But time was running out, and Floor L was high above. With gritted teeth and a sense of powerlessness over McCormick, Kate looked up the stairwell and ran.
*
As far as Ewan could tell, his sense of direction had not let him down. Distractions were everywhere, but he was pretty sure his route was the correct one.
The biggest clue was that the clone patrols were getting heavier. Ewan thought it might have been the perfect opportunity for them to blow him apart with speed mines, but clearly they didn’t want to damage any rooms important enough to be on Floor F.
He took a peek around the next corner, and was spotted by six biorifle soldiers.
Bringing in the big guns now. Literally.
Marshall wants me to run out of ammo. He’s using the soldiers with weapons built into their arms – guns I can’t steal once they’re dead.
His first spray of bullets took down four of the soldiers. Despite their advanced weaponry, the remaining two did not last much longer. Ewan double-checked the corridor and ran over to the bodies, and found that some of their other weapons could be stolen.
By far the most interesting weapon was the belt of incendiary grenades. Four of them. Ewan grinned. He couldn’t have asked for a more suitable weapon to bring to the Experiment Chamber. He seized the whole belt for himself, and astonishingly found the room he was looking for three doors later.
About time we had something good thrown our way. Right, let’s do this.
He used the seized keycard against the door, and it worked. He wouldn’t have long until someone noticed a dead clone checking into the Experiment Chamber, but fifteen minutes between check-ins would be more than enough.
Come to think of it, Ewan was surprised they hadn’t locked down the chamber altogether. But it had been out of action since the research was completed, and would never be needed again unless all their research mysteriously vanished.
Ewan walked inside. The Experiment Chamber was far from what he had expected. He found himself in a small, caravan-sized control room lined with computers, swivel-chairs, microphones and telephones, bordered by a wall of glass that separated him from the main body of the chamber. Small adhesive signs had been stuck to the corners of every glass panel, reading ‘DANGER: no metal or metallic products inside the chamber’. Beyond the glass, the chamber contained very little – just a large pile of metallic objects in one corner that included weights, empty weapons and clothing with metal attachments. Meanwhile its tiled floor had been half-cleaned of powdery bloodstains: clone blood that had come to rest between two stone pillars.
Ewan checked the porthole-shaped window on the door. No sign of Alex approaching. He hoped his teammate was OK, wherever he was. Or at least alive.
‘Alex,’ he whispered into his radio, ‘updates?’
Silence.
‘Alex.’
‘Still far away,’ came Alex’s voice, tired and gasping. ‘Got chased the wrong way down the corridor by a load of biorifles.’
‘OK,’ answered Ewan. ‘I’m here now, so no worries. Head to the nearest stairwell and get as close to Floor B as you can. I’ll meet you up there.’
‘Got it.’
The radio went silent. Ewan was on his own, but the work could easily be done alone. And it started with making sure he was in the right place.
He looked back at the desk, trying to guess the uses of the several dozen buttons and levers across the control panel. The red button next to the microphone was obvious, and the palm-sized button on the wall labelled ‘kill switch’ must have been there to stop experiments before someone important got killed. The dial at the far right seemed to control the lighting for some reason, and for all he knew the brown lever delivered fresh coffee or something.
There was another red button, protected beneath a translucent panel of plastic so nobody would use it by accident. Ewan’s instincts, fuelled by a whole childhood of toying with anything that looked interesting, commanded him to push it.
When he did, there was a brightly-coloured burst of light on the other side of the glass, like a red camera flash. Ewan looked up, and lost his breath.
Between the stone pillars, he saw the same type of shield his team had watched light up the skies around Harpenden. The same type of shield that had surrounded Oakenfold, and killed Raj. He stared in hatred at the crimson waves that flowed between the pillars like vertical water, and the little lightning bolts that leapt out from the metal ‘border points’ – or whatever Raj had called them before he killed himself. After a brief squall of excitement, the shield faded into invisibility.
Ewan could barely feel the organs inside his chest. Adolf Hitler with atomic weapons would have been less dangerous than a dictator with this technology. If Grant had his way, the same kind of shield would surround the whole of New London, and in time his other Citadels too, rendering him invincible forever.
Ewan reached for his assault rifle.
He released a flurry of bullets into the glass wall. The glass did not shatter, and the bullets only produced a couple of spider-web-shaped cracks. Clearly the chamber’s glass was bulletproof.
Bullet resistant, not bulletproof, Ewan corrected himself. No glass is perfectly bulletproof. You just have to get creative.
Ewan put his brain into gear. When it came to non-academic tasks, his brain was a formidable weapon. At that moment, it was remembering a school trip to the Roman walls at St Albans, back when he had been allowed on mainstream school trips. The tour guide had shown him a legionary’s sword – a gladius, if he remembered right – which had a little steel stub at the end of the handle. It was for braining enemies who got too close, by thumping the handle onto their head where the tiny stub would crack through their skull. The full force of a Roman’s arm would be concentrated into a square centimetre, and the results would be devastating.
The glass could be broken. Ewan just needed a gladius.
The butt of his rifle made a fine handle, with a flat enough surface to attach some kind of stub. He reached to the corner of the nearest window pane and peeled off the adhesive warning sticker, rolled it backwards over itself to make it sticky on both sides, and placed it across the rifle butt.
On the desk at his side, some smart-arse scientist had left his coffee mug behind – one that literally read ‘smart-arse and proud of it’. He grinned, and wondered whether that scientist had been smart enough to know a little fact that Ewan had learned via YouTube: that ceramics were great for smashing windows. He threw the mug to the floor, and picked through its shattered remains. He stuck a promising-looking piece to the butt of his rifle, and after three hits from his makeshift gladius the entire pane of glass shattered.
The scary side of the Experiment Chamber lay open before him, and Ewan engaged in a one-man war against the horrors of military science. He released his first incendiary grenade, which landed at the base of the first metal pillar. It exploded with a furious vomit of fire, which spread across the tiled floor and spilled up the pillar towards its border points. Ewan threw a second grenade at the other pillar, and a third at the collection of metal objects in the corner. They both exploded with equal ferocity, and through squinted eyes Ewan could see the objects in the pile begin to alter their shapes, and then melt. The border points, however, were holding on for longer.
With three nearby fires burning at over 2,000 degrees Celsius, Ewan’s skin prickled with sweat. He turned his rifle the right way round, and fired his bullets into the control panel. The gun clicked before he thought it would, and he threw his assault rifle to one side with a snarl. He would have to approach Floor B with nothing but his handgun.