Chaos Cipher (7 page)

The signal
grew more prominent on the map, drawing them deeper between the
garish pyramids and into the welter of vegetation and vines. Dak
could hardly believe his eyes. He held his hand up to stop Sonja,
inching forward on a drift of carefully planted feet. Each delicate
footstep arched quietly before the next, soft as a hunting cat on
autumn leaves.

He’d only
heard of the infamous legends of the Blue Lycans. There were
stories, dreadful rumours of the disappearances of villages and
even cities massacred at their hands, though he’d never seen one,
many who had fought them said they did not stay dead for long. Dak
glared fearsomely at the enormous cadaver lying face down on the
ground. It’s blue exo-suit, a segmented series of chrome alloy
plates shaped to muscle and physical contours, shimmered in the
sunlight. A large pool of dried black blood spread around its body.
It was as big as the rumours held, almost ten feet from head to
toe, just shy of three metres; it was true about the Blue Lycans,
they were giants. The exo-suit flickered in the light, its
photo-diffraction programs still malfunctioning from bullet
punctures, making parts of it invisible while others remained in
sight.

‘
DAK!’ Sonja
cried on seeing the corpses. ‘Oh! Oh God...is that...is that what I
think it is?’

‘
Looks like
it,’ said Dak meekly, his lip contemptuously curled at the monster
as Sonja stood close to him. ‘It’s a Blue Lycan. Dead I
hope.’

About twenty
metres away was another body, a woman curled into a foetal position
also in a patch of dry blood, her skinny arms a ghoulish,
post-mortem pallor. Her hair had clotted to her face like oily
webs. Dak moved a little closer and knelt beside the giant corpse.
Between him and the dead woman was a rifle, its ammo cartridge
spent.

‘
They killed
each other. Death by fatal wounds. From the looks of things they’ve
been dead about a day.’

‘
Who is she?’
Sonja whispered.

Dak noticed a
small white capsule on the woman’s back. ‘There, she’s something on
her back. And the signal’s coming from her body...let’s find out,’
he said, standing to approach. Sonja looked around, eyes attuned to
the high empty windows and the emerald pagodas and stone hollows.
Not a sound could be heard, save the psithurism of dry leaves
scratching and stirring over the sundried stones. And in the cold
black waters lay the flakes of blossom, amaranth peels slanting
through air.

‘
I’m really
uneasy about this.’ She muttered, ‘we should get out of here
now...’

‘
Wait!’ Dak
said on a serrated breath. ‘Just a second.’ And Sonja’s head
turned. Did she see something? She wasn’t sure; maybe her mind was
playing tricks now. What was she hearing?

‘
Dak let’s
go!’ She whispered pressingly.

‘
I don’t
believe it,’ said Dak, glaring at the spherical capsule on the
woman’s back.

‘
What is it?’
Sonja said startled, eyes like soap bubbles in a soft
zephyr.

And Dak held
his gaze down at the pod.

‘
Dak?’ he
heard her say again. ‘What is it?’

*

It was an
hour’s flight to Cerise Timbers, a micro city constructed for
mineral mining just on the boarders of South East Siberia. It had
existed there for the best part of a century, a sanctuary for the
itinerant precariat escaping neo-economic violence.

Dak leaned
forward to confirm the destination on the dashboard. The V-TOL
SkyLark angled its nose down, rotating the duel compression
thrusters forth and killing their forward momentum before adjusting
the thruster engines earth wise to balance their descent. Where the
forests opened into a glade of hilly fields it was easy to discern
the tall standing towers of the mines. There were nine in total,
each standing almost one hundred meters tall and shaped like the
fins of sharks. They were spaced over two or three kilometres
apart, and pulsed with lilac skylights. Only three were still
active, elevators towing back and forth vertically into the deep
earth. Between the towers arched the apex of the huge carapace city
dome, which opened up in the centre to receive SkyLark through the
top of the geodesic structure.

The SkyLark
broached for the landing ports, swooping above the buildings that
were cultivated with vegetation projects. The sky was populated
with gliders today. The weather was good for flying, he saw the
pilots in their wheel cages, the fans strapped to their backs as
the gliders ascended and descended through the air, wheeling
playfully.

The Cerise
Timbers dome had several roles in its past. Dak was told it was
originally designed to house huge logistic dirigibles during the
oil investment crisis in the period before the New Transformation.
But the inception had been blind to how deep the crisis of that
time was, until the biggest financial bubble burst, along with
their logistical airships. What was left became a prison camp for
slavery, not just here but in largely populated areas now called
the hardlands. Only here, however, labourers were held to
constantly mine and maintain digging machines. Today, it was a
micro paradise for those exiled from the Atominii worlds,
hardlanders left unable to deal with their stark new reality and
seeking something of a more pleasant existence. And Cerise Timbers
was expanding fast, drawing a migration from all over, its social
democratic experiment travelling like a legend. The welcome
committees met new comers always with open arms. Their motto had
been; no root, no fruit.

As the
SkyLark hovered towards its landing zone, Dak and Sonja stared out
at the topography. The small city was composed of structures that
had been swallowed by vegetation in the spring and summer season,
beautiful pale buildings grown in moss and vines and plants, trees
populating once barren roads while frequently efficient train
systems encompassed the designation zones from area to area,
encompassing the subterranean roads for underground auto-vehicles.
They saw people playing games on the rooftops, or exercising in
Yoga groups or gardening and selecting foods for their pre-planned
communal cook-offs. They saw kids hurrying across a bridge with a
ball and waving to the V-TOL SkyLark and they smiled and waved back
as they cruised overhead. They saw domed houses being constructed
on the fringes of the huge central dome. Even now the inner walls
of new buildings were being inflated with the fabric of old
zeppelins. Dak spotted architectural schools putting the remains of
old city ruins to better use. He saw the area all being fixed,
without planning permission, without law, and all aligned with
their other motto; hands that can, to build and plan. Vinyl and
nylon balloons, previously used for war and aero-commerce, now
inflated at ground level to be coated with concrete by power-hoses,
then cross-meshed with wires before another concrete layer was
rendered to build many houses fast around already dug aqueduct
trenches. Other structures were being printed, a task that required
a lot more planning, but was better for mass production of homes
once it got going. Above the city dome was the city’s symbolic
identity. The society here did not believe in nationalism, there
was no flag, but their way of life was symbolised by Three
Circles,
Cognition
,
Liberty
and
Ludus
.
The Three Circles could be seen around the dome and in different
areas of the city; it was a symbol that all the different factions
of the city agreed upon, a symbol that orientated their
livelihoods.

The SkyLark
approached a landing zone and some of the agency members were out
on the airstrip testing SkyLark engines and new ion thruster
cylinders and nano-powered devices. Apparently there had been some
development in creating ion-thrusters, but there was no means of
getting them into space where they would be useful. All they had
for the SkyLarks were power jets and hydro-fuels, but no design was
powerful enough for an orbital climb. That would take some serious
engineering.

There were
two striking characteristics on the airstrip that always drew
Sonja’s attention. One was the city’s only dirigible airship, a
huge titanium white egg-like craft that was mostly hollow. It had
been converted into a fungi house for their mushroom gardens and
pharmacology labs. Much of the mycelium was developed for
natural-plastics, moulding everything with 3D printers from chairs
to containers for long term food storage. The sleek-looking cockpit
at the nose of the craft often glowed with UV black lights where
purple figures went about their testing and substance control in
the fungi-labs. The other was a passenger plane, sat in a pool of
rust and iron on damper days and overgrown with moss and trees that
pushed out of its engine nacelles.

The SkyLark
hovered gently on a pillow of undulating hot air as Dak turned to
monitor the computer’s feedback. He made sure the navigational
systems were operative, looking out for any failures on landing, as
instructed to him by the technicians during flight training. The
vessel lowered towards the landing zone further still, and Dak and
Sonja watched the computer tentatively. A single arm mechanism
reached up from the landing ports to receive them in its magnetic
platform. The arm latched onto the SkyLark’s underside and drew it
carefully down to the hangars as Dak powered down the plasma
thrusters, lilac flames easing to gaseous wreaths. Automated
landing was a new thing in Cerise Timbers; it had taken a lot of
research and training from the local agencies and SkyLark
developers to get it right. Automatics were nothing new, they’d
been around for a while, but in Cerise Timbers, they had done a lot
scratch.

The cockpit
unlatched and slid backwards, allowing Dak and Sonja the space to
climb out onto a walkway. Already the automated refuelling wagon
arrived with new oxygen tanks for the fuel compressors.

Dak mounted
the side of the cockpit and shouted over for assistance. Stepping
down onto the concrete runway he reached back to receive the
life-casket from Sonja. He peered in through the ovular blue window
in the ovular sealed casket and saw the sleeping baby inside,
oblivious to its dead mother, oblivious to the commotion now
bustling around it, locked in its blissful cocoon, audio
synthesisers mollifying his premature and tender mind.

‘
Did you have
a good flight?’ shouted a familiar voice as the SkyLark engines
whirred gradually down. He saw their good friend Boris Isaac
heading over, an affable smile wide under his bushy brown beard.
Dak always thought Boris had a welcoming smile, one that would
start a chain reaction of other smiles, something Dak was conscious
about doing.

Boris was
wearing khaki shorts and a black sleeveless top. His face was
smudged with what looked like engine oil and he was sweating,
slightly exasperated from running and carried a back-pack that
looked full. He hadn’t been living in Cerise Timbers for very long
but like Dak he quickly adjusted to city’s sociocratic way of life
quickly. Boris was an old-fashioned handyman, a trade he’d learned
in the hardland boarders of the Atominii. He was a fixer and
builder, he’d cut his teeth renovating dilapidated homes for the
homeless, repairing vehicles ditched in old factories from spare
parts, and since the Atominii military police were constantly
undoing his good work he’d learned how to fix things fast. He’d
taken well to the hands that can motto.

‘
Got your
hands full, Boris?’ Sonja asked. ‘How are you settling
in?’

‘
Very well
thanks Sonja,’ he nodded, catching his breath. ‘I’m just heading
over to the technical school,’ he said and pointed with his chin,
‘they needed some tools, said I’d take them over. Didn’t think you
guys would be back so soon. What you got there?’

‘
You wouldn’t
believe me if I told you,’ said Dak.

‘
Try
me.’

‘
We found a
baby,’ said Sonja, ‘out in Onyx Waters.’

‘
What?’ Boris
gasped. ‘A kid? Jesus…I was told nobody survived the
massacre.’

‘
I need to
get to the hospital,’ Sonja announced in a speed walk.

‘
Hey, just
down here,’ Boris pointed, leading Sonja towards the technical
school where Boris had a vehicle waiting. It was a makeshift box
under constant change and innovation by various mechanics and
recently fit to run on fusion lithium cells designed by the open
source collective of scientific syndicates, ‘I’ll give you both a
lift. Just hop in.’

*

They’d found
a room at the far end of the maternity ward in the hospital. It was
a quiet place, and Sonja settled the casket onto a
table.

‘
Dak, get the
curtains,’ said Sonja in a low voice.

Getting
access was the easy part; Sonja had been working as a doctor in the
hospital for the last two years now. The lights were very dim and
Dak looked up as he drew the curtains and switched on a bedside
lamp. A soft and ambient blue halo of light breathed gentle
illuminations around them and he shaded the direct light with
another curtain. Sonja found a pressure lock in the side of the
capsule and with a gentle press unsealed the casket, which opened
with a light pop. The top semi-cup drifted up like a wing to reveal
the sleeping baby within, wrapped snugly in handcrafted linen.
Sonja began to scan the infant with her Quantic-W, sweeping her
forearm device over the child’s body. The infant was projected onto
the material’s screen and she saw his bones from the ultrasonic and
thermal imaging and gazed in amazement.