Brinkman

By Colin Hazel

Eddie Brinkman, once a famed lawman injured in the line of duty during the dying days of Earth, now a jaded relic of a past that the new galactic frontiers wish to forget. Languishing as the security chief of a lifeless orbital resort he stumbles across footage from a long forgotten Earth, images that suggest his arch nemesis 'Braun' Waltham is still alive and a lost contingent of cops needs his help. With a renewed sense of purpose Brinkman equips himself with the weapons of the future to confront the enemies of his past. Aided by cybernetic augmentations arising from his past injuries, Brinkman seeks passage through the perilous badlands of space, fending off a pirate assault to reach his derelict home planet. There he finds a hostile, ravaged London, a flooded, decaying necropolis where savage mutants, disease and death lurk around every corner. As he embarks on his odyssey through this realm of terror Brinkman uncovers a conspiracy involving sinister corporate forces who have unfinished business with the planet and its potential as a bioweapon. He soon discovers the small cadre of forsaken security forces holed up in the capital's last remaining command base, besieged on all sides by Waltham's forces; a drug addled gangster army that rules the city and captures and kills all in its path. Having battled his way into the beleaguered station he joins forces with its demoralised denizens; seasoned veterans who refuse to yield to Waltham's hordes. When the base is finally overrun, Brinkman and his new comrades evacuate to a seafort in the Thames estuary to plan a suicidal final assault on Waltham's fortress headquarters; the Tower of London, which his heavily armed acolytes have made their home. In the aftermath of the climatic battle Brinkman pursues the fleeing Waltham back into the estuary where he finds himself stripped of his weapons, drifting out to sea on a sinking boat and face to face with his archenemy for an epic last confrontation from which there'll be only one survivor and where the true motivation for Brinkman's vendetta is finally revealed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Colin Hazel
• Release date: Mar 21, 2020

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BRINKMAN

Copyright 2020 Colin Hazel

Published by Colin Hazel

License Notes

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The Bonfire and the Ants

I threw a rotten log onto the fire without noticing that it was alive with ants.

The log began to crackle, the ants came tumbling out and scurried around in desperation. They ran along the top and writhed as they were scorched by the flames. I gripped the log and rolled it to one side. Many of the ants then managed to escape on to the sand or pine-needles.

But strangely enough they did not run away from the fire.

They had no sooner overcome their terror than they turned and circled and some kind of force drew them back to their forsaken homeland. There were many who climbed back on to the burning log, ran about on it and perished there.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

PROLOGUE

The sky was abuzz with rotor blades, an increase in air traffic across the capital marked the beginning of Operation Exodus. ‘Happy Birthday’ by Altered Images had been playing on loop all morning across every radio and TV network; according to the briefing the song was to be the covert signal to set plans in motion. Sergeant Gaz Bradley and the men and women of Serial 105 Bravo had been dragged out of bed during the early hours with an urgent recall to duty; they had paraded at Oval Cricket Ground which had been transformed into a secure command post. The resources were impressive; for months the force had been rolling out two-day ‘point and shoot’ firearms courses across the boroughs and now every officer had been issued with a Glock from the Met’s secret stockpile. With the majority of the Police and their stretched military counterparts deployed on standby to the city centre to quell disorder in and around Westminster, Bradley’s rag tag serial had been cobbled together with whatever personnel the duties office had left to be used for local aid on Lambeth borough’s ‘central sector’. They weren’t expecting much trouble locally, aside from the usual gang tensions and a bit of intel on local agitators using the riots to mask their criminal activities, there hadn’t been any incidents of concern. It seemed that for now it was a waiting game until they received further instructions, and so there they all sat, in a carrier crammed with stale kit, chewing on mars bars; an otherwise typical aid tour. On the streets it was business as usual, a few concerned faces approaching marked units asking what all the fuss was about but other than that people were just carrying on with their day to day lives; whether that be panic buying, drinking or commuting.

By the following afternoon, the serial still hadn’t been stood down, the carrier was stinking of body odour in the humid city heat and Bradley’s Serial, along with three other carriers, had been moved down to the Brixton Road at the junction with Camberwell New Road, sandwiched between Kennington Park and Oval tube station with orders from Silver Command to close the road, man the cordon and not to let anyone through; the capital was being sealed off. The ring of steel was in operation, the seat of power was being secured. The only vehicles allowed through the cordons were Police and Military but other than a few unmarked units containing mysteriously garbed occupants, nothing had come past Bradley’s serial all day while all around irate motorists and pedestrians vented their frustration as loudly as possible. Vague news reports had started to come through of growing disorder erupting in major cities up and down the country, but from Bradley’s perspective the streets around him were eerily silent; word was getting round about the road closures and that something serious was afoot. Annoyance soon turned to concern, then to fear and finally to panic. Suddenly, without warning the radio erupted, ‘URGENT ASSISTANCE STREATHAM HILL!.....MALES FIGHTING VAUXHALL CROSS!.....SHOTS FIRED LOUGHBOROUGH JUNCTION!.....’ and so it went on without pause, but still Bradley’s cordon was deathly quiet, too quiet. Then an automated message, generated by a panic alarm activation back at the station, came over the airwaves.

‘BRIXTON POLICE STATION UNDER ATTACK, URGENT ASSISTANCE REQUIRED.....’

That was it, enough sitting around on their arses, they were needed elsewhere. Bradley could raise neither Silver nor the station ops room amongst the chaos on the radio so he left the other three serials at the cordon and ordered Nunez, his driver, to head to Brixton nick to see what the hell was going on down there. The carrier hurtled along the Brixton Road on blues and as they neared the town centre the smell of burning rubber hung in the air and a dense grey fog clung to the streets. As the serial reached the junction with Villa Road, Bradley was shocked to find the carriageway impassable; blocked by rows of burning cars and thick plumes of smoke obscuring the view ahead. Nauseating nerves rose within him, it looked bad, but he didn’t know how bad. Bradley ordered the carrier over to the side of the road, he didn’t want to draw the whole serial into trouble, he turned to the other officers inside.

‘I’m gonna do a quick recce, see what the fuck’s going on up there, best keep the engine running,’ he said ominously.

‘I better come with you skip,’ offered Laidlaw.

The two men decamped from the carrier, weapons drawn and jogged up to the road block, the smoke was thick and stung their eyes and throats; the heat, like a boiling flannel, clung tightly to their faces. Suddenly there was movement through the black smog, heads bobbing up and down behind the barricade, ‘ARMED POLICE!’ Bradley shouted, upon which there was hastened shouting amongst the bodies huddled before him followed by a flurry of movement as the figures starburst in all directions. Bradley and Laidlaw pursued them, the silhouettes scattered across the pavement and onto the forecourt of a block of flats, slipping around the side of the burning vehicles. Bradley locked onto one fleeing shape and followed him through the smoke, he could hear Laidlaw’s footsteps behind him, Bradley pointed at the escaping figure and shouted ‘Stay on him!’ to his partner as swathes of grey smog flowed between them and their quarry grew faint in the distance. Bradley’s radio was a continuous garble of panicked voices. Then suddenly they were clear of the smoke and the cool fresh air salved their coarse throats. But as the view cleared nothing could have prepared Bradley for the sight that greeted him as he reached the junction with Stockwell Park Walk.....

A throng of bodies stood before him, there were hundreds of them, rank upon rank from Stockwell Road up to Atlantic and beyond; groups huddled together, dressed all in black, a roar of noise, arms flailing about, the jagged edges of blades and barrels visible in their hands, a spontaneous show of force, a multi-tentacled beast, once dormant, breathing, breeding in the bowels of the estates, now awoken, united and loose in the streets. Suddenly the impressive resources he had seen back at the Oval appeared woefully inadequate. Brixton Police Station was ablaze; besieged and overrun, its windows smashed, its walls defaced, its occupants subjected to an unspeakable fate. The fleeing figures re-joined the swollen ranks of this abomination; ambush! This time they did not run when they heard the sirens, this time they stood. Then shots rang out; a crackle, a clap, a dink, dink, dink against the bus shelter advertising hording Bradley now sought cover behind. He’d lost sight of Laidlaw. Rounds zipped either side of him, coming from all directions, he saw flashes from barrels amongst the horde before him, Bradley instinctively levelled his weapon, he marked his target and pulled the trigger.....

‘Is that shots fired?’ asked Nunez from within the stifling heat of the carrier. ‘Sounds like fireworks to me,’ came a reply from somewhere at the back. Then suddenly Sergeant Gaz Bradley was spat out from the blankets of smoke before them; white eyes wide against a blackened face stricken with fear, his hands slammed against the van windows, jolting all inside bolt upright, ‘FACKIN OPEN UP, OPEN THIS CUNT UP!!!!’ the van door opened and he dived inside, ‘TURN THIS FUCKER ROUND NOW!!’ Nunez didn’t question, the urgency in the sergeant’s voice was enough and the van began to turn, then the windscreen shattered, ‘dink, dink, ping’, more rounds struck the engine block, all inside shrieked.

‘WHERE’S LAIDLAW?’ someone shouted.

‘JUST FUCKING DRIVE!’ Bradley screamed.

The insurrection had begun.

CHAPTER ONE – FREEFALL

He entered the narrow tunnel; veins of glistening flowstones ran through the dappled walls and bedding planes in which he was entombed. Using the traction pads of his suit for purchase, he descended from the plateaued ledge that he had crawled along, down onto a steep slope; one careless misstep and he would descend into the abyss like a coaster down a flume. He shimmied through the passage into the fetid darkness below. He was conserving his power reserves but activated the ambient optics when visibility deteriorated; his more advanced mapping aquonics were no use at this depth, the subtle signatures could give his position away and this was unchartered territory. A peculiar shimmer at the base of the tunnel indicated he had reached the end of the dry cave and was about to enter the flooded environs beneath. The pool was the treacherous barrier the rebels exploited to repel incursions. The hazardousness of cave warfare was laid bare by the discovery of Sergeant Sanchez’s lifeless corpse on a narrow ledge beside him. Blood ran from facial orifices and his countenance was fixed in an agonised gurn; arterial gas embolism. 

Something had caused him to ascend too quickly, explosive rebel countermeasures would do it. Futile though it had been it was an impressive feat nonetheless; to haul yourself clear while gripped by the agony of DCS, but then Sanchez always had been a tough operator. 

The Sergeant’s team had been part of a small forward reconnaissance element; that was the advantage of cave fighting in asymmetric warfare, it was a great leveller. You couldn’t send in regular shock battalions and standard tech such as drone sweepers and geo-mapping became unreliable in the harsh conditions. The complex subterranean networks both naturally occurring and man-made found on many contested and outlier worlds were second nature to their indigenous rebel tenants and they revelled in luring increasing small spearhead enemy forces further and further into the figurative deep water, stretching the supply lines where, having isolated, disorientated and depleted their foe, they would strike in decisive ambushes which would leave the invaders annihilated. Clearance work was painstaking and required small cadres of highly trained specialists. He toggled his aqualung, slid into the icy waters and slowly disappeared into the entry pool. The fate of Sanchez’s men was soon revealed to him after a short descent; loose rock indicated that a charge had indeed been detonated nearby, Randolph and Sayers were suspended against an overhang, disorientated after the blast, they’d risen too quickly, got snagged against an outcrop where they either succumbed to their injuries or ran out of air. Now they just hung there, suspended above him like gormless mannequins, clouds of crimson blossoming around their battered bodies; portents for what lay beyond. He found the final member of the squad, Meeke, when he reached the cave bed, his broken body lay beneath a rock fall; his tanks and breathing lines floating around him like idle tentacles. This was the epicentre of the blast from which the other three had fled. By establishing the fate of Sanchez’s squad he had accomplished phase one of his mission, although extracting the bodies would likely prove impossible. As no one had lived to report what lay beyond, phase two would involve mapping that abyss and confirming enemy numbers so that the commanders topside could formulate a bespoke assault plan. He squeezed past the pile of rocks that rested upon Meeke, rounded a u-bend and began his ascent up the adjacent tunnel, at the top of which his sensors indicated lay another pool and a dry cave. It was from this chamber that the aquacharges had no doubt been deployed against Sanchez and his men.

The controlled ascent had to be agonisingly slow; carbon dioxide toxicity momentarily blurred his vision before he adjusted his gas levels to compensate. He drew the nozzle of his primary weapon, ready for immediate contact upon surfacing. His weapon was a compact hydrojet which harnessed the unlimited abundance of water into a precision high powered blast of water that could cut through stone and bone alike. For rare sub-aquatic contacts he reverted to a repeating spearbow. The shimmer of the surface pool above suddenly neared; he slowed, hugged the tunnel surface for traction then breached the dry cave, his torso silently bobbing out of the water, the hydrophobic coating on his suit restricting the splash. Fate had been on his side; the pool was only being monitored by a rudimentary remote sentry gun mounted on an overhang above him, it had been tracking in the opposite direction and upon sensing his presence whirred and spun to fire, but he had outdrawn it and a well placed blast from the hydrojet separated the gun from its mount and pieces of the drone clattered down against the rocks, the metallic clang echoing in the chamber. Anticipating the noise alerting nearby rebels, he began to submerge back into the camouflage of the water and as he did so a garbed face popped up from behind a rock beyond the gun emplacement, an arm arced, an object was loosed from a hand and an aquacharge plopped into the pool beside him. He instinctively drew his spearbow, fired, and miraculously struck the base of the tumbling bomb which hurtled away into the blackness below him, propelled by the force of the dart. The charge detonated deep beneath him, the concentration of the blast thrust him hard against the tunnel wall amidst a wall of bubbles and silt, cracking his tank against the rock face. His mask sensors relayed the damage and he didn’t hesitate to unclip the fractured tank which spun away. He toggled onto his reserves and began to descend away from the kill zone. As he did so he sensed a disruption in the pool above him and glanced up to see a body enter the tunnel in pursuit. He spun to see a speardart hurtle across his shoulder, nicking his trapezius, but it was the hasty, overeager aim of the inexperienced which was answered by the steadier hand of the veteran. He discharged a bolt directly into the sternum of the figure above which jolted and spasmed with the impact. He fired a second to finish the job, this time a winch round, which he used to reel his target in with the intention of looting tanks should he need spares for the return trip down the tunnel. He had no idea what further damage the aquacharge had wrought; he could be facing a tactical withdrawal against further assailants. But as he reeled in the slain figure he recoiled in horror and his breathing hastened upon realising that refraction within water can create cruel illusions; the rebels had not sent a man after him but a child, a small child. He’d heard they used kids to navigate the narrow crevices of the cave systems but this was the first time he’d encountered one in combat. Gone was the threat, instead replaced by the limp frame and porcelain, cherubic face of an innocent, whose wide pleading eyes pricked his conscience even in the cold, isolated dark of those cave waters. He knew that he had to move or else the choking guilt would consume him, rob him of the guile needed to navigate the perilous return journey; many a cave combatant had perished to indecision in the lonely dark of those remote, unforgiving tunnels. He didn’t even wait to release the tanks and commenced his descent, fleeing the scene, the spectre of that porcelain face haunting him every treacherous step of the way.

He reached the pool through which he’d entered the system much quicker than he should have and, disoriented, he hauled himself up next to Sanchez. The last thing he remembered was crawling up the tunnel of the dry cave, fleeing the hallucinatory face of the porcelain child as it rose eerily from the pool beneath him. He was found by an ancillary recon team and medevacked to a multi-place chamber at a surface base camp in the rear for treatment. Upon regaining consciousness he was able to recall enough details of his expedition for commanders to decide against risking further assaults through that particular bottleneck of death. Only Sanchez’s body could be recovered; Randolph, Sayers and Meeke were considered too high risk and were eternally entombed within their watery grave when the command finally lost patience with the campaign and obliterated the entire site with high yield munitions.

.....and in other news Allegra Jones has been at Space City’s central plaza today watching preparations for what has been billed as the Exodus Jubilee celebrations. Allegra, a controversial occasion this as many of the older generations believe the Exodus should be marked with a memorial of remembrance, a commemoration more sombre in tone given the huge loss of life suffered during that dark chapter in human history.....’

‘That’s right Scott, this celebration is very much being driven by our system’s huge student body and its vast network of college fraternities; given the Jubilee coincides with the end of term time, the start of party season and the more upbeat renaissance perspective taught in these modern government sponsored educational establishments. Remember much of this younger generation are lab-brats; products of colonial population and fertility programs with a very different cultural perspective. But for a minority of older generations that proceeded them, the traumatic memories of Earth’s evacuation run deep; the protracted global conflicts that accelerated environmental degeneration, depletion of the planet’s natural resources, the world-wide energy crisis that followed; the gradual cessation of economic activity and eventual ecological collapse. As those events converged, the planet destabilised and anarchy reigned as major cities, once majestic, fell to famine, fever, frost, fire and flood. Governments of the day struggled to maintain order as supply lines collapsed and society was gripped by terminal decline. But it was during this same chaos, as humanity faced extinction, that salvation came through a leaked series of highly classified decoded signals; intercepts of an unknown, possibly extraterrestrial, origin, long suppressed by these faltering regimes eager to exploit the stars, finally released into the public domain by activists who saw their technological potential as humanity’s last hope. The huge step-change that followed, specifically terraforming blueprints and development of the now ubiquitous metadrive, brought interstellar travel and colonisation to the masses; Earth was evacuated and the once unassailable heavens were rapidly colonised. Renewed access to abundant resources from our own Copernican system, among many others, accelerated centuries of development in mere decades. New frontiers opened and the ‘Technolution’ began. And it is this sense of re-birth that organisers say is at the heart of the Jubilee celebrations, while others argue that the Technolution simply perpetuated the great inequalities that already existed on Earth; widening the wealth gap with advance parties from established government fleets first to exploit the technology; annexing and monopolising the vast swathes of Space richest in resources, leaving the low tech latecomers and those sections of society deemed undesirable by the new corporatist empires to be marginalised in the remnants, banished to inhospitable outlier worlds. And what of the abandoned planet we left behind? Well you’ll struggle to find more than just a cursory mention of it in any school book today; a desolate rock etched on rudimentary diagrams of the Orion Arm for the benefit of elementary kids. But in recent times small but vocal groups of historical revisionists have lobbied for more consideration to be given to what they see as an integral part of our cultural heritage, with some fringe organisations even going so far as to advocate re-colonisation, claiming that the planet of our origin is healing. But for now Earth’s only link to the systems that surround it is the tiny fleet of government aid ships that make sporadic drops to the small populations of marooned denizens, many ravaged by disease and decay, that are rumoured to still exist on what is left of the surface. Unconfirmed reports of unsanctioned expeditions to observe these rumoured inhabitants continue to circulate, however an official spokesperson for the UCOS central command has confirmed that a quarantine exclusion zone remains in place to all commercial traffic and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Now back to you in the studio Scott.....’

‘Thank you Allegra, so could you be tempted to sign up for a tour of Earth?’

‘Ew god no Scott.’

‘I second that. I can’t see them selling many tickets for that show! In other news a major offensive in the Galvidian system has seen the central command’s Shock Divisions halt the rebel advance and liberate a number of occupied worlds across the contested sectors.....

Brinkman woke. He breathlessly rose, cast the covers off in frustration and orientated himself. His eyes focussed on the blurred red figures of the clock face in front of him. He’d been stirred by the newscast droning from the unit’s speakers. His head hurt. He saw the inhalers on the bedside cabinet and remembered the heavy session the night before. He could hear the autoperc rumbling in the background and the thought of some warm coffee dragged him off the bed. He sat hunched on the edge of the mattress for a moment, getting his head together, wiping the sleep from his eyes and flexing the hydraulic joints of his left arm. Superficially he could pass for late thirties but his eyes betrayed hidden hardship. He had a rugged face; his hair was closely cropped with tufts of grey at the temples which offset his chiselled features. Someone had once told him he looked like J. Jonah Jameson; he had always meant to find out who that was. He glanced over at the tasselled tresses lying next to him, her friend had gone, she wasn’t stirring, so he silently slipped off the bed and into the kitchen zone. The lights jumped on, stinging his eyes as he walked onto the pre-heated floor tiles. He poured himself a beaker of steaming black coffee and sipped it raw.

As he got out of the cleansing unit he could see movement in the bed zone. The noise must have woken her. She was picking up various items of scattered clothing from the floor, trying to identify what was hers and assemble her outfit in the order that she dressed; busying herself to dispel the morning-after awkwardness. As Brinkman entered the zone she turned and smiled coyly through tired eyes; in the cold light, make-up smudged, she looked her age, late teens maybe older. He smiled at her and offered her a beaker of coffee. She shook her head in bewilderment. Brinkman’s throat tightened, he hated these moments, when they showed their age, when something he vaguely recalled as guilt swept through him. And more than anything he was angry at himself for feeling that way, a throw-back to the dated social conditioning of Earth. He suddenly remembered pushing the inhalers on her to try and loosen her up and a second wave of guilt flushed through him. He had a flashback to the streetwalker he’d tagged a few nights previous in the Quarters; her bruised skeletal frame writhing about on cheap motel sheets.

He forced another smile, ‘Gotta go to work…..’

She nodded dozily.

‘…..so, you’re going to have to go…..’ he continued.

‘Ok.’ She said chirpily and sped up gathering her things like an obedient puppy. When she was dressed he walked over to the door and opened it; her cue to leave.

‘You’ll call me?’ she asked, her eyes betraying a desperation which Brinkman found unattractive; the post-coital neediness shattering the allure she had possessed the night before.

‘Yeah, I’ve got your number. Sorry I’m not much of a morning person. We’ll hook up when I’m next off shift,’ he said insincerely. He could see she clung to those words.

He charged her commerce card and with that she was out the door, and off his hands.

With the girl gone he approached his A.I dock. It had been his third consecutive night of disturbed sleep. The dock glowed as he neared.

‘Problem sir?’ the soothing androgynous voice asked him.

‘Run psych.....’

‘Sir I see from your profile upload that the Karnarvan Cave Complex was a particularly traumatic deployment. You have previously declined a neural purge because you weren’t comfortable with the 33 percent chance of collateral loss.’

‘Yeah, I don’t want them taking the good wood along with the rot.’

‘You will continue to have these flashbacks until you rationalise the stimuli and reconcile the emotional deficit. This can be accomplished in one of three ways: The first option is to simply supersede the trauma with a greater stressor. This will however be more psychologically damaging in the long term and I advise against it. The second option is to re-immerse yourself in the same environment that caused the trauma, subject yourself to identical