Zhe 02_Chains of Tartarus

by Drew Dale Daniel Bryenton

  Higher still, up among the ragged clouds, and the slick blue bulge of the Beltway slid by beneath her, untouched as yet by the hunger of her new master. She could feel her bones turning to brittle rot now, her tendons parting like decaying thread. This flight would soon be over. All at once she realized what had happened to the last victim of this particular saprophyte – utterly digested in midair! What an easy target she must have made, cowering there on the Hab roof with an old automatic pistol in her hands...

  A laborious single wingbeat, the ache and creak of tortured bone, and the veil of clouds parted.

  She broke through into a night sky dominated by the overspanning arc of the satellite halo, a jaundiced moon painting the clouds sickly yellow. Here and there the blanket of roiling vapor was tinged with red, a spreading stain rolling out over the city.

  But the Voice wouldn't let her admire the view, even if it was most likely the last thing she'd ever see. This flight was for a purpose, and with her frail mortal flesh failing there was no time to waste...

  Her ragged wings clapped once, a surging downbeat which sent her careening in toward the jagged tops of the Lord's spires, in through a maze of steel teeth to where lights burned blue and bright about the base of the disused 'Lev.

  That single movement was enough to pull the muscles away from the bones of her tortured arms, splitting her new black skin. A rain of noisome stuff trailed in her wake as the towers sped by on both sides, her flight now a suicidal plunge in toward the light. Toward the sanctum of Kronos, a place she'd only heard of in the sermons of Manifest Dogma.

  The first PDR shifted into existence directly in her path; even if her ravaged frame could have steered around its burnished shell, her brain would never have reacted in time. Laney struck the missile platform at full speed, cartwheeling through the cold air as they broke apart. The PDR loosed a missile as it spun, smooth, and she felt the lick of its rocket exhaust hiss by as she fell.

  A tiny, happy part of her, locked away from the crawling corruption of the Worm knew that it wouldn't be long now until she hit the ground...

  Two more high-explosive rockets scudded past as the Saprophyte struggled to regain control, sending her spinning across the darkness, winking satellites and bloody clouds and walls of rusted steel wheeling before her eyes. It was the fourth one which struck home.

  Laney felt the impact, even through the numb detachment of her enslavement. The oily black thing which wrapped her in its embrace screamed as a ball of flame erupted around it, licking across its bubbling skin, laying bare her ruined flesh. It tore off her, burning, a tattered ruin adrift in the cold air, and the pain came up to meet her, the wind flaying her like claws. It was honest pain, and soon it would be over. Laney Forster took some tiny consolation in the fact that the creature which had killed her was suffering and dying, too.

  That was the last thing which went through her mind before the PDR's fifth missile slammed into her back, lighting up the megatowers with a brief flare of phosphorous white.

  Satisfied that no fragment of its target remained, the hovering mekan downshifted its mass, shrinking back to the size of a mosquito before it flitted away into the darkness to resume its endless patrol.

  Inside its claustrophobic section of the Wetsystems the Worm shrieked in frustration. That was the sixth one down! These feeble human insects were so frail, so limited! If it weren't for their delicious capacity for suffering they'd be better off extinct!

  The otherdimensional creature followed the death-plunge of its burning saprophyte minion, feeding on its pain as it went up in flames. It seemed that stealth was out of the question, even by air. Kronos' sanctum was proof against even the most subtle attacks which the Worm could muster. This could prove a problem, considering that it only had mere thousands of Saprophytes at its disposal. After an hour of frantic probing and prying it had discovered not so much as a crack in the lockdown which imprisoned it...

  But the Exalted were another matter altogether. Such a fine crop of them, and so strong! A handful of times throughout history the Worm had managed to enter the minds of the weak and wicked among its human flock, granting them a fraction of its power. Stories of witchcraft and cannibalism, berserk savagery and sacrifice rippled out from its chosen ones, sowing the seeds for a harvest of fear. But now, with part of its incalculably immense physical form across the threshold its Exalted were stronger than ever.

  Over time its slaves had always become different from their bovine kin – madness usually came first, then subtle shifts in their physiology, witch-marks and claws and blackened, pointed teeth... Now they took on the aspect of their terrible father almost as soon as they accepted its embrace. The great aching need to spawn one of its own kind still burned in the mind of the Worm, cutting as keenly as the desire to feed. But these things were almost children to it, nourishing their loving patriarch with the pain of the innocent. Some had consumed hundreds already! And unlike the Saprophytes they were intelligent, they learned, they grew.

  The oily black foot-soldiers of the Worm had to jump from host to unfortunate host, or wither away to ashen dust. These Exalted, though – the one called Gormann had already learned how to regurgitate its suffering victims, splitting its glutinous new form into a score of deadly free agents. Even the least of them, the newborns, were busily gorging themselves on human flesh, fusing arms and legs and eyes to their beautiful, twisted bodies...

  Twisted? Malformed?

  What was that, if not one of it's own?

  Something snapped the thread of the Worm's reverie – an image, a tiny scrawl of silver across the bubbling eyes of a burning saprophyte as it fell.

  Him! The vessel which had trapped it! The puppet of the Illuminatus, strung up and sliced to pieces by Kronos, his defiance flaring like a beacon in the psionic senses of the Worm.

  It only caught the tiniest glimpse of Edward Tsien before its vassal splattered across the jagged antennae of an office building's crown, but that was enough. He was incandescent, filled with hate and rage and sweet self-loathing. Such a prize!

  It was too bad that he was cut off from the sector of the Wetsystems where the Worm coiled, caged. Threads surely branched off from his augmented brain to Kronos itself, to the heart of the Forge. And down into the R.T, where the Illuminatus cowered, awaiting its judgment...

  But over and above all that, the Worm saw in Tsien the ultimate Exalted. Steel and flesh grinding against each other in suffering, his mind wracked with doubt and fear. He could become exquisite!

  The Worm had no concept of art, but looking down through the rain of blood at the lumpen form of the Super-Cyben it felt like a sculptor, contemplating a virgin slab of utterly perfect marble. Within that shell of metal and meat was the soul of a monster, just waiting to be tortured into existence.

  In the heads of a thousand slave saprophytes the Voice hissed and bellowed, turning their decaying eyes up toward the Beltway. It whispered and cajoled and bullied the Exalted from their crawling spread, promising them impossible excesses of pleasure and pain...

  Oh yes. Here was the key. Here, in this one half-human thing.

  Tsien had been crucified between life and death to lure the Worm, and he was the bridge between dimensions which had drawn it across. What better avatar could serve as its own living flesh when it took this world and raped it dead?

  Celebrant Grandmaster Benton Veer was vexed. Not only had tonight's gripping installment of the Game collapsed into static and noise before the end of the second round, but now the power was out as well!

  Honestly, one paid good money for a house in the Beltway, one worked tirelessly for Kronos and his Chosen, and this was how one was repaid?

  He might as well have stayed down in the subcity with his poor, doomed parents, with his gaggle of drunken brothers!

  Those loathsome brutes from the Compliance Division were cruising the streets outside, no doubt driving down property values by the minute. And if rumor was to be believed (which, in the social pressure-cooker
of the Belt, it most certainly was) the rest of Elysium was in utter upheaval tonight.

  That would mean a lot more work for all the chiefs of staff – even poor outmoded Benoic, even (and here Grandmaster Veer shuddered in his silks, his powdered face twitching with disgust) Sanitation Commissioner Callaway. Yes, even the bloody Sewer Tsar would have a ton of paperwork to wade through, if they woke tomorrow to find the drains stuffed with bodies!

  Benton paced the thick carpets of his villa, pensive, a wireless phone dangling from the sash of his robe and a flute of amaretto in one hand. There was only one consolation to be had tonight – a little real-estate deal, a paradigm shift in the power structure of Oleander Avenue. As President of the street's neighborhood association the Grandmaster of Celebrants had had one thing on his agenda for the last ten years – the expulsion of Direktor Octavio Ascher.

  Tonight it should all go down without a hitch, and then the vast pseudogothic pile next door could be bulldozed and transformed into a tennis lawn, with a tasteful little rose garden for the long-suffering Mrs Veer. Oh, how he'd persevered! The petitions, the meetings, the polite indignation... but in the end it would come down to his little lads in black, his Celebrants. This was one operation he was glad to be involved in, despite his general disdain for the dirty details of his trade.

  Benton nearly dropped his crystal flute when the gilded telephone at his hip chimed, tiny blue jewels sparkling across its rose-engraved shell. He touched its earpiece with one slim finger, and the voice of Grief Division Dispatch came in, hashed and blurry, making him wince a little at its crudity.

  “Chief, we've got a problem! That squad you detailed for the Ascher job...well, I dunno how to tell you this sir, but...ummm...we've lost them. Didn't even make it through the gates. I've sent up a spotter drone, and it looks like there's some kind of fighting going on up there – I swear, we though that it hadn't spread out of the lower city...”

  The dispatcher was named Holgarth, a Vice-Captain in the Undertakers, and a man who thought he was being groomed for Veer's own job. It always payed to keep your underlings deluded.

  “What?” barked the Grandmaster, relishing the thought of Holgarth's discomfort. “Utterly unacceptable! Nothing, we are assured, nothing will stand in our way! We are natural causes, Mister Holgarth, we are implacable!”

  Unthinkably, the idiot actually interrupted Benton just as he was getting into the swing of his little speech.

  “Grandmaster...sir...It's, I mean...we're getting some very strange reports from the lads on the streets tonight. Some of the other squads aren't calling in, either. And the spotter drone sent back images of tankhunters, sir! They're fighting the Bluejackets!”

  Veer's boys held all Elysium in disdain, but they harbored a special hatred for the Compliance Division. Most of his men had dropped out of the Academy of Law, and all of them were the type to nurse a grudge.

  “I didn't tell you to stop them, did I?” asked Benton, toying with his amaretto glass as he imagined blue-suited troopers being blown apart by heavy artillery. “Still, our mission stands, mister Holgarth. I have certain obligations to uphold, and we cannot be seen to be anything other than utterly dedicated to Kronos' grand design.”

  Obligations, indeed. Heavens preserve him if he had to tell Mrs Veer that her rose garden was still in the possession of a psychopathic severed head with a nine-figure bank balance...

  “All this unauthorized death must surely have freed up some of our men, hmm?” he purred, stalking over to the curtained windows and twitching the thick red drapes aside. A Comp. Div. tank rumbled down Oleander Avenue with its red and blue strobes blazing, painting the clipped lawns and whitewashed villas gaudy neon. “I want a show of force, Holgarth, the likes of which this city has never seen. I want Octavio bloody Ascher's head flopping on the concrete like a hooked fish! And I want it all within the next half hour, or so help me Vice-Captain, you'll be scrubbing out the crematoria with a toothbrush for the rest of your miserable tenure.”

  “I...I....that is....” stammered the unfortunate dispatcher, frantically rummaging through the empty coffee cups and folders on his desk for tonight's electronic roster. “We've got three Terminus units on standby, about sixteen Undertakers, a Crematory detachment, and the Axis Mortalis. Although that's not been out of its hangar for forty years... I think we can spare ten men, maybe twelve for the Ascher job, Grandmaster.”

  Veer scowled as he watched the pigwagon cut the corner of Oleander and Jasmine, mowing down an ornamental fountain.

  “I want them all, Holgarth. A full complement, armed to the teeth, and the Axis as well. We'll come in through the sky, grab that old bastard before he knows what's hit him!”

  There was a fire in his eyes now, as he gently placed the empty glass down on one of his mahogany end tables, images of his old rival Division Marshall Akembe dancing in his head. While that fat old fool's men went toe to toe with a gaggle of rusted machines, he'd be drinking a toast to Direktor Ascher's sorry demise.

  “Half an hour, you hear me! And tell them to be turned out in their finest, Holgarth. I'll be leading this operation myself.”

  'That fat old fool' as Benton Veer had called him was currently the focus of intense scrutiny. His holographic image glared down from the wall of the Last Post, as if reprimanding the officers there for their laxity and laziness. Some of them sat sprawled in chairs, lost in threedeeo reverie. Others were even wearing robes, slippers, pajamas for the love of all things holy! Akembe's leathery brown face was creased up in his habitual frown - as it had been for the two decades that he'd graced the wall of the day room. Gerhard liked to think he'd appreciate what was about to happen here, even if it wouldn't wipe the cold-eyed scowl from his ugly mug.

  If the bastard ever smiled - which Captain Mitchell sorely doubted, then it would certainly be at a fool like him, climbing up on top of a card table in an exosuit to address a bunch of dried-out old veterans. He'd laugh to split his sides if he heard what Gerhard was about to ask of them.

  "Listen up! Listen good, men - I've got some bad news for you. Well - good news, really, unless you wanted to end your days wallowing in your own filth! I'm here to reinstate your commissions!"

  The youngest man in the room aside from the Tutor-Captain must have been a hundred and three - Marty Maxwell, ex-commander of precinct 292. He was the first to actually look away from the Threedeeo globe, squinting up at Gerhard as if he were some bizarre new threedee advertisement.

  "Aren't you young Mitchell?" he asked, levering himself around on the end of the couch. "The one who got busted down to Academy duty for that fiasco with the Liquid Tong?"

  Gerhard grimaced, remembering that terrible night, the smoke, the confusion – it wasn't his fault that a Tong sniper had planted that hypodermic in his neck. And with that much Triple Platinum in his system, was it any wonder he'd been found naked, firing a pair of micromissile launchers at cars on the transdome highway?

  “Yes, sir, I'm that Captain Mitchell. As you can see, they've issued me with some pants it's pretty damn hard to take off.”

  Marty cackled as Gerhard rapped his knuckles against the iron codpiece of his exosuit, dragging the man next to him around with one liver-spotted hand.

  “You hear that, Perez? Ol' Bare-assed Mitchell wants us to go back to work! What do you say to that?”

  Juan Perez, once the most feared C-Tac assassin in all Elysium, looked up at Gerhard through a pair of outmoded cybernetic eyes, pushrods clicking as he tried to focus.

  “Back out there? I thought we were useless, son. I thought Marshall Lexington replaced us all with Cyben, not ten years after the Reclamation.”

  “Juan, you idiot, it's Akembe now.” chimed in another man, his voice issuing from a tracheotomy speaker in his neck. “Lexington was in here with us for three years before the Celebrants came for him.”

  At the mention of the Celebrants a muttering of resentment rippled through the room, and more and more of the old veteran troopers turned to look up a
t Mitchell.

  “Is that what you want, then?” he asked, throwing his arms out wide. “You want to end up like Iron Lex, waiting for the bloody corpse-rapists to take you? He was a pawn of politics, but he served for eighty years, dammit! When they shot his hand off during the Reclamation he kept fighting!”

  The muttering had turned angry now, and crafty old Marty Maxwell reached out and surreptitiously switched off the threedeeo. Every eye was locked on Gerhard, the holo of Marshall Akembe looming over his head.

  “You want to be picked off one by one, led off to the slaughterhouse? Is that how a soldier of the law dies?”

  Oh, he had them now. Gerhard knew what it felt like to get old. He was already sliding that way himself. But with fire in their bellies and a few million Slades worth of modern weaponry, these guys could hold the Beltway gates. The damn place was fortress, after all.