His Master had warned him about the one they called the Hand of Kronos, the machine's enforcer - the assassin who'd obliterated his dreams in a blast of plasma fire.
Lord Blaire had run 'mersive programs extrapolated from that brutal attack over and over again, mapping the killer's technique onto fighting holograms in his white plastic dojo. He’d matched the plasma cannon to its serial numbers and its manufactorium; the damned thing was a millennium old, kept oiled and clean by eyeless mekan in Kronos’s spire-armory. He'd suffered through Octavio's endless remeniscences of glory so that he wouldn't falter and fall when he heard that voice in his ear...
Knowledge was power.
He heard the reloading bolt of the assassin's cannon click back, and he knew that it would take exactly twenty-nine seconds for the coils of the antiquated weapon to power up again. Plenty of time to do what Direktor Ascher never could.
Simeon slid down a cold, slippery length of chain head-first, a controlled dive down into the darkness of the shaft. He leaped away from the chain as it ran out, the wicked hook at its terminus scraping past his black-painted belly by a whisper. From chain to chain he fell, while his hunter followed, leaping from the spiked walls, from the icy metal columns which towered up around him. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight....
Simeon jinked sideways right on cue, swinging out wide as a blast of hot blue plasma evaporated the chain which he had held a second before. Hissing droplets of molten metal flew around him, glowing red in the gloom. If only he knew the assassin’s true identity – his phyle, his clan, his name, any key to his weaknesses.
In the meantime, he’d have to play it very cautious.
Blaire landed with catlike grace on the floor of the shaft, slipping his taut body between a forest of razor-sharp blades still wet with the remains of the late Lord Valchek. Ah, well – at least he could count that poor fool’s name off his list. Now it was time to prepare some countermeasures.
Careful, lest the serrated teeth of the spikes cut through his clammy skin... Simeon knelt down, gripping one of the metal blades where it was screwed into the concrete floor. With one palm on either side he twisted with all his nano-boosted might, gritting his teeth as the cold steel resisted him. It came loose slowly, grinding, the tiny noise surely giving his position away as clearly as a phosphorous flare. Time was of the essence – eighteen seconds already... Half a turn, and the screw began to spin smoothly .
Blaire spun the jagged blade up out of its mounting with a single savage twist, catching it as it spiraled up into the air. He bent his other hand forward, making a fist, and the rubberized latex paint which skinned him over split, revealing a gunmetal hole in the top of his arm. Four little jaws, like the chuck of a power drill whirred open as he screwed the four-foot blade in place, gripping tight as he made it secure. Now his left arm terminated in a cruel curved sword; a thing much like the blades of bone Octavio Ascher had fought him with in the bowels of the Black Palace. Twenty-six seconds, and the gladius array’s illegal modifications were meshing with the sword, ramifying wires through its gleaming stainless-steel. Twenty-eight, and the whole thing was crackling with power, a pale nimbus of blue illuminating the garden of sharp steel around him, the shredded body of Vasily Valchek. And coming in from above, an answering spark of cerulean light, blossoming from a shadow with stickman arms and legs, a white grin cut across its face...
The technique was called yadome-jutsu, one of the secrets ripped from Mr Murai’s private computer terminal by the skilled hackers of Omnivasive. A long time ago it was used by the greatest kenshin to slice apart swarms of arrows in midair.
Now, with the aid of Simeon’s hot gladius system, the ancient martial art deflected a blast of searing plasma which could have incinerated a tank. The blade’s magnetic field flared with crawling flickers of lightning as he swung at the fireball, deflecting it off to one side with a noise like shattering stone. Smoke and flames billowed from the wall of the shaft as the plasma blast punched neatly through it, sizzling through machines and pipes and cables beyond, out in the automated guts of Spire-house Jaegenn.
Blaire braced his feet against the flat edges of two jagged spikes, leveling the point of his own glowing sword right up at his attacker’s chest. Smiling, he anticipated the shock, the scream as the assassin was impaled...
Impossibly, it never happened. The black-clad figure arrested its fall by riding the shockwave of the blast sideways, reacting so fast that Simeon knew he must be a member of the Razor Clique. He flew into the wall of the shaft feet-first, bracing the metal sides of his boots against two cruel barbs, setting up a terrible screech of tortured metal and a shower of sparks. Then he dropped the last four feet, spiderlike, to poise on the tips of the impaling blades, gripping four of them between his fingers and toes. Like the footwear of the Koga-ninja, the assassin’s boots were split down the middle, allowing him to clench the razor steel with precision. The great plasma cannon hung loose, swinging by a thick strap of webbing from the man’s shoulders.
For a second they were completely still, glaring hatred at each other as alarms and firefighting systems yowled and clamored in the sundered belly of the spire-house. In the creeping mist and chill of the shaft the only light was from the assassin’s plasma gun, coiled fire seething beneath its burnished casing as it charged up again.
It was he who broke first, propelling himself up out of his precarious crouch with superhuman agility. As soon as his pupils narrowed Blaire was swinging, his blade humming through the air in a blur. But he was too slow – finally matched against a foe who was his equal. The black-clad killer flew backward in a tight somersault, seeming to land among the knives and barbs as if he knew where every last one was embedded. His momentum made the plasma gun swing up on its straps; as soon as it reached the horizontal he snatched it out of free-fall and pulled the trigger.
This time it was Simeon who was too fast – his embedded blade came around on the backswing, flowing smoothly from attack to defense as he deflected the plasma blast through another wall. Yadome-Jutsu.
“You’ll have to do much better than that, I’m afraid.” said the warrior Lord, stalking forward through the impaling spikes, lopping them off left and right with his crackling sword. The nanoenhanced blade slid through steel as smoothly as unarmored flesh. “Now, are you going to tell me who you are before I kill you? I’d hate to send a wreath to the wrong family.”
The assassin kept just out of his reach, nimbly picking his way across the tips of the spikes, landing with a series of tiny clicks as his split-toed boots clamped down tight. Simeon had a better view of his adversary now – a creature costumed all in charcoal black, its face a crude death-mask of white paint scrawled across a cowl like an executioner’s hood. The material wasn’t just warpaint like his own; it was diamond-fiber mesh, supple and tough, able to stop bullets and turn blades. He would have to be fiendishly precise.
Luckily, that was just his specialty.
“No? How very unsporting of you, my Lord.” chided Blaire, slipping forward again, his bladed hand up over his shoulder, hovering like a scorpion sting. “I suppose that means you’d like an unmarked grave, as well?”
It was a guess, pure conjecture. Simeon only guessed that the assassin was one of his noble peers because of his sheer speed and ferocity – but it seemed that he had struck a nerve.
This time his foe came at him not with the heavy plasma gun, still building up another killing charge, but with a set of hooked claws which snapped out from his wrists as he leaped. The skull-faced killer propelled himself from his perch with his arms crossed in front of his face, slicing at Blaire with the claws in a scissor motion, then reversing his swing as the Kheptarch backpedaled, one set of blades coming in high, the other low.
Simeon felt the flat of an impaling spike up against his back – lucky, there, that it hadn’t been the jagged cutting edge. With only one sword with which to defend himself he parried the undercutting claw, leaning back over the top of the spike as the other whispe
red through the air an inch from his face.
For a second the tip of the impaling steel pricked blood from the back of his neck, and then he lunged forward, using his sword locked in the assassin’s blades to force him back. As Blaire came to his feet the killer’s free claw raked across his chest, peeling back paint and skin and flesh, tracing three livid gashes over his heart.
Scenting blood the assassin pulled back his claw to strike, a straight vicious stab which would have gone clean through Simeon’s chest, had he not at that moment planted his foot right in the middle of the man’s solar plexus. It was a strike a professional kickboxer would have envied, catching the assassin off guard and sending him flying, out of control, between the forest of razor sharp blades.
For a frozen instant the plasma cannon looped up on its straps, hanging in the air between the splayed arms and legs of its owner - then Blaire’s blade came up and around, slicing through the webbing with a sound like guitar strings breaking. The warrior Lord reversed the gun in midair, just as its charge indicator snapped live, blinking green LEDs.
Confoundingly it was Valchek who ruined his moment of triumph – instead of being sliced apart by the blades which studded the floor of the shaft Blaire’s assailant came up against the dead aristocrat’s body.
The assassin grinned through the ragged hole in his cowl, his fall broken by the raw meat of Vasily’s corpse. Simeon swore the bastard actually winked at him as he leaped straight upward, using the poor dead Lord’s face as a stepping stone to propel himself up among the chains.
Blaire’s plasma blast roared across the shaft, lighting the dark for a brief instant, evaporating Valchek and the spikes he was transfixed by. Once again the titanic energies unleashed by the pre-apocalyptic cannon cored out a neat section of Lysander Jaegenn’s home, the edges of bulkhead walls and cleanly severed pipes glowing cherry red as sirens wailed and flame-retardant foam hissed from countless nozzles.
Simeon racked the slide on the antique gun, and raised it over his head in one hand, the other surmounted by the flickering spike of his bonded sword.
“Run, you coward!” he bellowed, his voice chasing the fleeing spider-figure up the shaft. “Run! Because you’re being hunted, you bastard! HUNTED!”
Simeon leaped to the chase, propelling himself off the wall, up to the sheared top of a black iron column. This was much more satisfying than dispensing with Vasily Valchek – this was going to be fun.
In the back of his mind the warrior Lord exalted he’d beaten his erstwhile master once again. The killer who had brought Octavio Ascher low was fleeing from Simeon Blaire, disarmed and doomed.
He’d be sure to remind the old man of that little fact when they met – before Simeon finished the job that this assassin had failed to complete.
another tiny circular airlock and into the control room of the Kraken. There were a lot of things in the world designed for men of diminutive proportions- sometimes it seemed like the whole damned place was built just for Kaito Kayzi. Jaq had problems with chairs, with clothes, with motorcycles, with pens, and especially with chopsticks. Elysium was just too poorly constructed for a gentleman of his prodigious size.
The tiny control globe in the core of the Kraken seemed to be no exception – well, at least in here everything appeared to have been extruded from a single vast lump of stainless steel, but nevertheless, the floor was the only place to sit. His head was still level with Kaito’s, even though the little hacker had commandeered the best seat in the house, a swivel chair festooned with switches and lights and tiny screens.
“I think I can actually drive this thing.” he said, his eyes caressing the banks of controls as if they were so much candy. “They built this beast to be run by unaugmented grunts – it’s just a matter of finding the ignition.”
“I think it’s going to be a little more difficult than boosting a car, Kayzi.” said Hassan, leaning back and rummaging through the plastic lockers and boxes in the rear of the tiny control cabin. “Otherwise somebody would have stolen it already.”
He bobbed up again with a handful of silvery wafers – survival rations vacuum-sealed more than a thousand years ago. “What do you reckon – apricot or beef wellington?” he asked, sifting through the identical foil packets with their cheap paper labels. “The use-by date’s only out by three hundred years – should be fine.”
Kaito wasn’t listening – he’d retreated into that glazed-eyed dream state which came over him whenever he was deeply integrated with his own bio-onboard systems. He snapped out of it with a shake of his head, a comedown twitch which sparked through him like raw voltage.
“Yeah – got the schematics. I just do this.” His finger stabbed down once, twice, and the pitch of the rumbling machinery all around them changed slightly. There was a sense of the whole vast device waiting to lurch into motion, its gears spinning loose.
“Then engage the manual override sequencethere....now the control sticks are live....and we throw it into reverse....”
There was a shuddering, grinding noise, and the immense construction machine rocked backwards, making Hassan lose his fistful of ancient protein bars. Flatscreen monitors in front of Kaito’s command chair went live – each one of them showing a tangled mass of rubble and mangled steel. The piston legs of the Kraken scrabbled
against the walls of the shaft as the great plug of debris held it in place, pinning it by the wreckage of its claw-tipped tentacles.
Jaq’s head had caught up with the back wall of the cabin with a resounding smack – anybody else would probably been out cold.
“Nice driving, Kaito!” he grumbled, massaging his skull with one hand. “Reminds me why we both have separate motorcycles.”
The Kayzi spun his chair around with a frustrated scowl, one hand still tapdancing over the keyboards blind. The Kraken’s manual was still in his head, of course – ripped out of the machine when he’d euthanased it’s controlling personality.
“Jaq, does any of this strike you as out of the ordinary? We’re sitting in the control room of a thousand-year-old mechanical sea-monster, the soul of which, for want of a better term, I’ve just erased. We got here after our new friend, the most wanted operative of the Ashishim, brought down an entire shopping mall on our heads, after – and I want to make this part extra clear – battling a renegade Cyben built out of that bent bastard Eddie Tsien. And you’re...” Kaito paused at this point to swipe a foil packet out of Hassan’s hands and squint at its label. “You’re more concerned about some dehydrated lobster bisque packaged when our great-great-granddads weren’t even born!”
Jaq shrugged, clamping his teeth down on a rubbery mat of woven protein which claimed to be a chicken hot pot. Perhaps it should have been added to boiling water – perhaps it would have made no difference.
“Well, you have your bad days. Take it as it comes.” he said, chewing the great wad of freeze-dried pulp stoically. “Hey, you gonna eat that lobster, or what?”
A little vein was throbbing up on the Kayzi’s temple, a sure sign that he was about to lose his composure. Before he could draw in enough breath to start cursing Jaq leaned forward, right up in his face, and jammed a stick of alleged hot pot into his mouth.
“Kaito, I’m well past being worried about this shit. I went past panic about an hour ago. And before you say it, yeah, I knew about Eddie Tsien as well. I know who he used to be – my boss at Omnivasive showed me the photos. But you know what? I don’t care. I’m along for the ride. I’m not going to be mister fuckin’ crazy old Jaq Hassan this time. Reason being, last time things went all to hell like this, and I let it get to me, I got played. My whole family burned.”
He reached up with one chrome finger and hinged Kaito’s jaw shut around the glistening field ration, the grin on his face betrayed by the glittering madness in his eyes.
“So this time, I’m just going to go with it. So what. You just do your thing, and when I need to do mine, like back there with the hatch, and with those Cyben drones, I’ll just
do that too. So don’t mind me. I’m cool. I’m goddam copacetic.”
Anybody else looking at his face in that instant would have started praying for a painless death.
Kaito took a big bite of his chicken hot-pot, his fingers slowly creeping away from the keyboard, still twitching in midair. He swallowed, hard.
“Allright. That’s great, Jaq. That’s fine. I – I think it was all getting to me there. You’re right, it’s been a bad day. A long, fucked up, insanely bad day.”
His eyebrows lifted- first the left, then the right.
“Y’know, this shit isn’t half bad. Three hundred years out of date or not.”
Kaito nearly jumped out of his skin when the intercom howled and crackled into life behind him – his head clocked the low ceiling of the command module with a noise like a ringing bell. The sound which came through was at once very familiar and utterly terrifying.
It was Abdulafia 330, and something in his strained, tortured voice spoke of a mind which had gazed into the depths of hell.
“This is an open transmission to anyone still alive out there.” hissed the comm unit, while looping feedback tried to drown out the Ashishim’s voice. “Evacuate the Subcity immediately! There has been a critical containment breach, code zero-two-nine, repeat, a critical containment breach, zero, two, nine...” Crosscut chatter on the Ashishi band rose up in a babble of protest and disbelief.
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