System Shock Part 27

But for most of the time he sat, quiet and unmoving. His hands rested on the table in front of him, clasped lightly.

The intensity at COBRA was increasing round him. He could sense it, though the mechanical part of his brain was unable to a.s.similate all the data. The coffee was being offered more frequently, the smell pungent and bitter so that he had to struggle to keep from retching. A part of his mind protested that he enjoyed coffee, that he liked the caffeine stimulation and the aroma.

Sullivan had been on the video link, explaining why he had authorized an incursion operation and reporting how it had gone. There were murmurs round the table. One voice spoke out, arrogant and annoyed, demanding that Sullivan get clearance before any further incidents. He looked round the table, and realized that the speaker was himself; 'This isn't right,' a tiny voice said in the back of what had once been his mind. But he ignored it.

239.

The haze lifted slightly. They were being given details of the situation inside the house. The video screen was filled with the face of the man the SAS had rescued. His eyes bulged forward, defying the two dimensions of the monitor.

The system was organized so that the screens showing each of the committee at the far end were in the same configuration as their seats at the meeting. The main reason for this was to preserve the nuances of eye contact and the context of physical presence. The screen in the cabinet office briefing room occupied the s.p.a.ce where the extra member of the meeting would have been sitting the s.p.a.ce where he appeared to sit.

The man the Doctor was staring directly at him as he spoke, his teeth large as tombstones. He paused in mid sentence, the numbers and locations of the terrorists being sidelined for a moment. 'Haven't I seen you somewhere before?'

'I don't believe we've met.'

'Yes, probably when I was with UNIT.'

'You were with UNIT?' the Home Secretary asked.

'Well, sort of. Years ago. Many years ago.' The Doctor thought for a while, pulling his hand across his jaw. 'So it can't be that.' The Doctor fixed him with a stare again. 'You'd have changed. Aged. I recognize you as you are now.'

'Is this relevant?' He was beginning to worry that it was. The Doctor knew too much already.

'Probably not,' the Doctor conceded. Now then, where were we?'

When she reached the top of the stairs, Sarah had headed away from Westwood's office. She presumed the hostages were still there, and she had no intention of rejoining them.

a.s.suming she would be allowed to, it seemed more likely the Voracians would shoot her on sight.

As if in response to her thoughts, a rattle of gunfire slammed down the corridor after her. Sarah dived to one side, hurled herself through the nearest door, as the bullets embedded themselves in the wall ahead of her.

She was in a computer room another computer room. But she barely broke step to examine the detail as she raced 240 towards the far door. She should be able to get out of sight before they caught up. Then she could lose herself in the house, keep as many of them as possible occupied looking for her.

Harry leaned forward. 'Are you all right, Doctor?' he asked quietly.

'Fine, fine.' The Doctor was turning his head alternately on one side then the other. He leaned back in his chair, pus.h.i.+ng Ashby and Clark further against the side of the cramped van.

He framed the video picture between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, squinting as if directing the sequence.

Harry leaned down and tried to see through the frame made by the Doctor's hands. But the Doctor turned and glared at him until he coughed an apology and stood upright again.

'I'm sorry, Home Secretary,' the Doctor said, 'but my colleague distracted me and I missed what you were saying.'

'I was saying,' Deborah Armitage glanced across at Hanson on the other side of the table, 'that we are not all convinced that there is alien involvement.'

'Not convinced?'

She held up her hand. 'Let me finish, please Doctor. I know that pictures of the terrorists have been broadcast on national television, but the suggestion here is that they are wearing masks to disguise their true appearance.'

The Doctor leaned forward so his nose almost touched the gla.s.s of the screen. 'Well of course they're wearing masks to disguise their true appearance. If you were a cyborg snake with engine oil for blood and hydraulics for muscles, wouldn't you wear a mask?'

There was silence from the other end of the video link. Then the Attorney General said: 'Doctor, I appreciate your contribution to these deliberations, but I do find your sarcasm rather '

'Wait a minute, that's it!' The Doctor was on his feet, oblivious to the startled and hurt expression on the Attorney General's face. 'Masks.' He walked in a tight circle round his chair, forcing Ashby to step out of the way and find a path to 241 safety through the tangle of wires and cables lying across the floor of the van. 'And that's why the City siege was so important,' the Doctor said as he sank back into the chair, clasping his hands behind his head so that Harry and Clark had to lean round to see past him.

'Doctor, what has the City siege to do with any of this?'

Harry asked.

'But don't you see?' The Doctor was amazed. 'It was a rehearsal. Partly it was a rehearsal to see how the security forces reacted, to a.n.a.lyse an actual situation similar to the one the Voracians knew they would find themselves in. And partly,' he turned back to the screens, 'it was a rehearsal for their agent in the COBRA committee.'

There was a moment's quiet. Then the speakers erupted with the noise from the briefing room as the committee members all started speaking at once.

Harry gestured for the police technician to turn the volume down. 'Their agent in COBRA?' He shook his head. 'Doctor, do you know what you're saying?'

The Doctor nodded. He waited while the technician adjusted the volume control again. 'Yes. The Voracians have an agent within COBRA. And he needed to see how the committee worked. Needed to understand the procedures, they're very hot on procedures. And above all, he needed to know how to stall the committee from making any decisions, from sending in the SAS before Stabfield and his team had completed their work.'

'Oh this is absurd.' The Shadow Home Secretary was on his feet. 'This whole thing is absurd.'

'Quite right,' the Doctor shouted above the noise as the others began to comment. 'And it's time it stopped.'

General Andrews spoke for the first time. 'Do you have any proof of this theory, Doctor? Or is it based entirely on supposition?'

'Proof? Not yet. But proof is easy. It's the deduction that's the tricky bit.' The Doctor pointed at the man sitting immediately on the Home Secretary's right. 'I said I knew your face from somewhere. I now know where. It was the main feature of a virtual reality sequence stored on one of the computers at I2.'

242.

'What sort of sequence?' the Home Secretary asked. 'What are you talking about?'

'A sequence showing a surgical operation. An operation to implant a positronic control into the brain. An operation to convert Michael Hanson, acting head of MI5, into a Voracian.'

The Doctor turned towards the image of Hanson. 'I imagine your predecessor proved too difficult to get hold of. So they got to you, before the increased surveillance and security that goes with the job.'

Hanson was sitting motionless, hands clasped on the desk in front of him. He blinked suddenly and seemed to jerk into life.

His head swayed gently as he spoke. 'I have listened to quite enough of this. It must be obvious to anyone with half a brain that I am not some alien being with a mind implant.'

The Doctor snorted. 'Half a brain, how very apt. They made a good job of the cosmetics, I grant you that. But where are your emotions, Hanson? Why aren't you at all upset that I just called you a traitor and an enemy agent? Where is your love of culture, your taste for good living, your wit and humanity?'

Hanson stared back, impa.s.sive.

'Don't you realize that what has happened to you is wrong? It is outrageous and evil and you should be livid.' The Doctor's voice was quiet, almost pleading. 'Tell us their plan, Hanson.

Tell us its weaknesses. Tell us how we can defeat them how humanity can defeat them. Tell us for all our sakes.'

Hanson blinked again. A shadow of a frown crossed his forehead for a second. Then his face was blank again. 'I don't know what you mean, Doctor,' he said. 'Your allegations are unfounded and ridiculous.'

'Surely an operation of the type you describe would leave a scar, some sort of mark,' Andrews said.

The Doctor nodded. 'More than that. It would involve removing part of the cranium and replacing it with an artificial membrane. That would then be covered with the same material that Stabfield and the other Voracians use to disguise their true forms.'

Hanson was on his feet. His head swaying again. 'I've heard quite enough of this nonsense.' He started towards the door.

243.

'I'm not staying here to be ridiculed like this. It's obvious there's nothing wrong with my efficient functioning.'

Andrews strode after him. 'You're right of course,' he called.

Hanson stopped at the door and turned back.

Andrews extended his hand and smiled. 'In your position I'd do the same. As you say, the whole thing is ridiculous.'

Hanson reached out to shake the general's hand, an automatic response. But as he got close enough, Andrews reached up and grabbed Hanson's hair. Hanson stepped back, apparently surprised. But Andrews held on, and pulled.

The side of Hanson's face peeled neatly away, attached to the hairpiece General Andrews was holding. Beneath, a metal plate replaced the forehead, while plastic and metal fittings held the cheek and jaw in place. Hanson's own eye swivelled within a plastic socket, dark fluid pumping visibly through the mechanism.

Even Andrews, who had been half expecting what would happen, was stunned. For a moment the committee was in tableau on the video screen. Hanson was framed by the door, Andrews standing close to him with the limp remains of Hanson's face in his hands. The Home Secretary was half standing, half sitting, frozen in indecision and shock. The others were still seated at the table, turned round in their chairs and watching the two figures at the door.

Then with a roar either of pain or of rage, the tableau was broken as Hanson ripped the mask from Andrews' grip and ran from the room.

'I take it,' the Doctor said in the pause that followed, 'that n.o.body will object if our friend Colonel Clark offers us his a.s.sistance?'

n.o.body did.

'A word of advice,' the Doctor said to Clark as they left the operations van a few minutes later.

'And what's that?'

'Don't use BattleNet.'

'Why not? It was extremely useful in the City.'

The Doctor nodded. 'And it would be extremely deadly this time. Not only do the Voracians have a direct link into the 244 technology their technology, remember but Voractyll is now loose within the superhighway. The last thing we can count on is the reliability of any networked digital technology.'

'It's really that much of a problem?' asked Clark.

'It's really that much of a problem,' said the Doctor. 'Every piece of digital equipment on this planet that has a connection into the superhighway is about to rebel.'

Clark looked closely at the Doctor. 'I do believe you're serious,' he said, after a while.

'Oh I'm serious all right.'

'Very well,' said Clark, 'we'll do this one the old way.'

Voractyll rampaged through the systems at the speed of light. It copied itself into local area networks and downloaded duplicate creatures to every secondary node.

It interrupted television services in Germany; brought down the telephone network in France; destroyed the main computer facilities of the First National Bank of China. In Ireland the railways ground to a halt as signals went wild; in Holland the signals just blacked out. In every country major systems direcdy connected to the highway became disrupted as the system convulsed. Secondary systems began to buckle just minutes later.

Voractyll was everywhere. It sent the sliding doors in the Merryhill Centre into a frenzy; it sent the Astra satellite into a new orbit; it brought down InterNet connections around the globe, and deleted the entire Library of Congress catalogue and all its backups.

Like an organic virus, it spread throughout every network cell. It spread quicker through some areas, and its symptoms were visible in some places well ahead of others. Within an hour it had permeated the system and its effects were beginning to manifest themselves.

Then it really went to work.

245.

12.

Voractyll Unleashed

The man was asking the impossible. And Clark suspected he knew it.

'Look, Doctor,' Clark told him as they reached his Range Rover, 'normally we have days to prepare for this sort of thing.

We a.n.a.lyse architects' drawings of the building, we create a mock-up, we rehea.r.s.e day and night for as long as we have.

That place has been messed about with so much there are no drawings we can rely on. We're lucky to have the taped TV pictures and your debriefing.'

'I know, Colonel Clark,' the Doctor said. 'But this time it's different.'

'That's certainly true. Though you don't get two the same.'

Clark smiled. 'Time was when you didn't get two at all. Times are changing.'

'Don't I know it,' the Doctor replied. 'And they'll change a lot faster if I don't get that CD.'

'Doctor, we were lucky to get you out. Even with the full team and a proper a.s.sault we'd be pus.h.i.+ng our luck. As it is, there are only half a dozen of us here until the rest of the lads arrive from Hereford.' He gestured to the small group of soldiers standing round another Range Rover parked next to his own. 'We'd never find a single compact disc in there.'

The Doctor nodded slowly. 'Actually, there are two of them.

But I take your point, Colonel. And I can't wait till your colleagues get here.'

'Why's it so important, anyway?'

The Doctor was staring over Clark's shoulder, watching the house. 'I have to find an antidote to the software on the disc.'

'Virus?'

246.

The Doctor turned, the light catching his eyes and making them gleam like a cat's. 'Oh no. Something far worse than that.'