Warhead (55 page)

‘I could go get Constanza,’ said Mongrel.

‘She has her own battle to fight,’ snapped Carter. More Nex rockets flew towards him and sudden realisation dawned: his turret had become jammed. With a yelp, he threw himself backwards as two rockets converged on his gun turret. He was already moving as the missiles struck. But the blast picked him up and sent him flailing across the roof of the base. He hit the ground hard and then lay terribly still.

Stars were flashing in Carter’s head and there was a ringing in his ears. The sky above him was blue, and he breathed deeply and smiled as Mongrel filled his vision, looming over him.

‘You OK?’

‘Get back to the fucking guns!’ screamed Carter.

‘Thank God! You OK.’ Mongrel grinned and disappeared.

Carter groaned, rolling to his knees and pulling the dented helmet from his head.

Cursing, he reached down and pulled a two-inch sliver of shrapnel from his thigh. Pain seared through him, and with snaking fingers he dug out a tiny medical stapler from his combats and fired three thick sterile staples into his flesh, joining the wound.

Carter groaned again. Panting, he staggered to his feet and glanced back to see the twisted wreckage of his gun turret. It was an abomination against the skyline, a twisted, pounded, torn and sculpted monstrosity of sheared metal. But more importantly, the rocket blast had wrenched the rails from their housings, effectively disabling another two guns.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Carter spat. He glanced around. The thundering tanks had nearly encircled the base and Nex were starting to flood from behind the protecting armoured flanks.

‘We are
fucked,’
snarled Carter. Then he yelled ‘Mongrel! Get your fucking arse over here!’

Mongrel sent a stream of rockets plummeting onto the battlefield. Without looking to see if they met their targets, he leapt from the turret and ran over to Carter.

‘We’re compromised. Let’s go to Constanza. She needs to launch the fucking Warhead, right
now,’
said Carter.

But Mongrel wasn’t listening. He was staring at something behind Carter, his mouth open, his eyes bright.

‘What is it?’ Carter asked.

He was nearly deaf from the explosion that had torn him from his gun turret but as he started to turn he felt the down draught of armoured rotors and heard their
whump whump whump.
He swung his sub-machine gun up, finger tightened on the trigger out of reflex. But Mongrel was there, grabbing the stock of the weapon as the Comanche howled overhead.

‘Whoa, Big Man! It Jam—look!’

Carter’s eyes focused as the Comanche banked tightly around and dropped towards the roof. Jam and Sonia leapt free, then Fenny lifted the war machine back into the skies and flew towards the tanks. Hellfire anti-tank missiles detached and slammed down onto their targets.

Carter stared hard at Jam. ‘Man, am I glad to see your ScorpNex arse!’

Jam scowled. ‘What the
fuck
happened to you? You look like ... well, like you’ve been fighting a war!’

‘Long story. You got the EDEN targets?’

Sonia showed him a small silver cube. Carter grinned all over his blackened, bruised face. ‘Fucking
magic.
Let’s get it down to Constanza—we’re sure to be overrun in the next couple of minutes—’

‘Wait.’ Jam pointed.

Carter swung around to see a huge fleet of helicopters swarming down from the sky. There were RAH Comanches, EH101 Merlins, AS668 Tigers, Russian Mil Mi-14s and Mil Mi-28 Havocs; there were SS532 Cougars, Denel Ah-2A Rooivalks, a whole army of AH-64 Apaches with J2 armaments, NH90s, Sikorsky Black Hawks, and about ten Italian Agusta A180 Mangusta war copters thumping through the skies on huge V-twin Ducati turboshaft engines. They roared overhead, nearly two hundred combat aircraft in total, and spread out in vast swarms as their guns rained down death on the Nex army below.

‘How? What? When?’ muttered Mongrel, tufty, smoking hair swaying in the breeze of pounding rotors.

‘May I present to you your back-up, gentlemen,’ said Jam, his voice a low rumble. ‘Now, you wanted to upload this Warhead? Please be so kind as to show me the way.’

The group jogged across the roof of the Spiral base. Below tanks fired shells skywards and heavy machine guns opened up. Choppers were plucked from the air and sent screaming to their deaths, crumpling into the ice with rotors shearing free, and exploding in blasts of fire and smoke. Carter and the others reached the portal, which hissed open.

Mongrel entered first, followed by Sonia and then Jam.

Carter stood for a moment, surveying the insanity of the carnage around him. He licked his scorched lips and ran a hand through his sweat-drenched hair. Then he limped into the Spiral base, trailing droplets of blood and sweat, and dark honey tears, and was swallowed by the perfectly engineered metal portal.

‘You have the data?’

Sonia held out the silver cube and Angel Constanza attached it to a tiny cable. Lights flickered, and data streamed up the screen in a blur of white on black. Constanza’s fingers raced across the keyboard. Her stare was fixed to the screen, moving quickly over text and numbers and her mouth worked silently as her concentration focused totally.

The group stood around her in silence and Sonia glanced over her shoulder at the hovering Warhead. Its surface was a rolling, molten wonder, a golden, swirling display of an infinity of possibilities.

Jam pointed towards the vid screens, which displayed the churning warfare outside; the chaos of battle.

‘It savage,’ observed Mongrel.

‘The world
is
savage,’ said Carter, softly.

‘Despite their firepower, DemolSquads being given damned good fight.’

‘Nobody ever said the Nex were cowards.’

‘Maybe we not win this one. Maybe Spiral and REB boys just buying us time?’

‘At the moment, Mongrel, time is all that we need.’

‘Look,’ said Sonia. She had moved over to the EC Warhead and was peering into its molten surface with her head tilted on one side. ‘It’s doing something.’

The surface swirls had started to accelerate, spinning and gyrating in billions of wild patterns. Then, suddenly, there was a tiny click and the Warhead went black, a deep and endless black; the negation of a colour that lurks in deep eternity.

Sonia took a tentative step back.

Far above them, a tiny portal opened, showing a bright circle of crystal-blue sky.

And, in the blink of an eye, the Warhead was gone.

‘
Fuck
,’ hissed Carter.

‘Fuck
me
,’ echoed Mongrel.

‘Where did it go?’ rumbled Jam.

Constanza swung around on her chair, her face weary, her golden eyes staring sadly at the ground. Then she looked up at the rest of the group, and they could see that horror was etched into her features as if by acid. She spat on the floor, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she smiled, a hollow smile under deep-sunken eyes.

‘It is done,’ she said. ‘The Warhead is launched. God save us all.’

Carter slammed a magazine into his Browning. He took a deep breath, then said, ‘It’s got little to do with God, my friend. Now, let’s get the hell out of here—before the fucking Nex find us. This game is far from over.’

Outside, the battle was still raging.

Fire screamed across the sky.

Destruction raged across the earth.

The Nex reached the entry point and a group of thirty lithe black-clad figures flowed through into the dark interior of the base. They split up into squads of five and sprinted down dimly lit corridors, Steyr TMPs in their gloved hands.

Outside the tanks closed in, forming an armoured ring around the walls. Above them choppers were smashed from the skies by Nex using heavy MGs and Stinger v3.2 MANPADs—man-portable surface-to-air missiles, shoulder-fired and designed to counter high-speed, low-level attack aircraft, including helicopters. The Stinger v3.2 used proportional navigational algorithms to guide the missile to a predicted intercept point. It was proving effective against Spiral’s war machines.

A Nex pulled free a dark ECube which opened in the palm of its hand.

The Nex listened for a moment.

‘Yes, sir. We are inside. Understood, sir. I have seen the data-cube sheets on Carter. We all have; we will recognise him if we see him. And yes, our machines
have
picked up the launch of the Warhead—what they describe as the ECW. It launched just a few minutes ago. It would seem their race to upload targets has been successful. Their mission has been successful. Spiral’s mission is complete.’

Carter, Mongrel, Jam, Sonia and Constanza raced along the corridors leading back up to the roof, where they burst out onto the buckled alloy surface.

Jam got on his ECube, then looked at the others. ‘He’s coming in. Just hold on tight.’

The Comanche howled out of the battle, twin stowable three-barrelled 20mm turreted Gatling nose guns glowing. It banked and touched gently down beside the five operatives. The cockpit canopy folded back as another Comanche appeared and landed beside its twin.

‘OK,’ said Carter, glancing over at Jam. ‘Me, Mongrel and Constanza will head out with—’ he glanced in at the HIDSS-covered head, then gulped—‘um, with Mrs Sheep ...’ He saw Mongrel’s scowl. Mrs Sheep was renowned as one of the most psychotic pilots on the planet. ‘Jam and Sonia, you follow with Fenny.’

‘What’s our destination?’ said Mongrel.

‘Let’s get clear of this insane battle, then check on the Warhead’s progress. We need to get the DemolSquads moving, get them in place as back-up for when the Warhead strikes. After reading the tech sheets on that insane machine, I know that when the fight comes it’s going to come as fast as fuck, and we’ll all need to be in position. Also, Durell is sure to have a hundred back-up plans in place and we need to study his game.’

‘You think he can stop the ECW?’ asked Sonia.

Carter shrugged. ‘All I know is that I want to hit at his heart.’ He turned to Jam. ‘Have we intel on his location?’

‘I will scan the channels when we’re airborne—and I have my own thoughts on that one. Durell is a creature of habit. And to all intents and purposes he is extremely predictable ... There is a part of him flowing in my blood.’

‘So you know how he thinks?’ asked Mongrel.

Jam nodded his armoured head, copper eyes gleaming. ‘I do,’ he hissed.

‘Right. Let’s move out. And Jam?’

‘Carter?’

‘Once again, brother, I owe you my life.’

Jam grinned then, a quite horrible and frightening sight. ‘Let’s find Durell. And let’s show him what us Spiral boys are really made of. Hey, Mongrel?’

Mongrel grinned. ‘Aye, Jam. We teach that bastard a lesson he never, ever forget.’

The two Comanches cruised at maximum speed. Behind them the battle was abandoned as the DemolSquads peeled away from the ground army of Nex and split, heading out over the snowfields of Antarctica with new missions appearing on their ECubes. In their wake they left thousands of Nex slain, a hundred smashed and smoking tanks, and an empty Spiral base: empty of personnel, empty of technology—and empty of the Evolution Class Warhead.

Using ECube relays, Jam and Carter stayed in close contact, directing the DemolSquads to new targets and areas of contact. Constanza used a small tracking device similar in design to an ECube but with a certain very specific purpose. It was built for tracking the Warhead, to stay in touch with the greatest sentient weapon ever devised.

After a while, as they flew low over the sea, Mongrel turned to Carter.

‘Did it work, you think?’

Carter looked at Constanza, and she glanced up at the two battered smoke-stained men. She still looked exhausted. Then she smiled slowly, nodding, and let out a big sigh. ‘Yes. And it’s been a mad couple of days,’ she said.

‘You not kidding!’ snorted Mongrel. He gazed long and hard at Constanza. She looked away, then back into his face. She smiled then, and he smiled back at her. ‘You great lady, you know that?’

‘Just doing my bit. For King and Country, yeah?’

‘I just wondering ...’ Mongrel said.

‘Yes?’ Constanza was smiling as she nursed the Warhead tracking device in her hands.

‘You know? If you would like have dinner with me, some time?’ Mongrel beamed gappily.

Constanza took a deep breath to reply, but Mongrel continued, oblivious.

‘It just, I up there, in turret, facing certain death. And I scared, and all I keep thinking was, don’t you fuckers blow me up now, not when there nice young lady down there programming Warhead who I want to get to know bit better, and I thought to myself, I thought Mongrel, old lad, if you get out of this sour Mr Pickle sandwich alive, you should ask her out! Yes! For food! And wine! Nothing cheap, no stinking kebabs and pint-pot dregs for this classy lass but evening of
quality,
and I...’

‘Yes.’

‘... And I was thinking, I know I only tufty and have several tufts missing, but I—’

‘Yes, Mongrel.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Which bit of
yes
don’t you understand?’