p.m.
The immense stone structure of the MI6 building loomed up above the banks of the Thames. Traffic and pedestrians hurried along at ground level and nobody took any notice of a youngwoman, wearing glasses and a pink coat, who was heading south across Vauxhall Bridge. She was simply part of the crowd.
She walked quickly and steadily, but her eyes were glazed and unfocused.
Suddenly, a tiny light blinked on the arm of her glasses. The lenses darkened and began to scroll information. One switched to heat-sensitive vision, the other to infra-red.
The young woman reached into the pocket of her coat and pressed a switch. With a low hiss, jets built into the hem of the coat fired up. A second later, the jets roared to full power. The woman flew vertically into the air. Several people near her shrieked in fright.
A circular control pad lit up at the front of her coat. Using one hand, she guided her flight, aiming directly at the MI6 building. Behind her, cries of astonishment drifted up from the pavements.
Her speed through the air suddenly increased. She shot forward, her flight path taking her towards a large window on the building’s ninth floor.
She reached out with her free hand. A largenozzle whirred from her sleeve and in a burst of smoke, it fired a series of rockets. Her arm moved in a circular motion, guiding the rockets into a perfect ring.
They hit the building. A deafening explosion sent glass and stone bursting out across the Thames. The debris cascaded down the front of the building. Alarms and sirens sounded.
The woman shot towards the enormous gap that had been made in the ninth floor. She flew inside, the lenses of her glasses adjusting to allow her to see amidst the dust and smoke.
As the jets in her coat powered down with a whine, she raised her arm again and an ultrasonic pulse fired from a disc in the palm of her hand. The interior wall ahead of her shattered. Shouts and screams could be heard coming from nearby.
She stepped across the mounds of broken rubble, which now littered the floor. On the other side of the broken wall was a room packed with touchscreen PCs and wardrobe-sized computer servers.
An MI6 agent, coughing and covered in dust, managed to stagger into her line of sight. Hepulled a revolver from the holster inside his jacket and aimed it at her. “Halt! Drop your weapons!”
A crackling blue arc of electricity flashed from the woman’s palm. The MI6 agent was blown backwards from the force of it. He fell, knocked unconscious, his gun clattering and spinning across the floor.
The woman took a small cube, about the size of her palm, out of her coat pocket. She placed it beside one of the computer servers.
A thin metal probe snaked out of the cube and burrowed into the server, its end rotating like a drill bit. A second later, lights began to glow on the side of the cube, turning from red to orange to green, moving further up the cube as it sucked in data from the computer, filling itself with information.
After a few moments it bleeped and the woman returned the cube to her pocket. Taking out a marker pen, she wrote in large, neat letters across the screen of the nearest PC:
She turned to leave. Behind her, urgent voices could be heard coming from an adjoining room.
Without so much as a backwards glance, she powered up the jets inside her coat. They quickly hissed into life, their droning sound rapidly getting louder and more high-pitched.
Half a dozen agents burst into the server room. The woman shot away through the gap she’d blown in the side of the building. The agents fired at her, again and again, but already she was gone. She flew north at high speed, across the river and away.
“We’re tracking,” said Simon Turing.
“Has anyone else got her? Police? MI5?” said Queen Bee.
“No, we’re using the GPS systems Alfred reprogrammed himself. We’re the only ones who can follow such a small target at low altitude.”
In the SWARM laboratory, Simon was staring