by Andy Remic
A few feet above, Pippa and Franco descended, lights bobbing and dancing as they fell through the vast chamber. Keenan glanced down, slowing his speed as the bulk of the reactor shell came rushing up to meet him.
Something bit Keenan, bit his mind. He slowed to a stop, bobbing for a moment, and pulled free his MPK, checking the 152 round micro-clip. He switched on the beam, and the gun’s light swept the interior of the reactor cubicle.
“You see anything, Kee?” asked Pippa.
“Negative. Just... oil, I think. The whole chamber is flooded with oil.”
Keenan eased down, so his boots dangled just above the gloss surface. A few ripples swept away and Keenan peered at the reflected slick ebony.
“Affirmative,” said Pippa, scanning. “Standard mineral oil; probably used as a coolant of some sort and leaked from a punctured system. The PAD says it’s OK to proceed, it’s non-toxic.”
And yet, still Keenan paused; the serenity around him, the oppressive atmosphere, the glinting glass of the oil; it made him shiver. He got a sudden intuition that something bad was about to happen.
“You sure the PAD says it’s clear?”
“All readings zero, boss,” confirmed Franco, eyes locked to his own PAD.
Warily, Keenan descended into the oil, which surged up to his knees, crept into his clothing, and invaded his boots. The pool sloshed thick around him, sending ripples cascading to slap the walls.
Keenan’s weapon tracked, and his beam danced over rusted metal. He frowned for a moment, noting that around the chamber—set just above the undulating oil line—were holes, like feeder pipes, each about ten inches in diameter. There were eight of them, set symmetrically around the bunker’s circumference. Keenan turned his attention to the reactor shell, the reactor’s controlling J-UNIT, and unclipped his PAD from its cable.
“I’ve got enemy activity above,” said Pippa. Her voice was a growl. “Looks like they’ve found us.”
“They were shielded from our PADs,” nodded Franco, running a hand through his wild hair. He cocked his weapon, the noise loud and intrusive in this hiemal place. He glanced up, sweat beading his brow despite the chill. “Not quite sure how they did that. We’re talking advancedkit, mate. And now... Now we’re trapped?” It was the question none had wanted to voice: the maggot in the apple, the cancer in the core. It stank like a three-week cadaver; reeked of betrayaland corruption.
“Let’s make this mission count,” said Keenan, reaching the reactor’s J-UNIT. There was a shring as a serrated blade leapt from below the evil eye of his gun. Keenan inserted the blade behind the casing and prised the lid free. The buckled alloy panel spun into the oil with a tiny splash. Again, ripples eased away from Keenan, lapping rhythmically against the walls; the slaps reminded him of flesh on flesh.
He attached his PAD to the J-UNIT, and the PAD’s screen ignited blue. Tiny beams rolled from the PAD, joined like fluid umbilicals ending inside Keenan’s eyes. Licking nervous lips, he started a search for the shutdown sequences using pupil movement and controlled dilation.
“There’s something else,” said Pippa, gun-light sweeping the chamber.
“I’ve got it too,” snapped Franco. “Inside the walls, movement.”
Still working, still focused, and through the gritted teeth of concentration, Keenan said, “What’s it this time? Rats?”
“Doing a genetic scan now... um... The PAD’s reporting ID unknown.”
Keenan paused, glancing up at Pippa and breaking laser contact. “What the hell do you mean, ‘unknown’? The PAD’s got structures on every damned life-form in the galaxy!”
“I’ve seen this before,” said Franco’s low voice. There was a tone that made both Keenan and Pippa glance at him where he hung, boots dangling, eyes deadly serious, a soldier puppet on a wire.
And then...
The squirming noise reached their ears, accelerating in activity and volume, a slithering of metal on metal, a soothing sound not too distant from the lull of a mercury sea against a metal shore.
“Keenan, get out of the oil!” screamed Franco. “Get out of the fucking oil!”
Franco was hoisting himself up on his cable, motors droning, and Pippa instinctively followed his lead. Keenan turned back to the reactor shell, spent a few seconds finishing the >TERMINATE< instruction to shut down the core, then pulled free his PAD: as in the darkness something spewed from eight metal holes set in the chamber’s walls, a mass of what appeared to be tangled metal cables rolling over and over one another as they ejected from orifices and flooded the oil, bubbling and seething and churning then surging up and out, tumbling and broiling over themselves as they heaved and pulsed and surged at Keenan. He yelped, leaping up onto the reactor shell and clambering up the black ridges of corrugated metal, slipping and sliding, leaving oiled boot prints.
Pippa unleashed a hail of bullets into the tangled mess, but Franco caught her eye, giving a single shake of the head; firing halted, hollow noise reverberating.
“What is it?” bellowed Keenan, as yet more tangled metal mesh spewed and rolled into the chamber. The metal started to thrash, rolling around and over itself, and slopping oil up the walls. It had filled the basin; thin metal threads gleamed in the dancing light of Combat K’s torches.
“It’s a metal AI; they called it The Tangled,” said Franco over the din of the mass of surging, heaving, thrashing threads. He caught Keenan’s eye across the chamber again, and nodded. “Yeah mate, it is lethal. It eats into your flesh, burrows into your bones, then separates its threads lengthways to tear you apart from the inside out. Keenan, you do not want to touch this toxic shit. It’s a messy and painful way to die.”
“It seems to be calming down,” said Pippa.
The Tangled had finished flowing into the chamber, and the writhing had subsided; but still it moved, lethargically, a million tiny metal eels surging and broiling beneath the syrup of oil, weaving and meshing, intertwining, occasionally rearing above the surface with hisses as metal rasped metal, surging and slapping the walls, then disappearing from view.
“You’ve seen this before, then?”
“Yeah,” Franco nodded, “on Geeto8. Saw it take out twenty men during a swamp crossing. Nothing works on it; not bullets, not fire, nothing. The stuff is AI—has a shared intelligence—each strand making up a part of the collective brain.”
“The PAD didn’t recognise it because it’s made of metal?”
“That’s right,” said Franco, “non-organic life. Pretty rare, I think; doesn’t even ident as a GG or PopBot.”
The three looked up as voices echoed far above in the darkness. Suddenly, bullets screamed from the black and scattered through the oil filled basin, striking sparks from metal walls and the solid bulk of the reactor hull.
Keenan’s MPK barked as he returned a volley into the void. Tracer shot streamers.
“I don’t mean to be a killjoy, Keenan, but what have you done to the reactor?” Pippa’s voice was tinged with panic. Not a nice sound to hear; she was usually unflappable.
“What?”
“You shut down the cooling systems!”
“No, I deactivated the reactor. Once you’re in the control menu it takes no great skill.”
“I’m telling you Keenan, the reactor is alive... something must have been crossed, or mis-wired; now there’s no cooling. That means the bastard will—”
“Meltdown,” said Keenan. He glanced down into The Tangled, surging and pulsing around the reactor shell’s base; there was no way on earth he could get back down to the J-UNIT without the damn thing eating him. Then his head shifted back to Pippa and Franco, where they dangled, suspended in the gloom. “Once again, my friends, we’ve been set up. Some bastard has played us for fools. You two get out of here.”
“No heroics, Keenan.” Pippa’s eyes were wide in the darkness. He could taste her concern.
“No heroics,” he nodded. “But you’re there, I’m here. You get your arses out, clear me a path home, because w
hen I come out I’m going to be moving hard and fast.”
“We’re on it.”
Pippa and Franco glided up into the black and were lost within seconds, torch beams dancing. Bullets screamed above on trajectories of fire, and booms and crashes smashed echoes around the underground chamber. Tracer lit the darkness for a moment with streamers of green. Savagery unleashed.
Keenan glanced down, then stood and removed a long thin liq-N bomb from his pack; he attached this to a firing groove at the base of the MPK’s stock.
So, to kill you I’ve got to kill myself? He laughed bitterly, thinking of Freya and his two girls safe at home, sitting on the veranda he’d built three summers ago looking out over rolling fields that dropped to the valley and spread away to purple mountains capped with hats of snow. His stallions would be there, grazing under a summer sun, and Spritehis dog would bark at Freya’s heels as she called to him. Walking from the dense woodland where he loved to explore, he’d head home for a bowl of red-hot chilli, a mound of tortillas, and a fine cold beer.
“And what about me?” whispered Pippa. “What about my life? What about my love? What about the promises you made me you lying fucking whore?”
Keenan blinked, and the echo was lost.
He breathed deep; calmed himself.
Above, the battle halted with alarming abruptness. A voice with heavily localised accent called down. “Mr. Keenan, we have your friends. We have them alive, but I assure you, if you do not immediately surrender they will be executed under Terminus5 Law.”
Keenan allowed a slow breath to leave his body, hissing through gritted teeth. He levelled the MPK at the rolling mass of The Tangled, which seemed to come alive as if suddenly recognising the threat, rolling over and over itself, and rearing up out of the oil, broiling violently over the rim of the reactor shell, and climbing in staccato leaps and surges towards Keenan’s oil-slick boots... and the soft, penetrable, brittle, tasty bones within.
Nothing works on it; not bullets, not fire, nothing.
Alarms on the reactor started to shrill as it rapidly approached meltdown. Bullets rained from above like hail, kicking sparks from the shell on which Keenan’s battered, defiant boots stood.
“Tangle with this, fucker,” he snarled, and fired the liq-N bomb into the heart of the heaving, surging mass...
Closed his eyes...
And waited for the explosion to take him.
being an extract from:
THE HELIX WAR—A HISTORY
kv 4788—hv 3792
written by
Professor Marsaal SuΩb-Kr∂iy∞
TA(Hons), MA’’’, Tri-G Dip, P~TG ..DL
Mankind and his other-world organic colleagues (of course, the term “alien” is in itself now “alien”, for are we not all familiar cousins in this great soup of the Quad-Gal collective boiling pot?) are to be found in modest concentration around the galaxy cluster of SINAX, the Quad-Gal being the life-supporting arm of the SINAX CLUSTER. Within this bulge, HESOL, THEOD and TRIGON II are SPIRAL GALAXIES, brothers and sister, whereas the much smaller PRAXDA ZETA is a partially unexplored ELLIPTICAL GALAXY of the E07 category. Old and compact, with a mere 30 billion stars, PRAXDA ZETA can be considered the origin of our current Life-Arm, or Sentient Life Bubble. Ironically, it is the least travelled and the least explored.
There are three main theories provided by scholars regarding the origins, the stimuli, the trigger of The Helix War in kv 4788, which eventually came to embrace the entire sweep of the SINAX CLUSTER during its thousand year cycle. The theories run thus:
1. With the development of K5 fuel for FTL travel, and the subsequent mining technologies used in the extraction of K5 at specified points of Singularity, trade channels were instigated in a quad path between HESOL, THEOD, TRIGON II and PRAXDA ZETA. These channels were controlled by a combined force called The Singularity Ministry which imposed taxation on all K5 commerce. When taxation was increased three hundred and fifty percent, the subsequent price increase was passed down to planetary and state level. It affected every living organism in every cluster and made trade expensive to a point of extortion. The theory postulates that an unnamed covert army led by Inspectors from Praxda Zeta attempted a coup d’état over The Singularity Ministry. This failed, and in turn led to retaliations and a rapid escalation towards the state of Cluster War.
2. The President General Viol Vill of TetraF IV at Hesol was assassinated by Yugga Rebels from the planet Y7 in Praxda Zeta. This led to a quick-fire escalation of events concluding in a Halo Strike on a Hesol sun, which subsequently destroyed four systems and 25 billion souls. Again, events escalated until a State of War was declared across the Quad-Gal and fringe planets were dragged unwillingly into the battle.
3. LEVIATHAN, a benign member of a rumoured GODRACE,and technically dead for nearly a million years, was somehow reborn and instigated the origins of the Quad-Gal Helix War in retribution for a crime that the races of the Sinax Cluster could never comprehend. LEVIATHAN used its superior position [as GOD] to infiltrate governments, ministries, cabal clusters and monarchies, and from thence directed escalation with the outcome of State of War. This supposition is the favourite amongst Theod [Central] University conspiracy theorists; however main flaws are a lack of evidence. Teller’s World, LEVIATHAN’s supposed home planet, has never been proved thus; however, it does consume any who travel there, and has been classified as too dangerous to approach. Also, by definition, a GODRACE is a dead race; extinct. If LEVIATHAN was extinct, he could never be reborn, and if he could be reborn, would he really trouble himself with such petty matters?
One conclusion can be drawn, however; no matter which theory—if any—originated the events leading to the Helix War, after several decades the start of the war was no longer of consequence.
Atrocity followed atrocity. Escalation led to destruction, to escalation, to destruction in an apparent Catch 22 of spiralling violence. From three possible origins, all time/space strands intercepted and moved along a sequential and singular course... almost written in stone.
And certainly written in the blood of millions.
Some would later say that Life and War were manipulated.
Professor Marsaal SuΩb-Kr∂iy∞
TA(Hons), MA’’’, Tri-G Dip, P~TG ..DL
Part 1
Combat K
Chapter 1
Guilt Trip
Kotinevitch exercised naked.
Her taut, athletic figure gleamed with sweat as she practised complex yukana sword combinations. The yukana was capable of cutting twelve-inch armoured steel, and had an ugly curved blade formed from a single molecule. She twirled the weapon, which hissed as she danced, pirouetting, cutting, slicing, the chilled blade freezing droplets of sweat from the air to fall, tinkling almost imperceptibly, as ice.
Kotinevitch accelerated.
Moving fast, body twisting, spinning and delivering killing blows to imaginary opponents—the blade a solid black blur at the core of the action—the lithe yet powerful woman completed her Yukana Krell, The Seventh Ritual, and dropped to her knees, head bowed, eyes closed in a simple, calming prayer.
Moments passed. Releasing a deep breath, Vitch stood and sheathed the weapon; then pulled a silver robe of ancient Krell silk over her shoulders. The hem fell to the floor in a series of gathered, neatly stitched folds and the garment cooled her superheated skin.
Pouring a drink, she walked across the marble tiles as a tiny bell chimed and five men entered the vast expanse of the chamber from distant doors carved of white-oak; they were dressed in matching uniforms and marched with the steady, rhythmic step of the military.
Pillars flowed past to either side of the small entourage, and one of the men—the Terminus5 Ambassador General—gazed up at the high arched ceiling where stained glass allowed pastel light to drift like coloured rainfall.
Kotinevitch sat beside a crystal table and pulled the sheathed yukana sword towards her, positioning it reverently by her side. Sipping at her
teka juice—which stained her lips a vivid green—she patiently awaited the group that finally arraigned itself before her, Terminus5’s Ambassador General slightly to the fore.
“We were shown in.” His tone echoed displeasure.
Kotinevitch nodded, brown eyes taking in the five large men one by one, examining, appraising, then returning to the Ambassador General with a look of gentle acceptance. “You would be... Jukan. Correct?”
“That is correct, General Kotinevitch. Ambassador General Jukan. I find it modestly farcical that you have made us wait forty-eight hours for this simple meeting. You think, perhaps, our position in the war is a joke? You think we are a culture to be pushed around? You think your trade embargoes frighten our military might?”
Vitch looked up, then reached behind her and tied back her hair with neat little movements. “The war is over,” she said, “or at least it is for the majority of the Quad-Gal. You feel you have a superior viewpoint, an accelerated understanding? Do you really believe we will withdraw from your inter-continental disputes and allow you freedom for total self-rule?”
“Yes. We do believe that. It is no crime to self-govern. And yet you patronise and threaten us with proximity; you have Armoured Infantry Transporters, I-Freighters and Tri-Klags circling Terminus5 like a bad stellar disease. You do not behave like an army in deceleration; you behave like an army ready to invade!” With great effort, he calmed himself. Breathing deeply, he said, “Anyway, to business. We are here regarding the Combat K situation.”