Chaos Cipher (13 page)

‘What’s their
status?’ Max asked.

Tanya stepped
up to Malik Serat’s cryonic sarcophagus and a window appeared
across its arching chrome surface. She tapped a few options in the
projection field and analysed the readout.

‘
Preservation
successful. Subject is negative one, nine, six Celsius and intact,
Titan genetics stable, no crystallised cell ruptures, according to
nanome feedback. There’s some radiation cell damage on one of these
crew members.’

‘
These men
are generation two Titans,’ Max suddenly recalled, ‘I forget how
old they are.’

‘
Sir,’ said
Tanya, stepping over to a forth sarcophagus. ‘Another
subject.’

‘
Condition?’

‘
Containment
failure,’ she explained. ‘Thawing fatality, subject is called
Penelope Hurt, completely shattered, irreparable cell
crystallisations. Barnes must have done this. There’s evidence of
sabotage. Why did he kill this one?’

‘
Start the
reanimation treatment,’ said Max. ‘Let’s ask Serat.’

‘
Can’t sir,’
Tanya claimed fingering the holographic digits ‘insufficient power.
The aneutronic fusion hub seems to be in dormancy still. Minimum
power supply only.’

‘
Start it
up,’ Max suggested.

‘
Sir...no
fuel...she’s completely spent. She’s burning on empty, sir. We’ll
need a boost from the
Orandoré
exo-station.’

‘
Fine,’ he
said with a sigh. ‘I’ll start my report and draft a request for
power. Either way he’s getting revived. This mission went to hell
and its investors are going to want answers.’

‘
Right
sir.’

‘
As for you
guys I want you back to
Orandoré
for radiation treatment.’

‘
Right sir,’
said Tanya.

-7-

T
he oscilloscope was still showing a
long green flat-line where every few hours a faint and rhythmic
pulse would represent a reviving heartbeat. Max Elba folded his
arms as the research team circled the cryonic preservation chambers
on the Erebus, carefully monitoring power flow now channelling from
the exo-tower. The extraction process was a delicate procedure that
took several hours of cell restoration.

‘
I’ve never
seen this kind of preservation for deep space,’ said Tanya, walking
behind him to get a better look at the lit up chamber of the
sarcophagus. Engineers and science officers went about their
revival protocols, using holographic screening devices and probes
set to a hundred and ninety below zero Celsius as not to rupture
the surfaces of the cryonic chambers.

‘
Me neither,’
said Max.

‘
You both
ought to know it’s an old process,’ said Rufus, leaning forward on
one of the inactive terminals. ‘I studied
macro-biology.’

‘
You studied
biology?’

‘
Specialised
in it,’ Rufus smiled boastfully. ‘Studied biomechanics too, wanted
to be a programmer for medicinal nanoctors. I had some good ideas
for start-up applications, but the assholes said I had to afford
some certificate to use intellectual property like the nanomes.
Back then I just didn’t have the Atomons. Now I just know how to
break bones instead of mend them. Pity that.’

‘
Yep,’ said
Max stolidly.

‘
Course they
can’t just freeze anybody. There’s a whole genetic process to it.
Do you know amphibians freeze during the winter? Frogs can freeze
and thaw out again for spring.’

‘
Is that
right?’ said Max, offhandedly for the sake of saying something as
he watched the pulsing light beat of the sarcophagus in the other
room.

‘
Funny thing,
back in the age of late capitalism, maverick scientists used to
theorise all sorts of crazy shit. They ripped off a ton of
millionaires by promising them that in the future they could be
revived if they froze themselves. Dumb ass bastards used to buy
their cryonic preservation tanks and freeze their
heads.’

‘
Can’t we
bring them back?’ Max said with slight surprise.

‘
No,’ said
Rufus, ‘Cells are ruptured by the ice crystals, longer the
preservation the worse it gets. Best you could do is clone the
person and try to imprint an improvised memory that matches the
person’s most noted characteristics regarding their hobbies and
interests. That can be done, but what’s the point? Nobody would
bother with this extraction process. So for those frozen heads back
in the past…there’s no bringing those assholes back.’

‘
Doctor
Rufus?’ Max sniggered. ‘Imagine you as a doctor.’

‘
I never
finished my doctorate, Colonel.’

‘
Too bad, egg
head.’

Rufus play
punched Max hard in the shoulder and Max laughed and shadow boxed
with him, sparring into the air just under Rufus’ chin and they
feinted on their toes.

‘
So what’s
different about these guys, Rufus?’ said Tanya, looking in through
the observation window at the pulsing cryonic sarcophagus. ‘Why can
these guys freeze?’

‘
These guys?
These guys are still Titans, just early generation. You can see it
on the scans…Titan genetics intact, that means they genetically
respond to the freezers. Specifically grown to do this very
thing.’

‘
By who?’
Tanya asked.

‘
Their
parents,’ said Rufus with a shrug. ‘People with money who enlisted
their unborn children to the task of making history. Astro-glory,
they called it. Their genetic pre-sets had to be configured before
conception.’

‘
You-what?’
Max asked.

‘
Hell yeah,
it’s true. Their parents made the genetic changes. Before the
insemination process the eggs were encoded and designed with
certain characteristics. In their case, unusually high levels of
glucose production harmonised into their body, it would kill a
normal person. These folk were fitted with it, as well as a fast
metabolism to burn off the excess adipose when they are active.
These were the requirements specified for this mission. So the
people who had the money at the time signed up to the experiment
and wanted their children to be the first Chrononauts.

‘
These Titans
can survive a cryonic freeze because of high glucose levels in
their blood, helps the vitrification and acts as a kind of
anti-freeze so crystals don’t expand within their cells, they just
get cold and their internals keep wet.’

‘
Jesus,’ Max
uttered, ‘imagine a blood transfusion with one of those. Talk about
a sugar rush.’

The
Sarcophagus’s continued to pulse with paling light, strips of
concentrated photons sweeping across the solid surface of the
frozen body within, slowly returning it to the normal properties of
life. Nanoctors flushed through the veins and stimulated the
hearts, circulating the cold blood beneath the skin. First there
was a beat every hour for at least three, and then the tandem beats
began to increase, once every fifteen minutes, a slow crushing
pulse. Before long their hearts were beating once every six
minutes, compressing the gradually warming blood through their
arteries, reviving a full circulation. Nanoctors began to simulate
chemical reactions, regenerating other vital organs.

Malik Serat
opened his eyes. They stared gracelessly from the tomb to see
blurred objects moving outside the fields of pulsing light. A
string of painful memories began to awaken. He was not sure for a
while who he was, where he was, but as the nanomes reignited his
neural activity a network of pulses returned those last painful
months to him aboard the Erebus.

Once Malik
had been recovered, research technicians helped him from the
cryonic sarcophagus. He was shivering violently and reaching out
for people around him, his skin still damp and silvery like some
pale aquatic creature being hoisted from an egg. He was a lank and
morose man, his body completely vacant of hair, zapped away before
his last freezing cycle. His sea green eyes drawn in to a long
straight nose under his heavy brow, his enfeebled muscles
struggling to work after the thaw.

‘
Sit there a
minute, sir,’ one of the technicians instructed as various green
lasers swept over his skin. ‘You’re still fatigued, may take a
while before your muscles can work.’

He seemed
like he was unable to hear them, unable to realise fully what was
happening to him.

‘
Doctor
Serat,’ said another technician, ‘do you understand my words? Do
you recognise this language?’

Malik looked
up and nodded, still drowsy and confused.

‘
Can you
speak?’

His lips
perched and he attempted some mumbling but quickly surrendered and
shook his head dejectedly.

‘
Get him
aboard the station,’ Max ordered through the Erebus quantics on the
observation decks. ‘Find him a room, something warm to drink and
make him comfortable. How’s the other doing?’

‘
Almost
restored,’ said one of the technicians squatting by the sarcophagus
and showing him the thumbs up. ‘Another hour maybe two I’d
say.’

‘
Good as
gold,’ said Max, ‘let’s not beat around the bush here, station
masters and Ambassador Felix are all going to want some answers as
to what the hell happened to the Erebus and her crew. Chop,
chop!’

*

The towers
of
Orandoré
hung
high above the earthly land, a long orbital elevator conceived over
centuries as the greatest architectural feat yet achieved by
mankind. While attached to the carbon nanotube-ribbons, stemming
from the clouds far below, the
Orandoré
station’s lenticular
counterweight structure aligned in a geosynchronous orbit with its
base command anchor down in the North American sea. The station’s
domed surface burgeoned into space like a huge mushroom head,
plated with solar panels and a translucent shielding. Its outer rim
acted as a docking harbour for starnavis. Earth hovered above for
the station occupants, like a large beautiful opalescent lamp,
distant and serene.

Max, Tanya
and Rufus marched orderly through the various gardens and sterile,
uniformed looking hallways.

‘
Forensics is
all over the Erebus,’ Rufus had been saying. ‘They said there’re
some weird things happening with the communicators. Some kind of
radiation leak they can’t quite locate.’

‘
That whole
place is a radiation hazard,’ Medina chirped.

‘
You’d have
thought that Scott Barnes would have been killed in all that,
right?’

‘
Well, he’s
been sleeping throughout most of it,’ Max said back over his
shoulder as they walked. ‘What I wanna know is how in the hell he
woke up.’

‘
Why don’t
you ask him?’ said Rufus.

‘
He’s
slightly insane as you’ve noticed,’ Max said, ‘his information
isn’t reliable.’

‘
How about
the other guy?’ Medina said as they came to the end of their
helical path and walked into the gardens. ‘Did he fully recover
yet?’

‘
Who, Doctor
Serat?’ Max said. ‘As a matter of fact that’s who we’re going to go
and visit.’

*

Malik Serat
was febrile, his pallid countenance gaunt, his breathing heavy. His
fierce and predatory eyes came close together on his lean face, a
nose thin and long, lips narrow. He gazed ahead at his own ghostly
reflection in the mirrored window before him. Not a hair on him,
all of it burned away from radiation exposure on the Erebus. He was
wearing some sort of medical garment, he felt the silvery
insulation on the inside slowly warming his skin. The revival from
cryonics was a brutal and long event. He remembered parts of his
consciousness slowly waking, slowly becoming more and more aware of
things. At one point it was possible to remember his traumatic
mission before he could remember his own name. He had struggled to
move for what felt like far too long a time. The room he was in was
small, padded, and there was one window in front of him, the
mirrored one. On the other side he heard a woman’s voice filter
into the room. She introduced herself as Yerma Holts and said she
was a cognoputic analyst. He had no idea what that meant. They’d
been asking him questions, mundane, monotonous. He was tired as
hell and wanted to roll into his bed for a decent sleep without
feeling so
goddamn
cold.

‘
Red,’ said
the voice.

‘
Colour,’
Serat breathed effetely, bored.

‘
Domicile.’

‘
Why do I
have to do this?’

‘
Please
follow the test proceedings,’ Yerma instructed. There was a pause
before she continued. ‘Domicile.’

‘
A house,’ he
followed.

‘
Ocean.’

‘
The
sea.’