Children Of The Deterrent (Halfhero Book 1) Read online

  Peter McKean is a geneticist like Father. They've worked together before. I remember him coming round for dinner when Mother was still alive. He's short, serious, taciturn. He always struck me as a man who would only read books that he considered 'improving,' and would avoid fiction entirely. I may be doing him a disservice, but he does seem awfully lacking in imagination.

  Roger Sullivan is an American, so, naturally, I expected him to be brash, loud and insincere. Well, shame on me for my uptight English preconceptions. Roger is a softly spoken, polite man who has the knack of making you feel as if you're the only person in the room when he talks to you. Oh, all right, he's handsome too. I'm gushing. How ridiculous. He's there because of his knowledge of metallurgy, although he seems to be an expert on comets, asteroids, and meteorites, judging from the briefing today.

  Sandra Hodge is a government scientist. She wasn't particularly forthcoming about her speciality, and she has a forbidding glare that discourages asking questions. She's as old as Father, if not older. Mid to late fifties would be my guess. She dresses as if her gender must be disguised, or subdued, at all costs. Underneath that lab coat, there's an awful lot of tweed. Her chest is large and, apparently, solid. She's terrifying, frankly. I found myself wondering if she'd ever had sex. Does she know it's 1969, not 1939? Still, I'm hardly one to talk. It's not as if I embraced the sexual revolution. I'm not sure that a few half-hearted fumbles in nightclubs count, do they?

  Oh, dear God, I sound as if I'm sexually frustrated. Perhaps I am. Not much chance of changing that around here. Unless Roger...

  Oh, stop it, Cress.

  Mike Ainsleigh is my age. Lanky, hair down to his shoulders (I noticed Captain Hopkins giving him a disapproving look), a droopy moustache, and round wire-rimmed glasses. I think he would like to believe he looks a little like John Lennon, but he's too gawky and unsure of himself to pull it off. He's clumsy, too. Dropped his tea down his front when I asked him the time and he checked his watch with a full cup in his hand. Father says his thesis was outstanding, and he'll undoubtedly be one of the pre-eminent scientists of his generation. If he ever stops wearing his cardigan inside-out, that is. He may be outstanding, but he seems to be here to perform the dogsbody duties that no one else wants to do.

  Once the introductions were over (leaving Mike mopping his soaked shirt with a napkin), Father showed me the cylinder. It was in the middle of the room on a large metal table.

  While I stared at the thing and tried not to look underwhelmed, Father told me the story behind its discovery.

  It was found in the foundations of one of the new buildings going up in Marsham Street, in Westminster. I've seen the buildings Father was referring to - great concrete monstrosities. I know we have to move with the times, but honestly, is there any excuse for such ugliness? It's only a few streets away from the Tate Gallery, which has long been a favourite haunt of mine. Imagine coming out after gazing at those beautiful pictures and being confronted with that horror on the skyline.

  I digress.

  The construction workers turned up to work one morning and, about an hour into their digging, uncovered something strange. It was an odd looking thing, and it only took one of them to say the words 'unexploded bomb' for the site to be cleared and the foreman to telephone the police. The police called the army, the army came in, took a look and sent a query up the ranks to their most senior scientific officers. That was how Colonel Purcell got involved. After taking a look himself, he ordered the item be brought here.

  Station is Purcell's department, and I think he's been here a good while. I can't say how long, because if he doesn't like the sound of a question, he doesn't answer it. When I asked him directly, he gave me the silent treatment. The same as when I asked what else went on at Station. He knows I'm here to document our findings, but he does nothing to conceal his distaste at the idea. It was obviously foisted upon him from above, and he resents it. The man is profoundly unhelpful.

  Apparently, the construction company was told that it was indeed an unexploded World War Two bomb: an experimental weapon, which explained its unusual appearance. I doubt the workmen who found it were convinced by this story, but Purcell seems certain that no mention of this will ever appear in the press. How he can be so confident, I have no idea. I imagine a government department that has remained hidden in an underground building near the centre of London without a single mention in the newspapers knows one or two things about secrecy.

  Once the item arrived, Purcell assembled the scientific team. From the little that Father has let slip, they were recruited by appealing to their scientific curiosity and their patriotism. That, and a salary they would never get close to in academia. Despite Father's enthusiasm, this seems a little too much like bribery or hush money to me. I wonder what they would say if he wanted to leave the project? Or if I changed my mind? There's a kind of institutional ruthlessness about Purcell and his team that I don't much care for. In the interests of trying to be thorough, I will list them here, but as they have made it clear they will not be fraternising with the 'civilians', I only have my first impressions to go on, and they weren't good. To a greater or lesser degree, they all make me feel uncomfortable. There's Colonel Purcell, Lieutenant Colonel Ferriday, Captain Hopkins (worst of the bunch), and Captain Mansfield. Various uniformed underlings scurry about obeying their orders, but they appear to be nameless and interchangeable.

  The item itself is, as I said, a little disappointing. It's cylindrical, six feet, four inches long, fifty-eight inches wide, four feet deep, tapering at both ends. It's transparent and hollow - approximately six inches thick. I had once seen a German bomb in a museum on a school trip. It was ten feet long and weighed more than a ton. It scared me half to death. In contrast, the cylinder I saw today, supposedly heralding a new scientific age for Great Britain and the world, looks more like a school science experiment.

  Inside the container, occupying about a third of the space available, is a blue-green substance. It's a thick liquid. I heard Miss Hodge refer to it as semi-solid. To me, it looks like nothing more than mushy peas. If you can imagine mushy peas with a blue tinge on the surface. Doesn't sound very appetising, does it?

  Two facts about the item have caused an immense amount of excitement and led to this vast secret place being re-organised to study it. Firstly, the transparent material is not, as one might suppose, made of glass. It's some kind of metal. Don't ask me how - that's Roger's field of expertise, and he's convinced we're in the presence of the single most important scientific discovery of the century. He looks even more handsome when he's passionate about something.

  I just had a little giggle to myself at the thought of mixing up my official record with this diary. I can't begin to imagine Colonel Purcell's face if he was reading this!

  The second fact that has everyone freaked out is the goo inside. The mushy peas. Whatever it is, it displays what Mr McKean called, "an undeniable homeostatic condition observable under changeable conditions, combined with, theoretically, some kind of circulatory system."

  I must have looked blank, because Roger leaned over and whispered, "He thinks it's alive."

  No one's said it aloud, but I imagine everyone must be wondering the same thing as I am.

  Can this really be a coincidence? Some kind of unknown device, constructed of material beyond our capabilities, containing—possibly—something that is, in some sense, alive, appearing in the middle of our capital city in August 1969?

  One month after humans first walked on the moon.

  3

  Daniel

  My early childhood was unremarkable. Abnormal things started happening to me in 1998. George said I should write it down, all of it. Re-live it once, only once, by writing it the way I lived it, then read it back with the perspective I have now. Now that I know what really happened. Now that I know the lengths Station will go to. The lengths they were always prepared to go to.

  George was right about everything else. She's probably right about t
his.

  January has turned out to be unseasonably warm this year. Or perhaps it's just this part of the country. It's certainly warm enough for me to sit outside with the laptop, occasionally looking up across the fields to the sea.

  Right. The story of my life so far - at least, the bits that need telling.

  Who, where, when, and what - is that what journalists say?

  In which case: me, a small Essex town, 1998, and my balls.

  It all started with my balls.

  The summer before my eighteenth birthday, my balls finally dropped. They did so in dramatic fashion. I was woken by a loud noise one Saturday morning. The dream I had been ripped away from was generic in nature, familiar to anyone who is, or once was, a teenage boy. It involved teenage girls. I think I'll leave it at that.

  I had been asleep in my customary position: on my back, one hand down my pyjama bottoms. I knew immediately something was different, and a quick fumble around my genitals confirmed it. When I realised what it was, I wept with joy. Literally. I lay in bed, one hand checking my chin for anything that might be described as stubble, the other cupping my undeniably saggier testicles, heaving out enormous sobs as tears of relief ran down my face.

  I doubt there's ever been another adolescent male more prepared for the onset of puberty. I had spent hours in the local library, squirrelled away in the corner, reading every book on male development. I'd studied the diagrams, made notes about the changes that might occur. I knew the signs and had been checking myself daily since I was thirteen.

  It's hard to explain how terrible it was to be a late developer in an Essex comprehensive school in 1998. After PE, there were communal showers. Communal showers. What oafish, unfeeling, ignorant twat thought that was a good idea? Communal showers at the stage when the majority of teenagers—other than the lucky few who somehow moved directly from childhood to adulthood—were desperate for privacy. Communal showers. Unbelievable.

  As well as having a hairless chest, armpits, and groin to hide, I also had a pair of breasts some of the girls would have envied, perched above rolls of fat. Half of my classmates called me Danielle, asked my bra size, and generally derived a great deal of enjoyment from my physical appearance. I learned to say nothing. My voice was high, fluting. Hard to deliver a withering riposte asserting my masculinity when I sounded like Barbara bloody Windsor.

  If I'd been intellectually gifted, artistically talented, or even the class clown, I might have found some respite from the taunts of my peers. But I was average in every sense other than my size. Try fading into the background when your arse hangs over the sides of your chair, and your thighs can barely squeeze under a desk.

  School was a living nightmare, a torturous, endless endurance test. English was the only lesson I enjoyed. I had a little aptitude, and some feeling for the subject. When we studied Shakespeare, and I first heard Shylock's speech in The Merchant Of Venice, I felt—for the first time—that sense of awe when someone reaches out from the pages of a book and, across centuries, speaks directly to you.

  "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"

  I was no Jew, just a painfully shy obese kid. But when Mrs Hargreaves read that speech aloud to a class of bored fifteen-year-olds, I was transfixed. And when she read the next line, I was aware of Pete and Chris in my peripheral vision.

  "And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?"

  If I had known then what I would become, I might have derived some comfort from it. Then again, maybe not.

  That summer morning, balls in hand, tears wet on my cheeks, I became aware of an anomaly. I reached out for the glass of water I kept on my bedside table, only to find it wasn't where I expected it to be. The table itself wasn't where I expected it to be.

  I dried my eyes on the pillowcase. Something was wrong. It was a question of perspective. I squinted at the ceiling. The dusty Airfix Spitfire dangling from the light looked further away. The water was unreachable because the table was now a couple of feet higher than it should have been. Either that, or—

  It was at that moment that my mother opened the door. Unusually, she didn't knock. It wasn't that she had a greater regard for my privacy than the architects who design school showers, it was more that she feared seeing my corpulent form before I'd covered it.

  "What the hell was that?" she said, as she walked into my room. An unlit cigarette dangled from her lips. She looked older than her thirty-eight years. I imagine an impartial observer might have put her in her mid-fifties. Sustained alcohol abuse will do that to a person. She was wearing makeup, but it was the remnants of the previous night's slap, the black trails of mascara making her look like a melodramatic actor on a daytime soap.

  "What was what?" For one crazy moment, I thought she was referring to my testicles.

  She looked at me in disgust. Since that was my mother's default expression when in my company, I paid it no mind, but I did take my hand out of my pyjamas.

  She was waving a finger, indicating the bed. Her mouth was working, the cigarette clinging to her lower lip as she made sounds, but her brain had not yet provided her with enough horsepower to put together a comprehensible sentence. I was used to this. Children of drunks generally are. I waited for the sounds to resemble words. Eventually, she managed one of the clearest sentences I'd ever heard from her before midday on a weekend. Or a weekday, to be fair.

  "You...can pay for this out of your pocket money, you lazy, fat bastard."

  I didn't respond, even to point out that she had never given me any pocket money. Most the money I had saved came from my Sunday job stacking shelves at the supermarket. I supplemented this meagre income by stealing from her. The money went on school clothes and books she'd forgotten to buy. Or groceries. Sometimes her need for booze was so strong she forgot to shop for anything else.

  She backed out of the room and shut the door. Quietly. She never slammed doors in the daytime. Too hard on the hangover. It was only when she'd drunk away the previous night's damage that she would happily slam doors and kick things. Me, mostly.

  I sat up fully. That's when I realised what had happened. Rolling off the bed, I looked back at the damage. The crash that had woken both me and my mother had been caused by the bed collapsing, depositing me onto the floor. All four solid wooden legs had snapped like matchwood. There were splinters on the carpet. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to them. It wasn't a particularly sturdy bed, but even so.

  Briefly mourning the world-class collection of videotaped pornography that had been crushed, I felt the excitement that had arrived along with my freshly dangling testicles begin to diminish. I might be on the cusp of adulthood, but I was still obese. What kind of kid lets himself get so fat that his bed can't bear his weight?

  I stood up slowly, looked at myself in the mirror, and got my third shock of the morning.

  I moved closer to make sure I wasn't imagining things. My face looked back, and my eyes were drawn to the faint beginnings of stubble (yes!). I doubted anyone would have spotted any other changes. My mother had noticed nothing, but that didn't count for much. I could have shaved my head and painted it bright orange without her commenting.

  But I could see the difference. I looked at my flabby face and, hesitantly, an unfamiliar smile crept across my features.

  There was no doubt about it. I had lost one of my chins.

  4

  Cressida

  March 14th, 1971

  A visit from the top brass today. I suspected something out of the ordinary was on the way because of the amount of cleaning and tidying that's gone on in the place in the last few days. No one said anything though.

  I was writing up my notes when they arrived. Not t
hat there's much to write up these days. But I try to make some kind of effort to earn the very generous pay cheque they give me every month. There are only so many ways one can state the same thing: "day fifty-four, no change; day eighty-one, condition of item unaltered; day two hundred and sixty-seven, tests on the item yield no new knowledge about its nature."

  Miss Hodge has seen her hours reduced to seven or eight per week. McKean and Roger still come in, but their shifts are shorter. Even Father has reduced his working hours, arriving later in the morning and leaving mid-afternoon most days. I seem to replace his bottle of J&B far more often than I used to. It's hard not to worry about him. I don't know what he expected from this project, but I am sure it wasn't boredom. Only Mike keeps up his regular full-time schedule.

  Purcell himself greeted our visitors and showed them into the lab.

  Father shook some hands and mouthed some social niceties. I watched through the glass from the office next door, all the while, ostentatiously writing notes. We'd all been told to look busy, and I didn't intend to let the side down.

  As he waved his arms around in full professorial fashion, no doubt dropping in impressive technical jargon (the lab is all but soundproof so I couldn't make out what he was saying), the small party of besuited men ignored him and went straight to Abos.

  Oh. I've just flicked back through the pages and realised that I've yet to explain our subject's nickname. For months, it was 'the item,' until I overheard Mike talking to it while he mopped the lab. He didn't hear me come in and was chatting away as if to a friend.

  "And then Phil Spector was brought in to produce it, and to me, it sounds like a mess. I mean, it just isn't The Beatles anymore. You know what I mean, Abos?"