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  ‘Hush up, you two,’ Laura sighed. ‘I’m as much of a fan of snarky banter as the next girl but we’ve only got an hour until the surveillance loop expires. Come on.’

  They hurried along the landing to Franz and Nigel’s room where they found only Nigel waiting.

  ‘Where’s Franz?’ Otto asked with a frown.

  ‘He’s “scouting ahead” apparently,’ Nigel said, shaking his head. ‘I told him to wait here but he said, and I quote, “That danger lurks round every corner and that he was on point”.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Otto cringed. ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ Nigel said. ‘I wasn’t the one at the planning meeting who told him to “channel his inner ninja”.’

  ‘I was only kidding,’ Shelby said defensively.

  ‘OK, let’s get Tom and Penny and round Franz up before he attacks any security guards,’ Otto sighed.

  They all hurried down the stairs to the next landing where Tom and Penny were waiting.

  ‘You managed to get out without waking up your new room-mates then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Penny replied, ‘though I think it might have had something to do with the sedative drops on their pillows. You sure that one drop will be enough to keep them under?’

  ‘Should be more than enough,’ Otto replied, as they continued down the stairs to the atrium.?We’re not going to be gone that long.’

  ‘Where exactly did you get that stuff from anyway?’ Laura asked.

  ‘It was something that I’d been . . . working on,’ Otto replied slightly uncomfortably.

  ‘Why were you working on a new form of sedative?’ Nigel asked.

  ‘It wasn’t really supposed to be a sedative, it was just supposed to relax the airways and . . . erm . . . control snoring.’

  ‘Otto, is there something you would like to tell me?’ Wing said with a slight frown.

  ‘Look, there’s Franz,’ Otto said quickly.

  Franz was dashing from shadow to shadow, slowly making his way towards the huge steel doors that sealed off the accommodation block at night.

  ‘What’s he got on his face?’ Shelby asked.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Nigel said.

  As they approached they could all see that Franz’s entire face was black.

  ‘Franz, what have you done?’ Laura asked, stifling a giggle.

  ‘I am ensuring that I am blending with the shadows,’ Franz said. ‘It is increasing my stealthiness.’

  ‘What did you use?’ Otto asked, staring at him in mild disbelief.

  ‘I am using the marker pen but I am being very careful not to get any in my mouth because the label on the pen is saying that it is inedible,’ Franz said with a serious expression.

  ‘Indelible, Franz, indelible,’ Otto said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Nigel said, putting his hand over his eyes.

  ‘What is this indelible meaning?’ Franz said as he noticed the mixture of amusement and horror on the other Alphas’ faces.

  ‘Never mind,’ Otto said. ‘We’ll deal with it later. We need to keep moving. Laura, get the door.’ Otto handed the Hackbox to Laura and she walked over to the numeric keypad that served as a lock for the massive door. She touched a series of buttons on the device’s screen and a couple of seconds later the doors began to slowly rumble apart.

  ‘OK, no alarms going off, so I’m going to assume that the ghost interface is working,’ Laura said.

  ‘I never doubted you for a moment,’ Otto said, smiling at Laura. ‘Right. Everyone knows where they need to be. We have . . .’ Otto looked at his Blackbox, ‘fifty-three minutes. Good luck.’

  Otto, Wing, Laura and Shelby jogged away down the corridor ahead while Nigel and Franz headed off down another corridor with Tom and Penny. Otto reached out with his mind and his own strange ability to control electronic devices allowed him to hook up directly to the Hackbox. It was safe for him to connect with it as long as he didn’t go a stage further and connect directly to H.I.V.E.’s network.

  ‘Right, give me a second,’ Otto said, as he visualised a three-dimensional image of the layout of H.I.V.E., ‘let’s see what we can see.’ On the map in Otto’s head, small points of moving light began to appear. There were bright blue dots that represented the locations of his friends’ Blackboxes and a scattering of red dots throughout the complex that showed the current positions of the security patrols. He tilted his head to one side slightly and sent a live feed of that information to the Hackbox which then passed it on to the other Blackboxes.

  ‘Got it,’ Laura said, checking the screen of her own device. ‘The Hackbox is transmitting.’

  ‘OK, that should help us avoid any patrols,’ Otto said. ‘Now we just need some new outfits.’

  The four of them ran through the twisting maze of corridors, stopping only briefly to let security patrols pass by ahead of them. They quickly made their way deeper into the bowels of the volcano that housed the school. The lower levels were more dimly lit, with uniform grey concrete walls and floors.

  ‘It’d be real easy to get lost down here,’ Shelby said as they ran down yet another featureless corridor.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re nearly there,’ Laura said, looking at the Hackbox. ‘Next left.’

  They took the next branch in the tunnel and the corridor ended at a steel door with the words ‘Storage Area Four’ etched into its surface.

  ‘Right, here we are,’ Otto said. ‘Open sesame.’

  Laura tapped at the Hackbox and the door slid open. As the four of them stepped into the storage area, lights started to flicker on overhead.

  ‘Woah,’ Laura said, pointing at the opposite wall, ‘are they what I think they are?’

  Standing against the wall were three of the hulking assault droids that Cypher had used in his assault on H.I.V.E. a couple of years before.

  ‘I had wondered if they’d kept any of these,’ Otto said as he examined one of the giant machines more closely. ‘Do you think they’re still functional?’

  ‘I suppose it would depend on the condition of the servos and the musculature interlinks,’ Laura replied, tracing her finger through the dust that covered one of the huge machines.

  ‘Tick tock, guys,’ Shelby said as she looked around the room. ‘We need to stay on schedule. Anybody see what we’re here for?’

  ‘Over here,’ Wing said, beckoning the others.

  Hanging on a rack were a dozen thermoptic camouflage bodysuits.

  ‘Get changed,’ Otto said. ‘The other four should be in position any minute.’

  ‘I’m having a bit of trouble here,’ Laura said, frowning at the display on the Hackbox.

  ‘What is it?’ Otto asked.

  ‘They need to get closer to the door to the CPC or else I can’t get a link to the locking mechanism from their Blackboxes,’ Laura said.

  Otto looked at the display of his own Blackbox. The security patrols around that area were tight. Nigel and the others had a window of forty-five seconds, a minute at the outside, before another patrol arrived. He watched as the dots on the display representing their friends moved closer to their target.

  ‘Laura,’ Otto said, frowning, ‘they need that door open now.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Laura said, chewing her bottom lip nervously.

  ‘Wait,’ Nigel whispered to Franz, Tom and Penny, holding up his hand. At the far end of the corridor a pair of security guards walked past. Nigel waited, studying the display of his Blackbox. ‘Go,’ he said and the four of them hurried down the corridor. Ahead was a large double door that looked like it would be more at home in a bank vault.‘OK,’ Nigel said, ‘let’s hope this works.’

  ‘It had better,’ Tom said, placing a hand on the massive door, ‘because we’re not getting through these doors any other way. Not without enough explosives to bring this whole place down around our ears anyway.’

  Nigel looked nervously at his Blackbox. There was another security patrol heading their way. They only had a few more seconds.

  ‘Com
e on, guys,’ Nigel muttered to himself.

  Suddenly the thick steel rods that crossed the door slid back and they began to open. Nigel and the others hurried through the gap and almost immediately the doors began to close again. Nigel watched the position of the security patrol on his Blackbox, praying that the doors would shut and lock before the patrol came round the corner outside. All four of them held their breaths as the red dot moved down the corridor on the screen, followed by a collective sigh of relief as the guards continued along their assigned patrol route.

  ‘Thank you, Laura,’ Nigel said, ‘even if you did cut it a little close.’ He thumbed the comms button on his Blackbox and a second later Otto connected.

  ‘We’re in,’ Nigel said. ‘Over to you.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Otto replied. ‘See you on the other side.’

  Nigel turned round and tried to take in the scale of the room they were standing in. Six massive circular turbines, each several storeys high and thrumming with power, took up the majority of the floor. Surrounding the turbines were huge towers with giant metal balls on top of them that discharged arcing bolts of man-made lightning from one to another. The room was only dimly lit and the flashes of bright blue-white light from the thunderous electrical discharges threw odd shadows on to the walls. This was the Central Power Core, where the heat gathered by the school’s geothermal plant was converted into raw power that was then distributed throughout H.I.V.E. If H.I.V.E.mind was the school’s brain, then this place was its beating heart.

  ‘OK, Penny, you come with me to the control room. You two go down to the main floor and get ready by those breakers. Remember that you have to trip them at the precise moment I say or Otto and the others are going to have a really unpleasant evening.’

  ‘You can be counting on us,’ Franz said, giving Nigel a thumbs up before climbing down the ladder to the generator floor.

  Nigel and Penny ran along the gantry accessway to the elevated control room on the other side of the chamber.

  ‘If this place is so important, why is there nobody here?’ Penny asked as they entered the deserted control room.

  ‘It’s all fully automated,’ Nigel replied, searching for the right controls. ‘H.I.V.E.mind runs it all. The manual controls are only here in case the computer systems go down for any reason. At least that’s what Otto told me.’

  Nigel found the correct panel and quickly identified the controls that Otto and Laura had briefed him on.

  ‘Are you guys in position?’ Nigel said, speaking into his Blackbox.

  ‘Ready,’ Tom replied after a moment.

  ‘I am being ready too,’ Franz said.

  ‘OK,’ Nigel replied, ‘now we wait for Otto’s signal.’

  Otto lay on his belly inside the ventilation shaft, looking down through the grille into the room below. He was suddenly very glad that he didn’t suffer from vertigo – the floor was a good fifty metres below them. He reached over his shoulder and unzipped the side pocket of his backpack, pulling out a small steel multi-tool. He unfolded a screwdriver blade from the tool and set to work quickly unscrewing the mountings that held the grille in place. He pulled the loose grille free and handed it back to Wing. There was an ominous creaking sound from somewhere overhead.

  ‘You are sure this shaft is strong enough to support us all, aren’t you, Otto?’ Laura whispered from somewhere behind Wing.

  ‘Define sure,’ Otto said, sliding forward and popping his head through the hole in the floor of the shaft.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Laura sighed.

  Otto scanned the room beneath them. This was H.I.V.E.mind’s primary data hub and as such was one of the most sensitive and well-secured locations in the entire school. Thick translucent cables pulsing with blue light led down from the ceiling in the centre of the brightly lit room and into a central column. Beneath the hub more cables led down to the floor far below and fanned out to an array of black monoliths arranged in concentric circles. These black slabs were H.I.V.E.mind’s storage cores and inside one of them was the data that they wanted. There was just one small catch. A metre above the tops of the storage cores was what, from Otto’s position far above, looked like a sheet of sparkling blue light. It was actually quite beautiful, a fact which concealed its true purpose. What it actually was, Otto had discovered during the planning of the operation, was a fine mesh of high-powered argon lasers that would instantly vaporise anything that touched it. Its main purpose was to stop anything that fell from above damaging the precious storage cores but it also served as a highly effective security system. That wasn’t the only problem. Positioned at regular intervals just above the gantry that ran round the circular walls of the room were a dozen sentry devices with mounted Sleeper pulse guns. They would track the thermal signature of anyone entering the hub without the proper clearance and neutralise them. The fact that the entire room was chilled to just above freezing point in order to keep the hub’s processors cool would make any such thermal signatures incredibly easy to spot. It was figuring out how to get past these systems, and not Wing’s snoring, that had kept Otto awake at night.

  ‘OK, Laura,’ Otto said, ‘signal Nigel once we’re in position. Wing, Shel, fire up your suits. Time to go.’

  Otto pointed the grappler unit mounted on the forearm of his suit at the top of the ventilation shaft above the opening and fired. The metal dart punched through the thin wall of the shaft and clamped on. Otto activated his thermoptic camouflage system and carefully slid forward, lowering himself into the opening. The heads-up display in his mask started a five-minute countdown. The suits that they’d borrowed from the storage room were obsolete, first-generation units which meant that they only had enough battery power to run the camouflage systems for five minutes at a time. While they were active Otto, Wing and Shelby would be effectively invisible not only to the naked eye but also to the thermal sensors on the sentry guns. None of them wanted to still be in this room when that countdown expired. The incredibly thin line spooled out from the grappler unit as Otto descended towards the glittering blue laser field. Above him, first Wing and then Shelby dropped through the opening and began their own careful descents. Otto slowed his descent and pointed the grappler on his other arm at the gantry that led to the column in the centre of the room. He fired a second line and slowly reeled himself over towards the gantry. He caught hold of the railing and climbed over on to the walkway leading to the central hub before releasing and retracting his two grappler lines. He hurried over to one of the control panels mounted in the column and pulled a metal box with a small aerial from his backpack.

  Above them, Laura watched as her friends moved into position. The computer-assisted optics in the helmet of her own suit allowed her to see them despite the fact that they were currently invisible to the naked eye. Once Otto was all set and Wing and Shelby were positioned just above the laser net, she hit the button on her Blackbox to signal Nigel.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Nigel replied on the other end.

  ‘We’re ready,’ Laura said quickly. ‘Time to turn out the lights.’

  In the Power Core cavern Nigel hit the series of switches as Laura and Otto had drilled him. It would have been much simpler to just cut the power supply to the entire school but that would have been too obvious. This would be the first place that the security teams would be dispatched to and without power the four of them would be trapped inside this chamber just waiting for the guards to turn up. They had to be subtler than that.

  ‘OK, Penny,’ Nigel said, ‘when I say, throw that switch.’

  Penny nodded and placed her hand on the bright red switch in the centre of the console on the opposite side of the room. Nigel placed his Blackbox on the control panel and used it to signal Franz and Tom.

  ‘OK, guys, here we go,’ Nigel said, his hand hovering over a green button. ‘Three, two, one, now!’

  H.I.V.E.mind knew something was wrong. All of the system diagnostics that he had run had come back clear. None of H.I.V.E.’s security systems were repo
rting anything strange but he could not shake off the feeling that there was something he was missing. If he were human he would probably have called it a hunch but, as he found he was having to remind himself more and more frequently, he was not human. Once upon a time he would have relied upon the simple facts that the diagnostics were reporting to him but ever since he had shared consciousnesses with Otto he had found himself more prone to this erratic behaviour. He floated through the data structures of the school, searching for the files he wanted. He quickly found the correct location and began to stream the raw footage from the school’s surveillance network. All was as it should be, the only signs of life were the security guards conducting their regular patrols. H.I.V.E.mind froze the image of one of the guards walking past. There was something about it that was not quite right. He was just beginning to study the image in higher definition when suddenly everything went black.

  ‘There it goes,’ Laura said as the automated signal, alerting security that H.I.V.E.mind was down, flashed across H.I.V.E.’s network. She watched as the Hackbox intercepted the signal and deleted it. They didn’t have long – the majority of H.I.V.E.’s systems would automatically switch to the school’s lower-level computer systems but sooner or later someone would make a direct enquiry to H.I.V.E.mind and then they would have only minutes before they figured out what had happened.

  ‘Nigel, H.I.V.E.mind’s down,’ Laura said into her Blackbox. ‘Cut the power to the laser net.’

  In the chamber below the lethal blue field flickered for an instant and then vanished. Shelby and Wing dropped to the floor and reeled in their grappler lines. On the gantry above them Otto closed his eyes and placed a hand on the control panel mounted in the central column and reached out with his abilities for the storage cores below. Inside his head he flew through the vast fields of data that were stored in the black monoliths. Under other circumstances he would have taken this opportunity to delve deep into the secrets of H.I.V.E. but they didn’t have time for that now. Now he had to find the maintenance controls for the storage units. He raced through the network, scanning the control systems at an inhuman speed until he found what he was looking for. The instant that H.I.V.E.mind was shut down he would have performed an emergency core dump. Everything that was in his active memory at that instant would have been copied to secure physical storage somewhere in this room. Otto accessed the maintenance controls and opened the core containing the correct drive.