Chaos Cipher (51 page)

‘
Nice and
still!’ He reminded her.

Waves of
trepidation anchored Kyo dithering on the spot, the hood of his
garments flagging in the hot air of the Perigrussia engines. He
felt gravity upon him now, the short burst of energy suddenly
affecting his muscles, calling upon the debt they owed. The pain of
his tightened and over worked body gradually caught him up. His
breathing eased down, and he suddenly became aware of wounds he did
not know he’d acquired. His wrists ached from pushing Lyov over the
edge of the drained lake. His arms were splintered with micro
fractures that pulsed and throbbed. He limped on his sore feet and
fell backward with pain. Kyo cried out mercifully to the sky, tears
flowing as the physical consequences of his actions overwhelmed
him. His veins had now lost their luminous lustre and his power was
gone. With it, he was beginning to realise, he’d been too naïve and
conservative.

Horace
approached, weapon securely on Kyo. He was kneeling in the open
field, unable to do much else other than scowl and gasp for air,
barely able to lift his arms in surrender. As Horace reached Kyo he
had his rifle trained, then looked back at Nikkolai. The man with
the opalescent tattoo on his face glared at the boy somewhat
sympathetically.

‘
Go easy,’ he
told Horace, ‘he’s just a kid. He’s done here.’

‘
Yeah, he’s
done,’ Horace said back. ‘This little fucking mulatto is more than
done. He’s ours now.’

Kyo growled
frustrated, wanting to will his legs to run. But his muscles could
barely twitch.

‘
Well well
little man,’ Horace said, ‘you do live up to the
legend.’

Kyo watched
helplessly as Krupin approached. He was twiddling a toothpick in
his mouth, scooping out some rotten foot from between them. He
stood over Kyo and flicked the toothpick at him and smiled. Kyo
could only growl as the splint of wood bounced off his
cheek.

‘
What you did
to my body guard,’ he said, ‘bravo! That is why I need you. You are
a weapon.’

‘
I’ve never
seen anything like that,’ said Horace. ‘Never thought a kid could
hurt a grown man like that.’

‘
He’s on the
ship,’ Krupin told Kyo, ‘broken ribs, damaged lung, we putting him
on breathing machine. He wants to see you.’

Kyo grimaced.
‘Will you let them go?’ he asked.

‘
Your
friends?’

‘
My
family!’

‘
You don’t
have family, gene-freak,’ Krupin sniggered. ‘You were born of
deadly warriors. And I am not here to bargain.’

Horace crept
around the field and looked up at the papier-mâché clouds and his
nose tipped skyward as he grew disturbed by some distant rattling
in the woods.

‘
Don’t hurt
them.’ Kyo pleaded.

Krupin
enjoyed the solicitation. He smiled wide and proud.

‘
I could help
you not to care,’ Krupin offered his incremental kindness. ‘Look
how weak they make you. So long as you care for them and their
love, it always has a hold on you. Don’t you see boy? I have to
hurt them.’

‘
Don’t you do
it!’ Kyo urged through tears. ‘Don’t you do it I’ll fucking kill
you!’

‘
Vadim!’
Krupin yelled.

‘
Boss?’
replied Vadim Raw Dog, rifle angling up to his shoulder, oh-so
eager to shoot someone.

Kyo looked
back at his mother solemnly. She sat on her ankles by Dak, arms
still raised, hair strewn over her sweaty skin, still catching her
breath. She shook her head to him. Don’t be stupid.

‘
Please!’
Krupin heard the young Olympian whimper by his knees. ‘Don’t hurt
them, please.’

Horace had
his eyes suspiciously out on the forests. He swore he could hear
something over there, far out in the mountains. His optics
recalibrated aerial satellite visuals but there was nothing as far
as output could detect.

‘
Horace, what
you looking for?’ Nikkolai inquired.

‘
Not sure,’
he transmitted through his earpiece, ‘there’s
something.’

‘
We’d pick it
up from the Perigrussia Skybus if there was anything out there,’
Nikkolai promised.

‘
Let me say
goodbye,’ Kyo wept below Krupin’s smug perspiring countenance. ‘Let
me say it. At least give me that.’

‘
Ah now,’
Krupin sighed, casting his glance back to Kyo. ‘What I just tell
you about love? Don’t let it corrupt your warrior heart, little
man. Love is not for men. And it is time for you to know what sort
of man you are gene-freak.’

Horace
suddenly made a strange sound, somewhere between a laugh and a
hiccup. Nikkolai tipped his head to see Horace glaring about,
meandering drunkenly. What’s wrong with you, dick-head?

Horace
staggered, teetering forth for three or four steps and tried to
balance, then dropped his rifle.

‘
Horace?’
Nikkolai said.

Krupin turned
around, confused. He thought he’d felt rain, and he touched his
face before looking up to the cloudless sky. But on his fingers he
saw blood.

‘
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-

W
ith 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.