Alex Scarrow - Day of the Predator

Jasmine looked across at the palisade, twenty yards away beyond the flickering pool of light from the fire. ‘They’ll find a way in anyway.’

Liam looked at the creatures, now almost entirely encircling them, maintaining their cautious distance. ‘All right. Perhaps you’re right,’ he uttered. ‘Becks, how’re we gonna do this?’

‘Recommendation: I need to be in the vicinity of the interference device in order to detect any precursor particles arriving.’

Liam nodded. ‘Yes… yes. R-right. We should hold the ground over there.’ He reached down towards the fire and pulled out a branch. The end of it flickered with flames. ‘Everyone grab a torch. They don’t like fire!’

The others followed suit. Then moved together in a tight huddle, away from the reassuring glow of the campfire towards their contraption, a dozen yards beyond the growing pall of amber firelight.

The creatures followed them, silently padding across the soft ground, watching them, and ever so subtly closing the distance around them.

‘YOU BACK OFF!’ screamed Laura at them, waving her flaming stick.

The creatures hissed, warbled and mewed at that, one of the smaller ones attempting a copy of her shaking voice.

‘… Yoo… bak… offfff…’

Becks turned to Liam. ‘This location has just been scanned again. There are several hundred new particles.’

Liam felt a surge of hope. ‘Oh, c’mon! Why don’t they just get on with it and open a bleedin’ window?’

Becks cocked her head. She had no answer.

All of a sudden, the creature holding the spear barked in a croaky voice and, as one, the creatures surged forward towards them.

‘Oh my God! Oh my God! screamed Laura.

‘Recommendation: use your spears to — ’

2001, New York

The best part of an hour passed in silence with Maddy, Sal and Cartwright gathered around the monitors watching a progress bar slowly inch across one of the screens, and an empty directory slowly fill with low-resolution JPG files.

Forby meanwhile stood beside the doorway, cranked up a couple of feet, gazing at the jungle world outside. ‘They’re still hunting those beach pigs or whatever those things are,’ he called out softly.

‘Good,’ replied Cartwright absently. ‘How much longer?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘You can see the progress bar yourself, can’t you? It’s nearly there.’

The old man made a face. ‘If it’s anything like the Windows I got at home, nearly there can mean another five minutes or another five hours.’

‘This is an operating system from sometime in the 2050s,’ said Maddy. ‘It sure ain’t gonna be Windows.’

The progress bar suddenly lurched forward to a hundred per cent and Bob’s dialogue box appeared.

› Process complete.

‘Bob, can you do some sort of slideshow?’

› Affirmative. Images are taken one every five minutes.

A monitor to the left of them flickered to life, revealing a small pixelated image of green and blue.

Maddy squinted at the image. ‘What is that?’

‘Jungle,’ said Sal. ‘That’s what it is. Jungle and some sky.’

Forby joined them around the desk. ‘Yeah… that’s a jungle, I think.’

A second image appeared, almost identical to the first, a couple of pixel blocks had changed tone slightly. ‘Is this as clear as the images get?’ asked Cartwright.

› Affirmative. The pinhole and image data size has been kept to a minimum to conserve on energy consumption.

‘All we need is to see enough pixels change to indicate something moving around the area, right?’ said Sal.

› Correct, Sal.

‘Can you play through these slides a little faster, please, Bob?’

› Affirmative, Maddy. Increasing display rate times ten.

The next slide came up, just the same as the last, and another, an undecipherable flicker show of green and blue pixels. They watched in silence until approximately midway through the complexion of the image suddenly changed with a mass of dark pixels.

‘Whoa! Stop!’ said Maddy. She studied the shape on-screen. ‘What’s that?’

‘That looks like a person,’ said Forby. ‘See? That’s a shoulder and an arm.’

Sal cocked her head and frowned. ‘It doesn’t look right.’

‘What time in their day is this image, Bob?’

› 14:35.

‘Half past two in the afternoon,’ said Sal.

‘Give us the next image, Bob.’

Another dark image appeared on-screen, the blue pixels of sky and green of jungle almost entirely gone.

‘Somebody standing right in the middle of the portal location… for about five minutes,’ mumbled Maddy to herself. She looked at Sal. ‘That’s got to be the support unit? She’s sensed a tachyon particle and she’s hanging around for another?’

Sal shook her head. ‘Maybe… but the shape of the body looks all kind of funny to me.’

‘Oh, come on, it’s a one hundred by one hundred pixel image — everything’s going to look all funny.’

She shook her head again. ‘I’m not sure. It could be anything… it could be some animal.’

‘Bob, next image.’

Another image flickered up and this time the dark mass of pixels was gone, leaving the image the same even mix of blue and green squares.

Maddy grabbed a pen from the desk and scribbled the time of 14:35 on a scrap of paper. ‘Well, OK, we know someone was hanging around then. We’ve got one possible window. Let’s get on with the slideshow and see what else we get.’

Once more the images began to flicker on-screen one after another, a second apart, the blue pixels of the sky slowly changing hue from bright blue to a rose colour.

‘It’s evening,’ said Cartwright helpfully.

The sequence continued, with the sky pixels slowly reddening in colour, and the jungle’s light green becoming a deeper darker green, until all of a sudden, in the middle of the image, they saw a single dot of bright orange.

‘Stop!’

All four of them craned forward to get a better look.

‘That’s fire, isn’t it?’ said Forby. ‘A flame?’

Sal nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘Someone starting a campfire maybe?’

‘Fire… right,’ uttered Cartwright, ‘and the only thing that can make a fire back then is going to be human.’

Maddy tapped her chin thoughtfully. ‘Yup… so maybe this is a more reliable candidate than the other. What time is this image, Bob?’

› 18:15.

‘Give me the next image.’

The orange pixel became a dozen pixels, and half the screen was filled by a vertical block of black pixels. In the top left corner, they could just make out the sky, the pink evening becoming a deep purple with the onset of dusk.

‘Someone’s standing right there again!’

‘And that thing doesn’t look as weird as the earlier one,’ said Sal.

Maddy looked at her. ‘How can you tell?’

‘Screw up your eyes a bit, Maddy… it sort of blurs the pixels slightly. You can make out shapes more easily.’

‘A campfire and someone standing right there,’ said Cartwright. ‘Looks like the best time so far.’

‘Yes,’ she replied absently. ‘What do you think, Bob?’

› This image looks most probable.

‘Quickly run through the rest.’

The slideshow flickered through the last sixty-eight images, one image per second. A juddering animation of time… the fire slowly dwindling, dying and vanishing, the sky darkening until the final few dozen images were simply a sequence of black pixels.

› Sequence complete.

‘Looks like we have a winner,’ said Cartwright. ‘Can we now proceed?’ He looked up at Forby. ‘You know? Before those hunters come knocking on our door?’

‘OK… let’s begin powering up, Bob.’