‘You are rescued, aren’t you, Mongrel, you little maggot?’
‘How you know we not behind tank? How you know we not captured and lined up as prisoners? How you know we not be in the
bloody firing line
of HTank shells?’
Sergeant Simmo puffed on his cigar. Big blue clouds surrounded his head, enveloping him in a personal smog. Through his haze, his eyes glittered like a shark’s. He grinned a long nasty grin.
‘Lads ... in war it’s just a chance you have to take.’
Mongrel’s reply was lost in a bubbling tirade of frothing expletives as The Priest fought to hold the adrenalin-pumped soldier back.
‘Even though we have a visual on Carter, the QIV processor is completely blind to him.’ From his New York Sentinel Tower, Durell stared at the screens before him, images flickering from the helmet-cams of different Nex. The snow was falling thick in London, making images blurred—indistinct. Durell glanced down at the QIV processor read-outs.
His technicians were right. Carter was invisible.
An anomaly within the system. Just like before. ‘How can that be?’ said Durell. He reached out and drank slowly from a glass of water. The liquid quenched his burning throat and soothed him for a moment. Most of the time Durell endured this constant agony; it was almost an old friend, almost comforting. And he knew that his current state went hand in hand with the pain—one condition could not exist without the other. They were symbiotic. The torture just
was.
Durell accept this with good grace.
A tall black-glass door opened and Mace entered. He was a small Nex, lithe and athletic. His head gleamed, perfectly bald, and his ageing face was only slightly deformed. Mace seated himself next to Durell and waited patiently, hands in his lap.
Durell drank more water, then glanced over. ‘Carter has killed Jahlsen. We have the SpiralGRID within our grasp. It feels good, does it not?’
Mace gave a curt nod. ‘It feels good that we can exterminate the vermin. I am sick of Spiral hacking my TV stations with their pirate signals. I am tired of them detonating the WarFactories and NEP Production Plants. I am just
tired,
Durell.’
Durell nodded. ‘I, too, am weary of this insistent buzzing. They have long been a thorn in our side, and despite their falling numbers they are still blowing up garrisons and assassinating key military figures. It is their flaming torch in the sky that gives REBS strength. Without Spiral’s victories to look upon, without Spiral’s guidance and hand-me-down technology the REBS would die in an instant. An extinguished flame! But first…’
‘First we must cut off the head.’
Durell nodded, focusing on Mace.
‘Yes. A neat decapitation,’ he said.
They walked, Mace slightly behind Durell, down wide deserted corridors. The temperature was comfortably cool and Mace watched his master with respect as they descended a long, twisting flight of steps.
Down. The Sentinel Tower was huge above ground—and just as big below. A labyrinth. A
Nest.
It was cooler still below ground level and deathly quiet. Occasionally they stopped at sterile alloy doors before passing through into more tiled, gleaming corridors, identical in their symmetry. After long minutes of walking, they came to a large set of double doors. Silence reigned, and the alloy surface of the doors was different here—more intricate, graced with an element of design.
Durell reached out, his blackened claw pressing gently against a switch. A tiny needle slid into his flesh and sampled genetic structure; the doors hissed opened and an icy breeze whipped out, causing Mace to blink.
They stared down on a hive of activity, a microcosm of a city, a three-kilometre-square hub of laboratories and testing centres. Thousands of workers scurried feverishly below; thousands of slabs displaying precious Nex specimens—soldiers—lay spread out in a concentric pattern. There was an order to the seething chaos far below. An organic order.
Tears welled in Mace’s eyes.
‘So we are still losing Nex?’ came Durell’s soft voice.
‘Yes,’ said Mace.
They moved forward onto a glass bridge. Below them Nex scientists scuttled around like insects. The hive below showed a scene which wrenched at Durell and caused him real pain.
On a thousand slabs Nex writhed, slowly dying,
disintegrating
within their armoured shells as if some terrible disease had got into their bloodstreams, into their genetic cores, and was working its way to the surface, destroying their flesh as it went.
Durell’s slitted copper eyes looked on with sorrow.
And pain. And
hunger—
the hunger to discover the nature of the problem that was losing him Nex soldiers at a steadily accelerating rate. They were dying on the streets of New York. They were curling into balls and screaming in the rubble-strewn alleyways of Paris. They were vomiting bile and pus onto the cobbled walkways of Moscow.
‘One report investigates abnormality in The Avelach.’ Durell nodded softly, his gaze settling on Mace. The small Nex could almost feel his master’s pain. ‘As you know, The Avelach has been copied nearly a thousand times—on a design board created and modelled by the QIV. In all scans, on all wavelengths, the new machines are an identical copy of the original Avelach machine—and in tests all Nex specimens seem perfect.
Are
perfect—developed in the same way. Created in the same manner and containing all core-data structures without a single strand of evidence pointing to corruption. However ...’
‘Yes?’ Durell’s hiss was a sibilant plume of condensation in the freezing underground laboratory. Below him, a Nex shrilled a high-pitched shriek above the hearing threshold of human ears. The stricken creature fell and began to thrash on the smooth stone floor as technicians rushed to sedate it.
‘There may be a bump in the genetic sequence.’
‘A
bump?’
‘On the TZ-Graphs. It is so minor that it has gone undiscovered for a long time. No scans picked up this, shall we say,
tremor
in the strands.’
‘In which area does the anomaly occur?’
Mace shrugged. ‘A cluster of nodes which are inexplicable; even with all our expertise there are still genetic modifiers which are unexplained to our godlike eyes.’ He laughed coldly.
‘We need to sort this anomaly. And quickly. Our dominance relies on our strength.’
‘The scientists are working as hard as they can. And the QIV is continually searching for answers to the problem, committing more and more processor cycles to the discovery of the malfunction.’
‘Our miracle processor has come up with nothing?’
‘It has found no answers.’ As they quit the chamber, leaving the hectic bustle of experimentation and investigation behind, Durell was lost in thought.
A Nex runner sped into view, a sheen of sweat on its brow. It halted, saluting Durell, and handed him an encoded sliver of metal. Durell’s claw ran over the pitted surface and his eyes closed in a long, lazy blink as he absorbed the information.
‘What is it?’
Durell turned to stare hard at Mace. ‘It would seem that we have a defector.’
‘A ...’ Mace frowned.
‘It would seem that one of our Nex has chosen to join
Spiral
.’ Durell’s words were ice cold.
‘That is impossible.’
‘Yes. But then, so is internal destruction of Nex by an invisible enemy contained within their own genetic spirals. Or so we would have thought. These are the first tremors of our model cracking. We must not allow this state of growing atrophy to progress.’
‘But what is the answer?’ asked Mace gently.
Durell’s slitted eyes narrowed and his hood fell back to reveal his terribly disfigured face. Armoured scales seemed to click into place and he turned, gazing back at the door hiding the secret of his damaged and slowly disintegrating army.
‘The extermination of Spiral,’ he said, his voice so soft it was almost inaudible in the gloom of the sterile corridor. ‘We must move our plans forward. We must act
now.’
Twanging guitars filled the cabin of the old Volvo, screeching from dust-encased speakers as a gravel-voiced country and western singer sang of love, loss and the large swaying breasts of a woman on the ranch. The engine note grew harsher with a snarl of grinding gears. A sandalled foot slapped an out-of-synch rhythm as the singer moved away from the subject of love with a large-breasted woman, segueing neatly to the topics of whiskey and the needs of horses on the ranch. A head nodded, one hand coming up to fondle idly a set of rosary beads.
The Priest was content. For the moment, at least.
Pluming blue-grey oil smoke, the Volvo drove along the deserted roadway. What had once been a major A-road linking the north and the south of England was now a long strip of tarmac desert—a desolation created by the unleashing of the biological weapon known as HATE. But now (and unknown to the majority of the city-trapped general population) it was a cleared route, free from biological contamination.
The Volvo ground to a halt with a thrashing of badly meshing gears. The Priest, muttering that he really should get the old gearbox looked at, wound the window down and poked his bearded face out into the cold autumn air. Around the Volvo lay a scattering of glass and stones, glinting as shafts of sunlight broke from the heavy blanket of clouds.
The Priest smiled, nodding in understanding.
‘I hear you, Lord,’ he said in a clear, booming voice.
He stepped from the Volvo, his sandals grating against glass and stone. His gaze fixed on the wreckage ahead and he looked around warily, one massive hand fidgeting below his flowing brown robes and reappearing holding a Glock 9mm pistol.
The gun looked small in The Priest’s huge hand, like a child’s toy in the paw of a giant bear. The Priest, his robes flapping, strode forward, stopping to glance around at the empty fields to either side of the road, the low hedgerows and the distant, shattered pylons.
On the road were the crumpled remains of a military FukTruk. Smoke still curled from it and The Priest moved towards the scatter of burnt detritus. His nostrils wrinkled at the mingled stench of HighJ explosive, oil smoke, burning rubber—and fried human flesh.
The back of the large military truck had been the usual construct of steel and canvas. As The Priest peered into its charred remains, his gold-flecked eyes widened and his teeth bared for a moment. The truck had been full of people when the bomb or missile struck. Now they were a merged mass of burnt limbs, melted flesh and sticky liquefied human fat. Yellow bone showed in places. The Priest had seen the screaming wide eyes of a dead soldier, hair burnt off, scalp skin scorched but face somehow still a square of white against the dark charcoal of the rest of his head.
The Priest bowed his own head. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.’ He moved warily back to the Volvo, coughing a little on the smoke and damning all his enemies to an eternity in the fires of Hell... damning the world and its violence.
He killed the wailing plunking of the country and western guitar with a battered thumb and revved the Volvo’s engine hard. He wheel-spun past the scene of devastation as his rational brain continued to tell him there were always casualties. But his emotions would not allow him the sanctuary of such justification. Death was death. Cruelty was cruelty.
And there are no rules in love and war, he thought morosely. Had those corpses been Spiral? Or REBS? Or just fleeing citizens who had discovered that this part of the country was free from the curse of HATE and had made a break for it in a stolen truck?
The Priest did not know, but he understood they had been bombed by powerful aircraft and that made his hackles rise. His Volvo was faster than any army truck—but not by much. And he doubted whether the thirty-three-year-old vehicle with its peeling paint, rattling exhaust and three bald tyres could outrun a Manta.
His mouth a grim line, The Priest cut right down a narrow country lane and headed for the far-distant dock-side.
As the number of buildings grew, so The Priest became more alert and he allowed himself gradually to tune in to his surroundings. Everything was deserted, and the signs of battle were everywhere—fire and bullet marks scarring walls, crumbled, smashed edifices revealing the passage of tanks or the impact of missiles. The Priest steered his Volvo with care around the lumps of concrete or piles of crushed brick that occasionally littered the road. As the buildings became taller so The Priest realised that the ground was falling away, dropping down to the distant docks. He slipped the Volvo into neutral (fighting for about thirty seconds with the grinding gearstick) and allowed the machine to cruise with a steady hum of wide bald tyres and the occasional barking backfire.
‘Got to save petrol,’ he mused. ‘After all, the Lord provides for those who provide for themselves.’
A few minutes later, fingering his rosary beads once more, The Priest rolled to a halt. He had the Glock in his hand and, squinting through the dirt-smeared windscreen, he tried in vain to squirt water onto the curved glass. Somewhere a feeble motor whined, but precious holy liquid did not fountain forth to clear his vision.
‘Damn and buggering blast,’ said The Priest. He stroked his beard, and slammed his sandal to the floor. The Volvo lurched off, belching smoke. Gathering speed, it squealed around a corner and roared down to the dock-side. To one side a concrete slope fell away to meet inky waters edged with scum, old rope and ancient yellowed paper wrappers. The Volvo’s tyres thumped rhythmically across the concrete-section dockside as town buildings fell behind to be replaced by desolate and empty warehouse structures.