Warhead (62 page)

And then Durell was gone.

Carter stood there, panting. He turned slowly, looked around at the hundreds of Nex soldiers before him. They stood, immobile, but now every single one of them had fixed its stare on Carter. Slowly, as one, and on some unbidden command, they lifted their Steyr sub-machine guns and laid them against their chests with a unified
clack
that rattled out across the Dreadnought’s deck.

Carter stared as Alexis crossed to him, the only sound now that of her smooth footsteps on the deck. She saluted him, meeting his gaze. ‘What do you require, sir?’

‘I want to stop the EC Warhead. I want to stop the delivery of EDEN.’

‘We can do that. The QIV is below decks.’

‘
Wait...
’ hissed Kade.

‘What is it?’

‘Talk to me,’ said Kade. Carter moved away from Alexis, from the army of the Nex until he stood at the Dreadnought’s rim, gazing over and out and down at the expanse which had swallowed and pulped Jam.

‘You are standing on the edge of the world, boy,’ said Kade softly. ‘You are standing on the brink of a revolution. You are poised on the brink of an
evolution
.’

Carter frowned, his mind swimming, and a mild pain began to throb at the centre of his brain.

‘Your point?’

‘You have it all, Carter.
We
have it all. Power. Glory. Ultimate power, ultimate glory. You have Durell’s war machine. You have Durell’s empire. You have the fucking
world
, Carter. You can do what you want, go where you want, fuck who you want...’

‘I could do all that
before
,’ snapped Carter.

‘We are kings,’ said Kade, simply.

‘I don’t want to be a king,’ said Carter. But the pain was growing, piercing him, radiating out with a pulsating inner force. And then he realised ... it was Kade, pushing him pushing him and with shame he felt his weakness consume him, overflowing him like lava and it swamped him, Kade swamped him, and colours flickered and extinguished one by one by one by one like fireflies slowly exterminated by an all-consuming velvet darkness until all that remained was a terrible and frightening—

black and white.

Kade grinned with Carter’s face. He turned to Alexis and she moved towards him. Kade tilted his head. ‘When will the Warhead and its many brethren deliver the payloads of EDEN?’

‘Multiple strikes will begin in ten minutes,’ said Alexis softly, her eyes shadowed, unreadable.

‘Good. Allow them to continue.’

Kade folded his arms, nodding to himself and surveying his army of Nex. Then he turned, and looked down over Ethiopia. Over Africa. The place where it had all started. The place where mankind had been born ... where mankind had
evolved.

‘And the place where it will all end,’ said Kade. ‘The battleground where man will take his next steps forward on the road to evolution.’ With Carter’s eyes, Kade stared out over his country.

His world.

His dominion.

‘What fun we will have,’ he said sweetly.

B
ob Bob hammered both levers forward together and the battered Spiral HTank surged across the rocky landscape, tracks crushing small trees and shrubs, rocks and sandstone, engines howling. Behind the lead HTank, in a huge scything arc, followed fifty supporting ones, accompanied by Spiral SP59s and SP64s, their single, twin and triple guns gleaming in the blazing sunlight.

Ahead, the Dreadnought loomed against the sky, oppressive and dominant, an eerie totem of a world gone mad. Bob Bob scratched unconsciously at the stains of dried custard on his combats, then turned to his gunner, a man named Teeth—huge and black, with gleaming oiled biceps and a twenty-four-carat smile. The man wore his hair in a spiked Mohican which rubbed expensive hair lacquers against the inside paintwork of the gun turret. Bob Bob shook his head in dismay at this display of vanity.

‘Are those choppers here yet? We need aerial support!’

‘They’re coming, mate,’ said Teeth, with a big golden grin. Even as he spoke, the thump of hundreds of rotors swept overhead. Bob Bob checked his scanners, sweat crawling down his neck under his itching military-issue khaki shirt. The remains of the Spiral chopper squadrons filled the sky like a dark plague of insects.

An SS532 Cougar swept low over Bob Bob’s lead HTank, and incoming signals initiated the attack. There was no time to wait, the EC Warhead was on its way: EDEN was on its way, and the world was teetering on the brink of extinction ...

‘Here we go,’ said Bob Bob with a final grim smile that had little to do with humour.

‘And about bloody time, mate,’ snarled Teeth.

They surged forwards on matrix exhaust. Ahead of them Nex tanks swarmed from compounds beneath the shadows of the suspended Dreadnought. Small black attack choppers swept down from the skies and all of a sudden the world erupted into explosions and machine-gun fire, into rockets and missiles and the
krump
of shells. Above, a group of selected Comanches peeled free and headed for the Dreadnought with Nex combat choppers in close pursuit.

Bob Bob focused ahead on—

A Nex HTank, uncloaked and charging directly towards him. ‘You got that fucker?’ snarled Bob Bob.

‘I’m on it,’ said Teeth, grinning.

The HTank bucked on shrieking suspension, twin barrels firing shells across the rapidly closing gap. The Nex HTank was suddenly consumed in twin explosions and kicked backwards and up, trailing streams of molten metal as thick black plumes of smoke and incinerated Nex boiled out of it.

‘Bingo,’ said Teeth.

‘Bingo?’

‘Howzat!’

Bob Bob groaned. It was turning out to be a really
bad
day.

The skies around the Dreadnought NGO were swarming with choppers—Comanches and Apaches, Black Hawks, Mangustas, Havocs, Merlins—guns blazing and rockets leaving trails of fire across the heavens. Choppers ploughed downwards into the ground, rotors scything like huge razors across the swarm of infantry that came behind the pounding barrage laid down by the tanks.

Ed squatted behind a static, rumbling 8x8 FukTruk, a kilometre behind the insanity of the front-line action, breathing the huge vehicle’s sour fumes and staring at the digital pad on his lap. He watched with satisfaction as the bastard Nex were drawn towards the battlefront. The Nex were primarily assassins: ruthless killers, heartless efficient murderers. But as soldiers they were not in the same league as Spiral.

Ed traced several patterns with his tattooed index finger. And he watched as five covert squads on the other side of the Dreadnought began their slow advance on the Nex base.

Ed crossed his fingers.

He stared up at the sky.

‘Come on, Lord. Just give us this one chance. Just give us this one final shot!’

After being captured while supporting Carter in London, Ed had been brutalised and tortured by the Nex and placed in a cell with other captured Spiral operatives. This small group of hardened fighters had made an extremely explosive and violent exit from their prison cells, killing with their bare hands and stealing weapons before blasting their way to freedom and meeting up with other DemolSquads fighting for the same cause. And as the world shit had started to hit the fan, so Ed had been drafted into the front ranks of this, the final battle ...

The retired old soldier had done what he had said he would never do.

He had gone back to war.

Ed stared at the digital representation of the battlefield. He stared down at thousands of tiny dots, each one representing a living, breathing, dreaming, hating, loving human being. He grimaced. This was no game, no simulation. Warfare wasn’t something that could be conducted from a keyboard.

Eddie stroked the pad. He sighed, and tracked the advancing covert squads.

‘One shot, Lord. And then I’ll leave you alone. Please let me get what I want, Lord. I don’t need a future of continuous and eternal world domination. I’ll just close my eyes and pray for a future without this. Without war.’

SCENE:
A large airy studio tastefully decorated in orange and blues; three long settees at gentle angles to one another around a central table fashioned from a single slab of onyx, on which stand a purple jug and crystal glasses which catch the studio lights and glitter. The rear of the studio is taken up by a huge plasma screen which currently displays a plain black backdrop.

ENTER
Sonia J to ecstatic applause as
TITLE MUSIC [5.2/ vol7]
plays and gently fades to a backdrop
[vol3]
.

Sonia J is dressed in torn and ragged combat clothing, and she carries a Steyr TMP 9mm sub-machine gun, currently in a battered and dented condition and with a spare magazine duct-taped to the stock. Sonia J moves to the centre of the TV studio and stands, eyes filled with tears, staring straight into the camera. The newly hijacked audience fade to silence. They stare in shock, horror and surprise at the former TV presenter they thought was dead; a previous ‘traitor’ who had been horrifically executed by the World State as a REB and—ironically—as a terrorist.

SONIA J:
Welcome to this forced entry to HIVE Media and what will probably be my final broadcast across the globe—ever. Yes—I know—you thought you saw me executed on live TV for my supposed terrorist exploits and cooperation with the REBS. We yes, I am a part of the REBS. That much is true. But as for my execution? I am still here. I am still whole. And I am fighting alongside my brave comrades in a bloody and violent war against the
traitor
of mankind: Durell, his insect-blended Nex soldiers and the money-fuelled mercenary kill-squads known as JT8s.

AUD [volume enhance 5.8+ through 6.8+ through 9.8]:
... silence

CAM2 [zoom]:
close-up of Sonia J’s weary face.

SONIA J:
The truth is, you have been lied to. The truth is, you have been abused. The truth is, you have been gratuitously misled and misrepresented. It was Durell, he of Nex-kind and currently your World State leader, who launched the nuclear strikes which terrorised the globe five years ago ... and then he followed it up with multiple strikes of the biological weapon HATE. This supposedly made huge tracts of the world uninhabitable. You saw the pictures on TV, you saw the bubbling corpses out in the fields, on the lanes, in the desert, out on the ice ... and yes, HATE did exist—but only on a modest scale. You were conned, my friends. You were herded like cattle into the cities—ready for the next stage of Durell’s great plan. The ChainStations. Durell created the Dreadnoughts, and then the first ChainStation, with the aim of evacuating the planet. But not for you—not for the people. No. His intention was to clear out his Nex kind ...to give him a clear shooting gallery to launch EDEN. A newly designed biological toxin that was touted as a cure for the out-of-control poison that was HATE ... There would be no opposition to the development and launch of EDEN because it would be presented as a cure for a vastly over-exaggerated toxin which you believed riddled the world with its poison. But, believe me, when this EDEN poison is launched there will be no survival of the fittest, the meanest, the toughest, the slickest... there will be absolutely no escape from the
extinction
Durell wants to impose. He wants us out of the way, my friends. He wants you to become a Nex... or die, to make way for his new version of mankind, his new version of humanity. Even as we speak, missiles containing this poison are in flight. We have only hours until detonation. We have only hours until the missiles strike ... and the world becomes a barren desert, a biologically poisoned wasteland. A world wiped free of man. A world ready and waiting with open arms for its new half-breed child—the Nex. They’re all in it for the glory, the power, the domination, the resurrection, the extinction; they’re in it for the chance to murder, to hurt, to execute, to dominate, to slaughter, to massacre, to kill, to kill, to kill. They want us all gone—they want us all dead. But don’t take my word for it: here is a representation of what EDEN can do, followed by digvid of what it is truly capable of...

CAM12:

1] A complex series of molecular structures rotating then merging to create a new chemical: EDEN.

2] A chamber full of men and women: EDEN is released and they all collapse like bowled-over skittles in an instant, with blood leaking from mouths, noses, eyes and ears.

3] A large hall containing perhaps six hundred men, women and children; a single droplet of EDEN is allowed to fall from a pipette and before the droplet hits the ground the entire crowd hit the floor instantly, with blood leaking from mouths, noses, eyes and ears.

4] A series of outdoor experiments in natural environments; EDEN is released on a tube train, in a tower housing block, in a supermarket—all with the same catastrophic and instantaneous results.

SONIA J:
None of these events were ever recorded or shown on the news. That is because Durell controls the media; he controls the world; he controls YOU. Now is the time to rise up. Now is the time to retake your freedom. Don’t just take my word for it. .
[Nex file into the studio; they form a ragged line behind Sonia J and as one they rip free their masks showing a host of facial deformations from beneath those masks, and haunted, glowing, copper eyes.]