Warhead

by Andy Remic

  ‘What does it take to kill you, motherfucker?’

  ‘I do not die easily.’ Durell smiled from within the shadowing folds of his hood. His blackened clawed hands pushed back the hood and he moved across the carpet—past the lithe form of Alexis—to stand in front of Carter in all his deformity.

  ‘You call that evolution?’ snarled Carter.

  ‘I am the core, and this is the price I pay,’ said Durell. ‘Just like a queen bee abandons her ability to fly in order to rule—the greatest of sacrifices—so I must bear the burden of enormous power. However, this talk is needless. You work for me now, Carter. You have joined the ranks of the most powerful army this world has ever seen! You have killed for us—you assassinated Jahlsen, murdered one of your own Spiral men.’

  ‘You used me. Used ... Nicky.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’ Durell smiled again, his eyes glittering. ‘She was a clone, yes, one of our superb experiments closely linked to Nex work. When you create a Nex, sometimes—depending on the pattern—you can clone a subject. It doesn’t always work—some of our first trials were messy, although the original clone of Gol was a good one. Until you blew him up.’

  ‘Hey.’ Carter grinned through bloodied teeth. ‘Sometimes shit happens. But what about the real Gol—the one who betrayed you in Egypt? Durell, your Nex are far from perfect... I’ve read the recent Spiral memos, the ECube blips. They’re starting to turn, aren’t they? You’re losing thousands in unexplained incidents as they melt on the streets. And as for the rest—can you trust them, Durell? Can you really trust them?’

  ‘Enough. We have your boy, Carter. You will do what we require.’

  ‘Show him to me.’

  ‘In a little while—when I have explained our position.’

  ‘No, fuck you, show him to me or I swear to God ...’

  ‘God abandoned you a long time ago, Mr Carter. However…’ Durell nodded to Alexis, whose lithe figure slipped from the room. ‘I will allow you to see him. For a few short minutes.’

  Carter waited. Minutes stretched into pain-filled hours. Carter’s body screamed at him. Durell moved to the window, staring down over New York City—his world, his dominion.

  ‘Daddy!’

  ‘Joe!’

  Joseph sprinted across the carpet and fell into Carter’s arms. Carter held his son tightly, inhaling the boy’s scent. As Joseph pulled away there were tears on the little boy’s cheeks.

  ‘Are they being good to you?’ asked Carter softly.

  Joe nodded. ‘Why are you bleeding, daddy?’

  ‘I had an accident, but I’m fine, son. I’m absolutely brilliant.’ He ruffled the boy’s short blond hair. ‘They feeding you?’

  ‘Yes. And the nice lady, her—’ he pointed to Alexis — has been playing games with me.’ Carter glanced over at the Nex, frowning, but Alexis was looking away—at Durell. Something unspoken was passing between the two and Carter returned his attention to his son.

  ‘I’m sorry, Joe, but I’ve got to go away. I have something to do—an important job. But then I’ll be back and we’ll be together—for ever. I’ll never leave you again ... I promise.’

  ‘You will come back, won’t you, daddy?’

  ‘I’ll come back soon,’ said Carter softly, releasing the boy.

  Alexis took Joe by the hand and led him from the low, long-ceilinged room. As the door closed Carter stretched, testing his body. Pain flared in a hundred places but he pushed it aside and concentrated his attention on Durell. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You will bring down Spiral.’

  Carter paused for a long moment. ‘I would rather die,’ he said eventually, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  ‘And you would condemn your son?’ Durell moved across the carpet to stand close to Carter, whose nostrils wrinkled at the Nex insect stink. Durell’s armoured spine crackled softly as he moved and Carter realised that he had never been this close to Durell before without trying to kill him. It felt very strange.

  ‘One day, I will gut you like a pig,’ said Carter.

  ‘We shall see. However, for now you must come with me; we need to prepare you for your mission.’

  ‘And how do you suggest I bring down Spiral?’

  ‘In an ironic twist of fate,’ said Durell, ‘I find myself in possession of a MicroNuke, a fully functioning SpiralGRID map and the perfect location in which to concentrate the core of Spiral personnel. The rest just takes a little imagination. As you will witness. Indeed, as you will instigate.’

  The Grey Church was filled with streamers of sunlight. As the SpiralGRID fizzled and crackled, and the five Sleeper Nex composed themselves, shaking their huge triangular heads, after the nausea of their sudden sideways-shift journey, The Priest leapt towards them with his Glock bucking in his fist—

  Mongrel and Simmo leapt to the left and right of The Priest as their own guns came up. The Sleeper Nex jumped apart in a blur of movement, huge bodies crashing through old wood pews as The Priest met the first creature head on. Its claws lashed out, whirling past The Priest’s face with only a single millimetre to spare. He caught himself, swayed to one side, whirled low and slammed the heavy blade of his black knife into the Sleeper Nex’s armoured side. The blade slid smoothly between plates of armour and a spraying jet of blood pulsed out. The Sleeper reared up, a high-pitched chittering sound coming from its gaping jaws. Its belly was exposed now and The Priest unloaded the rest of the Glock’s magazine into its unprotected abdomen and watched black scales peel back under the multiple impacts of the bullets. Entrails spilled out like a tangle of squirming eels.

  Simmo, backed up by Rogowski and Mo, hammered bursts of bullets into the two Sleeper Nex to The Priest’s left. A hail of flying metal cut one apart, punching it backwards, sending it slamming against the ancient stone of the church wall. The second Sleeper leapt towards its twitching comrade and slammed into Simmo whose gun fired an unaimed spray of bullets, making Mo and Rogowski dive to the floor in panic.

  Simmo’s huge hand grabbed the Sleeper’s throat as he was pounded into the ground. A claw slashed down, raking the wooden slabs of the floor where his head had been. Simmo’s huge fist cannoned into the Sleeper’s triangular head again and again. Mo leapt onto its back, slipping a little on greased chitin and lifting his gun to the back of the creature’s armoured head.

  Suddenly, the Sleeper Nex’s head spun around. It snapped at Mo with long fangs as he screamed and recoiled, his gun blasting a hail of bullets into its open maw. Its jaws jerked forward and bit through his wrist, slicing flesh and bone as easily as a razor cutting through jelly. Dark crimson gushes pumped from the stump to the rhythm of Mo’s beating heart as he shrieked like a girl, severed tendon ends flapping against his arm. Simmo, still punching, caught a brutal blow to the head from a savage backswing of the Sleeper’s clawed limb. He lay for a moment, stunned, cigar resting against his broken cheek.

  The Sleeper reared, whirling as Mo was flung free. Rogowski charged, his gun yammering hot fire. The Sleeper, snarling, strings of blood and saliva pooling from its maw as it chittered, lurched towards Mo. Even as it thrashed in its death throes, its claws came up to zip through his throat and windpipe, tearing off his head and sending it rolling and bouncing across The Grey Church’s rubble-strewn floor.

  Rogowski, stunned by the sudden death of his friend, blinked and then continued to fire at the already dying Sleeper. With a great deflating sigh, the Sleeper Nex sank down over Mo’s headless twitching corpse.

  Mongrel and Roxi took on the other two massive beasts, charging together at them, firing as they ran. They rolled apart at the last moment and the Sleepers spun in a tight circle, bullets whining as they ricocheted from the armoured hides. Roxi, with incredible athleticism, leapt towards the wall and kicked off from the stone, somersaulting onto the rim of the circular pulpit on its small dais. As the Sleepers rounded on Mongrel, Roxi started to fire down from her elevated position at the creatures.

  ‘Son of a buggerin
g bugger!’ muttered Mongrel as his gun suddenly jammed. He shook the weapon uselessly and went white as the Sleepers growled menacingly and crept towards him.

  And then The Priest was there. The two Sleepers were caught in a sustained, coolly aimed crossfire as The Priest and Roxi pumped round after round into their writhing bodies.

  Then everything went quiet. The reek of cordite filled the church. Rekalavich slumped to the ground, uttering a foul Russian curse, both hands clamped over the deep wound in his stomach. It wasn’t enough to stop a crimson puddle forming slowly in his lap.

  ‘Why it always my bloody gun that jam?’ moaned Mongrel, kicking one of the Sleeper Nex corpses. ‘Mongrel cursed with dodgy weaponry! Bad God want him dead!’

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ snapped The Priest. His face and beard were speckled with blood. He had sheathed his blood-slick knife. In one hand he held his Bible, and with the other hand he was nudging at his rosary beads with the barrel of his Glock. ‘I assume by the arrival of these—’ he spat on the ground—‘these unholy vermin that the GRID is terminally compromised?’

  Roxi had placed a thick pad of cotton against Rekalavich’s stomach and had helped the Russian to his feet. He was pale from blood loss, and leant heavily on the slim woman for support. She grunted tinder his weight.

  ‘No,’ he managed to mutter, rubbing at his face and leaving smears of blood against his stubbled skin. ‘They have cracked the codes; they can use it, they can decode it—but so can we. They haven’t cut off our escape route just yet.’

  ‘Let’s get moving,’ growled Simmo. Despite the fight and the broken cheekbone, he had still found time to relight his cigar, which was all squashed and deformed like a length of twisted tree root. He rubbed tenderly at his forehead where a huge bruise had blossomed. ‘The Nex are at the front door—and they’re planting a bomb.’

  ‘You sure?’ asked Mongrel.

  ‘I can smell the HighJ.’

  The battered group moved to the SpiralGRID’s portal which crackled into existence, a SpiderCAR formation becoming visible at the call from The Priest’s ECube.

  The Spiral team had watched this portal spit forth the enemy and disgorge the Sleeper Nex. Now the whine of injectors filled the air as the GRID charged itself for another sideways shift. Then there came a soft click of detonation—and the group watched in sudden wide-eyed horror as the church door became a rapid raging inferno, a terrifying expanding ball of gas and fire and shrapnel rushing towards them. But then they were gone. Swallowed ... into the GRID.

  The Sikorsky Comanche RAH-NV was an old Spiral model, taken over by Durell after the great global collapse. Powered by a twin-turboshaft T800 LHT-950 plant, it carried twin stowable three-barrelled 20mm turreted Gatling nose guns, capable of firing 2,000 rounds a minute. It had a fully retractable missile armament I-RAMS system and the ability to carry a full payload of fifty-two standard 78mm rockets, twenty-two Stinger air-to-air missiles and eighteen Hellfire anti-tank missiles.

  As they landed on the roof of the WarFactory and Carter climbed down from the small black Nex helicopter, he eyed the Comanche with a mixture of careful consideration, awe and respect.

  ‘One of yours,’ said Durell, standing next to him on the concrete roof. They were surrounded by armed Nex, and Carter could still taste blood and the sour, bitter tang of his mission.

  They want me to kill Simmo and The Priest, he thought. And Roxi.

  And Mongrel...

  Carter’s vision blurred. He turned away from the Comanche and allowed himself to be guided by the surprisingly gentle hand of Alexis. They moved across the roof, past a hundred more helicopters—many of them new and gleaming black under the dull evening light. They walked down long corridors wide enough to accommodate tanks and aircraft, down more ramps, then up wide steep iron steps, footsteps clanking, until they came to some form of control centre which was a hive of activity. Many Nex sat at glowing work-stations, along with human programmers and military coordinators. A few glanced up briefly as Durell, Alexis, Carter and their contingent of armed Nex entered.

  On a bench to one side sat a silver box, half a metre long, narrow and vented. Carter found his gaze drawn to the MicroNuke as hackles rose on the back of his neck. If the bomb, small though it was, were to explode then it wouldn’t just take out the WarFactory. Half the damn city would be destroyed.

  ‘That it?’

  ‘This is a Grade 3 plutonium device,’ said Alexis, moving to place her hand gently—almost reverently—against the nuclear bomb. The MicroNuke—what Jam had once fondly called Armageddon in a suitcase.

  Jam, thought Carter.

  It had been a long time. Jam, Carter’s oldest friend and one of Spiral’s best operatives during their hectic antiterrorist days, had been captured while on a mission in Slovenia. Beaten and abused, he had undergone a transformation into a new breed of Nex that Durell was developing, a breed named the ScorpNex which involved such complicated genetic modifications that most subjects died before leaving the laboratory slab. With Jam, however, the transformation had been successful—changing the cheerful cockney into a monster, a horrific blend of human and cockroach and scorpion ... Jam had become an awesome warrior, a terrible killer.

  Carter had found himself face to face with his oldest friend—a new creature that could not be beaten—only to find that the power of the genetic Nex-hold had not been strong enough. During an epic struggle Jam had helped Carter and had undone the original betrayal. In doing so he had destroyed Durell’s plans to rule the world through the use of a machine capable of wreaking earthquakes on a global scale ...

  However, Spiral and other agencies had not realised that the quakes had been merely the first step in Durell’s advance. As they beat back the Nex armies, thinking that they were overcoming a terrible enemy, Durell was simply putting the next stages of his plan into operation—striking not just on one front but on three. With the power of the earthquakes weakening global infrastructure, and with the combined power of biological weapons and the awesome might of tactical nuclear strikes at his disposal, Durell had proved himself unstoppable. All these advances had been coordinated by the tactical prowess of the QIV military processor, a sentient machine capable of awesome destruction—a simple and yet infinitely versatile chip willing to play at God. And bring about Armageddon.

  Carter stared at the MicroNuke, his mind swimming.

  ‘You have to do it,’ whispered Kade. ‘You have to kill them ... if you want to live. If you want to save your baby. ‘

  ‘Yeah, like you care.’

  ‘I care, Carter. I care lots. ‘

  Carter focused on Durell, who was handing out some documents. Alexis lowered the MicroNuke carefully into a Gore-Tex pack as Carter reached out for his set.

  ‘Here are your coordinates—you can access the SpiralGRID through this outpost. There will be armed Spiral men there—but hell, you are Carter. They should recognise you. You shouldn’t need our help to get you past the Spiral perimeter guards.’

  ‘And if they don’t recognise me? If they shoot first and ask my corpse questions later?’

  ‘Then it’s game over,’ said Durell. ‘For you and for your boy.’

  ‘So I infiltrate Spiral. Then what?’

  ‘Get the nuke inside, and you will be contacted by somebody already there who will give you details of the next step. An old friend, you might say, who has decided to join us. Decided our way is absolutely the right choice.’

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like one of your fucking TV campaigns.’

  ‘Of course I do. I wrote them. Now, take the MicroNuke—the Comanche outside is fully fuelled with LVA; you’ve enough to reach London in one direct flight.’

  Carter hefted the Gore-Tex pack carefully—it was very heavy. But then, it should have been: it carried a low-yield nuclear bomb. He lifted his head, turning slightly as Alexis tossed him his 9mm Browning HiPower. He cradled the weapon, then glanced sideways at the surrounding Nex ...

  ‘We
could—’ began Kade.

  ‘No, we fucking couldn’t,’ Carter answered silently. ‘I’m weak, battered ... and they outnumber us a thousand to one. How fucking insane are you?’ Kade did not reply.

  Alexis smiled at Carter then, her copper eyes glowing. ‘We have taken the liberty of filling the Comanche with weapons; Armalite XII and Steyr 80 sub-machine guns, HPGs. You’ll even find a small case containing a MercG—a Spiral-issue garrotte containing your very own augmented digital signature.’

  Carter slid the Browning into his pocket, shouldered the pack with a grunt and a wince at some internal pain or other and moved towards the ramp. Durell followed him, armour crackling, and Carter stopped at the metal doorway.

  ‘Who is it that I must meet?’ he asked, his voice barely more than a whisper. ‘Who betrayed Spiral?’

  ‘You will see soon enough,’ said Durell, his tiny dark tongue wetting his hardened silver-veined lips.

  Carter said nothing more. He turned and was gone.

  Alexis glanced at Durell. ‘Do you think he will succeed? In bringing down Spiral?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Durell, nodding and making his twisted spine crackle. ‘Carter is our boy now. He is one of us. We control him, we direct him, we fucking own him. Just like it used to be.’

  The Comanche’s mechanisms hummed around Carter as he skimmed low across the Atlantic Ocean. Night had fallen, and below him the dark waters churned.

  Flying without lights, Carter saw the world below him as a very dark place. His HIDSS pilot’s helmet showed different slices of image, using different forms of night vision—infra-red, Green-eye and Ttii-BlueScale—and flickered with constant data updates from the Comanche’s electronic brain. Carter was kept active during this low-level night flight; there was plenty to see and do, plenty to control and plan ...

  Yet still—

  Turn back. Turn back and kill them and take your boy ...

  You have a Comanche ... fucking use it.