Rhys had said it was loud, but by god I wasn’t prepared for the noise when I finally reached the vast open chamber that was the pump station. Four of the gigantic machines sat in a row on plinths in the centre of the room. Two were currently offline, probably to prevent burnout. The other pairs’ motors spun in a blur. All of them were connected via an intricate layout of pipes and valves, all feeding into one massive pipe as tall as I was that ran up and through the roof.

“Felix says it’s so they can cycle them,” shouted Rhys, pointing at the silent pumps. “Prevents them from all having to work twenty-four-seven.”

I nodded and looked around at the walkways and soaring gantries that surrounded the equipment.

Unsurprisingly, most of the civilians had chosen to not take advantage of the prime real estate on offer. A couple of families were all trying to rest amidst a pile of duvets and blankets, their ears covered by construction grade muffs. In another corner, a trio of old gents were playing cards, totally unfazed by the hellish noise. A closer look showed six hearing aids, all dangling from their ears. They saw us, waved as if we were old friends, then returned to their hand and matchstick prize pool.

Felix was waiting at the top of a flight of steel steps which led to what I assumed was the control room. It was mostly just windows stretching about fifty foot along one wall, overlooking the entire room. He waved us up, a series of ear defenders hanging from his arm.

“Bit late for them, mate,” I yelled into his ear. “Could’ve used them when we arrived.”

His face blanched. “Sorry, Mark.”

“Get in there!” I shouted, pushing him toward the double thick door.

He stumbled on like a condemned man facing the firing squad. I pushed him harder, desperate to be out of the ear-shredding cacophony. We all bundled in and slammed the door behind us, groaning in bliss as the noise was cut down by ninety-five percent. The shrieking-whine was down to a low hum.

“I’m sorry, Mark!” Felix begged, falling to his knees.

I dragged him upright as if he weighed no more than a bag of cotton wool. “You’re not in trouble, you plank. You were in the bloody way!”

His watery eyes blinked a few times as if he hadn’t heard me. “I… I’m not?”

“Of course not. Your maps saved our arses out there. I owe you a beer or ten.”

He laugh-sobbed and stepped aside. I found myself staring into the faces of two youngsters. They were in their late teens if I was any judge, and after minding doors for years, I could tell a kid from an adult. The boy was inches shorter than the girl who stood around five-nine. He had floppy black hair that hung over his eyes. Hers was bleached-blonde, and hung down almost to her waist.

I glanced at Rhys. “These are your master hackers? The ones who created the encrypted communication? They’re kids.”

“And who are you?” demanded the irate boy. “The cleaning lady?”

I laughed and looked him over fully. He was nine stone soaking wet, but he had a fire in his eyes that I respected. “Did you speak to Ripper like that?”

“That bald-headed sex case? Damn right I did, man.”

Rhys nodded to agree. “He did. Ripper felt his gifts were valuable enough to leave his skin on.”

Unperturbed by the underlying threat of flaying, he kept right on. “Filthy old bastard. He tried to touch Mythic once. Grabbed her and slipped a hand into her knickers.”

“What happened?” I asked, seeing the girl’s face flush with anger.

“She kneed him in the nuts. You should’ve seen the veins bulge on his shiny dome while he squawked like a parakeet.”

“You did?” I asked her and she nodded. “So you’re Mythic, and you’re Vision.”

Vision slow clapped. “Top marks for the latest Ripper goon. Where is that dick anyway? I want Mythic to knee him in the balls again for tearing our shit up. This gear was priceless, man! Fucking priceless.”

They were both glaring at me when I answered. “I sacrificed Ripper to a demon lord I’ve enslaved.”

Vision burst out laughing, while Mythic just smiled. I suddenly realised she hadn’t said a single thing since we’d met.

Rhys coughed politely. “He’s not joking. It literally dragged itself from Hell and ate him alive.”

Vision scowled at his enemy’s former right-hand man, searching for bullshit. “For real, man?”

Rhys put his palm on his chest. “As I live and breathe. You can’t imagine what this thing looked like. It was…” he stumbled at the memory and knowing he likely faced the same fate. “It was awful.”

“So what are you, if you’re not the cleaning lady? The demon-whisperer?”

I liked this kid. “You could say that, mate. You do know what’s going on above our heads, don’t you?”

“Of course, man. We’ve been keeping track of the whole thing. I knew Lake was a goon, but dinosaurs? That’s fucked up.”

I narrowed my eyes at his words. “What do you mean keeping track of the whole thing?”

“We’ve been slipping in and out of their systems, ninja style.”

“How? Lake’s shut down the internet.”

“Pfft, shut down. That’s like stopping the sun from rising, or the rivers from flowing. All he’s done is throttled the main network to the point it’s useless. Our group set up a sub network as soon as he took over everything. We’ve got our own DNS servers across the globe, and our own gateway control points. We’re piggybacking on their hardware and they will never know.”

“Can’t they find out what you’re doing?”

“The elite hackers work on our team. We go by the name Legion. We call ourselves that because no one knows how many of us there are. It’s best to stay anonymous. The ones that work for Lake and the government are fifty IQ points behind Mythic. If they were any good, they wouldn’t have got caught and ended up facing thirty years inside or an eighty thou a year job in a soulless booth working for Homeland.”

Mythic stuck a thumb in her mouth.

“Exactly! Suckers. I’d have done the thirty.”

I left aside the fact that he probably wouldn’t have lasted thirty minutes in a prison. “What have you been seeing?”

“We knew about the air changes before they got bad. We knew about the seeding of the insect colonies across the country. We knew about the ships and the cargo that was being unloaded.”

“Wait. How widespread is this outbreak?”

“At the moment it’s just Osterland. Every major city.”

Mythic wrote five, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero in the air with her finger.

“Yeah, anything over half a mil. Why do you think we’d stocked up on so much Orange Jazz and Toaster Pockets? We were ready, man! And then Rip… Your goons showed up and fucked with our shit.”

“Didn’t they bring everything with you?”

“You think it’s that simple?” he snapped. “This is state of the art. Do you even know what a computer is?”

“Yeah. I built my own rig.”

His eyes widened and he waved his arms around. “Whoa! Slow down King of the Hackers. What’s the most secure system you’ve cracked with the rig you built yourself? I’ll bet you haven’t even gone deeper than the federal server farm out in Bexfair.”

I shuffled nervously. “Erm… I play games. I like games.”

They both looked like I’d farted at a relative’s funeral, swept the stink into the coffin, then slammed the lid. Mythic looked to Vision and mouthed games?

“Hey, you little shits! I never said I was a hacker in the first place! That’s why I brought you here. The experts,” I said, air quoting. “Now, I might not be able to crack a server farm in Beck’s Heath or wherever the hell you said, but I’ll bet you can’t bench three hundred and fifty pounds, can you?”

“I benched your mom,” Vision replied.

Mythic licked a finger and drew a one in the air.

“What is this, 2010? Mum jokes? Really?”

“Your mom seemed to enjoy them while I was benching her.”

Mythic high-fived him and Cris muffled a laugh behind her hand.

“Not helping!” I snapped.

“Your mom said it helped when…”

“Enough! The jokes might work if we weren’t facing a dinosaur apocalypse and I actually had a mum. Or dad. But I don’t, so cut the childish shit out because we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Or dinosaurs in our case.”

Vision glowered at me. “For real?”

I was growing frustrated. I still had Jessop to take care of. “You’ve seen the dinosaurs! You tracked the fucking things!”

“I’m talking about your folks. You’ve not got a mom or pops?”

“I probably do somewhere, but they dumped me when I was a baby. They could be dead for all I know, so you’d have been benching a corpse. Dirty necro.” I made to high-five Cris but she held it back, so I wrote a licked-finger number one in the air instead. “One all! Draw!”

Vision’s demeanour had changed completely. “Neither do we.”

The tension all bled out of me at the look of lonely sadness that I’d seen staring back at me in the mirror for nearly thirty years. “Sorry, mate. It sucks.”

“You got that right, man.”

“Look, can you help or not?”

He shrugged, looking genuinely remorseful. “It’s like I said. Your men fucked our shit up, even if they didn’t mean to. This stuff was never designed to move. It’s too sensitive.”

“What if I could get you new equipment?” I asked.

“A lot of this is custom. I adapted a lot of the tech myself. Sorry, man.”

I sighed. That was one of our very few remaining doors slammed right in our face. “Ok. Thanks, anyway. You can just stay here with us until this is all over.”

I made to leave for Jessop’s lab until Cris tugged on my arm. “Mark?”

“What’s up?”

“The realm points tab is flashing again.”

“Huh?” I blurted, pulling up the screen. All of the Kherrashi options were obsolete having used them, but a new cheat was available.

Award

Realm Points

Repair the Great Wall

40

Complete the Great Wall

20

Add Steps to the Great Wall

20

Complete the Trebuchets

20

Repair Vision and Mythic’s Hardware

30

???

???

???

???

Bart? What gives? I was expecting a “construct a dinosaur proof bunker” or something.

Where do you think you currently are?

A non-dinosaur proof bunker. Have you seen how many tunnels and passages there are?

Which are currently being secured with concrete blocks, correct? It’s better than hiding inside a tent or a poorly constructed toilet cubicle.

But what if I hadn’t collected them? What if they were already dead with a bellyful of Toaster Pockets?

I felt Bart’s mental shrug.

Butterfly effect?

Butterfly effect, he confirmed. My superiors might be emotionless husks, but they understand providing a semblance of balance. You’re not just up against the creatures, but the powerful interests behind them. The other volunteers will be able to tip the scales in other ways.

You’re a good man, Bart.

I’m not technically a man, but I appreciate the sentiment. Good luck!

He withdrew to the mothership and left me staring at a sea of expectant faces.

Cris pointed at the stack of equipment. “Well?”

“You might want to get behind me,” I warned. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen.”

Granted, this wasn’t hundreds of tons of building materials in front of us, but I was still blind to the effects of my new cheats. When everyone was safely out of the way, I clicked the icon.

“What have you done!” yelled Vision as the entire pile of computers, laptops, and monitors collapsed into a puddle of goop that ran together like black mercury.

“Well, shit,” I mumbled. A lot of use that was going to be.

“Wait!” gasped Cris, tugging on my arm excitedly.

The large puddle started to bubble and seethe as if it was boiling. We all took another pace back, fearful of ending up covered in piping hot tar. Imagine my shock when out of the liquid rose perfectly straight sheets of metal, screens, casings, circuit boards, and other items I didn’t recognise.

“Whoa, man,” whispered Vision as the pieces all began to shuffle around and join together.

Wires and smaller microchips sprouted from the obsidian soup, swirling and melding with the machinery as unseen hands built a wholly new type of system. In less than a minute, the entirety of the old computers had been broken down at an atomic level and reconstituted into the sleek machine that now sat on the bench. The “rig” was four times the size of my own PC. The individual monitors and laptop display were now a curved, six screen bank that pulsed with strange light. It only lasted a few seconds, before being replaced by a chaotic stream of code that flowed like water.

“Whoa,” Vision repeated, both he and Mythic moving closer to read it. “That’s years ahead of where we are.”

Mythic held up her hands and flexed her fingers multiple times.

Vision nodded. “Yeah, probably decades. How is this possible?”

“The people behind me are kind of advanced,” I explained. “Is that setup any good?”

The final touch was a strobing, neon cable that moved like a living thing, connecting to the back of the machine and then phasing through the server glass of the pump station’s equipment without smashing it. Mythic approached one of the keyboards. Before she could make a single stroke, the screen changed with a very normal Welcome! glowing brightly. I watched as she withdrew her hands slowly, staring intently instead. The greeting disappeared, replaced with a scrolling mass of new code appearing from nowhere.

“Myth, are you doing that?”

She nodded almost imperceptibly, concentrating on her work.

Vision turned to me. “She’s thinking this into being? What the fuck, man?”

“Thoughts are energy, right? I guess this is just like a neural link without the need to jam a microchip into your skull.”

Vision joined Mythic and gingerly tried the same trick. Their work began to combine into streams of data that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Images of companies and banks flashed on the screen.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“It’s using the backdoors we’ve already created, but a thousand times faster. We’re getting in to everything, man!”

“Ok, we can use that,” I said, wheeling two chairs over for them to sit on. “Just practice with the new system for a while until I can figure some stuff out.”

“Yeah, man,” said Vision, not really hearing me as he slowly sat down. “Take your time.”

“Can we get you anything?” I asked.

“Orange Jazz and Toaster Pockets,” he said robotically, his eyes reflecting the code. “Cold, straight from the packet.”

I looked at Felix who nodded and ran off. “Coming right up.”

“Shall we go and pay a visit to Jessop?” I asked.

“Those raptor heads aren’t going to cut themselves open, are they?” replied Sun.

Cris was almost as hypnotised by the next-gen computer as the two hackers were.

“You staying here?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’ll catch you up.”

She moved to the chairs and leaned on the backrests, rapt on the creations taking place. I signalled to the others we should go and left her in the hands of the two brilliant prodigies.