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Chapter Twelve

Otto waited as Raven retrieved her twin swords from their hiding place amid the pipes that ran along the ceiling and strapped them to her back. She had kept the body armour that she’d ‘borrowed’ from the man guarding the brig, as well as one of the assault rifles from the fallen men who had been escorting Darkdoom. She looked very much like someone with whom you did not want to mess.

‘Right, once Diabolus has drawn off the guards we’re going to hit the bridge hard and fast,’ Raven explained. ‘If anyone starts shooting, keep your head down. All of this will have been for nothing if you catch a bullet. Understood?’

Otto nodded and the pair of them set off, keeping a careful look out for Drake’s men. When they reached a junction with the corridor leading to the bridge, Raven carefully peeked around the corner. She raised her hand, indicating with four fingers. How many guards she could see. There were bound to be more inside.

The pair of them waited in the shadows, not knowing how long it would take for Darkdoom to provide the necessary diversion. A couple of interminable minutes passed and Otto was just starting to convince himself that something had gone wrong when the alarms sounded. Raven pushed him back out of sight behind a storage locker as Furan and the guards from outside the bridge ran down the corridor, heading for the stairs that led to the lower decks.

They waited a few more seconds and then approached the bridge door. Raven hit the switch next to the door as Otto took cover to one side. It slid open with a hiss and she burst into the room, scanning for any immediate threats. The bridge crew were sat at their stations, leaving only two guards flanking the President. Drake turned as she entered and Raven felt a grim satisfaction at the horrified shock in his eyes as she levelled her rifle at him.

‘Nobody move,’ Raven shouted to the bridge crew and the two remaining guards. ‘Anyone so much as looks at me funny and Drake’s the first to die, understood?’

The guards on either side of the President tensed, as if considering their options, but quickly realised that she had the drop on them.

‘You two,’ she shouted at the guards, ‘pop the magazines and then put the rifles on the ground. Slowly.’

The men did as they were told and then raised their hands.

‘Otto, get in here!’ Raven yelled, keeping the gun trained on Drake.

‘You really are very irritating, you know,’ Drake said. ‘I should have had Furan kill you in New York. I won’t make the same mistake again.’

‘You won’t get another chance,’ Raven growled.

Otto hurried on to the bridge and quickly spotted the black briefcase that was connected to the weapon control terminal. He unplugged the cable connecting it to the console and closed the case.

‘That won’t do any good,’ Drake said smugly. ‘The orders have been issued. You can’t countermand them without access to the satellite communications grid, and only I have the code.’

‘Give it to me,’ Raven said, stepping forward and pressing the muzzle of the rifle to Drake’s forehead.

‘No,’ Drake replied, ‘I don’t think I will. In fact I think you’ll give me that rifle and put your hands in the air.’

Raven felt something cold and hard press into the back of her skull.

‘Sloppy, Natalya,’ Furan said, cocking the hammer on the pistol he held to her head. ‘Poorly planned and poorly executed. I thought I’d trained you better than that.’

Raven lowered the rifle and let it fall to the deck.

‘Mr Malpense, I presume,’ Drake said with a smile as he walked towards Otto. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll take that.’ He held out his hand for the briefcase and Otto reluctantly give it to him. ‘I assume since you two are here that it’s Darkdoom running around causing trouble down in engineering. Not to worry. My men will find him soon enough.’

He stared at Otto for a moment.

‘I’ve been doing some research on you, Mr Malpense, or may I call you Otto?’ Drake said. ‘Some friends of mine provided me with quite a detailed file on you and your special abilities after you started to make a nuisance of yourself. I’m curious. What’s it like to be able to do what you can do? I’d imagine it must be quite a unique sensation. I have to say I was really quite impressed with the way you bypassed the security on the servers at my building in New York. I designed the security system myself. It was supposed to be quite impregnable and yet you got around it in just a couple of minutes. You know, you don’t have to die with Darkdoom and the rest of the idiots that follow him. There could be a place for you in our new world. You could be a valuable asset. What do you think?’

‘I think you’re a nut job with a god complex that likes the sound of his own voice just a little too much,’ Otto said with a nasty smile.

Drake gave a single short laugh and then backhanded Otto hard across the face, knocking him to his knees. Otto tasted blood in his mouth as he stood back up, a look of defiance on his face.

‘I see Nero already has his hooks too far into you for you to be of any further use to me. Such a shame,’ Drake said, turning away. He stopped for a moment and then turned back towards Otto. ‘Tell me one thing though, Mr Malpense. Why haven’t you just taken control of the Dreadnought? Surely, given what you can do, you could just have infiltrated her control systems. They are well secured, admittedly, but no more so than the systems in New York. It would certainly have been more effective than this –’ he gestured at Raven – ‘brute force approach.’

‘You know perfectly well why I didn’t,’ Otto replied. ‘I couldn’t. But I suppose that’s why you integrated that black filth into your network.’

‘Black . . . What on earth are you talking about?’ Drake asked, looking genuinely confused.

‘The organic supercomputer,’ Otto said, ‘the black slime that you’ve got running through your system.’

‘Just how stupid do you think I am, Mr Malpense,’ Drake replied impatiently. ‘Firstly, there’s no such thing as an organic supercomputer, not yet anyway, and secondly, I would certainly never integrate something like that with the Dreadnought’s systems, even if it did exist.’

‘You really don’t know, do you?’ Otto said quietly.

‘Know what?’ Drake demanded angrily.

‘Why don’t you just take a look for yourself?’ Otto suggested, nodding towards a cabling access panel on a nearby wall.

Drake stared at him for a moment and then moved over to the panel, unclipping it and removing it from the wall. There, clearly visible, intertwined with the other cabling, was a seething mass of glistening black tendrils. They seemed almost to pulse, as if in time with the data that coursed through the other wires. Drake looked at them with a mixture of confusion and revulsion.

‘What is this?’ he said, sounding genuinely bewildered. ‘Who put this into my ship?’

‘I did,’ Furan said, pushing Raven towards Otto and Drake, covering them all with his pistol.

The Shroud lurched violently to the left, its engines screaming in protest as the full force of nature’s fury tried to swat it from the sky. The pilot fought with the controls, a thin film of sweat covering his pale face. ‘I’m not sure how much more of this we can take,’ he shouted over the noise of the labouring engines and the howling of the storm outside.

Suddenly there was a bright white flash and an enormous cracking sound as the Shroud was struck by a bolt of lightning. The engines stuttered for a moment and then roared back into life. A series of flashing red warning lights lit up across the control panel in front of the pilot.

‘We’ve lost cloaking,’ the pilot said, an edge of panic in his voice.

Nero was sitting strapped into the seat behind the pilot and he could understand why the man was concerned. Without cloaking engaged there was nothing to stop the Dreadnought spotting them the moment they left the storm clouds. That was, of course, assuming that they made it through the storm in the first place.

Down in the passenger compartment the situation was no better. Francisco’s men were hardened soldiers, men who were used to putting their lives on the line, but even so he could almost smell the fear in the air. They were in the hands of Mother Nature now and she was not happy.

‘We are all going to be dying, we are all going to be dying,’ Franz whimpered at the other end of the compartment. ‘I don’t want to die, especially not on an empty stomach. Oooooh God!’

Lucy leant over and whispered in his ear. ‘Sleep.’

Franz looked surprised for a moment and then his chin dropped on to his chest as he fell unconscious.

‘On behalf of everyone, thank you,’ Shelby said, her knuckles white where she clung on to her seat harness.

‘My pleasure,’ Lucy said through gritted teeth as the Shroud plunged downwards again before slowly clawing its way back to higher altitude.

‘You couldn’t do the same thing for me, could you?’ Laura asked, only half joking.

Back on the flight deck, Nero winced as another bolt of lightning struck the Shroud. The pilot growled as he pulled hard on the joystick, almost willing the ailing aircraft to stay airborne. Then just as suddenly as their roller-coaster ride had started, it stopped, and the Shroud punched out through the interior wall of the storm cell and into the area of calm surrounding the Dreadnought.

‘Good God, is that what I think it is?’ the pilot said as they both saw the plane suspended by giant clamps under the belly of the Dreadnought with its unmistakable blue and white livery.

‘I’m afraid it is,’ Nero said quietly. ‘What has Drake done?’

Down on the engineering deck of the Dreadnought, Darkdoom knew he was running out of time. He scanned the control panel in front of him, trying to work out the best way to disable the safety interlocks on the system without alerting anyone on the bridge. He was relatively familiar with the ship’s systems, but this was still beyond his experience.

‘You don’t need to know how something works in order to break it, Diabolus,’ he whispered to himself. He flicked a couple of switches and twisted a large black handle that was underneath a screen displaying a series of green bars. As he twisted the handle the bars began to get longer, first turning yellow, then orange and finally red. ‘Well, that looks promising,’ he said with a slight smile.

He pulled the pistol he had taken from one of the fallen guards in the brig and pointed it at the control panel, emptying the clip into the machine. Nobody was going to be undoing his sabotage any time soon. He heard voices coming from the other end of the compartment. That was hardly surprising given that he’d made a point of setting off as many intruder alarms as he could on his way through the engineering deck. He just hoped that he’d provided enough of a diversion for Raven and Otto in the process. It was time to go.

‘What do you mean, you did this?’ Drake said, staring in amazement at Furan.

‘It was not difficult,’ Furan replied calmly. ‘The substance is self-replicating. I only needed to insert a tiny amount into the system while the Dreadnought was docked in Nevada; it was already programmed to do the rest. The Disciples call it Animus – I do not begin to understand how it works, I just know that it is some kind of organic computer that takes control of any system it’s inserted into.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Drake said. ‘Why would you do this?’

‘Because our esteemed guest over there was right,’ Furan said, gesturing towards the President. ‘You are insane. I’ve always known it and so have the rest of the Disciples, but until now we needed you. We needed your technology, your contacts in the military, your ship, but we knew that once those missiles detonated and the world was ours for the taking that you would be too much of a loose cannon to keep around. We knew that we were going to have to dispose of you and this ship. But how could we be sure that we could take control of its systems, that you wouldn’t have locked us out? Fortunately, technology that we have recently developed made that quite simple. As soon as the Dreadnought launched, the substance you just found began to multiply and integrate seamlessly into your systems, allowing us to seize control when the right time came. I’m afraid Mr Malpense has rather spoilt the surprise, but no matter. It just means that you learn that you are surplus to requirements a little ahead of schedule.’

‘Surplus to requirements?’ Drake yelled. ‘This was my plan. Without me there would be nothing, and this is how the Disciples repay me?’

‘You’ve served your purpose and so has the Dreadnought. We cannot take the chance that at some point in the future you might turn against us, or worse, reveal our part in the catastrophe that is about to befall the United States. You’re a dangerous loose end, one that it is now my job to cut off. Goodbye, Jason.’

Furan fired twice, both rounds hitting Drake squarely in the chest, and he dropped to his knees, eyes wide, before slowly toppling forward and hitting the deck with a thud. There were a couple of angry cries from members of the bridge crew but these were quickly silenced by the arrival of more of Furan’s men. They raised their rifles and kept Drake’s people covered. Furan looked at his watch.

‘Ten minutes to impact,’ he said and turned to one of his men. ‘Take the President back to Air Force One and take this with you.’ He handed the man the black briefcase that was the key to America’s nuclear arsenal. ‘They both need to be on board so that no questions are raised if and when the wreckage is retrieved.’

The soldier nodded and he and one of his comrades forced the President towards the door at gunpoint. Furan gestured to two more of his men.

‘You and you, get rid of that,’ he said, pointing at Drake’s body. ‘Now, what to do with you two.’ He smiled evilly at Otto and Raven. ‘It seems such a waste to just kill you. I know for a fact that at least one other senior member of the Disciples would very much like to dissect you, Mr Malpense, and Raven, you have always been my greatest unfinished project. The truth is, though, that you are both too dangerous to leave alive, too loyal to our enemies, too difficult to turn. So I’m afraid it’s goodbye, Mr Malpense, dosvidaniya, Natalya.’ He raised his pistol.

Outside the bridge windows something suddenly lit up with an impossibly white light. The Zeus Sphere reached its limits as the terminal overcharge that Darkdoom had accidentally set in motion reached its climax and the giant ball at the prow of the Dreadnought detonated catastrophically. The bridge windows blew out in a lethal hail of flying glass and the pressurised air raced out through the gaping holes. Several of the bridge crew and a couple of Furan’s men were sucked out of the windows, their screams vanishing in the roaring wind. Furan was blown off his feet, his pistol skidding away across the floor as he grabbed desperately for something to hang on to. Heavy steel emergency shutters slammed down, sealing the bridge windows as the pressure loss was detected and the bridge was plunged into darkness for a few seconds before emergency lighting came online, illuminating the chaotic scene with a dim red light. Furan struggled to stand, blood trickling into his eye from a vicious gash on his forehead. Raven and the boy were nowhere to be seen.

Wing felt the deck move as an enormous shudder ran through the Dreadnought’s hull, accompanied by the muffled sound of an explosion.

‘What was that?’ Nigel said as the whole ship seemed to emit a low-pitched groan.

‘Nothing good, I suspect,’ Wing replied with a frown. ‘But we may have a bigger problem.’ He looked out across the hangar deck. There was only a single Shroud in the whole bay and it was surrounded by at least a dozen of Furan’s men. He and Nigel were concealed behind a large fuel tank fifty or sixty metres away at the other end of the hangar.

‘Now what do we do?’ Nigel asked, pushing his glasses back up on to the bridge of his nose.

‘Honestly, I have no idea,’ Wing said. He had been trained well enough by the tutors at H.I.V.E. to be able to recognise a tactically hopeless situation when he saw one, and this was exactly that.

Suddenly there was the sound of another distant explosion and this time the whole deck seemed to tip violently towards the starboard side of the ship. Wing struggled to keep his footing, grabbing on to Nigel and stopping him from sliding away across the deck. The docking clamps holding the Shroud to the hangar floor groaned in protest and a few of the soldiers surrounding it fell to the ground.

‘I think we need to find a way off this ship sooner rather than later,’ Darkdoom said from behind them.

‘What’s going on, Dad?’ Nigel asked.

‘My attempts at diversionary sabotage may have been a little . . . overenthusiastic,’ Darkdoom replied, sounding slightly embarrassed.

There was the sound of another explosion from somewhere off in the distance.

‘I think we really need to get off this ship,’ Nigel said uneasily.

Otto and Raven ran down the corridor towards the hangar bay. They rounded a corner and Raven suddenly stopped. At the far end of the corridor were the President and the guards from the bridge who were escorting him back to Air Force One. They turned into a doorway at the end of the corridor and disappeared from view.

‘I can stop this,’ Otto said.

‘What do you mean?’ Raven asked, looking back down the corridor they had just come down for any signs of pursuit.

‘If I can get that briefcase, then I think I can stop the satellite from launching its missiles,’ Otto replied.

‘You heard what Furan said about “the wreckage”,’ Raven said with a frown. ‘They’re planning to crash that plane.’

‘I’m not stupid,’ Otto replied quickly. ‘I know that there’s no way to save the people on board but we could be talking about hundreds of millions of people dying if Yellowstone blows, not to mention global environmental chaos and financial meltdown, the blame for all of which will be placed squarely on G.L.O.V.E.’s shoulders. I can’t just stand by and let it happen. I have to at least try to stop it.’

Raven looked Otto square in the eye. She may have had a lot of blood on her own hands but she knew what he meant. If Drake’s plan worked it would mean indiscriminate slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Not only that, it would mean the end of G.L.O.V.E. Anyone who had ever had anything to do with the organisation would be hunted to the ends of the earth if Drake’s plan to pin the blame on them worked.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Raven said.

‘No,’ Otto replied, ‘they need you in the hangar bay. Don’t worry, I have no intention of tangling with any of Furan’s men. I leave that kind of thing to you and Wing. As soon as I’m done I’ll head for the hangar. I’ll be right behind you. This won’t take long.’

Raven hesitated for a moment, weighing up the risks.

‘Make it quick,’ she said, ‘and good luck.’

‘Let’s hope I don’t need it,’ Otto said with a tiny smile.

Raven gave him a small nod and Otto quickly headed after the President. He opened the Dreadnought’s external airlock and crept down the stairs to the forward door of Air Force One, listening for any signs of Furan’s men. As he stepped inside the plane he could hear voices coming from the stairs leading to the upper deck.

‘OK, get to the hangar,’ a gruff voice said. ‘Furan’s ordered a full evacuation.’

Otto ducked into the galley opposite the door and hid behind a bulkhead as the men filed quickly off the plane, resealing the door behind them. Otto waited a moment before coming out from his hiding place and heading to the upper deck. Unconscious bodies lay everywhere, everyone from flight attendants to bulky men in dark suits, some of whom were still holding the weapons they’d been wielding when they fell. He hurried up the stairs, looking for any sign of the President. He noticed that a nearby door with the presidential seal on it was standing slightly ajar and he pushed it open cautiously.

‘Hello?’ a voice said from inside.

‘Hi,’ Otto said as he walked into the room. The President sat behind his desk, each hand cuffed to one arm of the chair. ‘Where’s the case?’

The President nodded towards a filing cabinet on the other side of the room. The case sat on top of it.

‘Mr Malpense, wasn’t it?’ the President asked. ‘What exactly are you doing here?’

‘Trying to stop this nightmare from happening,’ Otto said, popping the latches on the case. ‘And much as I’d like to discuss it, we really haven’t got much time.’

Suddenly there was a clunking sound from somewhere overhead.

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Otto said quietly and then the floor seemed to drop away from beneath him.

‘Docking clamps disengaged,’ one of Furan’s men reported, looking up from the screen in front of him. ‘Payload away.’

Furan had activated the direct wireless interface with the Animus that now coursed through the Dreadnought’s hull giving him direct control of the giant vessel without the need for any of the recently deceased Drake’s command codes.

‘Sir, I have multiple radar contacts heading this way. Judging by their size and speed they have to be fighters,’ another of his men reported.

‘So the Americans have come to see what has happened to their President,’ Furan said. ‘What is their ETA?’

‘Four minutes, sir,’ the man at the tactical station replied. ‘The storm cloak surrounding the Dreadnought has dissipated since the destruction of the Zeus Sphere and weapons systems are non-responsive, presumably due to the damage caused by the explosion. There’s nothing to stop them blowing us out of the sky.’

‘Very well, then it is time to leave,’ Furan said. ‘Transfer the primary control interface to my system on board the Shroud. Clear the bridge.’

His men quickly gathered their equipment and headed for the hangar bay. Furan looked at his watch again. There was now only three minutes until the missiles were launched from orbit and nothing could stop that now.

Nero watched in astonishment as the giant blue and white plane detached from the underside of the Dreadnought and dropped away. The 747’s nose began to point downwards, going into what would soon become an uncontrolled dive. There was nothing that anyone could do to save Air Force One now; its next stop would be the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, thirty thousand feet below.

‘Head for the hangar,’ Nero ordered the pilot. ‘If any of our people are still alive on board that thing, that’s where they’ll be heading.’

‘Sir, without our cloak the anti-aircraft weapons on the Dreadnought are going to rip us to pieces,’ the pilot said nervously.

‘If those systems were active and functioning properly, I rather suspect we would already be a cloud of burning debris,’ Nero said. ‘I think whoever’s currently in control of the Dreadnought has rather more pressing concerns at the moment.’

As if in response to Nero’s words, a huge explosion ripped through one of the four clusters of engines that kept the giant aircraft aloft. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the blazing tangle of wreckage at the front of the ship, where the storm-generating Zeus Sphere had once been, tipped downwards. The Dreadnought too was going down.

‘The hangar. Now!’ Nero snapped.

Raven stuck her head around the corner of the large doorway that led on to the hangar bay. At the far end there were at least a dozen of Furan’s men guarding a solitary Shroud. She looked around the bay for any signs of Darkdoom and the others. After a few seconds she spotted Darkdoom’s head pop out from behind a fuel tank on the other side of the bay and then disappear again. There was another loud rumbling explosion from somewhere outside and the deck lurched sickeningly. Raven took advantage of the distraction to dash stealthily across to Darkdoom’s hiding place while the guards struggled to stay on their feet. She found Diabolus, Nigel and Wing all crouched in the cramped space behind the bulky tank.

‘You might want to be a bit more careful,’ Raven said. ‘You weren’t exactly difficult to spot.’

‘Fortunately, I think our friends over there are more concerned with getting themselves out of here than looking out for intruders,’ Darkdoom said with a crooked smile. There was another muffled crump and the deck shook again. ‘As you can see, my attempts at sabotage were rather overzealous.’

‘Trust me, I’m not complaining,’ Raven said quietly. ‘You saved our skins, that’s for sure.’

‘Where’s Otto?’ Wing asked, looking concerned.

‘He’s on his way. There was something he had to take care of,’ Raven replied. ‘In the meantime we need to secure a way off this death trap.’

There were the sounds of more running feet from over by the entrance to the bay and Raven risked a quick look to see what was going on. Furan and another dozen of his men ran on to the hangar deck. Raven had been hoping that he might have been seriously injured during the chaos on the bridge a few minutes earlier, but it looked like he had escaped relatively unscathed.

‘Where’s Drake?’ Darkdoom asked as he saw Furan too.

‘Drake’s dead,’ Raven replied.

‘I knew we could count on you, Natalya,’ Darkdoom said with relief.

‘It wasn’t me, it was Furan,’ Raven said and then quickly recounted the events on the bridge.

‘Whoever these Disciples are, they certainly like to do a clean job,’ Darkdoom said finally. ‘Such ruthlessness is almost admirable.’

‘Unfortunately Drake’s plan did not die with him,’ Raven said. ‘They seem quite happy for that to proceed as scheduled.’

She watched as Furan hit the controls to seal the hangar access door and then aimed his pistol at the control panel.

‘No!’ Raven spat, moving to try and stop him, but she was too late. He fired three times into the panel and it disintegrated in a shower of sparks.

Furan heard her cry and spun around, aiming the pistol in her direction and snapping off a couple of shots without aiming. The bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the floor and the wall behind her as he turned and ran after his men, who were hurriedly boarding the Shroud.

Raven sprinted across the hangar bay as Furan ran up the loading ramp at the rear of the Shroud, which started to close behind him. He turned back towards Raven as she raced across the hangar towards him.

‘Goodbye, Natalya!’ he yelled over the noise of the Shroud’s engines. ‘I’d say we’ll meet again, but frankly that looks unlikely under the circumstances.’ He gave her a quick wave as the ramp rose into place, sealing the Shroud’s rear hatch.

The clamps securing the Shroud to the deck released and the dropship’s idling engines roared into life as it began to lift off. Raven leapt into the air and slashed at one of the giant turbine engines, the crackling blade of her katana scything through the armoured casing. There was a loud bang and a cloud of black smoke belched out of the engine as Raven was knocked to the ground by the ailing thruster’s downdraught. The hangar doors began to grind open and the air rushed out of the rapidly depressurising bay. Raven rammed her sword into the deck and clung on as the howling wind tried to drag her towards the widening gap between the hangar doors. After a few seconds the bay doors were far enough open and Furan’s Shroud moved forward, straining for lift with just one functioning engine, and passed through the gap and out into the sky. Raven cursed loudly in Russian as the dropship’s stealth systems engaged and it disappeared from view.

She immediately felt the bitter cold and lack of oxygen at this altitude, battling for breath as hypoxia began inevitably to set in. She struggled to her feet. Furan had escaped – there was nothing she could do about that now. She just needed to concentrate on getting the others off the Dreadnought. The only problem was that she had no idea how. She walked slowly over to where Darkdoom sat huddled with Nigel.

‘Furan escaped,’ Raven whispered hoarsely, the air almost too thin for speech. Darkdoom just nodded and then winced as the largest explosion yet tore through the ship and the deck slowly started to tip.

Suddenly there was a roar of engine noise from behind Raven and she turned to see a Shroud manoeuvring carefully into the hangar bay. She felt a flood of relief as the secondary loading ramp under the Shroud’s nose descended to reveal Francisco standing in the hatchway, frantically waving at them.

‘Go!’ Raven barked at Darkdoom, who simply nodded and hurried with Nigel over to the waiting Shroud. Raven ran over to where Wing knelt, desperately pulling at the handle of the jammed hangar entrance door.

‘We have to go now,’ Raven croaked at Wing, fighting to fill her lungs with what little oxygen there was.

‘I’m not leaving without Otto,’ Wing said firmly.

There was an explosion somewhere on the other side of the door.

‘Wing,’ Raven said quietly, ‘Otto’s not coming.’

Wing punched the steel door, wanting with all his heart to believe that she was wrong but knowing she was not. He nodded once and they both ran towards the Shroud, sprinting up the ramp as it closed. The dropship backed carefully out of the hangar and rotated in the air before its engines flared and it rocketed away from the doomed Dreadnought.

‘This is Wildcat to all wings,’ the flight leader said into his mask, ‘engage and destroy.’ His orders were quite clear: he was to take out the giant aircraft before it crossed into United States airspace. He didn’t know what it was or where it was from, but he was going to make damn sure it never made it that far.

‘Joker Tally,’ his wingman signalled, indicating that he was initiating his attack run.

Wildcat looked out over his starboard wing and Joker’s F-22 banked hard towards the target.

‘Fox two,’ Joker signalled and a Sidewinder missile streaked out from the belly of his jet and speared into the threat aircraft’s superstructure, detonating in a huge ball of fire. The flight leader watched as multiple other missile trails followed in its wake, turning the giant aircraft into a blazing wreck that began a terminal descent towards the Atlantic.

He was about to begin his own attack run when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ the flight leader whispered, shocked. ‘Joker, form up on my wing now!’ He banked his aircraft hard and sent it roaring in pursuit of the unmistakable shape of Air Force One as it plummeted towards the ocean below.

Otto struggled to his feet as the giant plane’s airframe shuddered. It was eerily quiet; there was no engine noise, but the fact that they were not nosediving towards the Atlantic meant that at least they had been released at a high enough speed to be in some sort of glide. He resisted the urge to calculate how long they had at this angle of descent before they hit the ocean. Unfortunately, he didn’t have to do the maths to know that it wouldn’t be long.

He ran out of the President’s office and down the short aisle leading to the cockpit. He rattled the handle on the armoured door but it was firmly locked. He quickly tried to think of a way through the door but he knew it was pointless: cockpit doors were designed to withstand exactly that kind of improvised assault.

He ran back to the President’s office as the plane shuddered again, more violently this time. He realised that the floor was already at a steeper angle than it had been just a few moments before.

‘I need you to unlock this,’ Otto said quickly, placing the opened case on the desk in front of the President and raising the retinal scanner into position.

‘It won’t do any good,’ the President replied. ‘It’s reliant on the plane’s communications array to transmit commands, and unless I’m way off the mark, we don’t have any power.’

‘Leave that to me,’ Otto said and closed his eyes. The systems he felt all around him were dead. There was no power and without the engines running there was no way to generate any. He extended his senses, hunting for any trace of power, any electronic circuit that showed signs of life. There was the faintest glow in a far corner of the dead grid that surrounded him. He reached out for it: it was a simple switch powered by a battery. Without even really knowing what he was doing, he mentally threw the switch.

Underneath them, a ram air turbine popped out of the belly of the giant aircraft, the small fan spinning furiously in the high-speed air passing over the skin of the aircraft. The tiny machine produced just enough emergency power to activate some of the plane’s critical systems and Otto sensed some of the dead electronic grid that surrounded him flaring into life. He reached for the communication system, checking that it had enough power for what he wanted it to do.

He opened his eyes briefly and looked at the President, who was looking at him like he’d gone crazy.

‘I agree that now would be a good time for prayer,’ the President said, ‘but I was hoping you might be able to do something a little more tangible.’

‘Oh, I’m not praying,’ Otto said, ‘but you can if you think it will help. What I really need you to do is to put your eye up to that thing.’

The President looked curiously at him for a moment before putting his eye to the scanner, which bleeped, and the access light inside the case turned green.

Otto closed his eyes again. Now he was going to have to do something that he had never done before, something that, if he was honest, he really didn’t want to do at all. He immersed himself in the digital world once again, reaching out for the communications systems and connecting with them.

‘OK, mystery guest inside my head, if you’re going to help me, now would be the time,’ Otto whispered to himself.

For several long moments Otto felt nothing, and then a familiar voice whispered in his ear.

‘We are stronger together than apart.’

Otto tensed as he felt the power of his abilities increase ten-fold. He sensed the data connections between the ailing aircraft and the ground and raced along them, feeling his consciousness expand geometrically as it coursed through the world’s data networks. He felt like a god, his mind seeming to fill for an instant with the sum total of human knowledge, overwhelming him, burying him, erasing his personality.

‘No,’ Otto said, gritting his teeth and pulling back before he passed the point of no return. He focused the power he felt, reaching out for a ground-based transmission station in the right part of the globe and sending a handshake communication, searching for the right receiver.

‘There!’

He brushed against the systems controlling Thor’s Hammer, greeting the satellite with the right binary handshake before channelling the command codes from the briefcase next to him into its command core. The satellite immediately recognised his authority and cancelled the launch sequence. Only then did Otto allow himself to read the countdown to launch embedded within the system. There had been nine seconds left on the clock when he had countermanded the launch instructions.

Otto felt a searing pain in his head, as if something was swelling inside his skull. He wanted to pull back, to withdraw from the vast labyrinths of data, but there was still more to do. He took a deep breath and kept searching. Finding what he needed, he integrated himself seamlessly into the computer systems of the company he required, brushing aside their multiple layers of network security as if they were barely there at all. He searched out and downloaded the schematics and digital manuals that he wanted, absorbing them, learning their content as thoroughly as if he’d been studying them for years. Only then did he allow himself to return to his body. He slumped forwards on to the floor of the President’s office, a thundering pain in his head and blood pouring from his nose. The President struggled against the cuffs securing him to his chair, wanting to assist Otto, but he was powerless to help.

‘It’s over,’ Otto said, his voice broken and weak. ‘I’ve aborted the launch.’

‘What do you mean?’ the President asked, sounding confused. ‘How could you . . . ? I mean . . .’

‘You’ll just have to take my word for it,’ Otto said through gritted teeth. He was exhausted. All he wanted was to sleep, for something, anything, to stop the constant stabbing pain in his head, but there was still one more thing he needed to do.

He closed his eyes again, focusing through the pain, and reached out using the knowledge he had just acquired to interface with the avionics system. He started the engines and began to pull the giant plane out of its terminal dive. He tried hard to ignore the numbers from the altimeter as Air Force One’s nose slowly came up. The plane shook, the battered airframe groaning under the excessive loads that were being put on it. Their altitude dipped below a thousand feet just for a moment before Otto sensed that the nose was at the right angle and pushed the engines to their capacity and beyond, dragging the giant plane back into the sky and sending it climbing slowly up to a proper cruising altitude. Otto re-engaged the autopilot; he no longer had the strength or desire to even think about changing its destination. It would make little difference anyway: wherever this particular plane landed there would be a reception party waiting for them. Otto had a dim sense that this was probably not a good thing before he gave in to the pain in his head and lost consciousness.