Chaos Cipher (90 page)

‘
I hope
you’re not taking this time to build sandcastles,’ Vance called,
and a jovial chuckle came from some of the armoured troops. Vance
hadn’t expected them to laugh. It pleased him to greatly humour
them at the expense of his brother and he took this moment to push
his jokes further.

‘
Did anybody
bring a spade? Perhaps we can build a moat as well…?’

Just then, a
garish emerald fantail of light cast down from the Xenotech’s
middle and swept across the embossed symbols in the sand, first
vertically, then horizontally. A high pitched whirring sounded with
the mysterious sweeps of light. And in the next instant, they heard
a loud hollow rattling, the sound of a boot clattering around in a
tumble drier. The troops aimed their weapons high when a sudden
azure illumination bled through the machine’s ringular gills,
casting blue circles of light on the sand below it. Metal and iron
scratched and crashed as the wires pulled free of their anchorage,
sending spills of sand from its armour raining down and reflecting
the waves of light as conical diaphanous skirts. The troops were
unsettled. They stirred around, milling between targets, aiming and
following the cables as they pulled free and slithered through the
air, twisting intimidatingly above them like an octopus showing off
its many arms.

‘
Malik?’
Vance shouted, stepping back and tracing the cables with his eyes.
‘Is this you? What did you do, Malik?’

‘
This isn’t
me!’ Malik swore. It was the truth. He hadn’t expected anything to
happen, in fact.

And then a
targeting beam shone upon Malik Serat and he gazed up into the
lurid and powerful vent of light, trying to step out of its
boundary, but it followed him like an all seeing eye.

One of the
metallic tentacles writhed nearby a soldier’s ankle. Spooked, he
took aim and fired a burst of trigger happy rounds into the alloy,
and he screamed as another tentacle swung and launched him fifty
meters through the air, crashing in a puff of dust as he landed in
the scrap-yard debris.

‘
Malik.’
Vance shouted. ‘Stop this now, Malik.’

But Malik
Serat had his own problems now. The many silvery tendrils
surrounded him, circling down like the funnel of a tornado to
embrace him. He screamed into the light and heard her voice
again.

‘
Embrace
greatness…’

‘
I CAN’T.’
Malik screamed as the cables bifurcated into thinner and thinner
wires, working into his flesh and bone, feeding into his bleeding
body like ten thousand silver needles. ‘OH GOD! THE
PAIN!’

‘
Fear not
destiny…seize it!’

And Malik
screamed a blood curdling cry that put chills even through Vance
who could see nothing of his brother’s suffering through the
twisting curling mass of mechanical tendrils. His screams choked
out, begging for the pain to stop, begging for the burning and
tearing agony to conclude his death at last.

‘
It’s time to
endure, to transcend, to become the gods we have dreamed of
becoming.’

Vance stared
into the shining light from where the mass of tentacles worked. And
one of the soldiers began shouting, demanding to get some distance,
far away from this thing. Vance was quickly moving, stomping full
speed through the graveyard of V-TOL chassis and tanks. A loud
groaning echoed through the crater, the sound of a thousand iron
struts contorting. And Vance lost his pace as something smashed
into the ground ahead of him. Rock and dust exploded from the
impact and he saw one of the tanks toppling through the chaos,
tossed there as though it was a giant bowling ball. The troops dove
down, changing direction and firing back at whatever the hell was
happening behind him. Vance wanted out of this pit. He moved,
powering the exo-skeletal suit to full output, stomping towards the
distant crater’s incline. He saw the shadows of tentacles lashing
through the air behind him, shadows cast like black lace across the
barren sands. And just above the crater’s cliff face, he saw the
wink of Arrowheads cruising through the sky, their engines tearing
up the air as they passed thunderously above. And Vance almost
jumped out of his skin as the echoes of deafening explosions
erupted from the Xenotech as a cluster of submunitions rained fire
over the machine.

Vance dared
to turn around. He saw troops shooting into the carnage. The
twisting tentacles reaching out of black smoke and mushrooms of
fire still bloating to swallow the blue sky. Screaming victims were
pulled into the twisting arms of the Xenotech shredder. The loud
groaning beaconed once more through the valley. Filipe was running
out of the chaos, his face bleeding from lacerations. He was
followed by one or two more troops who had abandoned hope of
defending themselves.

‘
Don’t stop,’
Filipe called, approaching Vance and catching his breath. ‘Don’t
stop.’ But the sounds coming from the mechanical creature had
extinguished the fires and blown away the smoke. Once the veil had
cleared they saw the spherical head of the machine was alive with
illuminations and snaps of electricity. Spurious blue light shone
from the sub gills beneath the head, the hundreds of slippery
metallic cables still afloat in the air.

And something
else.

A man now sat
below the machine, a shrunken silhouetted figure down on his knees
in the pale blue light. A man that now replaced Malik Serat, a man
that looked remarkably similar, yet was entirely
different.

‘
By the God
and stars,’ Vance whispered incredulously. ‘Malik?’

Had he have
heard the name, Malik, the Mekhos would have denounced it. The
Mekhos needed only this corporeal form in so far as this
dimensional existence required it, and until he found a more
efficient one. He stood at last, eyes as tenebrous as the pits of
Charybdis, an infectious blackening that spread through his veins
like ink, webbing around his sockets and the dark lips of his
attenuated smirk. His bare flesh padded, each segmented muscle
fiber defined by renewed material, between organic and metallic, an
exo-shell that padded his upper body to the elbows and knees.
Mekhos braced himself for his first breath, braced himself to take
up tenure at the court of Judgement Day, the end of the old and the
next genesis: the second horizon.

-72-

E
d Rufus, Tanya Medina and Max Elba
were assigned to escort Scott Barnes from the cognoputic therapy
lounges of
Orandoré
to the Shield of Spheres conference room. He hadn’t been told
much, only that he was due to meet a very gifted child and that he
had to tell her as much as possible about the Erebus.

When they
arrived, the room was occupied by three individuals, Nitro Harbeck,
Avenoir and the immutable Raven Protos who stood at the back like a
long shadow.

‘
Take a seat,
professor,’ Nitro offered, though he knew the gesture was no
request. Scott Barnes was seated at the table with the assistance
of Max, before the Canaries waited orderly to be excused. Nitro
gave them the nod and thanked them for the escort. Barnes looked at
the diamond freckled child and realised her unusual eyes, one green
and the other red. And Avenoir stared back at him and there was
pity in her eyes.

‘
She has eyes
like…’ and Barnes covered his mouth with surprise. ‘She looks like
Penelope.’

‘
The
Chrononaut Penelope Hurt, correct?’ Nitro asked.

‘
Yes.’

‘
Avenoir
here, is a Chronomancer.’

‘
I know,’ he
assured. ‘The pigment mutation is a common feature.’

‘
Why did you
hurt yourself?’ Avenoir asked.

Barnes had
forgotten about his own appearance, the scars left on his
face.

‘
I ran out of
ink,’ he explained with a nervous smile. ‘I had to know when, or
where, I was.’

Nitro sat
back and tongued the inside of his cheek thoughtfully, wondering
where to start with this mess he was so dutifully supposed to
organise.

‘
Adamoss,’ he
requested. ‘Play the file transmitting from that
Xenotech.’

They watched
the reaction of Scott Barnes change to shock and awe when he heard
her voice.

‘
That’s
Penelope,’ he realised. He continued to listen, centring his focus
on her words but it sounded foreign, something about embracing
greatness and transcendence. ‘I’m afraid, I don’t know what she’s
talking about.’

‘
Neither do
we,’ Nitro submitted. ‘But right now there’s a real mess in
Havenband in the middle of the Nevada desert.’

Then, in the
hologram field they witnessed the damage being caused by the
Xenotech. And footage from one of the V-TOLs got a good image of
Mekho Serat, a minacious being with a fowl smile of blackened lips
and eyes and teeth like silver. He stalked from beneath the
machine, his arms outreached to where he wished to direct its
destructive force.

Scott Barnes
glared at the image in disbelief as Nitro updated him.

‘
His brother,
Vance Serat, wanted to crack the chaos cipher. Apparently, he’s had
some of the world’s most ingenious people try to understand the
pattern. He believed that Malik was taking him to find an
unfinished piece of the puzzle. Now this.’

‘
But what is
that thing?’ Scott asked.

‘
Whatever it
is it is very old,’ Nitro added. ‘Over thirty thousand years they
say. And somehow, it contains a message from Penelope Hurt and is
empowering Malik Serat and assisting him in some meaningless
mayhem. Unless you know something more, then your guess is as good
as ours.’

‘
I don’t know
anything about this,’ said Scott. ‘We killed Penelope Hurt. We
killed her to avoid this from happening.’

‘
Who killed
her?’ Nitro asked. ‘You said you didn’t know anything about her
death, you told our therapists, you told our interrogation
people.’

‘
We did it,’
said Avenoir suddenly. ‘You were there, weren’t you?’

And Scott
nodded.

‘
Don’t you
see?’ he pleaded. ‘I didn’t want to affect the time line. I
couldn’t tell anybody in case it altered something, we are going to
find a way back into the past and stop her.’

‘
And that’s
what we’re about to do again,’ said Avenoir, turning to see Nitro.
‘We’re going back on the Erebus again, I can see it. We’re going to
try and kill Penelope before she can create the chaos
cipher.’

Nitro nodded.
‘We are planning a campaign on the Erebus, yes.’

‘
And what
about Serat?’ asked Scott.

‘
The only
thing that can slay a monster,’ Raven’s voice boomed from the
darkness, ‘is another monster.’ And the Olympian’s eyes started to
glow rapaciously.

‘
Leave Serat
to us,’ said Nitro. ‘Avenoir will be able to navigate the chaos
cipher on the Erebus. She’ll be your guide.’

Avenoir
nodded contritely, pursing her lips. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘
Then, you
agree to this mission?’ Nitro asked Professor Barnes. The man
shrugged uncertainly.

‘
I already
have.’

‘
Good,’ Nitro
said standing, ‘your training begins immediately.’

Raven shifted
into the light and stopped Avenoir from leaving. She gazed up at
the large Olympian and he lowered to his knee so they could be at
eye level.

‘
Why did’st
thou hold thy tongue so many years?’ asked the giant, daring to
stare through an endless web of memory. She took his hand
apologetically.

‘
You would
never have trusted me, had I spoken before,’ she said. ‘I was too
young to know I was affecting people’s lives. I was too young to
see the damage.’

‘
Thou art
still young, my child,’ Raven reminded.

‘
Old enough
to know better,’ she forced a smile. ‘It was my mother. Old Osmond
wanted to know. I didn’t realise what I was doing I-’

Avenoir began
to pule and Raven held her quietly in his large arms and hushed her
into quiescence again.

‘
He wanted to
know how he would die,’ she whispered. ‘And that’s how my mother
died. He panicked. I didn’t see the connection. I just didn’t see
it. I was too young. So I stopped speaking until I knew I
absolutely had to.’

Raven Protos
understood now. Old Osmond had crashed a starnavis while they were
in the Cygnus system. It had killed both Malla and he, leaving
Raven to tend to Avenoir.

‘
You wouldn’t
have trusted me,’ she said again. ‘I saw it over and over, each
time I came close to telling you, I saw the ripple effect that
would change our course dramatically. I couldn’t risk it,
Raven.’

‘
And what of
our present destiny?’ the Olympian asked.

‘
You’ll get
your artefact,’ Avenoir told. ‘And you will succeed in your
mission.’

‘
My mission?’
he asked. ‘Or thine?’