The Sons of Scarlatti

DAY ONE 14:13 (BST). Siberia

Deep in the Siberian permafrost, 2,546 miles away, east by northeast, Kaparis watched the scene via his agent’s spectacles.

Everything was going according to plan. They were falling into his trap.

1  The beast was at large.

2  The ‘pheromone hypothesis’ had been successfully introduced by his agent at the meeting.

3  Boldklub had been established as the only viable response.

Kaparis was where he liked to be: in control. And yet… he was overwhelmed.

The boy.

Kaparis stared.

“My goodness, he looks like his father.”

The lung breathed in. The lung breathed out. And for a moment his heart swelled with nostalgia as he was transported back nearly twenty years to a Cambridge University of scarves and bicycles, lectures and tutorials, girls to fall in love with and limitless early promise… before, inevitably, his mind went to his moment of glory.

Why Does Grass Grow In Clumps?

A General Theory on the Development of Super-organisms

A lecture by D.A.P. Kaparis

St Stephen’s Hall, 10am, Wed 4th May 1993

And to how it was stolen from him.

In front of everybody.

In front of her.

And, as quickly as it had swollen, Kaparis’s heart emptied of blood and once more beat acid revenge.

“Our proposal,” said King, “is this – one: shrink a tracking device and fit it to the American Scarlatti and release it to find its missing clone.

“Two: shrink an attack helicopter and its crew…”

Eyes popped around the world.

“…all their equipment, including all tracking, transport, communications and weaponry…”

“Woah! Shrink people! Weapons?”

“…to the scale 150 to 1…” continued King.

“One hundred and fifty times!?”

“…and three…”

“Hang fire! Why not just shrink the tracking device and track the thing? Why shrink people?” asked General Jackman.

“Without going into too much classified detail,” said Al, “it’s to do with changes in waveform when you collapse the electromagnetic spectrum. A nano-transmitter produces a nano-signal that can only be picked up on a nano-receiver with a very limited range, perhaps 800 metres at the most. You can’t just amplify the signal in the normal sense. That’s why we’ll need a hunter crew at nano-level as well. Their transport can be fitted with a tiny ‘full-scale’ radio for communication, although again it will have a very limited range and we can’t bank on constant contact.”

The General looked like his brain ached.

King continued. “And three: the crew are to pursue the second Scarlatti to the first, then destroy both adults and any eggs or nymphs they find.”

“Whatever else it is, this whole scheme is crazy! At the very least untested. The risks to any participants must surely be suicidal,” said the American Chief Scientist, shaking her head.

“We have to measure the risks against what’s at stake, and against the only viable alternative,” said King.

“Which is?” asked the German Chancellor.

“Go nuclear. Displace a million people. Lay waste to part of London for generations to come.”

There was a long pause.

Finn suddenly realised something and looked back at the map that King had marked up earlier. The area of destruction included the village of Langmere.

“Grandma’s?” Finn said.

“I know,” said Al. “It’s personal.”

The US President was incredulous.

“And who’s going to take on this mission?”

“Given the unknown physiological risks, we propose just a three-man team led by Captain Kelly from our informal military cohort. Captain Kelly and Engineer Stubbs – both with nano-experience – plus a pilot.”

“Wait! Nano-experience? You’ve done this before?” asked Finn.

“Roll the film,” said Al.

Up on the screen appeared some scrappy, hand-held digital footage of a goat on a lead. At the other end of the lead was Al. Both looked like they’d been partying for three days straight. A time code ticked over along the bottom.

Captain Kelly walked into shot and spray-painted ‘Good luck’ on the goat’s hide.

The image cut to the Fat Doughnut Accelerator operating with a loud hum. Outside, Engineer Stubbs sat at a desk crammed with laptops. Al tethered the goat in the centre of the Fat Doughnut.

The time code jumped forward a few minutes to a more distant shot of the accelerator. The camera zoomed in on the goat as it became increasingly disturbed. Wheeling around its tether until… the screen went suddenly and completely white.

The camera pulled out to reveal the Fat Doughnut now contained a ball of perfect, intense white light. It seemed to ripple and spin for a few seconds before it faded, leaving behind a party of blinking observers and… no goat.

Al ran into the centre of the Fat Doughnut. On hands and knees he searched for something. Kelly and Stubbs crowded in.

Very carefully, Al picked something up. The camera zoomed in on his hand. Trying to focus. All blurry, unfocused skin tone. And then – finally, shakily – in the rivulets of Al’s skin, in the lifeline, stood a rather confused, silently-bleating, 4.5mm goat.

“Me next,” said Kelly off-camera. “I’m next!”

“Hey! Who did all the work?” protested Stubbs.

“Back away!”

The argument raged. The goat didn’t join in. It was all way over its head.

DAY ONE 14:19 (BST). Willard’s Copse, Berkshire

Lay lay lay lay…

Smallpox had laid waste to the badger and left its corpse a wretched thing, barely identifiable, pustulated and leaking the gall the Scarlatti found so conducive.

For fifteen hours more the Scarlatti would continue to produce fat white eggs from its abdomen, straining to evacuate them, planting each one carefully in the decaying flesh, its insides a furnace of reproduction.

In each egg a primitive nymph was forming. In less than six hours, such was the furious rate of growth, the first of them would begin to consume the remaining contents of its egg sac before bursting out to feast upon the corpse in turn.

Someone whispered something in the US President’s ear. He made his decision and nodded.

“You want our Scarlatti, you got it,” he said simply.

“And further accelerator capacity from CERN, Monsieur le Président? Frau Chancellor?”

“Oui.”

“Ja.”

Commander James Clayton-King loved it when a plan came together.

Then the American President raised a finger. “One condition. We supply the pilot. I want a man onboard.”

King raised an eyebrow in protest.

There was another whisper in the President’s ear.

“Make that a woman.”

DAY ONE 15:17 (BST). Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, USA

A Variant T Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor taxied out of the restricted M3 hangar.

Delta Salazar knew nothing yet of the mission she was being asked to undertake, only that it was priority number one: transit to RAF Northolt outside London at maximum speed, refuelling in mid-air twice over the Atlantic. With afterburners engaged and almost no payload, her cruising speed would be well in excess of Mach 2. Deep in the heart of the $150-million fifth-generation stealth fighter, in the empty weapons bay, wrapped in an ‘indestructible’ transport crate, was a single small frozen phial.

Control had cleared the skies.

Delta loved Aviator shades, beating men at anything and strafing ground targets with 44mm cannon. She also love love loved to fly.

In fact, the only thing she loved more was her little sister Carla, but that was not the sort of thing that she would say out loud in the (Classified) M3 Wing of the US Air Force.

“Clear for take-off,” said Control.

With an easy touch, Delta fully engaged the twin F119-PW-100 turbofan engines producing 35,000lbs of thrust that shot the aircraft off the runway and into a steep climb.

Her mother had been an alcoholic and she’d spent most of her childhood neglected, finding escape only in video games (starting with Splinter Cell back in 2002). In 2004 the USAF had started looking for recruits with exceptional hand-eye coordination in the online gaming community. They noticed the data spike around Delta’s tag and traced it to a state children’s home in Philadelphia where they found a fierce, scruffy, skinny thirteen-year-old who intensely distrusted authority, having been separated from her baby sister when taken into care. She tested off the scale.

The USAF put her into a top-secret training programme, arranged an appropriate adoption for Carla, with visitation rights, and gave Delta the chance to excel. She was triple-A rated on six different aircraft and had won two Air Force Distinguised Service Medals and a Medal of Honour. She was twenty-three years old – even if she looked an Indie rock nineteen.

At 20,000 feet she banked east off the American continent. She could never get used to how great this felt.

“Badass…” she sighed.

“I heard that, Salazar,” snapped Control.

She laughed and rocketed off across the Atlantic.

EIGHT

DAY TWO 02:46 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey

Just over eleven hours later, at the climax of what must have been an astonishing briefing, and in the midst of the organised chaos of all that was going on in and around the CFAC, Finn witnessed the moment Flight Lieutenant Salazar finally stopped chewing her gum.

Her eyes were still hidden behind her Aviator shades (despite it being the middle of the night), her boots were still on the desk and she still carried an air of youthful insouciance, but… the chewing had stopped. This was the biggest reaction they’d had from her since her arrival.

“We need your decision in the next hour. Lieutenant? Do you understand the proposition?” Al said.

Nothing.

Finn looked at Al. He’s not handling this very well, he thought. The Lieutenant seemed to have unsettled Al somehow. He was trying to be clipped and cool, but was coming across as nervous and edgy. The silence crackled.

“They’re going to shrink you!” said Finn, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

Still nothing.

Using his thumb and forefinger to illustrate actual size, Kelly tried to translate into militarese.

“Listen up! You’re going to be shrunk to 12 millimetres, put in a 110-millimetre Apache chopper, then pursue and terminate an apocalyptic bug with extreme prejudice. You copy?”

“I copy… Just let me suck it up,” Delta responded.

(She could have been more specific and told them what it felt like: that the idea was so crazy it had caused a temporary gap in the game code of her reality and that she needed to download a patch,1 but she had learned never to discuss her feelings with fellow soldiers. Besides which, where was she supposed to find the patch?)

Al blinked. Finn smiled. Kelly laughed.

“She’ll be fine,” said Kelly. “Move on.”

With the main briefings out of the way, Kelly, Stubbs and Salazar were handed over to a medical team itching to study the ‘before and after’ effects of ‘atomic collapse’ on the human body (they could smell a Nobel Prize).

Al expected them to be poked, prodded and drained of various fluids in the usual manner, but when he was recalled to the crew area, he was informed that the process had ground to a halt during a ‘psychiatric evaluation’.

Each crew member had been asked to construct a solid sphere out of a number of irregular-shaped blocks. Delta had just sat there (evidently still hanging with the concept). Stubbs had got started, but then fell asleep like a granddad doing a Christmas jigsaw, and Kelly got a member of the medical team in a headlock and forced him to eat one of the pieces.

“You have a voluntary mute, an old man suffering from depression and an idiot alpha male with the emotional sophistication of an earthworm,” said the lady chief psychologist.

Al said, “The young woman is just seriously cool, Stubbs just needs tea and biscuits and Kelly was at Cambridge with me – he’s only part Neanderthal. They’re all perfectly normal.”

“Dr Allenby, there’s no way I can pass any of these people fit for active service.”

“Fit for service?” laughed Al as he was dragged away to a crisis in Array Engineering. “They ride at dawn. Just make sure the pilot signs up – do whatever you have to do.”

By the time Al and Finn returned, the psychologist had the crew members sitting in a circle.

“If you could take one special personal item with you, what would that be?” the psychologist asked Delta. “Flight Lieutenant?”

Delta chewed her gum.

“OK. How about we move on to you, Leonard?” said the psychologist.

“I’ll need my tablets,” said Stubbs.

The psychologist gave him a hard stare.

“No, Leonard, we’re talking about a special personal item that…”

Finn, having spent a lot of time with grief counsellors, knew the drill and decided to be helpful to hurry things along.

“She means like a teddy bear or a wedding ring or something.”

“I never married,” Stubbs said glumly. “Who would want me? Married to the job. Not much of a looker. And I haven’t seen Teddy since the orphanage burnt down in 1962.”

There was a moment of silence as Captain Kelly fought to suppress a snigger, but failed, setting Al off. They were soon hysterical. Stubbs glared and shook his head. Not for the first time Finn wondered what the little old man was doing on such a mission.

“Ignore them,” Stubbs advised the psychologist. “Rise above it.”

“Captain Kelly!” the psychologist snapped in a tone of admonishment. “When you’ve quite finished… what item would you like to take?”

Kelly stopped himself laughing and gave Stubbs a playful squeeze on the knee to show there were no hard feelings.

“Ow!”

“Apologies. I just want my Minimi2 and maybe a couple of M27s3,” the technicalities of which he then explained at length to the confused psychologist, the confusion added to by Stubbs explaining at the same time that he really had to take his mobile workshop with him (a Pinzgauer all-terrain truck adapted to his own specifications), otherwise, frankly, what was the point in him bothering to come at all?

In the meantime, behind her shades, Delta constructed her own patch:

0382*