Chaos Cipher (89 page)

And he heard
his name.

Kyo...

The sky began
to glow steadily, in the passage of time the luminous bullets from
the Chinook racing ahead of them. He could see them pass as though
they were beams of narrow ephemeral visages, like tensile strings
catching the sun. Yet, the light in the sky was dominant,
swallowing the tracer bullets, overwhelming now even the red
caution lights pulsing on the bridge. And he squinted to protect
his eyes.

Who’s
there?

Pania’s eyes
eased open and in slow motion, her expression tightened to utter
surprise when she realised she was not feeling the glowing sun, but
something much brighter and closer.

Who are
you?
Kyo pleaded as the glowing light grew
larger and more prominent.

*

LAUNCH?

The word had
continued to beat softly and she positioned her finger over the
button. And waited.

Waited until
the alignments were perfectly right. Her eyes dilated to suck in
all the details around her, every vivid moment falling into her
extrasensory perceptions. In that moment, she had felt the movement
of the station travelling in retrograde to the Earth’s rotation…all
the intricate and salient patterns of physical life compiled,
crystallised into one perfect point. As the temporal horizon
approached time became slower. She could hear now the shaky draws
of her own breath taking in one deep inhalation of air.

‘
Kyo...’

Avenoir had
pushed the button, fully aware of the consequences of her
actions.

With a blast,
the capsule fired away from
Orandoré
station, ejected out
towards the planet’s orbital plummet. Capsule B’ One, zero, zero,
zero had travelled thousands of kilometres, curling into earth’s
pull. Upon its journey, the planet had spun out many hours during
its gradual descent. It smashed silently into orbital debris,
unsealing a house of cards that brought down with it satellites, a
whole chaotic system that began burning up on re-entry through the
planet’s atmosphere. And a rain of fire fell through the sky,
destined to plummet down above the Siberian surface. Unmanned and
damaged, the capsule’s life systems did not trigger reverse jets
and parachutes, and since no civilisation was around for hundreds
of miles, the capsule had descended unnoticed, catapulting through
the strata, just one more piece of orbital debris burning down to
its terminus.

‘
JESUS!’
Artex squalled, pushing the Perigrussia Skybus into a sudden nose
dive. He very scarcely avoided the fatal collision with the
hurtling fiery supersonic debris. A furnace of white hot fire
scorched the Perigrussia Skybus as it passed overhead, leaving a
great black tail smouldering through the sky. With hardly any
deviation to the capsule’s deathly journey, it crashed right
through the Titan Chinook and split the machine into countless
particles, leaving fire and smoke to spill into the unmanned moors
hundreds of metres below the cloud. The Chinook’s gunners had
suddenly vanished with the rest of the ship in the melting,
tumbling debris, a smashed shell of metal crushed explosively into
foil.

Artex
breathed a great sigh of relief and started to program the ship’s
nanomes for instant and much needed repairs. He found the nodes for
the alarms and deactivated the monotonous bleating noise that had
long ago started his headache.

‘
Wha- wha-
what happened?’ Gus gasped incredulously. ‘Did that thing just take
out the Chinook?’

The shock and
relief had caused Kyo to start laughing with utter surprise.
Nothing about today was a surprise for him anymore.

‘
Must have
fallen out of orbit,’ Artex noted, unable to blink since their near
brush with death. ‘We’re lucky as hell it didn’t hit us.’ And he
dropped out of the neurophase and set the autopilot, then turned to
lean out of his command seat to face the others. ‘I’m not a
religious man, but I’d say someone was looking out for
us.’

Kyo had also
never practiced religion, nor did he care for grand epiphanies or
divine intervention. Yet, part of him couldn’t help but
agree.

‘
I heard
something,’ he started, confusion tensing up his face.

‘
What?’ Pania
asked. ‘Just now?’

‘
No, no,’ he
explained. ‘Earlier. When that thing was falling through the sky, I
thought I heard somebody say my name.’ He looked at Pania. ‘Did
you? Did you say something to me?’

‘
I-’ Pania
shrugged and shook her head, baffled, rubbing her brow. ‘I don’t
know. Possibly. I was shocked so I don’t remember what the hell I
said.’

‘
I heard
someone,’ Kyo insisted. ‘…who was that?’

-71-

A
formation of Arrowheads cruised in from the
North, their slick titanium shells slipping through the airstream,
hot thrusters burning at the wing lengths behind exhaust grills,
glowing like a furnace inside the propulsion, manoeuvring fins and
spewing sulphurous undulating waves of heat. Vance had assigned
twelve of them for private escort towards the enemy zone. Vast
desert planes rolled beneath them as the baking sun beat across the
barren dunes. A leading Arrowhead made a quick pass to ensure the
target was still in the crater and provided visual feedback to
Vance’s vessel.

‘
Confirming
target is still in place and seems dormant again,’ said the pilot.
‘Returning to back-up.’

Vance had
also ordered two V-TOL Chinooks loaded with troops and armed with
heavy artillery. He leaned forward in the silence of his own
private V-TOL ship and glared out the window where the sky donned a
harsh and hot sun. One of the troopers saluted Vance from the
Chinook’s window, a show of courtesy he did not return.

‘
We’re coming
up on the landing site,’ said Filipe, now sat up front and staring
through the forward windows of the automated V-TOL. Malik was still
in his wheelchair, its mechanisms adjusted to lock down firmly in
case they hit any turbulence, but the flight had been smooth since
leaving the northern storms.

‘
You have to
stop these nerve harmonics, Vance,’ said Malik weakly. ‘I have to
see it. I need to be able to move.’

‘
I’ll let you
walk again,’ Vance promised, gazing out at the far horizon of hot
sand blemished into dusty pale clouds, smoothly blending into an
untarnished blue sky.

‘
Coming up on
Havenband,’ said Filipe. They watched as the destroyed city glided
beneath them quietly, while the low bass rumble of the engines
droned into the carrier ship. One of the Chinooks levelled with
them, a dust cloud suddenly spurring from the buildings as
something exploded in the desert city.

They secured
a perimeter. Vance knew he was taking a real chance going out to
see this thing personally. As the V-TOLs and Chinooks set their
bellies flat against the floor, troops were already unloading
moments before touchdown, dropping the last couple of feet and
sprinting into positions.

All around
the huge impact crater stood the semi-destroyed avatars and
androids like mechanical sculptures. The bodies of cyborgs lay
festering in the sun, drawing to the fresh meat a hungry buzz of
flies. Vance’s V-TOL opened up, the door gull winging above the
roof. He stepped out proudly and three military personnel hurried
to his aid. Vance was already holding his arms out wide, welcoming
their support as they attached armoured plates to his torso and
spine and hips and activated the mechanisms. Malik watched as the
plates began to join, constructing a well suited exo-skeletal
protection around him. A high neck collar lifted to protect his
jugular, and Vance peered over the top proudly. His hands fitted
into powerful gauntlets and he stepped into power boots that
latched around his shins and calf protectively, climbing his leg to
construct power conduction nodes. Vance turned to face his brother,
the heavy mechanical boots of his exo-suit stomping with a
dull
whomp
.

‘
You didn’t
think I’d come all the way out here unprepared, did you Malik?’ He
chortled derisively.

Malik wanted
to say yes, but decided against it. The wheelchair suddenly
uncoupled from the ground, stability arms folding away as it rolled
automatically out of the V-TOL and descended the ramp to meet Vance
at the bottom. Filipe was slipping into a shear-phasing armoured
vest, lightly constructed compared to Vance’s parsimonious
expenses. Malik could see now the quadruped machine glistening
beneath the sun. Distantly, it waited in a spinning cloud of dust
surrounded by a scrap-heap android and cyborg graveyard. Tanks and
armoured vehicles were propped up around the area, half buried in
the sweeping gusts of dunes. The armoured troops led the way,
securing each perimeter before allowing the Serats to follow. Above
them, the roar of Arrowheads thundered, like a sharp knife lashing
through tightened fabric their engines produced a larger and deeper
sound as they flew, tearing out a sonic explosion rumbling in their
wake. The Serat brothers climbed into the crater, angling carefully
down the deep furrows of the basin. Vance had to climb. Malik was
impressed by the dexterity of the wheelchair’s intelligent
balancing systems. For him, it was a smooth and effortless descent,
the chair’s alternating wheels and spidery legs did all the
work.

The hundred
meter tall machine waited in the eye of the hole where the crater
levelled out flatly. Its radial head was motionless, giving off no
signs of activity. Its four stilted legs evenly spread out,
displaying a transformative complexity to their mechanical joints
that Malik imagined would be suitable to adjusting to different
gravity settings or mountain regions. The myriad tentacles latched
down tight to the ground, extended wide like the camping lines of a
circus tent. And each of the wires led into some target, still
resting within the damaged and pierced armour of a truck or a tank
or a V-TOL, pinning down the devastated corpses of once proud
Syridan machines. They stood beneath its shadow at last, walking
through the web of wires, careful not to spring one in case
triggering some sort of trap. Vance’s boots stomped into the
clearing beneath the tension of metallic cables. Malik took a
moment to observe.

‘
Your move,
Malik,’ Vance stated.

Malik Serat
gasped as the nerves in his body began to tingle. He lifted his
quivering hands and tightened his fingers. He twisted his neck, a
sensation that had been troubling him the most, and he stretched
his back and his legs and groaned with pain. So many hours had they
been still. For so many hours now his hips had been aching to move.
With the nerve harmonics abating, Malik climbed to his feet with
the help of Filipe. He grabbed onto his shoulders for support,
gasping at the shoots of pain, now lancing through his spine as he
eased his body up.

‘
Come on,
come on.’ Vance pressingly urged.

Malik looked
around and listened to the vast space of the desert. They stood
beneath the huge mecha-quad, but all Malik heard was the dull gust
of hot air and the distant growl of Arrowhead engines zipping
above. Each of the dozen masked troopers kept their weapons firmly
on Malik, rifles that bestowed Syridan only knows what sort of
destruction and Malik sure as hell didn’t want to find
out.

Vance’s eyes
and nose were glaring over his exo-suit’s collar, eyes like ice
even in the hot air, cold and calculating. ‘I’m waiting,’ his voice
issued from behind the armoured collar.

Malik smiled
nervously at the armoured troops. He was improvising from here on.
Hard to discern exactly what the fuck was happening to him. In
fact, he just wanted to walk again, if only for a few minutes. With
a bit of luck he could get them all killed by this thing
somehow.

‘
Malik, are
you fucking around with me?’ Vance shouted, his voice loud but dead
on the vast open space.

‘
Let me try
something,’ Malik stammered, holding up his hands fearfully.
‘Just…wait.’

He turned to
the huge machine and looked high up at the apex of its radial sun
gleamed head. Where it’s four legs joined, he saw ice crystals
collecting on the underside of the machine’s armour. Ice? Malik
wondered. It’s a hundred degrees Fahrenheit out here. He moved
slowly beneath the large rounded body, beneath the tall quadruped
structure, where the wires pitched to a grill and worked their way
into apertures, in the underbelly of the machine’s armour. Once he
was almost fully under the machine, Malik genuflected to the
sand.

‘
What is he
doing?’ Filipe asked Vance in confusion.

And Malik
began to mark a large X into the sand by his feet. He waited a
moment, staring at the impression he’d left and looked up again at
the motionless Xenotech.

Nothing.

Malik then
began to draw an ampersand, followed by phi, and theta, and a range
of basic symbols used in the chaos cipher’s structural logic. Once
he was happy, he stepped away from the markings and
waited.