Giant Killer. John McNally

      Carla screamed. The huge female swung round to check its pile of young, then swung back.

      Finn, from the flying curl, saw Baptiste rising up the slope with the knife.

      “KICK THE BEAR!”

      “What?!” said Carla.

      “KICK IT AND RUN!” screamed Finn.

      Carla kicked at the dirt and ice before her, sending a spray of filth and grit into the bear’s face, enraging her and flipping her from defence mode into attack.

      “ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!”

      “GO!” screamed Finn.

      As claws and jaws flashed towards Carla, she rose like a rocket and threw herself as far down the slope as she could, straight past the rising Baptiste …

      “ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!” Man met mammal.

      Carla sensed the force of the blow and heard a gasp of air as the claws of the bear ripped Baptiste clean open. She felt hot blood spray against her, felt life end – and thanked God she couldn’t see it – as the bear’s jaws snapped home round Baptiste’s neck, breaking his spine like a dry stick.

      Finn caught a glimpse of it. Saw the crimson arc whiplash across the snow and sky. A final obscenity. But not final for long …

      “ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!”

      “RUN!” This was one mad bear.

      Carla fell and tumbled and ran and staggered down through the forest as the bear pounded after her.

      Carla had seconds.

      Moments.

      She would be obliterated.

      Finn braced himself for the incoming final hit and yelled, uselessly, finally, “NOOOOOOO!”

       YAP!

      Hope.

      Yo-yo galloped through the undergrowth and gave it everything, put every ounce of jelly energy into his spring and sank his teeth into the bear’s hind leg.

       ROOOOOAAAAAARARARARARARR!

      Yo-yo let go and – using the momentum of the bear’s reeling body – flew like a stone from a slingshot down the steep slope.

       ROOOOOAAAAAARARARARARARR!

      The bear roared again as it barrelled after the pelting, yelping mongrel, splintering the forest and exploding the snow.

      “Run …” Finn managed to say through his astonishment.

       TWO

      FEBRUARY 19 16:37 (GMT+1). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea

       Kaparis reviewed the tapes of the Monte Carlo sting.

       He saw Captain Kelly. He saw Delta Salazar. Both were full-sized.

       The last time he’d seen them, they were just 11mm tall.

       He ground this new information round in his massive mind.

       Like Allenby, Kaparis had been able to create a subatomic vortex within which all matter could be reduced, but his was crude, only capable of shrinking machines. Allenby could not only reduce living humans to nano-scale, he had now worked out how to reverse the process and restore them to normal size without killing them … Allenby was not just ahead in the race, he had made a great leap forward. It was like being in an old propeller biplane and watching a jet fighter shoot past.

       Given an infinite amount of time, Kaparis could and would deduce the four elusive fractal equations at the heart of the Boldklub process. But he did not have for ever. Yet.

       Now everything had changed. There was no contest. The game was up.

      FEBRUARY 19 17:48 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border

      As she crested the Kalamatov Ridge, Carla fell to her knees. Just like Baptiste had done, just like many a pilgrim in times past, at first sight of the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.

      Against the brilliant orange of the setting sun, perched on top of a thousand feet of sheer white cliff, was a ruined cluster of ancient buildings, a nest of towers and tiles and a once-golden dome, tipped with the Orthodox cross. It was, in its way, magnificent, a crown of thorns on a snaggletooth of limestone, and only madmen could have built such a place.

      “What is that?” asked Finn from the crow’s nest of Carla’s hair. There was not a whiff of smoke or any other sign of life.

      “A Holiday Inn?” breathed Carla. “I don’t know, but if we want to get through the night alive, we better check in …”

      “You’re not serious! How would you even get up there?” asked Finn.

      “We’ve got to get out of this wind. Baptiste may have been a psychopath, but he was heat, body heat, and when we crawled into a snow hole, that’s what kept us alive.”

       Yap! Yap!

      “What was that?” Finn said, and held his breath to better listen through the wind.

       Yap!

      Carla looked back to the ridge.

      “I knew he’d make it!” said Finn.

      “YO-YO! HERE! HERE, BOY!” cried Carla.

       Yap!

      Over the ridge shot a spray of finest pink-sunset snow, a skittering cloud – and at its centre, an effervescent black scribble: a bounding, dishevelled, filthy, injured, exhausted, idiot of a dog.

      “YO-YO!” cried Carla.

      “YOYOYOYOYO!” yodelled Finn.

      Yo-yo danced and circled, fearful of any trace of Baptiste, but Carla laughed and called his name and finally he came to her, yapping and wagging and loving the Finn-ness of her. Where his master had disappeared to nearly a year before was a mystery beyond Yo-yo’s tiny brain, but not beyond his quite brilliant sense of smell.

      Carla collapsed in the snow and submitted herself to an assault of licks and kisses. “Good dog. Smelly dog.”

      “Warm dog,” Finn said. “You can snuggle up in a snow hole with him. We can make it down the valley in the morning. There must be some kind of settlement serving that place. We’re almost ho—”

      He bit back the word “home”. It was too much. The thought of speaking, actually saying something, to Al and Grandma … There was an emotional avalanche banked tight in his chest and this was no time to let it sweep him away.

      “…Almost there,” was all he could manage.

      But Carla wasn’t listening to Finn. She had noticed something on Yo-yo’s collar.

      “Wait a minute – there’s something here.”

      Yo-yo’s collar was as filthy as the rest of him, but on one side of it was a lump.

      “What is that?” said Finn. He crawled out of the thick of her hair to dangle from the curl at her forehead again as she rubbed away some of the muck. It was some kind of plastic cylinder