“Please, just Finn.”
“I’m looking after him for a week. He’s a short version of me without the looks, brains or char—”
“He always says that.”
Stubbs sighed as if he knew exactly what Finn had to put up with.
“We can shoot him for you. Seriously,” said Kelly, crushing Finn’s fingers with his handshake.
“Ow!”
“Don’t listen to anything these men say,” said Al. “No one knows how they got in here.”
“Seats,” ordered Commander King.
Seats were duly taken. Technicians were setting up a series of digital projectors, fiddling with cables and tapping at keyboards.
As Al took his seat, Finn sat beside him and whispered, “By the way, Al?”
“Hmm?”
“What the hell is going on and why do all these people think you’re some kind of—”
“It’s just what I do. Sometimes.”
“Just what you do?”
“The secret side. There have to be secrets, Finn, to protect the innocent.”
“But how…? When…? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“When you were eleven? Come on. Who would tell an eleven-year-old something like that?”
This stumped Finn.
“Now go hide,” said Al, nodding to a gap between two banks of computers, out of sight.
“Why?” Finn asked.
“Oh, you’ll see,” said Al.
Screens came online.
World leaders started to appear.
“Mr President.”
“Commander King.”
“Prime Minister.”
“King. Mr President.”
“Prime Minister.”
“Guten Tag, Frau Chancellor…”
King went through the introductory motions.
Finn thought, I’m supposed to be in double geography right now.
The President of the USA was in shirtsleeves – the Oval Office in the background familiar, if a little less tidy than in its TV incarnations. The British Prime Minister was in a large, book-lined room – not the smooth PM of news bulletins, but an alarmed posh little man. The German Chancellor settled herself into a reclaimed pine ‘ergonomische stuhl’ as the President of France came online from the gilt and ornate Élysée Palace.
“Is Allenby there?” said the US President.
Al leant into shot and waved so that the leaders of the free world could see him.
“Guys,” said Al.
Guys? Finn thought.
“So. What have we got, Commander King?” asked Al.
The room fell silent. The lights dimmed.
“Slide,” ordered King.
A digital projection lit up a wall-sized screen and showed… nothing.
Or at least nothing but a blank whiteness with a black dot in the middle.
King snapped, “Bring it up to scale.”
The lens zoomed in on the dot and suddenly the creature exploded across the screen.
Projected to the size of a man, a vile black, yellow and red-flecked monster, fresh and newborn-slick from its final moult. Its exoskeleton was extended, exaggerated; its thorax like a clutch of girders; its head a felt and fang atrocity; its silver-black wings still plastered against its abdomen which, cruelly coloured, scaled and distended, hung bulbous from its thorax like a great droplet of buzz-fresh poison. And, at its end, an ugly cluster of three barbed, glossy harpoon stings.
Finn froze and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. For a moment he tasted his own fear. The fear of death he sometimes got when he thought about his mother. A sense of something terrible, unstoppable and unknowable. He gulped it back.
A mouse click and the next image flashed up. A rear shot of the insect with a better view of the array of stings emerging from the bulbous abdomen.
Click. The underside, amour-plated and beetle-black. How does this thing fly? Finn thought.
Click. In the next image, the answer: silver-black wings fully extended, as long as a dragonfly’s, but broader.
Wow.
Click. The head and mouthparts, feelers and proboscis. Finn felt his stomach turn. He didn’t want to look, yet couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Click. The egg pouch and reproductive organ.
The six legs.
The black and yellow and red-tinged whole, like some vile bullet that in flight must look like… Who only knew what.
And the sound? thought Finn. What evil bass buzz would those wings make?
Al watched, face frozen, King pleasantly surprised to observe that even he was stilled by the sight.
“Meet Scarlatti,” said King. “Named after the eighteenth-century Italian composer noted for writing five hundred and fifty-five piano sonatas, because it registers a score of five hundred and fifty-five on the Porton Scale: that used to measure the lethal potential of weaponised organisms. A single Scarlatti could theoretically kill five hundred and fifty-five human beings.”
“Sacré bleu…” said the French President, without a hint of irony.
“During the Cold War, all sides developed and produced biological weapons. One of the main branches of study at our research institute at Porton Down was entomology, the study of insects, and how they could be adapted to carry and spread disease. In 1983 a geneticist accidentally developed a whole new genotype of insect by exposing the embryo of a highly engineered smallpox-carrying wasp – phenotype Vespula cruoris – to gamma radiation. The result was… Scarlatti.”
An old video recording came up onscreen of live Scarlattis being studied in a laboratory.
“Scarlatti is an asexual self-multiplier that, given a sufficient supply of simple protein – the body of a dead mammal say – can lay up to fifty eggs. It’s pesticide resistant, seventy-five millimetres long (the size of a hummingbird or a human thumb) and is all but physically indestructible. It nurtures supplies of a unique and fatal strain of smallpox in the poison sacs of its abdomen. Accelerated development means a single egg can become a viable flying insect in four days. Therefore a single insect can produce a fifty-strong swarm in four days. And swarm they do – given how much protein is required during their nymph, or rapid hemimetabolic, phase. Each swarm produces many new colonies, each swarming every four days, and so on ad infinitum. Or until the supply of protein dries up.”
Finn could taste something sickening.
He means people by ‘the supply of protein’. He means… us.
Onscreen, the video turned nasty. White mice were introduced to the test chamber and seized upon by frenzied Scarlattis. They seemed to relish the kill, whipping their stings into the poor creatures long after they were disabled or dead.
“This