In the Earth realm Danny was still conscious, but only just. He was in a brightly-lit, clinical version of hell. He could hear the surgeon shout something to the anaesthetist about keeping him conscious. 'Whatever you do, don't let him go off,' he had yelled above the industrious din.
He was completely immobile. The drugs in the drip numbed the pain. A metal instrument held down his tongue and kept his airway open. A plastic mask went over his mouth and nose. Occasionally the anaesthetist, who sat by his side, would notice his blood gases dropping, he would then fiddle with valves and monitoring devices. Finger sensors were scanning, machines bleeped. Danny could see the scalpel move upwards, the ruro glowing brightly beneath his skin. Damn! They were going to cut him open and take it.
He'd tried to remember how he got here. Anything was better than watching that knife. Suddenly, in chunks, it flashed back to him.
It was mid-morning, a beautiful bright autumnal day. He was in his room, alone. A van had careered up the drive, its flashing blue lights reflecting on his bedroom ceiling. There was an angry triple thump at the front door. The ambulance man had shouted for Danny. Michael had said that nobody had rung for an ambulance. 'Don't be bloody stupid!' the ambulance man roared at the top of his lungs, ‘of course they'd been rung, why else would they be here?’ Daniel Sola was in shock or a coma apparently. He might need urgent life-support.
The ambulance men weren’t taking no for an answer. They forced their way into the house, pushing Michael aside. They had hooked Danny up to a drip and got him onto the ambulance within seconds, a minute at most. The ambulance hurriedly headed out the drive. Sarah had been dazed - this felt terribly wrong.
Michael had a horrible sense of De-Ja-Vu. What Michael could not have foreseen was that the vehicle did not head to the local general hospital. It turned left then immediately right before it dived through some gates to the nearby Territorial Army barracks. Danny had been transferred to a waiting lorry, a lorry that seemed to double as a mobile operating theatre.
Jodie kicked the car into third as she skidded round the corner into Zig Zag Drive. The images from Ben’s force-fed communication, the ambulance, the men in black, the automatic weapons - all spun in her mind. She tried to chase the images away. They sneaked back into her consciousness like scavengers feeding at a corpse.
She flew past the gates of the science academy on her right. Quickly, she banked sharply left into the last bend. She was nearly at the short drive to Danny’s house. But there in the middle of the road stood a black-windowed four-wheel drive vehicle, more truck than car. It was massive and parked sideways it blocked the road almost entirely.
‘What the hell am I going to do now?’ Jodie muttered. She knew it would be fully occupied. A man in green combat fatigues jumped out and trained an automatic weapon on her. This was it. She was dead.
Jodie slammed her foot on the brake. She pulled the handbrake up pulling the car into a sideways skid. She was careening toward the roadblock. She kept low in her seat.
‘HIT the gas NOW!’ screamed Orb, who appeared as a vision above the passenger seat. A cascade of bullets immediately rang out, ricocheting off metal and stone. Orb had created a protective field around Jodie but it was far from perfect.
Jodie slammed on the accelerator, let off the handbrake and shot sideways off the road. The disused metal gates to the sports field crumpled under the impact of Jodie’s car. The padlock and chain were thrown high into the air. The side windows shattered under gunfire. The black 4-by-4 slammed forwards after them.
‘Keep your head down!’ Orb yelled. More bullets shot through the car. The front window burst outwards in a blaze of glass.
‘To your right, steer to your right. Left a bit, a bit more. Keep going. Keep your head down,’ Orb’s instructions echoed loudly in Jodie's ears. This was no ordinary telepathy. Her inner ear and brain itself seemed to be vibrating. It occurred to Jodie that she was to master telepathy only to die from a violent death a moment later. She hardly dare lift her head to see where the car was going. Yet somehow she could see in grainy black and white. Orb was beaming pictures straight into her brain.
‘We're going through a fence,’ yelled Orb telepathically. The car smashed straight through a builder’s barricade. The lower half of the academy's field was a building site. Buckets and planks scattered. A portable toilet went flying upwards - the blue lumpy liquid and toilet tissue streamed like a momentary flag.
Jodie’s small SUV steamed ahead over the rough terrain. Every time she'd heard the firecracker sound of gunfire she had hit the gas pedal harder in terrified reaction. Now she was headed straight for an enormous mound of rubble and broken bricks.
She felt sick as the pulverised tyres caught the bottom of the mound and the car headed relentlessly up the steep angle. There was no other way. To stop meant certain death. She slammed the accelerator hard to the floor. The powerful engine gave it all it had.
Her car twisted left, then right, climbing over the rubble. Reaching the apex of the mound it shot out into thin air.
A tonne of metal danced serenely. It cleared the bottom wall of the field and travelled side-on across the road below. Gun cracker fire rang out again deafening her ears. Glass shrapnel flew everywhere, a line of blood snaked its way across her sweat-beaded forehead.
‘Careful with that thing,’ whispered the Leader as the surgeon reached into Danny's chest. The white-cloaked man held aloft the blood-covered, blue-glowing orb of ruro. The surgeon quickly passed it to one of the two uniformed officers who wiped the object clean.
‘Okay, prime the storage device,’ instructed the Leader. The blue globe was dropped into a short metal tube at the side of the lorry wall. The ruro entered the tube and fused with Golf who was being stored in the compartment below. Golf was not only capable of controlling minds and storing ruro but he was to be the unwilling transport that would deliver the ruro to the multi-dimensional Elif. The agency wasn’t to know that Golf could physically transport multi-dimensional items. The Elif, and Alistair, had lied to them. The Elif, in thousands of years, had not yet met a human who could withhold knowledge from itself. Still, the Elif didn’t trust Alistair entirely. He could still be working for the agency, or even someone, or something else. ‘The Leader’ was the Elif’s back-up man.
‘Okay, load the co-ordinates.’
‘At last, I will deliver the ruro to the Elif,’ the Leader thought. The material, safely stored within the multiple realm capabilities of the mind-entity, could now be physically transmitted to its destination. It was a process that would inevitably liquidise the mind-entity - an added bonus to the Leader's way of thinking.
Soon the Elif will have the power to control the Earth’s entire multitude of minds. The Leader thought greedily of the praise, the rewards, and the sheer power that would soon be due to him.
‘Sorry sir, I can't do that sir,’ replied the English officer.
‘What do you mean? I AM IN CHARGE HERE! Do it now or I'll BLOW YOUR BLOODY BRAINS OUT!’
‘Those are the orders sir. A special forces chopper will take the ruro and its carrier. Check with your superior if you don't believe me.’
‘Sod him. I don’t check with no human!’
The leader pulled a flap of skin-coloured plastic from his forehead. It revealed a black oval shaped eye with a red diamond-shaped pupil within a white triangle shape. His voice morphed into a deep inhuman bellow.
‘PATHETIC HUMAN. I HAVE NO SUPERIOR. I WORK FOR THE ELIF ALONE.’
The Leader's own eyes had turned completely black. He looked deeply into the eyes of the officer, who sat terrified at the keyboard. The red diamond pupil on the Leader’s forehead glowed brightly as the man crumpled and screamed, his body dissolving like molten plastic. The Leader kicked his steaming body to one side and started to enter the transmission codes himself. He would soon be delivering the ruro, and its host, to the Elif.
One of the soldiers the agency had secretly placed outside the van shifted out of the sudden trance he had entered against his will. That single moment of clarity was all he needed. Realising that something had gone wrong, he opened the van’s back door entered and aimed his automatic machine-gun at the Leader’s head.
A blue snaking bolt of energy immediately shot out from the white triangle within the Leader's forehead. The stream of energy struck the soldier’s head. The man fell screaming, clutching his head, his gun useless. His brain felt like it was boiling, which was in fact what it was doing. The other soldiers surrounding the van awoke from their trances only to fall to their knees screaming and clutching their heads. Their brains were on fire.
The Leader was about to dispose of all the soldiers when the sound of gunfire distracted him. Turning round he left the soldiers panting for their lives on the floor.
A loud whirling rumble could be heard as the energiser, for transmitting Golf and the ruro globe, powered up. The Leader turned to the computer monitor. Mounted upon the roof of the lorry an apparatus unfolded. It revealed a large white dish with a tube at its centre. Small electric motors powered in as it aligned itself with its satellite master. A blue laser-line connected the dish to the black satellite-globe far above.
There was more gunfire and a roar of engine. There followed a split-second of silence. Across the road a metallic green SUV appeared above a pile of builder's rubble. It flew sideways through the air turning its rear end toward the lorry as it spun. At the wheel, bleeding and semi-conscious, was Jodie.
He must not fail the Elif, he must not...but something was wrong. It must be another attack. He heard the ripped tyres burning the ground, the gunfire. NO! He can't allow this to fail. He counted the seconds, four, and three…Energiser not fully charged, two, just a moment to go now. One second till he could dispatch the ruro to the Elif...
The rear of Jodie’s car slammed into the side of the truck. The energiser lost power. Metal walls splintered and fractured. The heavy vehicle crushed its way through the thin aluminium walls of the lorry. The surgeons and soldiers were buried underneath torn circuitry and aluminium wreckage. The Leader’s mind-field had wavered and now their trance was broken. Now, death had flashed them by without warning.
Cables trailed randomly. The lorry lay upon its side. It was a twisted tangled wreckage. Jodie sat in concussion still gripping the driving wheel of the SUV. The car was implanted at a 45-degree angle within the truck, its rear wheels still spinning. Danny had been thrown across the lorry by the impact of the vehicle. He lay unconscious, his chest seeping blood amongst the body-strewn wreckage.
Orb dissolved the Leader’s Mindsnapper field. It would no longer control Golf. Orb and Golf entered Jodie’s mind. The sudden blast of energy from the ruro globe, which Golf held, shot Jodie into super-consciousness.
Thinking Stone had told Jodie she must follow Danny into the mind of the Elif. He cannot do it without her he had said.
It was all up to her now.