Project Venom Read online

  “Shut up,” said Hernandez quietly.

  He jumped to his feet and grabbed her by the collar of her uniform. The other passengers suddenly noticed what was going on.

  The cabin was filled with screams. Several passengers stood up.

  Hernandez levelled the gun at them. “Out to the back! All of you! This aircraft is under the control of the East Balboan Liberation Squad! If anyone presses the alarm, our prisoner dies!”

  The passenger who’d trapped Nero turned to the others. “He’s bluffing! You can’t get a real gun on a plane!”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Hernandez aimed the gun at the passenger’s leg and fired. The bullet skimmed the back of the man’s calf. He yelled in pain and dropped to the floor.

  More screams filled the air. Confusion broke out. The passengers scrambled in their panic to get away. The injured man followed, limping and swearing, a patch of blood showing on his trousers.

  Vinski joined Hernandez at the front of the First Class section. Her boots were back on. Her fingers fluttered nervously at the side of her head, tapping at her swirl of hair.

  Meanwhile, Chopper calmly signalled the SWARM. “Switch to attack mode. Prepare to neutralize targets.”

  “The Venom!” said Morph suddenly. “It’s hidden inside Vinski’s hair!”

  “You’ve scanned it?” said Chopper.

  “No. No time to explain now,” said Morph.

  “Hercules, retrieve it immediately!”

  Hercules flew at top speed along the side of the cabin, swinging around to approach Vinski from the side.

  Hernandez pressed the gun to the flight attendant’s head. “We’re going on a detour,” he hissed.

  Sabre the mosquito buzzed close to the ceiling. “I’ll sting both terrorists now!”

  “Wait,” said Chopper. “Not while that human female is in danger. We cannot risk her being harmed. Remember Queen Bee’s orders.”

  Hernandez manhandled the flight attendant over to the entrance to the flight deck. He pressed the barrel of the gun against her cheekbone. “Enter your code. Get us inside.”

  Hercules dived into Vinski’s tightly wound ball of hair, his claw set to fire a low-powered laser beam. The terrorist was too focused on Hernandez and the flight attendant to notice the micro-robot.

  “There’s a network of wires in here,” signalled Hercules. He quickly sliced through a series of looped cords. “Her real hair is being used to cover it. It’s designed to deflect scans or detection beams, rather like Agent K’s fighter jet deflects radar. Very impressive. No wonder we couldn’t find it.” He crawled through the gap he’d cut.

  “My sensors have detected the Venom!” said Sirena. “Now that Hercules has disrupted the network around it, I can see it’s contained in a small black tube, similar to the hollow finger Seede used.”

  Hernandez gave the flight attendant a shake. “The code!”

  “Morph,” signalled Chopper, “warn the pilots.”

  “I’m already on my way,” said Morph the centipede. He was at the lower edge of the flight-deck door. He flattened his flexible exoskeleton down to less than a millimetre and wriggled through the door’s curved rubber seals.

  Hernandez whispered to the flight attendant. “You have to the count of five, and then you’re dead… One…”

  Morph emerged on to the flight deck. He was now inside the physical and electronic barriers which prevented remote takeovers of the aircraft’s controls. Immediately, he transmitted a message to the earphones of the pilot and co-pilot.

  “Two…” said Hernandez.

  “This is a representative of the British secret service. Your flight attendant is being held hostage by terrorists, and you must not open the door. Please continue on to London Heathrow as planned. The situation will be under control soon.”

  “Three…”

  “Where the devil is that coming from?” spluttered the pilot.

  “Inside this cockpit, according to the readout,” said the co-pilot.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, man, there’s only you and me in here!”

  Meanwhile, Hercules flew clear of Vinski, the black tube containing the Venom clutched tightly beneath him. “Target acquired,” he said.

  “Four…”

  Hernandez levelled the gun against the flight attendant’s temple. In a split second, Chopper calculated the odds of eighteen different courses of action. He opted for a simple, direct approach to the problem.

  The dragonfly shot across the cabin, increasing the speed of his wings so that they produced a loud, droning buzz. He dived at Hernandez. The terrorist got a flashing glimpse of something coming at him. He started in surprise.

  Chopper sent an overload command to his eyes. A dazzling flare of light suddenly burst less than a metre from Hernandez’s face. The terrorist cried out in alarm, his vision suddenly a blank wash of white. He almost dropped the gun.

  As Vinski stepped forward to grab the weapon, Sabre the mosquito darted at her. Before she could reach for the gun, he injected a microscopic pellet into her neck.

  She jerked back, a wild expression on her face. Hernandez staggered, still blinded.

  The flight attendant seized her chance. She knocked the gun out of Hernandez’s hand, then ran out of the First Class section, the same way the passengers had gone.

  Vinski stood like a statue for a moment, then toppled over. “Freezer sting delivered,” said Sabre.

  Hernandez, blinking and shaking his head, let out a yell of anger and scooped up the gun. He began to follow the flight attendant. Widow the spider leaped up from the floor. She fired a steel-strength web around the terrorist’s hand, pulling it tight as she arced over his head. The gun fired, the bullet hitting one of the window seats and causing an explosion of stuffing.

  Widow swung rapidly around her prey, binding him tighter and tighter from shoulders to ankles. He struggled uselessly, finally losing his balance and falling into a squirming heap beside the motionless Vinski.

  “Venom recovered. Terrorists neutralized,” said Chopper calmly. “Time for us to leave.”

  The SWARM robots quickly disarmed the fallen gun, and vanished from the scene. Nero was alone in the cabin crew’s area, now that the crew had joined the passengers hiding in the Economy Class section. He flipped the lid off the plastic lunch box he was trapped in, and followed them.

  Air Weihan Flight AW92 continued on to Heathrow, landing only four minutes after its scheduled arrival time. The passengers and cabin crew, huddled fearfully in Ecomony Class, cheered loudly as the aircraft taxied towards the airport terminal.

  As soon as the plane’s door was opened, a small squadron of SIA officers came on board, led by Agent J. They found Vinski in a state of temporary paralysis, and Hernandez trussed up with what looked like a long length of thin wire. The remaining bullets from his gun had gone. The pilot and co-pilot were frantically searching the flight deck for the source of the message they’d heard.

  Meanwhile, the SWARM robots quietly left the plane through the tiny hole Hercules had made earlier. They dropped to the tarmac below, where SWARM’s Agent K was waiting to transport them back to London.

  Late that night, the staff and robots of SWARM were assembled in the laboratory at SWARM headquarters. Queen Bee ran through the mission, pointing out where improvements to procedures or equipment could be made.

  “There is one thing I’m still puzzled about,” said Alfred Berners. “I programmed the robots’ brains, and Simon Turing constructed their databases, yet Morph made a leap of logic on that return flight which I would never have expected.”

  “Yes,” said Simon. “Completely out of the blue. It shows the robots are learning all the time; they’re developing their own ways of thinking.”

  The robots were gathered on the lab’s central workbench. 3D displays flicked and scrolled around them.

  “What do you mean?” said Morph, his voice relayed through speakers hidden in the flat surface beside him.

  “How did
you work out that the Venom was inside Vinski’s hairdo?” said Alfred.

  “Humans instinctively protect what they value,” said Morph. “The Venom was of enormous value to the terrorists. I thought that Vinski’s raising of her fingers to her hair was nothing more than a nervous gesture at first. But she did it more than once during the flight, and I realized that she was unconsciously protecting her hiding place.”

  “You see?” said Simon with a beaming smile. “Intuitive reasoning!”

  “What about Pablo Alva?” said Chopper.

  “MI5 have let him go,” said Queen Bee. “They’re extremely embarrassed about the whole incident. He’s said he’ll go to the papers if they start threatening the staff at Smith-Neutall with prosecution. I think they’ll let sleeping dogs lie. Agent Drake is looking especially red-faced. And I think Smith-Neutall will be more careful about who they employ as sales people in future.”

  “And the Venom?” asked Professor Miller.

  “You needn’t worry on that score,” said Queen Bee. “I saw it incinerated myself.”

  She crossed to the screen on the wall, and tapped her debriefing notes shut.

  “Well done, everyone,” she said. “Another successful mission.”

  At the same moment, less than twenty miles away, two men met in the shadows of a derelict house. One was Drake of MI5. The other was a gaunt, slightly stooping man, with heavily lidded eyes and a permanently downturned mouth. They regarded each other with caution for a minute or two.

  “You have it?” said the gaunt man. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness of the night.

  Drake took a small, oval case from his pocket. “Safe and sound. The technical guys say you’d need a bomb to break this open. The contents are totally secure.”

  He handed it over. The gaunt man turned it round in his long fingers, gazing at it thoughtfully. “Amazing, isn’t it?” he said. “Something as small as that, capable of such destruction. MI5 and the SIA think it’s destroyed?”

  “Oh yes,” grinned Drake. “Got one over on them there. We burned up a fake phial. They think Venom is a thing of the past.”

  “Good,” the other man replied. “Some branches of the secret service don’t know a useful tool when they see one, eh? Your payment will be made tonight.”

  Drake nodded. Both men went their separate ways.

  A top-secret device with the power to bring down the world’s electronic communications has been stolen. It’s a race against time for SWARM to locate and retrieve the dangerous weapon before the thieves crack the encryption code protecting it. Can the SWARM team stop the villains before it’s too late?

  Read an extract…

  “Queen Bee to agents! Prepare to move out!”

  Two electronic voices replied, one after the other. “I’m live, Queen Bee.”

  Queen Bee sat in a high-backed black leather chair, in front of a wide bank of brightly lit screens and readouts. She was a tall woman with a shock of blonde hair and a smartly cut suit. She wore a pair of glasses with small, circular lenses that reflected the rapidly shifting light from the screens. Behind the lenses, her steely grey eyes darted from one readout to another, soaking up information. Her age was difficult to work out from her looks, but her slightly pursed lips, and the way her long fingers tapped slowly on the arms of her chair, showed that she meant business.

  One of the screens in front of her showed a man coming out of an office block. Numbers and graphs danced across the lower part of the image, sensor readings of everything from the air temperature at his location to his current heart rate.

  Queen Bee leaned forward and spoke into a microphone, which jutted out on a long, flexible stalk. “Chopper, begin data recording.”

  “Logged, Queen Bee,” said one of the electronic voices. It had a slightly lower tone than the other one.

  Outside the office block, Marcus Oliphant sniffed at the morning breeze for a moment. He was a tall, stringy man with bushy eyebrows and a loping walk. His nose wrinkled. The smell of vehicle exhaust seemed stronger than usual today. He took a tighter grip of the small metal case he was carrying, then set off along the street. The traffic of central London rumbled and roared past.

  A long set of black-painted railings ran alongside him. He didn’t notice two insects perched on top. One was a tiny mosquito, the other a large, iridescent dragonfly. At least, that’s what they appeared to be. They didn’t jump and flit like insects usually do. Instead, they seemed to be watching him.

  As he walked off down the road, the insects’ wings buzzed into life, and they rose into the air, following him at a short distance.

  As the insects rose, so the image on the screen in front of Queen Bee shifted and moved.

  Queen Bee swung around in her chair. Sitting behind her were half a dozen people with serious, quizzical expressions on their faces. Among them were the Home Secretary, the head of MI5 and Queen Bee’s boss, the leader of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Agency.

  “As you can see, ladies and gentlemen,” said Queen Bee, “the subject has no idea that he’s being tailed. Our micro-robots are much more effective than normal secret service agents, with their blindingly obvious dark glasses and their suspiciously unmarked fast cars.”

  The head of MI5 shuffled grumpily in his seat. “And much more expensive. How much are these technological toy soldiers costing, Home Secretary? You gave the SIA the go-ahead for this programme.”

  The Home Secretary looked slightly uncomfortable. “A lot. I’m afraid I don’t have the figures to hand,” she muttered.

  “The latest technology is never cheap,” said Queen Bee. “But my section, the Department of Micro-robotic Intelligence, has capabilities that make it priceless. The existence of SWARM is known only to my staff, and to the people in this room. However, nanotechnology is the future. Micro-robots will soon dominate the worlds of spying and crime investigation. These SWARM operatives are the most advanced robots on Earth. On the outside, they are almost indistinguishable from real insects, yet each has equipment and capabilities that make the average undercover agent look like a caveman.”

  The Home Secretary pointed to the screen. “Who is that man? What’s this demonstration supposed to prove?”

  “He’s Marcus Oliphant, leader of the team that’s developed the new Whiplash weapon,” said Queen Bee. “It has been created by a private company, Techna-Stik International, and is being sold to the British government. The prototype is in that metal case there – it’s only the size of a matchbox. He’s on his way to meet with your own officials, Home Secretary, and show them the progress that’s been made. I’ve asked for my robots to shadow him today, to show their effectiveness. Normally, an MI5 operative would be assigned, but since Whiplash is every bit as secret as SWARM, this man’s visit has been judged low risk. No unauthorized person could possibly know what he’s carrying.”

  “Whiplash?” said the Home Secretary. “Have I been briefed on that?” She turned to the man beside her.

  “It’s an EMP device,” said the head of MI5. “Extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.”

  “Extremely dangerous even in the right hands,” muttered Queen Bee.

  “EMP?” frowned the Home Secretary.

  “Electro-magnetic pulse,” explained Queen Bee. “It emits an invisible wave of energy which knocks out all electrical circuits. Fries them beyond repair. It does almost no physical damage, but destroys electronics – everything from air-traffic control to TV remotes. Vehicles, computers, the lot, all made useless.”

  “Whiplash shoots a narrow EMP beam across a few kilometres,” said the head of MI5. “It’s designed to target and disable enemy systems.”

  Suddenly, the high electronic voice of the mosquito cut across the air. “Sabre to Queen Bee. Suspicious activity detected.”

  About the Author

  SIMON CHESHIRE

  Simon is the award-winning author of the Saxby Smart and Jeremy Brown series. Simon’s ultimate dream is to go the moon, but in the me
antime, he lives in Warwick with his wife and children. He writes in a tiny room, not much bigger than a wardrobe, which is crammed with books, pieces of paper and empty chocolate bar wrappers. His hobbies include fixing old computers and wishing he had more hobbies.

  www.simoncheshire.co.uk

  Copyright

  STRIPES PUBLISHING

  An imprint of Little Tiger Press

  1 The Coda Centre, 189 Munster Road,

  London SW6 6AW

  First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2014

  Text copyright © Simon Cheshire, 2014

  Cover illustration copyright © Peter Minister, 2014

  Cover background and inside imagery courtesy of www.shutterstock.com

  eISBN: 978–1–84715–535–1

  The right of Simon Cheshire to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  www.littletiger.co.uk