Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  *

  ‘Four life signs are dead,’ said the Lance Corporal from the bottom of the stairway. ‘He’s up there alright.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ said one of the foot soldiers, ‘I’m also registering four drop-outs on the personnel neuro-ligature transponders. Sniper was killed first, cranial damage caused the body to open fire and jeopardise the pressure environment.’

  ‘I’ve got movement.’ Said another. ‘Target is leaving the Omega Suite.’

  ‘Target is unarmed,’ said the Lance Corporal, ‘for now.’

  ‘Sir, our weapons have nano-tech security, they won’t allow him to use-’

  ‘He’s an Olympian,’ the Lance Corporal reminded. ‘He can hack them.’

  *

  Raven was very much aware of the weapon security biometrics; it was not a challenge for his geobacter nanomes to hack. He took the dead sniper’s spherical grenade in his hand and squeezed firmly, engaging the flows of nanomes populating his bloodstream so that blue webs of light luminously mapped out his veins, and an osmotic type permeation of technology passed into the weapon from his skin, hacking its security and making it usable to him.

  *

  The Lance Corporal led the way, clearing the dark staircase and flooding into the halls. To their horror, the grenades arrived at their feet and exploded. White fire engulfed the hallway, swallowing the soldiers in its vortex and a fierce shockwave grew out of the chaos and consumed the staircase in its ravenous extent, opening huge cracks in the structure. Alarms surged through the building. Fire hydrants began to gas the hallway with cold carbon. Soldiers fortunate enough to survive the initial blast stumbled around broken and confused, spluttering and wheezing into their masks as the gasses overwhelmed them. Raven loped back into the hallway, strides that carried his indomitable body through the flames which lashed across his pyrophilic skin like innocuous wisps of velvet. His eyes were alight with imperious blitzkrieg. One of the thwarted men climbed to his feet, vertiginous from the shock and staggering away from the warring giant. But the moment he was in range, the Raven’s ineluctable grip seized the man’s throat and hoisted his head up into the ceiling. With his canines stabbed down monstrously as Raven roared triumphant with rapturous zeal. Nanomes began to glow under his skin, networking through his veins and lighting them up like opalescent fractals. Those eyes beamed brightly, shining like blinding headlights. As the Olympian giant’s still fresh wounds sealed into scars, he squeezed the man’s cervical spine until the head and body fell away from what became black oil in his palm.

  *

  ‘What is it?’ Alker said irritably, his arms crossed and his face the colour of villainy.

  JD O’ Three shook his head and brushed his hand over his itching bald scalp. He couldn’t help but wonder if there were lice still in this place after all.

  ‘Tactical errors,’ he reported. ‘Some crenulations have emerged in the Venster Suite. Not to worry, we’ll take him out, even if I have to go there myself.’

  ‘I think that would be best,’ Alker nodded.

  The Lawyer was at the large open screen staring into the stars and the curving ring habitat. He’d heard Alker’s comment and turned to witness the obdurate demand.

  ‘It may be best I operate from here,’ said JD O’ Three. ‘You may need protection.’

  ‘No need,’ Alker pressed, ‘your men are performing a perfunctory task at best, so I strongly suggest you go see to them personally. This way, at least, I can relax knowing the job is in more capable hands.’

  ‘I see,’ JD O’ Three realised.

  Alker continued to appeal to the man’s ego, reminding him he was hired because he was the best at what he did, that there was trust between them. But JD O’ Three was not a stupid man. He knew what he was up against. Raven was a first generation Olympian Genetic. And for all the illicit implants and body boosts and military hardware upgrades he’d parsimoniously spent his precious Atomons on, JD was still no match for an Olympian Genetic. He knew of no living creature that was apart from the infamously rumoured fifth generation Titans, Avatar creatures of cybernetic ingenuity. When it came to combat, they were grown for it. Everybody else was trained for it. He was waiting for Alker to add something.

  ‘Supposing your terrorist comes looking for you?’ JD tried again. ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t think he even knows we exist,’ Alker responded with a jocose pertinacity. ‘I don’t think he knows you exist either, or your handcuffs. That might be a good idea, why don’t you go and introduce him to your shackles, for the good of the Solar System Alliance?’

  JD was beginning to tire of their contracted agreement; this sense of superiority was overwhelmingly irritating. Alker’s disposition on picayune body guards was overtly disrespectful, and JD wanted to smash something alright, but it wasn’t an Olympian Genetic terrorist, it was this little prick right in front of him. How dare he stand there and imply that I’m a coward!

  ‘So-how many men do you think are left now?’ Alker continued, casually brushing creases out of his toga uniform. ‘Oh and B.T.W. You picked these fellows, they’re your responsibility. Go lift their spirits would you?’ Alker walked over to the Lawyer and took a whiskey tumbler, ‘while we lift ours.’

  Kintz half-filled Alker’s tumbler and then one for himself. They toasted to JD’s success.

  ‘Cheers!’ Alker said. ‘Oh and…alive is desirable. Dead, if possible.’

  JD O’ Three seethed through his large white teeth. He turned curtly and kicked his way out of the door before the automatic spring could draw it open.

  *

  With no leaders around to guide them, the soldier’s attacks became an erratic, semi-coordinated free-for-all. Already trigger happy, the men fired an enfilade of high velocity rounds through walls, pulverising accidental targets into a violent discarnate pulp, and shredding apart the superfluous integrity of the hotel in a frenetic rain of belligerence. Since the grenades detonated, a thick putrid cloud drew charcoal veils across the fires. Upper chandeliers sparked and the flames spread from electrical fixtures, reflecting off the melting, auriferous frescos which patterned arching doorways and painted cornices, beading into runs of gold which skeltered like tears of honey. Soldiers tripped over the felled bodies of their victims in the smoke, skating on the eviscerations unseen in the clamour. They shambled for safety through the carnage, as some terrible force tore murderously through the blackness. Their camaraderie scattered with equipment malfunctions, and screams momentarily hung in an echo, the origins of which could not be traced in the smoke, before abruptly ending in breathless chokes.

  One of the soldiers found his way to the reception, sidling out of the offensive smog and into the breathable air, his mask retracting back down into the chest plate to reveal his fierce and pained expression. He dropped to his side, aimed his assault rifle back into the black fog and fired a cascade of bullets into the crenulated flames where his optics mapped potential targets through the blackened veil that was. But the baying fires did not recline, fed by the fuel it crackled and roared, and a glass structure shattered in some unseen part of the hotel, surrendering its skittered elements to the rising heat. The waves of hot air stirred and smeared, faltering the visible insides of the hotel’s elevator hall with crimson serrations, as though the very ground had been baked by the vested issue of Diablo’s breath. And in the flames a devil did move, shifting in his steady stride, delivering solid purchase to each footstep against the charred remains of flesh and ash, two bright emerald eyes, tiny duel rings glowing like electric pearls through the blot of emission.

  And the man on his elbows cried for God and shifted for the exit while the giant emerged from the carnage, a black and slender figure stencilled before the pepper-red spoils of conflagrations. The smoke parted for him, coiling around him, cornicing back from his skin as though it was of some ethereal fabric or magnetic leather and the fires extinguished under his feet, as though his command was arrantly upon them. He asked the devil to be spared. By
the god and stars alive let me have my life.

  ‘Hath thee yet no humility, Titan?’ Raven addressed. ‘Alack the multitudes of innocents thou hast so readily lodged to the casket and pall this night, a votive performed under the cloven face of duty and militant force of violence. And ere now do ye cry mercy so cravenly when violence doth show attendance? Puzzle not on the absence of clemency Titan, not when violence has been thy volition.’

  Raven opened his palm and seized the man by the throat, hefting him off the ground as though he was uprooting some abhorrent weed, his equipment and spent weapons cluttering at their holsters and bandoliers as he kicked and choked and grappled with the giant’s wrist.

  ‘Cry then now Titan, let thy God know of thy penance and welcome perdition!’

  Threads of intense lightning then followed along Raven’s arm and the soldier’s limbs snapped rigid, locking into obdurate tension as adamantine as reinforced steel, his neck a series of suspension cables, eyes bulged, constricted orbs caged within their bloody webs. Blue snaps of light jumped between the space of the soldier’s boots and the floor as the energy sought to be earthed. And Raven dropped the frazzled cadaver, stepped across the steaming residue now frothing and coagulating ooze from what was left of its cranial orifice.

  In light shallow steps, Avenoir chased after him, running out of the concealing smoke and to his side once more for protection. Outside, emergency robotics were dispatched to extinguish the flames, firing pellets of expansion foam into the building’s broken fissures, moving through the darkness of space outside the damaged structure, the pale light of Jupiter’s clouds passing like some ungodly bulb as they rotated. They scurried high across the outside of the Venster Suite, resealing windows in the threatened structure and rerooting electrics and air pressure, vacuum washing the fire into safe purging conduits, drawing a long fulvous stream out flailing into the void like a luminous dentate tongue.

  Raven was outside the Royal Twilight’s reception now, looking up through the dome’s habitation facade at the hotel’s tower, high above and beyond the pressure shield that was their sky, high out into space. He saw the robots assiduously going about their protocols, skittering and trundling lightly across the transparent surface like mercurial ants, their drama silenced in the vacuum beyond the confides of the protective tubular sky.

  Avenoir took his hand then led him gently over to the end of the walkway, casting her finger above the railings and down to the entertainment districts of the habitation’s visage.

  ‘Our window it seems is now marred by the subtleties of time once more,’ said Raven, ‘for already our return to the Grill and Billiards is imminent I feel.’

  The child nodded to confirm he understood her, an artificial sirocco shifting through the atmosphere as the air filters worked to balance the jeopardised environment, pulling at her head-garment and causing it to waver in the breeze.

  ‘Hark Avenoir, may we bind courage to the gift of thy auguries,’ said Raven. ‘Now seek our destiny.’

  -48-

  ‘It’s a little sterile, this place,’ said Kelly. ‘A little quiet and a little sterile. I’m not…’ she sighed and looked around the curve of the ring system, vanishing behind the pseudo- planetary moon of the axel sphere docking port. ‘I’m not supposed to be out here.’

  Caspian was listening while hanging over the rails to spit, looking out on the plantations, their rigid columns bathed in UV light, the pipes and esoteric tanks filled with whatever was needed to service their artificial attempt at bringing memories of earth alive onto the ring system.

  ‘All I have is that ship,’ she said, almost weeping. ‘That stupid…fucking ship. I fucking hate that ship. I do…I really fucking hate that ship.’

  Caspian turned, leaned his lower spine against the rails of the walkway bridge that travelled over a soon to be gardening strip. They’d been building Omicron for centuries now and the process was nowhere near inhabited, yet people were flocking here, to work, to do something. To further mankind, to push those frontiers a little further to where we thought they needed to be.

  ‘I thought The Griffin’s Claw would free me.’ Kelly went on, ‘thought she would liberate me. When that was written into my parent’s Will and mine to possess I thought…wow, y’know…this is it. I own a Starnavis. The stars are mine to explore.’

  Caspian nodded as though he understood, but she knew, he didn’t. Not really. Caspian Mowser was a serial con artist, a talented actor, extremely talented. He could believe his own bullshit and sometimes, he even liked the smell of it. He’d be the first to say it too, in a moment of candour. But he did know one thing about life, the thing that got him away from the planet Earth, the thing that got him so far into space and so far into those dangerous frontiers. That some lies, when coated in gold, were the ones people liked to put a price on. Some lies, if the mask looked valuable, were worth wearing and buying into. If you got the good mask, people who see it are willing to believe its cosmetic aesthetic. No wonder bio-hacks and gene-therapy were such lush industries, she thought.

  ‘We fucked up…didn’t we?’ Kelly asked, turning wet eyed to seek approval.

  Caspian smiled wide and raised his brows.

  ‘Int loyfa bitch?’

  Kelly snubbed the captain and his stupid red leather and threw her arms over the rails, watching the distant pulse of proximity lights flash beyond the station’s atmospheric shield as Jupiter sickeningly rolled past for the second time in just eight minutes.

  “That ship has been nothing but a pain,’ she said, more to herself now than to Mowser. ‘But the deal’s going ahead. Our financer has agreed to the conditions.’

  Out in the silence, where the odd reflection of distant starnavis silently flashed asset the pitch black obscurity of space, Kelly let her eyes wonder through the solitude and sought some escape. She’d flown the ship far enough through velox zones to know that moving faster than light also had its limits. With the saltus-carousels on maximum fluctuation, gravmex tailoring fully functional, all that energy was enough to make a quick leap-frog, but one couldn’t leap-frog, bounce and hop again just like a frog does. Entropy applies to everything, and it all drains at the Alcubierre point, negative energy demands its counterpart debt. If you’ve the power to push past the light barrier, you’d better have some collateral. Kelly simply couldn’t run far enough from her problems without having to repay her commission, be it those shady bastards she’d been dealing with most her life, to the limits of space and time itself; it was all constant. The Griffin’s Claw had landed her in hotter and hotter water the further she’d tried to run. Each time she used that machine someone with some skill, necessity, burden, and chip on the shoulder or favour, needed her service, and offered her business or whatever. Sailing away was never an option, she was tied up from the start and never realised until, metaphorically speaking of course, setting sail. It seemed that technology couldn’t save her, she was at the whim of her decisions, and even they were limited by the nefarious whims of tyrannous reductionists like her financers and Jerrus Ar-fucking-melius.

  ‘Obsiduranium ees nut eesee da kum by,’ she heard Caspian say distantly. ‘I meen, weir jompen frum kruk te kruk anywai, wi kud alwaise sell eet ind jost du a runna from Jerrus ind his kruks as weil as ah foinansers.’

  Obsiduranium black alloy was one of those strange materials, one of those grey zones, one of those hit n’ miss on and off’s that could make or break the most punctilious of traders. It was rare and difficult to produce. It took time and pressure. Her father told her, in some allegorical way, to imagine the differences between coal and diamond. One of the two had undergone more time and pressure, he’d said, but the property was the same. So, if one considers that, the higher the pressure, the slower time moves, well, then one could grow quite old before that little cookie is cooked, especially considering time is moving much slower in the cooker than things are to the person waiting to eat, since that is how good old relativity works in the heart of a black hole where
Obsiduranium properties are extracted. Kelly might have asked if they needed a new cooker, had her father not anticipated her question by stating; “now you must know that the cooker is metaphorical, and the hungry consumer is also metaphorical, can you guess which the black hole is and which the humanity?” He knew she could of course understand irony, by which he’d also indirectly taught her rhetoric. But her father had a knack for being a patronising prick. True dat!

  Obsiduranium, she knew, was made of a highly dense superluminal material, radioactive and conducting some unknown properties to which there was only mechanical speculation. Kelly was never a physician, never a cosmonaut, never a curious person about science beyond the general tête-à-tête during an elated night of neuro-stimulants while musing over the wonders of the Epicurus lunar colony harvesting HE3 for fusion reactors and how the hell all that crazy high energy logistics worked anyway. Now and then, on a really crazy high, she would pontificate enthusiastically about how a really fit astronaut high-gee pilot on the Apollo Prix races managed to scoop the infamous gravitational pull of the moon, while getting as close as possible to the surface of the dark side without crashing. What was the deal in this? Was it all to gain points, while lapping back around the South American or African continent to gloat about apprehending some golden trophy? Was it all about the gold, or was there something more, was it all to do with science, and the wonders of the complex Starnavis vessel? Or was this process another allegory about time and pressure being the ultimate production of purity? Did it count for anything? And why was she even considering this while her shitty Starnavis was still-