"Get this fucking thing off me!" Norris shouted from the chair.
Ringo quickly undid Norris's restraints, cursing at the big man to keep quiet.
“Custard, get on the scrounge,” Ringo said as he worked. “See what you can find. We'll need food and water and a weapon if you can find one.”
“Typical scouser,” Custard said. “Do you want me to nick their DVD player while I’m at it?”
Ringo undid the last of Norris's restraints and the big man tore off the helmet, cracking what was probably a million bucks worth of state-of-the-art hardware like an eggshell.
Anything physical came easy to Norris. He was a big unit, the kind of bloke you put on posters to scare the enemy. He wore his sideburns and moustache so long they met at his jawline. The only thing stopping it from being a full beard was his clean-shaven chin which was prominent and sported a cleft Kirk Douglas would have been proud of. There was permanence to Norris. In a world where everything was getting smaller and lighter he was proudly unreconstructed. He was a brick foundry on a street of prefab bungalows.
"What the fuck's going on?" Norris asked, and Ringo quickly filled him in while Custard rifled through the lab's supplies.
"We're going to need some wheels," Norris said. He stepped over the prone bodies of the technicians and started tapping commands into one of the computers. "Looks like you were right about someone helping us out," he said. "It seems someone tripped some kind of contamination alarm. Got pretty much everyone on the base into emergency shelters and then locked them up. There are some decontamination teams looking for the breach but they're way over the other side of the facility."
Ringo found some surgical scrubs and a lab coat in a locker and stripped out of his filthy sweatpants. It wasn't much of a disguise, but it would have to do. The pocket of the coat was embroidered with a stylised dragon next to a pair of Chinese characters that read ‘Yinglong’.
The Chinese characters gave him a headache. He could read them, but at the same time they looked like a jumble of meaningless lines. When had he learned to read Chinese? He tried to remember, tried to dredge up some detail but there was nothing. Nothing at all. When he tried to remember details of his schooling he drew a complete blank and that terrified him, but he guessed that was some weird side effect of the virtual reality interrogation. He had more immediate concerns, like getting out of the building alive.
“Okay. Time’s up; we’re leaving,” he said. “Norris, you found us an exit yet?”
“What I wouldn’t give for a Jackal right now,” said Custard referring to the all-terrain long-range patrol vehicles favoured by the Regiment.
“Bingo!” exclaimed Norris.
“What have you got?” Ringo asked.
Norris looked up from the terminal with a grin. “Oh, Sarge. You’re going to fucking love this.”
“It’s got legs!” said Custard.
They were in a narrow corridor, staring through a small window set into the door that led to the hanger beyond.
“What the fuck have those boffins been doing out here? First the Navier-Stokes-whatever, then their virtual reality torture chamber and now this!”
The vehicle that squatted at the centre of the hanger was an angular mass of charcoal grey plates. It was streamlined in profile but given its size, Ringo guessed this was more to reduce its radar profile than for speed. The sharp angles of its hull were probably also pretty good at deflecting incoming fire. Rounds impacting on those angled plates would skip off taking most of their kinetic energy with them.
Instead of wheels or tracks, the central hull was supported on four huge legs that were themselves articulated arrangements of sharp, prismatic sections. Each leg ended in a kind of claw clutching a metallic sphere the size of a yoga ball, reminding Ringo of the claw and ball feet he’d seen on old furniture. Despite its legs, the bizarre vehicle looked as if it was designed to drive rather than walk, and if its spherical ‘wheels’ were as seamless and metallic as they looked, then it would be very difficult to disable. There were no tyres to puncture or complicated track linkages to break.
On its upper flanks it sported a brace of what looked to be at least 75mm guns with barrels at least three metres long. The big guns were mounted on independent pods and pointed skyward at crazy angles giving the whole vehicle the look of a giant beetle complete with antennae.
“That’s our way out?” Ringo asked.
“Fuelled up and ready to roll,” Norris replied. “According to the computer it was scheduled for a test run this morning. And…” he added with a mischievous grin, “—a live fire exercise.”
“It’s armed?”
“Oh yes.”
Ringo peered in through the small window in the door. The hanger looked deserted.
“Okay,” he said eventually. “You lot stay here while I go for a recce.”
“Why you?” Custard asked.
Ringo tugged the collar of his stolen lab coat a little straighter. “Because unlike you misfits, I actually look like I belong here.”
Ringo tried the door and it opened with a soft click. Everything about this felt wrong. It was all too easy — the open cells, the weird emptiness of the place. He forced himself to stride confidently into the hangar as if he belonged there.
The spider tank, or whatever the hell it was, was about as big as a Challenger, the army’s main battle tank, although the broad spread of its legs made it appear even bigger. A hatch lay open below the hull in the arse-end of the giant bug.
“Too easy,” he said to himself. How could this be happening? Maybe their target, the defecting Chinese scientist, had found a way to help them after all. Maybe he would be waiting inside their escape vehicle ready to guide them to freedom. There was only one way to find out. He peered in through the hatch. The interior was dark and cramped, but Ringo could make out two seats side-by-side like in the cockpit of a plane and another couple along the cabin’s flanks, probably gunnery stations for the two main guns. There was no sign of any defecting boffin.
He scanned the rest of the hanger. There was a row of more traditional vehicles in marked bays: jeeps and trucks in traditional olive drab with the red star of the Chinese military. Behind the row of vehicles were doors leading into some other wing of the facility.
All the doors were closed, just like every other door in the facility… every door, that was, except the ones along their route. Once again, Ringo hackles itched with the feeling this was all too good to be true. Surely this was some kind of a test, some perverse exercise in the building of hope only to take it away again.
The thought of that psychological torture brought back images of the meadow and for a second he became acutely aware of the lack of detail in the periphery of his vision. He rolled his eyes like a madman. Was that how it had always been? Or was the blurriness at the edges of his sight due to something else? Due perhaps to the limitations of the virtual reality simulation? Was he still inside the simulation? Would the walls fold away like stage scenery and drop him once again into the crushing embrace of the golden serpent?
He reached around and rubbed his fingers through the sweaty hair at the base of his skull as if to convince himself that he was in fact whole. That he was more than just a shell of polygons produced by a computer program.
His racing heart brought him back to reality. It was time to go.
He crouched behind the shelter of its lowered rear hatch and waved the others forward, patting his head in the familiar gesture — On me.
“I hope someone knows how to drive this fucking thing," Custard said.