Earth Fall, Page 3

  ‘That’s not fair!’ Mag snapped back. ‘Maybe you should ask yourself why he decided not to tell you if you’re such a good friend to him.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Stop it! Both of you,’ Liz said. ‘This isn’t helping anyone.’

  ‘Elizabeth is quite right,’ Stirling said calmly. ‘You can argue about the rights and wrongs of the situation later. Our priority now is to understand what has happened to Sam. It seems more than coincidental that this should have occurred at the same time as the Sleepers becoming so agitated.’

  ‘Agitated?’ Jay said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are they waking up?’ Liz asked, sounding surprised.

  ‘No, it’s more complicated than that,’ Stirling said. ‘It’ll be easier to show you all than explain, but we’ll get to that shortly. Let’s deal with Sam first.’

  ‘Damn right,’ Jay said. ‘We can worry about the Sleepers later.’

  ‘I agree,’ Liz said. ‘We can’t leave Sam like this. We’ve got no idea what’s happening to him in there. We have to help him before . . .’ Her voice trailed off as she stared nervously at the humming energy bubble that surrounded their friend.

  Stirling looked down at the unconscious boy trapped inside the blue force field. His face was still recognisable as the young man he had come to know and respect over the past couple of years, but there was no way of knowing if the person inside the body would be the same. Mag was right: he had been more withdrawn over the past couple of months, but Stirling had just put that down to post-traumatic stress, an understandable consequence of the desperate final battle with the Illuminate warrior Talon. Now he had to consider the possibility that there might have been more sinister reasons for Sam’s behaviour. Was Sam still really Sam at all?

  ‘Clearly we can’t move him,’ Stirling said, ‘so the best we can do for now is monitor him in situ and hope that his condition doesn’t worsen.’

  ‘And if it does?’ Anne asked.

  Stirling glanced in her direction. The look on his face was the only answer she needed.

  2

  ‘I’m going outside,’ Liz said, shaking her head. ‘It’s horrible. I can’t see them like this.’

  The floor of the warehouse below was covered with the bodies of hundreds of people lying in neatly ordered rows, all writhing in agony. The only noise was the soft scraping of their clothes against the ground, the horrified expressions on their open-mouthed faces made all the more terrible by their complete silence.

  ‘I know what she means,’ Jay said as Liz walked out of the building. ‘I thought I’d seen some pretty nasty stuff over the past couple of years, but this . . . this is grim. You’re saying they’re like this everywhere?’

  ‘Indeed. This is happening all over the city,’ Stirling said. ‘I’ve asked the Servant to dispatch drones to some of the other dormitories further out, but I suspect they will find exactly the same thing there. I fear this could be a global phenomenon.’

  ‘Liz is right, this is horrible. I mean, it was bad enough when they were just lying there,’ Nat said. ‘God, these poor people.’

  ‘We can’t really be sure if they’re suffering or not; there’s no scientific way of knowing what they’re experiencing,’ Stirling said.

  ‘Oh, come on, Doc,’ Jack snapped. ‘Look at them! You don’t need PhDs coming out of your ears to see what they’re going through.’

  ‘I understand the frustration you feel, but there’s a reason I brought you all here. Unfortunately, the situation might be worse than we first thought,’ Stirling said with a sigh.

  ‘Worse than this?’ Anne said. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Stirling replied. ‘As you’re aware, the Sleepers are fed and hydrated intravenously on a daily basis by the Voidborn drones.’ He gestured towards the machine at the far end of the warehouse that would normally have had a line of mute people waiting to place their arm inside and receive their precise daily requirement of nutrients and fluids. ‘However, the Servant is reporting that the Sleepers have stopped responding to even the simple mental commands that the Motherships under our control can give. Simply put, two weeks from now, every single one of these people will have died from dehydration.’

  The others all turned and looked at Stirling as the enormity of what he had just told them began to sink in.

  ‘There must be something we can do,’ Nat said. ‘If this is happening everywhere then that means . . . Oh God.’

  ‘There were at least nine million people in London at the time of the invasion,’ Stirling said. ‘Even with the resources of both Motherships under our control there’s no way we could administer the feeding solution manually to that many people, and if this is happening globally . . . well, I’m sure I don’t need to paint a more detailed picture for you.’

  ‘How can you stay so calm about this?’ Jay snapped angrily. ‘We could be talking about extinction here. Why would the Voidborn do this now? Why keep all these people alive for two years and then just suddenly decide they’re going to let them die like this? Why would they do that? It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have answers to those questions, Jacob,’ Stirling replied. ‘And since you ask, I’m staying calm because we may be the only chance these people have, so we really can’t afford to panic. I am working with the Servant to try to isolate the reason for this change in the Sleepers’ behaviour, but the truth is we’re struggling to find an explanation.’

  ‘And you think this has something to do with whatever’s happened to Sam?’ Anne asked.

  ‘It may just be a coincidence,’ Stirling replied, ‘but the fact that both events were concurrent suggest that, yes, there may indeed be a link. The statistical chances of them being unrelated events are slim.’

  They had left Sam under the watchful eye of the Servant while they had visited the Sleeper dormitory. It had been several hours since he’d been encased in the energy field and there had, as yet, been no signs of any change in his condition.

  ‘I’m going to find Liz,’ Jay said. ‘I’ve had enough of unanswered questions for one day, thanks.’

  He stalked away down the raised gantry and out through the fire exit that Liz had gone through a couple of minutes earlier. His head was telling him that Stirling was right and they had to stay calm, but his gut was telling him to go and find something to shoot. He saw Liz sitting on a low brick wall on the far side of the roof.

  ‘Sorry, couldn’t handle that,’ Liz said, giving Jay a weak smile as he approached.

  ‘Yeah, well, ’fraid it got worse,’ he said, sitting down beside her. He quickly explained the situation that Stirling had described and what it meant for the Sleepers.

  ‘Are we ever going to catch a break?’ Liz asked with a sigh. ‘Sometimes I just want to give up. Between this and what’s happened to Sam . . .’

  ‘Yeah, know what you mean,’ Jay said, running his hand across his dreadlocks. ‘Every time I think we’re finally getting somewhere and that maybe we can take the fight to the Voidborn, something like this happens. It’s as if someone’s trying to remind us how insignificant we are, even with those things under our control.’ He pointed up at the two massive Voidborn Motherships floating above them. ‘I’m still trying to get my head around it. In a couple of weeks we could be the last nine people on Earth, and I don’t know about you, but I can’t see any way to stop it.’ He put his head in his hands.

  ‘Stirling and the Servant will come up with something,’ Liz said, placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘They always do.’

  ‘Maybe, but what if they don’t and the whole planet just ends up becoming a mass grave? What then?’

  ‘I don’t really want to think about that at the moment, Jay,’ Liz said.

  ‘Hey, you two,’ Nat yelled as she stuck her head out of the doorway on the other side of the roof. ‘Drop-ship’s taking us back to the compound in two minutes.’

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Liz said.
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  ‘Sure, just give me a minute,’ Jay replied, staring up at the Motherships.

  ‘OK, see you down there.’ Liz ran across the roof and disappeared through the door.

  Jay stood there for a moment, watching as Voidborn drop-ships buzzed around the massive vessels far above, like insects around some kind of giant animal. They were lit with the yellow lights that indicated they were under the control of the Servant and therefore ultimately answered to Sam’s commands. He thought back to the first desperate days after the initial invasion, before he’d met Stirling and the others. He’d just been a scared kid back then, not the soldier he’d become, the guy who liked to make out that nothing scared him. He thought about the prospect of standing in that very same spot two weeks from now, humanity all but extinct if what Stirling was telling them was right, the city around him little more than a mausoleum. In that instant, he could feel the kid that he had buried deep inside a long time ago trying to fight its way back to the surface again. The boy who’d lost his family, the boy who watched the world go to hell, the boy who’d spent so many weeks desperately fighting simply to survive.

  ‘Come on, Sam, wake up,’ Jay whispered to the air. ‘We need you, buddy.’

  The drop-ship touched down in the centre of the compound, its boarding ramp slowly lowering to the ground. Jay was first out of the hatch and he quickly made his way to the accommodation block, eager to get an update on Sam’s condition from the Servant. He entered the common room and was disappointed to see that the force field surrounding his friend was still very much in place.

  ‘Any change?’ he asked the Servant as he walked across the room towards her.

  ‘There has been no change in the Illuminate’s condition,’ the Servant replied. ‘I have conducted further tests of the field surrounding him, but I am still unable to discern its energetic architecture or point of origin.’

  ‘You mean it may not be generated locally?’ Stirling asked as he came and stood next to Jay. ‘I assumed that Sam was generating it himself somehow.’

  ‘That was my initial assumption too, but I cannot determine how the Illuminate would be able to generate the level of power necessary.’

  ‘Seems like there’s quite a lot we don’t understand about Sam at the moment,’ Jay said, watching his friend’s chest slowly rise and fall on the other side of the impenetrable barrier.

  ‘Indeed,’ Stirling replied. ‘And have you made any progress in determining what’s blocking your control of the Sleepers?’

  ‘No. It would appear that whatever signal is being used to cause the change in their condition is vastly more powerful than the one the Motherships can produce. The origin point of that signal is impossible to determine precisely, but its strength would indicate that it is being broadcast across the planet.’

  ‘So whatever’s happening to the Sleepers is global,’ Jay said.

  ‘As far as I can determine, yes,’ the Servant replied.

  ‘So what the hell do we do about it?’ Jay asked, his frustration clear.

  ‘The first priority has to be working out where this new signal is being broadcast from,’ Stirling replied. ‘The only way we can hope to stop whatever’s happening to the Sleepers is if we cut it off at the source.’

  ‘I believe that it may be possible if we were to relocate the second Mothership and more accurately attempt to –’

  The Servant was cut off by a loud crackle from behind her as the bubble of energy that surrounded Sam vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared. Sam slowly rose to his feet, his eyes closed and his chin resting on his chest.

  ‘Sam,’ Jay said, approaching his friend. ‘Are you OK?’

  Sam didn’t reply, he simply lifted his head and opened his eyes, eyes that now burnt with a bright blue energy that pulsed through the glowing trails running back over his skull. Jay frowned and took another step forward, raising a hand towards Sam’s shoulder. Sam moved impossibly quickly, his closed fist whipping through the air and connecting with Jay’s chin with a crack, sending him flying across the room. The Servant glanced at the fallen boy and then back at Sam as he began to walk towards her.

  ‘Illuminate, I do not –’

  That was all she had time to say before Sam reached out and placed a hand against the side of her head. The Servant’s mouth flew open in a silent scream and then she disintegrated into a cloud of glowing yellow particles that drifted slowly to the ground.

  ‘What are you doing, Sam?’ Stirling demanded as he backed away. He looked hard for any trace of the boy he knew, but there was no emotion in Sam’s face; his weirdly glowing eyes were impossible to read. He did not reply; he simply stared at Stirling for a moment and then turned and strode purposefully towards the door leading outside.

  Stirling hurried over to Jay and rolled him on to his back. There was a bright red mark on his jaw and blood trickled from a split in his lip. He was out cold. Stirling felt a chill run down his spine. Whoever that boy was now, he wasn’t the Sam they all knew, that much was obvious. He got up and ran after him, following him out into the compound.

  ‘Sam!’ Mag shouted from the other side of the yard, seeing her friend walking towards her. Her grin of delight quickly faded when she saw the panicked look on Stirling’s face as he burst out of the door behind Sam. Nat and Jack looked up from the scavenged supplies they were sorting into piles on the ground and saw Sam draw to a halt in the centre of the open area, tip his head back and stare intensely at the Mothership hovering overhead.

  ‘Don’t go near him!’ Stirling yelled as Sam’s friends started towards him. ‘Stay back!’

  Stirling made his way over to where Mag was standing, giving Sam a wide berth.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Mag asked, staring at Sam as he stood motionless and silent twenty metres away.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stirling replied, ‘but he just knocked Jacob unconscious and did something to the Servant. I don’t think he has any control over his actions.’

  ‘Is Jay OK?’ Nat asked.

  ‘As far as I can tell,’ Stirling replied. ‘Go and find Will and tell him what’s happened. He has the most medical training.’

  Nat gave a quick nod and ran to the laboratory building.

  ‘Sam! Can you hear me?’ Mag yelled, taking a couple of steps closer to him. Suddenly, Sam’s whole body seemed to flare with searing blue light and a bolt of lightning shot into the air, striking the Mothership far overhead and sending waves of energy rippling across its underside. Moments later, a drop-ship swooped down towards the compound, its hull glowing with the same strange blue light that pulsed across Sam’s skin. It landed in the middle of the courtyard, kicking up clouds of dust, its hatch sliding open and boarding ramp descending as Sam approached it, his expression blank.

  ‘Sam!’ Mag yelled again. ‘What are you doing?’

  He offered no response as he strode up the ramp and into the drop-ship. Mag ran towards it, watching helplessly as the ramp retracted, the hatch slid shut and the aircraft rose into the air, beyond her reach. It banked and accelerated into the clear blue sky, disappearing from view in seconds. And just like that, Sam was gone.

  Nat walked over to the sofa, where Anne was shining a pen-sized torch into each of Jay’s eyes in turn.

  ‘Is he OK?’ Nat asked, as the rest of the group filed into the common room.

  ‘Yeah, he’ll live,’ Anne said. ‘Just a bit of wounded pride, I reckon.’

  ‘Feel like I got sucker-punched by a Grendel,’ Jay groaned, rubbing his aching jaw.

  ‘I can’t believe Sam did that to you,’ Nat said, shaking her head and sitting down next to him on the sofa.

  ‘Whoever that was, it wasn’t Sam,’ Jay replied. ‘Because, quite aside from anything else, he punches like a girl.’

  ‘Hey!’ Liz said, frowning. ‘Want me to come over there and show you how hard a girl can really punch?’

  ‘Sorry, no offence,’ Jay replied with a crooked half-smile, ‘but you know what I mean.’

>   ‘I think the whole glowing blue head thing and firing off lightning bolts everywhere might be a clue that he wasn’t quite himself too,’ Jack said. ‘You know?’

  ‘Our most pressing concern is trying to work out exactly where he’s gone,’ Stirling said, rubbing his eyes. ‘I don’t believe for a moment that he was in control of his actions here today. If we accept that’s true, the next most pressing question must be: who is controlling him?’

  ‘Out in the courtyard, he looked like . . . well . . . he looked like a Walker,’ Jack said. Before their victory over the Voidborn, enslaved humans had wandered the streets of London doing their alien masters’ bidding. There was no denying the similarities between their blank-faced obedience and Sam’s recent behaviour.

  ‘You don’t think something went wrong with his implant, do you?’ Anne asked nervously. ‘That somehow the Voidborn have regained control of him?’ All of them had been subjected to the same experiments when they were infants, implanted with devices that used hybrid Voidborn and human technology to block the signal that had enslaved the rest of the planet. Stirling had worked alongside Sam’s father on the technology and the implants were the only reason Sam and his friends had been able to resist and fight back. If those implants were now failing for some reason, Sam wouldn’t be the only one affected. Who would be next?

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Stirling said, pacing back and forth across the room as he often did when his brain was distracted with solving a particularly vexing problem. ‘If that were the case, then it’s reasonable to assume we would all have fallen under their control. Sam’s implant is, however, quite unique. His father built the prototype – my input was limited because, quite frankly, I had only a basic understanding of the nanotechnology he was using. I thought at the time it was simply because he was a genius, but now of course I understand that he was using Illuminate technology without my knowledge. It could be that there was something different about Sam’s implant, something that Daniel didn’t tell me. It would be just one more lie to add to the long list of those he told me.’