Derecho E-Book

G.A. Franks

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The year is 2121 and the Earth has endured a catastrophic century of global pandemics, conflict, and climate change. All international borders are closed, and the United Kingdom is no more. There is only ‘New Britain’ — a privately-run country governed by Aloysius Kroll, the enigmatic CEO of the megacorp ‘Kaoteck’.

Gideon Rayne and the surviving members of Cobra Team have discovered Kroll’s deception. The evil despot plans to use the Cobras and their powerful quantum armour to forge a new British Empire, and he’s prepared to sacrifice the entire population of New Britain in the process.

The young Cobras know they must free themselves from Kroll’s grasp, but the all-seeing gaze of the company A.I. ‘ADA’ makes escape from the Kaoteck pyramid seem impossible. To make matters worse, the presence of a mysterious new class of armour-clad warrior raises questions that just might be best left unanswered.

It seems the echoes of the past have caught up with Gideon — and there’s a price to be paid.

Following directly on from the events of the bestselling ‘Maelstorm – Gideon Rayne Book 1’, Derecho is a gritty, action-packed adventure that twists and turns as it draws you into a breathless race against time in a world where tragedy is waiting around every corner and the stakes are impossibly high.

Leseprobe

DERECHO

GIDEON RAYNE BOOK 2

G.A. FRANKS

CONTENTS

About the Author

Previously…

Prologue

Part I

1. Home

2. Murderball

3. The Warhold

4. Cobra Ii

5. Reunion

6. Cobra Alpha

7. W.H.I.P

8. Cobra Team I Presume?

9. And then there were…

10. The Raft

11. The Plan

12. Bandit

13. Way Back When

14. Daybreak

15. TCS Fairchild

16. The Meeting

17. Solution

18. Exit Only

19. Echoes

20. Derecho Dawn

21. Follow Me

22. 01:37

23. 01:45

24. Wake Up

Part II

25. 24 Hours

26. Avery 2.0

27. One Shot Deal

28. Transfer Complete

29. Hostile Takeover

30. One Small Step

31. Gotcha

32. We Should Be Better

33. The Broadcast

34. Echo 01

35. Echo 02

36. Echo 03

37. The Final Echo

38. The Forever Key

39. All Things End

Epilogue

Author’s Note

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 G.A. Franks

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

For more information about the author and new releases, please see:

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www.GAFranksauthor.home.blog

WELCOME TO NEW BRITAIN

The year is 2121 and Earth has endured a catastrophic century of global pandemics, conflict and climate change. All international borders are closed and the United Kingdom is no more. There is only ‘New Britain’ — a privately-run country governed by Aloysius Kroll, the enigmatic CEO of the megacorp ‘Kaoteck’.

In an attempt to stabilise the country, Kaoteck created a militaristic Constabulary to enforce law and order, and divided New Britain into three areas:

The Frozen North:

A barren wasteland covering the north of the country, where much of the land was lost to the rising seas and the devastating effects of the maelstorm.

The Factories:

The industrial heartlands, inhabited by the indentured, the poor and those with nowhere else to go.

The Rainbow Zone:

A place where those with enough power, wealth or privilege can live comfortable lives for as long as they remain servile to the rule of Aloysius Kroll.

PREVIOUSLY…

Gideon Rayne, a young orphan from the Rainbow Zone, is one of a small group selected to join Kaoteck as part of the experimental ‘Cobra’ programme. The youngsters are subjected to chemical alteration and given futuristic suits of armour with the capability to materialise weapons from quantum lockers stored on their backs. Sadly, not all of the newly christened ‘Cobra team’ survive the alteration process.

Meawhile, signs of dissent start to appear in Aloysius Kroll’s highly ordered society, causing the despotic leader to become increasingly paranoid. Because of this, the Cobra team are sent into the slum-like district known as ‘The Factories’ as a show of force. Unfortunately, the mission ends in disaster, leaving two more of the Cobras dead. Following a tip off, an enraged and reactionary Kroll dispatches the survivors — Gideon, Fan and Kristy — to the Frozen North, in a bid to eliminate what he believes to be the instigators of the civil unrest sweeping the country.

Upon their arrival in the North, the team fall under attack and are soon separated, unable to communicate with each other due to the interference from a nearby atmostpheric event called ‘the maelstorm.’ Injured, and with his armour badly damaged, Gideon meets an unlikely ally named Claws, who leads him to an underground town which the residents have christened ‘The Metro’.

Whilst searching for his missing team-mates, Gideon discovers that the Cobras have been misled by Kaoteck. The town’s inhabitants are peaceful and are hiding out in the North for fear of being sent to the Factories as Kroll’s indentured servants.

Just as he is about to make his escape from the underground town, Gideon is captured once again. This time by a mysterious woman called Isolde, and her fiery daughter Gwendolyne — both of whom wear a version of the supposedly top-secret C.O.B.R.A. armour.

A brutal battle ensues in which Isolde is fatally wounded and Gideon is reunited with his friends. It transpires that Isolde is the creator of the incredible quantum technology that powers their suits, and that she escaped from Kroll after he started weaponizing the technology she had created for altruistic purposes.

As she is dying, Isolde reveals how she knew Gideon when he was a child, and that it was Kroll who was responsible for the death of his parents. She explains that Gideon was kidnapped at a young age and experimented on by Kroll, who had wanted to take advantage of the youngster’s latent compatibility with the neural interface required to operate the COBRA armour.

Whilst this is happening, Kroll reveals to Archer — his second in command — that the Cobras are vital to his plans to visit the Enclave, a shadowy organisation who guard the last stock of intercontinental weapons on the planet. Despite having his own reservations about Kroll’s leadership, Archer conceives a daring plan to bring the Cobras back to Kaoteck.

When the rescue team arrives, the Cobras are left with a difficult choice — reveal the existence of the innocent people hiding in the North, including Isolde and Gwendolyne. Or return to Kroll, knowing he has deceived and betrayed them.

Aware she is near death; Isolde trusts them to make the right choice and sacrifices herself to buy them time. Her people hold off the rescue team, while Gwendolyne helps the Cobras to fake an armour malfunction, allowing them to return to Kaoteck without arousing Kroll’s suspicion. She promises to find them when the time is right.

After they are safely back in the Kaoteck pyramid, a seemingly suspicious Kroll informs Gideon that, once they are recovered and their armour repaired, the Cobras will be placed at the forefront of a brutal crackdown on the population.

Gideon and his friends find themselves in need of a way to plan their escape, whilst under the ever-watchful eye of Aloysius Kroll and his powerful A.I. assistant, ADA…

PROLOGUE

One singular, inescapable thought dominated Special Constable Daisy Mori’s failing mind…That she had burnt down the home and terrorised the parents of the person who was responsible for what would happen to her next. — The person who was standing over her now, clutching a scalpel and studying a data stream on her Ktab.

The inevitable decay had finally caught up with her. The slow creeping death that had begun the very first time she had donned her experimental Quantum Sub-Locker suit.

The QSL suits had been a stroke of unparalleled genius, the pinnacle of a technology which would have seemed miraculous just a few years earlier.

… No, that wasn’t quite true. They weren’t the pinnacle — that had come later. She hadn’t been good enough for that. Her brain wouldn’t work with the more advanced COBRA suits the way it had with the QSL suit. That might have saved her... She might have had what they had. But there was no more time for what might have been.

Mori smiled; she’d won... in a way…She’d outlasted all the others who had worn the QSL suits. One by one, each of them had fallen prey to the wretched decline which ate away at you from the inside from the moment the suit first connected to your thoughts. She’d beaten them all, she’d lived the longest — and now she was going beat death too.

PARTI

1

HOME

“Gideon, move it will you, our ride’s waiting, let’s go!” Chris Fan was obviously excited; his eyes were disconcertingly wide, and he didn’t seem to be able to keep one foot on the floor for more than a second or two. Nervous energy was bursting out of him, and it was making Gideon feel somewhat unsettled.

“You go ahead Fan, I’m right behind you.” Casting an eye around the Cobras’ new home, Gideon Rayne fought down a wave of introspection which threatened to swallow him whole. Since their return from the Frozen North, the surviving Cobras had been treated like royalty. As an orphan growing up under the watchful gaze of Miss Burnett, he had often ended up sharing a room with several other children and had relied on a mouldy cellar to find rare moments of solace. His possessions had been limited to a battered old Ktab, a small handful of clothes and second – or third hand sundries rescued from waste bins. It was all a far cry from the opulence surrounding him now.

Aloysius Kroll, the head of Kaoteck and CEO of New Britain, had personally seen to it that the Cobra team were lavished with their heart’s desires. Gone was their old, spartan quarters — replaced with almost an entire floor of the Kaoteck pyramid, filled with leisure and training equipment. Anything they wanted for was delivered to them without question. Gideon and his fellow Cobras were regarded as the company’s most valuable assets and nothing was too good for them.

An executive Dragonfly was waiting for the Cobras in a nearby launch bay. The craft was of similar design to the Constabulary versions they were used to, only painted in gleaming white and without the additional weapons and sensor arrays. Climbing aboard, Gideon was surprised to find Fan and Kristy already ensconced in oversized comfy-looking leather chairs and the cabin floor covered in a thick, plush carpet. The inner hull of the craft doubled as a display for the external cameras, allowing the passengers to feel as though they were flying in a transparent globe with an unobstructed view of the scenery beneath them.

The luxury cabin gave him pause for a moment. A vivid memory forced its way into his mind’s eye. He was lying, immobile and traumatised, on the bare metal floor of a Dragonfly with his armour caked in gore. His breath caught in his throat, and he batted the memory away before the others noticed anything was wrong.

“Check this out!” Kristy held her arms wide, beaming gleefully. “The Khalifas would have loved this!”

Gideon nodded and shot her a rueful smile as he settled into one of the oversized chairs, “Yeah, they would. I imagine Warwick wouldn’t have been quite so impressed though.” The spectre of the fallen Cobras hung heavily over the team; the loss of Warwick Bayna still sent a stabbing pain through his heart when he thought of her. They hadn’t known each other long, or even well, but there had been a definite connection between them — right up to the moment she had ‘died’ in front of him. The company strenuously denied she was dead of course, but they all knew the truth. It was just another of Kaoteck’s lies.

The lies were why they were here, in the back of a luxury Dragonfly on their way home. The Cobras badly needed to talk about what had happened to them in the Frozen North, and there was no way it could be done in the Kaoteck pyramid while the building’s semi-sentient A.I. ADA was around. Not without compromising themselves and the breakaway group known as ‘The Family’ they had encountered out in the wastes.

The flight passed by in silence, with each of the team relishing the peace, lost in their own thoughts as the toxic waters of the south rushed beneath them. But as the craft passed over the wall into the Rainbow Zone, Fan’s face drained of colour and he pointed off into the distance, “Are you guys seeing this? It’s worse than I thought!”

Plumes of greasy black smoke rose from the horizon, daubing the sky with dark smudges. Even from high altitude, it was clear things had changed dramatically in the Rainbow whilst the Cobras had been locked away in the Kaoteck pyramid. “It looks like the charneys have upped their game.”

“But how could they have penetrated this far into the Rainbow?” Kristy wondered. “Even allowing for breaches in the wall and tunnels underneath, it seems unlikely anyone could make it this far from the Factories without being picked up by the Constables.”

Neither Gideon nor Fan had an answer, and their time together was running out, Fan came from a wealthy southerly family and his drop off point was coming up fast. “Remember what I said about the game,” said Gideon, trying to sound casual, as the craft began its descent. “We should all go check out a murderball match while we’re here. I’ll be at the south entrance at fifteen hundred hours on Saturday if you want to join me.” He raised an eyebrow and widened his eyes, giving the others a knowing look.

Fan shot him a wink, grabbed his bag and unclipped his harness as the Dragonfly settled down in the middle of a wide boulevard. “Yeah, maybe mate. If not, I’ll see you back here on Sunday though, have fun.”

He stepped off the ramp into the brilliant sunshine and Gideon caught a glimpse of what looked like Fan’s entire neighbourhood coming out to greet him. The crowds gawped up in amazement as the craft lifted off again and dipped its nose before making its way towards Kristy’s home.

The next leg of the journey took place at lower altitude, giving Gideon and Kristy a better look at some areas of the Rainbow neither of them had seen before. Several boroughs were in total darkness, other than the light of flames here and there. The length of the journey surprised Gideon, the non-military version of the Dragonfly flew a lot slower, and despite being lumped together by Kaoteck as a single privileged ‘zone’ for the wealthy, the loyal and the lucky; the Rainbow was still a big place.

“I recognise where we are now,” said Kristy eventually. “We’re nearly to mine, looks like the lights are on around here, thank goodness, are you going to be alright?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” lied Gideon. He had no idea what charade to expect upon his return, but one thing was for sure, he wouldn’t be believing anything Jakub had to say.

The luxurious craft started its descent, this time the landing zone was a rooftop in a built-up area. Kristy waved down at the small group of figures huddled together against the downdraft from the Dragonfly’s fanless motors, and Gideon realised he should be thankful. Unlike the others, he wasn’t about to be reunited with a loving family knowing full well he may never see them again. It was a small mercy given what was to come.

“See you at the game on Saturday,” called out Kristy, as the ramp closed behind her, leaving Gideon alone in the cabin.

Eventually, the craft reached Gideon’s neighbourhood, and the inexperienced pilot spent several minutes searching for a space he felt confident enough to put down in. The appearance of a bright white Kaoteck vehicle circling overhead was enough to bring out every man, woman and child onto the streets as they stared up at the unusual sight.

Squabbles broke out amongst the crowds, as they argued about what the craft was there for. Accusations started to fly, swiftly followed by fists, and Gideon was surprised to see an unfamiliar armoured cruiser arrive. A squad of Constables, in gleaming new riot armour, disembarked and started beating the crowds into submission without any hesitation or warning. Several of the more aggressive agitators were shot on sight and left where they fell.

The pilot turned the craft away and called out over the intercom, “Sorry, I’ve never been up this far before, I can’t find a landing site and it looks pretty hot down there anyway. I’ll have to set you down a fair way from home, shall I summon a pod to lock in on your Ktab and pick you up?”

Gideon rolled his eyes and sighed. Not so long ago, the thought of being able to summon a pod would have been an impossible dream. Automated Kaoteck pods, or Kpods, were the most effective way of getting around in the Rainbow, but access to them was strictly restricted by CP and cost. They were the next best thing to actually having a company provided personal car. Turning up at the home in one would have been a poor substitute for turning up in a Dragonfly, but still beyond anything he could have dreamt of a year earlier. But after what he had just witnessed, something told him a more discreet entrance might be for the best. “No thanks,” he said. “I’ll make my own way, just get me as close as you can.”

By the time he arrived at Miss Burnett’s, evening had turned to night. The flickering holo sign above the door to the 'Kaoteck Industries Home for Children of The Rainbow' glowed in the moonlight, a welcome beacon of familiarity. Not for the first time that day, Gideon cursed himself for even coming back at all, but the Cobras had sworn to maintain their pretence of loyalty, and part of that was gratefully accepting all the luxuries Kroll was throwing at them. Drawing a deep breath, he raised a hand to the entry scanner and was just about to press the intercom when the door flew open and an over-emotional Miss Burnett exploded out in a flurry of fake fur and perfume and wrapped him in a bear hug.

“My boy, my boy, my little Gideon!” she wailed, loud enough to wake half the street. “You’ve come back to see me.” She hurriedly stole a glance up and down the street before yanking him inside and sealing the door behind them. “When I saw the aeroplane overhead, I just knew it would be you! You’re late you know, I made you a special supper and now it’s gone cold!” She ruffled his hair, gazed at him fondly for a moment, and dashed off to the kitchen shouting something about making everyone a ‘nice hot cup of tea’.

“Hey bud, how’s life in the pyramid?”

The moment Gideon had been dreading had arrived. Jakub emerged from the lounge with a wide grin on his face. A thousand questions burned in Gideon’s mind, chief among them was, had Jakub been here the whole time? Or had he arrived back at the home ahead of him in order to maintain the pretence? Maybe that’s what the pilot’s sudden inability to land had been about, had he been stalling? Resisting the urge to use his newly improved fighting skills to pound his former friend into a meaty pulp, he instead went to throw his arms around Jakub in as convincing a manner as he could manage, but fate intervened and the building was plunged into darkness.

“Damn blackouts, that’s the third one this week,” said Jakub. “I’ve started carrying this around with me,” he unclipped a torch from his belt. “We’d better go make sure the kids are alright.”

The power was restored after a few minutes, and Gideon spent the evening regaling everyone with fabricated stories about his life in a mundane support role for the Constabulary, being careful to drop in real-life details about the tube train and the grand atrium in the pyramid. Acutely aware of the fact he was under observation, he was careful to assure the children that Aloysius Kroll was just as amazing in the flesh as he was on the net, prompting a great deal of gushing from Miss Burnett. Jakub remained oddly distant, as though unsure of how to act around this new version of the boy he had grown up with. Gideon wondered if he was struggling to get back into ‘character’.

Once the children had all been sent to their rooms and the small talk dwindled into the realms of the forced and awkward, he was able to make his excuses about being tired from the journey. Miss Burnett fussed around setting him up with blankets on the same tatty old couch he had sat on the day he had first learnt of his successful application to Kaoteck.

Finally, alone except for the ever-present eyes of the home-feed, Gideon lay back and used his Ktab to de-activate the cameras that would be sharing his every moment live to anyone who cared to watch the home’s feed channel. With that done, he slid the VR band out from his Ktab and placed it over his eyes. It secured itself in place with a faint click and used his body’s own electrical system to connect with the bio-disk embedded in his wrist. As the system started up, he felt some of the tension that had built up in his body fade away and a smile crept across his face. At long last, he was able to do what he most looked forward to every day — it was time to ping Avery. Since his return from the disastrous mission to the Frozen North, he and Avery had grown closer, taking every opportunity they could to meet up virtually in the company intra-network known as ‘the E-scape’.

The E-scape was a secure virtual environment, where Kaoteck employees who were restricted to the pyramid could live out their company-approved fantasies of walking on a beach, or base jumping off a snowy mountain. Or even visiting a simulated version of a typical Rainbow Zone civic centre and basking in a moment of dreary, non-company related mediocrity.

His and Avery’s schedules and area clearances had yet to allow an ‘IRL’ or real-life meeting, so the E-scape had been the next best thing. Although infinitely more restricted than the civilian version, the E-scape had provided enough opportunities for the two of them to share as much of their scarce spare time together as possible. He had found himself profoundly conflicted by their relationship. On one hand, he wanted desperately to tell her about his plans to run from Kaoteck, and to beg her to come with him. But on the other, he didn’t want to put her at risk, and knew that every second they spent together would make leaving her behind even more painful. Even so, he found her completely irresistible, and the two of them had worked their way through the list of approved E-scape scenarios and activities together. They had ultimately realised that what they wanted most of all was just a place to chat and be together. Which made it all the more frustrating when a ‘CONNECTION NOT AUTHORISED. ACCESS DENIED’ message flashed up in the display. “Damnit!” he ran his access codes again, there was no reason why his top-of-the-line Ktab couldn’t use the civilian network to access the company E-scape portal. He had full access clearance and had checked with ADA before leaving that it wouldn’t be in breach of any protocols, but no matter how many times he tried, the result was always the same… access denied.

Writing it off as a non-starter, he grudgingly admitted that a very-real wave of tiredness had washed over him. So, he fired off an apologetic message to Avery, placed the VR band back in its slot on the Ktab and snuggled down underneath the bobbly blankets. But every time he closed his eyes, he was haunted by images of angry faces with T-shaped tattoos, laughing as flailing tentacles emerged from their open mouths and sliced deep into his flesh.

2

MURDERBALL

When Saturday came around, Gideon was relieved to escape the watchful eyes of Jakub and get on with the real reason for the visit — a trip to the murderball game. He knew from StatEd that there had been a great deal of sports in the old world. People had even travelled between countries to play games against one another, a concept so bizarre as to seem ridiculous. Only one game had prospered in New Britain, and that was murderball.

Nobody actually knew the origins of the sport; such things were of little relevance. There were small, makeshift murderball arenas dotted across the Rainbow, but the game the Cobras would be attending was taking place at the biggest and most prestigious of them all — ‘Murder One’, a huge arena in the middle of the Rainbow, which had originated in the old world.

In times long since lost to history, it had hosted music and sports events, and later it had doubled as a morgue and crematorium. At some point after the burnings had stopped and recreation had faded to little more than a memory, the arena had slipped into use as a de-facto township for the homeless and displaced. Many people claimed it was on the streets of that very township that murderball was first created.

Once Kaoteck had assumed control, and the walls had gone up, the homeless were all banished to the Factories and the township was burnt to the ground. But the legacy of murderball rose from its ashes, and soon Murder One became a hub of entertainment once again, as the spiritual home of murderball. By 2121, it was where all the biggest, company approved matches were played.

The pod ride to the arena had cost the equivalent of a month’s wages for many of the Rainbow’s denizens, but of course nothing was too good for the Cobras. Kroll had provided each of them with enough travel credits to cover the cost many times over.

Twice on the journey, Gideon noticed the power had dropped out in the neighbourhoods he was travelling through, but it didn’t detract from the excitement of seeing so many new sights. After the novelty of staring out the tinted windows had worn off, he spent the remainder of the journey messaging Avery, and trying to decide what he was going to say to the others when they met.

The plan was a simple one, it had been all they could come up with under the circumstances. They intended to use the noise and bustle of the crowd to overwhelm any sensors or snooping devices Kroll might be using to keep tabs on them. It would be the first chance they’d had to talk freely since returning from their eventful trip to the Frozen North and the company had initiated its brutal crackdown on the population. A crackdown which they were expected to spearhead once their advanced COBRA armour was repaired and ready.

Right on time, Fan and Kristy both arrived in their own complimentary Kpods and the three of them fought their way to their allocated seats in an upmarket ‘safe zone’. As they pushed and shoved their way through the thronging masses, Gideon dared to feel a growing confidence that their plan to hide in plain sight could work. The noise was overwhelming, and the movement of the crowd was chaotic at best, worsening when the power cut out before flaring back to life. With the penalty for misdemeanour in a safe zone being immediate extraction to the Factories, they were able to make the most of the crowd cover without having to worry too much about getting caught up in any unwanted drama.

“This is incredible!” Kristy swiped her Ktab over the reader on the smart seats, which confirmed her booking before duly unfolding themselves. “I never thought I’d be able to see a match here, I’ve always had a thing for murderball if I’m honest.”

Fan shook his head with fake solemnity, “Wow, ‘Captain Rocket Launchers’, I would never have guessed you’d be a fan of a game renowned for excessive violence.”

Gideon ignored them; he was too engrossed in staring out across the huge pitch. Growing up in the home, he had focussed all his energy on raising his CP and getting into the Constabulary. Murderball was something he had only dimly been aware of through Jakub, who would occasionally rant on about the outcomes of some match or another. It was something Miss Burnett had strongly discouraged discussion about under any circumstances. Looking out over the octagonal pitch, he could see why.

The whole point of the game was to accrue points by moving four heavy metal balls through a series of goals. Once a team had managed to pass all four of their balls through all four goals, they were declared the winner, but if all twelve members of the opposing team were incapacitated, it also counted as a win. Rules were thin on the ground in murderball, and the focus tended to fall heavily on the side of wiping out the other team by violence before even touching the ball — hence the name. Theoretically, anyone with sufficiently suicidal tendencies could field a murderball team, but they tended to be manned entirely by naturally aggressive charneys with a point to prove. That, or desperate indents from the Factories hoping to buy their way into the Rainbow with their winnings. Kaoteck didn’t officially endorse the game, but they did issue permits and provide escorts for teams to enter the Rainbow in order to participate.

“So, what’s the plan boss?” Fan muttered under his breath, trying to keep his lips as still as possible and his eyes fixed on the pitch. Gideon had been dreading this moment; he knew as the leader of the Cobras, that the others would be looking to him for answers, but the reality was that he had none. Gwendolyne’s last words to him had been that she would find them, but he couldn’t imagine how that could happen and nor could they wait to find out. In a matter of hours their armour would be ready to go, and the Cobras would be sent out to the Factories to enforce a savage crackdown against people just trying to survive. Which didn’t sit well with any of them, especially since finding out Kroll considered them to be little more than experimental lab rats themselves.

“Well,” said Gideon. “I was thinking we could request a flight test when we get the suits back, and then…you know… fly off.”

Fan and Kristy stared at him as though he had just vomited on their shoes.

“Just… ‘fly off’?” Kristy’s cheeks had already started turning red, “That’s your plan? Just… fly off!”

“Sssshh! Keep your voice down will you!”

“And what happens when they realise we’ve just ‘flown off’ Gideon? I’ll tell you — either they shut down the suits and we fall to our deaths. Or they shoot us down, and we fall to our deaths.”

“Brilliant plan,” said Fan. “We escape for five minutes, then plunge to a horrific death in the toxic waters about a hundred feet from the pyramid. If we’re really lucky there’ll be a passing tube train full of new selectees to wave at us while our skin falls off.”

“Good point,” conceded Gideon. “But if they can remotely shut down the suits, then doesn’t that rule out us using them to escape at all? I mean, if that’s the case, why don’t we just go now?”

The crowd erupted into a barrage of roars and screams, drowning out any reply as the teams emerged onto the pitch below. It was a stark contrast to the silence that fell over the three friends as they contemplated their fate. “We wouldn’t get as far as the wall,” muttered Fan once the barrage had subsided to a roar. “And even if we did, what then? Let’s say we somehow manage to slip out of here right now, safely cross the whole of the Rainbow, make it to the wall, somehow manage to magically cross said wall and end up in the Factories…what then?”

“We could keep going to the North,” suggested Gideon. “Try to make it to the Metro and live out our lives under the ice, we’d be…”

“…Safe in the knowledge that Kroll will hunt us down like rats before slaughtering every man, woman and child in the Metro when he catches us,” Kristy finished for him.

Moments after the deafening blare of a siren had announced the start of the first innings, the arena’s lights and scoreboard shut off, and a new and unfamiliar sound crept over the raucous objections of the audience. A ripple of unease ran through Gideon as a deep droning hum filled the air.

The sound was so intense that it reverberated around the arena and made Gideon’s chest hurt with the pressure. All around the Cobras, heads turned upwards as a long, dark shadow fell across the pitch and the sky turned black. It looked as though the Constabulary’s entire fleet of Dragonflys had arrived. There were so many of them that they covered the entire patch of sky visible through the arena’s retractable roof and blotted out the sun. On some unseen signal, the side doors of each demonic looking craft opened up, revealing an army of Constables in heavy SWAT gear standing behind the automated door cannons.

Fan looked at his friends, his face turning white, “Erm, did either of you guys realise we even had this many Dragonflys? Because I’ve never seen this many before.”

“No!” Gideon shook his head. “And I’m pretty sure we never had this many SWAT troops either.”

“I do not like the look of this!” Kristy was noticeably agitated. Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and Gideon could almost see her trying to wish her trusty shoulder launchers into being, even though their armour was still in pieces back in the QEMlab deep under Kaoteck HQ. “You think they’re here for us? You think they know?”

Gideon scanned his eyes around the increasingly restless crowd, before turning them up to the threatening assembly of attack craft hanging above them. “I don’t think so. Even if we had our suits on, I doubt we’d warrant this amount of firepower. Something else is going on, wait…” The power snapped back on and the ‘match start’ siren sounded five times. A trio of red flares shot up from the lead craft, silencing the crowd as they fell to earth. A familiar voice echoed from the arena sound system.

“Attention citizens of the Rainbow. This is Aloysius Kroll, CEO of Kaoteck and New Britain. As of today, the game of murderball is no longer permitted anywhere in New Britain. Anyone found to be playing or attending a game will be subject to sanction up to and including relocation or termination. These Constables are here to ensure a safe and organised dispersal from this site. Anyone found acting in a manner considered to be in breach of the peace will be subject to immediate relocation.”

“That explains all the Dragonflys,” muttered Fan. “They can scoop up anyone who misbehaves and drop them straight over the wall en masse!”

Gideon nodded, “See, I told you they weren’t here for us.”

Kroll’s amplified voice boomed over the sound system once more, “Cobra team, you will make your way to the pitch for immediate extraction to the pyramid.”

Gideon’s blood ran cold, and a solid lump formed in his throat. He could tell from their faces that the others were feeling the same.

“Not here for us eh! Great job team leader,” mocked Fan with venom in his voice.

“Well, there goes the ‘run-away now’ plan,” muttered Kristy. “Now we have to walk down there in front of the whole Rainbow, our faces will be all over the network in minutes as Kroll’s ‘Cobra Team.’”

Kroll’s voice was still filling the arena with instructions as the Cobras shuffled their way down the stands. Once they had reached the centre of the pitch, the lead craft touched down in front of them and a young crewman hopped out. He made an enthusiastic show of throwing them a smart salute and pointed at the waiting craft, “It’s an honour to meet you Cobra team, your presence is requested back at HQ ASAP. If you hop aboard, we’ll get gone.”

‘This guy is as green as they get,’ thought Gideon, studying the man’s pristine uniform. ‘He doesn’t even look old enough to have made selection day.’