Earthfall: Retribution (2 page)

‘Nothing,’ Will said, ‘but early indications are that they’ve fallen into comas triggered by neurological shock. What is impossible to determine currently is how much permanent damage was caused. We could be looking at brain death. There’s a very real possibility that they won’t ever wake up.’

‘These are the ones we were trying to wake?’ Rachel said quietly.

‘Yes,’ Stirling replied with a sigh, ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What happened to them?’ Sam asked.

‘As you know, the Servant and I had isolated what we believed to be the signal that could wake individuals from the Voidborn sleep,’ Stirling explained. ‘We created a portable transmitter that would allow us to broadcast the signal to a single individual and the results were . . . well . . . catastrophic. All the subjects showed clear signs of regaining consciousness and then all three suffered the same massive neurological shock. We must have missed something, some kind of fail-safe that the Voidborn have put in place to stop us from doing just this.’

‘And the Servant didn’t know that?’ Rachel asked. ‘She may be on our side now, but she’s still Voidborn.’

‘The Servant has no memory of her previous existence,’ Stirling replied, shaking his head.

‘So where does that leave us?’ Sam asked. ‘If we can’t wake up the world, how can we fight? We may have retaken the city, but there’s no way we can take the fight to the Voidborn with just one Mothership. If we can’t wake people up, all we can do is sit here and wait while the Voidborn do whatever they want with the rest of the planet.’

‘I am quite aware of that,’ Stirling replied, ‘but our understanding of Voidborn technology is still rudimentary at best and this is a perfect example of how that ignorance can have terrible consequences. It is likely that none of these three men will ever regain consciousness, but what if it had been three hundred Sleepers or three thousand? We need to proceed more carefully. These things can’t be rushed. We will
find an answer, it’s just going to take time.’

‘Is there anything that we can do to help?’ Rachel asked.

‘Yes, actually,’ Stirling said. ‘We need an ECG monitor so that we can properly assess the brain activity in these men. As to where you would find one, your guess is as good as mine. Local hospitals, medical equipment suppliers, somewhere like that, I would imagine.’

‘Jay and Adam should be back from their scouting run soon,’ Rachel said. ‘Write down exactly what you need and I’ll pass it on to them. If anyone can find what you need, it’s those two.’

‘Fine, give me a couple of minutes,’ Stirling replied, pulling a notepad and pen from his jacket pocket before retreating to the desk in the corner of the room to put together his shopping list.

‘Do you want to tell the others or shall I?’ Rachel said quietly as they walked back into the dormitory. ‘You know it’s not going to go down well.’

Sam was aware that the prospect of waking the Sleepers had been keeping the group’s spirits high since the elation of the Voidborn’s defeat in London. Nobody talked about it much, but they all knew it was the only way that they might ever see their friends and families again.

‘I’ll do it,’ Sam said with a sigh. ‘We’ll get everyone together when Jay and Jack get back and tell them what Stirling told us. They may not like it, but they all need to know.’

‘What if Stirling’s wrong, Sam?’ Rachel asked as they walked down the stairs leading to the exit. ‘What if we never find a way to wake everyone up? How do we fight then?’

‘Same way we always have,’ Sam replied as they stepped out into the crisp winter air. ‘Dirty.’

‘Well, that sucks,’ Jay said with a sigh as he collapsed back into the armchair in the living area of the team’s dormitory.

‘I’m going to have to agree with Jay, I’m afraid,’ Nat said with a nod. ‘So what’s the plan now?’

‘We can’t give up,’ Sam replied, sitting on the edge of the table at the end of the room. ‘We just have to hope that Stirling and the Servant can come up with a solution.’

‘But there’s no guarantee that they will,’ Adam said as he sorted the various items that he had scavenged on his last run into piles on another table. ‘Heads up, Jack, got something for you.’ He tossed a book across the room to the boy with bright red hair sitting opposite. ‘Don’t say I never do anything for you.’

‘Whoa,
Anarchist’s Cookbook
,’ Jack said with a grin as he examined the book, ‘a thousand ways to blow yourself up with household ingredients. Thanks, man.’

‘Great, remind me to thank you when we’re reassembling the building,’ Anne said. ‘Jack and explosives, what could possibly go wrong?’

‘So does Stirling have any idea why it didn’t work?’ Jay asked.

‘’Fraid not,’ Will replied, pushing his glasses back up on to the bridge of his nose. ‘Just guesses at the moment, but he’ll figure it out – he always does.’

‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ Nat said. ‘So what do we do in the meantime? Just sit and wait and hope that Stirling and the Servant come up with a way around the problem?’

‘No,’ Sam said, ‘we can’t assume that just because the Voidborn haven’t attacked us and our Mothership yet that they aren’t going to. We need to start planning our next move. We know from the TV coverage of the Mothership fleet’s arrival that there were ships above other cities around the world, but we don’t even know for sure how many were sent here to Britain. We need to know much more about the enemy’s strength if we’re going to take the fight to them. I know that we’ve all been focused on Stirling and the Servant’s efforts to wake the Sleepers, but it may be that the only way to actually do that is to elim­inate the Voidborn completely.’

‘The Servant has no ideas, I assume?’ Will asked.

‘No, her memory begins with the moment we first saw her on the bridge of the Mothership,’ Sam said, ‘and she has no connection to the Voidborn consciousness any more.’

‘Fortunately,’ Adam said, ‘because you know that’s going to be a two-way street and I don’t want to be around if she ever has a change of heart about helping us.’

‘So we need to go look, then,’ Jay said. ‘Let’s face it, another Mothership floating above Britain isn’t going to be that hard to spot.’

‘I agree,’ Rachel said with a nod. ‘I’m tired of sitting around waiting for the Voidborn to make the next move. We’ve barely ventured beyond the outskirts of London since this all began. We have no idea what might be happening in the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world.’

‘So how do we do this?’ Anne asked. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Jay, but, big as that thing is,’ she gestured upwards to the ship floating unseen above them, ‘we can’t just set off wandering randomly looking for another one. We need some clue to where we should look.’

‘I believe I can help with that,’ Stirling said, stepping from the shadows at the other end of the room. No one had seen him come in.

‘I hate it when he does that,’ Jay whispered to Rachel.

‘I still have some printouts of telemetry data from tracking stations that were monitoring the Voidborn vessels during their final approach to Earth,’ Stirling continued, walking slowly towards them. ‘It only gives us limited local sub-orbital trajectory data, but that should be enough to let us make some educated guesses as to where some of the other Motherships went. At the very least it should help narrow the search.’

‘Sounds good,’ Sam said. ‘How long will it take to crunch the numbers?’

‘A couple of hours,’ Stirling replied. ‘I’m afraid my orbital dynamics may be a little rusty.’

‘We could get the Servant to process the data,’ Will said. ‘Might be faster.’

‘I’m quite capable of performing the calculations myself, thank you, William,’ Stirling replied.

‘Of course, Doctor Stirling,’ Will said sheepishly. ‘Sorry.’

They had all experienced the more abrasive side of the doctor’s temper at one time or another, and their recent victory over the Voidborn seemed to have done little to improve his mood.

‘Once we have an approximate location we can scan more effectively for Voidborn signals and hopefully pinpoint their precise coordinates,’ Stirling continued. ‘I will discuss the necessary modifications to the Mothership’s equipment with the Servant.’

With that he turned and walked out of the room.

‘So what are we going to do when we find out where the other Motherships are?’ Jay asked Sam quietly as the others sat around chatting with one another.

‘Good question,’ Sam said with a sigh. ‘It’s important that we keep everyone occupied with planning this operation until Stirling and the Servant have more of an idea about what’s causing the problems with the Sleepers. What we don’t want right now is everyone starting to think about what it might mean if we can’t ever wake them.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ Jay said, glancing over at their friends. ‘We’ve all been thinking for weeks that this was our big chance, that maybe we could wake enough people and actually strike back at the Voidborn. That’s going to be a lot tougher if it’s just us.’

‘Hey,’ Sam said with a smile, ‘
just us
managed to take control of a Voidborn Mothership. Who knows what else we could pull off if we put our minds to it.’

Stirling sat at his desk in a tastefully furnished room that had once been occupied by his old colleague and traitor to humanity, Oliver Fletcher. The office was housed within the structure that the Voidborn had built around their drilling rig in St James’s Park. He studied the sheets of data, occasionally making small marks on a large map of the world that was spread out on the desk beneath them. The columns of numbers would have been meaningless to most people, but to his mind’s eye they were a graceful arc plotted through the open sky.

He reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled out a ruler, using it to mark a line that passed straight through London, intersecting with the location of the one Mothership that they knew for certain, before turning to another sheet of figures and starting to make small marks on the map.

‘Doctor Stirling,’ the Servant said as she appeared at the open door, ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but I have made a discovery that I believe you will find interesting.’

‘And what might that be?’ Stirling asked without looking up from the map.

‘I have been attempting a broad frequency scan as you had instructed,’ the Servant explained.

‘And you had success?’ Stirling asked.

‘Not as yet,’ the Servant replied. ‘I am proceeding with caution to ensure there is no possibility that I will inadvertently re-initiate my own connection with the Voidborn.’

‘So what have you found then?’ Stirling asked, frowning slightly as he looked up at her.

‘A signal of unknown origin,’ the Servant replied. ‘Both the content and transmission frequency suggest it is human in origin.’

‘Human?’ Stirling said, sounding surprised. ‘Some kind of automated beacon or distress signal probably.’

‘I do not believe so,’ the Servant replied. ‘I have recorded the message. Would you like me to play it back for you?’

‘Yes, please do.’

The Servant opened her mouth slightly wider and her own voice was replaced with a hiss of static that suddenly resolved into a man’s voice.

‘Hotspur two, this is Hotspur seven. We have live targets at grid seven two nine, repeat live targets. We need a Predator strike package on station now.’

‘Roger that Hotspur seven, Drone inbound. ETA four minutes.’