Carter rolled with a thump against the wall, and came around on one knee with the Browning raised. The Nex reappeared, blood slick against its tight grey uniform, copper eyes moving to fix on Carter’s position as it aimed the Steyr TMP—
Carter steadied his own aim.
Two bullets took the Nex in the forehead, exploding the top of its skull up and out in a gruesome shower of bone shards and brain tissue. Carter was already moving, pulling the pin from an HPG and launching it behind him, towards the dark mouth of the stairwell...
He ran, heard the hiss and concussive
whoosh
of HighJ explosive; purple fire raced along the corridor singeing Carter’s trousers as he threw himself to the right through a doorway, toppling over an upturned chair and sprawling as a whirlwind of flames rushed past behind him ...
The muted roar suddenly died away, and the conflagration was sucked back.
Leaving silence.
Carter stumbled across the room in darkness, and sensed rather than saw another human in the room.
‘Paddy?’ came a young lad’s whining voice. ‘Is that you? Did you get the photos of the bridge?’
Carter ignored the voice, reaching the window and delivering a front-kick which shattered the glass. The alloy frame swung outwards, lock broken and dangling free.
‘Hey,’ came the sleepy voice again, ‘who are
you
? You’re not Paddy. Where’s Paddy? What have you done with Paddy? Have you got Paddy’s photographs?’
Carter leapt up onto the rim, feeling glass shards bite into his gloves, and peered out into the snow. It was a long drop to a hard distant ground.
There was a small stone window ledge in front of him, and Carter stepped onto its slippery surface—then glanced up to where several steel hooks supported cables strung between this block and other buildings. Suddenly, skinny arms appeared and hands grasped his leg.
‘Where
is
Patrick?’ persisted the voice.
‘Get the
fuck
off me!’ Carter kicked the young man in the face, placed his Browning back in its holster, then leapt up, grasping one of the steel hooks and hauling himself up into the falling snow. He reached out, boots scrabbling against the snow-slick stone, and with a Herculean effort managed to stretch to a stone carving, his gloved hands finally reaching the lip of the roof of the building. Grunting, Carter hung for a moment, sweat stinging his eyes as he swayed high above the ground ...
‘Hey, hello there, do
you
know where Paddy is? He’s gone to get the photos. The rude ones! The ones about the new bridge.’ A Steyr TMP clattered, silencing the young man’s questioning whine. Carter cursed, and hauled himself up onto the stone-rimmed roof of the building as a Nex’s head appeared from the window, along with the barrel of the TMP.
The gun levelled at Carter’s dangling legs.
There came a distant hiss and then a thump as the 7.62mm Soviet sniper round took the Nex in the chest and spread most of its guts across the interior of the room. Carter pulled his legs to safety and glanced back across the hazy, snow-filled expanse.
Good fucking shot, Ed! he thought.
And about time!
The snow was falling heavier now, huge flakes spinning softly and blurring the world through which Carter ran, leaving footprints across the flat roof. He halted suddenly, halfway between the roof’s edge and the doorway leading to the stairs below.
The stairs ...
How many Nex?
‘How many, Eddie?’
‘Around ten entered the building. It was hard to tell due to the heavy snow. I only caught their tail-end.’
‘Can you see me?’ Carter peered through the heavy fall.
‘Just about, but things are getting worse ... wait ...’ Carter heard the whizz and thud of a sniper shot. ‘The fuckers have tagged me—get your arse out of there, Carter—get out of there
now!’
Carter pulled free an HPG and removed the pin, clicking the dial to ‘prox.mine’. He rolled the grenade through the snow towards the head of the stairwell, then dropped another three at his feet where they spun like tops.
He turned, and ran for it—
The edge of the building loomed close as Carter pulled free his Sp_drag—nicknamed a ‘Skimmer’, or ‘Parasite Skimmer’—and leapt up onto the rim. Bullets suddenly howled through the snow and Carter flinched, half-ducking as three Nex sprinted from the doorway behind him with their guns on full automatic—there was a tiny click and a roar shook the building as the HighJ chemical fury kicked the Nex’s ragged corpses high into the air.
Carter jumped.
Shrapnel cut through the snow.
He caught the cable, swayed for a moment, secured the Sp_drag and allowed himself to drop down the swaying wire connecting the two buildings—boots locked together, mouth a grim dry line.
Bullets cut through the snowfall behind him and made him scrunch his body tight. He glanced down, and saw a spread of Nex moving into the building where Ed was positioned.
‘Bastards.’
A 7.62mm sniper round took a Nex on the ground. Then another. And then they were in ...
More bullets screamed from behind him as another explosion from his proximity-primed HPG rocked the world, and distant sirens wailed. Carter, clinging onto the Skimmer with one hand, pulled free his Browning and began to fire ... one, two, three shots, back towards the window and the masked face of a Nex—
‘Carter,’ came Ed’s voice. ‘I ...’ There was a wave of crackling static.
‘This is not turning out to be a good
fucking
day,’ hissed Carter as the Browning clicked on an empty chamber and the Nex swarmed out not just behind him—at the edge of the roof—but ahead of him, on the elevated roof position recently occupied by Ed.
Carter’s eyes narrowed as he sped down the cable through the heavy snow. The wind buffeted him, making him sway dangerously. Bitter coldness stung him through his clothing.
The Nex levelled their automatic weapons, tracking with precision and patience. There were six of them ahead—copper-eyed stares fixed grimly on the speeding, falling target.
Without a flicker of emotion, they opened fire.
M
ongrel squatted in the alleyway, boots shifting slightly on the shattered concrete debris which littered the warped, corrugated road. His gloved hand reached out, steadying himself against the twisted metal skeleton of a rusted fire-wreck Volvo.
Mongrel, eyes squinting, unshaved face contorted in concentration and fear yet marked with an inner strength that made him the son-of-a-bitch rough-and-tumble psychopathic good-natured bear-like Spiral-op bastard that he was, stared out at the distant target.
He licked at dry lips, revealing broken, crooked teeth—victims of too many beer-fuelled late-night bar brawls, the smashed stumps reminders of the impact of innumerable knuckle sandwiches. Mongrel’s face was etched with battle-weariness. A deep and ingrained bitterness. And in this new world, fear was never far from his mind ... Mongrel gripped the stock of his Sterling sub-machine gun and his eyes narrowed as they peered over the twisted metal frame before him.
A fine mist of rain was drifting and falling, chilling Mongrel to the marrow. His guts were rumbling and his arse was on fire, making him even grumpier than usual.
‘It’s a shame,’ said The Priest, in a small but mournful voice. Mongrel glanced, to where the huge barrel-chested man lay on his considerable belly, dressed in full urban combat clothing but still wearing his sandals and rosary beads—like the religious maniac he most certainly was.
‘What is shame?’ rumbled Mongrel, glancing along the stretch of rubble-strewn alleyway towards the distant target: new and gleaming, it rose three storeys high and was just crying out for the five kilos of HighJ explosive they were about to deliver with, in the best tradition of covert warfare, extreme prejudice.
The Priest gestured with his silenced M27A carbine, the weapon black and glistening under the misty London rain. Mongrel glanced around, then frowned, hissing, ‘What hell you talking about?’
‘That!’ The Priest pointed, his rosary beads clacking against the bomb-blast debris.
‘The
car
?’
‘Yeah,’ said The Priest, his great sorrowful eyes filled with sadness, yearning and Great Pity. ‘Yea I say unto thee that I cannot comprehend how the infidels could wreak such hellfire destruction on such an honourable beast.’
‘The fucking
Volvo?’
snapped Mongrel in disbelief.
‘It is a most noble vintage model.’ The Priest nodded to himself, turning his gaze back along the confined alleyway. Near the end, where street met rubble-cleared highway, fires burned, sending up columns of oily smoke, and they could pick out distant patrols of Nex.
Mongrel checked his watch. ‘Come on—is nearly time. You follow my lead, you see how is done proper, right lad?’
‘Yes, I will follow the true professional.’ The Priest smiled, his gold-flecked brown eyes blinking slowly, calmly, as he cocked the weapon in his huge hands and rolled smoothly—surprisingly so for such a large man—to his feet. His sandals flapped softly as he followed Mongrel down the alleyway. They paused behind a heap of glowing embers smouldering in a rusted metal drum. Their eyes scanned what lay ahead ...
London: one of the greatest capital cities in the world—once the home of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, the Tower of London, the Globe Theatre, Tower Bridge, the West End ... and now—
And now a pathetic shadow of its former self, a blasted, smashed, buckled ghost, a capital of destruction, a pulped and pulverised pile of debris. The Sentinel Tower—unharmed by the twenty-kiloton nuclear blast that had ravaged the city’s streets five years earlier—stood tall, black and gleaming, proud amid the rubble of something once mighty.
‘Ten seconds,’ said Mongrel, clenching his teeth in anticipation and rolling down his balaclava over his face. Broad hands clasped the Sterling sub-machine gun and he glanced past the repaired streets now alive with cars and military trucks; past the gleaming ever-open NEP premises—the Nex Production Plant where humans, genuine thoroughbred one-hundred-per-cent humans voluntarily went to relinquish their human status, went for voluntary Skein Blending, a joining of human and insect, genetic sacrilege, a two-fingered salute to God and Evolution alike.
Mongrel’s stare fixed on a ... signal.
The patrol groups of Nex—three Nex soldiers per group, with perhaps fifteen operations groups surrounding the vast perimeter of the NEP, a circular stone structure with a huge steel and glass dome rising to a height of three storeys—heard the crack of concussion, followed by a massive boom as a nearby building shook and instantly turned into a raging inferno.
Mongrel glanced right as a FukTruk, a heavy battered sixteen-wheeler, veered towards him and halted with squealing brakes and a hiss of hydraulics. He climbed up the rope ladder slung against the canvas of the truck, then knelt, watching carefully as the Nex sprinted towards the NEP perimeter where the rattle of machine guns sounded. The Nex returned fire, taking up their positions behind stone pillars, aiming their Steyr TMPs with steady practised hands and the efficient eyes of trained killers ...
Mongrel dragged the tube from his back and flicked down the attached bipod. He quickly attached an ECube to the side of the dark green weapon and then dropped his canvas pack, lifting out a long heavy canister. He handled it with the sort of delicate care he usually reserved for a pint of beer, a woman’s clitoris, or—in this case—five kilos of powerful explosive.
The ECube clicked and hummed.
Mongrel, sweat soaking his balaclava despite the chill, licked at his salted lips and wished vehemently that he was in the pub. The machine-gun fire was blasting in bursts across the road. The traffic had now vanished, leaving only stragglers who had either panicked or been immobilised by stray bullets. Mongrel waited, watching in horror as a stream of spinning metal cut a diagonal line across the canvas back of the truck on which he perched, stopping at his boots.
‘Ne pizdi!
Son of bitch!’
The ECube blipped; Mongrel felt the tube shift in his hands as digital targeting motors altered the angles of elevation. Mongrel dropped the long HighJ canister into the launch tube, ducking his head as a fiery backwash scorched his eyelashes and the bomb soared out over the street and the battling Nex.
Mongrel was moving even before the bomb struck. He clambered down the ladder with the elegance of a baboon, all knuckles and knees, and was sprinting with The Priest close behind him even as the HighJ connected violently with the hub of the Nex Production Plant.
Several Nex saw the rapid trajectory of the bomb.
But by then, it was too late.
The production plant disintegrated in a ball of glowing purple, a sudden uprush of noise and fire and screaming, twisting melting lengths of steel. Chunks of masonry scythed across the surrounding streets, punching men and Nex from their feet, demolishing whole buildings and delivering the maximum in hard-core destruction ...
It began to rain stone, concrete and flaming lengths of alloy-stapled timbers as a column of blackened smoke poured into the sky. Cars and trucks were picked up, crushed and twisted like putty into lumps of tortured steel.