Spiral (53 page)

The two war machines hurtled towards one another. In the blink of an eye they had closed at speed, machine guns roaring, tracer bullets spinning lines of fire across the short distance. They veered, the Comanche twisting down and to one side, the black helicopter nearly over the top - but not quite ... A billion glittering crystal fragments shot out in a shimmering display as the Comanche’s armoured rotors smashed the enemy’s cockpit canopy into dust and sliced the Nex pilot cleanly in two.

The Comanche danced sideways, away from its dark and bloody deed.

Globules of blood spun up and out on ice-rimed rotors.

Within the black helicopter, the Nex looked down, mouth open in disbelief. Its body relaxed into two halves, the head and upper torso gesturing insanely in sudden panic as it slid into the footwell. The black helicopter tipped, Nex blood pooling in its interior, and screamed down into the sea. And was gone.

Searchlights from the crawling tanker strobed across the dark waves.

Carter breathed. Slowly.

‘That was fucking nasty,’
said Kade carefully.

‘Fuck you.’

‘Temper, temper.’

At a more sedate pace, the Comanche dropped lower, skimmed the dark waves and shot like a bullet across the watery desert desolation of the empty dark seas.

The Comanche flew on over the Pacific.

Carter glanced down at the corpse with which he was cramped into the cockpit, half seated upon: an unloving intimacy - the flesh was still warm, he could feel it through his own clothes. He tried not to think about the destroyed face and the pulp of blood and brains smeared over the inside of the cockpit. The smell made him want to be sick, though it had evaded his awareness in the turmoil of battle. Until now.

‘You’re better off alone, buddy. You know she was the enemy; you know she was bad.’

‘Leave me be, Kade. I can do without your shit.’

‘You need me, buddy.’

‘I’m not your fucking buddy,
buddy.’

‘Ooooh, touchy.’

Carter licked at his lips and guided the Comanche low, no particular destination in mind, just needing to fly, to run, to flee, to get away from the Nex and the horror they represented, the
death
they represented ...

What to do now? he thought. Carter sighed out loud. I’m tired, so tired. Tired of everything.

‘And
so
we need to think; to plan. Contact Jam - he can help you, Carter; he can kick you out of this brain-fuck childish melancholy
-
hah, just because the bitch is dead. You need to become strong again, Carter. Jam will help you do that!’

Carter pulled free the ECube. In the insect-head-like HIDSS, a dark visor surveyed the soft blue digits. He scrolled and punched in Jam’s descramble code and waited. The ECube rattled in his hand.

‘Carter?’

‘Jam - I’m in a world of shit!’

‘Carter - you remember our motto?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Remember it.’

The ECube died.

Carter smiled grimly.
Remember the Kamus.

Carter thought back.

Kamus-5.

And it sent a cold chill through his soul.

He chewed his lip for a moment.

‘Fuck, I need a cigarette.’

Natasha.

He remembered her pretty face.

A little part of his soul said: No.

But he knew; deep down. They had her; there was no escaping.
No
fucking escaping.

‘Now isn’t the time to roll over and die,’
snapped Kade.

‘Why not?’ said Carter gently.

‘Because you’re stronger than that. Because we can get through this; all we need is time and a little brotherly solidarity
-
man, we can work together now that bitch is gone. We can be strong again.’

‘Kade, I despise you.’

‘No, you don’t Carter. You are me; and you can’t hate yourself.’

‘I always have ... Listen, don’t you ever get tired, Kade? Tired of the killing?’

‘It is why I exist,’
said Kade darkly.

Carter nodded, the HIDSS bobbing. He banked the Comanche, there was a drone from the engines and they spun out across the Pacific Ocean; beneath them the waves rolled and the sea seemed suddenly endless, a vast world of black merciless beauty stretching out for ever and beckoning for them to jump aboard and ride her into a sweet-tasting oblivion...

‘Kamus-5,’ said Carter softly, nodding to himself. The blood speckles and smears had dried on his hands, on his face, on his clothes. He looked demonic in the gloomy light. ‘We made a pact; that the land of the Kamus was sort of holy; sort of
evil
.’

‘Are we going there, brother?’

‘Yes.’ Carter nodded to himself.

‘You know, that motherfucker Langan stitched us up bad. Dumb fuck led them right to us ... If I had known I would have shot the stupid bastard myself; drilled out his eyes and puked into his skull. I wish I had known. I wish ...’

Carter ignored Kade; Kade was an insignificant buzz of insect talk in his head. Carter felt sick. Carter felt cold. Carter felt alone.

Somebody is going to pay, he realised.

Somebody is going to pay bad.

□
Ωclass relay
□
qiii mainframe code logon

01001010

booting ... sequences initiated...

Carter fell from infinite dark dreams out of one world of pain and into another - a world of pain that was wakefulness. Pain: pure and white, it pounded his temples and brainstem like a lump hammer. A diamond drill bit pierced his eyelids and popped his eyes. A razor wire sliced layers from his cerebellum. His mind was crushed in an iron grip and held for all eternity.

He forced open his eyelids and looked up into a face he knew only too well.

‘How goes it, old buddy?’ asked Jam, grinning. The tall man was standing, leather coat wrapped around his frame, hands in pockets, a smoking cigarette hanging loosely from between his lips. His hair was still spiked, his eyes dark-ringed and hooded but twinkling with an inner humour laced with concern. ‘Thought you’d fucking died on us out there. You touched down in that battered war machine and bam, out you went like a fucking light!’

‘Not good,’ sighed Carter, wincing as he eased himself tenderly into a sitting position. He noted his Browning to his right, beside the bed where they must have dragged him. ‘That to share, you stingy old bastard?’

Jam held the cigarette towards Carter. ‘What’s mine is yours, and yours is mine.’ Carter’s weary face brightened a little and he took the cigarette, took a long drag, passed the cigarette back and lifted the barrel of the Browning gently under Jam’s chin. Jam blinked, hand outstretched to receive the weed. He coughed slowly.

‘You seem a touch on edge,’ he said at last, after a long meditative pause.

‘Let’s see both hands,’ said Carter, and Jam could see there was no humour and no compassion and no give in the man he had once called a friend. Jam removed his other hand from the coat pocket and spread his fingers wide.

‘What’s going on, Carter?’

‘Where’s Slater and Nicky?’

‘Out front.’

‘Where?’

‘On the landing yard.’

‘Let’s walk; you in front. And don’t make me shoot you in the back, Jam, because it would be a fucking bad ending to a good long friendship. Unfortunately, events have conspired to fuck with my brain; I can no longer trust anybody. Not even you. The Nex are fucking everywhere.’

‘We did Belfast together,’ said Jam, his voice hoarse through gritted teeth.

‘I know we did. And in a few minutes we’ll either be sharing a drink or a new adventure in the Realms of the Beyond. I shared a history with Gol, but a fucker who looked just like him still tried to kill me.’

They moved down the draught-filled stone tunnels, Jam’s coat flapping in the gentle cool mountain gusts. Carter walked carefully behind the other man, aware of how fast he could move and how deadly he really was. He might have a glib tongue and a wicked way with the women, but he was a deadly killer. Very deadly.

They emerged into the darkness of pitch-black night.

Slater was sitting on his pack; Nicky had unpacked a small stove and was cooking food. They both turned as Jam and Carter entered—

‘You OK, Jam?’ growled Slater, rising quickly, hands straying towards his gun.

‘No worries,’ said Jam softly, waving for the large man to sit down.

Carter pocketed the Browning. Jam turned, gently patted the face of his old friend. ‘You’re a dumb motherfucker, Carter, you know that?’

‘Hey, sue me,’ said Carter, moving over to the food. ‘Smells good.’

‘You pull a gun on him?’ asked Nicky.

Carter nodded.

She shook her head. ‘You mad bastard - he’s here to help.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

Jam jogged over and squatted beside the group. ‘Right, then - to business, now that Carter has it solid in his mind that I am real. I presume you know what’s going down with Spiral?’

Carter nodded. ‘I know some of the Divisions have been wiped out, some of the DemolSquads have been murdered by assassins. There’s some kind of splinter faction that has a processor that can take over the global military and is intent on world domination. And it was being run by two men: Feuchter and Durell. Only I killed Feuchter back in Saudi Arabia, when Spiral_Q blew up.’

‘Yeah, it really is that bad,’ said Jam, grimacing. ‘They’ve hit Spiral, and fucking hit them hard. Apparently they used this processor to hack Spiral mainframes, put us all in fucked-up situations where they could take us out.’ He took a breath and his eyes were wild, flaring with adrenalin. He lit a cigarette, grabbed a fork and speared a sausage. ‘Yeah, we found out much the same with the help of The Priest. Gol worked with Durell, way back, on something called the Nex Project -although no bastard seems to know what it was, or what it did. Gol pulled out, but Durell carried on with the work until Spiral withdrew the funding and moved him more on to medicines. Gol then moved to Prague - hey, and you know the history behind
that
little venture.’

‘How did you find out about this Nex Project?’ said Carter softly.

‘Well, we’ve been talking to some of the remaining DemolSquads - Nicky and Slater have pulled a few in here to the Kamus. They’re out now, helping The Priest with his
various projects’

‘Thank fuck for that. So we weren’t all wiped out?’

Jam grinned nastily. ‘Take more than a few copper-eyed cunts to wipe this bunch of Squads from the face of the earth. Once we’d discovered the shit that was going down, we used ECubes to relay messages to the Squads who were still alive; created our own little network, piggybacked on descramble codes. Then we started to work on finding out just where those fuckers have run to.’

‘But?’

‘Aye, there’s always a but,’ said Jam, blowing smoke into the night. He frowned as Slater shovelled food into his maw without offering anybody a single sausage. Jam reached over and stole another one, peering at it in the gloom as smoke trailed from his nostrils.

‘Demol16 was hot on your trail when you left England with Natasha. Apparently the TacSquads had a special interest in you - fucking secret police sniffing around your coat tails. Demol16 was sent to monitor you but always ended up being one step behind - they turned up to a fucking massacre in Africa; they nearly died there, Carter, fucking Nex crawling all over the place. Then they tracked you to Saudi Arabia, but lost you shortly after the explosion.’

‘What did Demol16 find in Saudi?’

‘A mess: the remains of Spiral_Q. But no Feuchter.’

‘That’s because I killed him,’ said Carter through gritted teeth.

‘There were no signs of his body. Even though he was involved in an explosion, they had top grade PFScanners and there were no genetic residues - no traces at all.
Somebody
must have come back for his corpse.’

‘Why do that?’ said Carter.

Jam shrugged. ‘No fucking idea. What use is a fried chicken carcass? But anyway, we lost you after that until your ECube blast. Glad you remembered the descramble code, old buddy.’ Jam bit into his sausage and chewed thoughtfully. Then he stood, walked towards the edge of the landing yard and the Apache, and stared out into the Austrian night. His long leather coat whipped around him in the wind.

Carter stepped up beside him.

Together, they stared out into the depths of blackness below. The wind howled around them, buffeting them on the cliff edge; here there were no parapets, no barriers - just a long steep fall into rocky chaos below. Far beneath the two men occasional lights twinkled: synthetic stars deep down towards the ground - bright yellow, white, and sometimes red.

‘I love it here,’ said Jam softly.

‘Yeah. Love the insanity of the place.’