WARHEAD
WARHEAD
It began with a contract.
A building contract worth 939 billion US dollars.
The sleek black Manta screamed through the heavens at over a thousand klicks an hour, armoured engine ports hissing and thumping, exhausts vibrating with metal torture. Carter gave a nasty sideways glance towards Mongrel whose face was a focused animal mask - as the sun broke in a sudden explosion over the distant horizon, sparkling through the tinted cockpit and radiating fingers of violet iridescence over the serrated, steel blade skyline that defined New York City.
‘ETA one minute,’ growled Mongrel as tracer started to streak and flash from the rolling urban landscape below; heavy calibre rounds smashed up from anti-aircraft guns and localised groups of small arms fire. Thunder seemed to rumble in the distance. Explosive purple flashes flickered, lighting the underside of the fist-bunched clouds in a surreal display. ‘I’ve got SAMs coming in; get your shit together, Carter.’
‘Let’s do it.’ Carter hit the cockpit release, which folded neatly back on tiny hydraulic sighs. Wind thumped in making the small fighter rock violently; Carter stood, gloved hands grasping alloy rings riveted into the fighter’s flanks as Mongrel banked the aircraft and Carter felt suddenly – weightless. His eyes widened and his breath was ripped away in a ragged gasp as Manhattan smashed beneath him, and the Sentinel Corporation tower block came rolling fluidly towards him with tracer streaking all around, coloured confetti tossed carelessly into the dawn sky on projectiles of high explosive.
‘Da vai!’ screamed Mongrel, but Carter was already leaping as if kicked by a hairline trigger of instinct; the fighter smashed above him and was instantly gone – and the wind cracked him in the face like a half-brick. He dived, clothes slapping, and the Sentinel tower block hammered towards him like some vivid, drug-induced dream; Carter armed the Spiral Parasite, felt it buzz beneath his gloved fingers as the world spun crazily in arcs around him … and fired: it rocketed into the lip of the concrete roof, tiny alloy teeth chewing to burrow deep and Carter was jerked violently and abruptly, swinging in a huge arc on an umbilical of 2mm TitaniumIII cable. His speed carried him forward and around with the stepped world of Manhattan flashing below him as a tiny buzz screeched like an insect in his earpiece. His dive decelerated as the Parasite hummed in his fist, and his downwards trajectory slowed as his boots touched with thumps against the vertical dark glass wall of the Sentinel Corporation’s New York HQ.
Carter grunted, all wind knocked from him. He glanced quickly about. The tower block fell away beneath him for a hundred storeys of glittering, violet stained glass. Far below, NYC was a toy town, with hundreds of tower blocks staggering away in huge stepping stones. Carter’s M24 carbine was tight against his back, his battered Browning 9mm HiPower holstered on his hip, and he grinned a sardonic grin.
‘Knock knock.’
Kicking himself backwards, he swung for a moment and aimed a tiny HPG, which projected to connect with the black glass fifteen metres to his left - and with the dial set to CE: concentrated funnel explosion, designed to create Carter a rapid entry point. Carter averted his gaze, and there came a sharp acid crack. Carter walked himself across the vertical wall, buffeted by the wind and nostrils wrinkling involuntarily at the cold chemical stink from the pressure grenade’s explosive - and blinked in astonishment.
The explosive had failed to penetrate the Sentinel tower block - and failed even to shatter the glass. Which was unusual – a HPG could eat a ten metre hole in 12 inch armour plate.
‘Son of a bitch.’
Bullets howled from far below; they ricocheted to Carter’s right with screeches and sparks, and he flinched, feeling suddenly - extremely - vulnerable.
Carter looked around frantically, hanging on his tiny spider’s thread. Grinding his teeth, he began to climb as Mongrel banked the Manta far above, and the tiny matt black fighter went into a steep howling dive with heavy machine guns thundering, fire blossoming orange petals from hot quad gun barrels ...
Carter gritted his teeth and climbed.
Reflected in the dark glass of the tower block, the world seemed on fire behind him. More Spiral fighters smashed through the glittering heavens, tanks rumbled through the streets far below crushing cars under heavy steel tracks, and Spiral soldiers fought Nex killers across the grid of order and ordered insanity that composed this contemporary vision of NYC.
Carter focused on staying alive. The Parasite buzzed beneath his gloves and he walked his way up the skyscraper, boot soles squealing in protest; within a few short minutes he reached the roof, leapt onto the galvanised flat roof rim and turned, inhaling deeply and looking down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Bullets spun up towards him, tracer rounds swirling lazy streamers past his face. Carter dropped to a crouch and turned. The roof spread out before him on a gentle incline rising to a tapered point – on which flashed the steady pulse of a bright white light as a warning to air traffic. The roof-panels were formed from corrugated alloy, undulating away and criss-crossed by galvanised grey walkways with handrails for servicing personnel. Huge extraction fans stood in grille-masked steel enclosures, and smoke poured from a narrow silver chimney beside a scattering of high-tech satellite dishes.
Carter’s boots squealed on the galvanised walkway as he made a charge for the black, alloy lattice-work doorway -
Which burst open, masked Nex spilling out onto the concourse. Carter’s Browning was already thumping the palm of his hand as he dived, cracks echoing, his bullets tearing the face from the lead Nex and crushing the chest of the second, leaving it on its knees, blood slick organs visible between twitching gloved fingers, eyes staring down in disbelief at its own glossy platter.
The third Nex had disappeared.
Carter changed mags, back against ridged alloy columns of satellite support struts. His head snapped right, then left, eyes narrowing, tongue moistening dry lips. His breathing calmed and his boot found purchase against the Sentinel’s rooftop as the Nex with the caved-in chest coughed and vomited a stream of blood and mucus into a large puddle to one side.
‘You want me to do it?’ came the cool voice of Kade.
‘I don’t need your help, brother.’
‘Yes, but I need you ... Come on, don’t be such a spoil-sport, let me kill them – I will take them all! It’s months since I imbibed the copper stench of blood … an age since I rolled from dreams of pumping bullets into unprotected faces, watching soft, rotting fish-flesh part and the handsome, neatly carved flush of crimson spurting from a perfectly pulped brain …’
Carter rolled, Browning describing an arc that ended with a –
Bullet. The Nex tried to flip, but was a nanosecond too slow; the bullet entered high in its throat, slightly to one side but still destroying the larynx within. The Nex sat down slowly, hands pressed against the heavy flow of spurting blood, eyes swivelling up to
Carter. He strode forward, cautious gaze scanning left and right. Above, Mongrel’s Manta screamed and accelerated with a burst of stinking aviation exhaust. Carter looked down at the Nex, gazed down into the soft glow of the copper eyes – fixed on him in anger, and hatred, and loathing. His march left imprints in the Nex’s blood as he rubbed at his mouth with the back of his gloved hand, and clamped a boot on the Nex’s MP38 submachine gun.
The Browning extended.
Carter thought briefly of Natasha. Natasha, the mother of his baby boy; Natasha, lying cold and dead in a grave over two thousand miles away, flowers withering against the simple black marble cross bearing no inscription. Carter’s teeth bared, strung with saliva and a burning need for revenge - in a fast calculating brain fuelled on the toxins of a long and distant war.
The bullet smashed through the Nex’s nose, spattering the Nex’s brains across the damp roof from the back of its shattered skull; the body flopped limp. A dead marionette.
Carter should have felt better. Should have felt cleaner. Should have felt avenged. But he didn’t – the death of the Nex wasn’t a sweet cordial, a honeyed nectar; no, it flowed sluggish, as bitter sour emptiness which left his soul bleached and bleeding, left a fist-wide hole punched straight through his heart down which his black emotionless tears could fall and tumble into an ice-chilled eternity.
‘We need to get this thing done,’ said Kade.
Carter looked deep within himself; looked into the glossy black emotionless eyes of Kade set in a face that was his own, only seen through a much darker mirror. A deformation. A twisted parallel. Kade smiled with tiny piranha teeth and a black tongue licked arterial-gore lips.
‘Yes.’
With a blink Carter spiralled back into reality.
Took a deep breath.
And headed for the stairs … and Durell beyond.
The Spiral mainframe had decoded the signals thirty five minutes earlier. All units had been scrambled – not available units, but all units. The call had gone out – code Silver. They received the co-ordinates of Durell’s exact location in NYC Manhattan – and intel that the terrorist maniac had with him the QIV military processor, a unit capable of sabotaging the world’s satellites, global military hardware, and of creating seismic insanity across underground LVA fuel streams global.
Carter crouched in the darkness on the stairs, the only light a stroboscope of spinning red, flickering on off on off on off and illuminating the twisting stairwell with falling red veils. He moved forward, boots smooth against the alloy and eyes scanning for sensors. His ECube rattled in his pocket, digitally disabling a hundred different detection sequences. And yet – Carter knew. Knew that they knew he was there; he was a detected infiltration; a breach of security; a maggot in their apple of expanding World Empire.
Carter grinned a malicious grin and hefted the stocky weight of his Browning HiPower 9mm. His trusty, battered Browning, his loyal and steadfast friend - the one thing in the entirety of his life which had never – ever – let him down.
Carter moved down the stairs – expecting a fight, and wondering where the hell the rest of the Spiral squads had got to; Carter was merely one amongst many. And yet now he felt suddenly alone …
He reached the door; behind the solid portal he could hear voices. Bracing himself, he lifted his leg and smashed a side-kick which thumped open the steel portal, revealing …
Antarctica
16kms south, Mount Erebus Base Camp
Sunlight gleamed against slick ice. Corrugated waves rolled off across an endless plain leading to distant pastel mountains. The wind mourned, a gentle sound carrying inherent airborne flakes which shimmered and flurried across the seemingly endless undulating snow fields, and came finally to settle …
As cracks echoed across the ice domain, the snow-bound dominion. Tiny webs of black flowed and zig-zagged across the glittering platter of silver ice, spreading out into an A-Z of chaos; and then the web suddenly separated, flowed into broken chunks of ice which lifted, were pushed upwards as something heaved and strained its way from dormant extinction to a bright birth - and Phoenix fruition.
Metal gleamed under the surreal witch-light of a cold and frosty arctic day. A round snub-nose emerged, leading into a smooth tapered cone – gleaming and perfect, and steadily rising to reveal delicate fins. Ice fell away, tumbled to the crushed plain as the missile rose from beneath the ice on powerful hydraulics and motors whirred and engines ignited, fire flowering out against the ice and scorching it black under tortured fumes. There came a boom and the missile suddenly leapt into the sky, like a lithe fish escaping the jaws of sudden death beneath the surface of a still lake; and powered away on twin jets of glowing purple into the cold vast bleak arctic heavens.
The ice continued to crack, revealing sub-surface black alloy blocks: missile batteries, containing M1270-k launchers, advanced 2ti radar and tiny elegant Engagement Control Stations.
Another missile nose appeared. Then off to one side of the broken web, another, and they were joined by a third, a fourth, a fifth until the whole plain seemed to lie scattered and riddled with the tapered, eerily ascending bulks of TitaniumIII warheads - and their gleaming single-stage rockets.
Within seconds the air was filled with sleek, ice-streaming bodies as two hundred glistening missiles, each the size of a PAC-5, arced elegantly up into the big blue like a plague and spread, engines droning as the glinting machines rapidly accelerated and disseminated – each targeting on a specific destination.
And then it was done.
And once it was done, it could never be undone.
Angola, Africa
Global Army [GA5] camp, 35kms west of the Kalahari Desert
The missile carrying the 5000 kiloton warhead flashed from the fathomless blue vaults of Heaven. 1000 metres above the behemoth of the combined Global Army HQ, on the plains of eastern Africa where 2,000,000 amassed troops of all nationalities were camped, along with enough military hardware to conquer any land mass on earth - the HighJ explosives detonated, creating a massive shock wave which propelled plutonium-239 shrapnel into a sphere. Pieces of shrapnel struck pellets of beryllium and polonium at the core, which in turn started the basic initial fission reaction rising quickly to cause supercritical mass - and the trigger bomb - to explode …
This initial explosion took 560 billionths of a second.
The warhead’s cylinder casing was cast from uranium-238. Within this tamper squatted the fuel for the explosion – lithium deuteride, and a hollow rod of plutonium-239. As the implosion fission device exploded, this trigger released lethal x-rays which heated the interior of the bomb and the tamper, causing the uranium-238 to expand and burn away forcing pressure towards the lithium deuterate; these compression shock waves initiated fission within the plutonium rod which in turn ejected radiation, heat and neutrons, the neutrons impacting with the fuel to create tritium. As a result, deuterium-deuterium and tritium-deuterium fusion reactions began producing excesses of heat, radiation and neutrons – and the neutrons from this first fusion induced fission in the uranium-238 pieces from the tamper. Fission of tamper and shield occurred, producing yet more radiation and heat, and causing the nuclear warhead to
explode.
The fission reaction took another 50 billionths of a second.
The Global Army, its soldiers, tanks, helicopters, fighter jets, jeeps, trucks, weapons, artillery, ammunition, tents, support staff: all were immediately and utterly vaporised.
What detritus remained on the outskirts of the blast after the initial ignition was fused into a molten sea of undulating glass; the world merged with the desert sands in a bright white blinding of insanity, intensity, impact and death.
Moscow, Russia
Red Square: Spiral and RFSS HQ
Rekalavich reached the entrance to the Sp_bunker in the narrow back-alleyway. He stood, chest heaving, stars of exhaustion dancing before his eyes as he fought to halt himself from retching. And then, by some unbidden instinct, his eyes lifted, squinting into the darkened sky. Something, the tiniest of sounds, intruded on his thoughts as a glint was abandoned from the heavens and he had a moment – a glorious picosecond - of deliberation in which considered confusion mingled with disbelief; and the half-remembered taste of honey lipstick, a residue from Tanya’s kiss ...
Realisation kicked him viciously in the heart and he stumbled backwards, tripping and tumbling and bouncing down the long narrow stone staircase, falling and slamming his way down and down, deep beneath the ground as outside –
Outside, a white flash ignited the sky.
An 800 kph blast wave screamed outwards, exerted pressure smashing everything within its roaring path and pulverising all that it met above the ground for 20 kilometres. At the hypocentre of the thermonuclear explosion, the rising and expanding fireball reached 480 million degrees Fahrenheit and vaporised the collapsing Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed. The initial pulse destroyed Red Square, the Spiral and RFSS HQ and all buildings and life instantly within a 6km radius.
The sky became illuminated by a surreal, blue-green hint. A column of writhing fire and dust and smoke climbed steadily into the sky, four kilometres wide at its base and curving majestically upwards; colours flickered and danced within the mammoth column, grey at the base, amber at the heart and pure bright white capping the rising column until suddenly it sprouted a frothing seething burning fury, a huge mushroom cap which surged up and out, driving the column upwards in excess of 60,000 feet and fermenting insanely within its own raging turmoil, as if the column was suffering from a feeding frenzy against itself. Thunder seemed to be rumbling, churning the ground and roaring, roaring, screaming and the whole landscape seemed to rotate and shrivel to the size of a toy, as if viewed from the Throne of God - who gazed down with impassive and glittering dark eyes … watching this awesome destruction, wrought by the hand of man.
New York, USA
Sentinel5 Tower, The Sentinel Corporation
‘Ah, Mr Carter. I’d like to say “I’ve been expecting you”, but that would be so clichéd.’
Carter uncoiled, eyes scanning left and right, Browning held high against his chest. The entire top floor of the Sentinel Corporation’s New York HQ was a single, high-ceilinged room – filled end to end with a dazzling array of high-tech next-gen equipment. From radar and guidance systems, military servers with wall-sized banks of glittering lights, mammoth, free-standing plasma displays sporting spinning maps of cities, countries, continents; distant squatting banks of military simulators, gleaming and silver on silent resting hydraulics; and on steel benches sat prototype engines, glittering machines of incredible complexity, and a small black platter on which nestled a tiny, inoffensive, frost-hazed black cube.
Durell, with his hood thrown back to reveal the terrible deformities of his twisted face, smiled with a twisting and crackling of flesh, and stared at Carter with slitted copper eyes. In one deformed claw he held a tiny silver disc which he squeezed – and there came a hiss of superheated air as Carter was suddenly surrounded by a haze defining a gentle green glow … He was caught in some kind of field, a cube of pulsating energy which ensnared him to all sides. As reflex, Carter started firing, Browning slapping against the palm of his hand as he dropped to one knee and the barrel’s dark eye sought Durell’s twisted face and Carter felt the hatred bubbling within him, a monstrous deep well of anger and frustration and a dire need: a need to
kill.
The bullets were caught in the haze of the field, spinning gently as Durell turned his back on Carter and moved towards a long alloy panel. Slowly, Carter uncurled and glanced quickly around, a bad taste nestling in his desiccated mouth as he watched the still-spinning bullets melt and drip slowly to the floor. What would it do to a human body? he thought sombrely.
‘You are just in time,’ said Durell, pressing a small black button. To Carter’s left, the QIV Quantech Edition military processor began to hum exquisitely. He laughed. ‘In fact, this is a perfection of timing. Especially for you, Mr Carter. Especially for our oldest adversary – and dare I say, friend? You will be here, at the beginning, at the end, you will witness our triumph – you will witness my triumph.’ Durell’s head had lowered, his voice dropping to little more than a whisper, eyes fixed liked bayonets on Carter’s expression.
‘What are you doing?’ hissed Carter, filled with horror, submerged in bile.
Screens, previous black pools of obsidian, flared into colourful life along one wall. Cities sprang into view, aerial views displayed in real time, living, breathing cities witnessed from a smattering of locations across the globe. Durell moved towards the window and looked down over Manhattan; over New York. It was bathed beneath him in an early morning mantilla of sunlight. Durell gave a deep sigh, and shook his twisted, misproportioned head at some internal dialogue.
Carter’s frown was dragged kicking and screaming to his left; to the glittering images on the screens: to the simulacra of twisting, speeding missiles.
Carter changed the magazine in his Browning and moved slowly forward, towards the walls of his hazy prison. He reached out with the tip of the Browning, and almost had his arm torn from its socket as the field wrenched the gun from his hand and slowly melted it into component particles. Carter watched as liquid metal ran down the inside of the ethereal green glow and pooled near his feet.
‘I hope Spiral have a good life insurance policy,’ said Durell softly.
Carter’s eyes lifted. To see –
To see a tiny glitter against the blue sky, a needle of mercury which seemed nothing more than imagination. And then there came a flash of such brightness, such intensity that even through the heavily shielded windows of the Sentinel Corporation skyscraper Carter flinched, dropped to his knees as if struck by a house brick and the knelt there, arms hung loose, useless, mouth open and eyes filled with a sudden and infinite pool of disbelieving tears.
‘No,’ Carter croaked.
Durell turned.
‘But yes,’ he whispered, as a wall of fire smashed neatly across New York, powered screaming towards them in their high heaven vantage point - and left a rising cloud of pulped and pulverised, stomped and torn and fragmented debris, atomised and crushed and pulled wailing into the all-consuming, deliquesced embrace of the dark and rising mushroom cloud.
Carter knelt, his face the face of a child, eyes dark and hollow and fixed impassively on the furnace of devastation. Durell turned, slitted copper eyes watching him closely – an observation - and Carter thought,
We are going to die.
We are going to fucking die.
Kade was silent in his brain, reclining and dark and oiled and watching and the blast wave hit the Sentinel5, hit the tower from which they watched in trepidation - from where they peered down with their superiority and their technology and the QIV processor hummed quietly to itself as Carter’s eyes were dragged to the black screens and the missiles flashing through the glittering blue atmosphere of the planet called Earth.
The tower shook. Screamed. Rocked.
Outside, the world before them was excluded; covered by a death veil; drowned by a sea of ash and broiling fire.
‘You are quite safe,’ came Durell’s soothing voice. ‘These towers were built specifically for this rationale. Built to protect – constructed with a single purpose in mind.’
‘To survive a nuclear blast?’ spat Carter.
‘Yes, only a nominal yield, but yes. After all, nothing without such a design brief would be able to survive that …’ The screen flickered to satellite scanners, and Carter looked down on a desert devastation. His stomach churned as he saw the fused and glowing glass, the edges of a crystallised desert, the charred half-corpses of an army lingering at the edges of TV reality. And he saw that the Global Army – the mammoth united worldwide conglomeration of all nations formed to combat the Nex, and Durell had been utterly … and totally … destroyed.
Carter vomited onto the smooth stone floor, heaved and heaved as the building around him shook with thunder and below him millions of people died in the raging fireball, and the blast waves of the nuclear devastation.
There came a fizz.
The shield surrounding Carter disintegrated and Durell motioned to two Nex warriors bearing Austrian Steyr TMP 9mm submachine guns. They moved forward on well balanced heels, clad in simple body-hugging grey suits, their faces pale and white, eyes copper and burning with an inner passion. They approached Carter, one reached down with a gloved hand and Carter’s face snapped up, lips covered with spittle and vomit and the long black knife in his fist slammed into the Nex’s eye, piercing the eyeball which popped free and slid snake-like down the clammy skin of a shocked white face – the dark steel thrust hard and deep into the brain beyond. Blood splattered against Carter, pumping out over his fist, and he had the Steyr TMP even as the Nex began to fall, the machine gun’s strap caught across its shoulder as Carter squeezed the trigger and bullets ate the second Nex like a swarm of parasites, drilled a slick blood groove up the Nex’s chest and caved in its throat. It flipped to the ground, fingers clawing at the metal in its flesh. It screamed long and shrill.
Carter rose to his feet, face covered in speckles of blood, eyes wide and wild and filled not just with anger, and hatred, but also an incredible deep sorrow - a hollow, cork-screwing emptiness. A desolation.
What good? What good now?
You are just too late, my friend …
Durell turned, mouth opening to show deformed teeth within the circular void of his black mouth. His tongue was a tiny fish. And he was smiling in victory.
Carter wanted to speak.
But he did not. Could not.
There were simply no words.
Outside, the thermonuclear explosion continued to roar.
Carter closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.
