn.
He watched the light creeping up Grandma towards him. He could hear his heart beat in his chest. He and the Bug were bound to light up any nano-radar. He was a sitting duck. He slapped open the chamber on the M249 machine gun in front of him. There was ammo in the block ready to run.
As the searchlight hit him a bright spot showed up on the screen of Spike’s phone. She shrieked.
Finn gritted his teeth and punched the controls forward, and accelerated towards a spot between Spike and Scar’s ghostly faces, taking them by surprise.
The Bug shot out into the cramped cargo hold, engine SCREEEEEEEEECHING to reverse-thrust before it hit the fuselage, the seat harness nearly tearing through Finn’s shoulders.
“Yaaa!” screamed Scar and dived for a cargo net, grabbing one and brandishing it.
Finn shot back past them, over the large white chest he’d just escaped, slaloming through a landscape of personal luggage and crated cargo, darting around, looking for any kind of exit.
Spike span with her phone until she captured the dot on her screen again. “Zhyaa!”
“It’s on the tracker. Confirmed nano,” reported Li Jun.
“Get it!” hissed Kaparis.
Nano-radar had been fitted into every Tyro phone to track the nano-bot army. They hadn’t been able to search the body properly in the haste to escape London, but now, after hours of waiting, Kaparis congratulated himself. The boy would soon be in his hands.
Scar flew through the cargo after the Bug, agile and vicious, a cat after a bird.
Finn pulled the controls up hard and fast to loop above her, but she cast the cargo net.
THWACK! It caught the edge of the Bug and sent it spinning.
Finn clung to the controls as gyroscopes fought to stabilise the spin.
Scar and Spike leapt as one to grab the spinning, glowing Bug, but as they did so a whole section of the fuselage suddenly shifted.
All three were dazzled.
Bright sunshine.
The cargo bay was opening. Finn, back in control of the Bug, jammed the sticks forward and shot towards the light.
With a hot wet wallop he hit the air of the tropics. Eyes adjusting in the rich sunlight, he flew out beneath the belly of the huge airliner they’d been trapped in, then corkscrewed around until he found himself rising above it.
As he climbed higher, an airport spread out beneath him, its runways ending where they met the sea, while beyond, steep mountains framed skyscrapers that ran in a crest around a natural harbour.
Finn’s mind jumped to the old kung fu films Al used to insist they watched.
And at once he knew exactly where he was …
The city clung to the hills about the harbour. Cargo ships and junk boats busied themselves on the waters. Old and new, land and sea.
Finn looked back down at the airport runway. Spike and Scar were on the tarmac, searching for him, pointing the radar into the sky. The white crate was already being unloaded on to a forklift.
Grandma …
He had to get help.
At the edge of the artificial island that was the airport, he saw a fast train approaching.
Twenty minutes later Finn was riding the train’s roof as it ran back into the city, like a desperado in the old Wild West, the Bug jammed into an air vent. Finn’s plan was to find a British official – there must be an embassy in Hong Kong – who could make contact with Uncle Al. Though what he would say, and how he would say it, he had no idea.
After another ten minutes of buffeting, the train stopped at a station called Kowloon. Finn recognised the name from a Call of Duty map, and got off.
He floated the Bug out of the station and flew to the top of a road sign where he tried to take in the scene. Dozens of images, sounds, sensations hit him. It was busy. The traffic was busy, the people were busy, the buildings were busy … even the air was busy, infused with aromas of Asian food, exhaust fumes and the sea. Then, penetrating the cacophony around him, Finn heard a tinny, high-pitched, stop-start buzzing.
DZZTZT-ZZZTZTZT-ZTZTZ-TZZZ-ZZZSZ-TSTS-TZZZTZTZ …
He looked up.
Incoming. His least favourite insect: stooped in profile, lazy in flight and responsible for the annual death of half a million people from malaria. A mosquito.
It swung down towards him, body swollen to the size of a Labrador, its wingspan the same as Finn’s height, arrow-thin proboscis pointing at the open side of the Bug, ready to run straight through him … DZZT! DZZZT!
Finn snatched up the pin he’d taken from Grandma’s bag and, using it as a sword, he parried the incoming stinger with a healthy smack, before thrusting forward to nick the mosquito’s swollen abdomen. BOOOSPLOOSSHHH! Its guts – full with blood harvested that morning – burst spectacularly.
Not since Finn had totalled the pinata at Max Campbell’s ninth birthday party had he seen such a multi-coloured explosion. Yuk, he thought, drenched in blood and guts.
But there was no time to recover, straight away …
DZZTZT-ZZZTZTZT-ZTZTZ-TZZZ-ZZZSZ-TSTS-TZZZTZTZ …
A dozen or so more mosquitoes appeared, from all directions, alerted by the smell. Finn aimed and fired the Minimi machine gun – DRRRRTT
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