Chaos Cipher (64 page)

The last RIG
member had time to take refuge behind the refrigeration unit,
fighting the turbulent escape of pressure. He hoped the freezing
walls would insulate him from the Sniper’s thermal and X-ray scope,
not realising at first that the indiscriminate shots were not
intentionally seeking targets.

The typhonic
air whistled like a storm squeezing its way out of a pinhole, and
the Venster Suite’s emergency fire-doors and pressure lock
protocols began to seal over. Raven hurried to a safe part of the
hall as the doors drew shut, lank legs and arms streaming through
the tempestuous evacuation of air. Finally the doors sealed shut,
locking the doomed soldier into the Venster Suite’s room with a
vacating atmosphere. The man’s mortal scream was silenced with the
howling wind as the fire-doors and the atmosphere locks sealed shut
forever.

Avenoir sat
hidden, knees to her chest and holding her ears by an emergency
fire extinguisher, which was now pulsing with the buzz of an alarm.
She stared at the floor incongruously. Raven knew that now was the
time to get passage to
The Griffin’s
Claw
. He had to get her out of this
building somehow, and he was no longer abashed to using sanguinary
methods. His impassive eyes analysed the Corporal’s body and he
began to forge an escape plan.

*

‘
Four life
signs are dead,’ said the Lance Corporal from the bottom of the
stairway. ‘He’s up there alright.’

‘
Confirmed,’
said one of the foot soldiers, ‘I’m also registering four drop-outs
on the personnel neuro-ligature transponders. Sniper was killed
first, cranial damage caused the body to open fire and jeopardise
the pressure environment.’

‘
I’ve got
movement.’ Said another. ‘Target is leaving the Omega
Suite.’

‘
Target is
unarmed,’ said the Lance Corporal, ‘for now.’

‘
Sir, our
weapons have nano-tech security, they won’t allow him to
use-’

‘
He’s an
Olympian,’ the Lance Corporal reminded. ‘He can hack
them.’

*

Raven was
very much aware of the weapon security biometrics; it was not a
challenge for his geobacter nanomes to hack. He took the dead
sniper’s spherical grenade in his hand and squeezed firmly,
engaging the flows of nanomes populating his bloodstream so that
blue webs of light luminously mapped out his veins, and an osmotic
type permeation of technology passed into the weapon from his skin,
hacking its security and making it usable to him.

*

The Lance
Corporal led the way, clearing the dark staircase and flooding into
the halls. To their horror, the grenades arrived at their feet and
exploded. White fire engulfed the hallway, swallowing the soldiers
in its vortex and a fierce shockwave grew out of the chaos and
consumed the staircase in its ravenous extent, opening huge cracks
in the structure. Alarms surged through the building. Fire hydrants
began to gas the hallway with cold carbon. Soldiers fortunate
enough to survive the initial blast stumbled around broken and
confused, spluttering and wheezing into their masks as the gasses
overwhelmed them. Raven loped back into the hallway, strides that
carried his indomitable body through the flames which lashed across
his pyrophilic skin like innocuous wisps of velvet. His eyes were
alight with imperious blitzkrieg. One of the thwarted men climbed
to his feet, vertiginous from the shock and staggering away from
the warring giant. But the moment he was in range, the Raven’s
ineluctable grip seized the man’s throat and hoisted his head up
into the ceiling. With his canines stabbed down monstrously as
Raven roared triumphant with rapturous zeal. Nanomes began to glow
under his skin, networking through his veins and lighting them up
like opalescent fractals. Those eyes beamed brightly, shining like
blinding headlights. As the Olympian giant’s still fresh wounds
sealed into scars, he squeezed the man’s cervical spine until the
head and body fell away from what became black oil in his
palm.

*

‘
What is it?’
Alker said irritably, his arms crossed and his face the colour of
villainy.

JD O’ Three
shook his head and brushed his hand over his itching bald scalp. He
couldn’t help but wonder if there were lice still in this place
after all.

‘Tactical
errors,’ he reported. ‘Some crenulations have emerged in the
Venster Suite. Not to worry, we’ll take him out, even if I have to
go there myself.’

‘
I think that
would be best,’ Alker nodded.

The Lawyer
was at the large open screen staring into the stars and the curving
ring habitat. He’d heard Alker’s comment and turned to witness the
obdurate demand.

‘
It may be
best I operate from here,’ said JD O’ Three. ‘You may need
protection.’

‘
No need,’
Alker pressed, ‘your men are performing a perfunctory task at best,
so I strongly suggest you go see to them personally. This way, at
least, I can relax knowing the job is in more capable
hands.’

‘
I see,’ JD
O’ Three realised.

Alker
continued to appeal to the man’s ego, reminding him he was hired
because he was the best at what he did, that there was trust
between them. But JD O’ Three was not a stupid man. He knew what he
was up against. Raven was a first generation Olympian Genetic. And
for all the illicit implants and body boosts and military hardware
upgrades he’d parsimoniously spent his precious Atomons on, JD was
still no match for an Olympian Genetic. He knew of no living
creature that was apart from the infamously rumoured fifth
generation Titans, Avatar creatures of cybernetic ingenuity. When
it came to combat, they were grown for it. Everybody else was
trained for it. He was waiting for Alker to add
something.

‘
Supposing
your terrorist comes looking for you?’ JD tried again. ‘What
then?’

‘
I don’t
think he even knows we exist,’ Alker responded with a jocose
pertinacity. ‘I don’t think he knows you exist either, or your
handcuffs. That might be a good idea, why don’t you go and
introduce him to your shackles, for the good of the Solar System
Alliance?’

JD was
beginning to tire of their contracted agreement; this sense of
superiority was overwhelmingly irritating. Alker’s disposition on
picayune body guards was overtly disrespectful, and JD wanted to
smash something alright, but it wasn’t an Olympian Genetic
terrorist, it was this little prick right in front of him. How dare
he stand there and imply that I’m a coward!

‘
So-how many
men do you think are left now?’ Alker continued, casually brushing
creases out of his toga uniform. ‘Oh and B.T.W. You picked these
fellows, they’re your responsibility. Go lift their spirits would
you?’ Alker walked over to the Lawyer and took a whiskey tumbler,
‘while we lift ours.’

Kintz
half-filled Alker’s tumbler and then one for himself. They toasted
to JD’s success.

‘
Cheers!’
Alker said. ‘Oh and…alive is desirable. Dead, if
possible.’

JD O’ Three
seethed through his large white teeth. He turned curtly and kicked
his way out of the door before the automatic spring could draw it
open.

*

With no
leaders around to guide them, the soldier’s attacks became an
erratic, semi-coordinated free-for-all. Already trigger happy, the
men fired an enfilade of high velocity rounds through walls,
pulverising accidental targets into a violent discarnate pulp, and
shredding apart the superfluous integrity of the hotel in a
frenetic rain of belligerence. Since the grenades detonated, a
thick putrid cloud drew charcoal veils across the fires. Upper
chandeliers sparked and the flames spread from electrical fixtures,
reflecting off the melting, auriferous frescos which patterned
arching doorways and painted cornices, beading into runs of gold
which skeltered like tears of honey. Soldiers tripped over the
felled bodies of their victims in the smoke, skating on the
eviscerations unseen in the clamour. They shambled for safety
through the carnage, as some terrible force tore murderously
through the blackness. Their camaraderie scattered with equipment
malfunctions, and screams momentarily hung in an echo, the origins
of which could not be traced in the smoke, before abruptly ending
in breathless chokes.

One of the
soldiers found his way to the reception, sidling out of the
offensive smog and into the breathable air, his mask retracting
back down into the chest plate to reveal his fierce and pained
expression. He dropped to his side, aimed his assault rifle back
into the black fog and fired a cascade of bullets into the
crenulated flames where his optics mapped potential targets through
the blackened veil that was. But the baying fires did not recline,
fed by the fuel it crackled and roared, and a glass structure
shattered in some unseen part of the hotel, surrendering its
skittered elements to the rising heat. The waves of hot air stirred
and smeared, faltering the visible insides of the hotel’s elevator
hall with crimson serrations, as though the very ground had been
baked by the vested issue of Diablo’s breath. And in the flames a
devil did move, shifting in his steady stride, delivering solid
purchase to each footstep against the charred remains of flesh and
ash, two bright emerald eyes, tiny duel rings glowing like electric
pearls through the blot of emission.

And the man
on his elbows cried for God and shifted for the exit while the
giant emerged from the carnage, a black and slender figure
stencilled before the pepper-red spoils of conflagrations. The
smoke parted for him, coiling around him, cornicing back from his
skin as though it was of some ethereal fabric or magnetic leather
and the fires extinguished under his feet, as though his command
was arrantly upon them. He asked the devil to be spared. By the god
and stars alive let me have my life.

‘
Hath thee
yet no humility, Titan?’ Raven addressed. ‘Alack the multitudes of
innocents thou hast so readily lodged to the casket and pall this
night, a votive performed under the cloven face of duty and
militant force of violence. And ere now do ye cry mercy so cravenly
when violence doth show attendance? Puzzle not on the absence of
clemency Titan, not when violence has been thy
volition.’

Raven opened
his palm and seized the man by the throat, hefting him off the
ground as though he was uprooting some abhorrent weed, his
equipment and spent weapons cluttering at their holsters and
bandoliers as he kicked and choked and grappled with the giant’s
wrist.

‘
Cry then now
Titan, let thy God know of thy penance and welcome
perdition!’

Threads of
intense lightning then followed along Raven’s arm and the soldier’s
limbs snapped rigid, locking into obdurate tension as adamantine as
reinforced steel, his neck a series of suspension cables, eyes
bulged, constricted orbs caged within their bloody webs. Blue snaps
of light jumped between the space of the soldier’s boots and the
floor as the energy sought to be earthed. And Raven dropped the
frazzled cadaver, stepped across the steaming residue now frothing
and coagulating ooze from what was left of its cranial
orifice.

In light
shallow steps, Avenoir chased after him, running out of the
concealing smoke and to his side once more for protection. Outside,
emergency robotics were dispatched to extinguish the flames, firing
pellets of expansion foam into the building’s broken fissures,
moving through the darkness of space outside the damaged structure,
the pale light of Jupiter’s clouds passing like some ungodly bulb
as they rotated. They scurried high across the outside of the
Venster Suite, resealing windows in the threatened structure and
rerooting electrics and air pressure, vacuum washing the fire into
safe purging conduits, drawing a long fulvous stream out flailing
into the void like a luminous dentate tongue.

Raven was
outside the Royal Twilight’s reception now, looking up through the
dome’s habitation facade at the hotel’s tower, high above and
beyond the pressure shield that was their sky, high out into space.
He saw the robots assiduously going about their protocols,
skittering and trundling lightly across the transparent surface
like mercurial ants, their drama silenced in the vacuum beyond the
confides of the protective tubular sky.

Avenoir took
his hand then led him gently over to the end of the walkway,
casting her finger above the railings and down to the entertainment
districts of the habitation’s visage.

‘
Our window
it seems is now marred by the subtleties of time once more,’ said
Raven, ‘for already our return to the Grill and Billiards is
imminent I feel.’

The child
nodded to confirm he understood her, an artificial sirocco shifting
through the atmosphere as the air filters worked to balance the
jeopardised environment, pulling at her head-garment and causing it
to waver in the breeze.

‘
Hark
Avenoir, may we bind courage to the gift of thy auguries,’ said
Raven. ‘Now seek our destiny.’