The Omega Solution Read online

  DURHAM RED

  THE OMEGA SOLUTION

  She had never been so close to the enemy.

  The Vampyr let down a ramp. A few seconds later, Saint Scarlet of Durham trotted down it. "Hey," she said.

  "Blasphemy. Well, of all the people I expected to have call me, I can honestly say you were the last."

  "I'd have brought a bottle, but the shops were shut." The monster drew close. "I thought you'd have a gun, or something."

  "Why? I have seen you fight, monster. I know what you are capable of. I have no illusions that, gun or no gun, if you sought my throat you'd take it."

  "Lucky for you I'm not hungry," grinned Durham Red.

  DURHAM RED

  -Peter J Evans-

  #1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE

  #2: THE OMEGA SOLUTION

  #3: THE ENCODED HEART

  #4: MANTICORE REBORN

  #5: BLACK DAWN

  JUDGE DREDD FROM 2000 AD BOOKS

  #1: DREDD VS DEATH

  Gordon Rennie

  #2: BAD MOON RISING

  David Bishop

  #3: BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  #4: ECLIPSE

  James Swallow

  #5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

  David Bishop

  #6: THE FINAL CUT

  Matthew Smith

  #7: SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  #8: WHITEOUT

  James Swallow

  #9: PSYKOGEDDON

  Dave Stone

  JUDGE ANDERSON

  #1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

  MORE 2000 AD ACTION

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  STRONTIUM DOG

  #1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

  FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

  #1: OPERATION VAMPYR

  #2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

  #3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  #2: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES - Mike Wild

  To my parents

  Betty and Bill

  Who passed their love of books on to me, incurably.

  And to the Ordo Literatus:

  "Scriptio sine Industria"

  Durham Red created by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra.

  A 2000 AD Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  www.2000adonline.com

  1098 7 65 4321

  Cover illustration by Mark Harrison.

  Copyright © 2005 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

  All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S. "Durham Red" is a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions. "2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-071-6

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-112-6

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  DURHAM RED

  THE OMEGA SOLUTION

  PETER J EVANS

  The Legend of Durham Red

  It is written that in that year of 2150, the skies rained down nuclear death, and every family and clan lost father and brothers and sons. The Strontium choked our beloved homeworld and brought forth mutants, squealing and twisted things.

  Yet such mutants were not weak things to be crushed underfoot, for the same radiation that had created them warped their bodies, making them stronger than any normal human. They became hated and feared by all, and were herded into ghettos and imprisoned in vast camps. There they plotted rebellion and dreamed of freedom amongst their own kind.

  Some, it is told, were able to escape from the shadows of ruined Earth, to join the feared Search/Destroy Agency. They tracked wanted criminals on worlds too dangerous for regular enforcement officers. They became known as the Strontium Dogs.

  The one they call Durham Red became an S/D Agent to escape the teeming ghettos of her devastated homeland. Shunned even by her own kind because of a foul mutant blood-thirst, she soon found that her unsurpassed combat skills served her well as a Strontium Dog. The years of continuous slaughter took their toll, however, and the tales relate that in the end Red willingly entered the deep sleep of cryogenic suspension, determined to let a few years go by without her.

  All know of the unexpected twist that the legend took. Her cryo-tube malfunctioned. Durham Red woke up twelve hundred years late.

  While she slept, the enmity between humans and mutants had exploded into centuries of total war, leaving the galaxy a shattered shell, home only to superstition and barbarism. Billions of oppressed mutants now worship Saint Scarlet of Durham - the mythologised image of Red herself! The bounty hunter from Milton Keynes has now become almost a messiah figure for mutantkind - and a terrifying blasphemy in the eyes of humans.

  Half the galaxy is looking to her for bloody salvation. The other half is determined to destroy her at any cost. The future is a nightmare, and Durham Red is trapped right in the middle of it...

  1. THE SHANTIMA DEBRIS

  The Iconoclast corvette Righteous Fury was destroyed on day 219 of the year of the Accord 810, while in surveillance orbit over the planet Gadara. The vessel was not on battle-alert: the system had been untroubled by mutant activity for decades, and Fury's remit was a detailed scan of the planet's surface. Perhaps the corvette's captain should have diverted some sense-engine feed outwards, but even if he had done the results would have been the same. Fury was taken completely by surprise.

  At 03.27 galactic standard time, two jump-points opened up within five thousand kilometres of the Righteous Fury, emitting the Tenebrae frigates Bright Fang and Sabreclaw. The mutant ships were preceded by a wave of flayer missiles, fired while still in jumpspace. It was a common and brutally effective Tenebrae tactic. The missiles crossed the intervening distance in less than a second, hammering through Fury's hull armour before detonating their warheads.

  Later study of the Fury's final transmission revealed that most of the bridge crew was wiped out in that first, terrible attack. Only the communications officer survived. Critically injured, surrounded by the burning corpses of her comrades, she survived at her post for long enough to punch a needle-beam distress call through the Tenebrae jamming fields and into the Iconoclast communications network. It was the last thing she ever did. Seconds later a flight of Vampyr assault ships strafed the Fury from prow to stern.

  The bridge took direct hits from antimat fire. The comms officer must have died then, utterly vaporised in a hail of energy bolts, but even if by some miracle she survived the Vampyrs, the damage already wrought on Fury's systems would have finished her. The corvette's reactor went nova at 03.28GST.

  In saner times the comms officer would have received a posthumous decoration for courage under fire. But in the dark days that followed so many lives were lost, so many ships destroyed, that the fate of the Righteous Fury went largely unrecorded.

  The Tenebrae crews, for their part, believed that their victory had been total. They hadn't detected the distress call.

  Neither had anyone on Gadara. The signal was directed outwards, away from the planet. For a few minutes of blissful ignorance, no on
e on the ground knew that anything was wrong.

  Tola Sineon actually heard the Righteous Fury explode; or, to be more accurate, she heard the blast-wave strike the upper atmosphere. She had been on her way to speak to Captain Ityus at the time. The sound made her pause and look skywards.

  Ityus was over by the Venture, leaning against a landing strut beneath the ship's gaping belly. He tipped the visor of his cap up as Tola approached.

  "Thunder," he muttered. "There's a storm coming."

  "Another one?" Tola made a disgusted sound. "Captain, this damned planet is all storms." She stopped next to the strut, puffing slightly. The rough, gritty sand of the desert made for hard going. Walking from the camp to the ship was enough to take the breath out of her lungs, but Ityus had banned the use of comm-linkers while they were groundside.

  Ityus shrugged. "It's not supposed to be pleasant, girl. If it was, we'd not be alone here."

  "I understand that, Het. But I'm worried about the camp. If a storm anything like the last one blows up, it could bring the whole Shear down on top of us."

  "You've been talking to Matthias again, haven't you?"

  Tola nodded. "Captain, I know Matthias is a strange one. But he's got a feel for these things. Like on Senta Tertius - he knew that migration was going to be trouble way before it hit us. Didn't he?"

  "Aye."

  "So he could be right about this, too."

  Ityus snorted. "He could. Or he could be as off-target as he was on Haven. Don't put too much trust in that mutant, girl. That Shear looks stable enough to me."

  Tola couldn't help glancing back towards the Harvester camp, the cluster of temporary structures nestling against the foot of the Shear. Above it, the great wall of stone reared up a thousand metres, the raw edge of a tectonic plate five thousand kilometres across, a rippling fracture that bisected the desert.

  Parts of the Shear overhung the dunes below, and the rock was dense, impervious to sense-engines. The camp had been set up below an overhang that jutted far out above the dunes, casting a long shadow that cooled the buildings for most of the short Gadarene day. Ityus had chosen a hiding place that was protected from both orbital scans and the scorching heat of the desert sun.

  But she had to admit that Matthias was right - something about the Shear frightened her. Looking up at its dark, fractured face gave her an odd feeling of vertigo, and there were too many pieces of it lying embedded in the sand below. The Shear felt poised, oddly malevolent.

  Or maybe it was just what lay in the lock-store that was scaring her. She shivered, despite the desert heat.

  Ityus was looking down at her, smiling. "Go back and tell Matthias not to be such an old woman," he said quietly. "We'll not be here for long. Besides, if a storm does come, where would you rather be? With the Shear at your back, or out in the open desert?"

  "In orbit, actually," Tola replied. "But I'll tell Matthias."

  After trudging back from the Venture to the camp, the inside of the lock-store seemed almost painfully cold. Tola winced as she clambered inside.

  The lock-store was where the Harvesters kept their merchandise and readied it for sale. Double-walled, temperature-controlled and protected by quantum-encryption seals, the store was the most valuable structure in the camp. It was always first to be lifted into Venture's belly whenever the Harvesters left a world.

  Which they did frequently. Tola had been with them for five of her sixteen years, and had never spent more than a week on any one planet in all that time.

  The lock-store had a long central corridor, hatches on either side leading to the various internal chambers. One was open, flickering light spilling from it across the rubberised mesh floor. Tola trotted forwards and poked her head around the hatchway.

  "Matthias?"

  The mutant looked up and switched off the light-drill he'd been using. Protective goggles covered his eyes, dark and many-lensed. With his slicked-back hair and pinched features, they made him look like a bug.

  He pushed them up onto his forehead. "Did you speak to the captain?"

  "Aye." Tola knelt down next to him. "He said the Shear looks stable enough to him, and we aren't going to be here long anyway." She chewed her lip nervously, glancing about at the objects strewn across the floor. "But I'm sure I heard thunder a few minutes ago. Will there be a storm?"

  Matthias frowned. "Maybe that's what I'm feeling. Sneck, I hope not. That last one shifted the whole store a handswidth, did you know that?"

  Tola shook her head. "Was anything damaged?"

  "No. I don't think so. Nothing in here, anyway."

  "Ah," said Tola. Matthias had been spending most of his time in this chamber, working on the Shantima haul to the exclusion of everything else. It was rumoured among the Harvesters that he blamed himself for the deal going sour.

  Then again, Matthias had an odd ability to tell when things were about to go awry, as Tola had reminded Ityus. It had saved their profits, and their necks, on more than one occasion. Maybe it was some unknown mutant ability, or just an eye for detail; no one had ever been able to find out. But it more than justified the man's place among the Harvesters, his other skills notwithstanding.

  It did make him a bit strange, though.

  She noticed that Matthias was eyeing her. "What?"

  "This merchandise troubles you, doesn't it?"

  "A bit." She prodded a fragment with her finger, feeling its coolness. "A lot. Matthias, something horrible happened in that system. No one's saying what it was - believe me, I've checked, but it had to be worse than just a battle."

  "I'm sure you're right." He got up, placing the light-drill on a nearby rack. "The Iconoclasts love to brag about their clashes, even the ones they lose. If Shantima had been the site of a battle it would be yet another epic Iconoclast victory by now, and all over the holofeeds."

  "Something even the Iconoclasts won't speak of..." Tola hugged herself. "That's what scares me. So how can you stand to be with this cursed stuff?"

  Matthias ran his long fingers over one of the canisters they'd found; a drum of metal the size of his clenched fists, the surface of it burnt black. Everything they had found had been scorched, but that was quite normal for what the Harvesters took aboard. What was strange about this find was just how many of the items were covered in shards of black, melted glass.

  "I don't know," he said finally. "Somehow, it calls to me..."

  Tola was about to answer when thunder rippled overhead again, closer. She frowned. "The storm?"

  Matthias didn't speak, just darted to the hatch and out into the corridor. Puzzled, and more than a little frightened, Tola scrambled up to follow him.

  When she got into the corridor he had already reached the main hatch. She saw it open and squinted as white desert sunlight poured in.

  Matthias had frozen at the hatch. She heard him whisper one word.

  "God..."

  "What is it?" She came up behind him. Tola was shorter than Matthias by some way, and had to peer under his right arm to see.

  The Venture was ablaze.

  She cried out in shock. The Harvester vessel was listing sideways on its landing struts, its dorsal drive ripped open and gouting fire. As Tola watched something whipped overhead, and the Venture detonated, shattered into a vast cloud of flame and spinning debris. Chunks of it whipped past the lock-store, hammering into the camp buildings, sending up fountains of shrapnel.

  The flier that had taken Venture was peeling around in a wide arc. Tola saw it joined by two more: russet-brown things leaping across the desert on cones of white flame, spitting energy from massively long gun-barrels at their prows. Antimat fire ripped out into the camp.

  Tola heard the explosions, deafening even through the lock-store's thick walls. She screamed.

  Matthias dragged her back, hitting the lock control with the heel of his hand. The hatch slammed down. "Hide," he gasped.

  "Who are they?"

  "You don't want to know," he snapped, and started bundling her back up
the corridor. "Trust me, you really don't."

  She struggled. "What are you doing?"

  "I might have a chance of reasoning with them. You haven't."

  "Matthias!"

  He was at the entrance to the chamber now. As they reached the hatchway more thunder growled over the store, deeper this time. Something much bigger than the fliers was coming in over the Shear.

  "They're here," he breathed, and shoved her back. She stumbled over the items he'd been working on and fell, fetching up hard on her backside.

  Matthias had an expression of terrible sadness on his face. "All my fault," he whispered, but not to her.

  The hatch slid closed.

  Tola leapt up, dived over to the controls, but Matthias had already locked her in. She didn't waste energy hammering on the metal with her fists, just went straight to the rack with the canisters on it and picked up the light-drill.

  She was aiming it at the hatch controls when the lock-store bounced.