Police Plaza was mobbed by enquiring minds, like moths drawn to a light. In this case, one of the only lights in town. Hospitals and emergency vehicles would still have juice but, otherwise, the LEP headquarters was the only government building still functioning.
Holly forced her way through the crowd, into the lobby area. The public service queues ran down the steps and out the door. Today everyone was asking the same question: What’s happened to the power?
The same question was on Holly’s lips as she burst into the Situations booth, but she kept it to herself. The room was already packed with the force’s complement of captains, along with the three regional commanders and all seven Council members.
‘Aaah,’ said Chairman Cahartez. ‘The last captain.’
‘I didn’t get my emergency juice,’ explained Holly. ‘Non-regulation vehicle.’
Cahartez adjusted his official conical hat. ‘No time for excuses, Captain, Mister Foaly has been holding off on his briefing until you got here.’
Holly took her seat at the captain’s table, beside Trouble Kelp.
‘Grub OK?’ he whispered.
‘He got a hangnail.’
Trouble rolled his eyes. ‘No doubt he’ll make a complaint.’
The centaur Foaly trotted through the doors, clutching armfuls of disks. Foaly was the LEP’s technical genius, and his security innovations were the main reason why humans had not yet discovered the subterranean fairy hideaway. Maybe that was about to change.
The centaur expertly loaded the disks on to the operating system, opening several windows on a wall-size plasma screen. Various complicated-looking algorithms and wave patterns appeared on the screen.
He cleared his throat noisily. ‘I advised Chairman Cahartez to initiate lockdown on the basis of these readings.’
Recon’s Commander Root sucked on an unlit fungus cigar. ‘I think I’m speaking for the whole room here, Foaly, when I say that all I see is lines and squiggles. Doubtless it makes sense to a smart pony like yourself, but the rest of us are going to need some plain Gnommish.’
Foaly sighed. ‘Simply put. Really simply. We got pinged. Is that plain enough?’
It was. The room resonated with stunned silence. Pinged was an old naval term from back in the days when sonar was the preferred method of detection. Getting pinged was slang for being detected. Someone knew the fairy folk were down here.
Root was the first to recover his voice. ‘Pinged. Who pinged us?’
Foaly shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It only lasted a few seconds. There was no recognizable signature, and it was untraceable.’
‘What did they get?’
‘Quite a bit. Everything North European. Scopes, Sentinel. All our cam-cams. Downloaded information on every one of them.’
This was catastrophic news. Someone or something knew all about fairy surveillance in Northern Europe, after only a few seconds.
‘Was it human,’ asked Holly, ‘or alien?’
Foaly pointed to a digital representation of the beam. ‘I can’t say for certain. If it is human, it’s something brand new. This came out of nowhere. No one has been developing technology like this as far as I know. Whatever it is, it read us like an open book. My security encryptions folded like they weren’t even there.’
Cahartez took off his official hat, no longer concerned with protocol. ‘What does this mean for the People?’
‘It’s difficult to say. There are best and worst case scenarios. Our mysterious guest could learn all about us whenever he wishes and do with our civilization what he will.’
‘And the best case scenario?’ asked Trouble.
Foaly took a breath. ‘That was the best case scenario.’
Commander Root called Holly into his office. The room stank of cigar smoke in spite of the purifier built into the desk. Foaly was already there, his fingers a blur over the commander’s keyboard.
‘The signal originated in London somewhere,’ said the centaur. ‘We only know that because I happened to be looking at the monitor at the time.’ He leaned back from the keyboard, shaking his head. ‘This is incredible. It’s some kind of hybrid technology. Almost like our ion systems, but not quite – just a hair’s breadth away.’
‘The how is not important now,’ said Root. ‘It’s the who I’m worried about.’
‘What can I do, sir?’ asked Holly.
Root stood and walked to a map of London on the wall plasma screen.
‘I need you to sign out a surveillance pack, go topside and wait. If we get pinged again, I want someone on site, ready to go. We can’t record this thing, but we can certainly get a visual on the signal. As soon as it shows up on the screen we’ll feed you the coordinates and you can investigate.’
Holly nodded. ‘When is the next hotshot?’
Hotshot was LEP-speak for the magma flares that Recon officers ride to the surface in titanium eggs. Pod pilots referred to this seat-of-the-pants procedure as ‘Riding the Hotshots’.
‘No such luck,’ replied Foaly. ‘Nothing in the pipes for the next two days. You’ll have to take a shuttle.’