Warhead (2 page)

The ice continued to crack, revealing subsurface black alloy blocks: missile batteries, containing M1270-k launchers, advanced 2ti radar and tiny elegant Engagement Control Stations.

Another missile nose appeared. Then off to one side of the broken web came another, and they were joined by still more, until the whole plain of ice seemed to be covered with the tapered, eerily ascending bulks of TitaniumIII warheads—and their gleaming single-stage rockets.

Within seconds the air was filled with sleek, ice-stream-ing bodies as two hundred glistening missiles, each the size of a PAC-5, arced up into the big blue like a spreading plague, engines thundering as the glinting machines rapidly accelerated and dispersed—each one targeting a specific destination.

And then it was done and it could never be
un
done.

The missile carrying the 5000-kiloton warhead flashed from the sky’s fathomless blue vaults. A thousand metres above the huge structure of the combined Global Army HQ, on the plains of south-western Africa where 2,000,000 amassed troops of all nationalities were camped, along with enough military hardware to conquer any land mass on Earth—the HighJ explosives detonated, creating a massive shock wave which propelled plutonium-239 shrapnel fragments into a sphere. They struck pellets of beryllium and polonium at the sphere’s core, which in turn started the basic initial fission reaction accelerating quickly to create supercritical mass—and causing the trigger-bomb to explode ...

This initial explosion took
560-billionths
of a second.

The warhead’s cylinder casing was cast from uranium-238. Within this tamper squatted the fuel for the explosion—lithium deuteride, and a hollow rod of plutonium-239. As the implosion fission device exploded, this trigger released lethal X-rays which heated the interior of the bomb and the tamper, causing the uranium-238 to expand and burn away forcing pressure towards the lithium deuteride; these compression shock waves initiated fission within the plutonium rod which in turn ejected radiation, heat and neutrons, the neutrons impacting with the fuel to create tritium. As a result, deuterium-deuterium and tritium-deuterium fusion reactions began producing excesses of heat, radiation and neutrons—and the neutrons from this first fusion induced fission in the uranium-238 pieces from the tamper. Fission of tamper and shield occurred, producing yet more radiation and heat, and causing the nuclear warhead to
explode.

The fission reaction took another fifty-billionths of a second.

The Global Army—its soldiers, tanks, helicopters, fighter jets, jeeps, trucks, weapons, artillery, ammunition, tents, support staff—was immediately and utterly vaporised.

What detritus remained on the outskirts of the blast after the initial ignition was fused into a sea of molten glass. The world merged with the desert sands in a bright white blinding of insanity and death.

Rekalavich reached the entrance to the Sp_bunker in the narrow back alleyway. He stood, chest heaving, stars of exhaustion dancing in front of his eyes as he fought to halt himself from retching. And then, by some unbidden instinct, his eyes lifted, squinting into the darkened sky.

Something, the tiniest of sounds, intruded on his thoughts as a glint appeared in the sky.

Realisation kicked him viciously in the heart and he stumbled backwards, tripping and tumbling and bouncing down the long narrow stone staircase, falling and slamming his way down and down, deep beneath the ground as outside—

Outside, a white flash ignited the sky.

An 800 k.p.h. blast wave screamed outwards, exerted pressure smashing everything within its roaring path and pulverising all that it met above the ground for twenty kilometres. At the hypocentre of the thermonuclear explosion, the rising and expanding fireball reached 480 million degrees Fahrenheit and vaporised the collapsing Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed. The initial blast destroyed Red Square, the Spiral and RFSS HQ and all buildings and life instantly within a six-kilometre radius.

The sky became illuminated by a surreal, blue-green tint. A writhing column of fire and dust and smoke climbed steadily into the sky, four kilometres wide at its base and curving majestically upwards; colours flickered and danced within the mammoth tower, grey at the base, amber at the heart and pure white capping the rising column until suddenly it sprouted a huge mushroom cap which surged up and out, driving the column upwards.

Thunder seemed to be churning the ground and there was a roar of awesome destruction, wrought by the hand of man.

‘Ah, Mr Carter. I’d like to say “I’ve been expecting you”, but that would be
so
clichéd.’

Carter uncoiled, eyes scanning left and right, Browning held high against his chest. The entire top floor of the Sentinel Corporation’s New York HQ was a single high-ceilinged room—filled end to end with a dazzling array of high-tech next-gen equipment. Radar and guidance systems, military servers, with wall-sized banks of glittering lights, mammoth, free-standing plasma displays sporting spinning maps of cities, countries, continents; distant squatting banks of military simulators, gleaming and silver on silent resting hydraulics. On steel benches sat prototype engines, glittering machines of incredible complexity, and a small black platter on which nestled a tiny, inoffensive-looking frost-hazed black cube.

Durell, with his hood thrown back to reveal the terrible deformities of his twisted face, smiled with a twisting and a
crackling
of flesh, and stared at Carter with slitted copper eyes. In one deformed claw he held a tiny silver disc which he squeezed—and there came a hiss of superheated air as Carter was suddenly surrounded by a haze, a gentle green glow ... He was caught in some kind of force field, a cube of pulsating energy which ensnared him from all sides. Carter started firing, Browning slapping against the palm of his hand as he dropped to one knee. But the bullets were caught in the haze of the field, spinning gently as Durell turned his back on Carter and moved towards a long alloy panel.

Slowly, Carter uncurled and glanced quickly around, a bad taste nestling in his mouth as he watched the still-spinning bullets
melt
and drip slowly to the floor. What would it do to a human body? he thought.

‘You are just in time,’ said Durell, pressing a small black button. To Carter’s left, the QIV Quantech Edition military processor began to hum. Durell laughed. ‘In fact, this is a
perfection
of timing. Especially for you, Mr Carter. Especially for our oldest adversary—and, dare I say,
friend
? You will be here, at the beginning, at the end, you will witness our triumph—you will witness
my
triumph.’ Durell’s head had lowered, his voice dropping to little more than a whisper, eyes fixed like bayonets on Carter’s expression.

‘What are you
doing?’
hissed Carter, filled with horror, submerged in bile.

Screens, previously black squares of obsidian, flared into colourful life along one wall. Cities sprang into view, aerial views displayed in real time from locations across the globe. Durell moved towards the window and looked down over Manhattan. It was bathed beneath him in early-morning sunlight. Durell gave a deep sigh.

Carter’s frowning gaze was dragged to his left, to the glittering images on the screens: to the images of twisting, speeding missiles.

Carter changed the magazine in his Browning and moved slowly forward, towards the walls of his hazy prison. He reached out with the tip of the Browning, and almost had his arm torn from its socket as the field wrenched the gun from his hand—and slowly melted it. Carter watched as liquid metal ran down the inside of the ethereal green glow and pooled near his feet.

‘I hope Spiral have a good life-insurance policy,’ said Durell softly. Carter’s eyes lifted to see—

To see a tiny glitter against the blue sky, a fleeting needle of mercury. And then there came a flash of such brightness, such
intensity
that even through the heavily shielded windows of the Sentinel Corporation skyscraper Carter flinched, dropped to his knees and knelt there, arms hanging loose, useless, mouth open and incredulous eyes filled with sudden tears.

‘No,’ Carter croaked.

Durell turned. ‘But yes,’ he whispered, as a wall of fire smashed across New York, powered screaming towards them—and left a rising cloud of pulped and pulverised debris, atomised and crushed and pulled into the all-consuming mushroom cloud.

Carter knelt, eyes dark and hollow and fixed disbelievingly on the furnace of devastation. Durell turned, slitted copper eyes watching him closely, and Carter thought:

We are going to die.

We are going to fucking die.

Kade was silent in his brain, observing as the blast wave hit the Sentinel5 tower from which they watched in trepidation. Carter’s stare was dragged back to the screens and he saw missiles flashing through the glittering blue atmosphere of the planet called Earth.

The tower shook. Shuddered. Rocked.

Outside, the world before them was excluded; covered by a death veil; drowned by a sea of ash and fire.

‘You are quite safe,’ came Durell’s soothing voice. ‘These towers were built specifically for this day.’

‘To survive a nuclear blast?’ spat Carter.

‘Yes—only a nominal yield, but yes. After all, nothing without such a design brief would be able to survive
that...
’ The screen flickered as satellite scanners kicked in and Carter looked down on a desert. His stomach churned as he saw the fused and glowing glass, the edges of a crystallised wasteland, the charred half-corpses of an army lingering at its edges. And he saw that the Global Army, the mammoth united worldwide conglomeration of the soldiers and weapons of all nations formed to combat the Nex and Durell had been utterly—totally—destroyed.

Carter vomited onto the smooth stone floor as the building around him shook with thunder and below him millions of people died in the raging fireball.

There came a
fizz.

The force field surrounding Carter disintegrated and Durell motioned to two Nex warriors carrying Austrian Steyr TMP 9mm sub-machine guns. They moved forward on well-balanced heels, clad in simple body-hugging grey uniforms, their faces pale and white, eyes copper and burning. They approached Carter. One reached down with a gloved hand and Carter’s face snapped up, lips covered with spittle and vomit. The long black knife in his fist slammed into the Nex’s eye. The dark steel thrust hard and deep into the brain beyond. Blood spattered against Carter, pumping out over his fist, and he had the Steyr TMP in his grasp even as the Nex began to fall, the sub-machine gun’s strap caught across its shoulder. Carter squeezed the trigger and a swarm of bullets ate into the second Nex, drilling a slick, bloody groove up its chest and caving in its throat. It flipped to the ground, fingers clawing at the metal in its flesh. It screamed long and shrill.

Carter rose to his feet, face covered in speckles of blood, eyes wide and wild and filled not just with anger and hatred but also with a terrible emptiness.

What good? What good now?

You are just
too late
my friend ....

Durell turned, mouth opening to show deformed teeth within the circular void of his black mouth. His tongue was like a tiny fish. And he was smiling in
victory.

Carter wanted to speak.

But he did not. Could not.

There were simply no words.

Outside, the conflagration caused by the thermonuclear explosion continued to roar.

Carter closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

CLASSIFIED NK54/nuke277/SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS UNIT

ECube transmission excerpt

Date: November 2XXX

On 5 November 2 XXX two hundred nuclear warheads with varying yields struck strategic military and civilian targets within the space of 35 minutes. Targets included heavily militarised cities such as London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, plus a variety of vast armies and stockpiles of military hardware.

The destruction was on a vast scale. The loss of human life runs into billions.

During the emergency, World Agencies were crippled. They were unable to do anything about these targeted strikes; all fail-safes failed, anti-nuke satellites swam blindly in near-space orbits, ground silos refused to operate: all were under the seemingly omniscient control of the QIV cubic processor. This fully sentient machine finally delivered its threatened promises.

Shortly after the staggered nuclear strikes, a further wave of long-range missile warheads was delivered; this time they did not contain bombs but advanced chemical agents named Half-life Accelerators. These chemicals were scattered over strike zones, and over the following months quickly reduced dangerous radiation levels to a moderate and effectively survivable level.

The self-proclaimed perpetrator of these nuclear attacks was the former Spiral agent named Durell.

World governments have been assimilated and are run with pro-Nex staffing; centres of control, trade and finance [CTF] have been shifted to the many Sentinel Corporation towers which adorn most major world cities. From these Sentinel towers Durell now rules his empire.