Why weren't the nanobots shutting him down? The Direktor's grisly conveyance, that scorpion of engraved brass was clearly robotic in nature. And surely precious electricity coursed through the rebreathers and puriteks, blood-filters and whirring pumps which kept his head alive?
Instead, the tight twin helix of whispering metal seemed to draw in tighter to Benton's body, shrinking back as the Direktor's mechanical palanquin clattered forward.
"Surrender? Oh, I think not, dear neighbor. I've had many years to prepare for this moment, and as you can surely imagine, I intend to savor it sweetly..."
The voice had begun to answer him before he even finished talking! Something was definitely wrong here...
He could smell the hot exhalation of oil from the machine now, as it reached out with one serrated pincer, clicking and whirring as it closed around his neck. The shimmering edges of its blades pared the tiny transparent hairs at his throat, so tight, so intimate... if he moved by even an inch he'd slice himself a new smile.
"I - I have men up above! They're only waiting for my word!" Veer meant it to come out as a snarl, but instead it was the squeak of a trapped rodent.
In that moment, as Grandmaster Veer felt a trickle of blood spill from his throat, he saw the great brass key winding down in the thing's back. No electricity! This machine was an automaton so primitive that the deadly motes of Kronos couldn't touch it! And if he were to be pruned like a flower by this clockwork beast, the scepter of Celebrants would fall into the clutches of Ascher...
Benton Veer may have looked like a powdered fop, but he was at his core still the cruelest and most effective of killers – a street Celebrant who'd risen through the ranks by scrambling up a mountain of the dead. Indeed, his veneer of soft and pampered civility was as much a disguise as the false rubber head in its clockwork conveyance which faced him.
“I suppose you have the house surrounded, Veer?” prated the lifeless machine, unaware that its charade had been uncovered. “But you just had to see to this mission personally, didn't you? Whyever do you think I wanted to live here in the first place....”
He slipped left, out of the wicked claw's embrace, jamming the steel-shod tip of the scepter up into the mechanism which would make those razor pincers snap shut. At the same time he reached into the folds of his ornate peacoat, pulling loose a tiny pistol damascened and cloisonned beyond absurdity. Benton hit the ground on one knee, snarling into the sights of the tiny weapon, a thing from the apocalypse wars treasured by his Order Militant for centuries.
Its blast, when he tightened his finger on the firing stud was out of all proportion to its rococo decoration.
The false Direktor Ascher spun back across the floor, its brazen claws gouging grooves in the marble. Its voice faltered as the filigree and gold of its clicking body melted away to slag, blasted apart in a great hissing rosette by the thermic devastator in Benton's hand. Inside it was all springs and gears and copulating rods of metal, with a phonograph at its heart to broadcast the voice of the Direktor from discs of black vinyl. Such technomancy! Benton had never seen anything so advanced – more amazing even than the ancient magnetic tapes which were sometimes dug out of the rad-lands.
He had no time to wonder at the workings of that mechanical voicebox, however – the machine advanced on him again, its one remaining claw held high, snicking open and shut like a demon shear.
Benton could see the umbilicus of taut cables which directed the thing now, snaking off across the floor to disappear through a shadowed doorway. He dodged right, ducking down, waiting for the pincer to snap closed where his neck would have been, then he let loose another thermic blast, slicing the whole baroque arm from Ascher's clockwork avatar.
How could it track him? Surely the real Direktor had no eyes, if he were truly as grotesque as the leering simulacrum before him...
Yes! Of course! The spiraling cloud of nanobots were literal-minded things, as unimaginative as their father Kronos. The cameras which were watching this little fracas weren't dangerous in and of themselves. And the thing they directed was far too primitive to warrant their attention...
Benton danced back across the slippery marble tiles, grinning as the clockwork insect bulled at him, gesticulating with the stumps of its arms. He brought the little pistol in his hand up, right over his head, and searing force spewed from the deaths-head of its muzzle.
Plasterwork and fretted hardwood charred and ignited, bursting into vivid flames. And with it went the slick black camera-globe through which Octavio had controlled his pet.
The thermic devastator was spent – three shots were all that weak modern batteries could coax from its incinerator vanes. But now Ascher's tricky little toy was silent and immobile, completely helpless.
Ah, if only the Direktor himself was really there inside that globe of glass, as feeble as a newborn! Veer bent forward to stare into the milky eyes of the simulacrum, wiping away a sheen of condensation from the glass. Was it his imagination, or was the thing's mouth lolling open, its eyeballs rolling up in their rubber sockets, miming death?
“Oh, Octavio, you silly old fool!” chuckled the Grandmaster of Celebrants, tapping the globe with one jeweled fingernail. “This pageantry might have confused a lesser man, but you're dealing with the Grief Division! I'm not one of Akembe's walking corpses, you know!”
Slowly, lifelessly, the cadaverous face winked at him.
The hypodermic dart came out of the false Ascher's mouth so fast that even Benton Veer's impeccable reflexes couldn't save him. Glass shattered as the pneumatic projectile lanced out from between those slack purple lips, a slick ovipositor of metal tipped with a primed syringe.
It pierced the Grandmaster's eyeball with a wet popping sound, pumping him full of liquid neurotoxin in a fragment of a second.
“Holgarth!” he gurgled, clawing at his swollen eye “Full assault! He....he wants the scepter! He must be stopp....”
But that was all the world would ever hear from the perfumed lips of Benton Veer. His whole nervous system rebelled as the toxin saturated his brain, crushing his windpipe and stopping his heart in mid-beat. Darkness closed in from every side as his spine curled over backwards, a counter-foetal death rictus enforced by uncontrollable muscles...
The last thing he saw was the face of a child, looming out of the shadows with a knife in one tiny hand. Although he had the face of a cherub there was a look in the boy's eyes that Benton found utterly chilling, even here on the threshold of death.
“Uncle, is he dead?” asked the child, kneeling at the Grandmaster's side. “Or shall I finish him myself?”
Benton Veer didn't hear the answer, as black waters closed over his head. But he fancied that the last thing he felt was mercifully sharp steel at his throat, parting the red-hot wires of his muscles and tendons, setting him free...
Down through hatchways in the Direktor's dome roof they came, swarming down cables and chains, black-hooded wraiths armed with deadly technology. Down from the bobbing sleek belly of the Axis Mortalis came a small army of Celebrants - Undertaker commanders in their top hats and tails, Cremator squads strapped up with heavy flamethrowers, Grief Division troopers with their skull-faced pocketwatches swinging from their belts. One by one they dropped down into the sensorium dome, secure in the knowledge that their master had disabled Ascher's security systems.
When the last one was in, and the vast emptiness of the dome rang with the click and slide of a hundred weapons being readied for war, the hatches slammed shut. The doors rumbled closed, sealing those unfortunate men inside as the screens came to life, one by one.
Pure white light flooded the sensorium, as a column of metal rose smoothly from the very centre of the floor.
Fingers scrabbled at locks, and hammered at handles, and fists pounded against unyielding steel. Bullets ricocheted and whined, sparking from the diamond-fiber mesh of the screens. All to no avail.
Usually, that pistoning column of brushed steel would have borne up Octavio Ascher's p
reservative tank, raising him up out of his office and into his private viewing sphere. Not this time, however.
This time a cannister of gas rested atop a velvet cushion there, a cannister of a very special substance concocted by the machines of Don Gianni Vexx for a princely sum.
As the column locked into place the gas began to hiss from a daisyhead of dispenser nozzles, quickly filling the entire sensorium with odorless, colorless weaponized adrenochrome.
Had these been the warriors of the Ashishim, trapped like rats under the dome of screens, they could have used the mind-bending effects of the drug to warp their bioelectric fields, to become - if only for a few seconds - superhuman. But these were nothing more than well-paid thugs, lackeys of Kronos not even good enough to prosecute the law. Unhinged laughter and fits of uncontrollable weeping rippled through the dome as the screens began to show images, winking on one by one.
They were the faces of death - real, honest death, not the sanitized soul-slavery of the Grief Division.
Some came in live, fresh from the bloody streets. Others were archival, ancient, black and white, faded...
They cycled from one to the next, the bombed, brutalized and beaten, the tortured and diseased, faster and faster, until the whole great dome seethed and throbbed with death, until the air was thick with death, a crushing weight of carnage grinding into the souls of the Celebrants. Under such an onslaught, under the twisted influence of the 'chrome it didn't take long for the first one to crack. They were all heavily armed, after all.
Flame licked out from a Cremator's cannon. A howling Undertaker put the muzzle of his pistol to his head...
With the first shot the screens began to strobe, completing the image of a technomantic hell.
Bloody panic ran rampant for ten seconds, for twenty, bullets flying wild, flesh and bones tearing and snapping...
Within a minute it was all over.
The three warmekan exploded in a spray of darkness, metal fragments and chunks of reinforced armor skittering and tumbling across the gateway plaza. But surely his magnifiers deceived him? It was as if the corroded steel had been nothing more than a casing, an outer shell filled with some oily, slithering mass. Where the machines had faced Tsien, now there stood a trio of dark monolithic shapes, crudely humanoid, dissolving slowly into liquid as the Super-Cyben leaped back, his sword dragging behind him.
Gerhard Mitchell had seen some pretty strange things in his years on the force - mutants running rampant with stimm in their veins, Ashishim spies flickering in and out of sight like deadly chameleons, gut-shot gang-rats still hacking at his exo-armor despite their mortal wounds. And other things, weirder things indeed on that night when the Liquid Tong had spiked his blood with drugs. His father and grandfather had told him tales of the Reclamation, of the bizarre and crafty foes who lurked in the R.T, waiting for the thin line of the Division to falter.
But he never thought he'd see one of his own cadet pupils cut down a dozen tankhunter mekan in hand to hand combat. He'd only entertained paranoid fears about what was unfolding before him right now, the madness of Kronos turned against its people.
"Keep firing! Give him some support, dammit!" roared the Tutor-Captain over the thud and clatter of the gateway guns. "Nothing gets past these gates tonight!"
But in the back of his mind doubt and fear still twisted, reminding him of the tactical reality of his situation. The burning city lay before him, but if it was Kronos itself which he defied - it's inner sanctum was at his back. A person had to scale each torus of the Beltway, all the way up to Oleander Avenue, in order to reach Ground Floor
One, the root of the space elevator. In the basement levels beneath were the process core and the cerebrate core, the heart and brain of the machine. And up above were its
control room, its fortress - and its armory. If Kronos really wanted to invade the Belt, really wanted to turn its whole populous into inhuman Cyben, it would surely come from inside...
Shells flew in a blaze of muzzle flashes, in a shifting cloud of cordite smoke. The veterans were pouring fire into the hazy black creatures which confronted Tsien, but to no avail. He was surrounded by a moat of bubbling, seething darkness now, and from its surface figures were rising, homunculi with too many arms and horns and teeth...
Even the massed battery of the gatehouse guns was powerless against them - shells plowed straight through the gelatinous substance of their bodies without detonating, arcing out over the subcity below. Shrapnel shot cut them down, only to have them reform again, grinning, the razor shards studding their flesh like thorns.
Mitchell couldn't even see Tsien anymore - he was utterly surrounded by a mob of capering devils, black on black, looming up around him like a wave about to break. Then the communicator clipped to his webbing belt crackled into life.
"Gerhard! Can you hear me? It's no use trying to shoot them. I know what they are, what they want..."
Was that resignation he heard in the Super-Cyben's voice? Despair?
"Son, what they want its a taste of napalm. I've got Marty and Juan looking for some incendo ammo right now... just stand clear on my mark."
Tsien's laughter came through like static, bleak and inhuman.
"Trust me, that's not going to help, Captain. We have to evacuate the belt."
"Evacuate?" snarled Gerhard, slamming his armored fist down against the parapet. "Like hell, trooper! Do you think I'm going to desert my post just because Kronos has dug up some fancy bioweapons?"
Even he didn't quite believe that one - nothing in the armories above matched those things. They were sickening just to look at. "Anyhow, we couldn't do it. Where can we go from here? The only way out is up..."
When the reply came back he could just imagine Eddie's sardonic little smile. “Exactly... the only way out is right over your head.”
And as he looked up he saw it. Just the tail, bobbing out of reach above the top torus of the Belt, a black shark-fin of diamondmesh emblazoned with a white hourglass. The Axis Mortalis.
"By god, trooper, you might just have an idea there. That thing could carry a couple thousand at a time."
Tsien's voice was growing fainter as the saprophytes closed in, a solid dome of crawling night.
"Fall back when they come at you. Street by street, Mitchell. Use fire - anything that'll burn. Torch the houses as you go. I'll catch up with you at twenty-nine Ridgemont Street, torus two..."
The comm unit gave out with a squeal of feedback then, and Gerhard watched the boiling mass of nightmare creatures pounce, watched them descend on Tsien from all sides in a rush. He squinted out over the ruined gateway plaza, watching the localized storm of darkness which raged around Tsien, expanding and contracting like a living thing. He fancied he saw, once or twice, a thin line of silver slice through the oily blackness, and heard the hiss and scream of dying creatures on the breeze.
If anyone alive could actually survive out there, it was definitely his boy Eddie.
“I'll catch up with you at twenty-nine Ridgemont Street, torus two....”
His home. That little polyfoam box which almost all of his wages mortgaged from the Khept' banking clans. Tsien felt like a mythic sorcerer, his human heart torn out and kept safe in a rune-crusted bottle.
That was his reason. That was why he gritted his teeth and swung the blade, parting the noisome slop of the saprophytes like rancid butter, surgical, brutal...
Toria, Nik, Ceena – the wife and kids, the photos in his wallet and stuck to the cracked plastic dash of his Comp Div cruiser. Three icon-images hovering in his mind as fire clawed and raved around their edges, as a wall of gibbering monstrosities tried to suck the flesh from his steel bones.
Manifest Dogma didn't offer a patron saint for things like him – just the lie that his mind would be stored away after death, waiting for a future of wonders in which he could be reborn. But some deity had seen fit to deliver the Axis Mortalis to him, and he wasn't about to waste the chance to use it. Would it be better to suffer slaver
y cased in gnawing steel, or in crawling black filth? Tsien had a plan which would save many thousands of people from that grim choice.
He only hoped that Gerhard and his men would hold up their end of the operation...
Some invisible signal must have come from the Exalted Ones then, because the taunting circle of saprophytes came down on him like a breaking wave, ululating their fierce joy as they clawed at him with knife-bladed talons and teeth. Now was the time for butchery, for rage – now he was glad that his humanity was locked away behind the blue plastic door of number twenty-nine Ridgemont. This was a job for an unfeeling death-machine.
Tsien spun on one heel, his blade held out in front of him in both hands, its edge ripping through the rotten flesh of the saprophytes with a sound like tearing canvas. These weren't the Exalted – that unholy trinity were content to let their peons do the work, and die in slavering waves. Up, and block a scything blade of bone, shearing it from its wrist. Down, and cleave into the bubbling torso of another horror, hearing its shriek of death-agony as he swung right, lopping the clutching pincers of a third off at the elbows. There were once-human things smothered under the saprophytic ooze abused shells which collapsed to slurry when their parasitic possessors died. How many, throughout all Elysium? Were there any left alive at all, barring the prisoners of the Beltway? Left, and spin, the scarred wedge of steel parting crumbling bone and gelid darkness, powering through six of the creatures with one blow.
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