‘Horace?’ Nikkolai said again. ‘What is it?’
Horace stumbled forward and suddenly vomited about a whole pitcher of blood. He held up his hands, saturated carmine, and turned to Nikkolai at last revealing an affronted exit wound where a bullet had torn through his chest. The pink fingers of broken ribs protruded like shards of shattered porcelain where thick jets of black liquid pumped from a ruptured artery as the final beats of his heart lost pressure. Horace’s eyes rolled back and he heaped to the floor dead.
Nikkolai began barking orders in his native tongue, repeating a word that sounded very much like sniper. He fired back into the fields blindly. By the time Vadim could react, he saw Nikkolai’s head implode, and a fifty meter mist of blood unfurled across the field in the wake of a high velocity bullet.
Kyo spun back in time to see the security man’s body tumble into a meaty hillock in the glade. Krupin wrapped his terrible and strong arms around the screaming boy and restrained him in his stinking embrace, lifting his enfeebled body up onto the Perigrussia Skybus. Krupin wheezed as the zip of ballistics snapped through the air around him, but he got the gene-freak aboard, passing him to an assistant inside.
‘GO! GO!’ He ordered.
Two of Krupin’s security men were shooting into the fields, defending the cadonavis from what unseen enemy had suddenly surrounded them. In an instant, one of the security guards fell dead, exploding into a shower of dust and giblets.
Vadim cursed hatefully. As an act of reprisal, he kicked Dak one last time, before sprinting after the Perigrussia as the ship’s engines fired up. The silver cadonavis was already a few meters above the ground. Small blasts of dirt and rock burst into the air behind Vadim as he sprinted to safety, and another one, closer this time. He threw himself aboard the Perigrussia Skybus cargo platform as buckshot smashed up the rock where moments ago he ran. And Vadim saw at last what was in the field from his vantage.
The tall men in dark chrome armour appeared as if from nowhere, sliding into visibility. They stalked forward on invincible stride like gods unfazed by the slings and arrows of their world. They were holding weapons he’d never before seen. A flash of lightning stabbed up towards the Skybus and the impact rocked the entire vessels. The engines roared into full thrust to compensate, fleeing desperately from the assault. Vadim heard the screams of one of Krupin’s security men as he battled hopelessly below with one of the Blue Lycan. He watched in dread as the monster pulled off the man’s arm and kicked through him, his pulverised body reduced to a shower of gore. Not a moment later the ship’s thrusters reached full power, and he felt the dizzying vertices of the ascent and held on for dear life. Vadim scrambled inside as the platform lifted up into the belly of the Perigrussia Skybus. He caught a final glimpse of the bodies of Horace and Nikkolai shrinking in the fields, and at last the shutters sealed up completely. Vadim gasped, hoping they could make enough distance, relieved he was not one of those unfortunate souls who had fallen victim to the deadly Blue Lycans.
PART TWO
CHRONOMANCER
AUGURIES
-37-
With explosive impetus, The Constella Transit pealed from its warp envelope and punched through the photon field. Its speed drastically reduced for the next two hundred thousand kilometres, a moiré silhouetted hull finally revealing its true egg shape as the sun’s light waves trundled through the distortion field. It cruised into local space, drifting towards the indomitable gas giant, Jupiter.
Unlike usual starnavis, The Constella Transit was a high energy deep-space runner, transporting live cargo through the nebula. The egg-shaped shell was surrounded by a clock-work of oscillating, twisting rings, gravmex layers that spun and slid to produce the gravitomagnetic turbulence needed for the vessel’s deep space velox-reach. The saltus-carousel rings slowed down and silently mandated an alignment, merging to form one thick solid ring, which detached from the starnavis. The huge machine cruised forth, seeding into space and leaving the warp rings behind it in a Lagrange zone, ready to use for the next deep-space runner, and the ring drifted off to join an assembly point somewhere in a near-by auto launch station.
As The Constella Transit’s auto captain went primary, locks around the ovoid craft disengaged and her enormous battered shell split, dividing the warp shields into two semi-ovular cups. They drifted apart, popping into hemi-spheres in the silence of space, and the chrome viscera of the vessel within seeded out into the vacuum like metalliferous dehiscence, meeting the touch of starlight for the first time since it began its voyage fifty nine weeks prior. Motes of ice and dust flocked with the giant space craft in a cloud caught within its pull, scintillating in the glow of the remote sun. The Constella Transit was almost five hundred metres long, a rounded head leading several cylindrical decks below like a bulbous rocket. Some of the decks had tainted windows, such as the main galley right at the top of the ovular machine. Others were abundant with esoteric gadgets and technical conduits feeding down to the tapering engines where blinding ion exhaust tails bloomed through the silent void.
The vessel’s macro-gravity environment held time frozen inside the ship. It was a high-energy solution for temporal inertia, used to suspend those unable to survive a cryonic deep-freeze, a feat only Chrononauts were designed to endure. (Cryonic methods were considered uneconomical for commercial deep-space travel, since Titans had to be engineered from birth to undergo such a condition, making it exclusive to those who had the blood.) As the gravmex plating placated, the higgs-intensifiers returned subatomic particles from their ecstatic high energy state deep in the machine’s core, and particle resonances were restored to low energy states. Alloys reformed to their memory programming, clatonic tables emerged from liquid pools to solidify into a pre-programmed shape again, and electrons adjusted to their normal environment as the electro-gravitational pressures withdrew once more to a pleasant equanimity.
Technicians were first to be revived from the Temporal-Inertial-Cycles. Nutrient fluids drained from the tanks suspending the naked technicians and spilled out into the drainage gutters surrounding the pods. Catheter feeds and electronic motor stimulators detached from their limbs as the capsule gull-winged open, drawing occupants from a near upright position into insouciant recline. They gagged and coughed as the gullet feeds were retracted automatically by robotic arms. Others vomited up nutrient soups being fed into their stomachs directly by umbilical feeds. Recovery was a slow process, sometimes taking hours. After drying off on their backs, electronic impulses routed through their neural synapses, reviving memory and stimulating muscle movement. The technicians wondered down to the sub levels, and began to wake up the crew. The manual process for them was much more delicate than the auto-captain’s methods. Each of the three hundred people were revived in groups of eight, submerging level by level, for all six floors governed by the chrono-phasing technology.
Passenger 101 was an unusual size for this sort of transport. His abnormal height of seven foot and six was difficult for transit. Many of the technicians put a wager on back at the Cygnus colony that the individual would die in transit, Olympian Genetic or not. Hologram screens framed around the man, and anatomical animations projected in the space above him as the masked technicians touched at options in the hologram field. The diagnostics on the subject’s mind was showing deep sleep and unusually slow respiration. The motions outside and the noise was waking his sedated mind, he heard their welcome and began to brood.
Welcome to the future, passenger one O’ one, a greeting indeed! I think their sentiment ironic. What acrid proclamation to fish thee from darkest slumber? A technician’s tongue in coltish parlance. Alack, time is not but a crude ruler for those blind to cause, an invented purpose to the unexplained.
He began to count how long the inertial sleep was expected to last. Three fetch thee double zeros and score the days of extended sleep in the Temporal-Inertial-Cycles. Raven Protos bethought those desultory fits of asphyxiation, nightmares of drowning in slow motion, sustained
on machines. He regarded the blackest deluge, where electrons pass’ed not and the starlight prevailed as reposed, latent in the Gravmex-field somewhere beyond the mechanical walls of this superluminal and oversized mass sarcophagus.
Welcome to the future, he wondered. Once a romanticised aphorism shared amongst the Astro-Cavalcade with not but brief recognition to the vast solitude one finds in space, now a drab empty gesture on the lips of tired itinerants as he wakes. While yet his has been a life inexorably frozen; an inter-galactic itinerant himself, denied breath and sunlight. Denied his dearest…elixir! Though as good as dead in the world of material, he affirmed to his dearest kin in spiritual covenant that not once had the child eluded his psychic rapports. He promised his brother again, and again, she, Avenoir, was in good care. By the time Raven was revived and suited, he found his way to the Vista Bar on the top floor of The Constella Transit. His skin flaky and etiolating, head shaven to a nail width and not scaled a millimetre since entering Temporal-Inertial-Cycles. Raven often had to bow below doorways, which was never a problem when he was living on the Kyklos. The station was designed for mature Olympians of his size. He was sure the human race was getting shorter and fatter these days. Not that it troubled him, it simply was an interest that he had lived long enough to see such physiological changes not brought about by diet, but by adventure. The majority who spent their lives in space looked dreary, dolorous and undernourished. Like all beautiful things, from diamonds to nebula, it took misery to acquire, whose misery was usually telling, for it was upon the backs of daredevils who helped forge the first bridges anywhere, a red carpet for all who followed.
When Raven entered the Vista Bar, he gazed around. Several people were attending high tables and others sat in large chairs looking out at Jupiter’s eye, a swirling tempest of foam that seemed to return the gaze.
He closed his eyes and shut out the muttering voices and the shunting and skimming of hydraulic machines serving nutrient soup for the tired and weary travellers.
The little girl was looking out at the alien world before her. Her glazed big eyes, one green the other red, watered in extol of Jupiter’s blustering storms. She had minute diamonds freckled upon her forehead and nose; the carbon compressed remains of her ancestors from generations gone, permanently set into her frontal skull, each one a life taken in the Kyklos disaster. Shadows of dark skin naturally tainted the lids, holding her curious and contrasting eyes in nests of alluring darkness. To the gas giant, she dared to gaze back, and lost herself in the tumultuous stirring of milky clouds below.
Avenoir wore the same jumpsuit her mother had had made for her in the Cygnus colony. It would be her only outfit in space, as clothing and fashion was not something of an issue when station hopping. It was a lightly coloured jumpsuit lined with thermal optics and nano smart wear, synergising with her body heat; her mother’s light cream head garment covered her neck and forehead.
She turned to her guardian, Raven, in the dark of his mind as he searched the bar for her psychic eminence. Once he sensed where she was, Raven opened his eyes and walked through the tired crowds to find her standing behind a group of technicians. He lowered to his knee and rested his hand on the child’s head lovingly. They shared in a fleeting snap of emotion on recognising one another in the physical world again.
He had seen her visions during the long sleep from Cygnus. But he was unsure what to make of it. Had she shown him the past…or things destined to occur? He knew she remembered parts of her past, but much of it was fleeting.
Since she’d been in the care of Raven, no abdication befell dearest Avenoir. By his life he pledged to Rynal gone, no harm to her could manifest, he only wished he could have told him in person before he sacrificed himself. She will continue to influence their direction to the Galileo Coterie as she has all her life. He promised to gather the forces he needed and beseech the mightiest opposition to smite the Syridan and Atominii State from one archology to the next, and the Atominii paradigm will fall asunder. They will know mortal compensation for what they did to his dearest kin.
All this will he would redeem on SkyLord Kent Gallows’ echelon. He was the one to order the destruction of the Suntau colony and the death of the Suntau star. A bone to break and a tooth to pull for every cadaver listed upon his barbarous résumé. Raven bethinks he hath not enough bodily units to spare the debt. But he would ensure to his deepest ambitions SkyLord Kent Gallows will die by the manner of his agency. And he shalt know all definitions of pain. There will be nothing left to beacon a man when thy vengeance closes the day. And Raven sought to lead death to each Atominii state, upon which the SkyLord’s duties were arrantly commanded.
The on board auto pilot opened an announcement into the Vista Bar.
‘All passengers of the Starnavis runner Constella Transit, thank you for your participation in this deep space journey back to the solar system. We are now docking with the Jovian station, Omicron. We hope you have a pleasant stay. And remember, the cultural greeting here is, Haf-lah. It means have love and hello...’
*
JUPITER
Omicron hovered like an argent ring at an altitude of two million kilometres from Jupiter, close to Calisto’s orbital path. The halo station was composed of a resin shell, grown specifically to frame the construction’s skeletal foundations, with geodesic glass bulbs housed by nanomes into its inner circumference, allowing sunlight to filter in on the artificial agriculture and hydroponic orchards. For the most part, it carried about as much aesthetic vibe as an industrial chemical plant, nothing like the illustrious beauty of the Kyklos station. Here it was like a conglomeration of pressure pipes flushing liquids and gasses through and around the huge station, towering canisters and observation decks, a myriad limpid walkways and platforms designed to view the gargantuan gas giant and the distant sun, or opaque on command to shut out the faint wink of the stars. Four Cosmo towers, reaching from the ringular horizon, jutted out into space for hundreds of metres, like stalactites of metal growing out at each quarter of the way around the ring station. Omicron wheeled in a clockwise motion creating a centrifuge for the inhabitants, which simulated an earthly Gee-force in the gardens around its centripetal levels. Its mass in space allowed it to keep its angular velocity spinning for days without an acceleration boost. The station had a circumference of over twenty five kilometres, completing a full rotation almost every five minutes.
Omicron’s central docking ports were located in the wheel-habitat’s centre. A perfectly rounded axel sphere, with a capacity of a cubic kilometre, marked the nucleus of the station. Its surface was freckled with the aft engines of docked deep space runner Starnavis, which poked out like thorns on a rosebush. With hundreds of ships like this docked with the axel sphere, it started to resemble a Datura seed pod blooming in the night.
*
The Constella Transit found the allocated recess cratered into Omicron’s axel sphere. For safety reasons the gravmex panels reduced their influence on approach and aft burners took over, a procedure to which all three hundred personnel had to be seated. As the influence of the gravitational turbulence diminished, the passengers within dwindled to micro gravity.
The teardrop shaped space craft sedulously adjusted its motion, Vernier thruster jets blasting short bursts of gas to align its dense head with the docking cradle. Aft burners at the tail forced the ovular head down into the crater and the starnavis locked lightly into the port, security clamps snapping in to certify the bond, a sound which vibrated through the vessel.
At the port side an octagonal shaped platform raised from the tower, and from one of its faces an umbilical bridge extended to meet The Constella Transit’s eastern airlock face, ready to unload.
*
The spindles merging the ring habitat with the axel docking Sphere ports were long elevator shafts, carrying down users into high towers within the centrifuge zone.
When Raven and Avenoir followed the crowd from the huge airlock hatch in The Constella Transit’s side, s
everal technicians coupled them by karabiner and line to a slow moving track. Their suits magnetically locked to small electro-magnetic connections and carried them away through the low gravity environment like organised luggage moving to the appropriate customs terminal. Raven’s breath fogged up his breathing mask. Everybody was fitted with one, mainly to safely store an unexpected surge of vomit in the event of space sickness. Avenoir looked anxiously around, stuck firmly and helplessly to the moving track as it towed them through corridors. She could see hundreds of people in the hallway, moving at the same pace, dragged from the airlocks and organised into custom ports. Robotic runner cables zipped along lines, towing people to the required areas. Yells and squalls echoed, voices heckling and laughing and screaming alike. Raven knew it would trouble the child, she wasn’t used to this strange environment. He was too far away from Avenoir to hold her hand, but she could feel his parental presence. He knew that micro-gravity was a big problem for her; she didn’t bode well at all.
‘Almost there,’ he said gently.
Avenoir’s eyes were wide in wonder, one green and the other red, her pupils pulling in every object with complete recognition, and fascinated rediscovery. They were pulled to the end of the track, dragged into more narrow tunnels where the moving belt pulled Raven onto a glowing round pad. The magnets deactivated and his back slid over the pad, which sonically pumped him along a tunnel. Humming oscillatory vibrations assisted his ascent along the tube. Avenoir followed close.
Chaos Cipher Page 36