Atomic Swarm Read online

  The glass bubble hissed as it slid backwards.

  For Jackson, the inescapable truth was that he was face to face with the man who’d caused so much pain and misery in his life – and there was nothing he could do to give him his just deserts. One wrong move and the gun in his back would go off.

  ‘You and that other worm think you can come to my mine and steal my diamonds,’ Yakimoto hissed. ‘Tell me how you heard about my latest find, or you’ll go the same way as your partner!’

  ‘What are you talking about? Lear is your partner, not mine!’ Jackson said wearily, still not quite understanding what he had just seen. ‘I know all about the diamond deal the two of you struck.’

  Yakimoto looked at Mr Botha and the two men burst out laughing. ‘I have no deal with the snivelling scar-faced fool I just tossed to his death – whoever he was!’ He strode forward, scooping Jackson up in the arms of the lifter.

  ‘Tell me what you know, or I’ll crush you where you stand!’ Yakimoto touched the controls of the lifter and the talons that gripped Jackson’s thighs clenched. The pressure was intense, but Jackson was determined not to give Yakimoto the satisfaction of him showing his pain. Then, just as Jackson felt his legs might crush under the force of the lifter’s steel grip, he spotted one of Lear’s dead spherical robots on the ground.

  ‘I will only ask you one more time before I send you the same way as your friend – how did you know about my diamond discovery?’

  ‘What diamond discovery?’ shouted Jackson. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  Yakimoto turned the lifter towards the icy precipice, and every movement sent fresh waves of pain into Jackson’s body. Struggling to drag his phone from his pocket, Jackson tried to ignore the pain and focus on sending Punk a message: ‘FTCH BLL’.

  ‘OK, let me go,’ Jackson pleaded. He needed vital seconds before he was crushed to death. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’

  Yakimoto released the lifter’s grip on Jackson and he dropped to the ground. Wasting no time, Jackson immediately spun round and grabbed Lear’s defunct tennis-ball-sized robot, throwing it, cleanly, inside the cockpit of the lifter just as Punk shot out of the damaged helicopter, his spikes extending and retracting in an intricate matrix that had him moving along the ground towards Jackson and Yakimoto at incredible speed. Moments from reaching them, Punk bounced into the air. As he flew, each of his sharp spikes extended, all twelve reaching full extension in less than two microseconds.

  Punk embedded himself into the lifter at shoulder height, one of his spikes piercing straight through Yakimoto’s right cheek. He dropped into the cockpit cavity, spiking cables and electronics and human flesh at random as he searched doggedly for the ball that was rattling around somewhere inside.

  As Mr Botha opened fire on Punk, Jackson took his chance – and ran.

  Bullets from Botha’s pistol ricocheted off the metal huts either side of Jackson as he half ran, half slid, on the icy ground, before he made it round one of the structures.

  Jackson kept running, zigzagging between the garages and huts until he came across Tread. He tried to wrench the heavy wheel-bot from the debris of the building in which he was buried, but before he could free him he heard the cocking of a weapon. It was Botha again.

  Jackson spun round. Tread pivoted on the spot, shooting a dart from the centre of its hub.

  Tread had transmitted a wireless surge of electricity between his main power cell and the metal barb in Mr Botha’s leg before the man even knew his skin had been pierced.

  Botha let out a bloodcurdling scream and dropped his weapon as his muscles were paralysed by the flow of electricity. When it finished, he just lay on the ground whimpering. But at that moment his moans were drowned by the sound of beating helicopter blades. Jackson ran towards the helicopter pad to find Yakimoto in the cockpit of his helicopter as its rotors spooled up.

  Luckily, Jackson slipped and fell to the ground, as a spray of bullets left the shattered cockpit and came in his direction.

  Dragging himself to his feet, Jackson looked into the whirlwind of frozen, granular snow that was whipped up as the helicopter rose. He could see the bloodied face of Yakimoto, sneering at him through the smashed cockpit glass.

  The helicopter continued to rise – until it was swallowed by the white sky.

  The snow drove harder than ever against Jackson’s face as he attempted to recover Punk from inside the frame of Yakimoto’s powerlifter. As he scrabbled to get a grip with agonizingly cold hands, he thought he heard a whimper coming from the edge of the diamond mine.

  The snowstorm was horizontal now, driven by an angry wind, as Jackson ventured towards the edge of the massive hole.

  Through the white-out he could just make out the form of a person, clinging to a thin sliver of ice on the sheer rock face.

  ‘Help me! Help me, Jackson!’ It was the voice of Lear, drifting up from the churning mist.

  Jackson edged gingerly down towards Lear. He could hardly believe what he was looking at – a beaten and bloody Devlin Lear balanced helplessly on a brittle, icy ridge, a swirling white cavity beneath him.

  Jackson took his phone from his pocket. He held it up and snapped a mugshot of Lear’s panic-stricken face. It was the evidence he needed to exonerate all of them.

  ‘Why would I ever help you again?’ Jackson shouted into the abyss.

  ‘Because I’m Mr Pope,’ spluttered Lear. ‘Because, Jackson, I’m your father.’

  Jackson was stunned. For a moment he said nothing – then rage bubbled up.

  ‘You utter madman,’ Jackson bellowed. ‘You’re not my father. How can you be?’

  One of the legs that Lear had jammed into the ice slipped, and for a second Jackson thought the man would fall as he struggled desperately to find a crevice to hold on to. Lear cried out in pain and Jackson noticed that one of the hands clinging to the rock face was twisted and broken.

  ‘I came here for the same reason you did, Jackson,’ he cried. ‘To catch Yakimoto. To make him pay for what he did to us! The diamonds. The reactor. I needed a way to catch his attention. I knew I could lure him here if pure blue diamonds were found in his mine.’

  Jackson stared down at Lear, dumbfounded.

  ‘Because he killed your mother, Jackson,’ Lear continued. ‘Yakimoto killed the only woman I ever loved.’

  Jackson struggled to find the denial he desperately needed, but it evaded him. He thought about the photos of Mr Pope – about the face he had never quite been able to see. It all made a horrible kind of sense.

  ‘But… what about the money?’ shouted Jackson.

  ‘I won’t pretend I wasn’t trying to extort money from the black-haired assassin Yakimoto,’ Lear hissed. ‘But the diamonds, Jackson. They’re radioactive! Even now, as he flies away with them, he has no clue the stones are rotting him from the outside in.’

  Without warning, the ice supporting Lear’s feet cracked and he slipped.

  ‘Aargh!’ Only one foot was left on the crumbling ledge, with the fingers of one frozen, bloodstained hand jammed in a crack in the ice.

  ‘But Mr Pope died!’ Jackson’s words echoed in the pit as he tried to understand the truth about his parentage after weeks of torment over the mystery.

  ‘I spent four years as a captive of Yakimoto’s gang, hidden away in a forest camp deep in Japan. Even my own government didn’t come looking for me as they thought I was dead. When eventually I managed to escape and make it back to England, I made myself a new identity so Yakimoto wouldn’t hunt me down. He doesn’t know who I really am.’

  Suddenly Yakimoto’s denials all made sense to Jackson. He really hadn’t known who he was dealing with. Jackson glared furiously at Lear – at least he’d had the option to escape Yakimoto. His mother hadn’t.

  Lear’s voice was strained as he struggled to hold on. ‘That’s when I found out that your mother had a child. You, Jackson. You were three years old. I couldn’t make contact with your mother as I was worri
ed Yakimoto’s men might be on my trail and I didn’t want to put her in any more danger. But I watched you from afar, Jackson, as you grew. I was, after all, trained by the same people your mother worked for and I used those skills to keep track of your progress. Over the years my business dealings made me a very rich man and enabled me to set up MeX. Through MeX, we finally met.’

  The wind blew so hard on to the exposed ridge that Lear’s hand slipped. Again he was able to recover it, but Jackson could see he didn’t have much more strength left in him.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Jackson shouted. ‘Why target the MIT reactor? Why kidnap me?’

  ‘I may have been looking out for you, Jackson,’ Lear cried, ‘but my paternal instincts don’t extend to that sanctimonious Professor English. It was his network that allowed you and that strange daughter of his to ruin MeX and turn me into a wanted man. Goulman and the reactor were my revenge against him.’

  ‘But you left me tied up in the tunnels under the campus. I could have died in that reactor explosion!’ replied Jackson.

  ‘The tunnels were the safest place to be when my bomb went off. I had you picked up and left down there to guarantee your safety, Jackson.’

  Lear started to slip. This time, his hand slid out of the crack in the ice.

  ‘Hold on!’ shouted Jackson, leaning out over the edge to grab Lear’s hand. But all Jackson managed to clutch was a handful of the man’s sleeve before the material started to rip.

  ‘No!’ Jackson couldn’t let this happen. Not now – there were still so many things he needed to know.

  The wind was blasting, the hole below roaring up at them. A frightened Lear looked at Jackson. ‘I’m sorry, son,’ he said. Then his coat sleeve ripped and he fell, his body consumed by the snowy chasm.

  And as Jackson lay on the ground, staring open-mouthed into the abyss, a peaceful voice echoed through his head:

  All things in the world are two.

  Strong and weak, wise and unwise,

  Friend and foe, father and son.

  CHAPTER 28

  Something inside Jackson was missing. It was the paranoia.

  He was sitting in the window of Cyber Republic. Brooke was late, as usual, but things were looking up. He hadn’t even needed to ask: his Coke had been waiting for him when he’d reached the checkout – a stack of 10.6 ice cubes floating in the brown-black liquid.

  Across the street he could see the Cambridge Bicycle Shop beside which he’d once thought a sinister black van had waited. As it had turned out, he’d been right. That was partly why he was no longer scared – he knew the truth. He knew who his real father was. He knew his father was dead and that he hated him for the chaos he’d wrought. But he also knew that, even though Lear’s greed and arrogance had wrecked too many lives, this man – who he still saw in recurring nightmares, falling into the snowy abyss – was the very reason that Jackson had had his mother in his life. And he was grateful for that, even for the short time he’d shared with her.

  The FBI had come for Jackson. But thanks to the evidence Brooke had shown her local sheriff, it was a rescue mission rather than a manhunt. They’d also come for Goulman. They found him via a number of money transfers from an account they traced to Lear. Jackson hadn’t ever needed to show them the picture on his phone to prove Lear’s existence. Lear had incriminated himself and so Jackson deleted it. He knew who Lear was to him – he didn’t need the photo.

  The FBI’s initial investigation had uncovered evidence that Lear had employed Goulman since before his faked death and that he had paid J.P.’s assistant over two million dollars to spy on Brooke, J.P. and Jackson. Brooke had taken that betrayal hard, but found some solace in the circumstances of Ghoul’s capture. A Columbian coast-guard found his yacht floating in the Pacific, stripped of everything and savaged by fire. Goulman himself had been beaten to within an inch of his life. He’d been attacked by pirates.

  Yakimoto had so far evaded capture.

  At first Jackson had tried to push Yakimoto from his mind, but in the weeks since the Canadian expedition information from the twins had revealed that he had made it back to Japan. Yakimoto might be alive, but the fear that had stalked Jackson since he’d gone against Lear, over a year ago, was no longer with him. Yakimoto didn’t scare him; he made his blood boil. The rage Jackson felt towards the man who had killed his mother had also given him a new source of strength. Jackson had found himself fantasizing about what he would do if he came face to face with Yakimoto for a second time. His favourite idea saw him cleaving Yakimoto in two with one of WizardZombie’s Enchanted Thunderfury Broadswords.

  Brooke flashed into the cafe and jumped into the seat beside Jackson’s.

  ‘Come on then, tell me, did you hear back from Singer yet?’ she asked excitedly.

  ‘Yes, I did!’ said Jackson.

  ‘Tell me what he said already! Did we win?’

  ‘I haven’t opened the email yet; I thought I’d wait until you got here,’ he answered.

  With everything that had happened, Jackson had forgotten all about Singer’s Artificial Intelligence competition, but Brooke hadn’t. No sooner had Jackson arrived back in Boston, and Brooke had been entirely sure that he was OK, than she started pestering him about sending their data to the professor.

  Jackson had made several alterations to the lines of raw code to hide the true identities of Punk and Tug, not to mention some of their defensive capabilities. But the two complementary personality profiles were there, with the idea that Jackson hoped might clinch it for them – the text-message interface.

  Jackson used his phone to bring up the professor’s email. For a moment he just sat and read the words that seemed almost printed on the shiny white surface of the phone, then he started to shake his head despairingly.

  Brooke’s shoulders drooped. She was clearly very disappointed.

  Suddenly Jackson beamed a big smile. ‘I’m just kidding. It says we won!’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ said Brooke, bubbling over with excitement. ‘I’ve actually won something! I am a winner!’ Brooke jumped up and did a tiny jig beside her chair. ‘Do we get a trophy? Tell me we get a trophy!’

  ‘If you want a trophy, Brooke, I’m sure I can organize something,’ said Jackson, grinning.

  ‘Anyway, listen up, I’ve been thinking. I’ve got a new idea for a robot interface!’ Her eyes were blazing with excitement. ‘Mind control!’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Jackson. ‘Let’s do it!’

  EPILOGUE

  Japan

  The expensive hotel suite sat high above Akihabara, otherwise known as Electric Town.

  It didn’t matter how many times Mr Kojima looked at the Tokyo skyline, he never grew tired of it. Every colour imaginable was here, infused with electric light, drawing the outlines of buildings, which, in his opinion, were as beautiful as any of Japan’s mountains, forests and lakes.

  Mr Kojima squinted as the rest of his family arrived, the flashbulbs that accompanied them bouncing off the floor-to-ceiling glass window. Three of the security guards he employed pressed against the doors and squeezed the press and autograph hunters out.

  He leaned forward in a deep uncurving bow, his eyes never leaving his five children.

  ‘Sit down, little ones,’ said the man’s elegant wife, pulling back chairs for her three youngest, and motioning the older Kojima twins to sit round the large table that dominated the centre of the room.

  Mr Kojima waited for them all to settle – and then a little while longer as was his way, until they were completely silent.

  ‘Tonight is a proud night for our family,’ he said, raising his chin. ‘The twins have won another great victory.’ Everyone round the glass table, which included the three six-year-old identical sisters, clapped politely.

  Mr Kojima looked down and locked the twins in a serious stare.

  ‘As the winners of Japan’s most coveted professional computer-gaming tournament,’ he continued, ‘we now have the noble r
esponsibility of carrying the Kojima family name with pride and dignity. Tonight’s tournament win may feel like the crowning achievement of the last few years, but it is only the beginning. Before us all is a lifetime in which people will look to us for inspiration and leadership.’

  Master Kojima couldn’t help but let out a stunted snigger at the idea that he, a ten-year-old gamer, was some kind of role model for inspiration and leadership. In turn, his sister spat out a single subdued laugh.

  All their father needed to do was widen his eyes, and the twins fell instantly silent again.

  ‘I have reserved a restaurant for us and some of your friends.’

  A buzz of excitement shot around the room.

  ‘As we make our way there,’ Mr Kojima continued, ‘I ask that you conduct yourselves with dignity. All of Japan will be watching.’ He then nodded and the family scraped back their chairs and moved towards the door.

  The family scurried along the hotel corridor and into the lift, two thickset suited guards at the front and one behind – enough to keep the handful of photographers and diehard gaming fans at bay.

  When they reached the lobby, it was a different affair. From the moment they left the lift, throngs of young people and paparazzi stuck everything from notepads to full-sized digital TV cameras in their faces. The twins smiled and tried to scribble on the pads and scraps of paper thrust before them as they were ushered along.

  With their bodyguards carving a way through the crowd, the family finally reached the pavement outside, where a stretch limousine was waiting for them.

  Suddenly three tiny metallic discs rolled on to the ground between them and the car and instantly began to smoke. Everyone around the car started coughing and choking. Mr Kojima and his bodyguard struggled to push his wife and children into the waiting car – which by now was revving hard. But, unexpectedly, his wife flew backwards out of the car, knocking into the triplets, the four of them landing awkwardly on the pavement.