‘Cleo,’ came Thorpe’s calm, calculating voice. ‘Are you
sure
those scanners show jack-shit?’
‘One hundred per cent positive, sarge.’
‘Contact!’ screamed Thorpe, bringing around her machine gun as the Nex tanks filled the horizon and the black swarm of helicopters leapt into view. Their sounds smashed across the desert and Thorpe watched in horror as sudden explosions echoed across the undulating plain ...
Everything became a sudden madness. There came a whistling, then a
crump.
Thorpe saw one of the M1s picked up and tossed across the desert, fire blazing around its hull, gun twisted as it described an arc and connected with the ground, ploughing a trough and being ripped apart. Another tank was picked up, then another - and then the helicopters came in as Thorpe hit the dirt hard, rolling, her SA1000 rattling in her hands as the choppers swept overhead—
Bullets flew all around.
Trucks exploded.
Thorpe heard screams.
Something happened, and with her head spinning Sergeant Thorpe was thrown through the air. Something hit her hard in the back of her head, and she remembered staring at the sand and hearing roars and concussive booms all around her, and she wanted to roll over, to fight this sudden unprovoked enemy that had come from nowhere.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she moaned.
She seemed to lie for an eternity where she’d fallen. She could feel blood running across her hips and belly.
Her throat was dry, parched.
Water, she thought. Just... water ...
Hands rolled her over. Three dark figures stood over her, blocking out the sun, and in her confusion she could have sworn that their eyes glowed like copper, like tiny molten suns.
‘Water?’ she whispered.
‘Be quiet, bitch.’
The sub-machine gun touched her face and blasted her pretty features in a spray of gore across the desert sand.
The BBC London helicopter swept over the Thames, camera panning from the destroyed Houses of Parliament to the leaning, mortally wounded tower of Big Ben.
‘The whole of London mourns today for all those killed and maimed in a great tragedy,’ came the sombre voice of Mr McSouthern. ‘Here we witness the aftermath of the most terrible earthquake ever to hit the United Kingdom.’
Again, the camera swept across the carnage.
It zoomed in on collapsed buildings, cars crushed by massive slabs of concrete, exposed steel wire and sections of fallen brick. Emergency personnel and civilian volunteers picked their way through the devastation and tanks and bulldozers were being used by the military to clear a passage through some of the blocked roads.
The vid_scene switched to the London Underground, where collapsed tunnels spewed crushed Tube trains, full of twisted limbs and bodies, to fill the screen. Blood pools lay still under flickering strip-lights as water gushed from smashed pipes above the subways and silent, stationary escalators, washing dirt, blood and mucus from the rictus death-grins of a thousand crushed commuters caught underground when the quake struck ...
BBC London’s camera viewpoint switched then. It moved to the south coast of England, where a collapsing coastline had swallowed individual houses and whole small villages in a mammoth cave-in, taking them tumbling and sliding into the English Channel.
No part of the country was unaffected; there were sweeping vid_scenes from Inverness, Glasgow, down through Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Oxford, London and onwards to Portsmouth ... fallen buildings, loss of power on a massive scale, overcrowded hospitals -a nation pushed to the limits of its emergency services in the sudden aftermath of an insane devastation.
‘The roads are severely gridlocked up and down the country,’ came the voice of Mr McSouthern, ‘and are causing endless difficulties for military personnel and vehicles who have been drafted in to help with the country-wide disaster zone ...’
Within the hot, dry Libyan drilling station, the titanium-carbide VII drill bit rotated at high speed within its protective Plas-7 sheath, the rock and stone detritus sucked up and away by thick alloy-rubber hoses. Ivers stared from behind a mask of mud and rock flecks, eyes searching for defects or any hint that the drill bit was faltering - variations in speed or angle of descent, excess vibration, changes in the extracted rock slurry.
The platform was a huge hardwood structure, set some four kilometres below the earth’s surface. It nestled, together with the Sub-3KM control quarters of the drilling rig, in a small hollow of rock. Ivers and his team of LVA-ENG Level-2 engineers worked in shifts and analysed data deep below the earth’s surface to make sure that the drilling process went smoothly. As their superiors always stressed: a drill that doesn’t drill is a drill that loses money.
‘Slow her to twenty-five,’ shouted Ivers, back over his shoulder, then returned his gaze to the spinning drill bit. He felt tense, nervous. He hated this job. It had the allure of being extremely highly paid, but it was even more dangerous. If a titanium-carbide VII drill bit snapped at anything over 32 speed, then its operators would all be pulped to blood and liquid flesh.
Ivers chewed his lip, craving a cigarette. Instead, he reached into his overalls and popped a stick of chewing gum into his mouth. He didn’t like gum but at least it gave him something to do with his jaws.
Of medium height, with sandy-coloured hair, Ivers was quite stocky, with the trade-mark powerful arms and shoulders of the LVA engineer class: as the saying went, ‘To work a rig, a man has to be stronger than a fucking Pig’-
A red light flashed, reflecting from the Plas-7 sheath. Ivers turned, frowning, and Kesstelavich gestured that somebody was coming. Ivers cursed, stepped forward to the TBD console and checked the readings. All were OK, tiny needles flickering in the amber. They were on target. The drilling was going according to plan, despite them pushing the machinery hard.
Ivers turned, waiting for whoever it was to arrive and wiping sweat from his brow. Probably another fucking fuel inspector, he thought. I fucking hate inspectors. If a child, teenager or adult shows any inclination of wanting to become educated in the inspectorate, they should be taken behind the bike sheds and fucking shot in the back of the head, he growled to himself through his tough and tangy strawberry chewing gum.
That’s how much he hated them: always fucking whining. Always finding some little tweak that supposedly had to be made, some fucking little justification for their hugely disproportionate salaries, and forever covering their own arses with a plethora of pointless paperwork.
Wankers.
Ivers frowned as the two figures came into view. The first was heavily robed, face hidden within the folds of a black cloak and, with a sudden, sinking feeling of dread he realised it had to be—
The top man.
The money behind the LVA phenomenon.
The Big Boss.
Ivers knew of this almost mythical figure through reputation and gossip. He had never met the fellow before, but had spoken to the friends of friends who had been inspected by this dark-robed money man, this suit without a suit. They said that he wore the robes because he had contracted some horrible disease that had eaten his flesh. Ivers shivered, feeling a little sick as he imagined strips of flesh hanging from a green pus-filled face.
And Ivers knew: this man was
strict -
far worse than any snivelling waddling bureaucratic turd of an inspector with a comedy clipboard.
Behind the dark-robed figure stood a large man with greying hair and beard. He had huge hands and a violent look about him, as if he should be wearing desert camouflage gear instead of the dark trousers and loose jacket that he now wore.
Ivers put a false smile on his face as the figures ignored Kesstelavich - who Ivers saw sigh with relief - and headed straight towards him and the TBD console.
‘Ivers,’ came the cool, intelligent voice from within the folds of the robe.
‘Yes, sir. It is a great honour for you to pay us a visit... ahh.’ He glanced up, but could see nothing but darkness within the folds of the hood, abetted by the natural gloom of the working LVA extraction platform. When nothing else was forthcoming, he blurted, ‘I - have not got another inspection scheduled for at least three days. I thought that our work was satisfactory and, and, and—’
‘It is,’ came the smooth voice. ‘Do not panic, Ivers. I am not here to inspect; in fact, your team has provided sterling service while in our employ.’ A hand - a
claw -
emerged from the robe and Ivers found himself taking the metal sheaves and staring at the place where the twisted darkened hand had briefly been. Suddenly, realising his rudeness, he glanced up into the darkness of the hood and felt sweat roll down his entire body, sticking overalls to his flesh in a clammy, uncomfortable embrace.
‘Release orders. You and your team are relieved of duty for exactly one hour.’
‘I... but...’
‘Scan the documents. They are all the authorisation you need.’
Ivers turned, clumsily juggling with the metal sheaves. He scanned them on the console and then turned back, a look of confusion on his face. ‘I ...’
‘Drop the speed to five.’
‘Five? But it—’
‘Do not question me, Ivers. Drop the speed to five - then take your unexpected one-hour break and be thankful that you do not need to hear answers to questions you really should not be asking.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Ivers gathered his documents and together with Kesstelavich, Rothwell, Oldroyd and Kenny headed for the pressure lifts. He glanced back once as the figure watched him depart, and saw the large grey-haired man produce a small pack and stare at the engineers until they disappeared into the gloom of the vertical ascent…
Durell threw back his hood as Gol passed him the QEngine - the ‘Foundation Stone’.
Durell smiled, the smile looking strange against his deformed face.
‘Let us show the world what we can do,’ he said softly.
The Priest wore a grey robe, wooden rosary beads swung against his massive barrel chest and a small battered leather Bible nestled in his huge palms. He stroked the cover, his gold-flecked brown eyes closed for the moment, mouth silently incanting passages from his Holy Book -the words of his God. Outside the cockpit windows of the Comanche the desert rolled by, and eventually The Priest opened his eyes. His keen gaze focused on the featureless expanse beneath him.
‘We shall be there soon,’ said Heneghan, her voice soft. Her head was encased within the HIDSS and hid her shoulder-length hair and smiling oval face.
‘We will be there when God allows, sister,’ came the soothing voice of The Priest as he folded his hands humbly in his lap, at peace with the world.
The Comanche flashed through the clear blue skies, its engines humming.
The sun beat tattoos of light across its dull desert camouflage.
And below, the world rolled by uncaringly.
An hour passed, and The Priest came awake with a start. Getting old, he chided himself sombrely, and yawned, stretching his considerable frame in the confines of the Comanche’s cockpit. Getting too old for
this.
‘ETA four minutes.’
‘Thank you, Heneghan. May God bless your children.’
‘I’m sure he already has,’ she said.
‘No, no,’ said The Priest shaking his head in all seriousness. ‘I would know about that sort of thing.’
The HIDSS helmet turned, the blacked-out insect-eye panels staring hard at The Priest. He smiled gently at the pilot and gazed out of the window at the distant mountains past Al Hijaz. Saudi Arabia - the Arabian Peninsula.
Rub al’Khali - the Great Sandy Desert.
Rub al’Khali - three hundred thousand square miles of mostly unexplored desert. Three hundred thousand square miles of sand and rock, a plateau baked tinder the scorching sun for millennia, a land without any obvious attractions ... And once the home of Spiral_Q: a high-tech base where the major development of the military QIII Cubic Processor had taken place under the watchful gaze of a man named Count Feuchter.
The Priest watched calmly as the Comanche banked, sunlight gleaming from its fuselage, and soared in a huge arc around the blast zone that marked the erstwhile site of Spiral_Q. A huge crater squatted against the desert - and although the preceding year had allowed much of the area to be reclaimed by the desert sands, the enclosed vertical shaft beneath the surface still remained - along with much half-buried detritus of twisted alloy, steel and shattered glass.
‘Take us down,’ said The Priest softly.
The Comanche settled gently, its rotors whipping up huge sand eddies. Heneghan slowly shut down the engines but left them primed - in case they needed to lift off in an emergency.
Heneghan had been on missions with The Priest before.
And they were never simple ...
Opening the cockpit, The Priest stuck his nose out into the heat and looked around. He climbed down and jumped, sandals sinking a little and the hot desert sand burning his toes. He breathed deeply, enjoying the fragrance of purity within the Empty Quarter; enjoying the sudden rise in temperature. It reminded him of thick black coffee, lapping blue sea water on luxurious sandy beaches, and snorting camels with thick strings of saliva between their evil teeth.