Atomic Swarm Read online

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Jason Bradbury likes gadgets – a lot! He has scoured the globe to find them and rarely stops talking and writing about them. He also likes computer games – perhaps even loves them. The first computer game he ever played consisted of nothing more than two dots and a straight line, but it was enough to ignite a lifelong passion for the (pixellated) pastime – and, despite having real human children and a robot called Vernon to look after, Jason still finds time for more game playing than is wise.

  He is best known as host of Five’s The Gadget Show, on which he swims with sharks, rides rocket-powered bicycles and jumps off bridges – but before his TV career took off he has been a comedian, a script writer and a breakdancer.

  Jason lives in London, where he cruises the streets on various electric vehicles and newfangled types of skateboard.

  The science and technology in the Dot.Robot series is real and Jason has witnessed much of it first hand – including a trip in a self-driving robotic car in Las Vegas, a flying robot test flight and a look at an invisible jacket… if you can look at something that’s invisible.

  To find out what Jason is up to, go to his website www.jasonbradbury.com

  Books by Jason Bradbury

  Dot.Robot

  Dot.Robot: Atomic Swarm

  For Mum

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  First published 2010

  Copyright © Jason Bradbury, 2010

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194379-4

  PROLOGUE

  Paraguay

  Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, wasn’t called the ‘cheapest city in the world’ for nothing. But that didn’t mean that Fabie, the fifteen-year-old waiter at the Cafe Cassava, could afford to eat more than one main meal a day. If the tourists tipped, then he might be able to pick up a burger and Coke for one US dollar on the way home to Barrio San Pablo.

  It had been a hot day, even by Paraguayan standards, hot enough to turn the asphalt sticky, and this meant Cafe Cassava had been busy all day. The ice machine had broken down, as was the case every other week, and Fabie had added hourly trips to find ice to his already hectic day. Consequently, Fabie missed the tips from several customers.

  Fabie was thankful at least for the impressive tower of the hospital that overshadowed the whole piazza. It made Cassava the city’s coolest place to eat and drink when the sun was at its most merciless. The soaring structure also provided a steady flow of Paraguay’s richest citizens, two of whom had just sat down in Fabie’s section.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ Fabie said. He could tell immediately that the two men were English speakers. ‘Would you like to start with a cold drink?’

  ‘You betcha,’ said one of the men, a bronzed American with a thick neck and large biceps bulging beneath his T-shirt. ‘I’ll have a cold beer and a large bottle of mineral water. And make sure it’s the real deal. Not tap water and superglue!’

  The man was referring to the practice adopted in bars and cafes throughout the city of filling old plastic bottles with tap water, then glueing their tops back on and selling them to tourists as new. The shelves in Cafe Cassava’s own kitchen were stocked with hundreds of the counterfeit bottles.

  ‘That doesn’t happen here, sir,’ Fabie lied.

  ‘And for you, sir?’ he continued, turning to the most smartly dressed customer he had seen all week. Something about the man was familiar. The man was dressed in a cream-coloured suit. He wore a pale-blue shirt with a crisp collar and a white-and-gold striped tie. It was knotted almost up to his neck – a quintessentially English style of dress and quite something in this heat.

  He looked up at the young waiter from beneath the brim of a panama hat and asked for a yerba maté in perfect Spanish.

  Fabie was taken aback. Not only did the Englishman speak excellent Spanish but he had asked for a drink usually only ordered by locals. Interesting.

  As Fabie added hot water to the powdery mixture of brewed herbs the Englishman had ordered, he suddenly remembered when he’d seen the customer before. It must have been about a year ago. For several weeks he’d been a regular customer. But it wasn’t the man’s face Fabie remembered because most of that had been conspicuously concealed behind bandages. (Fabie had assumed this was the result of plastic surgery treatment, for which the hospital was famous throughout South America.) No, it was the man’s dapper dress and flamboyant mannerisms that had initially jogged his memory. But what Fabie now gleefully recalled above all those things was that the man had been the most generous tipper he, or any of the other waiters, had ever met.

  Fabie let out a yelp of excitement. He’d be eating burgers all week!

  While the American examined his water bottle’s plastic lid for signs of tampering, the Englishman took a sip from the metal straw poking out from the bowl of hot, dark liquid that Fabie had placed in front of him.

  ‘Bueno!’ he exclaimed.

  Fabie glowed at the compliment. This was surely a good sign. ‘It’s hot to be drinking maté,’ Fabie added chattily, hoping to increase his chances of a generous tip. It was strange talking to someone whose face you couldn’t see, though. The man’s hat covered most of his forehead and beneath that was a large pair of black sunglasses.

  ‘There is a theory that Indians drink hot tea on a hot day to cool themselves down,’ the Englishman replied, looking up at him. ‘Something to do with the dilation of blood vessels. Personally, I chose your delicious infusion because I like the taste.’

  Fabie just stopped himself in time from taking a sharp intake of breath. The man’s skin ran in deep ripples across his face, almost as if it had been melted. Fabie wondered for a moment what might have happened to him – he couldn’t imagine this had been the work of any plastic surgeons that he’d heard mentioned by the wealthy people around here. But really this was none of his business. His concern was getting that tip. So, instead, Fabie politely enquired after the men’s intention to stay for lunch. ‘The beef soup is excellent today.’

  ‘Not today,’ said the Englishman.

  Fabie’s heart sank. If the men were only drinking, there would be no generous tip.

  ‘Perhaps I can get you some cornbread and olives?’ he offered, desperate to salvage something from this.

&nb
sp; ‘Whatever,’ the American said, dismissing the waiter. A disappointed Fabie walked back towards the kitchen. He placed a bowl of olives on a plate and surrounded it with several slices of sopa Paraguaya cornbread. He stepped back on the terrace to make his last attempt at securing a tip that day, when there was an enormous explosion.

  The young waiter instinctively threw himself to the ground as a wall of dust raced across the piazza, engulfing the cafe terrace.

  The wail of car alarms filled the air, quickly followed by voices of men and women calling to see if colleagues and loved ones were OK. Fabie couldn’t see more than ten metres or so ahead, the dust was so thick. But eventually, as it cleared, he looked up to see that where the tall hospital building had stood for the past few years, blocking out the sun’s harsh rays, there was now only blue sky. Through the chaos and dust, the two men he had been serving walked towards him. The muscular American walked straight past Fabie, but the Englishman stopped and glanced down at the young waiter lying flat on the ground.

  Putting a hand inside his jacket, he pulled out a large brown leather wallet. He took a hundred-dollar note from inside it and, squatting down, handed it to Fabie.

  ‘That maté was excellent, by the way.’

  CHAPTER 1

  Smack!

  Jackson Farley’s eyes widened. He could feel the blood start to pump a painful beat in his temple.

  This was it. Certain death. No matter what numbers the brilliant young mathematician could crunch and regardless of the powerful robots he could summon with a mere wave of his mobile phone, there was nothing the thirteen-year-old could do now to prevent his certain demise.

  This chess match was lost.

  Jackson tried to rub away the tension in his head that another defeat had brought. He looked at the face of the young opponent who was sitting on the other side of the chessboard. Atticus79 had just slammed his last chess piece down with the force of a gladiator delivering his final killer blow. Now he sat there on the grass, grinning.

  ‘That’s what I love about you Brits,’ said the tall, skinny fourteen-year-old. ‘You bring all your ideas over here, and us Americans end up doing them better. American football, that’s rugby, but better. And you guys claim you invented the sandwich, but the American sub is way better! Now this?’

  Atticus79 was referring to Bullet Chess, an entire chess game played within just sixty seconds. Jackson had introduced it to him several months ago and today Atticus79 had won all of the ten matches they’d played.

  ‘Mind you, I suspect my victory might have something to do with the fact that you’re playing two games simultaneously!’ Atticus79 pointed at the thin rectangular tablet computer that Jackson was balancing on his knees.

  ‘What, Whisper?’ said Jackson. ‘I’m not really playing it. It’s more work than play.’

  Jackson had been logged into the online role-playing game for the entire time they’d been playing Bullet Chess. But, as far as he was concerned, guiding his character, WizardZombie, through a few menial tasks could hardly be considered distracting. He’d been playing the game for as long as he could remember. He could do it with his eyes shut.

  ‘What d’you mean, work?’ asked Atticus79.

  ‘I direct my character, WizardZombie, to mine for gold, do a little blacksmithing here and there, and buy and sell weapons and other goods. After a few hours’ play I can usually make enough Whisper gold coins to trade them for real dollars on various websites. It’s called gold farming – trading game money for real-world money. It helps me supplement my college fees!’

  MIT wasn’t cheap. Just over a year ago when Jackson had been offered the chance to leave his rather ordinary secondary school in Peckham for a scholarship at the USA’s top technology university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he had been torn. He had desperately wanted to go, but found it very hard to leave his dad.

  It wasn’t that his dad couldn’t cook or keep the flat in order without him or even that they were together all the time – they weren’t. What with Jackson being at school in the day and his dad working nights, some days they’d only see each other for a few minutes. But they were a team; they’d been through a lot together. When Jackson’s mum had died several years ago and his dad had struggled to keep a job, they’d supported each other.

  Mr Farley, however, had given Jackson no choice. ‘It’s the kind of education your mother and I could never have afforded for you,’ he’d said. ‘You’re going, and that’s an end of it.’

  As for the cost of moving to America and paying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of college fees, his dad did his best. But it helped that the robotic engineering course, on which Jackson had enrolled, was headed up by J.P. English, the millionaire father of Jackson’s fellow roboteer Brooke English, with whom he’d been through so much in the last year.

  So here he was, sitting on the lawn in front of MIT’s imposing Great Dome, starting the eleventh chess game of the day, which this time he had no intention of losing to Atticus79. Jackson looked at his chess buddy in between rapidly exchanged chess moves. Atticus79 was tall for his age, made even taller by a thick tangle of wildly curly carrot-coloured hair that shot up and out in all directions. He had the obligatory metal brace glistening between his teeth that so many American teens wore and he was wearing a T-shirt that read ‘I ROCKS’.

  It was a joke that only made sense if you knew that Atticus79 was a complete geology nut.

  Atticus79 had been one of the first people he’d met during orientation week nine months ago. It had been hard enough that Jackson was abroad for the first time in his life, not even on holiday, but actually living on his own, 5,500 kilometres away from his dad. In those first few strange days, when every fire-engine siren and every pedestrian crossing seemed like it belonged on an alien planet, Jackson was pleased to have found the MIT chess club and in it his new friend, Atticus79.

  The two boys were the odd ones out. Both were a lot younger than the ten or so other club members. When Atticus79 had introduced himself with a number in his name, Jackson was immediately intrigued.

  ‘Why 79?’ he’d enquired.

  ‘Why do you think?’ asked the boy, his brace glinting as he smiled.

  Jackson thought for a moment. ‘I dunno. Your mum and dad really liked prime numbers?’

  In fact, it had been nothing to do with Jackson’s favourite mathematical idiosyncrasy. This was all geological. As a young boy, Atticus was obsessed with rocks. While other children in his home state of California were playing hide-and-seek and riding their bikes, Atticus was panning for gold in the streams of his once famous gold-rush hometown. At the age of eight, he found his first sizeable nugget and started a mini gold rush of his own. When a teacher at school named him Atticus79, ‘79’ being the atomic number of gold, the name stuck.

  But not even a geology genius, with ten games of Bullet Chess under his belt, was unbeatable.

  ‘Aha!’ Jackson let out a long-awaited victory cry.

  ‘No! How did you do that?’ Atticus79 didn’t even attempt to hide his irritation at losing the chess game. Jackson’s killer combination of moves had worked – ten games to one.

  ‘The king must be safeguarded in the opening of a game. You left him open for my rook. Winning makes you cocky!’ That was a phrase his dad used. His dad wasn’t clever, not like Jackson was, or like his mathematician mum had been, but he had a way of getting straight to the point. Jackson smiled; he would see his dad very soon. It was only three days until he visited for the first time since Jackson had come to America.

  Desperate to redeem his form, Atticus79 was already busy setting up their next breakneck bout when Jackson’s phone rang from inside his bag.

  Jackson flicked it open. ‘Hel–’

  ‘Don’t panic!’ Brooke interrupted.

  ‘Wha–?’ Jackson still wasn’t given time to finish.

  ‘I may have got myself into another situation.’

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘Everybod
y stay calm!’

  From where she was standing at the centre of a multi-car pile-up, Brooke’s words could just about be heard above the cacophony of shouting and car horns.

  She’d seen it all happen as she was jogging in the park across the street. It would have been hard to miss the driver of the Lamborghini Murciélago SV – rather than wait for the cars in front to move, like everybody else, he’d weaved his way dangerously in and out of the thick line of traffic leaving the city. As soon as he’d seen a gap, he’d opened up the 600-horsepower sports engine and shot forward, only to plough into the back of a tattered old pickup that had pulled up at a pedestrian crossing. At least ten other cars had then ploughed their way into one almighty mess of warped metal and broken glass.

  Brooke couldn’t see the pickup truck that had taken the full force of the Lamborghini’s impact. She’d lost sight of it in the fender-bending mêlée but she knew its driver could be in real trouble. Brooke clambered on to the bonnet of a mangled Chevrolet Camaro and spotted it – an ancient F-Series Ford in baby blue. It had mounted the metal guard rail that ran alongside the Charles River and was now balancing precariously over the edge. Alarmingly, Brooke could see an old man still sitting in the driver seat, wrapped up tight in the wreckage.

  She jumped down and ran over to the Ford. ‘You OK, sir?’ she asked, being careful not to touch or nudge the delicately balanced truck in any way.

  ‘Never been better, missy. I just needs a tow, is all!’

  ‘I think you need to get out of the truck, sir, pretty darned quick!’ From where Brooke was standing, the truck looked like it was ready to tip and fall into the river at any second.

  ‘I’d love ta, but this steering wheel is a little close for comfort.’

  Brooke leaned over to look through the open driver-side window. The large metal steering wheel was up against the man’s chest and it looked to Brooke like the console had been compressed and was pushing down on his legs in the footwell. The truck shifted precariously towards the river, just a couple of metres below.