Downtime - Marc Platt [85]
She knew he would need it. Without hesitating, she lifted up the weapon, surprised by its weight, and slipped it into the inside pocket of her coat.
She locked up as best she could, pulled her tatty bicycle off the boat and set off along the towpath in the direction her father had taken.
The towpath of the canal ran along the south boundary of New World University. From the foot of the hill, the Brigadier and Harrods surveyed the complex. Its array of ziggurats crowned the rise like a maleficent fortress. The place looked deserted.
The needles of light from the pyramid that crowned the largest building were still forking up into the sky. Directly overhead, a glittering canker was forming, slowly throwing strands of material outwards to form a canopy in the air. Here and there, tiny shreds of web were floating down through the trees.
Harrods seemed undaunted by the spectacle. He produced some fruit he had ‘borrowed’ from the boat and offered an apple to the Brigadier. ‘Sir? What now, sir? Take the place by storm?’
‘If we must,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart. He felt in his jacket and faltered. He started to slap his other pockets in growing disbelief. ‘Damnation. I’m an old fool.’
‘Sir?’ queried Harrods.
The Brigadier shook his head. ‘My gun. I didn’t pick it up.’
He felt so old. His faculties were slipping away. How did he miss his gun? He remembered putting it down on the bed.
He reached into his inside pocket again and touched a card. It was the picture of his grandson. No wonder he was losing his marbles after a shock like that.
‘Want to go back?’ Harrods asked.
The Brigadier touched the card again. No need to look.
‘No, too late for that,’ he said with grim foreboding. ‘Come on.’
He set off up the hill with Harrods marching behind him.
The Intelligence flexed its power. It was spreading outwards through every connection, sending rings around the Earth.
Blind darkness no longer confined it. It saw through thousands of eyes, lived in thousands of shapes. Its webs were spreading over the globe’s surface and filling the sky above. And once the planet was cocooned, it would all be the Intelligence. One mass of thoughts in one global body.
Since that malicious reversal in its fortunes contrived by the Doctor, it had waited, slowly building its power, feeling its way into the Earth’s power systems. Everything leading to this moment of release and rebirth.
It would have happened sooner, but the Intelligence had been weak and the humans unreliable. It had lodged in Travers, but he was not enough. The monks of Detsen tried to trap it, but could not wholly withstand its influence. Charles Bryce had been meant to find the Locus, but he died, carried away by some unforeseen Earth virus and the Intelligence had been too weak to save him. So the task fell to Victoria Waterfield and that was better, because it fulfilled a grudging lust for revenge against the Doctor by using one of his servants.
Entranced by the shapes it inhabited, the Intelligence flexed its power again. On a railway line in Kent, an abandoned Eurotrain shuddered and suddenly reared above its tracks like a snake. Hundreds of tons of screeching metal turning this way and that. Eventually the Intelligence got bored and threw the train down an embankment in ruin.
In the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, dozens of deactivated computer terminals logged themselves in again and rose above their work stations as high as their cables would allow. In a demented dance of computer death, they flung themselves back and forth, smashing to pieces against desks, walls and workers.
From Manila to Mexico City, bank cashpoints unexpectedly spewed streams of paper money onto the streets.
In Stockholm, the computer-based heating system of the Söderström Corp went into overdrive and the building went up like a torch.
Data was displaced and transferred from one system to another. Cancer research scientists in Brazilia were regaled with theatre ticket availability in Vienna. Monitors in the Kremlin watched in amazement