Chaos Cipher (97 page)

-79-

R
aven Protos fished through the
darkness. The smell of jet fuel was all around him and the distant
crackling of fires kindled outside. He used his gauntlet to crush
and pry away parts of his support harness still holding him in
place, then fell to the ship’s ceiling, coughing in the thick veils
of smog. He dragged himself out of the cadonavis and stood in the
warship graveyard, poised listening to the fires in the black
smouldering bistres. High above, the sky was tarnished with the
vaporous foam from destroyed ships, the remains of
Deacon Skies
Wing
scattered through the welkin. And explosions tore on through the
massive impact zone as more Arrowheads nosedived towards the
Xenotech machine below in a suicide flight. But they wouldn’t get
close. Raven watched them collide with the ephemeral geometric
shapes which appeared to obstruct their kamikaze before vanishing
after the Arrowheads were either swallowed of
vanquished.

Raven lifted
his blade above his shoulder and began making his way towards the
large four legged machine. He saw the tiny wires hovering around
it, though he knew close up they were big enough to wrap around
your wrist and pull off your arm. He saw the machine thrumming,
lights pulsing, dust and sand falling from the bulbous head and
from the mechanical contours of its legs. Raven followed paths
through smashed up Chinooks and parts of engines. He saw armoured
bodies lying dead in their masks. He saw bits of limbs and parts of
cyborgs stashed around where they fell, and stacks of deadly
weapons, all unused, all failed against this monster. Raven drew
close now; ascending a small hill in the middle of the impact zone,
a fused mound of black glass mottled with fractures and shrapnel,
parts of machines and crashed ships. The Xenotech stood upon it,
those countless wires and cables now floating like a shoal of
silverfish circling in a steady clockwise current. Sitting beneath
the machine he saw Mekho Serat, his dark pearl eyes turned up to
the sky where the shapes were manifest. He was sitting back on the
cables, they attached to the back of his legs and shoulders to
support him in the air. Mekhos regarded Raven at last and slowly
came to his feet with a juvenile smile. Then, he issued a laugh, an
excited and steady laugh that came from the gut, a genuine laugh of
pure ecstasy.

‘
If thou has
a joke,’ Raven told, sword balanced over his shoulder, ‘then
perhaps thou should share it.’

Mekho Serat’s
smile faded to a very serious countenance and he began to analyse
Raven.

‘
They’ve sent
everyone to stop me,’ he said ‘-from suicide pilots to androids and
now a cosmonaut with a sword.’

Raven began
to walk closer until he was at the bottom of the mound.

‘
But you’re
not like the others, are you?’ Mekho Serat noticed, prowling upon
the glass dune beneath his monument of mechanical chaos. ‘You’ll
bleed all the same. You’ll die just as easily. But you’re
different. You’re an Olympian, aren’t you?’

‘
I am the
pride of
Kyklos
.’
Raven said, heading further up the slope.

‘
I hate
Olympians,’ Mekho Serat declared. ‘Your kind is a fucking vermin.
Funny they sent you. I heard Olympians don’t die so easy. I’m going
to enjoy trying to put that theory to the test.’

He stopped,
weapon tilted down and faced Serat with steady breaths.

‘
Thou art but
a child,’ he noted, ‘with too many toys.’

‘
A child?’
Serat raged, a seemingly visible charge of electricity firing down
through the cables to enter his extremities and lighten his armour
with charge beneath his torn jacket. ‘I am an Eternal compared with
you!’

Raven began
to run, fangs flashing with rage, he swung the large sword and
suddenly the four vertical faces of a triangular shape stabbed out
of the ground tip first and swallowed Mekhos in its pyramid wedge,
the sword slamming heavily over the immutable material. Raven
watched the pyramid shape sink back into the earth and an identical
one grew out of the ground elsewhere, opening like a flower head to
reveal Mekho Serat safe inside. He stepped out of the device
grinning, walking confidently at a distance from Raven as the
Olympian heaved his heavy blade back onto his shoulder.

‘
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Oh, space man. This is kind of funny really.’

Raven started
to move when suddenly he was struck by a flying cube and then a
sphere smashed his face from the side, throwing him dazed to the
floor. The Shadow Goliath landed with a heavy clang spinning across
the sand and the Olympian looked around in confusion.

‘
Why are you
here, Olympian?’ he asked. ‘Are they so desperate now they’re
waiving their policies on having Olympians on the planet? I’ll have
to remind them that so long as they have rules, they better play by
them. I don’t care how liberal they become in spite of me, I’m not
going to allow it.’

‘
Thou art a
futile fool,’ said Raven, collecting himself and getting back to
his feet.

‘
Oh, is that
right?’ Mekhos sniggered.

Raven was
suddenly hit again, this time by a large and long shape speeding
like a train. He was hauled through the air into what looked like
the middle of another shape and Raven was falling. He plummeted
down the long vertices, his gauntlet reaching out to scratch at the
flat sides where the chaos cipher’s encryption blinked and flashed.
He fell far into the throat of the tunnel, which suddenly opened up
to a maze of clockwork. Raven gazed in surprise as he looked
through the complexities of the shifting, moving giant machine, a
living, flexing and enormous space of mirrors and twists and folds
all servicing the operational functions of the hyper dimensional
craft. He saw stairways and elevators shifting back and forth. He
saw Mekhos running inverted on the walls, chased by what looked
like a doppelganger version of himself lashing his long sword. He
saw more doppelgangers and Arrowheads flying lost through the
Hypermekhos, desperately piloting through its capacious, changing
and confusing dimensions. Then, Raven fell through another trap, a
triangular hole that led out into a white light. And Raven realised
he was in the sky, plummeting through it towards the crater he had
moments ago stood with Mekho Serat, thousands of feet below him
now. He screamed with surprise, falling above the surface, swooping
in free fall through the clouds. All around him appeared the random
shapes and they clipped his shoulder as he fell beyond them,
smashing into him and sending him into uncontrolled spins. And
Raven dropped into another shape like a coin through a slot machine
and this time he was hauled against gravity up out of the ground,
as though the earth itself had spat him up into the cables and
wires of the Xenotech’s many metallic tendrils. And the machine
tangled him up, lowering him by the ankle back down to Mekho
Serat’s level. He smiled odiously at the Olympian, hanging by the
leg like a helpless chicken.

‘
Heraclitus
understood the continuum even if it was only very naively,’ Mekho
Serat explained. ‘He knew that change was the only
permanence.’

Raven was
released to the floor and he collapsed in a heap, confused by the
sudden descent and constantly altering directions.

‘
No man ever
steps in the same river twice,’ Mekhos explained, ‘because it’s not
the same river and he’s not the same man. I’m like that man. I have
many faces. Many obverses sides and inverses, I am multiple and
singular. I am change.’

Raven
suddenly envisioned Avenoir, her saddened face staring up at him,
her eyes tearful. She had told him he was the pride of
Kyklos
. She had told him
she was sorry for her betrayal. Raven even now couldn’t understand
it. Why hadn’t she warned him of this impossible enemy? Why had she
used him this way? He could have assembled the Galileo Coterie and
with such an allied force, they certainly would have smashed this
opponent from a distance. But perhaps, he would not have listened.
How often, Raven wondered, did it happen that he failed to hear
others? Raven listened now to the Mekho Serat’s narcissistic
soliloquy going on about change. Perhaps he was right. Maybe he was
here to realise something, maybe he was here to realise change.
Avenoir used Raven as a sacrifice. He had come here with a phalanx
of pawns called the
Deacon
Skies
. It was no coincidence. Raven Protos
was to die this day. This was not to be a victory. He was destined
to buy them some time.

‘
You will
succeed in your mission.’ Avenoir had said. Even now, he could hear
her faint gentle voice whisper contritely. Raven spat up a dark
spot of blood and climbed once more to his feet, to face his
smiling enemy.

‘
Ah man, you
just keep getting up,’ Mekho Serat shook his head, hands on hips.
‘Don’t you remember what just happened to you? Hello! You can’t win
this gene-freak. The rules are stacked really heavily against
you.’

‘
Hast thou
ever known a thing about love?’

‘
Love?’ said
Mekhos, glowering with anger. ‘I only ever wanted the love of my
mother. But I was just a tool for her personal success. I see now
how love destroys nations. Love is sickness and madness. Only the
selfish are pure, only the individuals are honest. Lovers lie and
lie to each other. Their jealousy and ownership they claim for each
other is toxic. Love is as chemical as acid and just as deadly. I
do nothing for love anymore and nor should you. Love is the most
deceptive of notions.’

‘
One should
not show love to simply have it returned,’ Raven spoke. ‘Or thou
art running a business. One should show have it without
condition.’

‘
You idiot,’
Malik sniggered. ‘So you should show love because it feels good?
That’s pretty selfish. I think love is boring anyway. It is better
to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.’ Said Mekhos
decidedly, ‘my brother would have said that, and he was able to own
half the planet. The world respects power, it fears it. It is the
only language humanity understands. I will teach them something
about themselves and the destructive forces of love. I will show
them something about themselves, something about humanity, things
they do not know they really know about themselves.’

Raven dashed
for his sword and seized the hilt. He spun quickly, charging the
weapon with his gauntlet and descended the blade toward Mekho
Serat’s head. A large black bar speared through the air and stopped
the Shadow Goliath with a heavy clang, and Raven’s veins started
glowing as more nanology permeated his glove and powered the sword.
Heavier and heavier the blade became, causing the mysterious shape
to crack under the weight. Mekhos looked surprised, and he quickly
sent a sphere smashing into Raven’s gut. The Olympian huffed out a
long breath of air and pulled the Shadow Goliath free, spinning it
out and releasing it toward Serat. He ducked in time, moments
before the weapon could decapitate him, and Mekho Serat was
suddenly seized by the giant. Raven drove his fist deep into
Serat’s gut and he roared with pain, his eyes returning to colour,
his black nanologic armour cracking under the force. Raven spun
Serat gliding over the glass dune and he glissaded to a stop,
clawing furrows in the ground before scrambling to his
feet.

Ahead of him,
he opened a tesseract of shapes and darted evasively into it,
vanishing out of their dimension, and Raven grabbed his blade and
chased his assailant into the Hypermekhos.

They ran over
platforms, shifting walkways and floors that seemed to defy logical
order. Raven was able to jump from one of the platforms onto a
vertical wall and keep running, as though gravity was relative to
his position. And Serat dashed ahead, taking a running leap to a
higher point almost fifty feet above him. Raven leapt the wall,
sprinting after Serat and swinging the Shadow Goliath mercilessly.
He followed him into the heart of the machine and was surprised the
air even here was as hot and dry as the desert. The roaring engines
of a distant Arrowhead fired above them and the sonic wave sent
explosive air through the hollow space, spinning out cubes and
triangles from their orbiting positions. Raven looked up and saw
his earlier self-plummet through the middle of the structure, and
he continued to swing his blade like an axe after Serat. The
Hypermekhos opened ahead of them now and Serat stepped through,
back into their normal dimension and Raven quickly began writhing
as he collided with the thousands of lashing cables and tentacles
of the Xenotech. He roared as they pulled him up into the air. And
tore into his body and branched into his skin like poison ivy,
spreading and slicing his flesh.

Serat stalked
below him, smiling proudly as the Olympian struggled. Raven held
tight to his blade and began to overmass the Obsiduranium. The
Xenotech’s wires were pulled into tension as the sword became
unbelievably massive, pulled down to the Erath’s central body,
heavier and heavier until they could no longer hold Raven. And he
crashed to the ground, the blade shattering the glass dune and
throwing up billows of black sand. He breathed the dust in heavily,
coughing and spitting. And through the twirling clouds he heard
Serat’s manic laughter pitch.