Lost Worlds (15 page)

‘I don’t like surprises,’ he said. Tara saw his eyebrows lift as a thought occurred to him. ‘Then again, I’m sitting in a car with a fifteen-year-old goth,
preparing for a trip to a former Soviet republic in search of a mythical missing link between apes and humans. I wasn’t expecting
that.

‘Yeah, but do you
like
it?’

He laughed. ‘I’m getting used to it.’

They passed a sign saying
Army Research Laboratory – Aberdeen Proving Ground: next left.
A few seconds later, Rhino steered the car across the road and into a side road that almost
immediately terminated at a security barrier and a security hut. Soldiers in grey combat fatigues converged on the car. They all had semi-automatic rifles. Tara suddenly felt very small and very
scared.

‘Don’t worry,’ Rhino said reassuringly. ‘This is my area of expertise.’

He rolled his window down and smiled up at the soldier who loomed over him, gun held half ready at his side. ‘Morning!’

‘Sir, please turn off your ignition,’ the soldier rattled out. As Rhino complied, he went on: ‘ID, please, sir.’

Rhino reached down to the storage unit between the front seats and pulled out two passports – his and Tara’s. He handed them across. ‘We’re here for the
demonstration.’

‘Wait here, sir.’ The soldier quickly checked the passport photographs against their faces, then crossed to the security hut. He handed the passports to a colleague, who
cross-checked the names against a printed list on the table in front of him. He nodded. The first soldier returned to the car and handed the passports over.

‘Thank you, sir. Please follow the signs to Parking Area Green. Have a nice day.’

‘Thanks.’

Rhino started the car and drove towards the barrier. It lifted into the air just before the bonnet touched it, and Rhino drove into the base.

‘Well, that was simple,’ Tara said. ‘I was expecting a full body search!’

‘Five Ps,’ Rhino said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Standard military strategy.
P
rior
p
reparation
p
revents
p
oor
p
erformance. What it means is, make sure you’ve arranged everything early. In this
case, Professor Livingstone emailed our names and passport numbers to the organizers of the demonstration, and they put us on the security list. As long as we have our passports with us,
we’re OK.’

They drove around a wide curve, and then down a tree-lined avenue that was lined with armoured vehicles. There must have been a couple of hundred of them, in two long rows. Most of them were
tanks, or things that looked like tanks, but there were others that Tara couldn’t even identify. Some had no turrets, some had several turrets, and at least one had a gun that looked wide
enough to fire beer barrels from one side of London to the other.

‘It’s called the Mile of Tanks,’ Rhino said. ‘I thought you’d be impressed. These are all experimental vehicles. Only one of each of them was ever built. You like
it?’

‘No,’ Tara said quietly. ‘Part of me feels a bit scared by the amount of military firepower that’s on display, and part of me is angry at the amount of money it costs to
build a single complete and functional armoured vehicle just as part of an experiment.’

‘Oh.’ Rhino grimaced. ‘Sorry. I keep forgetting that you’re not a military brat.’

‘I’m not
what?
’

‘A military brat. Nothing personal – it just means those kids who grew up around the military. Me, I love this stuff.’

There was silence in the car for a few minutes as Rhino drove through a landscape of close-cut lawns and white-painted two-storey buildings, following the signs for Parking Area Green. There
were, Tara noticed, also Parking Areas Blue, Red, Black and Purple. She guessed that there were a lot of cars on the base, which indicated a lot of people.

Parking Area Green turned out to be at the end of a road that seemed to be leading towards the edge of the base. They stopped in the shadow of trees, next to a collection of ten or so cars.
Small signs had been hammered into the earth, pointing towards a path that led into the forest. They read:
ARLENE Demonstration.

‘ARLENE?’ Tara asked as Rhino locked the car.

‘
A
utomated
R
obotic
L
oad-carrying
E
nvironmental
E
quipment,’ Rhino replied. ‘That’s the thing we’ve come to see. This is the USA
– they love acronyms.’

He led the way along the path through the forest. It ended in a clearing. A prefabricated hut had been built near the trees. A dark opening in the front of the hut looked big enough to drive a
car through. From somewhere behind the hut, Tara could hear the
chug chug chug
of a portable generator.

A group of men was standing next to the hut. Some of them were wearing suits, and some were wearing uniforms, but they all had close-cut hair. A few of them turned as Rhino and Tara appeared.
They glanced at Rhino, then at Tara, then looked away. And then they looked back at Tara again, and frowned. She guessed that the goth look was not the usual style of dress at these
demonstrations.

‘Here,’ Rhino said. He handed her a pair of sunglasses. ‘Wear these.’

‘Protection from bright lights?’ she ventured.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Because it looks cool.’

He slipped on a similar pair of sunglasses as they approached the group of observers.

A grey-haired man broke away from the group and moved towards them. ‘My name is Chesterson – Brad Chesterson. I’m the technical director of the company that makes ARLENE. You
must be the two visitors that Professor Livingstone requested be given access.’ His eyes were a faded blue, Tara noticed, and his skin looked as if it was permanently tanned. ‘We had to
pull a few strings to get you accredited this late in the day.’

‘And we’re very grateful,’ Rhino replied smoothly.

‘Who exactly are you representing, if I may ask?’

Rhino made a movement of his head that wasn’t quite a shake, and wasn’t quite a shrug. ‘A potential user,’ he said quietly. ‘One who wants to remain . . .
discreet.’

‘Ah, I understand,’ the man said. Clearly he didn’t, or he had made an assumption of his own based on what Rhino had said. Either way, he seemed satisfied. He turned to the
rest of the group and announced: ‘Gentlemen . . .’ He turned back to look at Tara. ‘And ladies . . . it’s time to start. I won’t beat about the bush. I don’t
have to tell you how much equipment our soldiers are carrying right now, in Afghanistan and in other theatres of war. What with weapons, armour, rations, radios, binoculars, video cameras, personal
sensor systems, battery packs, ration packs, medical packs, water bottles and entrenching tools, it’s as if each man is carrying another man on his back. This situation has crept up on us bit
by bit. Each new piece of equipment that we give to our soldiers is heavier than the piece it replaced. Every new piece of electronic equipment uses a different battery. Things have got to the
stage where we are losing more soldiers through heat exhaustion, muscle strain and fatigue than to improvised explosive devices and small-arms fire. This situation cannot go on.’ He paused
for effect. ‘That is why we have, on behalf of the US Army Research Labs, developed ARLENE. Now, I could spend the next ten minutes describing ARLENE to you, but I think it would be much
better if I just let you see it.’ He turned his head towards the prefab hut that the group was standing in front of. ‘Corporal Higgs – if you please!’

A soldier emerged from the hut. He was wearing the kind of sand-coloured camouflage uniform and helmet that Tara was used to seeing on news reports, but he didn’t have the big backpack
that she remembered from the broadcasts. He just carried a semi-automatic rifle. He ignored the group of watchers, and turned back to the hut.

‘ARLENE – follow!’ he called.

And something walked out of the hut after him.

It looked to Tara like someone had built the skeleton of a prehistoric animal out of stainless-steel rods, pistons, cables and lengths of black elastic. It stood shoulder-high to the soldier,
and it was about the width and the length of a single bed. It had six legs, but these legs were articulated with hip joints and knee joints and ankles. Where a living creature would have a head,
this thing, this device, had a thin neck that was topped with a selection of sensors – video cameras, infrared cameras, microphones and radio aerials. Where a living creature would have a
tail, this thing had a radio antenna. Solar cells glittered across its surface, forming a kind of intermittent skin. Packs had been strapped to its sides, attached to convenient hooks and anchor
points, partially covering some of the solar cells. They had been arranged so that the weight balanced out, left and right.

‘OK,’ Tara said. ‘Kinda impressed now.’

‘ARLENE,’ the corporal said, ‘mission mode: reconnaissance. Follow me at a ten-yard distance.’

He set off at a fast walk across the clearing towards the far trees. ARLENE obediently waited until he was ten yards away, and then ambled after him, matching his speed exactly. Tara had
expected it to sound heavy and clanky, but apart from a slight hiss as the pistons expanded and contracted there was almost no noise. In fact, she thought that the soldier was making more noise
than the robot.

The corporal reached the trees and vanished into the shadows. ARLENE stopped for a moment. Its sensor ‘head’ scanned back and forth for a few seconds, weighing up alternative paths,
and then it followed him.

‘Mom, are you
serious?’

Natalie Livingstone knew that she had that whiny tone in her voice again, the one that drove her mother mad, but she didn’t care. In fact, she was glad. If there was one time that she
wanted to put a dent into her mother’s invisible protective shield, it was now.

‘Yes, Natalie, I am completely serious. I am always completely serious. I don’t have time to be trivial or humorous. You should know that by now.’

They were in a black London taxi, heading back to Calum Challenger’s apartment. It was morning, and everywhere Natalie looked she saw men in suits and ties walking along the sidewalk. No,
not the sidewalk – the
pavement.
Stupid word. A sidewalk allowed you to walk along the side of the road. What the hell did a
pavement
let you do?

‘But, Mom, you promised that as soon as you’d given your speech at this conference thing we’d head back home. To Los Angeles.’

‘That was the plan.’ Gillian Livingstone gazed out of the taxi window at the passing crowds as if on the lookout for business opportunities. ‘Plans change. Get used to
it.’

‘But Savannah is having an epic pool party on Friday.
Everyone
is going to be there. Everyone who matters. And if I’m not there people will think
I
don’t matter
any more.’

Natalie’s mother shook her head, still not looking at her daughter. ‘That’s just stupid. Nobody will think any less of you because you aren’t at this party. And, besides,
people have parties all the time, especially in LA. There’ll be another one along before you know it.’

‘When we were at home, you said that you had to be at this conference in England. When I asked you why, you said that it was an important conference, and that lots of important people were
going to be there, and you said that if
you
weren’t there then people would wonder if you were still important. And I said that there’ll be other conferences, and you said that
there wouldn’t be any conferences as important as this for a while.’ Natalie took a breath. ‘Well, that’s what Savannah’s party is going to be like. It’s really,
really
important.’ She paused, trying to force her eyes to well up with tears and hoping that her mother might turn her head for long enough to notice. ‘You don’t want my
social development to be affected, do you?’

That hit a nerve. Natalie knew that her mother was paranoid about her having a wide circle of friends and lots to do. Natalie suspected that her mother had grown up without many friends,
probably due to the fact that she was so intelligent and so career-oriented, and she didn’t want Natalie to turn out the same.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gillian said quietly, and this time she did turn away from the taxi window and – hurrah! – she
did
notice the tears in Natalie’s eyes.
‘I understand that this seems like the end of the world to you, but it’s not. It’s really not.’

‘What if I flew back to LA by myself?’ Natalie asked. She’d found that if she presented her mother with a reasonable alternative then she usually caved.

Not this time. ‘I’m not having you back in Los Angeles without a chaperone. I can’t trust you.’

‘What about Dad? I could stay with him.
He
could look after me. I haven’t spent much time with him recently.’

Gillian looked away, out of the window again. Natalie could see from her reflection that her mother was angry; her lips had thinned, and she was frowning. ‘Your father needs more looking
after than you do. I wouldn’t trust him with a kitten, let alone a teenage girl.’

Natalie knew from her mother’s tone of voice that there was no point in pursuing that line of argument. Whatever feelings had existed between her mother and her father had burned out a
long time ago. He ran a moderately successful landscape-gardening business in LA, and seemed happy to just drift along in the sunshine, enjoying himself and not thinking about the future. Gillian
Livingstone, on the other hand, lived in the future. She rarely thought about anything else.

There was silence in the taxi for a few minutes. Looking out of the window, Natalie recognized Trafalgar Square. They turned right down a wide, long avenue that was lined with old-fashioned
buildings.

‘I don’t suppose you’d let me stay here in London?’ she asked quietly. ‘I could hang out with Calum Challenger while you’re doing your stuff in
Georgia.’

‘Not going to happen. I like Calum, and I trust him, but he’s a teenager and so are you. I’m not leaving the two of you alone together.’