The earthquake had subsided a little, but still echoes groaned from the tortured world as rock ground against rock; as mountains shook and pulled viciously, impatiently, at their foundations.
‘You thought you could fuck with me?’ snarled Durell. ‘Look what I made you! Look what I created! I gave you everything; I made you not just Nex, but ScorpNex—and you turned on me, you betrayed me, you betrayed what you had become.’
And then it came to Jam. Rustling in his mind, like old newspapers blown drifting across a concrete boulevard; like the rasping corpse-skin of a dried cadaver attempting to rise from the dead ... they flooded into his mind, tiny black orbs watching him impassively as he fought to retain his strength and energy and power and identity, fought to retain his wisdom and intellect and emotion and concept and focus ... his humanity.
we see you () see you
we see your acts () once-betrayer
() you be whole again
() we be one again () we be nex again
open the () door
() we can help you we can make you () free again
() we can make you strong again
() we will crush him we will give you back your () strength again
() strength to maim strength to () kill
() you will be pure nex one nex whole nex
you will be scorpnex
be scorpnex
‘No!’Jam screamed, drool pooling from his twisted fangs. His head wrenched up, the rustling of insect wings reverberating around his hollow blended skull and he stared hard and true and wild with a bright intensity from his own copper orbs, his own Nex eyes, the eyes of the blend, the eyes of the tortured, the eyes of the suddenly
sane
and his head tilted to one side and his mouth opened in a bloodied snarl and he said ...
‘I will never be Nex.’
‘No. You will never be one of our master race,’ snarled Durell. He hoisted Jam into the air and, screaming viciously, he launched the huge ScorpNex over the edge of the Dreadnought deck ...
Durell stood beside the vast sweeping drop, staring down, watching Jam tumble until he was nothing more than a tiny plummeting rag doll. Then Jam merged with the landscape, merged with Ethiopia, merged with all Africa ... and he was finally dead, and gone, crushed and terminally fucked and finished.
What is wrong with them? thought Durell bitterly.
Why are the Nex turning against me? What went wrong?
And it came to him. In a flash of brilliance, like a lightning strike, it came to him. The Avelach. It was a corruption. It was playing its own game. It was using him. Abusing him. It was twisting him. It was serving some higher purpose of which he had no concept. He was a pawn. He was just a fucking
pawn ...
and that was why Nex soldiers had been dying, disintegrating on the streets and in his laboratories under the Sentinel Towers. He was not in control—as it liked to prove to him.
The Avelach ruled him. The Avelach was his
master.
Durell’s face twisted into a snarl of self-contempt, and long trails of saliva drooled from his deformed Nex jaws. Then he turned to see Carter still on his knees, his face still covered by his blood-smeared hands. Alexis had emerged, flanked by more Nex soldiers. She gave a command, and the silent ranks of Nex brought their weapons up, eyes still staring straight ahead as they stood in their massive rigid column.
Another quake rumble echoed menacingly.
Durell, weary and broken, limped across the battered deck. He picked up Carter’s Browning, turning it over in his dark clawed hands, examining the weapon’s scars of battle. Then he moved back to Carter and stared down at the broken man.
‘Will he join us?’ asked Alexis, her hand resting on Durell’s chitin.
‘No.’
‘Does he know?’
‘Not yet. Carter—can you hear me, Carter?’
Carter looked up then, eyes red-rimmed, haunted, the guilt from a thousand murders threatening to engulf and overwhelm him. He climbed slowly to his feet and faced Durell. Then he glanced down at the battered Browning, and up again into the face of his oldest, most bitter enemy.
‘You going to use that?’ he croaked.
‘Not yet.’
‘Kill me, Durell. I am tired of this life. I am tired of this game. You were right about one thing, you ugly piece of shit: I was a pawn. From the beginning. But then, ultimately, in this life we are all pawns.’ His eyes glinted. ‘Even you, Nex. Even you.’
‘There is just one more thing.’
Carter grinned then, a malevolent baring of his teeth. ‘Oh yeah? You think you’re going to improve my fucking day? You think I
care
what you have to tell me? Spiral used me as a fucking experiment: they turned me into the perfect soldier, the perfect killer—and then looked on in horror when I did what I did best.’
‘Listen to us, Carter,’ said Alexis.
He focused on her. His head tilted to one side. ‘I’m listening,’ he snarled through strings of saliva and blood.
‘There are two reasons why we want you to join us. Why you
must
join us. One of those reasons is Kade—the KillChip. And the other ... well, the other is ...’
Carter raised his eyebrows. They arched over eyes that glittered with oceans of unwept tears—the tears of the fathers and the mothers, the brothers and the sisters, for all the murdered who lay rotting in the earth of the world’s killing fields. For all the innocent. For all the memories of the
dead.
‘You are PureBreed, Carter,’ said Alexis softly. ‘You are PureBreed Nex.’
The Comanche powered through the pitch darkness, engines whirring, starlight flashing from whirling rotors as the aircraft banked.
The war chopper circled three or four times, pinpointing a location, and then dropped like a black bird from the sky and touched down in a cloud of rising sand. The rotors slowly thumped to a halt.
The cockpit canopy opened, and a lithe figure climbed wearily out to stand on the Angolan plateau. She moved forward, a sub-machine gun in one hand, a 9mm pistol in the other. Both weapons were matt black and invisible under the night sky.
Roxi halted, scanning the area, her NV sunglasses outlining her surroundings in a subtle purple hue. Then she dropped to one knee and touched the ground, rubbing her index finger and thumb together.
‘Shit.’ She pulled free her ECube, which opened in her hand. Digits flickered. They read, simply,
Mongrel
vb486.
‘Bastard.’ Roxi stood, surveying the rocky plateau once more. In the darkness it was eerie and vast, and she imagined she could hear the distant sea, a crashing rush of surf in the gloom, pounding and retreating, pounding and retreating. There was no evidence of Mongrel’s passing: no helicopter, no boot prints, no abandoned packs. Only a trace of dried blood on sun-scorched rocks. ‘Mongrel?’ she screamed. ‘Mongrel, you there?’
Only the darkness replied with the gentle sounds of the night.
Roxi moved towards the edge of the plateau. Her NV glasses told her there was a vast drop ahead of her, but even by pumping up their enhancements to MAX she could see nothing over the edge—and nothing at the foot of the cliffs far below.
‘Mongrel?’ she called out once more, voice lower this time. More resigned.
And then, an internal dialogue:
—He’s dead.
—You know it. In your heart. The old warrior, the tough mean bad tufty squaddie, the gap-toothed rump-slapping tattooed goat has finally bitten the dust.
—Mongrel: a victim of dog eat dog, politically incorrigible, a senile delinquent. Dead and buried in the rocks.
‘Mongrel!’
‘Down ... fucking ... here ...’ Roxi stared. Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart beat strongly against her sternum. She swept the rocky slope before her once again, enhancing the NV glasses through ten different settings ... and there, a pale ghostly glow, caught in a rocky nook, lay Mongrel.
‘I’ll get some rope.’
‘And some blood,’ came the distant croak. Roxi grabbed her pack, tied two thin coils of steel_rope to the Comanche’s gear-winch and then tossed the coils from the edge of the plateau. She slipped a hook onto her belt, adjusted her head torch, fed one of the ropes through the belt hoop, then leapt off the side of the mountain ...
The rope hummed through her gloves as she walked down the near-vertical rock wall. Her boots found easy purchase on the rugged dry surface and she dropped a hundred feet to the narrow depression where the huge curled figure of Mongrel lay. There was no room, no rock platform on which she could stand so she secured the rope and hung there, swaying gently next to the huge wounded man, the light from her head torch illuminating the tiny notch that had caught him. Her eyes swept over his frame, and she reached out tenderly and touched at his shoulder.
‘How you feeling, Big Guy?’
Mongrel shifted then, turning a little so that Roxi could see his bruised face. His skin was speckled in blood, a tiny amount of which had dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He was shivering violently.
He grinned at her like a dead skull. ‘I has felt fucking better,’ he whispered.
‘Did you fall all this way?’
Mongrel frowned. ‘No. I did fucking bounce. And tumble. And roll.’ He coughed violently, dribbling more blood.
‘You are one lucky son of a bitch!’
‘I not dead yet.’ Mongrel coughed again. Roxi reached forward and, dangling precariously, cut away his jacket and jumper and shirt with a tiny scalpel. Her skilled eyes read the wounds and she paled, mouth going dry.
‘Six
bullet wounds?’
Mongrel coughed, nodding, his face contorted in searing agony.
Roxi injected him with diamorphine, and the pain gradually receded from his expression as his head lolled back, his mouth opening, a huge sigh escaping him. She cut away the rest of his clothing and surveyed the damage: two bullets in his right shoulder, one near his heart, two below his sternum, and one to the right of his belly.
I can’t work here, she thought wildly. Not dangling halfway down a damned cliff! She pulled free a heavy-duty StapleG and said, ‘This is going to hurt,’ to which Mongrel responded with nothing more than a flutter of his drooping eyelids. Then she gathered his slippery, blood-slick skin under her gloved fingers and slammed staples into his flesh, closing the ragged bullet holes.
She tried to get her hands under his arms, but Mongrel was a huge man, topping twenty stone in weight, and she grunted with the effort as she tried to lift him. Finally, she looped the second rope around him in a makeshift harness, slapped his face to get his attention, and said, ‘I’m going to have to winch you up.’
‘Yeah, babe. I love you, Rox. You know that? This squaddie love your little nose.’
Roxi grunted something unintelligible, and started the climb back up to the Comanche with a growing sense of urgency. Six bullets! Six fucking bullets! The old monkey should be as dead as a plank of wood.
Reaching the top, she started the Comanche’s winch and ran back to the edge, sliding down her own rope a little and taking some of the slack as Mongrel appeared from the darkness, arms and head thrown back in a state of unconsciousness.
Roxi used the winch to drag Mongrel across the ground to the Comanche. Then she laid him on a bedroll and covered him with blankets from her pack she took what looked like a tool kit and spread it out on the dust. The glitter of steel shone under her head torch’s beam. She checked Mongrel’s BP, and found that it was dangerously low. ‘You should be dead,’ she muttered, shaking her head. She climbed into the Comanche, retrieving the emergency field-dressing packs and a small plasti-sack of universal O-neg. Then she tripped a switch inside the Comanche’s cockpit—it would scan for movement in a one-kilometre radius. The last thing Roxi needed was the nasty surprise of ambush from behind as she worked ...
Ripping free a cannula from sterile packaging, she inserted the needle into Mongrel’s vein at the joint of his arm between a tattoo of a woman with ridiculously large breasts and a more smudged one of a comedy devil baring its little red arse to the world. Then she pulled free a spring-loaded plastic tripod and hung the O-neg, connecting the blood-giving set, priming the line and then turning the dial to establish a steady flow rate. That done, she gave him another injection of diamorphine, sprayed his wounds with antiseptic, and pulled free a tool which looked like a cross between a scalpel and a pronged fork. It was a StapleG remover; she sprayed the tool and, holding her breath, dug into Mongrel’s flesh and worked free the first staple. Then she inserted a gleaming steel barrel and checked the blinking blue light. This tiny machine would locate and extract the bullet.
A droplet of sweat fell from the end of Roxi’s nose, landing on Mongrel’s serene but pale face.
‘Don’t die on me, you old bugger. Don’t bloody die.’
It was an hour later. Mongrel was wrapped in blankets and Roxi built a small fire. She could hear the steady
beep
of the Comanche’s scanners, and she checked her ECube for the hundredth time; she was using it as a secondary back-up scanner. The curse of her paranoia.
Out here, she felt so vulnerable, so alone.