‘So, if it’s not the Voidborn controlling him, who is?’ Jay asked with a frown.
‘That, Jacob,’ Stirling replied, ‘is what I believe they call “the million dollar question”.’
Sam woke with a start, standing bolt upright in a darkened room, his head spinning. His last memory was of standing in front of his friends in the resistance compound, and now he was somewhere else entirely, with no memory of how on earth he’d got there.
‘Where the hell am I?’ Sam said to himself, taking in his surroundings. The room was filled with desks and dead workstations, and at the far end was a large window that filled almost the entire wall and through which came a dim, grey light. Sam’s nose wrinkled as he sniffed the air; the unmistakeable sickly sweet stench of death and decay hung heavily. It was a smell that he had got all too used to over the past couple of years. Not everyone who had been enslaved by the Voidborn control signal had been able to make their way to one of the dormitories, and Sam had found enough bodies around London to know what this odour meant. People had died here and not that long ago by the smell of it. He headed for the window and looked through the glass into the cavernous space beyond.
Light was pouring in through a huge opening at the far side of a vast chamber; below him a submarine was floating in a long channel of water that led out to the sea beyond. It sat at an awkward angle in the water, listing heavily to one side. The five other docks that filled the huge room beyond were empty. Sam had seen this place before: it was the submarine base at Faslane that Talon had used as his base of operations when he had been going by the name of Mason, his true Illuminate identity hidden by his people’s shape-shifting abilities. At the time the facility had bustled with activity, filled with Mason’s men, all carrying implants that supposedly protected them from the Voidborn control signal. They had later discovered that it didn’t block the control signal, merely adjusted it to put the men under Talon’s control instead. Now the place was deserted, the foul smell hanging in the air suggesting that whoever was left here was not going to be coming to meet him.
‘How on earth did I get to Scotland?’ Sam asked the dust-filled air around him. A flare of blue light was reflected in the glass of the window as the veins of energy running back over his skull began to pulse. Sam stared at his reflection, willing his face back into its more human form, but nothing happened; the boy staring back at him was still very much the Illuminate–human hybrid that he had gone to such lengths to conceal from his friends. He had wanted them to see this, his real face now, but he had also wanted to explain what had happened to him, something he had clearly not been able to do.
Sam.
The voice seemed to come from nowhere, but he wasn’t hearing it: it was inside his head, like a whispered thought. Sam turned around quickly, scanning the room, but there was no one there, just the dark shapes of the dormant equipment that filled the room.
Sam, it’s me.
‘Dad?’ Sam said, his eyes widening in surprise. It couldn’t be; his father had died in front of him.
In a sense, yes, the voice replied, its whisper like an itch inside his skull that he couldn’t scratch. We don’t have much time. I . . . we need your help.
‘My father is dead,’ Sam said, still scanning the room for any clue as to where the voice might be coming from.
I know I am, the voice replied, and now I need your help or billions more will die, just like me.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ Sam replied, ‘but whoever you are, you’re not him. What do you want? Why have you brought me here? More to the point, how did I get here?’
You were summoned here.
‘Summoned here? What’s that supposed to mean?’
I was forced to subvert your will; you were given an irresistible mental imperative to come to this place. How exactly you did that I do not know, other than the fact that you arrived here in a Voidborn vessel.
‘So you kidnapped me?’ Sam asked, feeling a creeping sense of unease.
It would be more accurate to say that you kidnapped yourself, the voice replied.
This is a trap, Sam thought.
This is not a trap, the voice replied, Sam’s bewilderment increasing as he realised that whoever it was he’d been talking to had just plucked that thought straight from his head. If I had wished to harm you, I could have done so at any point during your journey to this place.
‘Well, you didn’t give me much choice about coming here,’ Sam said, ‘so why not just force me to help you?’
What I have to show you, I need you to see with your own eyes and with an open mind, the voice replied.
‘OK then, show me,’ Sam said. ‘Let’s see what’s so important you had to drag me up here.’
Head down to the submarine pens, the voice replied. I’ll tell you what you need to do when you get there.
Sam went over to the door and made his way down the stairs. He opened the door at the bottom and winced at the putrid smell in the room beyond. Over a dozen bodies lay on the cots of the makeshift dormitory next to the pens: Talon’s men who had been left in Faslane when the bulk of his forces had travelled to London with him and Sam. Once Talon had died, the men he had left here would have received no further orders, including the ones to eat and drink. Sam was just glad that they wouldn’t have known what was happening to them. It was a stark reminder of what would happen to the Sleepers if the Voidborn were to stop caring for them.
Sam put his hand over his nose and mouth in a futile effort to protect his newly enhanced senses from the stench. He hurried through the room, grateful to pass through the heavy steel doors on the other side and step out into the cool, relatively fresh air of an enormous maintenance workshop. Suspended from a massive supporting framework was the black bulk of a partially disassembled submarine, hanging in the middle of the space like some kind of huge disembowelled beast.
Sam made his way across the workshop towards the massive doors that led to the submarine pen, the noisy echoes of his footsteps bouncing off the bare concrete walls and ceiling. He was approaching the suspended submarine, when he heard a clang. He froze in place, his ears straining, listening for any other sound. Now he could hear nothing but silence. He sniffed. The smell of death hung in the air, but here there was something else, layered beneath the stench of decay. Something about it was horribly familiar.
There was a sudden scratching sound from the other side of the workshop, as if something was running across the concrete floor. Sam dropped low behind one of the pieces of heavy machinery that were scattered around the floor of the maintenance section. He held his breath, trying to make as little noise as possible, but again silence had returned. There was definitely something else here, something alive.
Sam crept slowly forward, moving carefully and quietly from hiding spot to hiding spot, staying low, checking the shadows nearby, his ears still straining for any sign of whatever had made the noise just a minute earlier, before making a dash across the open floor into the shadows beneath the giant machine. He looked up at the gutted warship; masses of cables that would have once formed the vessel’s electronic nervous system now dangled uselessly from holes in its belly. As he passed underneath, the odd smell he had noticed before began to get stronger. Suddenly, like a switch flicking inside his head, Sam remembered where he had smelt it before. It wasn’t here that he’d encountered that scent, but it was in a nearby city . . .
Too nearby.
A creature dropped from the hole in the hull of the submarine directly above Sam’s head. He barely had time to react, diving to his left as the Vore fell towards him, striking a glancing blow on his shoulder and carving a chunk out of the white Illuminate armour that now covered it. Sam felt a surge of strength as the nanites inside him responded to the adrenalin pumping through his system. At the same instant, his right arm began to flow and shift, morphing into a half-metre-long golden blade. The tiny machines that made up that arm were similar to the Illuminate ones that coursed through him, but they were Void
born in origin, a relic of his first battle with the Voidborn in the skies above London. The Voidborn and the Illuminate may have been enemies for millennia, but at that precise moment their technologies were combining to protect Sam from the monstrous creature that was itself a twisted by-product of corrupt Illuminate technology. Sam didn’t really have time to appreciate the irony; he was too busy trying not to get killed.
The Vore circled Sam warily, its dripping jaws opening wide as it hissed at him, the tiny black eyes in the sides of its elongated, misshapen skull blinking slowly as the slime-covered slits of its nose twitched, sniffing the air. It crawled on all floors, its razor-sharp claws scratching on the concrete. Sam raised his arm, holding the golden blade in front of him as he backed away from the slavering once-human monster. The Vore lunged at him with a roar and Sam swung the blade, the hideous creature screaming as the golden weapon struck home. Black blood flew through the air, spraying across the concrete floor, and the Vore tumbled away, thrashing wildly, mortally wounded.
Sam heard another roar from somewhere nearby, his blood suddenly running cold. The Vore they had encountered in Edinburgh never hunted alone; where there was one there were bound to be more. Sam sprinted towards the doors leading to the submarine pen, but when he was less than twenty metres from them a pair of Vore came running around the corner, barring his route. He raised his weapon, unsure whether or not the physical advantages that the nanites within his body gave him would be enough to face a pair of the mutated creatures. As he was weighing up his odds, three more Vore came charging across the floor of the workshop, joining their brothers in the hissing pack. The group crept towards Sam, sniffing at the still-twitching corpse of his first victim as they passed. Sam slowly backed away, knowing that he probably only had a matter of seconds before the creatures attacked.
He heard a clatter behind him and whirled around to see half a dozen more Vore heading his way. He was surrounded. He looked quickly between the two groups of Vore, his head flicking back and forth as he tried to keep them all in view at once. He made a sudden dash to his left and the Vore reacted instantly, sprinting towards him at inhuman speed. He grabbed a chain dangling from the ceiling, the blade of his right arm morphing back into the shape of a human hand, and the temporary boost of strength to his limbs allowed him to haul his body up towards the metal walkway overhead just as the nearest Vore leapt in his direction. Its claws slashed through the empty air where his dangling legs had been a fraction of a second before, and Sam pulled himself up on to the walkway.
He sprinted along the gantry, heading for a ladder that led up to the top of the curved body of the submarine. The Vore were just seconds behind him, vaulting up into the walkways surrounding the submarine with superhuman agility. Sam didn’t dare to look back, he just ran. He reached the bottom of the ladder and scaled it as quickly as possible, taking three rungs at a time. As he stepped on to the curved upper hull of the submarine, the Vore were already scrambling up the massive vessel’s curved flanks, their razor-sharp crystalline claws tearing into the steel hull as they climbed.
Sam turned and ran for the conning tower sticking up from the deck twenty metres away. He clambered up the access ladder on its side, the Vore now only a few metres behind him. He reached the top and realised with horror that there were Vore on the walkway above him too. There was nowhere to go. He spun around as the Vore scrambled towards him and stared into the hole leading down through the conning tower and into the darkness of the submarine below. For all he knew the interior of the giant vessel could be swarming with Vore, but at the moment it was his only escape route. He hurried through the hatch, slamming it shut behind him as the first of the pursuing Vore climbed over the railing and on to the top of the tower. Sam grabbed hold of the wheel on the underside of the hatch, spinning it in the darkness, sealing the heavy steel door shut. Almost immediately he heard muffled roars of frustration as the Vore started to claw violently at the other side of the hatch.
‘Great escape plan, Riley,’ Sam said to himself, sitting in the pitch black. He heard an ominous crunch from above him and a tiny chink of light appeared as the metal that was the only thing separating him from the Vore started to buckle and tear. He felt a sudden sense of panic as he realised that the hatch was not going to hold the Vore back for long. He took a long, deep breath and forced himself to focus past the fear he was feeling. ‘Calm people live,’ he said quietly, repeating one of the mantras that Robert Jackson, the ex-Royal Marine that had taught Sam and all of the other members of the resistance to fight, had drilled into him during his training.
He reached out in the blackness, using his sense of touch to build up as accurate a mental map of his surroundings as possible. After a few long seconds of desperate blind searching, he found another hatch in the floor and he lifted it up with a protesting screech from its unlubricated hinges. Another ladder led still further into the darkened depths of the vessel. Sam climbed down and quickly descended into a larger space, at least judging by the fact that he couldn’t immediately reach out and touch all four walls. He walked into some sort of waist-high counter, swearing under his breath as the corner dug into his thigh. Running his hands along the top of it, he found a large metal object, which felt like a toolbox. He opened the lid and put his hand inside, carefully feeling for anything that might be useful. His fingers closed on a rubberised, cylindrical object and he lifted it out of the box, mouthing a silent prayer to whatever gods might be looking down on him at that precise moment. Sam pressed the stud on the side of the cylinder and the torch he was holding flickered into a feeble half-life. He banged the torch with his other hand, as a thousand pre-invasion movies had taught him to do, but disappointingly it refused to get any brighter. In fact it just seemed to make it flicker more. Given that it must have been at least two years since the torch was last turned on, Sam supposed he should just be thankful that it worked at all.
He cast the feeble beam around the room, its weak light illuminating the dust-covered bridge of the vessel. There were no obvious signs of Vore here at least, though judging by the cacophonous sounds of banging from the main hatch above, they were only seconds away from breaking through. Sam moved quickly through the cramped spaces within the submarine, running down corridors that were barely tall enough for a man to stand upright in and past row after row of bunks built into the bulkheads in three-bed stacks. It would have been an oppressive environment at the best of times, but now, in the flickering light of his torch and with two years’ worth of dust hanging in the air, it was beyond unsettling.
Again Sam felt a flutter of panic in his belly as he heard the screech of tearing metal from somewhere behind him. He sprinted between the bunks, his heart pounding in his ears so hard that it was making it hard to think. He did his best to push all thoughts of getting trapped with the Vore in that dark, confined space towards the back of his mind and pressed onwards, heading towards the prow of the vessel.
There was a sudden loud bang and then the sound of heavy things moving through the darkened compartments somewhere behind him. The Vore were inside. Sam picked up speed, running faster through the gloom and trying to ignore the hissing sounds of the Vore as they raced through the chambers. He came to the final compartment and quickly waved his light around the room, spotting a row of hatches on the far side. He took a deep breath and swung the door behind him closed, spinning the wheel to lock its latches. He shone his torch through the ten-centimetre-wide toughened glass porthole and leapt backwards, his eyes suddenly wide with fear as slavering jaws slammed into the glass. A moment later the Vore began their assault on the door, setting it rattling under their superhumanly strong blows.
Sam hurried over to a hatch at the end of one of the long torpedo tubes that ran the length of the chamber and pointed towards the prow of the submarine. He opened it and shone his torch down the polished barrel within. The far end of the torpedo tube was still sealed by its outer waterproofed hatch. There was no way out through there. He checked the second tube,
finding exactly the same thing. Behind him, the top corner of the door sealing the compartment from the Vore began to buckle inwards as huge claws forced themselves into the gap, ripping and tearing at the metal.
‘You’re not dying in here, Riley,’ Sam muttered to himself, trying to suppress the rising tide of panic building in his chest. He moved to the third and last torpedo tube and grabbed the wheel sealing the hatch. He pulled with all his might, but the handle refused to budge. He paused for a moment, took a deep breath and then tried again, willing the nanites in his hands and arms to boost his strength as far as possible. He felt the wheel move a fraction with a pained screech of corroded metal on metal. Behind him the door almost gave way completely, half hanging off its hinges; the Vore would be inside in seconds. He heaved at the wheel again, yelling out with the exertion as he felt it begin to move, slowly at first, with grinding reluctance, but then more quickly as the metal surfaces separated. He wrenched the tube open and shone his torch inside. The hatch at the far end was sealed.
‘Oh God,’ Sam whispered. There was no way out.
Behind him, the door finally gave way and Sam scrambled into the tube as the Vore smashed their way inside the chamber. He crawled desperately forward, claws scratching at the lining of the tube just centimetres from his feet as the Vore tried to squeeze into the narrow space behind him. Sam crawled further forward, feeling the tips of the claws brushing against his feet as he scrambled for grip on the smooth, polished walls of the tube. He pressed his weight against the sealed hatch at the far end and, to his surprise, fell headlong through it, landing hard on the concrete five metres below and knocking the wind out of his lungs.
Sam lay there for a second, fighting for breath, before he hauled himself painfully to his feet and looked up at the torpedo tube above him. What he had mistaken for the heavy waterproof hatch that normally sealed the tube was actually just a light plastic dust cover taped in place from the outside. He ran towards the heavy armoured doors that led to the submarine pen and slapped the large, red, mushroom-shaped switch mounted on the wall next to them. Somewhere far below his feet, emergency generators coughed into life, and a blaring klaxon sounded as an orange warning light flashed above the door, which slowly began to inch upwards.