The Omega Solution

by Peter J Evans

  "Ah, your famous obsession with the Scarlet Saint. I'd heard so much about that."

  "From Antonia?"

  The name rang cold and dark behind Ketta's ribs. "Among others."

  Saulus shrugged. "Well, major, here's one truth you'll learn tonight. The Blasphemy is nothing to me, except a useful tool."

  "Most people are tools to you, Saulus. But her too? You surprise me."

  "It's not about the Blasphemy, agent! It was never about her. It's about terror."

  "Whose?"

  "Everyone's, fool. High Command, the Patriarch, the Grand Cabinet - they're all so in terror of that one mutant that the very mention of her name will drive them to anything! All I had to do was show a few pretty pictures of her to our Holy Father, and he agreed my plans in a moment. A moment."

  "From what I hear, your plans were already in motion long before your presentation to the Patriarch." She leaned closer, twisting the knife slightly, so that the point of it caught the skin of his neck and turned it, a tiny spiral on the tip of the blade. "You and your deep-cover crone had been grooming the Umbrae Nova to eliminate the Grand Cabinet for you for six years. Correct?"

  "Close enough."

  "And with the Cabinet gone, what then?"

  He chuckled. "Still don't see the picture, Ketta? You realise there's a damping field around this room? That any recording devices you have implanted won't pick up a word?"

  She turned her head slightly. "Saulus, Huldah Antonia was a valued colleague of mine, a fine officer and a friend. Thanks to your machinations she is dead, vaporised along with her flagship. In addition to that, I have endured six months in the chapels of purification, undergoing retraining that is little short of outright torture. You might gather, therefore, that I am not in the best of moods." She pressed the knife upwards, so that he had to clamber up the bed to escape it. "So I ask you one time: what picture?"

  "The Omega Solution, of course." His good humour was gone now. Perhaps he finally realised how much trouble he was in. "Creating the Omega-class troopers is just the first step. Once the Umbrae Nova had destroyed the Grand Cabinet I would have been given free rein to complete the Solution."

  Ketta nodded. "Now I see. Genocide."

  "You don't see! You people never see! You think you can hold off the mutant threat indefinitely?"

  "So your Omega Solution is, quite simply, to wipe out every mutant in the Accord."

  "And beyond. And don't think this has finished me, Ketta. I have agents other than Enostine, other tools in my armoury than the Blasphemy and the Umbrae Nova. If the human race is to survive, I have to see this through!"

  "At all costs?" she hissed.

  "What use is the Grand Cabinet to me? Their deaths would have galvanised the Accord into accepting the Solution as the necessity it is. Now I have to find a different tack, that's all."

  "You're very sure of yourself."

  He smiled. "I can afford to be."

  He was looking past her.

  Ketta felt movement, a shiver in the air. She dodged smoothly sideways and whipped the blade across the throat of the man standing behind her.

  The Omega warrior snapped out a hand and grabbed the blade.

  Ketta cursed and leaped away. The poison on that blade would have killed a normal man before his body hit the floor.

  The Omega, she could see, was no normal man.

  Even before the process, he had been an exceptional specimen - he must have been something special to survive both the selection process and the ordeal of conversion. Now his corpse-white skin gleamed like metal, rippled with the artificial muscles and armour plates implanted beneath it. His face, around the prostheses that replaced his eyes, was a network of scars from where the new nerves had gone in.

  He smiled. His teeth were bright steel, and scalpel sharp.

  "Come to Daddy," he breathed.

  He darted forwards. He was quick, horribly so. Ketta just managed to get out of the way in time, before the Omega's swipe carved her open. Blades had emerged from beneath his fingernails.

  She whirled, kicked hard at the side of his head. He dodged the first kick but she took him on the second. The first had been a feint, a lure. He was strong, fast, and deadly, she saw, but he lacked skill.

  Training. That, if anything, was what would save her.

  The Omega shook his head, as if to clear it, and powered forwards again. Ketta jumped over his head, kicked at his back, landed in a fighting crouch and slammed her foot into the back of his knee. The Omega stumbled, long enough for her to whip out another blade and punch it through his spine, just above the waist.

  The Omega roared in pain, and staggered. He twisted and knocked Ketta across the room.

  She rolled hard into the wall, and jumped up again. The Omega either had a secondary spinal cord, or his regular nervous system was so well armoured her blade had turned inside him.

  "What do you think?" Saulus was in the corner, watching the fight. "There are a hundred like him in the first batch. Others undergoing conversion even now."

  "Impressive." Ketta ducked another blow. "For an amateur. Maybe I should buy a few for sparring partners."

  "You'd like a few?" Saulus laughed. "It's your lucky night."

  Three more Omegas were barrelling through the doorway.

  "Oh shit," Ketta breathed. For all her bravado, the Omega was proving a tough fight. She could beat him, she knew: his lack of experience, his reversion to shocktrooper tactics of brute strength and brawling went against him. But as for four...

  It was time to go. She leaped away, over the head of the nearest Omega, kicked the knees out from under a second, and bolted away.

  She heard his voice echoing after her. "They'll find you, Ketta. A hundred warriors, after the Blasphemy and after you. They'll find you."

  They probably would, at that. This night hadn't gone entirely according to plan.

  Ketta had a personal daggership. The Omegas chased her as far as the landing bay, but once she was on it they backed off. She tried to cook them with the drive flame, but they were too fast for that.

  She settled back into its control throne as the vessel sped away from the Custodian. The side of her face hurt quite a lot where the Omega had hit her. She had to hand it to Saulus, or at least the technicians he had at his disposal. The Omega-class warrior was a force to be reckoned with.

  If thousands of them were made, and sent out into the Accord to hunt down the Blasphemy, Ketta didn't think even Saint Scarlet would last for long. Luckily, the first hundred would be the last.

  Lord Tactician Saulus was dead. Not that he knew it yet, of course. He thought that the poisoned blade Ketta had to his throat was her weapon, and by avoiding that had saved himself.

  This time, Ketta's weapon was simply the truth.

  The tactician had put a brave face on things this night, but he was already finding himself a lonely man. His colleagues had begun to desert him, subordinates found themselves posted away from his control. He was being isolated, swiftly and ruthlessly, the way a pack of wolves separates a prey animal from the herd, nipping at its heels until it collapses.

  Evidence of the tactician's manipulations had, mysteriously, been turning up in the personal mail of all kinds of people. Generals, admirals, the Patriarch himself... Quite a lot of people who had been on Irutrea when Saulus's pet madman had come so close to irradiating it.

  It was the Patriarch himself who had given Ketta the codes to shut down the damping field.

  Once his words were broadcast, his fate would be sealed. Arrest would be quick, investigation slow. He might last a year, but Ketta doubted it.

  There would be no Omega Solution, no wholesale slaughter of mutantkind. Not yet, anyway, and not under these circumstances. If it did happen, it would happen in a way that was quiet, and quick, and certain.

  The temple-station Noamon loomed ahead of her, its docking ports gaping to welcome her back aboard. Ketta slowed the ship, pondering.

  No, this was no time for
hesitation. The decision had been made a long time ago. This was the last mission she would undertake as an Iconoclast.

  The interrogation had been too much. Ketta had almost died under their ministrations, suffered torments unimaginable to anyone but the hopelessly insane. Besides, she had seen too much corruption in the Iconoclast forces to have much faith in them any longer. Saulus was not the only spider in that web.

  Was he right? she wondered. Had the Blasphemy infected her in some way?

  She hoped, with a hundred Omega warriors after her blood, that she'd live long enough to find out.

  Ketta swung the daggership about and ignited the light-drive. She had a long journey ahead of her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter J Evans has over four hundred pieces of published work to his name, ranging from the back covers of videos to big articles about Serious Stuff. He has produced regular columns for gaming magazines, short fiction, long fiction, reviews, interviews and a sticker book. His first novel, Mnemosyne's Kiss, was published in 1999 by Virgin Publishing, under their worryingly short-lived Virgin Worlds imprint. Evans previously contributed towards Black Flame with Judge Dredd: Black Atlantic (co-written with Simon Jowett) and Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave.