‘Are you guys going to be OK in here?’ Otto asked. He looked around the interior of the fake church and was struck by just how much attention to detail had been used when the building was constructed.
‘Don’t worry. We’ll be fine,’ Laura said, helping Tom lower Nigel on to the floor behind the altar.
‘How are you feeling, Nigel?’ Otto asked. His friend looked paler and his breathing seemed more laboured.
‘I’ve felt better,’ Nigel said quietly. ‘I don’t think I’d really recommend getting shot, to be honest.’
‘It wasn’t actually that high on my list of things to try,’ Otto said with a smile. ‘Don’t worry, help will be here soon.’
Otto handed Laura one of the Disciple assault rifles.
‘I know you don’t want it but take it anyway. If they get past us, then it’s up to you and Tom to protect Nigel and Penny.’
‘Hey,’ Penny said with a frown as she sat down next to Nigel, ‘I’m not that badly hurt.’
‘I know but you’re not in any condition to go running around outside either,’ Tom said. ‘Don’t worry, Otto, we’ll be fine.’
‘OK, I need to get back outside and make sure that Wing and Shel know what they’re doing,’ Otto said. ‘See you guys soon.’
Otto and Laura walked back towards the church doors together. Otto pulled the door open but Laura pushed it shut and pulled him towards her.
‘Good luck,’ Laura said and then she kissed him. It felt just like he had hoped it would. It felt right. Otto pulled away from her and stared into her eyes. There was something there that he hadn’t expected – she looked afraid.
‘Hey, don’t worry,’ Otto said, ‘we’re going to get through this. In a few hours we’ll all be back at H.I.V.E. wishing we had something more exciting to do.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Laura said with a sad smile.
‘’Course I’m right,’ Otto said with a grin as he pushed the door open again. ‘I always am, remember.’
The Disciple commander examined the enormous rusted doors. There was no doubt that the beacon signal was coming from somewhere on the other side of them.
‘The gunship’s reporting that there’s some sort of glass dome hidden between the peaks up there,’ his comms officer said, pointing up to the rocky slopes that loomed above them. ‘They’re saying that there’s some sort of artificial lighting inside and what look like buildings.’
‘What is this place?’ the commander asked with a frown. ‘It’s not on any of the maps.’
‘That’s not unusual for the Russian military,’ the comms officer replied. ‘At least that’s who I’m assuming built this.’
‘I want this door taken down,’ the commander said. ‘Get a demolition charge set up.’
‘Yes, sir, it’ll take a few minutes.’
The commander walked back down the road towards the two transport helicopters that had brought him and his troops up the mountain. Minerva waited as he approached.
‘We should be inside shortly,’ the commander reported.
‘Good, the longer that beacon is transmitting the more likely it is that G.L.O.V.E. forces will detect it. We cannot afford a direct confrontation at this stage,’ Minerva replied. ‘Nero must be weakened first.’
Minerva and the commander watched as two of his men worked quickly to attach shaped charges to the metal door. After a couple of minutes they both hurried back towards the helicopters. The man holding the remote detonator looked at the commander and he gave a quick nod.
‘Fire in the hole!’
‘How did this happen?’ Nero asked angrily. ‘Why wasn’t he searched more carefully when he was detained?’
He and Chief Dekker watched as two security guards carried a sheet-covered body on a stretcher out of the detention block.
‘I’m sorry, Doctor Nero,’ Dekker replied, ‘it never occurred to me that he might have some sort of suicide capsule. It must have been smuggled to him by his Disciple contact. We know that they had equipment brought into the school for him by his contact. We found a covert transmitter hidden in his quarters. It seems that there was an awful lot about Cole Harrington that nobody knew.’
‘What about his accomplices, the Henchman students?’ Nero asked. ‘Are they working for the Disciples as well?’
‘No, I don’t believe so,’ Dekker replied. ‘I think they were just unwitting pawns. In their case, very unwitting. I don’t think either of them would even be able to spell “Disciple” much less leak information to them.’
‘That still means that there is somebody inside the school who is working for the Disciples,’ Nero said with a frown. ‘It has to be somebody that has permission to leave the island or they wouldn’t be able to get this equipment in the first place. Which means that we’re either looking for a member of the teaching staff or someone on the support staff. Either way we’re going to have to try and flush them out. We can’t afford a traitor in our midst, especially at the moment.’
‘I shall start conducting interviews with everyone who has been off the island in the last six months,’ Dekker said. ‘This isn’t going to be easy. That’s a lot of people when you consider how many of the teaching and support staff have taken leave during that period.’
‘I suggest you start immediately, Chief. We have no time to lose.’
‘Understood. I will schedule the first interviews for this afternoon.’
‘Good. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to head back to the control room to see if there have been any developments in the search for Raven and the surviving Alphas.’
Nero walked out of the detention centre and headed up the corridor towards the control room, his mind racing. Things were moving too fast. He was used to dealing with casualties in his line of work but he had never found it easy to accept the death of one of his students. The fact that the Disciples had murdered or captured almost an entire year of Alpha students was unbearable. Despite that, he knew that he had to stay focused. If he dwelled too much on the scale of the unfolding tragedy in Siberia he would be of no use to anyone. Raven and the remaining Alphas were still out there somewhere and he would do absolutely everything in his power to ensure that they were returned to the school unharmed. He walked into the control room and one of the communications technicians hurried over to him.
‘Doctor Nero, we’ve just received a transmission from Colonel Francisco,’ the tech said quickly. ‘They’ve picked up a Shroud distress beacon in the mountains to the north of their current position. They’re trying to get a fix on its location now.’
The Disciple troops picked their way through the twisted remains of the metal doors in the mountainside and headed down the tunnel beyond with the commander and Minerva just behind them. Enough of the lights in the ceiling were working for them to see that this was clearly a military facility of some kind. There were rooms that were unmistakeably barracks and mess halls. The Disciple troops moved slowly and carefully, alert for any sign of booby traps or an ambush. They knew that they could take no chances, especially considering the prey that they were hunting. Eventually they arrived at the control room at the end of the passage. The soldiers took up defensive positions around the room as the commander and Minerva looked down through the huge window at the bizarre scene below them.
‘A slice of apple pie in the heart of the motherland,’ Minerva said. ‘I had heard of such places existing but I had never seen one before today. I expect the Americans had an artificial Russian town just like this hidden away somewhere too.’
‘It may be a fascinating relic of the cold war,’ the commander said, ‘but it is also a problem. They could be anywhere down there.’
‘Then I suggest you start your search immediately, commander,’ Minerva replied. ‘There is no time to waste.’
‘OK. We’ll head for the town square first,’ the commander said, addressing his men, ‘then conduct an expanding sweep search from there. Let’s move out.’
The commander headed out on to the gantry and followed his men down the stairs to the cavern floor. They made slow but steady progress down the main street towards the centre of the town, checking carefully for any sign of a trap.
‘How far to the beacon?’ the commander asked as his men reached the town square.
‘It seems to be coming from the church,’ his comms officer replied, waving a small electronic device back and forth in front of him.
‘OK, I want four-man fire teams there, there and there,’ the commander said, pointing to positions around the outside of the square. ‘Overlapping fields of fire. I want this square to be a kill box.’
His men moved quickly towards the strategic locations he had picked out. The commander knew that just because the beacon was in the church it didn’t mean that Raven and the H.I.V.E. students would be but, he was certainly not going to take any chances at this stage. He needed to deactivate the beacon before G.L.O.V.E. could use it to pinpoint their location.
‘OK, let’s see if we can find that thing and turn it off,’ the commander said. ‘Ma’am, I suggest you wait here.’
Minerva gave a quick nod and the commander led the rest of his men across the square towards the church. They were halfway to the church when there was a monstrous roar from the direction of the fire station on the other side of the square. The commander and his men slowed, trying to identify where the sound was coming from. Suddenly, in an explosion of splintered wood, the doors on the front of the fire station’s garage exploded outwards as a tank smashed through them.
Inside the tank Wing pressed hard on the accelerator pedal, sending the giant armoured vehicle roaring towards the startled group of soldiers in the middle of the square. The troops scattered in all directions as the tank bore down on them, a couple of them squeezing off pointless bursts of fire from their rifles, the rounds pinging harmlessly off the tank’s armoured skin.
‘Keep them away from the church,’ Otto yelled from the command seat in the turret. Wing swung the tank towards the church doors, blocking the way as Otto brought the main gun to bear on one of the fire teams that the Disciples had set up at the edges of the square.
‘Now, Shelby!’ Otto yelled over the growl of the giant diesel engine. ‘Fire!’
It had only taken Otto a minute to read the thick operations manual that he had found inside the tank, though it had taken slightly longer to try to show the others how the systems they would be operating worked. He doubted that any tank crew had been trained in half an hour before but thankfully it had been designed and engineered to actually be very straightforward to operate. What Otto was slightly less confident of was whether or not the fifty-year-old vehicle’s main weapon was still functioning correctly.
‘Woohoo!’ Shelby yelled as she pulled the trigger on the main cannon’s firing controls and the whole tank rocked with the recoil. On the far side of the square the building behind the Disciple troops’ position exploded in a cloud of dust, shattered masonry and woodwork flying in all directions. Otto rotated the turret, towards one of the other Disciple positions. The men scattered, running for cover.
‘Franz, give me a sitrep,’ Otto said into the throat mic of one of the communicators that they had obtained from the soldiers in the woods the previous day. High above the square, in the church tower, Franz scanned the streets below with an ancient pair of binoculars which he had taken from the tank earlier.
‘There is being one group heading down the road east of you,’ Franz said as he watched the Disciple troops fleeing through the streets, trying to hide from the armoured monster that had suddenly attacked them. ‘And there is being another group who are heading south towards where Raven is waiting.’
‘OK, we’re heading east,’ Otto said, almost feeling sorry for the men who were fleeing south. ‘Wing, take us through the drugstore.’
In one of the adjoining streets the commander led his men away from the square at a run. They were not equipped to take down a tank – they needed to retreat and regroup. He had seen other vehicles that had been left around the town during some long-forgotten military exercise but it had never occurred to him for a moment that there would be anything as deadly as a tank. Suddenly the ground beneath his feet began to tremble and then the tank exploded through the wall just in front of him, burying several of his men. He and the rest of his men turned and ran as the tank’s turret rotated towards them. There was a thunderous boom and the wall ahead of them exploded. Several of his men went down as the commander ducked into an adjoining alleyway, running for his life.
To the south some of the remaining Disciple soldiers were gathered in the backyard of one of the houses that made up the sprawling suburbs surrounding the main square.
‘What do we do?’ one of the men said, sounding panicked. ‘We can’t fight that thing. We don’t have any anti-armour weaponry.’
Raven somersaulted off the roof of the house behind them and landed just a couple of metres from the startled soldiers, a glowing katana in each hand.
‘That’s the least of your worries,’ she said with a nasty smile.
In the church tower Franz watched the purple blades slashing away for a few seconds before he lowered his binoculars, looking distinctly pale.
‘You know,’ he said to himself, ‘I am really wishing that I hadn’t been watching that.’
Amidst the chaos unfolding in the streets below Franz did not notice a figure dressed in black hurrying across the square, dashing from cover to cover, heading for the church doors.
Inside the tank, Wing wrenched on the controls and sent the tank smashing straight through a brightly coloured, timber-clad house as he continued his pursuit of the fleeing remnants of the Disciple forces.
‘Fire!’ Otto yelled and Shelby pulled the trigger. The shell struck the rear of one of the abandoned military trucks that had been parked in the middle of the road ahead of the Disciples troops and it flipped up into the air before slamming back down on the road in a cloud of smoke and fire.
‘OK, forget the Ferrari,’ Shelby shouted, a massive grin on her face. ‘The day I get my driving licence, I’m getting one of these things.’
‘I’m not sure they’re that easy to buy second-hand, Shel,’ Otto yelled back, ‘but, yeah, I do know what you mean.’
Back inside the church, Tom and Laura levelled their rifles at the door at the far end of the aisle as the handle slowly turned. A woman with a veiled face, dressed all in black, walked into the church.
‘Don’t move!’ Tom yelled at the woman. ‘You take one more step and we shoot.’
‘Oh, you don’t want to shoot me, young man,’ Minerva said. ‘You see, the organisation I represent would not take kindly to anything happening to me. They might hurt all sorts of people if that were to happen. They might even be people that you care for, isn’t that right, Miss Brand?’
‘Drop the gun, Tom,’ Laura said, turning and pointing her rifle at his head. ‘I don’t want to kill you but I will if I have to.’
‘Laura,’ Nigel gasped, ‘what on earth are you doing?’
‘The only thing I can. Now drop the gun.’
Otto aimed the tank’s cannon at the handful of remaining Disciple troops as they backed up against the cavern wall. There was nowhere for them to run. Suddenly Franz’s voice crackled in his earpiece.
‘Otto, come in, Otto,’ Franz said urgently.
‘What is it, Franz,’ Otto replied.
‘There is someone who is wanting to be speaking to you,’ Franz said, sounding frightened.
‘What do you mean, what’s going on, Franz?’ Otto asked.
‘Hello, Mr Malpense,’ a dry, rasping voice said in his ear. ‘My name is Minerva and I would very much like you to surrender immediately to my troops. If you don’t I’m going to execute all of your friends who were hiding in the church one by one while you listen. Do not make the mistake of thinking this is a negotiation. I expect to see you shortly.’
The line went dead. Otto sat there for a moment, his mind racing, trying to formulate some kind of plan but he realised there was nothing he could do. Whoever this Minerva was, she suddenly held all the cards.
‘Guys,’ Otto said, suddenly feeling a sense of creeping despair, ‘they’ve captured the others. We have to give ourselves up.’
The Disciple commander shoved Otto roughly in the back, pushing him towards the centre of the square where his friends were already kneeling in a line with their hands on their heads.
‘Ahhh, Mr Malpense, so good of you to join us,’ Minerva said as the commander forced him down on to his knees.
‘What happened?’ Otto said, looking at Tom.
‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Tom said bitterly, nodding towards Laura, who was standing nearby, staring at the ground.
‘What are you talking about?’ Otto asked, genuinely confused. ‘Laura, what’s he talking about?’
‘Tell him, Miss Brand,’ Minerva said. ‘Tell him what a fool he’s been. Tell him how you were the one that gave us the location of the Hunt. Tell him how you tricked him into obtaining that information for us. Tell him everything.’
‘Laura,’ Otto said pleadingly, ‘what’s she saying? That can’t be . . .’
Otto fell silent as he realised that this was exactly what he had already begun to suspect. That someone within their group had betrayed them. But it couldn’t be Laura, it just couldn’t. No matter how he tried to deny it, deep inside he knew that it was true. He thought back to Laura persuading him that hacking into H.I.V.E.mind would be fun and how she’d been so relieved that he’d managed to discover the location of the Hunt when she’d thought they’d lost everything. But more than that he knew it was true because he could feel his heart breaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ Laura sobbed, still staring at the floor. ‘I had no choice.’
‘You had no choice?’ Otto shouted, suddenly angry. ‘What do you mean, you had no choice?’
‘They have my family!’ Laura shouted back at him, her voice filled with anger and despair. ‘My mum, my dad, the baby brother that thanks to H.I.V.E. I never even knew I had! I MEAN I HAD NO BLOODY CHOICE! They were going to kill them.’ She began to cry, tears rolling down her face. ‘They were going to kill them all unless I did exactly what they told me.’
‘Oh God, Laura,’ Shelby said, tears in her eyes too. ‘Oh hon, please tell me you didn’t do this.’
‘But I did, Shel. This is all my fault,’ Laura sobbed. ‘All those people died because of me. I had no idea what they were planning. If I’d known, maybe I wouldn’t have . . . I dunno . . . maybe I’d have been able to stop all this. Now I don’t think I can live with all this blood on my hands.’
‘Laura,’ Otto said, ‘look at me.’
Laura looked at him, her bright green eyes red with tears.
‘This isn’t your fault, you didn’t kill anyone . . . they did.’ Otto pointed at Minerva. ‘And I promise you, no matter what, we’re going to make them pay for every last drop of blood they’ve spilled.’
‘Such optimism, Mr Malpense,’ Minerva said coldly, ‘but I fear that the only way you are going to have your revenge on me is if you come back and haunt me and I’m afraid I don’t believe in ghosts. Don’t worry though I’m not going to kill all of your friends. Miss Brand has earned a reprieve with her exemplary service and young Mr Darkdoom is worth far more to me alive than dead. These two,’ Minerva gestured towards Tom and Penny, ‘I don’t know these two. It seems they had nothing to do with the destruction of Overlord so I am minded to spare them. Especially when they are such promising candidates.’
‘Candidates?’ Tom asked. ‘Candidates for what?’
‘Oh, you’ll see, my dear,’ Minerva hissed, ‘you’ll see.’ She motioned to the commander of the Disciple forces. ‘Take these four to the transport.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the commander replied, hauling Laura to her feet. She twisted out of his grip and ran to Otto, hugging him.
‘It was Dekker,’ Laura whispered in his ear. ‘Dekker works for the Disciples. I love you.’ The soldier pulled her off Otto and dragged her away at gunpoint. Another two soldiers lifted Nigel on to a stretcher. Tom and Penny followed along behind with their own armed escort.
‘I know you’re here,’ Minerva suddenly shouted to the air. ‘I know you’re watching, Raven. Surrender now or I put a bullet in his skull.’ She pulled a pistol from inside her coat and levelled it at Otto’s head. ‘You have five seconds. One . . . two . . . three . . .’
Otto felt his heart sink as he saw Raven step out from the shadows of one of the buildings destroyed by their tank. She walked towards them, her hands raised in the air.
‘Far enough,’ Minerva said. ‘Lose the weapons.’
Raven slipped out of her tactical harness and let it drop to the ground. One of the Disciple soldiers ran over and picked it up as two more kept her covered with their rifles.
‘Hands behind your back,’ Minerva instructed. ‘Commander, tie her hands.’ The commander walked forward and pulled a thick cable tie from one of the pouches on his belt. He looped it round Raven’s wrists and pulled it tight with a zipping sound.
‘You couldn’t let them die, could you,’ Minerva said, walking towards Raven. ‘Sentimentality was always your weakness, Natalya.’
‘Who are you?’ Raven asked, her expression furious. There was something hauntingly familiar about the woman’s rasping voice.
‘Don’t you recognise your handiwork, my dear?’ Minerva said, lifting up her veil. The hideously disfigured face beneath was covered in scar tissue, the relics of what must have been horrific burns. Despite the disfigurement there was one thing that had not changed – her eyes. Eyes that Raven would never, could never forget. In that instant Otto saw something in Raven’s expression that he had never seen before. Fear.
‘That can’t be. You’re dead . . . I watched you die,’ Raven gasped, her eyes wide with horror.
‘No, Natalya,’ Anastasia Furan said, ‘you didn’t kill me, you just left me wishing you had. You betrayed me, you killed my brother Pietor and you helped that brat destroy Overlord. For that I am going to make you watch me kill these children with your own weapon.’ She put her pistol back into the shoulder holster inside her coat and took one of Raven’s katanas from the soldier that had been carrying them. ‘Then I’m going to use it on you.’
Anastasia walked towards Otto, Wing, Shelby and Franz.
‘I’ll even let you decide which one goes first,’ she said with a sadistic smile.
‘Just get on with it, you scar-faced old hag,’ Otto said, his voice filled with contempt, ‘or are you going to try to talk us to death like Overlord did. I honestly can’t tell you what was better – the fact that Overlord died in agony or that he was wearing your brother’s body like a cheap suit at the time. I suppose you’d call it two birds with one stone.’
Anastasia turned towards him, her face furious.
‘You obviously have a death wish, Mr Malpense,’ she snarled. ‘Well, consider your wish granted.’
She raised the sword above her head. Otto closed his eyes. The world seemed to slow as he used every ounce of his mental strength to push past the electromagnetic shielding that Professor Pike had installed round the tiny but incredibly powerful fuel cell that powered the sword’s variable geometry forcefield. He could not see but could sense the sword swinging towards his neck in slow motion as he commanded the fuel cell to discharge all the power it contained in an instant. The handle of the sword detonated like a tiny bomb with a bright white flash. Furan shrieked as the blade clattered to the ground, clutching at the shredded remains of her hand. The soldiers nearby staggered backwards rubbing their eyes, temporarily blinded by the light of the detonation. Otto opened his eyes and leapt forward, slamming into her and knocking her off her feet. They tumbled backwards together as Otto reached inside her coat and pulled the pistol from her shoulder holster and pressed it to her forehead.
‘Drop your weapons, all of you,’ Otto shouted to the Disciple troops, ‘or I pull the trigger.’
‘Shoot him!’ Anastasia hissed. ‘That’s an order.’ Otto cocked the hammer on the pistol, pushing the muzzle harder into her scarred brow.
The soldiers looked to their commander, unsure what to do. The commander raised his rifle, aiming it at Otto. In the split second before he could pull the trigger there was an enormous explosion above them. Everyone’s heads snapped upwards just in time to see the blazing wreckage of the Disciples’ helicopter gunship crash into the glass dome overhead. The dome disintegrated as the doomed aircraft hit it and the blazing remains of the helicopter and a shower of giant glass shards plummeted towards the startled occupants of the square below.
‘Run!’ Otto yelled at his friends as the Disciple troops scattered in all directions. Otto leapt to his feet and sprinted for cover in the fire station garage as Anastasia Furan staggered to her feet and ran in the opposite direction. The commander of the Disciple troops seemed frozen in place as the burning hull of the gunship fell from the sky and smashed down on top of him. The explosion knocked Otto and his friends off their feet, sending them sprawling. Massive glass sheets smashed down around them, exploding in sprays of deadly crystal shrapnel. Otto, Wing, Franz and Shelby all ran headlong for the fire station garage. They dashed inside as more and more glass tumbled into the square, huge sheets impacting like mortar shells. After a minute or so the dust in the square began to settle and the full extent of the damage became visible. The flaming debris of the gunship lay surrounded by tons of shattered glass and the church building was on fire, the flames spreading rapidly across its wooden structure. Several of the remaining Disciple troops had not made it to cover and lay where they had been cut down by the lethal rain of glass.
‘Stay down,’ Otto whispered to the others as he saw Disciple troops starting to cautiously emerge from the buildings they had taken cover inside around the square. One of them pointed over to the fire station. Otto was just about to shout to his friends to run when the air behind the advancing Disciple troops shimmered and one of H.I.V.E.’s assault Shrouds decloaked. The soldiers never even knew what hit them as the Gatling cannon under the chin of the dropship spun up and opened fire. Seconds later a dozen men in black body armour leapt from the loading ramp at the rear of the Shroud and spread out, forming a defensive perimeter.
‘Looks like the cavalry’s here,’ Otto said with a relieved sigh. ‘Guys, this is going to sound weird but don’t tell them anything about what Laura did. Let me handle it.’
He looked at his friends, seeing his own confusion, anger and sadness reflected in their eyes. One by one they nodded their agreement.
‘OK, let’s go.’
Otto, Wing, Shelby and Franz walked slowly out of the fire station and a couple of the G.L.O.V.E. troops spotted them and raised their rifles.
‘Hey, same team!’ Shelby yelled.
‘Hold your fire,’ Colonel Francisco bellowed as he ran down the Shroud’s loading ramp.
‘I think I can honestly say that this is being the first time I have ever been happy to be seeing Colonel Francisco,’ Franz said quietly, a relieved smile on his face.
‘I’m glad to see that at least some of you made it,’ the Colonel said. ‘Sorry it took us so long to get here. If it hadn’t been for that beacon, I doubt we would have ever found you.’
‘Well, you can thank Raven for that,’ Otto said, suddenly frowning. ‘Hold on, where is she?’
Anastasia Furan ran along the corridor leading out of the hidden facility, trying to ignore the agonising pain from her shredded right hand. She had endured far, far worse before now. She reached the shattered exterior doors and stepped out into the daylight. The transport helicopter was waiting, its rotors spinning at full speed, ready for take off. She hurried across the snow-covered ground as the rear ramp of the helicopter lowered and climbed inside with the help of two of the Disciple soldiers on-board. Laura, Tom and Penny sat huddled at the other end of the compartment with Nigel lying on the stretcher next to them.
‘Get us out of here,’ she yelled at the pilot who pulled on the collective control and sent the giant twin-rotored chopper climbing into the sky. Anastasia looked out of the rear hatch and felt a chill as she saw a familiar figure sprinting across the snow towards the slowly climbing helicopter.
‘We need more altitude,’ she yelled.
On the ground Raven aimed her grappler at the rear of the transport which was now twenty metres off the ground and fired. The dart attached to the helicopter’s metal skin and Raven hit the retraction control, sending herself shooting into the sky, trailing behind the helicopter as it tipped forward and swooped away from the mountain.
One of the Disciple troops on the helicopter braced himself just inside the open hatch, drew his pistol and aimed at Raven as she whipped around on the end of the monofilament line a dozen metres behind the helicopter. The motors in the grappler screeched in protest as they tried slowly to pull Raven towards the back of the transport, fighting against the massive turbulence that tossed her around like a fish struggling at the end of a line. The soldier fired and missed twice before Furan snatched the gun from him with her good hand. She didn’t aim at Raven – instead she took careful aim at the silver dart embedded in the helicopter’s fuselage just outside the hatch. She fired and the bullet struck the dart with a spark, dislodging it and sending Raven tumbling away into the sky. Furan ran to the rear hatch and looked down at the dark green treetops that flew past below. She handed the pistol back to the soldier and hit the switch to close the rear hatch.
‘Goodbye, Natalya,’ she said as the hatch closed with a thud.
‘We’ve finished our sweep, sir,’ the G.L.O.V.E. soldier reported. ‘There’s no sign of anyone else inside the facility. The Shroud even performed a thermal scan of the cavern from the air and there’s nothing.’
‘Understood, lieutenant,’ Francisco said. ‘Get the rest of your men back on-board the Shroud. We’re heading back to H.I.V.E.’
Francisco walked up the ramp to the Shroud’s interior and watched as the medic finished checking over the four Alphas.
‘They all seem fine,’ the medic said as Francisco approached. ‘A little dehydrated and some cuts and bruises but nothing serious.’
Francisco nodded and walked over to where the four exhausted-looking Alphas were sitting.
‘There’s still no sign of Raven or the other missing students,’ Francisco said. ‘I’m taking you back to H.I.V.E. Nero’s orders.’
‘We’re just going to leave?’ Otto said angrily. ‘How do we know that the Disciples aren’t holed up somewhere nearby with Laura and the others?’
‘We don’t have time for a full search of the area and Disciple reinforcements might arrive at any moment,’ the Colonel said, shaking his head. ‘We have to get out of here.’
Shelby suddenly burst into tears, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. Wing put his arms around her and hugged her.
‘We will find them,’ Wing said. ‘I swear to you.’
The last of the G.L.O.V.E. troops filed on to the Shroud and Francisco headed towards the rear. He walked down the ramp and looked around the debris-filled town square. The fires started by the destruction of the gunship that they’d shot down were spreading and there was little they could do to stop them. Soon the whole facility would be ablaze. He was just about to head back up the ramp when he saw a familiar figure walking slowly towards him across the square.
‘You weren’t going to leave without me, were you?’ Raven asked, raising an eyebrow. She was walking with a slight limp and her bodysuit was torn in several places, blood covering her face from a nasty gash in her hairline.
‘You look like hell,’ Francisco said, smiling.
‘We’ll see how you look after you fall from a helicopter,’ Raven said. ‘The other Alphas are gone. I tried to stop them being taken but I was too late.’
‘Nero’s ordered us back to H.I.V.E.,’ Francisco said.
‘Good, I need to speak to him. Our situation may be worse than we thought,’ Raven said, frowning.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Let’s just say that a ghost from mine and Max’s past has come back to haunt us.’
Raven walked up the ramp and into the Shroud, Francisco just behind her. The Colonel closed the loading ramp and the Shroud’s turbine engines roared into life, lifting it into the air and up through the shattered remains of the glass dome overhead. As it climbed out of the cavern its cloaking systems engaged. It shimmered for a moment in the fading autumn light and then vanished.