Nero turned as the heavy doors that led into the crater rumbled open and Otto and Wing appeared in the doorway. He was still worried by the prospect of letting the two boys leave the island but under the circumstances he had little choice. He could hardly deny Wing the chance to attend his own father’s funeral. Nero still had an unpleasant feeling, though, that there was something slightly odd about the whole situation. He couldn’t quite put his finger on exactly what was bothering him, but he had learnt long ago to trust his gut instinct in these matters. He just hoped that the precautions he had taken to ensure his students’ safe return would be sufficient.
‘Good morning, Mr Fanchu, Mr Malpense. You are scheduled to depart shortly. I trust that there were no problems with any of the arrangements,’ Nero said, looking from one boy to the other.
‘Everything is in order,’ Wing replied. ‘We were informed that we would not need to bring anything with us.’
‘That is correct. You will find that everything you need has been supplied at the safe house in Tokyo,’ Nero said, looking past the boys towards the entrance. ‘Ah, good, your chaperone has arrived.’
Raven was walking down the stairs to the launch pad, an unwelcome if not entirely unexpected addition to their travelling party, Otto thought to himself. He and the others had briefly discussed what Nero might do to keep track of them once they left the school over dinner the previous evening. Laura had expected that some form of sub-dermal tracking device would be implanted in them both before leaving. Otto feared that Raven would be entirely more difficult to evade than any amount of sophisticated tracking technology.
‘Gentlemen,’ Raven greeted them as she approached, ‘I trust we are all ready for our trip.’
‘I’ve asked Raven to accompany you to ensure your safe return to H.I.V.E.’ Nero smiled at Otto and Wing. ‘After all, we wouldn’t want anything to stand in the way of your continued education, would we?’
‘I feel safer already,’ Otto replied. He may have promised Wing that he would return to H.I.V.E., but any plans that they might have had to evade Nero’s surveillance had now essentially been reduced to nil.
‘I’m flattered that you feel that way, Mr Malpense,’ Raven said with a slight smile. ‘Are the pre-flight checks complete?’
‘Yes, the Shroud is ready,’ Nero replied, beckoning one of the nearby guards to approach. ‘Guard, would you be so good as to escort these two students to their seats.’ The man nodded and gestured for Otto and Wing to follow him over to the waiting aircraft.
‘I’ve contacted the safe house, they’re ready for us,’ Raven reported, watching the two boys climb the steps leading to the Shroud’s interior.
‘Good,’ Nero replied. ‘Be careful, Natalya, I suspect that you’ll have your hands full with those two, and I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong here.’
‘Don’t worry, Max. I know what those two are capable of. I’ll take good care of them.’
‘I have no doubt of that. Just make sure that you all make it back here in one piece,’ Nero said as the Shroud’s engines began noisily to warm up on the launch pad.
‘When have I ever let you down?’ Raven replied, raising her voice over the noise of the jets. She smiled at Nero, slung her equipment bag over her shoulder and walked quickly towards the boarding ladder.
She had never let him down, Nero knew that, but given Number One’s constant reminders that his own well-being and that of Otto Malpense were inextricably linked, he couldn’t quite shake an unusual feeling of nervousness. If Raven did not keep her promise and something did happen to Malpense, he felt sure that his own life expectancy would be measured in hours rather than years.
The noise of the engines rose to a roar as the entry hatch slid shut and the streamlined black aircraft rose slowly into the air. Nero watched as the huge camouflaged doors that concealed the true contents of the crater from the outside world rumbled open and the Shroud passed through the gap, climbing rapidly into the clear blue sky.
.
Chapter Four
Laura sat at her workstation in the computing sciences laboratory, staring at the monitor. Line after line of code filled the screen but her hands rested motionless on the keyboard. She’d been working on this code for weeks. It was meant to intercept encrypted wireless transmissions and allow the user to piggyback their own instructions invisibly on any data stream. She’d hoped that coding for a couple of hours might distract her slightly, but she kept finding her attention wandering. She was worried about Otto and Wing. She couldn’t really explain it, but she just had a terrible feeling that they wouldn’t be coming back. She’d tried to talk to Shelby about her anxieties but her friend had just laughed and told her that there was nothing to worry about, they were only going to be gone for a couple of days and there was no reason to suspect that anything bad would happen during that time. Shelby was probably right, but that hadn’t stopped Laura from worrying.
‘Come on, Brand, get on with it,’ she muttered, forcing herself to concentrate again on the complex routines that filled the screen in front of her. She was sure her code was bug-free, but for some reason it wasn’t working. She’d tried to create a dummy transmission in order to test her latest theory but every time she did she was getting a garbled torrent of nonsense instead of a clean data stream. She had deliberately used one of the more obscure transmission frequencies to avoid clashes with any of H.I.V.E.’s constant background network activity, but she was still getting interference from somewhere.
She ran a backtrace routine to see if she could identify the source of the problem, and as the results scrolled up the screen her brow furrowed with concern. It looked like someone was opening an unauthorised socket in H.I.V.E.’s network. The location wasn’t specific but somebody somewhere appeared to be attempting to covertly transmit a message from within the school. There was a sudden burst of activity on the line and then nothing. Laura retrieved the log of the last few seconds’ activity. The data that had been transmitted looked like nonsense but she pulled up the code anyway, just to be sure. At first glance the strings of jumbled characters seemed to be random but then something caught her attention. She quickly transferred the file containing the unusual transmission to the computer back in her room and shut down her workstation. She could examine the file later, she was already late for Tactical Education and she didn’t really want to end up being barked at by Colonel Francisco again.
Laura gathered up her stuff and hurried out of the lab, totally oblivious to the surveillance camera that turned silently to track her as she left.
On board the Shroud Otto sat in the windowless passenger compartment, entirely focused on the glowing display of his Blackbox. On the tiny screen page after page of text flicked past, too fast for anyone to follow but him.
‘Otto,’ Wing said, seated in the seat opposite. There was no response as Otto remained completely transfixed by the small black PDA.
‘Otto!’ Wing said more loudly, breaking the trance and finally getting his friend’s attention. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Learning Japanese,’ Otto replied, pausing the stream of text on the screen, ‘I had H.I.V.E.mind upload some textbooks to my Blackbox before we left.’
Wing chuckled at Otto. He had known people who had studied Japanese for years and who still did not feel they had mastered the language. Otto however seemed to think that today’s flight should give him ample time.
‘How’s it going?’ Wing asked.
‘OK, but you weren’t wrong when you told me how difficult it was. At this rate it’s going to be at least a couple of hours before I’m fluent.’ There was no smugness in Otto’s statement – by his standards that qualified as a steep learning curve.
‘Well, just let me know if you want to try out what you’ve learnt,’ Wing said, resting back against the padded headrest of his seat.
‘Not just yet,’ Otto replied. ‘I’d only make a fool of myself.’
Wing doubted that was true but he
knew how much Otto hated making even the most minor mistakes. The door through to the cockpit slid open and Raven climbed down into the passenger compartment. She smiled at Wing as she sat down in the seat next to him.
‘You’ll be glad to hear that we’re slightly ahead of schedule. We should arrive at our destination in a couple of hours.’
‘Thank you for choosing H.I.V.E. Airways,’ Otto muttered, glancing up at Raven.
‘Since we have some time together I thought that this might be a good opportunity to go over some of the ground rules,’ Raven said, her smile fading. ‘While we are beyond school limits you are in my care, and that being the case I intend to make sure that nothing . . . untoward . . . happens on our little trip. So here’s how it’s going to go.’
Otto switched off his Blackbox and gave Raven his full attention.
‘I don’t want either of you leaving my sight at any point when we’re away from the safe house. Where you go, I go, no exceptions. And yes, before you ask, Mr Malpense, that does include trips to the toilet, so if you’re shy I suggest you make sure that you’ve gone before we leave.’ Wing raised an eyebrow at this; Otto tried to keep a straight face.
‘If anything unexpected happens, you follow my orders without question. My job is to keep you both safe and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to ensure you don’t end up in harm’s way, but you have to trust me and do what you’re told. If anything happens to me you make your way back to the safe house as quickly as possible. No heroics. I can look after myself and I don’t want or need any help from you two.’
Raven suddenly fixed Otto with a very cold stare.
‘I hope it goes without saying that any attempt to escape my supervision will be treated as deliberate truancy. I’m sure that I don’t need to remind either of you what the H.I.V.E. mandated punishment for that is.’
Otto did not need reminding. He may have trusted Raven to protect them, but he had no illusions about what she would be prepared to do if the school’s security was jeopardised.
Raven got up out of her seat and gave a crooked smile.
‘OK, so we’re clear on the ground rules. If there’s anything else you need or if you have any other questions, I’ll be up on the flight deck. In the meantime I suggest you enjoy the view,’ she said, looking around the entirely windowless compartment. Otto’d hoped that he might have been able to get some clue as to the geographical location of H.I.V.E. if he’d been able to spot any other landmarks, but whoever had designed the vehicle had clearly decided that windows were an unnecessary extravagance. The two boys watched in silence as Raven climbed back up to the flight deck, only speaking again when she had disappeared from view.
‘Well, sounds like we’re going to be well looked after,’ Otto said with a sly smile.
‘I was expecting little less,’ Wing replied quietly, ‘though I get the impression that Raven is less than happy with being assigned this task. I can’t imagine why.’
Otto grinned at Wing’s single raised eyebrow. He wished he could have seen Raven’s face when Nero had told her that she was going to be accompanying the pair of them on this trip.
‘You do kind of get the impression that she’d rather be somewhere else, don’t you?’
‘She has nothing to worry about though, right?’ Wing whispered, looking Otto straight in the eye.
‘Don’t worry,’ Otto replied, ‘I promise I’ll behave myself, but I want you to promise me something in return.’
‘What is it, Otto?’ Wing asked, sensing the sudden note of seriousness in his friend’s voice.
‘When we get back to H.I.V.E., we find out everything we can about the amulet that Nero was wearing,’ Otto whispered. ‘Let’s find out if it is the other half of that one round your neck.’
Wing looked down at the steel decking, silent for a moment.
‘Very well, though I fear that it may be difficult to find out any more without confronting Nero directly.’
‘I don’t think that would be very wise,’ Otto replied, ‘but there has to be another way to find out the truth.’
‘Unfortunately the truth is a commodity that is in short supply at H.I.V.E.’ Wing seemed suddenly lost in thought.
‘Are you sure you want to know?’ Otto asked quietly.
‘Yes,’ Wing looked carefully at Otto, ‘but sometimes you should fear the truth, sometimes it is better not to know.’
Otto understood how Wing felt, but until this question was answered there was always going to be something tying his friend to the school, something that would stop them seizing on a golden opportunity for escape like this. There was a little voice very deep inside Otto that asked if he would take that opportunity himself if it arose in the next few days. The truth was that he wasn’t entirely sure, but it would still be better to have the choice when the chance presented itself.
‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ Otto replied, ‘oh, and a megalomaniacal headmaster, the world’s deadliest assassin, giant mutated plant monsters, an international cartel of super-villains and the security forces of every country on earth, but other than that . . . just fear.’
‘What are you doing?’ Shelby asked, peering over Laura’s shoulder at the screen on her desk, which was filled with cascading symbols.
‘Banging my head against a brick wall at the moment,’ Laura replied, still staring at the glowing monitor. She’d spent the past hour trying to make some sense of the fragmentary signal that she’d managed to retrieve from the network, but the longer she stared at the screen the further away the answer seemed to be.
‘What is it?’ Shelby asked, leaning closer to the screen.
‘Something I picked up on earlier. I think it’s part of some sort of transmission, but it’s using encryption that I’m not familiar with.’ Laura frowned slightly as she spoke.
‘Come on. Don’t worry about it, it’s probably just the security section’s shopping order.’ Shelby took an impatient step towards the door.
‘No, I think someone was trying to hide it. Something’s not right.’
‘Well, can you put it on hold for an hour?’ Shelby said, sounding slightly frustrated. ‘The senior boys’ water polo practice starts in five minutes and I want to get good seats. It’s the highlight of my week and I’m not going to miss it just because Brand’s got her nose buried in machine code again.’
‘You go on, I’ll catch up,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t suppose that you’ve actually bothered to learn the rules of water polo yet though, have you?’
‘There are rules?’ Shelby grinned.
‘Save me a seat,’ Laura replied with a chuckle as Shelby headed out the door.
‘Don’t be long,’ Shelby said and hurried away along the walkway outside.
As the room fell silent again Laura’s attention returned to the monitor. The apparently random strings of numbers and letters continued to scroll past. The more she looked at them the more convinced she was that it was an encrypted signal, but the key to decrypting it still danced maddeningly beyond reach. She wasn’t used to being stumped like this – her uncanny abilities with computers were after all the reason she’d ended up at H.I.V.E. in the first place. She remembered the sense of disorientation she had felt when Nero had informed her that her parents had sent her to the school voluntarily so that she would not end up in prison for carrying out a highly illegal hack on the command computers at an American air force base. Until then she’d believed that she’d been abducted by H.I.V.E. without their knowledge. Finding out that they’d allowed it to happen had been a difficult thing to accept, even if they had been trying to protect her.
‘Damn,’ Laura hissed. ‘Concentrate, Brand.’ She’d tried to put her old life, her normal life, to the back of her mind – it had seemed like the best way to survive at H.I.V.E. – but it was never quite as easy as that. It was no good – the fact that her mind was wandering like this was a sure-fire sign that her concentration had been broken. There was little point now in sitting there staring at the scr
een hoping that the numbers would suddenly make sense. She needed to take her mind off the problem and focus on something else. She shut down her workstation and got up from the desk, looking at her watch. There was still time to get down to the pool before the practice started. She too would have to learn the rules of water polo at some point, she supposed.
Otto looked up from the pages of text flicking past on his Blackbox as he felt the Shroud bank sharply to the left, and heard the distinctive roar of the engines change in volume and pitch. They were slowing down.
Raven’s voice came over the tannoy in the passenger compartment.
‘We’re on final approach now, gentlemen, so buckle up.’
Wing and Otto both dutifully clipped their restraining harnesses closed.
‘Well, looks like we’re here,’ Otto said as he fastened the final belt into place.
Wing gave Otto a nod and a small, tight smile. He was clearly not relishing the prospect of his imminent return to his old home.
Up on the flight deck Raven peered past the pilots at Tokyo’s skyline, its perpetual glow illuminating the night sky. They were still a fair distance from the city but they had to make as unobtrusive an arrival as possible.
‘Five miles out,’ one of the pilots reported, reaching for a panel of switches mounted on the ceiling. ‘Engaging thermoptic camo, engines to whisper mode.’
The roar of the engines suddenly stopped, replaced instead with the faintest of whispers. At the same time, the photoreactive skin of the aircraft flickered briefly and then fully engaged, rendering the Shroud almost invisible to the naked eye. Someone who knew what to look for might notice a slight shimmering in the sky as the Shroud passed by, but to most people the powerful aircraft would now attract little more attention than a breath of wind.