Warhead (65 page)

‘Come and taste God,’ hissed The Priest, and charged.

They connected, Carter slamming punch after punch into The Priest’s face; The Priest launched a kick, but Carter blocked it with a downward blow, then smashed his elbow into The Priest’s face. The Priest rolled, knocking Carter from his feet, and then stood with his face a demon’s mask of crimson, smiling down, chuckling, showing absolutely no signs of pain, or discomfort, or weariness.

Carter blinked—

And saw the gun in The Priest’s hand.

Carter breathed out slowly, gaze fixed on the dark eye of that gun and then lifting to meet The Priest’s gold-flecked brown-eyed stare. Triumph danced there, shone in those bottomless depths.

‘Why, Priest? Why? I thought you were Spiral. I thought you were on our side. I just don’t
understand
.’

‘I can see the bigger picture, Carter. Whereas you—well, you only see a tiny part of the puzzle. There is a time to keep silent, and a time to speak—a time to love, and a time to hate. Now is my time to hate, Carter. Now is your time to die.’

A scream hammered from behind Carter, wind forcing him down against the deck as something huge and black smashed into and over his vision, a titanic fury that howled scant inches above his prostrate body making his ears scream and his head pound and ripping all breath from him ... The Comanche, travelling at over two hundred kilometres an hour, slammed into The Priest, front landing gear crumpling and crushing to push the war machine’s nose down heavily onto the deck with a screech of tearing steel and showering sparks. It skittered along, tail sweeping around in a broad arc and sending Nex soldiers sprinting for cover, and then slowly slid to a halt at the end of a long red smear of liquid, pulped Priest.

‘If you’re going to preach, then preach. If you’re going to kill, then kill.’ Carter smiled a real nasty smile. ‘And amen to that, holy man. A-fucking-men.’

The cockpit canopy creaked open, and Mongrel heaved his patched-up body out onto the Dreadnought’s deck. The armoured rotors finally thumped to a halt, and Mongrel grinned over at Carter, then moved round to the front of the Comanche and attempted to peer underneath, limping and wheezing with pain.

Carter climbed to his feet, and followed the long red smear to the ticking, clicking, hissing Comanche. Mongrel gestured with his thumb at the mangled crush where the remains of The Priest were wrapped partly round the mini-gun, partly around the twisted landing gear. The head, apparently, had gone.

‘I think I could have managed softer landing,’ he said.

‘No, no.’ Carter smiled, slapping Mongrel on the back and making the huge squaddie groan in agony. ‘I think you did just fine, my friend. Ten out of ten. You deserve a fucking Blue Peter badge.’

‘Sorry I took so long. Had a few little ...
complications
.’

‘Believe me mate, you arrived
just
in time.’

Mongrel glanced at the red mush that The Priest had become. ‘I think we not have problems from
that
cunt again. I think
that
cunt gone to meet his maker in a bin bag! And I ain’t talking about no pearly gates, mind you, but the old hot-sulphur-under-foreskin kind of welcome! You digging The Mongrel?’

Carter frowned, giving Mongrel a strange look. ‘You OK? Lost a lot of blood, have you?’

Mongrel grinned. ‘It finally does look like Lord decide Priest was expendable. After all, not every day somebody drop helicopter on your head! The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways!’

‘Daddy!’

Joe ran out, followed closely by a heavily armed Roxi. He fell into Carter’s arms, and Carter held his son for long minutes, smelling his hair and his skin, feeling the warmth of love that spread through his every atom. Then, finally, he glanced up at Roxi, at her glittering green eyes, and she smiled, winked, and blew him a sultry slow kiss.

‘Joe, wait here with Rox. We have one more very important thing to do.’

Mongrel tossed Carter an H&K sub-machine gun, and the two men limped back down the ramp and into the control room; the battered leading the bruised. Carter pointed his gun at Alexis, but she shook her head, hands lifting in modest supplication.

‘Stop the Warhead,’ Carter spat.

‘I already have,’ she said, and pointed towards the screens. They showed an array of missiles floating on the ocean, a huge gathering of metal debris. ‘I have sent Nex soldiers to pick them up; to destroy them.’

‘Why they floating?’ said Mongrel.

Alexis turned, and pointed to the QIV processor—or, at least, the smashed remains of the QIV processor. Carter and Mongrel stared for a moment, then Carter looked back at her.

‘They no longer have a control source,’ she said. ‘The QIV destroyed the original Warhead’s AI; it took complete control of the machine sentience. Without the QIV, the Warhead has no guidance. Without the QIV, the Warhead has no
life.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘It deserved to die,’ Alexis said.

‘It should never have been born,’ snapped Carter.

‘Yes.’ Her stare fixed on him then, a deep and questioning look. ‘There are many among us who had already turned against Durell; we were tired of his exaggerations, of his blind vision, of his
lies.
I allowed Roxi to take your son from the Sentinel Tower. I covered for her; I protected your little boy.’

Confusion flooded Carter’s mind. He took a deep breath, and nodded. Words would not come to him. He did not know what to say.

‘What would you have me do next, PureBreed?’

‘PureBreed?!’ choked Mongrel, but Carter’s mean stare cut off any thought of progression with that well-loved Mongrel humour. Mongrel chewed at his own tongue with his stumpy teeth, trying not to express the myriad of jokes which inundated his mind.

Carter stared into Alexis’s eyes. Then
he focused.
Now he understood; now he knew what he had to do. ‘I want you to evacuate the Dreadnought immediately. There is a package I must deliver.’

‘Hey,’ said Mongrel, nudging Alexis. ‘You know, your lot and our lot, we need to learn to live together! As big family, no? An int—... an integ— ... a big mixing pot of Nex and human, eh, love?’

Alexis reached over, and kissed the huge soldier gently on the cheek. ‘I think that is a battle for another day,’ she said, her copper eyes glowing. They walked from the command centre, boots crunching across shards and splinters of the shattered, broken,
destroyed,
QIV processor.

The Comanche touched down gently on a high ridge of jagged rock, and Carter helped the wounded Mongrel out onto the rocky mountain top. Roxi and Joe followed. In the distance the final choppers were howling through the skies as they fled the dying behemoth of the Dreadnought.

Joe came to Carter and gave his father a big hug. As they held one another, there came a series of distant detonations in quick succession. This was followed by a distant groaning, a mammoth meshing of metal with metal, and the Dreadnought slowly and majestically tipped at one end, and fell gradually towards the Earth two kilometres below.

As the Dreadnought connected with the ground, it seemed to fold in upon itself, compressing and crushing under its own titanic weight. A noise like the destruction of planets blasted out from the merging of ChainStation BCB module and the Earth as a great cloud of dust and rock rolled up into the sky and billowed out in a huge, expanding mushroom cloud.

Fire erupted then, a kilometre-high column of bright purple laced with silver and green, a huge towering inferno of flame that burned the sky and pointed an accusing finger at God ...

‘Over. Carter, it’s really over, ain’t it?’

‘Yeah, Mongrel, it s over.

‘Oh. Good.’ Mongrel beamed weakly, clutching at one of the bullet wounds in his chest and the red-soaked pad there. His face was pale with exhaustion. ‘Hey, Carter, you want to finally hear that story? Fat Chick Night?’

‘Not in front of the boy, Mongrel.’

‘Ahh. Ahh. Yes, I see what you saying. Maybe later, then.’

‘Yeah, Mongrel. Much, much later.’

Carter stood, staring at the destroyed Dreadnought, watching the rolling billowing desert and staring at the pillar of fire connecting the sky to the African continent. Roxi came up behind him and placed a hand gently on his wounded shoulder.

‘You OK?’

‘I’m OK,’ he sighed. ‘It’s just been a long fight.’

‘But now it’s done.’

‘Yeah, now it’s
dead
.’

‘Shall we go home?’ Her gentle words were filled with a promise.

Carter stared over into Roxi’s bright green eyes. ‘You mean the three of us?’

Roxi ruffled Joe’s hair. ‘Yeah. The three of us.’

‘That would be good.’ Carter smiled and, reaching across, kissed her warm soft lips. ‘That would be
really
good. Like you could never imagine, my love.’

A few minutes later, the Comanche leapt into the sky, banked, turned its tail on the devastation left by the dying Dreadnought—and cruised steadily across the endless blue.

W
ith the world still in uproar, Carter led his new family back to the UK, where they ripped the boards from the doors and windows of his old house in Scotland and allowed fresh air to infiltrate the dusty interior for the first time in half a decade. It took them a week to clean the place up and make it liveable. When they had finished Carter bought himself a bottle of genuine Lagavulin and sat, after lighting the wood-burning fire, staring out of his old window at the snow, breathing the scent of wood-smoke and watching the distant peak of Ben Macdui. For a long time he replayed the past. He became a victim of nostalgia, but did not really mind. Now, finally, he had a lot to be thankful for.

After the attack in Cyprus where Samson, Carter’s faithful chocolate Labrador, was shot, the old Spiral woman Mrs Fickle, gnarled and ancient but with the strength of ten men, had come across the wounded animal. She had taken the whimpering dog back to her own cottage, removed the bullet and stitched the wound the old-fashioned way. With a tenderness that belied her outwardly brutal appearance of gun-toting, psychopathic granny, she had slowly and carefully nursed the dog back to health.

Mongrel had regained his full health after his bullet traumas at the hands of The Priest, had married Constanza and now headed one of the newly formed Spiral units whose aim was to re-establish world order and help with the building of new governments. On his stag night, he had faithfully retold the story of Fat Chick Night to a gathering of sixty-four inebriated men—including Carter, who sat in a drunken haze in the corner with his shaking head in his hands as Mongrel’s voice boomed over the crowd. The story involved Mongrel, a
Twilight Zone
series of events that led to every single woman in every public house in the
entire town
on that particular evening being at least a generous and bouncing size 18 and having breasts like melons, a subsequent encounter with thirteen drunken fat women out on a hen night who all took a shine to Mongrel and insisted on him sharing their communal bedroom—and an ensuing night of intense debauchery that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush. When questioned on his persistent choice of ample-framed ladies, Mongrel had himself blushed like an English rose and delivered the immortal statement: ‘Fat women best. I tell you, plump lady crème de la crème, they truly beautiful ones, because you never short of handful!’ Mongrel had chundered away all night. His final words, before he passed into a drunken Guinness-stained coma on the sticky bar-room floor, were the words, ‘I now revised. Is true. Mongrel finally improved in moral fibre. Mongrel new Weetabix. Little Mongrel no longer Wild Willy.’ After the wedding, Mongrel went on a mission to plump out Constanza as best he could, successfully endured a series of chemotherapy treatments, and gave a hearty two-fingered salute to the prospect of death by cancer. His favourite phrase became ‘Fuck that cancer.’ And he did. Well and truly.

Mongrel and Constanza had fourteen children.

Across the globe, many of the old governments were reestablished and peace descended like a gentle veil over the planet Earth. It appeared that
finally
humanity was sick of brutality and death. In a way, the Eden that both Durell and The Priest had so zealously sought was actually established. For a time, at least.

Sonia J created a brand new TV show called
Tales of Strength and Courage,
and took over the reins of HIVE Media with the aim of promoting the positive attributes of human nature. The programme became the most successful TV venture in the history of the planet.

Four months had passed since the end of Durell’s reign of terror and insanity. After the first month, Carter had started to experience headaches which grew in intensity with each passing night. He deliberated long and hard on the cause, finally making an appointment to see a Spiral specialist. After various scans and X-rays, she informed him of an alien artefact near the centre of his brain. She told him it was impossible to remove. She told him that to remove this ‘growth’ would very probably leave him in either a vegetative state or, quite simply, dead. It was too deeply buried. It was too well
secured.
Carter refrained from telling both Roxi and Joseph about his pain, his worries, or the recent medical diagnosis. This was a burden he knew he must carry alone.