“Well done, very good, nice reaction times everyone, but we are not the enemy. We have met the enemy, and he is dead. Now, everyone back to work! I want full reports on all exterior and interior defences, and in particular why most of them didn’t bloody work.”
The weapons disappeared, and the lab assistants went back to shouting at each other and bullying their computers. Some were clearly exhausted from fighting, while others were still yawning from being dragged from their beds. All of them were giving everything they had to the problem of why so many of our defences had failed us in our hour of need. The Armourer moved quickly among them, peering over shoulders and asking pertinent questions, like why had the robot machine guns and the automatic energy weapons been the only systems to kick in? I’d been wondering that myself. There should have been force shields, shaped curses, floating invisible incendiaries, nerve gas clusters and teleport mines . . . The Armourer kept reeling them off, and the answer was always the same. Someone had shut them all down, in advance, inside the Hall. Someone inside the family. No one else had the codes, or access to the security computers. The automatic weaponry had remained on line only because they were controlled by the Armourer’s personal computer.
I found an empty chair, by stealing it from someone else when they weren’t looking, and sank into it. It felt really good to be off my feet. I was aching in all my muscles and some of my bones. My clothes were soaked with sweat, like I’d run a marathon. The armour provides us with strength and speed, but it’s still all down to the man inside. Someone thrust a cup of hot tea into my hands, and was gone before I could ask for a splash of whisky in it. I burned my mouth on the hot liquid, and blew on it for a while. After all I’d seen and been through, I felt like I could sit there forever.
The Armourer didn’t look tired. He raged back and forth, striding up and down the length of the Armoury, driving on his assistants, constantly coming up with different approaches and new leads of inquiry. He hurried from post to post, encouraging and remonstrating, his voice flat and harsh, his eyes cold. Just the thought of a traitor in the family had filled him with a terrible fury. He finally came back to stand before me, scowling furiously.
“A traitor! Inside the family, working against us, leaving us wide open to our enemies! We’ve had rogues gone bad in the past, but never anything like this. Even Zero Tolerance didn’t want to put the family at risk! Once, I would have sworn something like this was impossible, but now, after the Matriarch’s death, and Molly’s, I don’t know what to think. It’s like everything’s been turned upside down. You can’t trust anyone or anything.”
He found another chair and sat down beside me. His back was still straight, but his hands moved uncertainly, unable to settle, and his eyes looked strangely lost.
“This is serious, Eddie. Deadly serious. We could have lost, out there. We could have fallen, and the family could have been wiped out.”
“But we didn’t, and we weren’t,” I said. “Because we’re Droods.”
We sat and watched a steady stream of bodies being carried through the Armoury on stretchers, on their way to the attached hospital wards. Dead Accelerated Men on their way for autopsy and examination. Most of the bodies were in pretty bad shape, withered, desiccated, almost mummified. Others had been struck down and torn apart by golden armour, and those bodies left bloody trails behind them. Some were in pieces, roughly assembled on stretchers; others were just bits and bobs, collected in black plastic garbage bags. A part of me found that entirely suitable. There was no room left in me for mercy, or compassion. If we could have brought the dead men back to life I would have spent all day killing them again, and gloried in it. I shook my head slowly. That wasn’t me. That was the tiredness talking. The stretcher bearers just kept passing before us, more and more of them.
“How many died?” I asked the Armourer. “Do we know yet?”
Somebody immediately thrust a file into the Armourer’s hand, and he leafed through it slowly. “Two thousand, seven hundred and eighteen dead Accelerated Men. We’re having to open up the extra-dimensional arms of the hospital ward, just to hold them all. I’ve ordered every single one of them brought down here, under full security. Who knows what kind of chemical or bacterial agents they might have buried inside them, for one last assault on the unwary? We’ll have no Trojan horses here. I want those bodies rendered down to their smallest parts, and made to give up every secret they have. We need an answer to the Accelerated Men, before they come again.”
I looked up sharply from ˚ my tea. “You think there’ll be another attack? Another invasion?”
“Why do you think I’ve been yelling at everyone to get all the defences back on line? Until they are, we’re vulnerable. The whole family is vulnerable.”
“How many did we lose?” I said. “How many Droods died out there?”
“Two hundred and thirty-eight, so far. Over four hundred more critically injured, and as many again seriously. More figures are coming in all the time. They’re up in the main hospital wards. The living and the dead. I didn’t want our honourable fallen lying beside scum.”
“Accelerated Men,” I said. “I never thought to see their like again.”
“Given the way these new Accelerated Men acted, with almost insane levels of rage and ferocity, it would seem Doctor Delirium has been experimenting with the formula. Improving it . . . Oh yes, I recognised the black and gold uniforms . . .”
I told him what I’d found and what I’d learned, at Doctor Delirium’s last base, and he sat quietly for a while, considering. “Every answer leads to more questions. If Doctor Delirium and Tiger Tim killed off all the people they left behind, presumably as a trial run for the new augmented Drug, where did they find the thousands of new subjects they used to attack us? Doctor Delirium couldn’t have raised an army that size without our noticing. Unless the traitor has been interfering with our records . . . I hate this, Eddie. I really hate it. I look around, at all these familiar faces, and I feel like I don’t know them at all. Any one of them could be the traitor. In an ever-changing world, the only thing everyone could trust, and count on, was the family. And now even that’s been taken away from us.
“I have an answer, as to where this new army might have come from,” I said. “But you’re really not going to like it. What if Doctor Delirium and Tiger Tim have made an alliance with the Immortals?”
“You’re right,” said the Armourer. “It is an answer, and I really don’t like it. As if things weren’t bad enough. I thought you said you saw the Immortals fighting with Doctor Delirium, to get their hands on the Apocalypse Door in Los Angeles?”
“That was then,” I said. “They could have teamed up since, to handle something they couldn’t control on their own. Doctor Delirium provides the genius, the Immortals provide the warm bodies, and Tiger Tim acts as go-between. Maybe the Door was just . . . too scary?”
We were interrupted before we could follow that thought any further, by two young lab assistants bearing a limp form on a stretcher. The man in the black and gold uniform was still alive, and carefully strapped down. He looked about a hundred years old, but there was enough fight left in him to glare viciously in all directions. He cursed us all, impartially, in a dry cracked voice. The two lab assistants smiled cheerfully at the Armourer, and dropped the stretcher on the floor before us. The impact shut off the swearing, for a while.