The Covert Academy (29 page)

The claw on the end of the rope punched down into the block of coral where Joshua and Sarah stood in their embrace.

Ichiro wound his end of the rope, jumpsuit and all, around a handhold on the boarding ramp. He tied it off then stopped it from letting out more cable. The Nyctalopia soared past the lagoon and the rope snapped taut. The claw yanked the coral block completely clear of the lagoon. Joshua and Sarah hung on to the end of the rope, but Casey’s lifeless body slid off and disappeared beneath the calm waters of the lagoon.

Richard hauled back on the controls of the Nyctalopia, pulling up just in time so their cargo, dangling out the rear, didn’t smash into the ocean waves. With the slick outer hull still engaged from the outer-atmosphere journey, their momentum sped the ship through the air at an incredible speed, putting distance between them and the Academy.

The missiles struck home in the lagoon. Explosions rocketed all around. Chunks of land and coral were projected skyward.

Suddenly Casey’s failsafe bomb, in the ancient wrecked aircraft, exploded as well. Just the sort of fireworks show to send Casey off. The closest drones evaporated in the extremely high temperatures, which also washed down through the secret passages to the Academy itself under the ocean floor. Everything inside incinerated causing large secondary explosions, which bubbled up out of the ocean.

The supersonic shockwave of the bomb sent a wave of destruction much further than the blast radius, catching Simeon’s luxury cruiser among the remaining drones, ripping everything to shreds and falling as nothing more than debris into the ocean.

Casey’s
little secret stashed at the Academy entrance was a Russian “thermobaric” bomb, with a blast radius of over 200 metres. A relic from a forgotten age, when nations vied for power through conventional explosives.

Richard outpaced the shockwave until he felt it was safe to slow their airspeed enough to touch down in the ocean. He pitched the ship back to drop off Joshua and Sarah as gently as possible.

Ichiro cut them loose from the ship when they brushed the waves, then dived
into the ocean with life preservers.

‘I thought you were dead!’ Joshua couldn’t contain his happiness. He hugged Ichiro over the
life-preserver, and slipped down a little into the deep ocean.

Ichiro pu
lled him back up with a laugh. ‘You will not believe where I landed back on O’ahu... But I will tell you all about it later, I need to get the others.’

‘Others?’ Joshua asked, confused.

Ichiro nodded and grinned. He pointed back towards the island from where a strange boat was drawing near. Joshua squinted at it.
It couldn’t be
.

Sarah zoomed in with her iPC
and smiled.

It was Will, Elayne, Kayla, Alara and Marcas. They were drifting toward them in a boat fashioned out of the
ir dropship’s two engines. One was underneath a layer of planks where they sat, the other pointing out the rear at a right angle, like a hovercraft.

Joshua laughed. It was ridiculous.
How had they managed this
?

Then he saw they had also saved the bio-ID computer. Not only that, Marcas was conscious and he wasn’t attacking anyone. His eyes were back to the same keen brown they should be. He was smiling along with the rest of them.

Once everyone was bundled aboard the gutted remains of the Nyctalopia, Will explained their story.

By the time Elayne and Kayla had plugged the hole in the dropship, he had been able to save the super-computer and use it to isolate and cleanse Marcas’ iPC from Simeon’s bio-ID virus. Then they gathered a huge bunch of the drone flares and burned through the dropship engines. The computer already controlled the two engines, so it was just a matter of lashing together a raft. They had only just got out in time. They were caught by the tail end of the shockwave and it had damaged the engines beyond repair, but the computer’s data survived intact.

‘We’re the only ones who made it out, aren’t we?’ Will asked.

‘We can’t be sure of that,’ Sarah said.

‘I wouldn’t count out Jayson and Val
so easily,’ Richard countered. Everyone was silent for a moment as they thought of their lost friends.

‘You know,’ said Will, ‘t
he computer was able to, sort of, “read” Marcas’ iPC before running the repairs.’

Joshua looked up, catching on. ‘I got the General’s iPC from Casey.’

Will looked sad at Casey’s name, but couldn’t hide his excitement.

Joshua looked to Sarah.
‘May I?’ He held a hand out. She gave him the iPC.

‘Better if you hold this anyway,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t want to end up like Marcas eh? Ha ha!’ She gave him a jab in the ribs.

‘Hey! What?’ Marcas complained. ‘I don’t remember a thing, honest.’

‘Lucky you,’ said Kayla. She turned to Sarah. ‘Alara still needs medical treatment.’

‘I know a place,’ Sarah replied. ‘We’ll head there as soon as we can...’

While they talked
amongst themselves, Joshua went over to the computer with William. He handed him General Withers’ iPC.

‘Don’t look into it directly,
’ Joshua warned. ‘We don’t know who else may be watching.’

Will nodded and held it in front of the
jet-engine shaped device that tapered down to a precision laser. He’d saved that along with the computer too. He tapped a button on the computer and the eyeball came to life.

Everyone fell silent.

‘Oh what is that?’ Kayla asked.

A beam of light poured out from the device, through the iPC eyeball that William held out, and projected a live-streaming video image on the wall of the Nyctalopia’s burnt out galley.

Joshua stared up at the wall and walked towards the images, perplexed. “
Don’t lose what’s inside
,”
Casey had said. But inside what
-? A notion occured to him, and he whipped out Casey’s sword.

Everyone took a step back.

He examined the sword closely, turning it over.

‘What is it?’ Sarah whispered.

Joshua turned the pommel, and it came right off in his hand. He lifted it up and a crumpled piece of paper fell out. He unfolded it against the wall, pressing it flat. It was the same photo of the High Council members they had found in Meyrick’s office. Casey must have rescued it for them after they’d left it in Meyrick’s interrogation room.

‘Casey installed
the General’s iPC in himself,’ Joshua whispered to himself. ‘Then he got the photo from Meyrick. Casey would have used it on him...’

On the back of the photo, Casey had written a simple note.

It read: “Do not trust your sister. Meyrick knows the High Council are pawns. Go through them to get to the King. Find the Sanctuary before they do.”

Joshua gave up on
the confusing note and turned the photo back over. He looked up and brushed his hand over the images on the wall. He suddenly recognised a face from the photo.

These were first-person views of the seventeen other members of the Confederate High Council. The General had seen
them all together, and his iPC had stored their bio-IDs in its memory, logging their every movement should he wish to keep track of them. Just as Dr. Prewett had intended when he designed it.

Joshua
grinned to himself.

This
was how they would find the last of the High Council members. No matter how long it took, he’d hunt them down. And the Confederacy, that infernal organisation that had ruined so many lives, would be finished, once and for all.

His smile widened.

He would find these people.

Then he would kill them.

The leviathan transport cruiser rained down on the ocean in droplets of twisted metal. Larger chunks bobbed up for several minutes until the air bubbles were forced out, then they too sank beneath the waves. Sunrays broke through the surface of the water and bounced merrily off the plunging rubble.

T
he light became obscured as the murky silhouettes of a hundred bodies plummeted in search of their watery graves. Men and women who were gifted enough to be chosen over their destitute peers for a life of security and servitude, but too weak to defy their master’s wicked ways. This was the price for their lack of conviction.

Yet their master fell with them, his machinations of intimidation and control turned against him, bringing about his downfall by his own hand. Simeon
Warner’s body was enveloped by the crushing weight of the ocean, disappearing into the history books as simply another over confident power-hungry despot, an oligarch, whose reach had exceeded his grasp.

But the Confederacy lived
on without him. With Simeon and General Withers dead, a power vacuum was left in their place. The remaining members of the High Council would play their mind games on each other, build their military forces, research new technologies and salvage what they could from the now-empty Colonnade.

These seventeen men an
d women of exceptional ability, who had brought themselves together in the name of peace, would now fight each other to the death. Anyone in their path would be crushed like ants.

They would do whatever it took to claim their reward - the world, and everything in it.

A
s the sun rose high once more over the ruined island where the Academy once lay hidden, Lucia’s tiny raft bumped into the sandy shore.

Raft was an overstatement. She wore the suit all Fletchers were supplied with
by their benefactor. It was similar in design to the ones the Academy had developed.

W
hen she had jumped from the crashing dropship, Lucia had inflated her suit around her, providing a cushioning impact on the concrete-like ocean. She had floated over the waves until she saw Simeon’s cruiser bearing down on the island in the distance. Assuming things would get messy, she had deflated her suit and switched it to strength mode.

On
her suit this didn’t just enhance her muscles and add weight. It also hardened around her body in a thick impenetrable shell, protecting her from the crushing weight of the ocean as she sank to avoid the inevitable explosion from Simeon’s cruiser.

When debris and bodies sank down to her depth, she carefully adjusted her suit’s weight and brought herself slowly back to the surface. There was nothing to do after that but wait for the current to wash her in to the island.

Once she finally hit the beach, she turned her suit back to
its normal state and staggered out of the water.

Wake Island had been devastated in the attack. The lush foliage
had all been burned away to ash, much of it still smouldered. Thin wisps of smoke trailed high into the air. There were hunks of twisted metal strewn about, some of it even melted from the explosion.

Lucia wandered over the beach and up a small hill. If there were any bodies here, they had been turned to dust. The occasional black and crispy Academy jumpsuit caught her attention, but she ignored the mangled remnants of the students.

She gazed at the crater in the middle of the island where the lagoon had been. Water dripped down into the gaping chasm, extending hundreds of metres into the Earth. If anyone had been down there, they had suffered a quick death.

In her bedraggled state,
Lucia didn’t notice the five ghostly forms advancing on her. They converged on her location in a sweeping delta pattern, until they stood hovering only a few metres away. One by one they deactivated their suit’s camouflage. The men standing in front of her became visible in their inky black suits.

They lowered their weapons and stood at attention.

Lucia straightened her back. ‘They got out?’ she asked.

‘No ma’am,’ one of the Fletchers said. They kept their faces covered with hoods and goggles. None of the Fletchers would ever use iPCs from now on.

Lucia had seen first-hand the effect the smuggled super computer had on the maintenance men on O’ahu.

‘We’ve done a thorough forensic scan,’ the Fletcher said. ‘No sign of them on the island.’

Lucia pointed down the chasm to where the Academy had once housed hundreds of eager students. ‘You checked there?’

‘Yes, ma’am. No one could have survived that.’

Lucia nodded. ‘He’s dead then-’

One last Fletcher hurried up from the beach to them, panting hard. He pulled up in front of Lucia and held out his hand. In it was a
well-balanced hunting knife with heavy signs of repair on the handle. A handle she herself had once repaired, long ago. Joshua’s knife.

‘I found it off the coast,’ the new Fletcher reported. ‘In a raft of salvaged dropship parts.’

‘So my brother escaped,’ Lucia snatched the knife away. ‘He’s going to go after the other Council members.’