Chaos Cipher (65 page)

-48-

‘I
t’s a little sterile, this place,’
said Kelly. ‘A little quiet and a little sterile. I’m not…’ she
sighed and looked around the curve of the ring system, vanishing
behind the pseudo- planetary moon of the axel sphere docking port.
‘I’m not supposed to be out here.’

Caspian was
listening while hanging over the rails to spit, looking out on the
plantations, their rigid columns bathed in UV light, the pipes and
esoteric tanks filled with whatever was needed to service their
artificial attempt at bringing memories of earth alive onto the
ring system.

‘
All I have
is that ship,’ she said, almost weeping. ‘That stupid…fucking ship.
I fucking hate that ship. I do…I really fucking hate that
ship.’

Caspian
turned, leaned his lower spine against the rails of the walkway
bridge that travelled over a soon to be gardening strip. They’d
been building
Omicron
for centuries now and the process was nowhere near inhabited,
yet people were flocking here, to work, to do something. To further
mankind, to push those frontiers a little further to where we
thought they needed to be.

‘
I
thought
The Griffin’s Claw
would free me.’ Kelly went on, ‘thought she would
liberate me. When that was written into my parent’s Will and mine
to possess I thought…wow, y’know…this is it. I own a Starnavis. The
stars are mine to explore.’

Caspian
nodded as though he understood, but she knew, he didn’t. Not
really. Caspian Mowser was a serial con artist, a talented actor,
extremely talented. He could believe his own bullshit and
sometimes, he even liked the smell of it. He’d be the first to say
it too, in a moment of candour. But he did know one thing about
life, the thing that got him away from the planet Earth, the thing
that got him so far into space and so far into those dangerous
frontiers. That some lies, when coated in gold, were the ones
people liked to put a price on. Some lies, if the mask looked
valuable, were worth wearing and buying into. If you got the good
mask, people who see it are willing to believe its cosmetic
aesthetic. No wonder bio-hacks and gene-therapy were such lush
industries, she thought.

‘
We fucked
up…didn’t we?’ Kelly asked, turning wet eyed to seek
approval.

Caspian
smiled wide and raised his brows.

‘
Int loyfa
bitch?’

Kelly snubbed
the captain and his stupid red leather and threw her arms over the
rails, watching the distant pulse of proximity lights flash beyond
the station’s atmospheric shield as Jupiter sickeningly rolled past
for the second time in just eight minutes.

“
That ship
has been nothing but a pain,’ she said, more to herself now than to
Mowser. ‘But the deal’s going ahead. Our financer has agreed to the
conditions.’

Out in the
silence, where the odd reflection of distant starnavis silently
flashed asset the pitch black obscurity of space, Kelly let her
eyes wonder through the solitude and sought some escape. She’d
flown the ship far enough through velox zones to know that moving
faster than light also had its limits. With the saltus-carousels on
maximum fluctuation, gravmex tailoring fully functional, all that
energy was enough to make a quick leap-frog, but one couldn’t
leap-frog, bounce and hop again just like a frog does. Entropy
applies to everything, and it all drains at the Alcubierre point,
negative energy demands its counterpart debt. If you’ve the power
to push past the light barrier, you’d better have some collateral.
Kelly simply couldn’t run far enough from her problems without
having to repay her commission, be it those shady bastards she’d
been dealing with most her life, to the limits of space and time
itself; it was all constant.
The Griffin’s
Claw
had landed her in hotter and hotter
water the further she’d tried to run. Each time she used that
machine someone with some skill, necessity, burden, and chip on the
shoulder or favour, needed her service, and offered her business or
whatever. Sailing away was never an option, she was tied up from
the start and never realised until, metaphorically speaking of
course, setting sail. It seemed that technology couldn’t save her,
she was at the whim of her decisions, and even they were limited by
the nefarious whims of tyrannous reductionists like her financers
and Jerrus Ar-fucking-melius.

‘
Obsiduranium
ees nut eesee da kum by,’ she heard Caspian say distantly. ‘I meen,
weir jompen frum kruk te kruk anywai, wi kud alwaise sell eet ind
jost du a runna from Jerrus ind his kruks as weil as ah
foinansers.’

Obsiduranium
black alloy was one of those strange materials, one of those grey
zones, one of those hit n’ miss on and off’s that could make or
break the most punctilious of traders. It was rare and difficult to
produce. It took time and pressure. Her father told her, in some
allegorical way, to imagine the differences between coal and
diamond. One of the two had undergone more time and pressure, he’d
said, but the property was the same. So, if one considers that, the
higher the pressure, the slower time moves, well, then one could
grow quite old before that little cookie is cooked, especially
considering time is moving much slower in the cooker than things
are to the person waiting to eat, since that is how good old
relativity works in the heart of a black hole where Obsiduranium
properties are extracted. Kelly might have asked if they needed a
new cooker, had her father not anticipated her question by stating;
“now you must know that the
cooker
is metaphorical, and the hungry
consumer
is also
metaphorical, can you guess which the black hole is and which
the
humanity?
” He
knew she could of course understand irony, by which he’d also
indirectly taught her rhetoric. But her father had a knack for
being a patronising prick.
True
dat!

Obsiduranium,
she knew, was made of a highly dense superluminal material,
radioactive and conducting some unknown properties to which there
was only mechanical speculation. Kelly was never a physician, never
a cosmonaut, never a curious person about science beyond the
general tête-à-tête during an elated night of neuro-stimulants
while musing over the wonders of the Epicurus lunar colony
harvesting HE3 for fusion reactors and how the hell all that crazy
high energy logistics worked anyway. Now and then, on a really
crazy high, she would pontificate enthusiastically about how a
really fit astronaut high-gee pilot on the Apollo Prix races
managed to scoop the infamous gravitational pull of the moon, while
getting as close as possible to the surface of the dark side
without crashing. What was the deal in this? Was it all to gain
points, while lapping back around the South American or African
continent to gloat about apprehending some golden trophy? Was it
all about the gold, or was there something more, was it all to do
with science, and the wonders of the complex Starnavis vessel? Or
was this process another allegory about time and pressure being the
ultimate production of purity? Did it count for anything? And why
was she even considering this while her shitty Starnavis was
still-

‘
Eef wi dunt
sell eet den, I dunno maybe wi kud use eet as ai weapon?’ Caspian
smiled, clearly now being playful with her silence.

‘
Maybe,’ she
mumbled.

‘
Weil,’
Caspian breathed after reaching out his arms like the flanks of
some aeroplane in a nose dive. ‘Iye need ai sheet! Wi gowen bek to
da Grill en Billyeds ah-wut?’

‘
Yes!’ She
insisted. ‘Yes. You know what. Yes. I want to get drunk. Screw this
bloody…twatting…bloody hell hole. Sod it! C’mon Caspo, let’s get
buggered.’

*

‘
I’m tellin’
ya Casp the guy was a giant!’ Scuttle raved frenetically. The Grill
and Billiards was almost brimming with the shoves of shoulders, in
and out they went about their swaying abrasive jostles and shoves,
impelling themselves forth against any who dared to congregate
against the traffic.

‘
Remember
that guy we saw in the Royal Twilight place? Well, I think it was
him.’

Both Caspian
and Kelly were spirited in ruin, and their mood satiated with
alcohol, making everything but their new cargo arrangement seem now
ancillary. Kelly had eased into the idea of doing business with
Jerrus after a few glasses of champagne and forced herself to
accept the persistent pocket hopping perpetual debt handling
servitude of rental quiddity.

‘
Spit eet
owt, ownes!’ Caspian laughed, landing a heavy hand onto Scuttle’s
shoulder. ‘Wut deed’ee wont?’

‘
I dunno’
man, look, he just said something about wanting to go to the lands
of Adam or some shit. Spoke real strange, y’know like some freaking
arcane dialect. And he said…also, he said that if you refuse access
to
The Griffin’s Claw
then we will all perish – at least, I think that was the gist
of it.’

‘
Sounds leik ai nut, fukkim, ah.
Ees jost pullin ya jowls!’

‘
Forget it,
Scuttle,’ said Kelly flippantly and half drunk, swaying a little
and smiling at world’s end. ‘Forget that drifter bloke. I agree
with the Cap, he was most likely jesting, I bet…’

‘
Well he
seemed pretty damn serious to me Kelly...it’s hot in here, isn’t
it?’

‘
Ah yew
kiddin’? This plais ees pompin’!’

‘
It’s too
crowded…I’ve got to get some air.’

Scuttle
pushed through the clamour, leaving Caspian and Kelly bewildered
and mildly amused. Caspian ordered another round and held Scuttle’s
seat near the burger press.

Scuttle
however, didn’t even make it to the door. The sight of toxic strata
thwarting the natural view of Jupiter outside and the partiality of
a visible burning hotel was enough to stop him in his
tracks.

‘
CAPTAIN!’
Scuttle shouted above the yammering. ‘LOOK!’

Caspian would
normally be embarrassed by Scuttle’s paroxysms, but the kid seemed
genuinely spooked today. Caspian indicated for Kelly to follow. She
grabbed the drinks from the dispenser, snatching one away from the
robotic arm impatiently, and squeezed through the crowd to join
them. Muttering heads cast their gaze star-wards at the devastated
Royal Twilight hotel, a once beautiful mushroom-shaped structure of
crystal and gold sprouting above the tubular sky dome, now
billowing trails of black ash like some volcanic butte donning
blades of pressurised fire into space. Emergency robots and crew
scurried along the bridges and archways above. Droves of people
cluttered through emergency corridor tubes running outside the
habitat, and even in space they could see jets of oxygen bleeding
out of the building from inside the dome. Caspian gaped upwards.
He’d never seen such a magnificent spectacle.

‘
It’s no
coincidence, Cap,’ said Scuttle.

‘
Chroeest!’
Caspian bawled, grabbing his head as though to stop it rolling off
his shoulders.

‘
I don’t
believe it!’ Kelly re-joined, swallowing a cup of the alcoholic
beverage, and then chasing it with Caspian’s.

‘
Dhid yew
leave anythinke in yore room?’ he asked her.

‘
No,’ Kelly
said neutrally, ‘actually the station botched up my luggage through
the passport.’

‘
Ah, yeah,’
said Caspian with a click of his finger.

‘
Captain,’
Scuttle said sullenly, ‘we have to leave and fast. Something is
happening and I promise you this guy threatened me. He threatened
the ship.’

‘
O’roite,’
said Caspian, gripping Scuttle tightly by the shoulders. ‘I believe
ye broer. Let’s cut to da Greeffin, ah? Wi ken peck our crap ind
chuck.’

-49-

‘Y
ou’ve got to be kidding me,’ said
Nitro Harbeck ‘is this related to our current mission?’

‘
No,’ a
woman’s voice returned from the view screen. Nitro had his feet up
on the cabinet in his room as he listened. His boots were by the
room’s side wall light panel, casting a large bloated shadow that
blocked the light from his eyes. The screen displayed a symbol that
was the same as an apparent tattoo on Nitro’s neck, expressing a
private line with audio channels only. ‘We think most likely the
phenomenon is alien.’

‘
Alien?’
Nitro chuckled. ‘For real, Chief?’

‘
This
technology is extremely powerful,’ she stated casually. ‘It’s
presently not been identified. They’ve already destroyed a shipment
heading to the Cygnus colony and one of our remote C.A.L.C
stations.’

‘
Alright. So
what’s the next step?’

‘
We need to
intercept,’ she explained. ‘Try and stop these things. Drop this
Jerrus Armelius act and keep an eye on
The
Griffin’s Claw
, but you’re going to have
to put your present mission on hold. I need you.’

‘
Right,’ said
Harbeck sombrely. ‘I don’t want
The
Griffin’s Claw
crew members getting
suspicious. We’ve yet to find out who exactly is financing a dig
with Obsiduranium edge drills.’