Alert. Air pressure loss detected. Radiation breach imminent.
His veins began to glow with a faint opalescence as the molecular nanomes racing through his blood worked to fight against the radiation. He reached through space, and seized the diodes, a positive in the left gauntlet, and a negative in the right. A snap of lightning shot along his arms, his veins transforming into rivers of light, his skin glowing like the skirts of luminous jellyfish, the two gauntlets flashing with emissions of dangerous gamma photons as his energy became converted into flows of antimatter. The Catalyst began to move, rotating gradually in space. Rynal’s screams were locked in the helmet for his ears alone. Snaps of fire raced from his body and delivered his geobacter over to the catalyst and with one yelping cry it was done. Rynal was now poised on what would soon become a black hole. Just a milligram of antimatter was all it took to power it, and almost Rynal’s entire geobacter life force to produce. He looked to his numb hands and saw the damage. He could hardly believe his eyes. Blackened flesh and bones were exposed. It had not been the pain he was expecting, but sure enough the shock had sent him into a near euphoria.
Rynal gasped and stepped away from the diodes, leaving them to glow like molten rods. He dropped to his knees, brought down by the building macro-gravity of the device’s Gravmex-field. Once the Obsiduranium fuel was excited there was no way to pacify or reverse the effects. As the macro-gravity increased, Rynal was on a one way ticket down. Pulled onto his back, his arms dropped under their own weight. But despite his demise he remembered the seed he’d planted on Amora and found time to think of his daughter and smile.
*
Osmond sealed his eyes shut contritely as Rynal’s gasping screams tore through The Cereno’s bridge.
‘I’m with you Rynal!’ he promised, sharing his agony through the transqualia neurophase, sharing in the pains of his aching ribs and bones.
‘Just fly the starnavis!’ Rynal gasped his order as every bodily fibre was under strenuous gravitational pressure.
‘Focus on getting away Osmond! Go!’
‘I can share your transqualia.’
‘No!’ Rynal shouted, blocking him out. ‘I will go through this alone. You have to focus Osmond. Get them out of here.’
Rynal’s pelvis fractured, hot webs of pain threading through the bone, and Osmond retreated fully from the transqualia and screamed in the memory of Rynal’s agony. With deep panting breaths the old man focussed on their flight. After sharing in Rynal’s physical experience he knew now the pains of his own broken ankle were but a fraction of what his friend was enduring.
*
John Ripley could barely believe his eyes. A sudden gravitational shift emanated from the catalyst and his gravest fears were realised.
‘Break formation, the Catalyst is live, repeat, the Catalyst is live!’
Ripley saw the great energy and mass readings through the neurosphere, gazing with the prowess of his eyeless mind as though feeling its ethereal dimensions from The Deathwind’s sensors. He gasped incredulously. He’d never seen a manufactured black hole before.
‘Quanti-magnus!’
The Deathwind broached suddenly, firing reverse thrusters and looping into a great arch. The Arrowheads, although sleek and smart in design, lacked the dynamic engine efficiency of The Deathwind, and were unable to escape the inevitable pull of the Obsiduranium locus. Ripley saw the man down there, spread out across the surface of the machine, disintegrating in the growing radiation. And as Arrowheads smashed into the catalyst’s flanks he lay there still, trapped in a world of agony as the gravity pressed what was left of him against the solidity of the Catalyst surface.
Upon the solid black surface of the alloy, Rynal reached his arm forth with all his might. It felt as though his arm weighed a ton. It pulled back to the black surface as though his skin was magnetic.
‘Osmond!’ he breathed, gasping through the thinning air of his helmet. ‘Tell them I’m with them Osmond. Don’t forget me.’
Osmond had heard the transmission and opened a channel to reply from The Cereno’s bridge. It crackled over audio as radiation continued to gather over the catalyst.
‘We’re with you Rynal!’ He shouted.
The transmission was breaking up, a scattering plea breeching The Cereno’s bridge, segmented by the increasing gravity.
‘Don’t forget me Osmond…!’
And as the Catalyst generated its climactic reaction, the surface burst into blinding light. And all at once Rynal’s pain was over. Although small, the concentrated radiance beaconed ten times brighter than the system’s local Suntau star. The light shifted and coiled, creating loop prominences of fire which descended gradually into a pitch black horizon. All the catalyst’s solidity had now been either swallowed in the event or atomised. And a disk of devastating radiation began to gather around the glowing quanti-magnus.
The Jackal had been hunting The Cereno when it realised the danger ahead all too late, and started to turn. But their collision now was unavoidable. Mass distortions rippled through space, alerting the crew of the meteoric danger drawing them into orbital eminence at super-fast speed.
To the surprise and horror of the Jackal’s crew, the micro black hole smashed into the shielding like a hot needle through wax. A great fissure opened along the Jackal, unzipping the hull and shattering the armoured shell, sucking all the fragments into its tiny spore. Blinding radiation flared where metal and iron rushed to the centre of the singularity, compressed into an atomic space beyond the black spherical face of the event horizon.
Slowly, the Jackal Dreadnought tore itself open on its own momentum, billions of tons of material drifting against the immutably dense object like a python sliding over broken glass. The Catalyst smashed through the star-sail beams and nanotube riggings, its position fixed in space; its infernal surface feeding.
The Jackal was forced to a full stop as electrical failures flickered and burned on multiple levels throughout the starnavis where the micro black hole feasted parasitically within. The radioactive light of the quanti-magnus shone through the darkened windows of the powerless Jackal. The parts of the Dreadnaught that were pulled into the quanti-magnus event vanished forever, and Ripley watched the enormous starnavis implode. He watched it disintegrate into a million fragments as strangely shaped fires burst out of the armour and dropped into reverse, back towards the greedy event horizon. All that lay outside the influence of the gravity collected in the fiery accretion disk, swirling down into infinitesimal nothingness. Like dry sand the Dreadnought fell apart. While distress calls bled out across the network, evacuation capsules vacated the devastated war cruiser.
‘Get to The Cereno!’ Ripley commanded to his remaining strike-ships. ‘Don’t let her get away!’
‘Sir, that device is too powerful; we have to go around the quanti-magnus event until it dissipates...’
‘Whatever it takes!’ Ripley shouted. ‘Whatever it damn-well takes!’
*
Arrowheads streamed quickly towards their target. The Cereno began slowing down now as it approached a small field of saltus-carousels, a hundred chrome rings perfectly aligned and awaiting duty. The damaged starnavis slid through the centre, slipping down the tunnel created by the alignment of rings, shielding them from potentially fatal blasts of beams and throwing off the tracking systems of javelin-missiles in hot pursuit. Osmond activated the starnavis ski couplings, and two parallel skis descended beneath the ship as a third reached out of The Cereno’s mount. The starnavis slowed as it approached the end of the aligned tunnel of saltus-carousels and passed through the last one. As it did, the three ski couplings sprung like extending wings from the body of the ship and latched onto the huge torus device. With a blast from The Cereno’s thrusters Osmond hauled it from the assembly and drifted towards a velox point.
‘Saltus connection established.’ He reported to the bridge logs.
Initialising Gravmex spatial distortions, electro-gravity online. Moving to the velox po
int, said The Cereno.
The newly acquired saltus-carousel quickly began generating gravito-fields. Conductions of power from The Cereno pulsed through the ski coupling into the toroid’s circuits, spinning the electro-magnetic superfluid into rapid oscillations and rotation beneath its thick, platinum shell. Osmond returned thrust to the main aft, and in an instant The Cereno’s speed increased dramatically, distorting space around the starnavis.
‘Velox in sight!’ Osmond shouted.
Spatial target confirmed.
He took a brief moment to look back on Amora and the salient destruction of his home and he tacitly bade farewell.
‘Main engines on!’
The main thrusters blasted from behind the starnavis, and in a magnificent lustre, it vanished through the violate nebula, the sole survivor of a cosmic genocide.
‘Negative kill, commander,’ one of the Arrowheads reported. ‘Target’s away.’
Ripley took a deep breath and sighed.
‘Fuck it all t’hell.’
‘The singularity distortions from the quanti-magnus are messing up my trackers...shit!’ Another Arrowhead squalled. ‘SHIT! I can’t see a thing...’
‘The Nexus interface is down, sir,’ said a voice over the audio. ‘That Dreadnaught was our main network hub. We’re flying solo.’
John Ripley dropped out of the neurosphere interface, changing The Deathwind’s cockpit windows limpid to finally observe the disaster with his own two radium green eyes. He watched the black hole shrink and gradually disintegrate in a cloud of molten matter and radiation.
‘Sir?’ the voice said again. ‘This is dead air sir. Do you copy?’
‘Start a hunt,’ said Ripley despondently. ‘Find them before they escape the nebula. I want all wings on this mission. Our cover mustn’t be jeopardised. Grab whatever saltus-carousels are compatible with your strike-ship and get after them. Once we overmass the SunTau star, relative time dilation will hold this place to centuries of silence before news gets out. By then nobody will give a shit what happened here.’
‘Copy sir,’ said one of the pilots.
‘What about the commander?’ said another. ‘She was on that Dreadnaught.’
Ripley watched it burn and wheel around the empty space where the black hole had been, now a mist occupied by forks of lightning, pulsing silently within the junkyard strata. With a lugubrious silence he decided to himself that he would resume command.
‘Keep to objectives,’ he stated, ‘round up the survivors for processing. Find The Cereno and terminate everyone on board.’
-4-
Steps of sterling emerald led the way in their thousands, from the Yenisei River up through the infinite spread of conifers, to lower region mountains and the gates of the abandoned city Onyx Waters. Towering above the city was the head of one of the valley’s tallest mountains, and into the rock buildings were forged. They had been smoothed and rendered over the years to form geometrically precise structures, ardently crafted by the grafters of their time.
At the top step, Dak Gibson craned his head and beheld a vast rectangular lake of great magnitude, a man-made reservoir for boaters, and to breed a variety of fish. The gutters were a three foot wide opening in the surrounding perimeter, catching the overspill of water in its dark subterranean reservoir. One could jump over it with a little running skip and land in the cold black lake, but to fall down the drainage space between the basin’s wall and the surrounding pavement would be potentially fatal. The chasm was deep, overgrown with thick vines and had things living in there Dak didn’t even want to imagine.
The draining water could be heard constantly over spilling from the lake’s superior basin into the darkness below. Dak gazed at the boats sailing leisurely in the distance, regarding them as though they were far-off shreds of paper. Some were anchored around the middle of the lake, unreachable without another boat to journey with. Behind their sails was the city, partially carved from the rock of the mountain, free-standing emerald pyramid structures and chrome glass parabolas. Onyx Waters once had a population of fifty thousand inhabitants, yet today, its silence made audible the frolicking of rodents in the foliage, and the hawk of soaring eagles on high.
They didn’t have eagles where he came from. Nostalgic geneticists from the Ameritropolis Atominii had tried in vain to clone them but the weather conditions were too violent for their survival. Like the eagles, everything living on the fringes of the Atominii’s cruel borders was dying.
Dak was now one of a growing black Ameritropolis demographic in the Siberian precariat worlds. Mostly, impoverished black indigenous people on the fringes and racial segregation lines were getting forever worse in the police states. Reciprocally, the Precariat people were eager to recover their communities; the more people living in the new colonies meant one less person plugged into the Atominii. It took him a while to get used to the cold but it was easier than trying to adapt to three hundred mile per hour winds and frequent floods, famine and the genetic viruses programmed to wipe out anyone without a medical nanome update.
Dak sauntered cautiously beside the lake, his spiky short hair and black dreadlocks swinging at the back of his head, reaching down behind his shoulders and lower back. He had a necklace around his dark-skinned shoulders that jingled lightly with wooden carvings and beads, a gift from the Minerva Meadows. Dak could see Sonja’s avatar in his ocular display field, it was synchronised with the Quantic-E device that coiled around his earlobe like a silver hook sending micro-vibrations into his inner ear.
‘Can you see anything?’
‘That’s a negative, Foxtrot,’ said Sonja Jenner, playfully feigning her military jargon ‘nothing on the West flank either, sir. Over.’
‘Ten four, soldier.’ He said with a widening grin, a smile he usually put to one side of his mouth more than the other, something conscious he’d learned to do in order to hide his missing left dental. He knew by now Sonja didn’t care for such things, but the habit was long ago set. ‘What’s your twenty, over?’
‘I’m about East...erm...West something, got a big steaming pile of bear crap under my foot, over.’
‘Roger that, watch out for those Siberian grizzlies.’
Dak looked across the lake, his ocular relays, the almost unnoticeable nano-tech contact lenses they both wore, now amplified the distance to zoom in on his partner. She smiled at him and gave a little wink.
Sonja was a slim young woman from the Megalo-Britai. Her father was Japanese and her mother had been from Anglican origin and although she was bilingual she mostly spoke the global language of Neo-English. Her dreadlocks were very long and thick and she tied those at the front back around her head and over the lower threads that hung around her bosom.
They wore the same orange smart suits, optical information sliding and spinning around the material. The one-suits were spotlessly clean, aqua phobic sequins and nano-tech scales made the clothing impossible for dirt to cling to, giving them an unusual splendour against the background.
‘Eerily quiet,’ said Dak, ‘hard to believe fifty thousand people once lived here.’
‘Hard to believe fifty thousand people were killed here,’ Sonja added grimly.
‘Maybe,’ said Dak, ‘I’ve heard when you see the bloodstains left in the caves and buildings...it’s not that hard to believe.’
‘Just focus on the signal, Dak,’ she piqued with a strong disturbance in her tone. ‘I don’t like talking about that and being on the other side of this lake alone, okay?’
‘Why’d you start it then?’
‘I can’t help it,’ she said looking about, ‘just thinking out loud I suppose.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, kneeling to spy a group of tulips growing by the water. ‘I’m right here.’
‘That’s comforting,’ she muttered sardonically. ‘You being here or, rather, there, is not exactly close to my here.’
He hadn’t seen tulips in decades, and he was quite sure that neither had Sonja. He wired the photogr
aph to her and a second later she chuckled.
‘Tulips!’ She said joyously.
‘I know,’ he smiled.
‘Beautiful.’ She said. ‘That’s a rare find.’
‘Then I better go around them.’ His voice sailed, gently stepping around the plants, careful not to disturb their growth.
The signal was growing stronger as they closed in on the city. Dak lifted his arm and checked the map on the Quantic-W device. The translucent blue meta-material displayed locational information across its smooth electronic surface.
‘Alright. The signal’s East of our location,’ said Dak, ‘you need to get across the lake.’
‘How about I just swim, huh?’
‘We’ve got time,’ Dak casually divulged, eyes fixed on the ruinous cityscape ahead. ‘Could be fun.’ He added with his slanted smile. ‘I’ll meet you halfway, girl…’
‘I’ll meet you at the city harbour,’ Sonja pressed taking umbrage. ‘We’ll meet there and find the target together.’
Chaos Cipher Page 4