Tiny cameras mounted in the back of his skull caught a tiny mote falling from the gateway above, where Gerhard was pumping his fist triumphantly in the air. It was a communicator, and Tsien caught it with his free hand, hearing the whoops and cries of jubilation crackling from its little speaker as he raised it to his ear.
“Good timing, Captain.” he said, keeping his eyes locked on the three remaining tankhunter mekan where they huddled at the base of the ramp. “Another couple of seconds and I wouldn't have been around to thank you.”
“Did I tell you I had some good officers in reserve, or what?” yelled Mitchell, so loud that Tsien could feel his augmented auditory system overloading. “Just three more to go, and then we're home free! That pile of silicon scrap isn't gonna try this again!”
But the Super-Cyben wasn't listening. His boosted optics had caught sight of something in the shadows behind the three warmekan, a slithering darkness coiling between the lightless buildings.
“Gerhard, I don't think you should be breaking out the beer and medals just yet. There's something strange going on down here...”
Even as he spoke one of the warmekan turned, its autoguns spinning up with a clatter of gears. The rhythmic hammering sound of high-explosive shells echoed across the bloodstained concrete of the gateway plaza once again, but this time the machine was firing off into the dark, down into the subcity.
Another of the mekan followed suit, peppering the jagged rooftops and steel-sided habs with lead, sending sparks and ricochets flying. Now the shadows pooled and flowed here, in a darkened doorway, now they slithered across the corrugated iron of a manufactorium roof, congealing, circling in closer...
“Tsien! Beware!” roared the central warmekan, the voice of Kronos echoing up against the gates like a breaking wave. “They're here! Help me...”
Then the darkness curled back, hissing, all the shadows clenched up like fists, and the saprophytes struck.
Solid rays of blackness lanced out of the gelid mass that was the vanguard of the Worm, spike-tipped pseudopods faster than bullets. They transfixed the three tankhunters effortlessly, absorbing maser beams and blasts of superheated plasma as if the doomed machines were firing into murky water. But their own weapons parted steel like tissue, hungrily filling the empty armor of the warmekan, spilling from their joints and oozing obscenely from the muzzles of their guns. Coils of twitching dark pulled tight, binding them to the shadows, turning the war machines into grim puppets dripping with rot.
They turned slowly, lifted off their feet on glistening tongues of jelly, borne up by the bulk of the beast which had enslaved them. Now that evil puppet-master heaved and slubbered its own bulk forward into the light, a thing the size of a house all pincers and suckers and doomed, screaming faces.
This time no voices echoed in Tsien's head, no caged souls flickered and faded as they tasted freedom. Whoever Kronos had chained inside the rusted casques of those machines, they had been released from one form of slavery into another. He knew that this thing had heard the fleeing spirits of the warmekan when it opened its mouth to speak, spewing forth a flood of noisome darkness.
“My name was Sonny Gormann, mister Tsien.” rumbled the massive creature, its tiny human face dwarfed between shoulders of inky matter which piled up and slumped down again, twisting and reforming a jumbled mass of spikes. “Better known to you Bluejacket pigs as prisoner number 19330-299456. Then as Junior Constable. But my new daddy's got a better name for me, a new name for the New Flesh. He calls me... Exalted.”
"And I - Exalted!" chimed in a second voice, this from a creature arraigned in flayed skins, a twisted one-armed dwarf who carried on the tip of his finger a pulsing sphere of gelatinous night. Like Gormann's ever-shifting flesh it bubbled with anguished faces, blindly groping hands and tortured bodies.
"An-and-and I...ex-ex-ex-xalted!" stammered a third of them, lurching forward from the unnatural shadows, a stick-thin wraith of a man teetering atop a serpent tower of saprophytic stuff. This one's face was peeled back in flayed strips, petals of flesh pinned down with hooks. Whether this was a modification made before or after its transformation Tsien didn't care to speculate.
Each of the chosen ones of the Worm held a tankhunter mekan twitching at the end of a black umbilicus, dangling them in front of the Super-Cyben like bait.
"What's wrong, Lieutenant? Suddenly not so tough, eh? Perhaps you were expecting more little tin toys from your machine-father's armory?"
Gormann laughed, coughing up bubbles of oily black resin which slithered down his bloated chest.
"Now, one way or another you're going to join us. I've been told you'll even get to share our name, Tsien. Such a shame, really - I can almost taste your fear already!"
His wrist-thick black tongue lashed the air, dripping, as his gross bulk shook with mirth.
"Taste it! Yesssss!" giggled the gnome, capering while his floating ball of darkness thumped like a living heart overhead. "Come with us, brother! At least then you'll be saved from the crawling steel!"
"At l-least then you'll n-n-nnot be one of these things! You won't d-die a machine!" stuttered the flayed one, his hooked-open eyes rolling madly.
Tsien tightened both hands around his makeshift sword, his face twisted up with rage. Whatever these things were, whatever trick of that damned machine....
But there was doubt. It flared tiny as a matchstrike in the echoing darkness of his soul, throwing the jagged shape of his hatred into sharp relief.
Self-hatred. Despair. Rage.
He could feel it calling out to them, across the gulf through which the caged souls of those tankhunters had fled. Perhaps he belonged with the Exalted...
The roar of twenty cannons saved him then, cutting short his morbid introspection with a thundering barrage from above. As the shells screamed over his head Tsien realized how close he'd been to reaching out and touching the sickness, inviting it inside. He'd felt it before, when he'd been transformed, when he was strung out on a rack of Mark-Four nanotech, between life and death.
With the flare and blast and impact of those screaming projectiles he realized what had happened.
His hate was misplaced. Kronos was complicit, but the machine had been played like a fool. That writhing black despite which had filled him wasn't just born of pain and hopelessness - it had taken physical form. It was the stuff which Gormann and his brethren wore like armor, the manifestation of pure malice.
It was the enemy.
He tried to fix the image of his wife, his children in his mind, but combat programs were blurring his eyes like delirium, and the nanotech was a furnace in his belly, demanding slaughter. Tears burst out around the welded reticules in his sockets, washing away the dried blood which crusted his face.
Howling, wordless, mindless, he gave himself up to the steel, raising his impossibly large blade over his head, and charged.
Axis Mortalis.
The flagship of the Celebrants hadn't been used for decades, but the secretive priesthood of that Order Militant kept the sleek black zeppelin oiled and ready, its guns loaded and its tanks brimming with ethanol fuel. From stem to stern the 'Grandmaster's Own' measured a full four hundred feet, a teardrop of oily black diamondmesh stretched taut over gasbags and antigrav generators. Slung under the Axis' frame was a command gondola shaped like a downward-jutting fin, a blade of metal whose leading edge was studded with guns and sensors, all the better to hunt down its prey.
In years past the sight of the Axis Mortalis riding the sky had been enough to fill those below with superstitious dread - they said that if its shadow touched you then you were marked for death. In reality it was only ever used to hunt down fleeing recalcitrants, those wealthy opportunists who thought they could suckle at Kronos' teat for a lifetime and then strike out into the rad-lands when their time grew short. Such individuals were few and far between now, as the city slowly decayed.
How would they ever know that a recusant was fleeing, these days, with the defensive perime
ter of Elysium hopelessly mixed up with the pickets of the Reclamation? And indeed, how could the cash-strapped hierarchy of the Direktoriat afford to send a beautiful beast like the Axis after them, with it's fuel costs for one mission alone enough to maintain a Cyben for a year?
Benton Veer watched the ceremonial crew of the air-battleship fussing over their litanies and pre-flight checks through an ormolu-framed twodeeo panel in his villa, smiling his thin-lipped smile as they toiled. Some of those men had waited since their fathers' time for the order to be given, and now they cast off the mooring chains and fired up the engines with prideful satisfaction. In the hold of the vast airship squads of Celebrants in their torquemada hoods and armor checked their weapons and offered up thanks to mighty Kronos for the chance to participate in history.
For Veer, the opportunity was a little more personal. In his studied opinion the only thing which Direktor Ascher had done to make the world a better place was to broadcast the Game, and tonight he had failed in even that trifling task. That he should have lived for nearly an hour now past his allotted demise galled the Grandmaster like a thorn in his boot.
Assured that his forces were rising up from out of the great hollow ziggurat of the Grief Division sanctum, Veer checked his own uniform one last time, and posed in front of the twodeeo screen, shutting it down with his bio-onboard so that it shimmered to a mirrored sheen.
Quite the gentleman officer, he fancied. The black brought out the ivory hue of his powdered skin, the stiff collar of riotmesh cupped his ornate periwig just so... and the acres of gold braid added that ineffable air of superiority he liked to think placed him above his fellow Burbanites. Especially the loathsome Direktor Ascher, for whom
sartorium held no function or appeal.
The last touch to his regalia was his scepter of office, an opera cane of rosewood topped with an ornate golden hourglass. Tiny antique clocks set into its sides would unleash the nanorobotic swarm which stole away his neighbor's mind.
Humming to himself contentedly Benton sprayed his cheeks with perfume and powdered rubies, then proceeded through the dim halls of his darkened villa to the french doors which opened out onto his lawn.
Strange – the immaculate false world within the belt should be dark, shaded deep blue by the lights of the Megatowers dappling its polyprop sky. Instead purple shadows coiled and shuddered as the flamelight of the burning city filtered in through the inflated walls. Veer could hear rain falling against the tight-stretched skin of his private little world, a tattoo like the roll of far-off drums. But inside all was silent, the air hushed and hot and dense, awash with the scents of sweat and oil. Perhaps the riots really were as bad as Holgarth had intimated? Perhaps the air-scrubbers and rad-filters of the Beltway had actually failed...
Veer took a pinch of snuff blended with pseudopiates and stimm to bolster his courage. He was stepping into enemy territory now, unguarded, and a thrill of frisson crackled down his spine. He knew that the Direktor's house was empty, save for the massed machinery which kept him alive. And with the scepter of his office in hand, no machine in Elysium could touch him, warded as he was by the arcane artifice of Kronos' nanotech. How it would please him to beard the lion in his den! How that withered thing called Ascher would writhe when he walked right up to it and pronounced its doom!
How much blissful peace he could look forward to when the redoubtable Mrs Veer finally had her rose garden...
“Holgarth!” he hissed into the tiny microphone which perched like a beauty spot on his powdered cheek. “I want you in position above the target NOW! I can dissect his automated defenses myself – and I don't suspect there'll be any other trouble. Dear Octavio really hates to have people see him in his current state – and who can blame him?”
High above, standing on the command deck of the Axis as that sinister black ship sliced through the clouds Jimson Holgarth was stricken almost speechless. From his lofty perch he could see what was happening in the streets, the crowds surging and seething like liquid as they scrabbled desperately for escape, the crush of bodies piling up against checkpoints and battlements designed to keep the Ferals out. Now the very structure of Elysium was a trap, a vast meat-grinder which made his own Order Militant seem petty by comparison. In this one night the work of every Celebrant who ever lived had been eclipsed. And yet the Grandmaster was still fixated on his little feud? Well, at least Holgarth and these few blessed souls were lifted up above the carnage, aloft on black wings.
“We're bringing her into position right now, Sir. They're just about to fire the mooring clamps.”
And afterward? Would they really go back down there, back into the jaws of the grinder? Even the ziggurat walls of the Sanctum couldn't possibly hold out against such madness. No, it would be better to strike out across the rad-lands, and find some far deserted place in which to live out the rest of their lives. If Veer had a problem with that he could always slip, accidentally, while standing in the airship's hatchway...
“Firing one. Two away. Three cleared....we're locked down.” Holgarth's voice came in over the titanic triple thump of the clamps striking the metal dome of Direktor Ascher's mansion, a burnished carbuncle pushing up through the blue skin of the Belt.
“Wait for my mark.” whispered Benton Veer, picking his way across the Omnivasive chief's lawn as though it were a minefield. Indeed, for all he knew it actually was! A gunmetal shimmer in the air betrayed his tiny guardian angels, spiraling like a double-helix around his body as he crept up to the ornate oak doors of the mansion. They'd shut down anything electronic which tried to harm him, fouling its circuits with sheer numbers and suicidal determination. The little machine which controlled them was the last of its marque, a thing designed for the boosted troopers of the Terminus Separatist Army more than a millennium ago. Layers of gold and filigree and ornamentation sealed it within its hourglass, just as arcana and superstition had accrued about the technology which had forged it.
Certainly, Benton Veer had no idea how the little talisman worked – it was enough that he believed in it blindly. So he was unsurprised that Octavio's door stood ajar, tiny coils of incense smoke creeping over the black marble threshold. Suspended lamps shaped like cyclopean pyramids glowed, ghostly pale blue, lighting the way into the den of his foe. Yes, the technomantic spells of the Scepter were with him, and all the crippled Direktor's defenses were stripped away...
That was when he heard the music.
Once I built a railroad, made it run...
The tune spun out, screwloose and warped, a plinking music-box melody over a sound like scuttling spider legs ... made it race against time. Once I built a railroad - now that's done...
Veer turned, serpent-quick, his body remembering for an instant his days on the streets, the slippery combat-sense of a frontline Celebrant. But there was nothing there. Still the song staggered along, louder now, the staccato of innumerable claws echoing in the sumptuous dark.
...Buddy, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower to the sun, concrete and mortar and lime. Once I built a tower, now that's done... Buddy, can you spare a dime?
It brought its own light with it, a ruddy orange glow cast by a score of candles. When the unseen musician came stalking into the entrance hall the pillars seemed to bend and twist like snakes, curling over to pin Benton to the spot.
It was Direktor Ascher - or what was left of him. The Grandmaster of Celebrants hadn't seen his face since the terrible fiasco of his final Game, his failed power-play to join the ranks of the Kheptarchy.
What faced him now was a scarred knot of mutilated flesh, a head floating in a bubbling tank of fluid.
A score of fat, dripping candles were melted onto its baroque frame with gobbets of wax.
Within that fishbowl globe Octavio Ascher's face was distorted and ravaged, pierced by wires and tubes and needles feeding nutrients to his wasted tissue. Of the dark-haired, craggy warlord Veer remembered from threedeeovision very little remained. Here a sheaf of hoses raped the cadaver's m
outh, there a ring of rivets and hooks pinned its eyes open. Muscles twitched beneath translucent white skin, while a forest of wires sprouted from the Direktor's scalp like a mane of hair.
And this thing wanted to live? Even without fathoming the arcane archaeotech which sustained his foe, the Grandmaster could tell that it was as much a machine of excruciation as of sustenance.
"Welcome, Mister Veer." spoke a voice from out of the many-jointed brass machine which bore up that hideous globe. "I knew you'd get here sooner or later. One of the pleasures of living right next door to the man who you know will one day try to kill you..."
Benton straightened himself up, adjusting his braid-encrusted peacoat with a contemptuous frown.
"You've had a good run, Direktor." he said, clicking his beringed fingers against the hourglass as he leaned on his cane. "Good of you to come down from your aerie and do this like a gentleman, now that the game's up."
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