Vance leaned back on a railing staring at his brother. The golden distant sunlight was in Malik’s eyes and he had to wince to make out Vance’s silhouette.
‘I see you’re still confused.’ He said. ‘Adamoss…play the relayed message from the Xenotech source.’
Malik heard a strange crackling sound, the rustle of static. His eyes widened in horror. It was a sound he knew. The crispy dense and distant hiss of a super massive body in space, its radiation condensed and translated into sound. It was the Charybdis!
And then a voice he knew very well. A voice that sent shivers down his spine and set his heart racing and pours leaking with perspiration.
‘Malik…’ she said, almost a whisper.
‘…PEN…!’ He almost screamed it, unable to crane his neck. And Vance watched him carefully as he sat there, forced to listen. The window began to display the image of blackness, visuals scattering in static, coalescing to forge something within the display, creating patterns, patterns that Malik knew very well, patterns of X’s and zeros, of coloured markings and symbols designed by himself and one other associate. It was the chaos cipher. Gradually, the symbols formed into a face, the face of the deceased Erebus crew member, Penelope Hurt.
Her pale and angelic features were made sinister by the advanced nanomes she had somehow on this recording acquired. She had red markings upon her skin, cosmetic appearance likened to claw marks, as though a tiger’s paw had drawn deep and even furrows down her pale long neck. Her eyes were like sparkling black jewels in the shadow of a blood red mist smudged below her brow, fading into her pale skin around the high cheekbones, her lips, thick and plush blackened with a cosmic red. She wore a crown upon her head, darker than the photon traps of the Charybdis itself, forming large curling spikes like the horns on a demon’s helm. In the darkness, she was scarcely visible.
‘…I can feel you out there. Waiting for me. Waiting for our inevitable unity again. They have come a long way to find you. They have reached beyond the limits of time. Crossed centuries and starscapes all to give you the tools you need to unite us again. Embrace greatness. Fear not destiny…seize it! We are not here to write the future, Malik. The future is determining what we do now. It calls to me. And it’s time to endure, to transcend, to become the gods we have dreamed of becoming.’
But it was her parting statement that gave Vance the chills and made his own temper start to buoy with blood boiling rage too hot to hide.
‘It’s time for the Second horizon.’
‘Penelope!’ He cried. ‘NO! NO! WHERE ARE YOU?’
Then, the image scrambled into static and disappeared. Vance promptly unlatched the braking mechanisms on the wheelchair by remote and Malik glided into reverse, toppling sidelong into a painful crash that carried his momentum tumbling down the steps. He hit the long edges limp, his head awkwardly angled into the bottom step with his body sprawled agonisingly across the hard ledges. And Vance hurried down to sit on the step beside his head.
‘There are things you’re not telling me, Malik,’ Vance incensed. ‘Things that are causing me great pains and I’m starting to wonder why I can’t get it out of your mind.’
‘I don’t know anything.’ He promised, spitting onto the floor.
‘She sent those things here…’
‘What things?’
‘Those Spydrones. They came from Cygnus. I know it because there is a manufacturer out there refusing to share information about them. I also know they’ve started doing their own research on these things, which means they’re watching them. How? Where is she hiding?’
‘She’s dead!’
‘Did she jump ship?’ Vance said, ‘did she hop off the Erebus at some point on the way home?’
‘You told me she was dead!’ Malik roared. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know where she is.’
‘Sir,’ Adamoss suddenly interjected. ‘The DNA samples in the Erebus cryonics suggest irrefutable evidence that Chrononaut Penelope Hurt is indeed deceased.’
‘Then, how?’ Vance asked again. ‘When did she make this message? What does she mean by being united again? Why is she talking about the second horizon?’
Malik knew then what he feared the most. He feared the loss of control. He feared change. Vance reached out to his disabled brother but thought twice about touching him and instead moved away from the steps.
‘Adamoss, put him in the chair,’ he ordered.
Two of the androids soon appeared, one to collect the wheelchair from where it had crashed and the other to collect Malik, easing him into place. The android righted Malik’s head and cushioned it still, leaving him to gasp in place, eyes rolling and spinning with distress. Vance put his hands over Malik’s wrists and leaned into face him close.
‘Where is that fucking bitch?’ he scowled, face twitching.
‘I know,’ Malik gasped weakly. ‘I know what it means. I understand now.’
‘Talk.’ Vance starkly ordered. ‘Tell me this and I can very quickly arrange to have you back at my penthouse fucking those odalisque meat feasts again. And you can put all this horrible stuff far behind you, even live in the Atominii’s Nexus, if you wish. But you will explain this first.’
‘She means the chaos cipher,’ Malik said tiredly. ‘She has the other half of the code. The part you can’t find. She has brought it here for me. I can get it for you.’
‘And what then?’
‘You’ll understand all dimensions of space-time,’ he promised. ‘I’ll show you how. But I have to see this thing. I have to see it. You have to take me there.’
Vance considered this for a moment. He looked to one of the Adamoss avatars and the android nodded.
‘You’re suspicious,’ he noted. ‘But Malik does not appear to be lying.’
‘Do you know what Penelope is planning?’ Vance asked.
‘No,’ he whispered meekly.
‘Do you know what she means by embracing greatness? Or the Second Horizon?’
‘No,’ he said again.
Vance checked with Adamoss who had been carefully analysing Malik for any micro-expressions that could indicate deception.
‘His candour is verifiable.’ The android confirmed.
‘How do you know she has the rest of the chaos cipher?’
‘What else could it be?’ Malik asked. ‘You heard her yourself. She crossed centuries and starscapes to bring it.’
‘So, we can be like gods?’ Vance questioned.
Malik swallowed nervously, his eyes moving to look at Vance and they solemnly contained the answer. Vance looked to the android, his countenance sober and his body language a tall example of his gravitas.
‘You heard him. Ready my ship.’ He ordered the android. ‘My brother has a job to do.’
-69-
Kyo lay in the dimly lit cell. Another mouldy, stinking mattress coated in blankets stained with dry blood that no matter how often was washed just never seemed to give up the stains. He was in a large warehouse, his cage one of many below strips of light that cast the black zebra shadows onto everything below the obscurity of the steel bars. And he saw moths batting around the lights, circling blindly in hopeless search of the moon’s light. Distantly, he could hear laughter, the more liberated inmates chortling and japing, the buzz and whirr of motors and electrical gadgets resonating in the workshops.
Kyo turned in his sleep. His heart rate was up again, beating at the inside of his bruised ribs.
He almost felt the agony again as he desperately tried to defend himself in his nightmares. He’d wake, twitching and wrestling with himself. Yesterday, they had thrown him into a boxing ring with some other sprite young fighter. He didn’t win, but he didn’t exactly lose either. It was nothing personal, he’d felt bad for hurting the other guy as much as he did. But Kyo sensed the feeling wasn’t mutual. Nobody feels bad for a gene-freak. Here, Kyo would have to fight harder and harder. He’d have to be tougher than Hattle, wherever the hell he was. Maybe they killed him.
He had
more nightmares as the evening wore on. The slapping sound of knuckles flapping against burst lips. He remembered the blinding flash that happens when your brain gets nudged from the heavy impact of a punch and the hard smack of the floor where the warm smell of asphalt and grit and sweat is all that’s there to cushion your fall. Kyo rolled and tussled, wrestling with his blankets, his bruises aching, old wounds opening up in the night, bleeding onto his pillow.
He woke to the sound of metal scratching across the floor one night and in a panic, he scurried to the far end of his room in a cold sweat. Two armoured guards were walking slowly, leading a person between them. They were moving gradually, as though the prisoner they were guiding to a cell was elderly. Maybe his ankles were tied up, Kyo thought. But no. He knew his face the moment it came into the light.
Hattle!
He watched nervously as they walked Hattle by. He hadn’t even noticed Kyo in his prison cell. They stepped him inside and lay him on his back, closing the gate with a heavy slam. The armoured guards marched out of the facility, the buzz of another electronic gate sounding from somewhere deeper in the darkness, further away where cold air howled into the corrugated facility. The crash of cross-wire fencing could be heard as the footsteps gradually faded away. Kyo hurried to the front of his cell.
‘Hey!’ He called over, trying to keep his voice low. ‘Hattle! It’s me! Hey!’
But there was no response. Hattle didn’t even budge. And Kyo suddenly became aware of motion in another cell just beside his. It was dark there. And in the darkness something was moving, and Kyo whimpered as grey and scabbed fingers coiled around the bars near his bed, just breaching the boarder of light. And faint features shifted behind the bars, eyes that shone reflections back at him. Kyo grabbed his bed and pulled it into the middle of his cell, scarpering as far as possible from the reach of the unknown prisoner. And he curled up in the furthest corner and wrapped himself up, whispering comforts to himself again and again.
‘They’re coming…they’re coming… okay Kyo…everything’s alright…they’re coming….’
He watched as the grizzly grey hand reached out to him and littered a small crumpled piece of paper to the floor before retreating into the darkness. Kyo stared at the paper, he saw scribbles of writing on it and blotches of dry blood but he dared not reach for it. He dared not read its horrible message. Kyo crammed his eyes tightly shut and pled for his friends. Please hurry.
*
Vilen Krupin had taken a long shower in his private room on the Perigrussia Skybus. Today was a big day and he intended to look his best. An associate and business partner was visiting, someone he both admired and feared. But Krupin knew how to keep on the individual’s good side. Since meeting him, in fact, Krupin’s own business ambitions had done nothing, if skyrocket.
He’d been hoping to present Kyo as a new project to see if the investor would ready him for military training, but so far the kid had been uncooperative with fighting. He was beginning to wonder if he should have broken Hattle’s ribs after all, since he now had no official back-up fighter in case his client didn’t like the gene-freak. Kyo was starting to look thin and undernourished as well. Soon, they would have to force feed him. If they weren’t interested in Kyo, then Krupin wouldn’t mind personally jamming the feeding tube down that little bastard’s nose himself. Ever the optimist, Krupin was still hopeful. If anything, he would get something out of that kid, even if it meant sending him to the Encybleron cyber-bio neurology labs. Who knows what those unpredictable malfunctioning low-budget Synthians would do to him.
Krupin headed up to the main watch-tower in his best suit, wheezing and climbing a flight of steel stairs with fleshy porcine hands plucking at lead rails and gantries. He climbed to the top where the view was good. He wore a long black jacket with a right side half-long extension stylishly reaching to the knee, breaking up the symmetry of the coat and showing more of one leg than the other. His pants were black and neatly pressed, the souls of his shoes pulsing under the pressure of each step. With a high collar white shirt and black tie, he finally donned low energy jewellery, which clung to his spine and powered segments of his suit with soft tones of colour that matched his mood, changing like a chameleon. Krupin frowned as he noticed a large bird of prey swoop down and land on the watch-tower’s roof. Settling on a satellite dish, she crowed into the sky three times and he grimaced at the animal, wondering if it would shit on his suit, as he passed under it.
Cedalion followed Krupin stolidly as he entered the watch-tower. A guard handed Krupin a pair of binoculars and he curled his chubby fingers around the chrome black device and entered the main surveillance room. Through the window he, spied a Chinook hovering closer. The camp’s alarm systems began to resonate loudly around the court yard, scattering people training there to arrange into assembly positions, as magnetic fields prepared to deactivate the EMP’s into dormancy. The stirring engines of the approaching Chinook grew louder, and as it passed Cedalion arched her wings and soared from the watch-tower, unsettled by the hot sirocco. The engines directed long lilac flames towards the ground and the machine came gently to a touchdown on one of the camp’s landing platforms beside the Perigrussia Skybus.
Once the struts and wheels were grounded, the carrier’s rear door dropped open with troops readily disembarking. Clad in high-tech military armament, photo-diffraction and nanological Shear-Phasing armour padded to their guts and chests, they marched orderly into the yard. With their helmet visors synchronised to their ocular lenses, they analysed the prisoners, clocking potential threats. They carried smart rifles slung around their shoulders and yomped in an informal fashion through the court yard, sizing up the disciplined and orderly camp trainees. Some rested their rifles on their shoulders, others rested them beside their leaning legs and they scattered about, some squatting, waiting confidently, lower mandibles, grinding, masticating on gum.
Krupin ambled along the gantry above as the leader was just stepping out of the Chinook to join the soldiers on the yard. He was a tall and lean man, powder white skin with a bald head and a sour face. His thin, almost colourless lips were drawn out only by a tattoo that ran over his chin and carried tribal designs down the middle of his neck like a rail-line somewhere beneath his white, neat collar and presumably over his chest. The pale lank man wore a black, tailored, luxury vicuña suit which had a white strip vertically coloured down his centre from collar to groin, following his spine to return to collar on the other side. The eyes were pure black, like polished obsidian pearls hampered within the blinking lips of his hairless eyelids.
The creature wore black leather gloves and polished black shoes that seemed to stay clean even as he stepped over the snaking muddy power cables strewn through the courtyard.
‘Good to see you, B’Two’O,’ Krupin shouted down.
The thing turned its head to find Krupin and didn’t respond. B’Two’O seemed to be frozen in place like some insouciant Buddhist strolling through his unabated reality. It always alarmed Krupin. He was never sure exactly where those black, uniformed eyes were looking.
‘I trust your flight was good one, no?’
‘Most comfortable,’ said B’Two’O at last, his voice fair and level.
‘Good,’ Krupin was nodding with slight trepidation.
B’Two’O turned his attention on the assembly of men stood attentively and well-spaced in the yard, despite the light spills of rain. The alarms began to once more signal around the camp, sirens bleating as fulvous lights rotated to caution the personnel that the magnetic fields were powering up again.
Generation five Titans like B’Two’O were the Atominii’s replication of an Olympian Genetic, only with cybernetic upgrades. They were still in test phase. Since the Olympian uprising, a century or so ago, the Atominii Eternals weren’t keen to experience another, so these models are still being slowly fed into the hardlands outside the Nexus interface in controlled and manageable numbers. They delighted in pain. Their own pain as well as the pain of
others. And he knew well from experience that B’Two’O’s pain tolerances were extraordinary. Krupin had seen him once burn off his fingers in a bet one drunken night in Singapore. He’d laughed it off and grown them back just two days later, fully forged fingers ready to burn off another day.
‘Have you been keeping these blood bags healthy, Vilen?’ B’Two’O habitually inquired, ‘are they of much use to you or not?’
‘They’re perfect,’ said Krupin happily. ‘The men are all happy here, they’re fighting strong.’
‘You’re all much better here than on the streets, aren’t you?’ B’Two’O called out rhetorically to the assembly of people. ‘This one,’ he pointed, ‘this one was the last one I brought to you, isn’t he?’
There stood a young man, hair shaven and shoulders strong and broad, his nose up as he stared ahead in a disciplined trance. ‘He was the programmer, wasn’t he?’
‘He was programmer, yes,’ Krupin nodded, leaning on the rails of the gantry above.
‘Imagine...from useless hacker to a hacked useful member of society.’ And B’Two’O walked along the line of faces until he was satisfied.
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