Carter shrugged once more, then lit another cigarette. Nicky reached out, took it from his fingers and allowed herself a deep drag. She sipped at her black coffee, frowning to herself at some internal dialogue; then she visibly calmed and looked up suddenly, her gaze meeting Carter’s cool and calculating stare.
‘You don’t know what I want you to do.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘You do care.’
‘All right, I do care, but Joseph is my priority. I said I wouldn’t leave him, and I won’t fucking leave him. You understand me? You know what I’ve been through, you know what happened to Natasha—’
‘Yeah, and you think you’re the only one to suffer a casualty of war? Don’t hit me with that fucking arrogant selfish standpoint, Carter. You lost Natasha, I lost Jam. It’s a cruel fucking world we live in, I know, but sometimes we have to make sacrifices and they both died doing what needed to be done—doing what they were paid to do but, more importantly, doing what they knew to be right.’
‘I’m not interested in sacrifices. Those days are over for me.’ The lie tasted bad, even as it left Carter’s lips. He knew the words were not true. He knew he was ...
better
than that. Because the day mankind no longer made sacrifices ... well, that was the day the Nex deserved to win.
‘Spiral are in trouble.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Spiral are in a world of shit, Carter. Durell’s New World Order has forced us underground—they’re calling us fucking
terrorists,
for Christ’s sake. The Nex Agencies are just too powerful now, too dominant. We are fighting a battle we cannot win and the real bitch is that we
know
we cannot win it.’
Carter sighed, sipping his coffee. Samson’s barks drifted over to him, followed by his son’s giggles. He felt his heart flutter then—and a sudden vortex of darkness clamped his mind.
He looked into Nicky’s eyes.
For long moments, an intimacy of understanding passed between them.
‘Go on,’ he said softly, finally.
‘We are compromised. The only thing that keeps us in the game is the Spiral GRID: the network which allows us to wage a
terrorist
war from below the streets, pop up, slam a war factory, disappear into the GRID again. Well, we recently discovered that we’ve got a traitor—a piece of shit who is going to compromise the SpiralGRID in its entirety. He’s one of Spiral’s top men, one of our few generals who have the SpiralGRID brain-tattooed. He has been detected by covert tracking, digitally recorded sending coded messages to the Nex Agency; they were hacked by accident, by one of our sub-system programmers. This man has set up a rendezvous with the Nex Agency: he plans to allow them to laser the details from the surface of his brain—that’s the only way to access the information. He will compromise the GRID. He will betray Spiral—he will betray the last chance humanity has to overthrow Durell.’
‘His name?’
‘Jahlsen.’
‘And you want me to—’
‘Kill him. Blow the bastard to Kingdom Come.’
‘Ahh.’
Carter rose and moved to the steps where he stood, hands in his pockets, staring out over the sea. Waves crashed against the rocks in a turmoil of white foam.
‘What about Joseph?’
‘I would look after him. Me. Probably the only person in the world you still trust. Or ... Mrs Fickle. You sometimes have her look after the boy, don’t you?’
Carter shook his head, turning to stare at Nicky. ‘I’m retired, Nicky. This is not my fight any more. This is no longer my fucking
gig.’
‘This has
always
been your fight, Carter. You know it, and I know it. Now, I’ll not bullshit you. This is a tough fucking takedown—CitySide London, halfway through the nuked zone, crawling with Nex and JT8s. You can go in alone, or with a squad—whatever you prefer. But we need you, Carter—we need you to do what you do best.’
‘Kill?’
‘Yeah, Carter. Kill.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on, Carter, we
need
you. Believe me, there were many who didn’t want me to ask for your help; they think you’re fucked, brain-fried, heavy on the whisky and burned out. But I
know
you can do this—and there’s not many I believe can. Without this assassination Spiral will be crushed—all of us will be captured, tortured, murdered. The Priest, Roxi, Mongrel, Simmo ... me.’
‘You’ll have to give me time to think about it,’ said Carter softly.
Nicky stood, and dropped a silver ECube onto the table. She smiled at him then, and took a deep breath. ‘If you choose not to do this, then I understand. Truly, mate, I really do understand.’ She glanced to where the boy was splashing in the waves. Samson’s excited barking echoed along the beach.
‘Give me a few hours.’
Nicky nodded, long, elegant lashes blinking at him. ‘A few hours,’ she agreed.
Daylight was fading.
The soft hiss and surge of the surf taunted Carter through the half-gloom. He sat on the steps leading to his porch with a bottle of beer in one hand, cigarette in the other. Samson sat by his side, broad chocolate head on Carter’s lap, snoring, one eye opening occasionally to give his owner a baleful glare.
The glow of the cigarette brightened as Carter inhaled, then dimmed to a dull glow. Footsteps padded across the porch and Ed dropped to the planks beside Carter, handing the ex-Spiral op a fresh beer.
‘You OK?’
‘Never better.’ Carter smiled weakly.
Both men watched the sea for a while, lost in thought, then Carter glanced sideways at Ed and studied the man’s ravaged visage. In his sixties, Eddie was a veteran: an old soldier, burned out by the army and a hundred battles—and by visions of his dead friends which haunted his nightmares. Heavily tattooed, head still shaved and boots still polished, he was the wisest, sanest influence Carter had encountered in many years.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Ed softly.
‘What would you do?’
‘Not my decision to make, laddie. It’s a tough call, that’s for sure. I know you believe you’re well out of the loop now, retired, ex-Spiral and all that—but what’s in your mind? What’s in your
heart?’
Carter said nothing. His stare locked on the sea, mouth a grim thin line.
‘They were your friends, yes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘They are still your friends?’
‘Of course. Until we die.’
‘Then ask yourself this question—can you stand by while they are betrayed? Are you going to watch Durell’s media circus parade your friends like freaks across the TV screens, watch as they are slowly tortured on the box? Murdered on fucking Pay-For-View? Slaughtered like lambs?’
Carter worked his bottle into the sand, then fished out the silver alloy ECube. It glinted dully in the rays of the fast-falling sun. He toyed with it briefly.
‘I’ll come with you, if you like.’
Carter met Ed’s gaze. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Back-up? Mate, I am a fucking mean shot with a Barrett. Can’t say I’ll charge into the action—a gammy leg, you understand—but any Nex sneaking up behind you is
guaranteed
a .338mm round up the arse.’
Carter sighed—seemed to deflate. He stroked Samson’s velvet ears and looked out to the sea once more, then activated the ECube. It glittered with blue digits. He smoothed a pattern across the surface and there came a tiny blip.
Carter flicked his cigarette end towards the sea; it landed on the rocks, glowing briefly before dying.
‘You made a decision?’
Carter thought about his friends, thought about the many battles he had waged against the Nex—and against Durell—as a Spiral operative. He thought about Jam, about Natasha, thought about his son, Joseph. And, finally, he pictured the dead eyes of Tomas—an old man just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘I’ll do it,’ he whispered, and closed his eyes against the rays of the setting sun.
T
he Cobra-S lifted on a cold cushion of LVA fumes as it left behind a desolate, barren landscape. A cold wind was blowing, scattering the fine exhaust fumes as the Cobra-S lifted its nose and climbed steadily into a cold blue sky trailing streamers of broken cloud.
Behind lay the distant devastated skeleton of New York.
Ahead lay the eighth Dreadnought.
It had begun as a cooperative project between NASA, the RFST and CRSA upon the discovery of a technology which would simplify and ease the myriad problems of construction in space—in terms of scale, materials and finance. The new technology was a machine grandly entitled a Gravity Displacer. No larger than a football, it could specify digital global parameters and neutralise gravity, in effect creating a specific area which contained zero gravity for the duration of a construction. Normal gravity would persist in and around the building zone itself—but the actual structure would, in effect, be weightless. Like a ten-million-tonne helium balloon.
In this manner, the first of the Dreadnought construction blocks had been fashioned. People gathered on the ground beneath in their tens of thousands to gawp open-mouthed at this eighth wonder of the world—hanging solid and immovable and matt black against the glowing backdrop of the sky.
The size of a seventy-five-storey tower block which had been flipped onto its side, the BCB construct hung solid and cold, a skyscraper slab painted against the heavens, suspended by the digital precision of a GD in its own parameter fields of weightlessness.
Helicopters and fast Manta Shuttles ferried personnel and building materials, news crews and ASP workers to and from the suspended building block as work on it was, over a period of months, completed. News programmes ran features in solid rotation, along with advertisements for
ChainStations—a New World For a New Tomorrow,
and
LVA — the Fuel For a New Space Age.
Just as interest started to wane, and the crowds of techno-tourists drifted apart, the first freight tug using its own tiny onboard GD was put into service. The long, vaguely doughnut-shaped vehicle had hooked up to the BCB construct and, with flashes of silver and violet across the darkened evening sky, the Gravity Displacer fashioned a tunnel through which the freight tug towed the enormous building block—up past the Earth’s atmospheric influences and out into the dark expanses of space.
With this first ChainStation building block in place and actively operational, the Accelerated Space Programme had thrown massive funding into the project, buoyed by success and public support—especially in the wake of the HATE outbreak which, in effect, imprisoned the majority of the world’s population in the cities, those desolate half-destroyed concrete wildernesses.
Six months after the initial success of the first BCB construct, another six units had been tugged down their Anti-G tunnels and into the darkness of space, looking down upon the glowing sun-bright orb which had spawned them.
Now the ASP was actively developing another ninety-four BCB units globally. They would, within three to six months, join their cousins circling the Earth to create the first-ever ChainStation: a promise of escape for those tortured souls who were sick of the ever-present threat of HATE and toxic disintegration ... a promise of a New Future, a New World.
The Cobra-S accelerated silently towards Dreadnoughts, which hung immobile and strangely silent in the cold gloom of the dawn. Rain was falling gently around the sleek craft as it banked, the huge black tower block half enshrouded in thick drifting clouds that filled the craft’s scanners which issued mid-prox warnings with low-level bleat sirens.
The Cobra-S pulled alongside the huge black construct so that it was cruising a parallel course and the pilot glanced out to his right—through the fine mist—and thought he saw a slight resonance.
The BCB vibrating; so delicately and so quickly that it was hard to see as more than a barely visible vibration. But it was there, evidence of the GD field which held this ten-million-tonne block of space station in temporary stasis.
The Cobra-S slowed and then turned, hovering with tiny hisses of cold matrix exhaust. In the blank black surface of the BCB a huge portal slid into itself, fine spirals of metal rotating to reveal a circular hollow punctuating the zero-gravity field. The Cobra-S slid into the opening and the slivers of alloy closed neatly behind it, leaving nothing but a fine mist and a grey, upwards-falling rain.
There came a huge crash as the freight tug engaged with the BCB construct; engines screamed and the TitaniumIV thread-chains went from slack to taut as the tug shunted sideways, taking its position.
Computers hummed, altering Gravity Displacement coordinates, and then, slowly, the tug started to pull the mammoth Dreadnought across the sky.
Below, thousands of people turned aside from their daily chores. They watched in awe as the tower block lying on its side, impossibly huge, at first crawled and then accelerated away into the distance. It gained altitude in a broad upsweeping arc until it was climbing vertically—until the freight tug finally released its chains as great swinging slack pendulums and the GD motors whined down as the BCB construct was shunted into a precise orbit around the Earth.
The tug’s work was far from over. Several miles away, seven Dreadnoughts had already been linked—by floating, undulating ChainLink Corridors, so that seven Dreadnoughts formed huge tower-block couplings in the ChainStation set-up as a whole. Even now, lights flickered across the vast expanses of these primary test modules—and plans were being finalised in boardrooms and laboratories for the newly planned NG Units: BCBs a hundred times larger than the skyscraper construct units currently being tested. A billion diagnostic tests were run through, with checks and counter-checks.