Hunt and Power. Stephen Hayes
furious about making the first pact, but they did it anyway, so she knows they’ll meet her demands if they want it enough. I reckon between me, her and Amelia, we can cover all the ways the Hammersons might try to get at us, and make sure they don’t.”
“I’ll reserve judgement until I know for sure that we’ll be safe,” said Harry smartly.
Most people seemed to agree with that, including me, but my mind was elsewhere. At around midnight that very morning, I had awoken from a terrible dream of the Hammersons; not Stella but the other two, and there had been something about a pact in it. I was sure of it, though I’d only just remembered the dream. It was just too much of a coincidence to think that I’d been dreaming of things that were happening, possibly at that very moment. I’d had dreams about being in the company of Tankom and Hammerson in the past, but had never had an outlet to talk about them. Now, however, things were falling into place and almost making sense. Just one question remained unanswered: How?
It was almost bell time so we all got up and headed back to the locker bay. I wasn’t listening to the others’ conversation as we walked, and almost walked into several people on the way because my mind was on the dream. I’d gone to sleep the previous night thinking about the time when we had entered the Hammerson headquarters, and my thoughts had somehow slipped into actual dreams.
The headquarters itself had been quite a remarkable place. Stripped of privacy, each house of the Hammersons’ supporters was connected to the Hammerheart Highway. It meant that it was easy for Lucien to get in there, but quite as easy for any of the Hammersons to get into his and Marc’s house. That in itself was a problem if they wanted to attack him. The Hammerheart Highway was an underground tunnel that was traversed by small two-man cars that shot from one location on Earth to another at what I suspected might have been the speed of light, connecting the homes of their supporters to their various bases. At the Chopville Base, there had been sixty or seventy platforms for cars to pull up, and they could even jump over each other to get into the tunnels—something that must have been magical, considering they ran on cables.
But the magic didn’t stop there. Not that I saw a lot of the base, as the six of us had been hidden inside an enchanted backpack at the time, but we had seen the Worship Hall—the place where the Hammersons held their meetings. Lucien had said that they had one in every base in the world, and they could all link magically to the one where the Hammersons lived, which was the one we’d been inside. It was a huge place, with such security that its insides had been heated to over a million degrees centigrade. Each of us had been required to wear a Hammerheart uniform (Marc had used magic to duplicate Lucien’s), because the uniforms were enchanted to counter the heat, so that we felt quite normal when wearing them.
Though it was extremely dangerous to do what we’d done, I wouldn’t have minded doing it again, for although most of what we had learnt had been completely useless information, the trip itself had been very useful. I remembered it clearly, being in that bag with the boys; travelling through the fire place in Marc’s living room and along the tunnel; emerging into the star point in the tunnel system (Marc and Lucien’s house also had a network of tunnels under it). One of those tunnels went down into the Hammerheart Highway; Lucien had slid down it to push a button at the bottom of the slope. The car had pulled up and we’d got in, pushed some buttons, and shot off, pulling up a split second later at the Chopville Base.
Out of the car and for the stairs at the end of the platform, and we’d gone up those and along to the elevators at the end. They went from levels one to eight, and that was the point at which my pondering had slipped into one very strange and detailed dream. In the dream, I’d taken one of the elevators up to level one. I had walked along a dark, silent, doorless corridor. There had been a dead-end at the end of the corridor, but I had walked through the wall as though it wasn’t there, and found myself in a new room. There had been two doors in there, and I had gone through the one on the left and up another flight of steps before stopping in front of another door, hesitating. This was dangerous territory, I’d known. I had opened the door as quietly as I could, slipped inside, and been about to turn right, where I knew I would be a little safer, when I was distracted by the sound of voices somewhere to my left. I had crept towards them; it sounded like they were in the den, for I knew, without knowing how I knew, what that room was; not to mention who those people likely were.
I had stopped around the corner and, using the reflection in the mirror against the opposite wall, managed to get a glimpse of the people in the room. Three people had been sitting around a small table, all three of them I had recognised: Hammerson, Tankom and a man wearing a uniform with the code 2C7, whose name (I somehow knew) was Hank Cornish. Stepping back so that they wouldn’t see me in the mirror, I had listened to the conversation within the room.
“Yes, H2’s fine now,” Cornish had said. “Yes. What about 4Y18, then?”
“Give her another round of P3,” Hammerson had said dismissively. “That should be enough—”
“I don’t think so,” Tankom had disagreed. “No, P2; she must be aware.”
“It didn’t make a difference,” Hammerson had said impatiently.
“It could have,” Tankom had said stubbornly. “I think P2, and that’s merciful considering what could have happened.”
“Would you like to tell us, then?” Hammerson had asked.
“When I finish it off,” she had said, “but not yet.”
“Personally,” Cornish had said quietly, “though I know nothing about it, I would think H2 is really by-the-by compared to H3 and H4.”
“You know about H3?” Tankom had said, sounding furious.
“Not exactly,” he had said calmly. “No more than you do. I’m just saying—”
“H3 is my business,” Hammerson had cut across them both. “That is mine to sort out.”
“So then,” Cornish had said, and I had heard someone rustling papers within the room. “About H4 then, how do we—”
“That,” Tankom had said, “is outlined in S4D. If you just read the memo—”
“Yes, about 3M78, you mean? Yes, that’s clear, but the rest of it—”
“H4 will be unprotected,” Hammerson had said. “No, I’m not worried about that either. I’m more concerned with his power. His position—”
“Do you think S4E is worth considering?” Cornish had suggested.
“Can’t now,” Tankom had said. “Dispose of 4SE; 3M27 is too remote.”
There was another silence, then Cornish had said, “So, S4D; there’s still the matter of 1H4—”
“I’d thought of that,” Hammerson had said, sounding annoyed, and my stomach contracted. I had known I needed to move, now, before I was seen. If they found me now, I would be in more trouble than I could imagine, and yet a combination of fear, curiosity and (I supposed) that feeling you have in dreams where you can’t move when you most want to, held me in place.
“Yes,” Hammerson had gone on, “it does provide a problem. Of course, there’s always the influential charm, or the domination charm—”
“The influential charm, if all else fails,” Tankom had said. “But if that doesn’t work, we’re one less weapon … S4D would have to be scrapped too; 1H4 would be useless, and the Woodwards would be on us again.”
“That’s what I thought about the domination charm in particular,” Cornish had said. “So, S4D is pretty much our last—”
“There are branches of actions depending on the result,” Hammerson had said. “But they’re quite vague and we should really worry about S4D just now.”
“H4 is a problem still,” Tankom had pressed, “because—”
“That’s an ongoing plot,” Hammerson