Carter glanced up, at the steel and glass walls of Spiral_R—and something suddenly jarred within him as he saw cold sunlight sparkling through a missing expanse of roof. And now that they were close enough to see, he also noted the dented struts, the missing windows, the damaged pillars. Spiral_R was no longer an operationally viable base. It had been ravaged by war.
They increased their pace while below them the swarm of Nex helicopters swept down like a plague with their guns blazing. Fire erupted from mounted flame throwers, scorching the earth and sending the army of the insane running burning into their own trenches where they set their comrades alight. Then Carter heard it: the smash and
krump
of tank shells.
They continued to climb and finally reached the winding path leading to the buckled alloy doors of Spiral_R—development headquarters for the QIV processor, the production centre for the original QuakeHub under Durell’s perverse guidance ... and the intellectual powerhouse that had created the miracle of the Evolution Class Warhead: the greatest single intelligent weapon ever devised.
‘Why did you bring us with you?’ asked Carter, bathed in sweat and panting. His legs quivered with the strain of the incredibly steep ascent and his lungs were burning because of the reduced level of oxygen at this altitude.
‘You brought the Nex to me,’ said Constanza softly. She moved towards Carter and placed a hand on his shoulder. He looked into her eyes then, but they no longer glimmered with power, dignity or hope. The Glock lifted, and Carter realised that she carried a short knife in her other hand as the blade came to rest against the skin of his cheek ...
‘Kill her, and kill her now!
’ hissed Kade. ‘
Let me do it, let me take her, let me fuck her hard and watch her corpse tumble into the valley below ... but do it quick, do it before the fucking Nex arrive, do it, Carter! Fucking DO IT NOW!’
Kade’s arrogant tone had risen to a painful scream which pounded against the inside of Carter’s skull like a rock being slammed against his brain. Stars flickered behind his vision; agony bounced around his skull.
Constanza’s knife fell—and parted the binding wires. Then she moved to Mongrel and cut through the large man’s bonds. Reaching into her own pack she brought out Carter’s Browning and Mongrel’s Sig. She passed the stunned men the weapons, and said, ‘You have more ammunition in your own packs.’
‘You are helping us to escape?’
Constanza shook her head. ‘I am helping
myself
escape. The Nex have left us alone here for a long time, gentlemen. I am no fool—the surrounding SAM sites are controlled by the Nex. For whatever reason, they left these people here to breed and feed from one another. To kill and brutalise and cannibalise—they left them alone even when the odd stray Nex fell into the web. I was trapped here after the bombing of Spiral_R, left to rot and to die by my colleagues. Do you know how that feels? The sense of abandonment? The utter loss of hope? But the army—they saw me as a queen, they saw me as a
god.
And I adopted their ways for my own survival. It is incredible what a human being will do to survive, gentlemen ... what a person will do in order just to continue to breathe God’s good clean air.’ She gave a low, sardonic laugh. ‘Facts: you have arrived. You brought the Nex here. The Nex have decided to exterminate the army—
my
army—maybe because they are disgusted with the brutality of these twisted people, although I doubt it. Or maybe because they are still looking for
you.
My best chance for survival is to show you — here, in Spiral_R—the secret buried within this ruin.’
‘But why? Why bring us?’ rumbled Mongrel.
Constanza smiled then. ‘Because, my dear Mongrel, I cannot fly the Manta which nestles under a protective shield of alloy in one of the bunkers. I do not have the ignition codes. I am trapped.’
‘And you propose?’ said Carter softly.
Constanza stared down at the distant carnage. Guns were still thundering, choppers swooping and diving, bullets cutting the few remaining people to shreds of meat.
‘An exchange. Of information. Of skills. You get me out of here alive, and I will program your EC Warhead. If you save my skin, then I will take you to your machine.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Yeah. I will save the world.’
‘Well, guys, we better be quick.’ Mongrel gestured, and they glanced down the steep mountainside to where the swarm of choppers had gathered and was hovering. ‘Look like we might have some bad company on its way.’
Even as the words flowed from Mongrel’s mouth, the choppers powered ahead and then swept up like a huge black swarm, engines screaming, rotors thumping.
Carter, Mongrel and Constanza shouldered their packs and sprinted towards the huge buckled gates of Spiral_R as the Nex helicopters screamed up from the valley and opened fire. The three hunted people dived for cover under a protective but precariously leaning archway.
Carter growled, ‘Where is this Manta? Which way do we go?’
Constanza pointed. ‘There, towards the bunkers ...’
But then three choppers swarmed overhead and squads of Nex threw themselves from the howling machines on wildly swaying fast-ropes, Steyr TMPs yammering. Carter took a deep breath and led the group in a pounding charge towards the underground bunker and the promise of escape.
J
am watched impassively as the Sleeper Nex poured into the reactor chamber of the K-Lab. He turned: Sonia looked alien to him with her pale flesh, parted red lips, fear like a bloodstain on her strange human features—
The trapped insects chattered in Jam’s mind, desperately urging him to return to the ways of the Nex, to relinquish all emotion ...
And then Nicky was there, her face close. He could smell the musk of her skin. Feel the soft velvet of her hands. Taste the caress of her lips, brushing his as he fell and tumbled into another world, another time, another existence—and he knew then. Knew she was dead, murdered by the Nex. She was dead, and had returned to warn him. To help him. ‘No,’ said Nicky, and Jam’s copper eyes blinked—
‘No,’ said Sonia, her arms resting gently against his black armour.
Jam nodded, breathing deeply as the chittering of the trapped insect souls in his shell receded. Then he was calm again, whole again, one again. He stared calmly at the charging Sleeper Nex, then looked down at Sonia. He could read her panic. Her fear. Her despair.
‘Call Fenny. Tell him to pick us up from the roof. Now.’
‘The roof?’
‘Just do it!’ snapped Jam. Spikes sprang up along his armoured forearms and he leapt forward, limbs smashing out to rake a great hole in the thick panel before him, dragging it free so that it fell, tumbling end over end until it splashed into the thick green reactor coolant far below.
Jam moved to the edge of the level and glanced up. There was a huge tube, some form of ventilation system; it had a ladder riveted to its internal wall. But the distance to it was at least fifteen metres—too far for Sonia J to jump.
‘Fenny’s on his way,’ Sonia reported.
‘Come here.’
Sonia glanced up. ‘Oh no, no way, Jam—I cannot possibly make that jump!’
‘You’re not going to jump.’
The Sleeper Nex were pounding up the ramp. Jam swept low, lifting Sonia in his armoured claws—then he whirled and with a powerful thrust of his awesomely muscled arms he launched her across the gap without giving her time to think. Sonia flew, slammed into the wall and scrabbled frantically for the ladder. She dropped her Uzi, which fell into the green coolant. Grunting and cursing, legs kicking frantically and sweat-slippery hands grasping and sliding, she finally managed to get a secure handhold and glanced back to Jam—
As the first of the Sleeper Nex arrived. Two pounded towards him, snarling, long trails of saliva drooling from their bloodstained jaws. Jam leapt forward, ducking a slashing claw and grabbing the first Sleeper’s head. It struggled, snarling, and Jam launched it across the chamber where its flailing body crashed through a tall rack of delicate glass tubes. Then more claws slammed against Jam’s armoured flank and Jam’s own talons hammered down, breaking one of the second Sleeper’s limbs—a
crack
that made Sonia cringe. Jam’s left armoured forearm smashed forward, claw slicing into his assailant’s belly and grabbing a mass of internal organs, wrenching them free in a gore-splattering shower of offal. The Sleeper Nex slumped to the ground, blood gushing from its disembowelled gut cavity, flooding through the mesh of the buckled alloy and falling into the old reactor’s coolant pool far below. A third Sleeper charged up the ramp—followed by another two, and then two more.
Jam crouched to avoid twin blows, then straightened and slammed one Sleeper sideways. It teetered for a moment on the edge of the walkway before toppling into the green coolant. It went under in a huge splash of glutinous green and did not reappear.
Sonia shuffled nervously up a couple of rungs of the ladder. It was a long way to fall. She felt incredibly vulnerable, hanging there, with no floor beneath her to break any such tumble.
Jam’s head snapped right. He snarled, ‘Fucking
climb
, woman!’
Sonia started up the ladder, chilled by the look on Jam’s face—frightened to her very core by the visible hatred and hint of insanity. He was, right now, most definitely more ScorpNex than human.
Jam leapt and fought, slashing left and right with his claws as the Sleeper Nex flooded up into the chamber and towards him across the K-Lab’s mesh alloy floor. Jam slipped and slid on the blood-and meat-strewn surface, ducking blows, dodging snapping, rending jaws, powering vicious thrusts into abdomens and heads, splitting armour, cracking skulls like brittle eggs, gouging bellies and ripping pumping, glistening organs free in a blur of unstoppable powerhouse violence.
Then Jam suddenly turned, ran and leapt, sailing out over the disused reactor and slamming into the vertical cylinder, which shook alarmingly under his weight. His claws grasped at the internal ladder and he swung himself up into the dark interior. The ladder rattled, shaking violently, and several rivets popped free with squeals of stressed steel. Below, the stunned Sleeper Nex stood for a moment, eyes focused on Jam’s disappearing figure. They snarled as one, a loud and terrible sound: a sharing of the Hive mind. Then, whirling, one Sleeper Nex ran, its claws gouging the mesh floor, and made the leap. But it bounced from the ladder and tumbled into the old reactor below. Another leapt, claws gaining purchase with clumsy movements, and it started to climb. Jam’s armoured foot cannoned down, five times, breaking its face and sending it, too, tumbling towards destruction and a horrible death by drowning in the highly toxic mix of glutinous nuke coolant.
The Sleeper Nex spread out. Then, as if receiving the same instantaneous command, they turned and sprinted away, searching for another way to reach Jam—and the incredibly valuable data cube that Sonia carried in hands that shook with mortal fear.
They moved along wide shafts. Several times Jam stopped and smashed holes through thick alloy panels with his armoured claws, bending back huge sheets of metal and urging Sonia to follow him quickly.
They climbed upwards, and along several more girders that were part of the building’s internal roof structure. They emerged onto a platform high within the roof space, a series of long narrow beams with thick tensioning cables bolted at stress points and supporting the whole structure. Jam led Sonia, like a tightrope walker, across the beams and she quivered, filled with terror as she inched her way across, never once daring to look down.
They reached a wall. Jam punched a hole through the concrete blocks, giving himself a foothold to clamber higher where he tore a gaping wound in the roof alloy. Daylight spilled in and Jam levered himself through the gap. Then he reached down and hauled Sonia up.
The fresh breeze slapped her cheeks. Sonia breathed deeply, panting, aware of her thundering heart in the huge echoing cavity of her chest. Then she heard a sound, and down below a Sleeper Nex sprinted across a narrow girder without any sign of fear or vertigo.
Jam aimed his sub-machine gun through the hole in the roof and drilled the Sleeper Nex with bullets as it ran. It skittered on blood-slick steel and fell away from the beams, toppling fifty feet and slamming into several metal beams on its downward trajectory until it smashed into a metal panel which crumpled under the heavy impact. Sonia peered into the gloom.
The Sleeper Nex was thrashing around.
It was hurt, but it was far from dead.
The sounds of thumping rotors echoed from the distance, and the twin-rotor Chinook powered over the horizon like a lumbering monster, its Honeywell turboshafts whining. Sonia waved towards the aircraft as it flew towards them and Jam pointed across the roof, towards the massive panelled dome of the cooling system some hundred metres away.
More Sleeper Nex had emerged. They glanced up at the Chinook, then saw Jam and Sonia and began to sprint towards them. The Chinook swept low, trailing a cable from its loading doors, and Fenny’s skilled piloting ensured that the aircraft steadied, cable swaying slightly.
Sonia started to climb up the cable. Jam wound the end around his armoured forearm and signalled to Fenny who lifted them swiftly from the roof of the disused plant—scant seconds before the Sleeper Nex arrived. One leapt, and from his swaying vantage point Jam emptied a full magazine into its snarling face. Bullets crashed into its visage and split its armour, and, trailing a spray of crimson, it fell and slammed hard onto the concrete surface four storeys below. The Chinook lifted high into the clear Norwegian sky.