Chaos Cipher (62 page)

Vance
considered this for a moment and got to his feet. He approached the
recovery ward’s observation window and transformed the limpidity of
the glass from opaque and saw the turning nimbolantis storm below.
Swarms of drones milled about the misty clouds, planes drifting
through the lower atmosphere like trinkets in a tornado, all
seemingly without destination, yet all certainly with
purpose.

‘
You did
happen to overlook one critical factor in your quest to permeate
the limits of time,’ Vance said morosely. ‘And that is the limits
of human temperament. Lust, hate, greed…envy.’ He raised his brows
on the last word, as though surprised with himself. Vance turned on
his heels from the window, his dull shadow cast across Malik’s dour
and enraged face, resuming his train of thought acrimoniously. ‘You
were never meant to come here Malik. The human race stopped being
human centuries ago. There is no transcendence. I am here to ensure
the Atominii is conserved. This, our glorious utopia is forever
actualised. The Nexus feeds our imagination with no risks. Why
would we ever want to transcend this and risk it all on the notion
of the Erebus?’

Vance smiled
and bowed his head.

‘
Amuse me,’
he told Malik. ‘How does that famous oath of the Chrononauts go
again?’

‘
No depth of
knowledge must go unexplored,’ Malik started reluctantly, his
countenance grimaced with the words, preferring to stop himself
from speaking yet the words just poured out anyway.

‘
-no-single
thing unaccounted for in the sphere of our empirical wisdom. Should
such a thing exist, it does so against our reason and accord. Be it
the deepest oceans and dead stars, to the clock-work of the heavens
and the mechanics of the atoms, all must be known. This is the oath
we take in the name of new horizons.’

‘
Ah yes yes,’
Vance laughed, ‘that’s it. Yes…music to my ears. Oh you once said
those words with such pride Malik.’ And he stood at the foot of his
stretcher now, analysing Malik’s neurological readings, which
spiked with activity. ‘Oh, you are deeply distressed I see. So let
me leave you with something to sleep on before the next
neuro-stimulant kicks in.’ And Vance wrapped his fingers tightly
around the recovery stretcher’s foot rails, his knuckles white with
anticipation.

‘
That
explosion on the Erebus was meant to destroy you!’ He said,
simpering. ‘My parting gift. But you are a tenacious soul Malik.
You make an honourable Serat my big, younger brother. Unfortunately
for you, however, you’re in my world now. If the Serat name is to
make any more legendary frontiers…should it matter if the name is
Malik or Vance when both are Serat? I am the limits of this world.
If anything is worth changing, then I will be the one to call
it.’

Malik growled
and seethed, he twisted and turned, rage building, yet his muscles
would not cooperate as the nerve harmonics continued to dull his
motion. Malik could only scream, and he roared, desperate to beat
Vance’s skull against a wall.

‘
You can make
your time here heaven or hell.’ Vance reminded, heading for the
door now. ‘And one is especially good when you taste a bit of
both.’

Malik
thrashed his head, growling, shaking, desperate to break free of
his cybernetic-induced ataxia.

‘
You’ll
forgive me,’ Vance tenderly pledged. ‘You’ll forgive me again and
again, Malik. You are, oh so, forgiving. And thank you for giving
me the chaos cipher. My research team has a big job piecing it
together.’ Vance said leaving the room. ‘But it is funny how we
think of time, isn’t it? Time of my world. Time for the Atominii.
Time for returning to Earth…’ Malik thought he saw Penelope Hurt
again, reaching from the cryonic chambers, inviting him into the
cold, numbing and subduing ice. ‘Time to sleep.’

And from the
wailing and roaring, Malik’s neural oscillations flat lined on the
beta waves, fluctuating evenly on alpha waves and delta, plunging
him quickly into a deep and dreamless sleep.

-46- 

I
t was a short ascent up to the
Lewis family house through the garden. Edge Fenris scowled at the
verdant and neatly trimmed gardens typical of Lewis style. He’d fed
the security dog with tranquiliser Laux had batched up earlier, a
fact that wouldn’t make Pierce Lewis very happy but delighted him
all the same. As he suspected, most of the doors were
electronically locked, but that never stopped Edge from getting
past a security panel. Slowly, he crept under one of the home’s
large multi-platform veranda and shifted up against the wall where
the glass door was. At the security panel, he held in the two
buttons Laux told him about, the hash tag and the star, and waited
like this for a whole minute until the panel made a sound. Seems
the professor was right again, he knew the hack would work for this
model. Now, Laux said something about the reset code being generic
for this locking key panel, a simple one, one, two, two eight.
Another long tone from the panel and the code waited for the new
assignment. Edge Fenris punched in the new code and hit the enter
button to set it. Once the panel was ready, he dialled in the code
he’d just made up once again and the light turned green.

‘
That’s how
you hack a security panel, Pierce.’ And he shifted inside and slid
the door to the frame behind him.

Edge Fenris
looked around carefully, riffling through notes and magazines sat
on the oversized and otherwise bare marble window ledges. The space
of the living room was neat and there was hardly anything inside.
Edge moved across to Pierce’s mini bar and spied a half emptied
bottle of Metaxas just sitting on the counter in a bottle goblet.
He took the bottle by the neck and unplugged the stopper, gulping
down a big swig, shivering after the brandy’s flavour hit home,
Edge planted the crystal back down with a dull knock.

‘
Now for the
incriminating evidence,’ he muttered to himself. Edge started from
the basement. The lights flickered to life to illuminate a gym at
the bottom of the stairs. The smell of sweat and dry paint was
strong in the otherwise cool shaded air. Edge looked around,
checking the equipment, the storage rooms where sandbags were
heaped beside dumbbells, and he even walked around the ring. Once
he was satisfied, he moved up a level, back into the Lewis kitchen
to descry the cooking method, making sure it didn’t need oil of
some kind like the shit he poured around Hangar-Fifteen just before
setting the place ablaze. Edge opened higher cabinets and still
found nothing. He moved up a level, into the privacy of Pierce’s
bedrooms. The bathroom boasted a large shower area and a tub. It
was tiled with blue and white marble and mirrored. He hadn’t
expected it, but the place was spotlessly clean, meticulously
ordered and tidy. Everything in its place.

Edge tried
Hattle’s room first, slipping through the sliding door. There was
everything that could be expected from a young man of Hattle’s age
littered around. The bed was folded neatly, as though regimented by
Pierce’s influence, and the window ledge was without a speck of
dust, but around the floor lay piles of clothes dumped and some
masturbatory content littered under the bed, a secret stash he’d
been collecting unbeknown to his father, he imagined. Edge wondered
in and turned to the large screen on the wall. He tried to switch
it on but the screen demanded a biometric reading, and something as
sophisticated as this he wasn’t sure how to hack, so he let it
be.

Edge Fenris
approached the master bedroom. The doors were doubled and slid
apart on rails as he entered. It was an oval room, nicely lit with
a balance of daylight, the roof designed to prevent too much of the
sun coming in directly, and a king size bed was centred. A fitting
room stood at one side, glass doors leading out onto a veranda on
the other. Edge snooped out of the panoramic windows and could see
the curving dome to the East. He opened the fitting room and looked
around, finding smart suits and opticidyne fabrics but nothing
obscure or out of place, the evidence was illusive
still.

Edge roamed
into the middle of the room and slipped a cigarette in his mouth
and lit it. Tapped his foot thoughtfully and walked out onto the
veranda overlooking the garden.

‘
If I was an
egotistical arsonist, where would I hide my toolbox?’ he asked
himself, realising all too soon the ironies of such a statement.
Edge Fenris had been told on many occasions he was quite literally
mad, and his credentials did nothing to absolve that. Suddenly, he
heard a voice coming from the garden, and Edge ducked low behind
the balustrades, peering through the gaps as the person walked
under the veranda.

‘
-So, what’s
the next move?’ asked the Bear.

‘
We got the
kid as collateral,’ said Pierce Lewis from the Bear’s Quantics.
‘Next plan is to reinstate rule on Cerise Timbers. We’ll be backed
up by the Atominii soon. Krupin said he’s taking us to his training
camp where he’s going to request Atominii Syridan support for the
operation and help us.’

He’d never
heard Pierce so upbeat, and no wonder. It sounded to Edge like he
was on the cusp of a massive coup.

‘
Well, you
should know,’ said Berengar, ‘they’re sending people after the kid.
Apparently, Artex Valdek will be leading an expedition to retrieve
him.’

Pierce
started laughing. ‘That I gotta see.’

‘
It leaves a
little vulnerability in East B’ One’s militia,’ said the Bear,
‘with Artex out of the way, most other ex-Atominii Syridan Mercs
are just scattered about.’

‘
How does he
plan on tracing us?’

‘
Nobody
knows,’ said the Bear, ‘and if they do, they aren’t
talking.’

‘
What about
that bitch Enaya?’ Pierce asked. ‘Has she been sniffing
around?’

‘
Not
recently,’ said Berengar. ‘Whatever you’re gonna do though, I’d get
moving on it. You leave this place for too long, they’ll put your
house to use.’

‘
The hell
they will!’ Pierce cholerically hissed.

Berengar
listened as Pierce yammered on about his return to the dome with
vengeance when he noticed something amiss with the door panel. The
light was green and the glass pane hadn’t been slid shut
properly.

‘
Uh-hu,’
Berengar uttered to Pierce, trying to make it sound as though he
was listening. Slowly, Berengar walked into the house and saw the
brandy bottle left on the counter, the stopper left by the crystal
bottle. The faint smell of smoke was in the air and Berengar took a
big sniff.

‘
Know what,
sir?’ Berengar said, ‘I’m gonna call you right back.’

Edge sensed
something was up. He listened as the Bear moved below him, back in
the master bedroom, ears attuned to Berengar’s movement. But
everything became suddenly very quiet. Edge looked around for
something to arm himself with. If it came to blows with the Bear,
he imagined he’d not be able to defend himself well without a
weapon.

‘
You still
here, Fenris?’ he heard him call.

Fuck!

‘
I have a gut
feeling it’s you, you know,’ said Berengar, ascending the stairway
foot at a time. ‘Typical sneaking around with a cigarette, leaving
the brandy out, that you couldn’t help yourself from drinking.
Leaving the door open. Nice work on the security panel. Though you
have to admit, not hard cracking those older models,
eh?’

He considered
diving under the bed, but he hated the idea of being discovered in
such a cliché position, even more so the idea of being killed in
such a cliché way, under the master bed of his enemy. Too
embarrassing. What would they put on his tombstone, he wondered?
Was there room here for some clever zinger? Do Cerise Timbers even
make headstones for their dead? He didn’t think so, on
reflection.

Edge hurried
back onto the veranda and quietly closed the bedroom door. He
rushed to the end of the upper platform and sat over the
balustrades and looked down. It was a six meter drop to the lower
patio and Edge knew if he landed improperly, he’d damage his
ankles. Suddenly, the veranda doors slip open and Berengar stepped
out.

‘
One more
step and I’ll jump!’ Edge tried.

The Bear
snarled and hurried to try and grab him, but Edge was already over
the side. He landed hard on ground and fell unstably onto his
backside and rolled, scrambling quickly to his feet to make a run.
And a moment later Berengar came down heavy on his feet, landing
perfectly in a crouch, powerful legs like supportive pistons. He
was already moving fast after Edge.

‘
YOU
BASTARD!’ Edge Fenris roared, sprinting as fast as he could, legs
up to his chest, neural-headset flapping at his ear. He dared not
turn but he could hear the Bear’s pounding feet gaining on him, and
thought he felt the large man make a grab for his jacket. There was
a sudden change in the terrain that Edge hadn’t prepared for, and
he glissaded down wet grass on a slope, rolling at the bottom and
running. The Bear tumbled after him, rolling all the way down to a
stop. He grunted and raged angrily and heard Edge Fenris burst into
laughter, exhilarated by the chase. Edge came to the house gate and
jumped as high as he could, throwing one tired arm over the other
to ascend the metal bars of the perimeter fence. The alarms began
to sound, but he knew there’d be no dog no to chase him, that
little fucker was comatose, he made sure of that much. And Edge
threw his leg over the top, snagging his trousers on the spike as
he dropped to the other side, surprised by the sudden tension and
tearing of material from which he momentarily hung. As his trousers
tore open at the seams, he fell from the fence and hit the ground
face down, crying out with shock and pain. Edge Fenris scrambled
backward as the Bear came up to the fence and glared at him from
the other side. Dusting himself off Edge stood again, if not a
little wounded generally alright, he leaned over his knees for
breath.