Christopher Evans - Omega

Her attempt at a smile was not successful. “He’s very useful with his stick. Quicker than you might imagine. He pushed his old friend in front of me so that he took the shot I had intended for him. And hacked me down.”

I was surprised that she could speak of it without emotion, given their long association. All the while she was scrutinising the instrument panel. The Nimbus was still descending, dropping down and down through the gathering darkness.

“Well, major,” Legister said to me. “What is your decision?”

He’d lowered his pistol. I realised I was still holding the one Rhys had given to me.

“You’re too late,” I said. “The weapon’s already been used.”

“What did you expect us to do?” Rhys interjected. “Nothing?”

“The Americans will already be retaliating.”

“Indeed,” said Legister. “Though whether the conflict escalates may depend on how successful we are here.”

“What do you mean?”

Legister looked impatient that he had to spell it out. “Sir Gruffydd represents the extreme of the warmongers among our chiefs of state. He has concentrated his supporters here in England over recent years. Many of them are aboard this aeroplane.”

“Are your men in control of it?”

“Only this forward section. But it will be sufficient for our purposes if we can hold out.”

“Really?” I said sceptically. “How? Are you going to crash the plane and kill everyone? That won’t stop the war. You heard what my uncle said. Other Omega attacks are being launched from continental sites.”

“Not yet they aren’t. Your uncle rather exaggerated on that score—exaggerated the extent of the enthusiasm on the European mainland for its indiscriminate use. Those in charge there do not share your uncle’s unbridled appetite for all-out war.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Put yourself in their position. The European landmass has suffered far more devastation than our islands. They’ve been in the front line for sixty years, seen their homelands reduced to cinders and rubble. They have every reason to be extremely cautious.”

Was this just another lie? I tried to recall the tenor of the Versailles meeting. There had been no sense that the participants had known anything about Omega. I said as much.

“Knowledge of its existence was severely restricted,” Legister admitted. “As you saw yourself on this very aeroplane. The translocation of the fleet is intended as a demonstration, a bargaining counter. This was the compromise arranged between the opposing factions in the high command. But, like all compromises, it’s neither fish nor fowl and will be unlikely to deter the Americans from wholesale retaliation. Unless we can supply them with stark evidence that there remains a significant tendency opposed to total war.”

Legister had a fondness for the orotund phrase and the circumlocution. He had known all about Omega and my uncle’s intentions when he interrogated me—presumably merely in order to gauge my loyalties or check the extent of my amnesia. It was absurd that we should even be discussing the potential outcome of its use on the flight deck of a hijacked aeroplane, surrounded by corpses and a croaking mass of nerve gas victims.

“Why should I believe any of this?” I said.

“We’re flying back to the main facility at Orford Nss,” Rhys told me. “The plane’s transmitting a homing signal tuned to the frequencies of a B-75 Stargrazer.”

A high-altitude bomber that could be armed, I knew, with nuclear missiles. This one, I was certain, would be carrying DPMs.

“They’ll never let you get near there,” I said. “They’ll shoot you down.”

“I don’t think so,” Rhys replied. “Consider the importance of the passengers on board. The chief of the JGC, no less! And the fact that Colonel Vigoroux can provide all the necessary security codes to ground control. We’ll tell them we need to make an emergency landing. There’s an airstrip close by.”

“And then what? Are we going to parachute out of here before the missile hits? Fly the plane into the building? It’s absurd!”

My incredulity was largely a function of my own private panic, a fear that I had trapped myself here while my true existence was stolen by a deranged upstart. There was something else, too—some significant exchange between Tanya and me that I simply couldn’t bring to mind in the frenetic circumstances of the present moment. The very effort made me giddy and disorientated.

“The parachutes are merely a precautionary measure,” Legister was saying. “At a prudent enough height we should survive any missile impact on the ground. You will recall that the earth penetrating devices are designed to focus their destructive power downwards rather than upwards. If we are lucky enough we’ll be able to spirit ourselves away, find a soft landing somewhere.”

It sounded ridiculously optimistic, though it was possible that, even now, he wasn’t telling me the whole story. Perhaps there were prior arrangements—a friendly ship waiting in the North Sea or an airfield specially secured for the purpose.

“And if not?” I asked.

Legister gave the impression that the question was not even worth considering.

Giselle had started to talk to ground control at the Ness. We couldn’t be more than minutes away. In the cabin beyond the two MPs remained on guard, one of them with his weapon trained on the bulkhead hatch, the other on the still-twitching bodies piled at the door to the main corridor.

Including myself, there were seven of us. Rhys looked fervent, Marisa merely wide-eyed with fright. Legister had probably compelled to her help him, and she wouldn’t have been able to refuse him. What she’d most wanted was distraction and a semblance of a normal life. She would never have it now.

“Thank you for saving me,” I said to Rhys in Welsh.

“What are brothers for?” he replied in the same tongue. “Who else do I have, Owain, but you?”

This was said with emotion but without self-pity. I squeezed his arm, something I was certain his real brother would never have done.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said in English to Legister. “Why did you let it come to this in the first place? If you knew what was going to happen, wouldn’t it have been easier to have my uncle done away with in the first place? Or did you try to poison him and fail?”

Legister gave me a smile of withering condescension.

“My dear major,” he said softly, “that would have defeated an important objective of this entire enterprise. It still remained necessary to show the Americans the extent of the damage we can inflict on them. A suitable demonstration of our capabilities. One cannot negotiate from a position of perceived weakness: there would be nothing to negotiate except the extent of one’s capitulation.”

Absurd that I should ever have thought otherwise, his tone conveyed. And he was right: it was absurd. Absurd to imagine that even those who balked at full-scale war in this world had anything remotely resembling pacifist tendencies. It was merely a question of the degree of armed force that needed to be applied to achieve one’s strategic aims. Even for so-called politicians, diplomatic initiatives were the outcome rather than the determinant of military considerations. It was an attitude bred in the marrow of everyone in high office.

Horrified at what I was about to do, I raised the pistol and pointed it at the side of Giselle’s head.

“What if I ended it now?” I said.

Legister didn’t even blink: he merely radiated scorn.

I pulled the gun back and stuck the barrel into my mouth, gagging with terror. Squeezing my eyes shut, I pressed the trigger, jerked with the emphatic bolt action.