Omega

PROLOGUE

I woke up in the back of an ambulance. Two men in short-sleeved shirts were standing over me.

“I’m sure I’ve seen him before” one said.

The other one leaned closer. “What’s your name?”

For some reason I grinned. It probably looked cheesy.

“Owen,” I mouthed. “Owen Meredith.”

I wasn’t sure whether the words had actually come out.

A gold Christmas-tree star hung from the roof, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. I tried to remember what had happened. An explosion. I’d been knocked over. The ambulance’s siren was wailing.

The man who had loosened my tie was asking me other questions, but I couldn’t hear him properly. Pain was blossoming in my head. Everything began to fade.

It was Lyneth who had insisted we take the girls Christmas shopping in the West End. We’d set off early, taking the train so that Sara and Bethany, seven and five, could peer excitedly at the industrial estates and wrecked car graveyards that lined the approaches to London Bridge station.

We spent a couple of hours in Covent Garden, where there were jugglers and mime artists to keep the children entertained, before lunching in the Piazza. Then it was on to Regent Street, Lyneth already having accumulated three carrier bags of presents by strategic strikes on selected stores while I shepherded the girls away from ice cream stalls and street vendors selling helium balloons of Winnie the Pooh and Harry Potter.

As Lyneth led the way down Regent Street I felt myself beginning to flag. We were headed for Hamley’s, where the girls had been promised an audience with Santa Claus. The pavements were thick with uncompromising shoppers. I clung on tightly to Bethany’s hand as we wove through the crowds, dodging buggies and squalling toddlers, pulling up sharply at intersections where traffic lurched out of side streets the moment the lights changed.

At the entrance to the store Lyneth stopped and marshalled us. She looked, if anything, fresher than when we had set out that morning, her bobbed blonde hair sprinkled with drizzle, her cheeks rosy, her eyes filled with the gleam of a good morning’s work already done, targets met, everything still on schedule. We’d met at school and had first gone out together when we were sixteen. Half a lifetime ago. So long a companionship only heightens those moments when you look at someone and see if not a stranger then someone whose familiarity is in itself strange.

Of course I can’t honestly say I thought anything of the sort at that moment. I remember only her standing there in her navy gabardine coat, putting her shopping bags down to wipe Bethany’s nose before straightening.

“Listen” she said to me in the considerate-yet-purposeful tone she always adopted when making a concession, “why don’t I take the girls inside while you pop off for half an hour and get something for Rees? A sweater or something.”

Rees was my brother, always a problem to buy for.

I grinned. “An hour would be better.”

She gave me a firm look. “Forty-five minutes at most. It’s going to be heaving in there.”

“OK. I’ll see you at the grotto.”

“There isn’t one. He does the rounds.”

“Then how will I find you?”

“Mobile, silly.”

This was Sara, always quick off the mark, just like her mother. I poked my tongue out at her and she responded in kind.

“Make sure you switch it on,” Lyneth said.

“Will do.” We had one each of course, so Lyneth could co-ordinate our movements in situations like this. She was always doing battle with my timekeeping and organisation.

I watched her take the girls inside before crossing the road at a red light and heading down a side street for a swift drink to restore myself.

I stood at the bar of a pub whose name I can’t remember, sipping a half. In the mirror I could see three men in their twenties sitting at a table. One of them was staring at me. Cropped hair, lots of muscles, a bit fearsome looking. He said something to the others and began making gestures in my direction. They looked blank. Before I knew it, he was at my side.

“You did that series, right?”

His accent was cod-cockney: grafted on, like a studied attempt at de-refinement. He was in his early twenties, a silver ring in one ear, his tight ribbed polo neck showing evidence of bodybuilding.

I nodded amiably.

“Battlezones, yeah?”

“Battlegrounds”

He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Those tank battles, man. Awesome.”

His lips were pursed in approval. I made appreciative noises.

“That Tiger tank—where was it? Same place as that submarine.”

“Kursk.”

“The way you took us inside, showed us what it was really like. The graphics were A-1. And that tank commander, he was a real hero. Six kills! He survive the war?”

“He wasn’t a real person. We generated the character from a variety of original sources.”

“You felt as if you were really in there, you know? All the controls, the bumping and hustle. You could almost smell the sweat and ammunition!”

“We wanted to make it as realistic as possible.”

“There going to be a PC game or anything? I’ve got Steel Storm and Red Star Rising, but I liked the intimacy, you know?”

I wondered how to reply to this.

“Excellent idea,” I told him. “I’ll talk to my brother. He’s the computer wizard.”

“You’d rake it in. What about another series?”

“It’s in the planning stage.”

“Yeah?” He plainly wanted to know more.

“We’ll be focusing on more recent conflicts—the Falklands, the Gulf, Bosnia, possibly Iraq.”

“You travel there? All those places? North Africa and stuff?”

“Some,” I said vaguely.

“I’m in the T.A. myself. Hitched a ride on a Challenger on Salisbury Plain one time.”

“Oh? Was it fun?”

“Nearly fucking choked from the exhaust fumes. Those things can really motor.”

I kept smiling, now a bit uncertain of the exact nature of his enthusiasm.

“Best thing I’ve seen on the box in years,” he announced.

“That’s great to hear.”

He was offering his hand. I took it and shook. His grip was firm and muscular, and he pumped my arm as if he was sending me off on a suicide mission.

“When’s it out on DVD?”

“In the spring. Lots of background info on how we did the simulations.”

“I’ll look out for it. You really opened my eyes.”

He returned to his table.

It was hard not to look in the mirror, to watch him enthuse to his friends. At the same time I’d learned to be wary of the enthusiasms of militaristic types. It wasn’t often that I was recognised and it still surprised me whenever it happened.

Battlegrounds had been broadcast in the autumn on Channel 5. The series had been given plenty of pre-publicity emphasising the use of state-of-the-art computer animation to give tactical and strategic overviews as well as more intimate portraits of the actual experiences of individual soldiers in major battles. Although it had been designed to appeal to a wide audience the scale of its success exceeded everyone’s expectations.

Battlezones. Now that was a title worth considering for the new series. It had a suitable ring of modernity to it.

I swallowed the last of my beer and departed with a mannered wave to the three men.

Five minutes later I slipped into Racing Green and emerged with a heathery V-neck. It was unlikely Rees would ever wear it, his style tending more to sweatshirts and ancient denims, but Lyneth had a mission to civilise him. Rees was a talented software designer specialising in graphical interfaces, and we’d employed him during the making of the series, so for once he wasn’t short of cash. But his personal life was a mess and he was presently living alone in a Peckham bedsit. Lyneth had invited him to spend Christmas Day with us. I doubted he would actually show up.

I spotted a gap in the traffic and sprinted across the road. Two things happened, one after the other. The mobile in my pocket started trilling and I instinctively paused to pull it free. An instant later there was an enormous bang that picked me up and hurled me backwards.

My head hit something—it may have been the body of a car—and I felt a blaze of enveloping pain. I saw the entire front of Hamley’s bulging outwards, dust blossoming and debris cascading down on the swarming street. Darkness swallowed me up.

What followed were snippets of disconnected impressions: the persistent squeaking of a trolley wheel as I was bundled down a corridor; Christmas greetings cards pinned around the frame of a notice board; distant voices blurring in and out of earshot; a taste of stale blood on my bloated tongue. The pain in my head was so intense that it dwarfed everything else, even my fleeting thoughts of Lyneth and the girls. I kept passing out and resurfacing before eventually settling into a more prolonged period of unconsciousness. When I finally woke again I was in another world entirely.