A third and fourth shot followed him down as he dove back into the water, bubbling wakes trailing behind them. Zhe could only hope that Ruby and Straw and Big Leon were either dead or safely snap-frozen, or else he may have blundered into a trap.
There was simply no time for this nonsense! Didn't that idiot machine know that the world was about to be torn apart? Of course not – the Tin Man was a device of severely limited scope, a consummate killer. And yet...Hadn't Hassan and Kaito survived the attentions of the Emerald City Gang? Perhaps there was something in the files which could help him...
Deep in the stygian depths, breathing through a set of gill-slits in his neck, Technician Zhe's focus spiraled in through the weeks and days and hours of footage inside Kronos' mind. To another place of drowned steel under black water, to the radioactive slime of the seabed...
"This is God's modus operandi, people. This is the way He operates. Look at Nineveh, Sodom, Gomorrah, Las Vegas - all struck down by his wrath! Each and every one of those cities was a place of sin, a temple of vice and greed. Now look at your own city, your Elysium. Don't you think that a time of judgment is inevitable? How long do you think God will tolerate the decadence of your villainous cesspit?"
The face which filled the threedeeo globe was almost rabid with vehemence - a death-mask with foam- flecked lips and bulging eyes. It was a face familiar to all Elysium – or at least, to every subcitizen who could afford a threedeeo set.
Deuteronomy Jones, the last of the Pentecostal warlords.
"All I'm saying is that he's completely insane." said Jaq, leaning back between the seats in the Kraken's tiny cockpit. Kaito had frozen the frame on the old preacher's blazing eyes, his blue-black skin glistening with sweat under a bank of hot halogen floods. "Have you actually sat through one of his sermons? The guy's got more loose screws than a mekan junkyard."
The Kayzi cupped his chin in one hand, scrutinizing the image of his prey. Deut' had to be a century old, with his tonsure of curly white hair and his wrinkled, bible-black skin sagging from his skull. But you didn't live that long as a wanted fugitive if you were crazy. And you certainly didn't hack the threedeeo networks' security to pieces at least twice a week if your brain wasn't as sharp as a razor.
The problem was, how could they find a guy like that if he wanted to stay hidden? Kaito hadn't told his friend yet, but they only had a few more hours worth of air left in the control bubble of the Kraken.
After that they'd have to surface, and then they'd be a big fat target for Kronos' guns. The machine would probably be none too pleased at having its ancient toy stolen right out from under it.
"Crazy or not, he's got the means to save tens of thousands of people." said Kaito, still slumped forward over his control console. "If the whole city tries to just pile down the Spillway then it's gonna be a massacre. All that thing from space will have to do is wait for them to get funneled into its jaws."
Jaq grunted, conceding the point. Although it would be nice to see a few hundred Confederate boys get fed through that kind of mincer...
"I have to keep a tight watch on that mekan I've stolen - the one that's gonna dig 'Afia out. So in the meantime, could you keep an eye on the sonar, try and pick him up? I know it's probably a waste of time, but you can't hide a ship like his that easily, right?"
Sure, it was impossible. But Jones and his Pentecostals had managed to evade Kronos for decades...
and if you were counting impossibilities, tonight had already supplied a lifetime's worth.
Kaito's eyes went dim and blank as he turned his full concentration to his bioonboard rig, using the antiquated interface of the Kraken to tweak the tiny brain of his sequestrated warmekan.
The things he saw through its camera eyes were enough to make him sick with fear - the city was tearing itself apart. Random shots ricocheted off the rusted armor of the tankhunter as it lumbered through the streets, heavy weapons swinging at the end of its bulky piston arms.
He was a big target – the only thing moving through the oily smoke and flames in some areas, where even the dying were too scared to cry out...
Each individual Hab and civic block had become a separate little fortress, the panicked defenders inside driven mad with fear. Luckily most of them were only armed with civilian guns - good enough for blasting muggers and thieves, but useless against the armored might of a tank-slaying war-mekan.
They hadn't just been shooting at him, though. It looked as though they'd turned on each other as well.
The streetfront facades of most buildings were cratered and blistered and blackened, spattered with blood. Bodies lay twisted in the street, some of them crushed to unrecognizable smears by the treads of tanks and the steel claws of Kronos' soldiery. Among them the charred wreckage of ruined mekan still smoldered, hydraulic fluid mingling with the blood in the gutters. In some places whole streets were drenched crimson, as though gore had rained down from above. But surely not? Otherwise the mad sermons of Deuteronomy Jones might actually be coming true...
Once or twice Kaito was sure he caught a glimpse of something moving in the corner of the mekan's camera eyes - dark fluid shapes skulking in the alleyways, eyeless and black. In the mouth of one narrow crawlspace he saw a headless body covered in unmistakable teeth-marks. Oh, he was glad he was just an electric trace inside the stolen head of this giant machine. Something had come through this neighborhood like a reaping machine, perpetrating atrocities. The little severed limbs of children, the scattered furniture and clothes, the shattered buildings like broken-open skulls...
"Kayzi! Hey, Kayzi!"
The image blurred and pixilated before his eyes, a nightmare interlaced with the dull grey metal of the Kraken's cockpit.
"Come on, Kaito - get back here, man!"
It was Hassan, shaking his shoulder so hard it felt like it was in a pitbull's jaws. With a despairing sigh the Kayzi set his tankhunter on autopilot and jacked out of the interface, scowling.
"Dammit, Jaq! I was nearly there, right on top of his trace! I thought you were supposed to be looking for Jones and his Archangel whatever-it's-called. "
Kaito rubbed his fingers into his aching eyes, trying to clear the purple starbursts from his head. All he could see was a murky grey-green blur, shot through with beams of yellow radiance.
It took him a second to realize that this was an LCD screen cranked down on its mounting right in front of his face, held in place by Jaq Hassan's gleaming silver hand.
"Uhhh – what exactly am I looking at here? Is there something wrong with the sonar system?"
Hassan leaned in over the screen, pointing with a length of broken-off antenna like a schoolmaster.
"Well, I found out how to launch some scanner drones from out of this thing's ass." he said, "And this is what one of them's picked up. See, this here is us." he tapped his pointer on a little cigar-shaped blur in the corner of the screen. Above it a huge shadow moved, drifting slowly in a cloud of yellow light.
"And that?" asked Kaito, his heart in his throat. Had Kronos sent something even worse than the Kraken to destroy them?
With a twist of his chrome digits Jaq zoomed the drone's camera in, cutting through the undersea murk to reveal a sunken edifice welded and bolted and riveted together from the hulks of ruined ships. Searchlight beams stabbed out from its corroded flanks like insect legs, and every inch of its hull was painted with ornate crucifixes.
"Well, that's what I wanted to tell you, K. I didn't need to find the Archangel Uriel. It's found us."
CeeAn 187 was dead.
She had figured her whole life that she'd greet that kind of news with panic, with furious disbelief.
With something.
But actually it was quite a relief. Nothing else could possibly go wrong - at least not for her. This was really as bad as it got, unless those madmen from the Vatican were right...
CeeAn knew she was moving, accelerating through timeless, formless darkness up and away from the ghost-lights of the world. There was
no sign of the flaming purgatory or the gilded heaven the Ecclesiarchs promised - but there was nothing else, either. No neon trace leading her back down into the R.T, no glowing beacon of the Chrome Ark to light her way home.
No, this time it was final. She must have been blown to pieces, crescent unit and all when the node went up...
And what was in there, anyway? What in the world had defeated her?
If she was still alive the thought of being humiliated in battle would have made her furious. But here it was impossible to care. She couldn't even remember why they had to operate on the node, why 'Afia thought it was so important to shut it down...
That stopped her. His name was like an anchor cast out into the dark, hooking into the soft black nothingness and slowing her down. If he wasn't here, he must still be alive!
The slower she went the more she saw, as if her eyes had been blurred with speed.
No eyes now, of course. And yet the memory of them could see with perfect clarity...
This place between realities was like the eye of a hurricane, a calm tunnel through the centre of a churning maelstrom. Down below was the rippling, watery membrane of the world, a cerulean eye through which she could see innumerable sparks moving, the souls of the living. Above, high over her head was another portal, an inverted pool which glowed and faded as if something deep in its liquid heart were pulsing, slow and regular. Both of those gateways were the size of oceans, immeasurably vast.
Now she was moving at a crawl, barely rising between the twisting walls of the maelstrom. Things were blazing past her on every side - tight scribbles and scrawls of light, mad blurs trailing sparks as they ascended. With a shock she realized that there were her fellow-travelers - the dead, sleeting in from the world and on toward that impossible ocean above. They were rising in iridescent clouds like sparks from a bonfire - too many, surely for all of them to have died of natural causes? What was Abdulafia facing back there which could unleash such horror?
Her doubt and fear jerked her to a stop as if she'd reached the end of an immensely long tether. She tried with all her will to force herself down, back toward the world. As if she could cram her soul back into her incinerated body, pull each atom back together with sheer determination...
That was when she realized she was attracting attention.
The walls of the maelstrom weren't made up of vapor or smoke, but of writhing darkness, slick and oily, a substance she had only ever seen -
Inside the node. Infecting the vivisected soul of Magus Verlaine, smothering his mind under a slick of pain and horror....
It was a black melange of masticating jaws, rolling eyes, grasping hands, dripping organs, torn-open bellies, twisted spines...
And it was reaching out to her, seductive and slow, a pulpy tentacle pushing out from the seething wall of the maelstrom to grope at her blindly. Perhaps it would have grabbed her, dragged her under the heaving surface with those other damned souls, had the intellect driving it not been occupied with other atrocities. Thick ropes of dripping darkness erupted from the maelstrom in a hundred places, plunging down and down like gnarled roots to rape the living world.
Surely that was wrong. Surely that thing had no place in reality - it was terrible enough in this un-place tight between life and death. Those foul roots writhed and pumped and heaved, forcing the foetid matter of the walls down into the mortal world as if they were regurgitating a crop of suffering.
CeeAn broke away, panicked, everything blurring and fading as she rushed blindly toward the light. Through the blue nimbus which surrounded her she could make out the pulsing heart beneath its inverse ocean, a thing the size of a planet with the gravity-well of a bloated supergiant sun.
For some reason she wondered why it hadn't done anything to stop the horrors being perpetrated below. But why would it care?
CeeAn risked a final look back down through the maelstrom, to where a rising storm of blue sparks spiraled up between a nest of knotted black tentacles. Some of them slowed, and stopped, and tried to go back. Some of them weren't as lucky as CeeAn and were dragged under the oily surface of that turbulent wrack, extinguished forever...
No. It was wrong.
And with that thought she stopped, close enough to reach out and touch the surface of the vast liquid membrane above her.
It was utterly impossible to restrain her curiosity. Even dead, she was still CeeAn 187.
She reached out. She touched.
Ripples raced out in vast concentric rings from the spot where her fingertip grazed the surface, and she felt the immense heart of light thump once, a noise like some huge subterranean drum. A pulse of radiance burned through her with that sound, filling her head with afterechoes and shadows.
Voices. Faces. Images....
History unrolled for her in that single infinite second, a billion upon a billion lifetimes earthed through her like lightning. It was like the Vision of the Ashishim all over again, but on a titanic scale, a scale which dwarfed the crude mechanisms of Kronos.
That beating heart which floated behind the veil was the seed of a new world, one which would be woven out of chaos from the experiences of the dead. She saw love and hate and loss, pain and triumph, war and joy and grief in that flash of otherworldly light. The ripples from her touch were swells the size of mountains by the time they reached the shores of that inverted ocean, and now they were curling back, returning.
The light was fading as they came, back down into its tight-packed shell of souls, taking all those billions of voices with it. She understood - the Wetsystems of Elysium were a crude cargo-cult imitation of this immortal seed, planted in the immaterium the day the first mind questioned death. CeeAn had communed, if ever so briefly, with each and every person who had ever lived – all but those who had been devoured by the maelstrom below.
And yes, it was wrong. It wasn't part of the great breathing, pumping supersystem of the multiverse at all, but a parasite on an immense scale. She saw it as it really was, in a sliver of frozen time – a thing which filled a whole dimension, an appetite with teeth...
Waves towered above her now, foam-capped breakers seething in from every side. The ripples of her touch had come back from the far shores of the hanging ocean, and now they broke.
The force of it was simply indescribable. In this place where physical laws seemed not to apply it was as if she'd been struck by an entire planet, a hammer the size of the sun.
CeeAn fell back toward the world in a power-dive, the churning walls of the maelstrom blurring as she accelerated, down through a tangle of gelid black roots, down toward the rippling blue surface of reality. Snake-tongue whips of darkness lashed out at her from every side, too slow to catch her.
And then the water was right beneath her, shattering as she splashed down, closing over her head with a storm of echoes and the sound of tolling bells. Pain came with it – excruciation shunted in from a body which she thought she'd never see again.
Muscle and skin and bones and veins and teeth. Nerves and hair and blood unfolding, and now a spark inside it, forced back into a world of suffering.
The pain was all too real, and the afterimages of that bizarre interzone between life and death hazed like static, blown away by the ravening agony of her flesh. Her mind struggled to hold onto the feeling of that heartbeat of light, the touch of her fingertip against that inverted ocean. But it was impossible, like trying to grab a handful of smoke. The things she'd heard and seen in communion with the world-seed became an indistinct blur, crushed under a mountain of pain.
Crushed.... yes, something was pressing down on her like the jaws of a hydraulic clamp. Blind, burning, CeeAn struggled to get her hands under the metal beam which lay across her chest. It took all of her strength to shift it just enough to breathe, then her arms gave out and the terrible weight pinned her down again. If only she had another hit of ambrosia, a precious capsul of the 'chrome to boost her battle-clone body! But after all she'd endured the potent drug would likely kill her quicker
than suffocation.
Only her own strength to rely on, now. Only raw, unaugmented human will.
Reach through the pain, fingers tight around the jagged edges of the steel, and push... or else she'd find herself through the looking-glass again, back in that dimly remembered world of seething darkness and coiled, thorny roots...
CeeAn caught a flickering glimpse of it as she strained, a taste of the sheer alien wrongness of that parasitic thing. It had no place there - and even less in the world of the living. Out here there was suffering enough already...
The anger gave her strength, enough to heave the crushing steel from off her chest and away down a mountain of debris. She took a deep, racking breath, and lost it all in a coughing fit as dust and smoke swirled around her. Everything hurt. Most of her was broken. But she was alive...
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