Chaos Cipher (98 page)

‘
You’re much
more fun than the others,’ he shouted. ‘At least you put up a
fight. Not like these weak Titans of flesh and so called
Eternals.’

Raven looked
up at the Xenotech. He had to get rid of that thing if there was
any hope of beating Serat. Suddenly, he noticed something unusual
about the machine. In the shaded area beneath the head, he saw ice.
What manner of technology produces ice in such hot and stifling
deserts?

‘
But you
can’t destroy the Hypermekhos, Olympian.’ Mekho Serat was shouting.
‘It took years to build it. Centuries to plan it, to pull it
through to this dimension took nothing less than planning on a
scale that defies centuries and starscapes. But now that it is
here, I have the key. I have the knowledge of its being. I am the
master of time and space.’

Mekho Serat
suddenly appeared in the dust. He reached up to the giant and
grasped his throat, arms reinforced by the tangle of the Xenotech’s
tentacles, pulling Raven off the floor choking.

‘
Are you
afraid, Olympian?’ asked the Mekhos with black and endless eyes.
‘Are you afraid of dying?’

Raven felt
blood spill down his front as the wires began to saw at his flesh.
And he fished one of the Elixir spheres from his bandolier as the
arresting nanologic vines raced to entwine his wrist in their
terrible slicing embrace. Raven activated the chrome sphere and the
device jumped into the air and burst into a radiant blinding flash.
A lustrously and compelling light was born and Mekho Serat gasped
in horror as it bled into his sight, swallowed by an everlasting
whiteness...

‘
What’s
happening…?’
 

*

‘
Malik?’

‘Malik…open
your eyes…’

‘Look at me
Malik…that’s it…it’s alright, you’re safe…’

Malik Serat
opened his eyes to the warm spaces of the Erebus medical centre as
Penelope Hurt stroked her fingers softly through his
hair.

‘
Don’t get
up,’ she said, her pale angelic features blanched in his adjusting
vision. Her face was smiling, young. Her short blonde hair hanging
in a fringe that was cropped longer at the front. Her unusual eyes,
one green and one red, stared sympathetically down to
him.

‘
It was an
accident,’ said Dale Hister from the side of his recovery bed where
Malik lay. Dale Hister shook his head regretfully, face tattooed
with pneumatan markings, tribal patterns that represented the man’s
beliefs. ‘I don’t think we’re ready for this. If we can’t even
manage simulation…’

‘
Hister, calm
down,’ Penelope said. ‘He needs rest. We are fine.’

‘
Okay then,’
Hister said softly, moving to leave the room, he chuckled amicably.
‘We’re doing good. It’s okay. Just an accident. I was worried about
you, Malik. We all were.’

‘
You’ll be
fine.’ Penelope promised softly.

‘
We’re not in
deep space just yet Malik.’ Said Hister. ‘But try and imagine we
are. Out there the risks are real. I don’t want anything bad to
happen to any of us. I’m glad you’re okay my friend, but please
take more care.’

As Hister
left, it was Captain Zemi who leaned into the door. He doffed the
peak of his baseball cap and winked at Malik.

‘
You’ll be
fine skud, take your time,’ said the captain softly, following
Hister.

‘
I can’t
remember,’ said Malik. ‘What happened?’

‘
You lost
concentration, that’s all,’ said Penelope. ‘Butter fingers. You
crossed a fuse line during a repair routine. As fate would have it,
you didn’t blow yourself to pieces.’ And she lightly petted his
shoulder.

‘
Yeah,’ Malik
uttered. ‘I’m lucky to be alive.’

‘
You’re lucky
to be with us, Malik,’ she said touching the side of his face. ‘We
only have each other on the Erebus. There’s no going for help.
There’s no calling back to Earth. All we will have is each other.
We have to depend on each other. I’m lucky to have you.’

‘
Yeah,’ Malik
smiled in relief. ‘I’m lucky to have you, too.’

*

As the
spurious light cleared, Malik Serat stared at his trembling hands
and fell to his knees in shock. He reached to his face, touching
the parts of his skin where dead nanomes flaked away like thin
plaster. Parts of his forged armour now pealed from his flesh, the
gathering of nanomes washing away like sand. All around him the
cables and wires of the Xenotech were hanging like tinsel
festoonery, flaccidly dangling from the powerless
machine.

‘
No,’ he
said, suddenly realising he had lost control of the Hypermekhos.
‘No! NO! Where is the key?’ he screamed, searching desperately for
the small black cube that had fallen away from his body.

Raven crawled
further beneath the Xenotech, fingers clutched to his bleeding
throat. The Olympian warrior choked and gagged on his own blood,
drawing a long trail of it beneath his stomach as he drew closer to
his sword. Meanwhile, Malik searched desperately for the key, the
incorporeal geometric shapes in the sky now became less frequent,
disposed in less situated locations as the Hypermekhos drifted out
of their dimension. Malik searched through the sand and glass, the
nanology of his once proud armour, now dulled to his mere draping
jacket, his pale skin bleeding from the wounds Raven had opened
without him realising. Malik looked around the sky. The myriad
tentacles of the Xenotech dangled and rang like loose chains now,
and he searched around for any signs of the Hypermekhos, but the
sky was clear.

‘
C’mon…c’mon
where are you?’ he stated, eyes searching hungrily for one of the
shapes, eyes no longer blackened but clear and almost recognisably
human again. Suddenly, a prism appeared a few meters ahead of him,
and Malik made a desperate dash to grab it, but the shape was gone
and he crashed to the sand.

‘
NO!’ he
screamed, looking for another piece of the Hypermekhos he could
interact with. ‘She’s falling…SHE’S FALLING! NO! You Olympian
BASTARD, what have you DONE TO ME?’

Malik turned
vengefully to Raven and crouched into the sand to find himself a
shard of glass and he took up a long and sharp piece and stalked
towards the bleeding warrior to finish the job.

‘
You made me
lose the Hypermekhos,’ he roared. ‘For that, I’ll take your fucking
head with my own two hands. That light! It was that light! What was
that thing?’

Raven climbed
to his knees, still pulling away the metallic tentacles of the
Xenotech from around his bleeding throat. He seized his sword and
powered the Shadow Goliath with the last of his
nanology.

‘
I can still
find the key, you gene-freak!’ Malik Serat promised with a wild
laugh. ‘I can still find the key and when I do…I’ll show no mercy
on this world. I’ll bring the Hypermekhos all around it and crack
the planet like a giant egg.’

Raven held
his arm like a javelin thrower, up high above him, his other firmly
held of the Shadow Goliath’s handle. Malik held the shard in his
hand, keeping a safe distance from the Olympian. With his throat
bleeding like, that he guessed Raven wouldn’t have much strength.
All he had to do was dodge his attack and slice the rest of his
throat up until the head was off.

‘
Let’s go,
you fucking freak!’ Malik cackled, a mad and skinny creature in
torn leathery armour and frayed jacket with a mane of frowsy black
hair and a wild smile that had all the signs of murderous
intent.

Raven swung
the blade, pivoting on his heel and released it up, high, high into
the icy belly of the Xenotech machine, smashing tip first through
the armour of its power generator. And a fierce and blinding light
burst from the aperture. Raven dropped to the floor and welcomed
his death, satisfied the target was hit. And the supermassive
Shadow Goliath tore out the machines guts as it fell in overmass
back down to the ground.

Malik
squinted into the light, shielding his face as gusts of cold air
began jetting out of the machine’s bulbous armoured head. He
suddenly became aware of how intensely cold the air was becoming,
and before he had the chance to scream, the beaconing light
emitted, blowing open the reactor and turning all the light touched
to solid ice. A precipitous grey cloud burgeoned from the machine
and the dreadful rents of thunder ruptured through the skies.
Lightning tore out threads of pulses, the sudden cumulonimbus
growing to dominate the once clear blue skies. And Havenband
quickly vanished beneath its obscurity.

-80-

T
he bronze sun was at its lowest
point on the horizon by the time confirmation of Serat’s defeat had
reached Shield of Spheres HQs. One of the V-TOLs leading the way
towards the frozen desert crater, had confirmed satellite visuals
of the impact zone and detected the strange reflection of ice
there. Accompanied by two Nova Storm models, they set down on the
cold sands and as the side doors slid open, dozens of troops
unloaded.

Adamoss
stepped out of the V-TOL to look around at the environment, his
complex artificial feet spreading over the ice with a crunch. Faint
wisps of snowflakes sailed around them while troops marched through
the snow to secure areas for scientists. Chief Claudia Noble had to
see it for herself. She could hardly believe the desert had been
turned to ice, even just a small fraction of it. Hundreds of small
drones fluttered around the site, collecting data and zipping back
and forth from recharge stations on the V-TOLs. Claudia Noble
followed Adamoss and asked for analysis data, her long white coat
draping behind her as she trudged in the frost and
verglas.

‘
What kind of
power system is that?’ she asked.

‘
A crystal
lattice,’ said Adamoss. ‘A more detailed analysis is still needed.
However, it looks like the freezing process is an emergency fail
safe to prevent the Spydrone’s power core from destabilising. The
crystal is like plutonium, only instead of perpetually burning, it
seems to have a propensity toward constant growth. It is from this
unexplored process, that the reactor extracts energy. The crystal’s
growth is tempered only by the super cold temperature kept at a
billionth of a degree. Nothing like this power unit has been
documented before.’

‘
I want to
find out what the hell Ampotech are up to,’ she simmered. ‘Such a
crystal could decompose at a frightening rate and level cities, if
not worse. That kind of power output is insane. What the hell were
they thinking? Is the crystal stable now?’

‘
Of course,’
Adamoss assured, ‘the fail safe freezing process dropped the whole
area to almost absolute zero. The Spydrone’s shut-down sequence
protects the crystal’s destabilisation and isolates it into a
freezing bath. However, I recommend permanently isolating the
reactor deep under-ground.’

‘
I think our
new recruits of
The Griffin’s Claw
will come in handy for a mission to Cygnus.’
Claudia said. ‘Dig up some dirt on Ampotech’s secretive
technologies. This kind of thing can’t go unregulated, especially
if it’s a threat to the Atominii.’

They scaled
the frozen mounds beneath the huge Xenotech machine, now a large
ice sculpture, hanging tentacles like white fingers of ice
stalactites jutting down around the space between its legs. Adamoss
found the body of Raven Protos solidified in ice, his gauntlet
still reaching for the sky, where he lay on his back looking up at
the damaged machine above him. Adamoss analysed all of this and
then looked over to Claudia. She was gazing down at the frozen
shell of Malik Serat. The Chrononaut was down on his knees, his
face twisted into a silent scream, wild hair frozen as stiff as
steel needles.

‘
Did you
recover the Hypermekhos key?’ she asked the android.

‘
So far
nothing’s turned up,’ he replied. ‘But I’ll make sure I keep
looking until it’s found.’

‘
Serat could
have been humanity’s saviour,’ said Claudia Noble. ‘Give a man the
power of a god and the means to believe it, he’ll go utterly
insane.’

‘
Ma’am, Raven
forced the question, but what is a god to a non-believer?’ Adamoss
asked sincerely, as he stared around the glacial crater. Claudia
put her hands deep in her pockets and stared a while
longer.

‘
His
unwitting subject,’ she answered.

‘
I sense a
cadence of admiration,’ Adamoss noticed.

‘
His brother
was a genius, lost to greed. Malik also a daring thinker, lost to
the corruption of power. Why are the greatest among us also the
craziest?’ she pondered aloud before walking away, back towards her
ship.

‘
I believe
the idea of greatness to be something of a human preference,’ said
the android who watched her leave. ‘If I may add, the greatest
scientist of our century Willow Kruger ahd views very different
from those of the Serat family.’