“How’s he getting through?” asked Hassan, leaning in to twist the dials of the intercom at random. The message slewed out and in of a haze of static.
“It’s the R.T. band. Jacked from the old Terminus Lib Army, back in the days before the Reclamation.” explained Kaito, elbowing Jaq out of the way. He fine-tuned a little wheel on the black box, and ‘Afia’s voice came through clear again.
“This is not a test, this is not a drill – evacuate immediately! I confirm, code zerotwo-nine – extraterrestrial incursion. Pull back to the first defense perimeter and await the instructions of your commanders. Celestial HQ, Confederate HQ, Vatican High Command, please, you have to believe me! This is no time for us to be fighting turf wars! It’s loose in the Valley View sector, right above the CK synthesoy vats. The whole mall’s down, the wetsystems are locked out...if anyone can hear me, please respond. This is Operational Commander Abdulafia 330 of the Ashishim Collective. This is an open transmission to any survivors – code zero-two-nine! Code...”
After a mad scrabble among the dangling wires and plugs of the communications console, Kaito finally found a handset – an old-school trucker’s mike with a little button on the side.
“Confirm please, Abdulafia 330 this is Kayzi and Hassan aboard the Kraken. Our little plan came off without a hitch. What’s this about an incursion? Is it that... that thing in Verlaine’s head?”
For a second the flashback stripped his defenses bare, a memory etched into his seething brain and the choking wires of his bio-onboard. It was a viral which straddled the boundary between metal and meat, flashing images of the poor Magus’ suffering in front of his eyes in a hot black whirlwind of terror. His knuckles clenched white around the handset – so tight he forgot to let his finger off the button.
“....out of Verlaine, and into the Wetsystems! It’s mutated faster than anything I’d ever believed possible! We have to pull out of the city, Kaito – we need to be cut off from Elysium, and especially from Kronos. When that creature gets its claws into the master controls we’re all going to want to be very, very far away.”
Kaito was more than a little unnerved by the sheer panic in the battle-clone’s voice – if he was worried what the hell should the rest of them be thinking?
“Why quit the city?” he asked, trying to keep his composure “Surely that’s a bit drastic, even if the virus is alien. I saw it too, remember, and I’ll admit it ain’t pretty. But given enough time and enough processing power we can crack this mother. If we can’t, nobody can.”
There was a pause as crackling static cooked on the airwaves. Kaito was unpleasantly certain he could hear screams mixed up with the white noise.
“Kayzi....listen. I let it loose. It was trapped in Magus Verlaine’s body – locked up tight. But I had to be the big hero, didn’t I? I had to try. And it SHOWED meit showed me what it wants to do with this world. It’s....perverse. Just sick. It’s not just a danger to the Wetsystems, or to those of us who’re hardwired. It feeds on suffering, Kaito, human suffering. You’ve seen the first secret of the Magi – the dead souls in the machine. When it gets to them it’s going to increase its power a thousandfold.”
It was the hoarse whisper of a man defeated – a voice on the edge of death. Kaito wondered, not for the first time, how Abdulafia had survived the collapse of the Valley View. Or indeed, if he had survived it....
He had to keep the Ashishi agent focused, or else he was going to lose himself in despair.
“I’ve seen them, ‘Afia. I know what you guys are working for, now. You have to set them free. I gotta admit, it all sounded pretty tripped out and spiritual, until I saw the truth of it....”
When it came back Abdulafia’s voice was bitter, filled with spite.
“That doesn’t matter now – It doesn’t matter that you Subcity fools thought we were mad. It doesn’t matter that we had to tempt guys like you with power and secrets, when the truth seemed like a drugged-out conspiracy. What you need to know is the LAST secret, the one they only tell the highest echelon of the indoctrinated. What that thing found out from poor damned Verlaine.”
Even Hassan was on the edge of his seat by now, leaning in over the comm. unit as wails and moans sifted out of the static. Kaito could just picture the Ashishim somewhere in the dark, crushed between layers of broken concrete, drawing a final heaving breath.
“Those souls, the dead ones, the things in the Wetsystems – it’s been storing them up since it was built. All of us in the inner circle have heard the final transmission, the last command which Kronos’s makers gave it before the missiles hit. It wants to save us."
He paused fro a second, fighting for air.
"It's... it’s figured out how to remake the Earth, remake everyone and everything on it as if the Separatist Wars never happened. It’s built a thing called the Forge....and it needs all those personalities to drive it. It wants to stitch them together into a net that shrouds the Earth, use them to pattern a vast field of energy, and run it like one big Assembler. It’ll remake each blade of grass, every city, every last inch of the old Earth again, from the atoms up. But it needs two things to accomplish its purpose. The first is a staggering amount of souls – human personalities to weave the energy mesh. It’s gonna burn them up like gasoline."
Kaito could hear great slabs of stone and steel grinding together behind the Ashishi's voice, the aftershocks of the Valley View's collapse. At any second they could slip...
"The other thing is – it needs a living, breathing human being to operate the Forge. So as much as we hate that vile machine, and what it's done, we must accept that its Book of Manifest Dogma is technically correct. There will be a rebirth, and for it to occur there does need to be an Emperor of Elysium. It’s just that nownow it looks like it’s going to be that...that...atrocity. That abomination will possess the machine as easily as it did Verlaine. And then – you can probably guess what kind of a world it wants to create. Me, I don’t have to. I’ve already been shown.”
Kaito reeled back, stunned, his mind scrabbling at the edge of madness. It was too much to take in all at once.
“It promised me that I would be one of it’s Exalted – that I’d have no choice. For setting it free I’d become one of its priesthood, in a world more cruel than any hell. The sum of all hells, really – that thing has has no imagination. It’s only got a stitched-up patchwork of every nightmare ever dreamed. I’ll be lord over that, forever – or at least until its spawn hatches. That’s the plan, you see. It wants to feed until it’s gravid, and then it'll split in two, like a giant bacterium. Its seed will germinate in the Earth’s core, and emerge to devour this whole universe, one galaxy at a time.”
There was a racking sob, an anguished, rattling breath.
“And it all started with me! I’m responsible!”
Kaito didn’t resist when Hassan’s huge arm came in over his shoulder and plucked the mike from his hand. He was still utterly stunned by the implications of ‘Afia’s confession – still trying desperately to explain it away as some kind of hysterical hallucination.
“Listen up, Ashishi.” growled Jaq, ripping off another chunk of freeze-dried protein with his teeth. “I’ve just given this little speech to my friend here, and I don’t like repeating myself. But if what you’re saying is true – and it sounds like you believe it – then self-pity ain’t gonna help. I saw what you can do, back there at the Valley View. Me, I’m a simple man. If I see a problem, I just beat it down. Perhaps because I’m not as sharp as you or the Kayzi here – but it usually works.” He masticated loudly for a second, crushing the handset in his huge meaty fingers. “I haven’t got any special training, or an army behind me like you do. I haven’t got brains, or wetwiring, or any tricks. I can’t do that freaky thing that you do, with all the damn fireworks out of nowhere. But if some piece of shit comes crawling from out of space and tries to take my city, I’m going to fight.”
Kaito looked on in disbelief – this was a living legend his friend w
as lecturing, a warrior who had actually fought in the Reclamation! When he looked at Hassan’s face the Kayzi could guess what was going on behind his eyes – the rippling animated flames of his tattoos writhed and twisted across his skin, a constant reminder. He was in the grip of his own personal nightmare...
“If you lose it now everyone you care about will die. If you lose control your enemy has you by the balls. And when you come back down, when you realize what you’ve done, then you’ll know despair. Then you’ll want to die. Right now, you still have a choice.”
Kaito knew he was speaking from personal experience. And the pain gave his words vehemence, gave them an edge which cut through the static and the feedback, right into Abdulafia’s tortured mind.
“You don’t understand!” he wailed, blurring the signal as his rage and shame overcame him. “It can’t be fought! The more you kill, the more it feeds – all I could hope to do is take as many people to safety as possible. But I’m going to die here. I’m trapped under tons of rubble, and if it shifts....”
Now Kaito was back on the keyboards, sweat beading his brow as his fingers moved in a blur. The Wetsystems were in tatters, but the old fiber-optic network was still live, and this ancient machine was plugged in, communicating with others of its kind across the city. The archaic interface he’d seen when he confronted the Kraken’s mind was all he needed to take the outmoded system apart....
“Sit tight, ‘Afia.” said the Kayzi, pulling the mike back on its cable. “I think I can get you out of there. Then we can talk about evacuating the city.”
There was a grinding noise for a second, and a tortured ultrasonic squeal. Kaito caught himself praying to the blessed Saint Ilya (something he hadn’t done since the age of six) that the debris hadn’t just crushed ‘Afia flat.
“Allright. Allright. I – I think I can last about another twenty minutes. That’s as much power as I’ve got left, from that last hit of ambrosia. But if we’re going to do this at all, we’re going to do it right. I need you guys to go and get some help – help from outside the city. There’s a guy out there who owes me a favor.”
Kaito breathed out, catching a glimpse of Jaq’s grinning face reflected in the monitors. All the Ashishi had needed was a little push in the right direction.
“I don’t know if you’re a big threedeeo fan, but you may have heard of Deuteronomy Jones.” said Abdulafia, his voice growing stronger by the second. Kaito could imagine him forcing the layers of rubble apart with renewed vigor, down there in the dark. “Most of the time he’s just a crazy evangelist, but you don’t carve up Omnivasive’s network like that without some serious skills. You know how they’ve been trying to get his head on a plate for the last decade or two? Well, there’s a reason that he’s never been found. It’s called the Archangel Uriel.”
While he listened, Kaito was still blazing a trail of devastation through the ramshackle remnants of Elysium’s fiber-optic network, marveling at the number of millennium-age machines still live and drawing power from the city’s core. Taking control of one of them would be strange – kind of like trying to drive while wearing boxing gloves. But he’d just spotted the perfect tool for the job, striding down the transdome ring-road as if there was a parade in town.
“O.K, ‘Afia – I think we’re good to go down here. How do we get Preacher Jones on our team?”
The Kayzi could just imagine Abdualfia’s pained smile, deep under a mountain of twisted metal and fractured concrete.
“All you have to do is swim out and surprise him, K. I’m sure that thing you’re riding in will help him to see our point of view.”
Abraxas met its prey out amidst the frozen rocky maze of the asteroid belt, stepping down from lightspeed to lay up among the tumbling boulders and hide.
In astronomical terms this was barely out of spitting distance from Earth, but it had been necessary for the great battleship to wait, its slaved A.I.s instructed to sit tight and observe the fate of its sister ship. If the Kataphrakt-Commander of the Multiplicity fleet could be persuaded to see reason, there would be no need for its suicidal mission.
As it transpired the Aegis had proved only a minor distraction to the Praetor’s finest – an FTL messenger drone had given the Abraxas a full update microseconds before it slipped into superspace.
Now the great spacecraft hid in the shadow of a long-dead mining colony, a spider in the centre of an electronic web. Thousands of smart munitions were seeded across this sector of the belt – stealth-black things packed with nuclear explosives, shielded from the senses of their prey by swaddling layers of foam. The Blacksteel fleet, still formed into a massive jagged sphere, would pass right through their ambush on its way toward the Earth – and here, the A.I. cores fervently hoped, it would be stopped in its tracks.
The ships it was facing were utterly unlike the exploratory system Everdark – they were prefabricated tubes the size of skyscrapers, bristling with weapons at one end and driven by powerful thrusters at the other. There seemed to be little danger of them shifting and transforming like the fluid exploratory; or of them overwhelming a swarm of smart munitions as easily as they had done the doomed, overconfident Xerxes. But despite all its preparations the faceted mind of Abraxas was worried. Or rather, it had been infected with a little of Technician Zhe’s anxiety; he knew full well the excesses of destruction the Unity were capable of.
Abraxas’ cause for concern was ramped up to the verge of electronic panic as it watched the massive, moon-sized slavesystem battle fleet roll and split open, shedding immense cylinder-ships as it came in toward the belt. Had it somehow betrayed its presence? Could the Blacksteel really pick out its shape behind the asteroid mine, its systems all tangled up with those of the dead colony inside the rock?
Almost assuredly not – at least according to the records Zhe had uploaded into Abraxas’ computer brain. The Unity were a vast and ungainly conglomerate – a foe who conquered galaxies by main force rather than by guile and cunning. Some of their fighting units, the Hastatii and Triarii battle robots, had been in production for more than twenty thousand years without any significant upgrades. The Motherbrain’s only concession to tactics was to paint the lumbering hulks a different color depending on the terrain where they fought. A thing like Everdark, the pinnacle of Blacksteel ingenuity, was still only allowed just enough autonomy to appear clever.
No, Abraxas wouldn’t be betrayed by some new twist of Unity tech.
It would be undone by the very people it had been designed to subjugate.
When the first of the Blacksteel ships came within hailing distance something inside the asteroid sensed its vast bulk, and systems which had lain dormant for a thousand years crackled into life again. In black chambers carved into the frozen rock mummified corpses floated in vacuum, starved and suffocated when the Earth forgot them. But their voices were preserved in the indelible optic cores of their computer systems. What the war-fleet of the Blacksteel Unity heard as they closed in on Abraxas’ hiding place was their final cry for help.
“Please – anybody! This is Colony Nine-Theta, Terminus Mining Company subunit twenty seven... we’re out of supplies. The water purifiers are shot. The air scrubbers are down to twenty percent capacity...Dear God, they’re already talking about cannibalism in the labor habs. We haven’t had a supply ship from Earth in three months, no news, no transmissions...Political Officer Grant tells us its just solar radiation blocking the signal, but I’m not sure anymore. Please, if anybody can hear us, this is Nine-Theta, requesting immediate assistance...”
The microwave transmission drew in the Blacksteel slaveships like the taint of blood in shark-infested water, fifty of the outriding cylinders pointing their cannon-studded noses in toward the asteroid. Behind its deceptively solid bulk the Abraxas cowered, hoping beyond hope that the vast mass of the Unity fleet was in range of its munitions.
Panic sparked across the void faster than any radio message. Every cannon, every bomb in the whole damned sector seemed to detonate
at once.
Fifty Blacksteel ships cupped the asteroid in a half-circle formation, while the jagged ball of the Motherbrain’s main fleet hung back, watching, analyzing. It saw the stealth munitions go live, spiraling in toward its vanguard, even as their plasma lances ignited, transfixing Colony Nine-Theta in a cross of fire.
Abraxas’ A.I. cores worked feverishly in that blazing instant, trying to redirect their nuclear weapons against the main bulk of the Unity fleet. Most of the smart bombs were already inexorably locked in on their targets though – isolating the fifty outrider ships as a very clear and present threat.
Even as the asteroid’s shell cracked and shattered the swarm of nukes hammered into the Unity forces like a hellish rain. The radiation storm ripped through energy shields drained to the point of critical weakness as full power was pumped through their plasma lance batteries.
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