Chaos Cipher (100 page)

‘
Wow,’ she
admonished with surprise. ‘Well, then…we’ll miss you.’

‘
No you
won’t,’ Ethan scoffed as they shook hands.

‘
You saved
our lives,’ she reminded him, ‘you really made a difference here.
If there’s anything you ever need…’

‘
It’s been a
crazy ride, Miss Banner.’ He chuckled.

‘
Have you
told the others?’

‘
No way,’
Ethan shook his head. ‘I hate goodbyes.’

As it
happened so did Kelly.

‘
I heard you
guys are going to Cygnus?’ he said. ‘You’ll get some first class
training from the Shield of Spheres, I’ve no doubt. What are you
doing out there, do you know yet?’

‘
I don’t know
much about it yet,’ Kelly claimed with an offhanded shrug. ‘But the
little I do know, is that we’re investigating a weapons
manufacturer that supplies Shield of Spheres weapons and tech
division. It’ll be a clash of interests.’

Ethan looked
back out of the window at
The Griffin’s
Claw
for one last time and smiled with
some pre-nostalgic comfort.

‘
Glad you
remembered I saved you assholes back near
Omicron
,’ he basked proudly. ‘Don’t
forget it because, since I’m going to have the screening and
everything…I’ll forget how awesome I was. But I think I’ve done my
time.’

‘
Damn right,
you did,’ Kelly smiled. ‘Good luck, Ethan.’

‘
And you,
Kel.’ He winked, doffing the peak of his baseball cap. ‘Have a nice
life.’

‘
Exactly.’
She laughed.

*

Duval had
been stood patiently in the observation room of
Orandoré
where the Chronomancer sat
beneath a large open view screen of the planet Earth. Even now as
the crevice of light dawned on the penumbral, curve Avenoir was
revising the chaos cipher’s patterns. Duval had broken the news to
her lightly about Raven’s death and since that time, she’d fallen
into a strange silence that wasn’t quite grieving, but more
tenuously related to guilt and depression. He didn’t understand
what was so shocking, had she not seen his death coming?
Distractedly, she traced the lines of code with her finger,
uttering unknown words to herself as she worked, doing her best to
occupy her mind.

Not a moment
too late, did Claudia Noble finally turn up at the studio and Duval
moved to shake her hand.

‘
How is
she?’

‘
Well,’ Duval
sighed. ‘Difficult to say. She knows about the Olympian terrorist
she came here with.’

‘
His name was
Raven,’ Claudia announced. ‘We respect dead members of Shield of
Spheres.’

‘
Of course,’
Duval nodded, looking over to where Avenoir sat in the distance of
the observation room. ‘He came through for you in the end, didn’t
he?’

‘
He didn’t do
it for us,’ Claudia answered. ‘But he did it knowingly, either way.
He had a lot of faith in the girl’s vision.’

‘
Do
you?’

‘
Cautiously,’
she implied, remembering her past experiences with Chronomancers.
‘We’ve lost too many of our best and brightest. I’ve been looking
all over for Nitro and he’s literally vanished. I don’t think he’s
dead. But one doesn’t quit the Shield of Spheres without recourse.
As for the Plato Wing…Ace Ripley was our finest Olympian pilot.
That was a painful loss.’

‘
But you may
have gained Cassandra,’ he whispered. ‘With a Chronomancer on your
side, you’ll never be out of work.’

‘
Indeed,’ she
smiled. ‘The child will be focussing on cracking open the mysteries
of the Erebus and that chaos codex.’

‘
I saw the
pilot neuro-stream visual feedback from the desert,’ Duval stated,
leaning in and lowering his voice. ‘Do they know what that thing
was?’

‘
The
Hypermekhos?’ she asked. ‘Not yet. Theory is that it’s some kind of
inter-dimensional machine or station or something. Speaking of
which, what’s the news on the whereabouts of the third
Spydrone?’

‘
The Orbital
Guard lost track,’ said Duval. ‘They believe it came down over the
Pacific Ocean somewhere near Fiji. But almost every station in the
Solar System in presently in too steep a crisis to commit to an
effective search effort.’

The last
Xenotech spelled trouble for humanity and she didn’t need to
convince him. In the wake of their arrival, all that was a proud
and rising space Empire now rained fire through the skies, burning
up on re-entry as it all spiralled out of orbit like a falling
domino economy. It was a fact that depressed her, that there were
forces outside their knowledge which they were not ready to face.
What troubled her most, was the existence of a machine like the
Hypermekhos, a machine that was even now all around them, perhaps
as big as the Earth itself, perhaps bigger yet, a machine that was
dynamic and transformational, able to reach into their reality and
snare them like fish. It was becoming apparent how small their neck
of the universe was starting to look. They really were in
it.

Claudia Noble
dismissed herself and began to walk slowly towards Avenoir. She
ascended the stairway leading up to her platform by the window and
sat beside the Chronomancer with the diamond freckled head. Claudia
smiled amiably.

‘
Hello
Avenoir,’ she greeted. ‘You probably already know who I am, don’t
you?’

She turned to
the woman and nodded.

‘
I’m sorry
about Raven,’ she said. ‘He was a brave Amorian. And as I promised
I will reveal what happened to your culture. Those responsible for
the destruction of the
Kyklos
will be brought to Atominii justice.’

Stoically
Avenoir watched the stars rotating out the window and slowly
continued to copy the lines of the chaos cipher into an
e-pad.

‘
Can’t get
that code out your head, huh?’ she asked. ‘You still working on
cracking it?’

And Avenoir
nodded, determined, angry.

‘
Any
closer?’

But she
didn’t respond, simply bit her lips and glowered.

‘
I’m going to
look after you now,’ she promised. ‘Not as a warrior. Not as an
instrument of Atominii national defence. But as a promise to honour
what Raven did. I will uphold my end of the bargain.’

Avenoir
nodded.

‘
You can
already see that I will, can’t you?’

And again
Avenoir nodded, keeping stiltedly mute.

‘
I think you
and I will be good friends,’ Claudia smiled.

Avenoir
turned to her and scowled, then slowly shook her head.

*

The weeks
that followed saw some very quick changes aboard the station.
Security had tightened for one, it was impossible to move as easily
around as before. Shield of Spheres, however, had a limitless
access to the base. Colonel Max Elba and his Canaries were in
charge of station security, nothing went on without their knowing
it. They had the place sealed as tight as a drum.

As Avenoir
and Scott continued to work on the enigma of the chaos
cipher,
Orandoré
had meantime assembled a team of mechanics to modify
The Griffin’s Claw
,
fitting the starnavis with an updated pyro-catalyst fusion core and
five Temporal-Inertial-Cycles, which now occupied the space of the
cargo

hold. Kelly
had been worried about the large capsules until the
Orandoré
Spanners
assured her the pyro-catalyst core would produce enough energy to
operate them while in a long transit velox. The Shield of Spheres
had delivered on their promise, and
The
Griffin’s Claw
was starting to look indeed
like a state-of-the-art craft. Their training had been
intense.

Kelly settled
into one of the inertial seats on the bridge and pulled the webbing
polymer across the fabric of her space suit. Pawel stood in the
centre, surrounded by nodes of light which interacted with his
pulsing suit. Caspian climbed up through the main conduit and
walked onto the bridge, moving to settle down in a command
seat.

‘
Pawel, dunt
forget da cargo calibrations men, weir nut carrying Obsiduranium
aneemore, boetie.’

‘
Of course,
Captain.’ He said, analysing the interplay of augmented
holographics.

Caspian
Mowser had settled in beside Kelly and smiled excitedly, clapping
his hands.

‘
Whoduyah
thinke?’ he said opening his arms. He was referring to his new
rags, no longer business rags but the attire of a professional
deep-space captain. She smiled.

‘
You look
well cut for the job.’

‘
Fukken roite
aie do,’ he smiled, fist bumping with Kelly.

‘
Scuttle,
Pawel, you guys sitting pretty?’ Kelly shouted to the bridge’s
network. Pawel channelled her voice through to the lower levels of
the Starnavis.

‘
Ready
captain,’ Scuttle said.

‘
Alright,’
Pawel announced, relaxing into his pilot seat and taking manual
control of
The Griffin’s
Claw
. ‘This is your pilot speaking.
Orbital debris field at minimal orientation, leaving
Orandoré’s
Shield of
Spheres in approximately thirty seconds, prepare to detach.’ And
Pawel realised a communications request filtering through his
neuro-ligature. ‘Erm, Captain. The Chief is on the
line.’

‘
Petch ‘er
through,’ said Caspian.

‘
Good luck,
Griffin’s Claw.’ Claudia Noble said as she displayed her voice
pattern in the augmented field. ‘Unfortunately, your shuttle is not
fitted with superluminal communication. We’re about out of time for
starnavis updates so
The Griffin’s
Claw
is as good as she’s going to be.
However, there will be stations in Cygnus from where you can
contact me, set-ups made by our distant base allies.’

Silently,
The Griffin’s Claw
unlatched from the station and pulled away,
drifting out of orbit pulling a five gee acceleration. Pawel locked
onto one of the lunar Lagrange points and began an approach vector,
and he felt himself becoming weightless in the micro-gravity, as
did the rest of the crew.

‘
How long are
we going to be asleep?’ Scuttle’s voice croaked through the
network.

‘
There’s a
shield velox point at your first destination,’ she said. ‘There’s a
maintenance crew waiting to attach the deep-space impact ovule.
That is when you’ll need to put yourselves under for TIC sleep. I
think you’ll be out for almost a year Earth time. When you arrive
at Cygnus,’ Chief Claudia went on, ‘you’ll rendezvous with Jules
Wade near the colony moon, Syndruss. He’ll take it from
there.’

‘
Roite!’
Caspian shouted, pointing ahead to the stars. ‘Operation Bulaweyo
is a goh!’

‘
We’re not
calling it that,’ Kelly argued.

‘
Eets moy
meeshon, Keyl, weir kawleenke et Bulaweyo.’

‘
I
tentatively leave this in your hands, Griffin’s Claw.’ Said Claudia
Noble. ‘Good luck. Shield of Spheres – out.’

The Griffin’s
Claw’s
long tapering bow aimed for the new
astro-location. Shifting into the sun’s gravitational neutral zone,
the expanding belt of adapted saltus-carousels snapped into
position, starting up the electromagnetic toroid. Dense superfluid
within stirred, warping the Higgs field around the starnavis. With
a resplendent haze the engine nacelles burst to life and the
celestial shuttle reached into the expanding voids and veloxed away
from the Solar System, home to a manufactured chaos.