Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus

by Drew Dale Daniel Bryenton

  But until then, there was work to do. Until then, there was the Voice, and its undeniable commands.

  KILL. FEED. REPLENISH.

  Somewhere off in the dark somebody was screaming...

  Liquid darkness above and below; pressing in one every side, insitent, cloying...

  This was the Chasm, the deepest pit beneath Elysium, a place where hideous toxins dripped and seeped from the city above. It was a perfectly smooth shaft, square and sheer and dark, sliced a mile down into the living rock below even the deepest manufactoria, below the great hissing tokamak coils of House Jaegenn’s fusion generators. Nothing moved down here which had a name. Many-limbed insectoid things scuttled from the light as if it burned their pale flesh, and in the hell-broth of chemicals and oily seawater at the bottom of the pit things slid and slithered which had never seen nor tasted humankind.

  Unless – and this was more than a small worry for the nervous Ashishim who guarded the top of the Chasm – they had once been human, before the taint of centuries of pollution had changed them...

  There was a rusted open-platform lift bolted to the side of the Chasm, a little cage suspended over the darkness in a pool of neon light. It was the only way down, and that was where Illuminatus Zeon, his human skin zipped up tight to fool his retainers, was going.

  “Spare me the details, please.” he said, barely restraining his temper as he pulled a floating microphone up to his lips. “I have full confidence in you all, my loyal brothers, and I know you will hold the line. Kronos’ machines were no match for us on the day of the glorious Reclamation, and now we are stronger still!”

  Through the Ashishim network he could hear a thousand voices babbling, urgent, screaming, calculating... his little hive of pet humans, all utterly loyal to a thing they thought was one of them. He knew they would hold the line, even when the Saprophytes of the Worm came for him. Even when the Blacksteel Unity descended on the Earth. They’d hold the line, and draw the fire of every one of Nyl’s enemies.

  While he was down here, retrieving a relic which hadn’t seen the light of day for decades.

  “Your Eminence, we are ready to proceed.” said the commander of the Chasm Guard – a shit-list posting if ever one existed, but one which the Ashishi soldier was trying very hard to honor. “There may be a jolt as we start our descent, revered Illuminatus – please hold onto the rail.”

  The Technician scowled – this was the price you had to pay to win their respect. For some reason frail and old carried more weight with these foolish creatures than young and strong, and he was forever being doted on like some senile relic.

  “Don't worry about me, commander.” he said, forcing a smile onto his artificial lips. “I've been in worse places in my time. And this is a very important mission indeed – I don't plan on falling.”

  The little lift did more than just jolt as it dropped away from the the edge of the Chasm – its rusted couplings shrieked like the damned as they free-fell twenty feet or more, before the sweating guardsmen could wrench the manual brakes closed. Nyl smiled as they struggled and cursed – not one had noticed that his feet were welded to the meshwork floor. So much for his frailty, then. At last the all-clear was sounded from above, and the cage descended on its rattling chain, down though veils of noxious mist and into the dark. The neon tubes which studded the lift pierced the gloom for only a few feet on either side, and the air would have burned Nyl's lungs had they been anything other than utterly alien. As it was he could metabolize gases unknown to human science, and the toxic smog of the Chasm was nothing more than an annoyance. This would just add to his legend, he supposed, as his retainers slipped on rebreather masks and coughed up gobbets of unhealthy slime.

  He could feel it below him now, calling out to him. And despite being psychic cripples, blind in the realm of his enhanced senses he knew that the Chasm Guard could feel it too. It was a sense of disquiet and dread leeching up through their boots, conjuring images of vast slippery things down there in the dark, fanged snouts breaking the oily water to scent human prey....

  Of course it was nothing so trite. It was the Arkborn, some pleading, some cajoling, some threatening, scrabbling against the walls of their prison as their master came down to greet them. This was the reason the prototype 'containment vessel', built so long ago by BionLab Gaudi had to be kept in the deepest, darkest pit imaginable. If it were given pride of place among the halls of the Ashishim its imperfect design would betray the Illuminatus' secrets. The Arkborn would seep into the dreams of his thralls, whispering forbidden truths about their beloved leader's origins – and what really came of his promises of paradise.

  “Stop the lift! There! We are close enough, now.” he barked, clenching the manual brake in one wizened hand. With a sudden wrench he threw it closed, bringing the lift to a shuddering halt. Powdered rust sifted down through the choking air, and now through the mist and steam they could see the black surface of the subterranean lake, an obsidian mirror scrawled with oily rainbows.

  “What – what's down there?” stammered the Ashishi on Nyl's left, twitching his rifle nervously from side to side. “Did you hear anything? I'm sure I heard something”

  The fear was infectious, radiating from below the surface of the lake in waves.

  “There's nothing to fear.” said Nyl, carefully folding up his human form to sit cross-legged on the floor of the lift. “This place is far from ideal as a repository of the sacred Ark, but it is far removed from our enemies. Kronos himself has no power here, though it was his machine slaves who carved this pit.”

  The Illuminatus cast out his senses, probing the oily depths with his mind, reaching out to the Ark with invisible fingers. And though its prisoners were locked up inside their man-made hell by his deceit, the thing had no choice but to obey.

  A pale, sickly light began to radiate from deep beneath the noisome waters of the lake - a tiny pinpoint, growing and swelling as the ancient artifact pulled free of the silt-bed and rose toward its master. Inside his artificial skin Nyl sweated violet, the strain of wielding the Ark racking his exhausted frame. It was frightening just how much of his energy the Worm had stripped away...

  “That's it! The Ark! It's coming up!”

  The excited voices of his soldiers seemed to come echoing in from a vast distance as Nyl struggled with the weight and mass of it. Pressure built as he dragged it up, breaking the surface of the water in a cloud of steam, a glowing thing of twisted metal sheathed in a nimbus of howling ghosts. He felt the horror bloom in the minds of the guardsmen at his side, and he knew what had to be done. It had been inevitable, he supposed, since they'd stepped onto the lift platform with him.

  Because while they gaped in terror at the writhing, tormented faces which wrapped the Ark in a sickly halo, they were slaves to it as well...

  Every one of his followers, from the lowliest hydroponic farmer to the most skilled Dervashi warrior had been granted the Vision, that opening of the soul's eye which let them see the truth. The truth of Kronos's grand design, the machine's hoarding of souls against the time when it would burn them all up in remaking the Earth.

  How else could such a gift be granted but with a relic of the same technology?

  All these men had been promised a far better afterlife – a paradise inside the Chrome Ark which was nothing but an artfully programmed lie.

  In truth they were destined to the same fate as the personalities stored and sequestrated within the Wetsystems, fuel for an engine of terrible power.

  The link with the Ark which provided the Vision, and proof of the Ashishim faith, was also an open channel. From the time of their initiation the Chasm Guards had been living on borrowed time, promised to the insatiable hunger of the Ark sooner or later.

  Now Nyl needed it's help. There was no way he could master it by main force – it would need to be coerced.

  And so he let it feed.

  “Wretched ones! Wraiths!” he shouted in the white silence of his mind. “Hear me! The time has co
me to serve me again! For some, the pain is at an end...and for the rest of you – the fools amongst you who cling to the hope of revenge – I bring an offering. New life for the strong! And may the weakest be torn apart!”

  Now the great dripping mass of the Chrome Ark hung in the air below them, pulling the toxic mist around itself like a shawl, a sheen of half-imagined leering faces. Though they couldn't hear Nyl's taunts and promises the chasm guards could see the nimbus about the artifact change, cycling up through the spectrum to binding incandescence.

  “What's it doing? What – what ARE those things?” stammered the commander, shouldering his rifle. In that instant he forgot the sacred nature of the Ark – and the fact that bullets would be useless against it. Even so, he marked himself out as its first target.

  A searing bolt of energy leaped from one of the obelisk tips of the Ark, earthing itself through the unfortunate Ashishi's body in a shower of crawling sparks. Sizzling tendrils of fire played over his face, stabbing into his eyes and mouth as he screamed. Nyl watched, smiling, as his body was lifted into the air, sucked dry by the insatiable thirst of the Arkborn. If he was strong enough, he'd soon join their number. If not – he'd buy another few months, another year or two for the desperate wraiths who seethed within the containment unit. In the flickering strobe-flash of his death the lightning resembled nothing more than a great skeletal arm, its fingers searing into flesh and cracking bone....

  Already it was lighter. Already Nyl could feel the sullen resentment of the Arkborn fading as they concentrated their hatred on the chasm guards. United, they could resist the orders of their Illuminatus, but feeding them was divisive, throwing them into conflict. Divide and conquer....and then....

  Amid the storm of flickering death Technician Nyl smiled, raising the Ark up with a gesture, spinning it on its axis as if it were weightless. Kronos had found out how to enslave minds to machines, long ago when BionLab Gaudi was still listed on the stock exchanges of Old Earth. It had taken Nyl – Illuminatus of the Ashishim – to find out how to possess those systems, how to use the damned as a weapon. He was willing to bet that the Unity hadn't seen this coming.

  The commander of the Chasm Guard (he'd really need to be replaced, Nyl supposed) slumped down next to him, a desiccated thing all bones and tight skin and dust.

  No, the Motherbrain had endured any number of attempts at crude digital warfare, but in this fragile place, in a universe so thin and cracked that the Worm could find its way through....well, here Nyl could improvise.

  And with the nanotech might of an Explorator system at his command, the Worm would soon be back under his control, fused with soulless machinery. Against that kind of hope, what was the death of three useless little human soldiers, sucked dry by the Arkborn?

  “Feed, my children! Feast!” he laughed, rising up from the floor, still cross-legged as he spun the Ark through one hundred and eighty degrees, balancing its bulk on one finger. “We have much work to do, and a long way to go. Back to the Tower! Back to the fortress of Kronos!”

  But in the back of his mind he could still hear the voices of the saprophytes, trapped behind the sealed airlock door of his private sanctum. Nothing he could do would snuff out their mockery.

  “Oh yes, Mighty Illuminatus!” they hissed, even as he rose up out of the pit like Lucifer triumphant “Come out and play in the streets! Bring your little puzzle-box of souls, and let me taste your flesh!”

  He could see what was going on out there – the pain, the terror, the riots turning to routs as things heaved themselves up out of the dark beneath the city....

  He felt the confinement of the Worm, felt it thrashing and howling in its prison, sending out tendrils of darkness to raise its legions of Exalted...

  And he smiled, drinking in the hatred which flowed from the Ark, from its disembodied prisoners.

  The Worm's hubris would be its downfall. Because too much hung in the balance for Nyl to fail, and it was simply inconceivable for a Technician of the Multiplicity to do so.

  All Direktor Ascher could do was watch, and wait.

  Both of these activities had occupied his entire life since his Fall – another few hours should have been easy enough to endure. And the scenes of carnage and riot on the streets tonight – they were like music to him, a symphony for his artificial senses. If tomorrow was supposed to herald his funeral, then the terror and carnage which flickered across his whole sensorium dome was the perfect wake.

  Oh, of course not all of it was of his own orchestration. Kronos's ham-fisted attempts at keeping the peace were a tragicomedy in their own right – military mekan running amok in the habs, war machines obsolete for centuries turning on each other as glitches multiplied through their ruined systems...

  And the tribes of the R.T. - they'd played their part as well. He watched Celestial riflemen outflank Confederate stormtroopers, Vatican war-suited paladins cut to ribbons by swift Dervashi, desperate rebels mown down by wild-eyed fanatics...

  He set it all to music, there in his vast dome of disjointed images. Kettledrums pounded out the beat of heavy artillery, the strings swelled to the chorus as rioters surged up against a thousand spiked barricades, and cymbals clashed to beheadings, explosions, buildings collapsing in fire and ruin.

  Did any of them remember how it started? Were there, among the snarling, heaving mob any people who still fought for Simeon Blaire, and the hope of a better tomorrow?

  Octavio Ascher remembered. He was waiting for him, alone in his symphonic vision of war and pain. The great steel claw which suspended his preservative tank spun slowly at the wrist, letting his eyes take in the full scope of his handiwork.

  There – and again, there....what were those things? Sinuous, black – some kind of biotech, perhaps? Some secret relic from the wars dredged up by Kronos? But no, the slithering, oily creatures were too fast, to smooth. The slide and crosscut and bite of them was pure filthy life.

  Search programs ramified out through the datanet, slamming up short on the locked-down Wetsystems. Central Omnivasive archives could find no record of these creatures, things which were tearing into the Reclamationists and the Compliance Division, civilians and soldiers and machines with the same gleeful abandon.

  Image-matching software cycled through billions of frames of threedeeo, centuries of archived footage, an all-seeing network of live cameras...

  There. Freeze. Zoom.

  There was a face he recognized. There was a thing he'd seen before, if only for a second. A thing which had cast him down in pain, torn his beautiful, deadly body out from under him...

  It was Lysander Jaegenn, but he was a being transformed, a hulking brute straining the seams of his black diamondmesh armor. That particular outfit, with its painted-on skeletal bones, its executioner's hood now hanging loose around Lysander's grossly swollen neck...

  The little bastard was the assassin. The hand of Kronos, who'd cursed him to this bodiless hell. Direktor Ascher checked the input feed – as if he needed to. This was live, and it was coming through direct from the eyes of Simeon Blaire.

  Fool! He had to revel in his moment of glory, didn't he? So very sure of his little prodigal, so certain he'd come home without a hitch....this was what he got for losing focus!

  Octavio killed the music, dragging out the single screen which showed the monstrous Lord Jaegenn to fill an entire wall of the sensorium.

  His eyes were boiling black, and they seemed to draw Octavio in, tearing his soul from its withered vessel, right through the datalink and down into a vision of hell. In that instant he felt the plasma fire rip through his chest a thousand times, he felt the despair blossoming in his pain-wracked mind again and again and again....

  “We know your pain, Direktor.” said a voice in his head. “We know how to take it away. Even better – we know how to give it to others. We want to share the gift, the gift of the New Flesh....”

  It was crooning, keening, seductive – and vile. Beneath its honeyed words Mister Ascher could hear
the sound of rusted saws cutting meat.

  Somehow, it felt his resistance. Impossibly, Lysander Jaegenn cocked his head to one side, listening, grinning mindlessly as black tears rolled down his pallid cheeks.

  “Dare you oppose us, human? Do you think you know of PAIN? Just because you are broken does not mean you cannot suffer beautifully....”

  The voice was harsher now, demanding, prying his brain open. But years of deprivation had given Octavio iron discipline. And despite his cynicism, he'd taken note of some of the techniques from Murai's ancient books....

  “Fool! Maggot! WE WILL HAVE YOUR FLESH!” howled the voice, dwindling now as the Direktor took control. “How will you run, you broken thing? How can you hope to escape us?”

  With a final burst of concentration he forced it from his mind, willing the link to Simeon Blaire to shut down.