The Weapon (The Hourglass Series Book 2) (18 page)

Sarah,
Finn, Boulder, her father and a few of the other scientists sat around the
fire. They had found out from one of the scientists currently trying to make
hot drinks that when her father had leapt from the car to return to get her the
sniper had jumped straight out too. The others didn’t hesitate for much longer.
The man with the gun was their best marksmen. It turns out that even hunted
scientists on the run have hobbies. He won their department marksmen contest
yearly. After the other scientists had heard the shot they had stormed the
room. They had taken the Captain’s body somewhere, as well as Lieutenant Wong,
who they had quickly subdued. The body of their friend they had carried
reverently out of sight, to mourn later. Clara was being looked after by a lady
with a kind face. Despite what she had said to the Captain and the fact that he
had tried to kill her, she was still taking his death pretty hard.

Boulder
had grown an egg-sized lump behind his ear and was occasionally twitching
spasmodically as a side-effect from the stunner, but was otherwise ok.

“So,”
said Finn, breaking the silence that had grown in the last few minutes. “You’re
Sarah’s father?”

“Yes,”
said her father, “but I haven’t been much of one, I’m afraid.”

Sarah
looked up but didn’t say anything. What does someone even say to a father who
abandoned both her and her mum when…

“Did
mum know?” she asked suddenly, “that this is where you went?”

Her
dad nodded slowly. “She did. She wasn’t happy, but she understood. She
understood the need.”

Sarah
took a deep breath.
Logic
, she told herself.
Be logical
. It was
the only way she was going to get through this without crying or hitting him in
the face. Most likely both.

“The
machine,” she said, “the one that will win the war.”

“Yes,”
he said, answering the statement.

Sarah
looked directly into his eyes. They were the same shape as hers.

“How?”

Her
father looked at her, hesitating. “I’m afraid the answer to that is going to
involve a bit of a company history lesion. We don’t have to go through it now
if you don’t want to. We have time, Sarah, we can-”

“No,”
said Sarah, cutting him off. “I need to know why you did this. To me, to mum,
hell, even Finn and Boulder’s last few months are because of you.”

Her
father sighed, conceding the point.

“When
the Hourglass Group started manufacturing weapons for the war effort, hundreds
of years ago, you understand, a small faction of the designers built in a
failsafe mechanism without anyone else knowing. They were worried, you see,
that the war would be prolonged, and clearly they were right to be worried.”

“So
why didn’t they just hit the kill switch five years in?” interrupted Boulder.

“They
couldn’t. The failsafe wasn’t something they had the technology to trigger at
the time, but they predicted that future technology should be able to work it
out, to find the answer.”

“Well
that was stupid,” said Boulder, unimpressed.

“Actually,
it was smart. It meant that nobody else outside the faction would realise what
it actually was. It was such a minor thing, but still integral to practically
every weapon manufactured by the Hourglass Group, from then to now. The problem
was, it was forgotten about. We believe that the surviving faction who knew
about it years later were killed off when a bomb hit one of the facilities, and
the secret died with them before they could pass it on. At least, it was until
we stumbled across it.”

“Can
you imagine what it was like?” said another scientist who was listening in and
now pouring the drinks. “You’re working in an industry that is killing thousands
and eating your soul, and the solution to wipe out nearly every weapon in use
with practically no bloodshed, effectively forcing an end to the war, falls
into your lap? It was like deliverance. It was our chance to make things
right.”

“All
we had to do,” said Sarah’s dad, “was to work out how to trigger the failsafe.
Unfortunately word got out that we were working on something big and we had to
split from the Group before either side, or the company, investigated and found
out. Can you imagine what would happen if they knew? They would destroy all our
data, then us, and then they would change the weapons. Our only chance would be
destroyed. The war would never end.”

“So
can you do it?” asked Sara. “Do you know how to trigger the failsafe?”

Her
father nodded, proud. “We’ve spent the last month making and planting trigger
devices near storage and battle areas. We have so much more to do, but we’re
so, so close. It’s vital, you see, that we trigger them all at once. We can’t
let one side have the advantage.”

“What
about non-Hourglass weapons?” asked Finn.

“Yes,
well, turns out we were really good at our old jobs too, apparently. We
estimate that only 0.4% of weapons in current uses are non-Hourglass.”

“So
you can do it then? You can really end the war?”

Her
father nodded. He looked at her, his eyes pleading.

“I
know I don’t have the right to ask you this, but will you help us?”

“To
end the war?” Sarah thought about her mum and uncle and everyone she knew
living on protein bars. She thought about Finn’s dead family, about Mr Wall
falling to his death. She looked at Finn, who grinned back, and then at
Boulder, who shrugged a yes. Sarah turned back to face her father.

“Hell
yes.”

The
End