Chaos Cipher (12 page)

‘
What are
these markings?’ asked Max.

‘
It’s chalk,’
said Rufus brushing his palm over one of the marked X’s and
smudging it over the surface with his hand then smelling his
hand.

‘
Pay
attention!’ Tanya admonished. ‘I thought I saw
something.’

‘
Where’s our
target, Rufus?’

‘
Right
there!’

Ed Rufus’
avatar shared a visual and positioned the target a few metres ahead
of them, hiding behind the operating table. Sonic feedback detected
a rapid heart-rate, quick target analyses reported the subject’s
condition to be in a state of aggressive agitation.

‘
Jesus...he’s
got a heart rate of two, two, and one here. Keep your
distance.’

‘
Scott.’ Max
said softly. ‘Professor Barnes, it’s alright. We’re here to
help.’

Max stepped
in something, it looked like a long rubber pipe and it was soaked
with fresh blood. He moved around it and saw more symbols marked on
the interior of the room, marked in black stains of blood that
looked like ampersands.

Suddenly the
lights began to flicker again, shorting out slightly. The room was
quickly filled with the tearing sound of static, and Tanya covered
her ears and shrieked. Six screens based around the medical centre
hosted a red figure, a Chrononaut hung in the blackness encompassed
by a bright arching halo, a faceless helmet donning the middle of
his head like the plucked eye socket of some flayed Cyclopes. Max
stared at the red figure, wincing in wonder and confinement. The
screens vanished along with the red Chrononaut and the static
sounds faded, dropping them into the vacuous dark, their glowing
suits the only emission of light.

Then an ear
piercing scream.

Hysterical,
wild as a banshee, Scott Barnes leapt up from behind the operating
table, the dim light catching the surface of some sharp bloody
instrument in his hand, glistening in crimson syrup. His face was
scarred, black laces of dried blood clung to the skin from the
freshly self-inflicted wounds. Max darted out of the way, his
vicinity too close to react, his terroriser too fast. Tanya was
also fast. She slipped her palm under Barnes’ jaw and the
nerve-pulsars in her gloves delivered a numbing blow. Stunned,
Barnes toppled backwards, and then Tanya finished the attacker by
touching her index finger to his forehead, directing a flow of
incapacitating energy through the man’s skull. Rufus quickly darted
behind the man vying to apprehend him and clasped his head in his
hands vice wise, palms over his lateral temples, and he spoke into
Scott Barnes’ ear smoothly.

‘
Everything’s
alright, Professor. Your muscles are relaxing because of the
afferent nerve harmonics. Don’t fight it, just relax. Ease down,
sir. We’re here to help.’

The cutting
instrument trilled as it dropped like pewter to the
floor.

‘
Wh-wh-who
are you?’ Barnes stammered, eyes darting around
worriedly.

‘
We’re
Orandoré
security
personnel.’

‘
Canaries for
unpredictable situations like this,’ said Max, brushing himself off
as he stood. ‘There’s supposed to be a team of eight people on this
starnavis and our scanners only detected three, you being one of
them. The other two are in freeze. Naturally we assumed you could
have space dementia.’

‘
You might be
right,’ Barnes chortled slightly, desperately seeking humour in his
circumstance. He drew very serious suddenly. ‘Will you let me
go?’

‘
Eventually,’
said Max. ‘But for now, I want my team buddy here to keep you
sedated. You’re free to talk, however. Start by telling me what
happened to the Erebus?’

‘
I’m insane,’
said Scott, ‘I’ve seen things and...Mad things too I can tell you.
I don’t remember...it’s all so...so crazy. I’ve seen you before. It
feels so long ago now. But I remember seeing you...please take me
home. Please, god! Please take me home. Where’s my chalk? I wanna
go home.’

‘
Where are
the other members of the crew?’

‘
Dead.’

‘
Dead?’ Max
echoed superciliously, ‘how?’

‘
Technical
complications. Unexpected events. Who knows-?’

‘
We were
hoping you know.’

‘
No...No,
no...I-I can’t tell you what happened here. I can’t tell you where
it started, how it began. I just know we’re all in it. We are all
inside it...you understand?’

‘
Not really,’
Max offhandedly reported, ‘perhaps your black-box recordings
will...’

‘
Oh no, no,
no, you won’t find anything in there.’ Said Barnes.

‘
Why
not?’

‘
We purged
it. We tore it out and sent it spinning into the Charybdis black
hole.’

‘
And why in
hell’s fiery bowels would you do that?’

‘
Seemed like
the right thing to do...at the time.’

Max squinted,
stood, and then rubbed his forehead.

‘
This guy’s
clearly insane,
’ he neuromitted to the
others, ‘
and by his own admission. Rufus,
take him to Yerma Holts for a cognoputic analysis;
Tanya!
’

‘
Sir?
’

‘
You’re with
me.
’

‘
Where we
headed?
’

‘
The
bridge,
’ said Max. ‘
With our target now isolated, think we should search around
and find out what happened to this place.
’

*

Max stalked
onto the bridge with Tanya following close. They saw it was a
capacious area of operations, an elongated dome scooping above
them, arching with sinuous, lithe design and smooth ceilings that
were now opaque but could be thrown into limpidity by a simple
command. It was like the Chancel stage of some neo-utopian
Cathedral, only rather than vertical stain glass windows the Erebus
had tall rectangular screens inundated with lustres of neon-blue
data-streams and geometrical patterns awaiting the instruction of a
pilot’s touch. The digital information of esoteric patterns and
nodes shifted in texture and luminescence.

The bridge’s
observation window for the Captain was reminiscent of an axial
chapel, with two apsidal wing compartments to the left and right
waiting to be manned by whichever specialists they were designed to
house. There was evidence of meddling to be seen hanging from the
open circuit conduits and manhandled wall terminals and
compulsively uprooted floor panels abandoned during makeshift
efforts, much like the obligations the crew had forgotten to their
abrogated mission itself. From console to console lay the tangles
of a myriad optical cable. Everywhere signs of some desperate
alteration to the ship’s facade, exposing the viscera of its
complicated circuitry.

In the far
corner of the room a grim discovery was made. A crewmember, Dallas
Rogers, could be seen wedged into a conduit, as though pulled
backwards into the pipe by his belt, boots and festering head and
hands bunched at the mouth of the opening, tangled in the coiling
appendages of optical cables, dry pale eyes bulging wildly in their
sockets, tongue degraded to a black worm that shrivelled and
ossified like a sundried tomato. Tanya covered her nose as she
walked around the bridge and whimpered on making the next fatal
discovery.

‘
Oh Jesus!’
Max uttered, pulling her away from the mess.

They beheld
the rigid ossature of what was once a man, skin flensed away by
veering waves of heat which had risen out of the exposed radiation
shield plates even still in its danger colour shift on the caution
coating, even still radiating marginal degrees of dangerous unseen
particles. His skull had melted to the panel like a jellyfish left
to dry like brittle paper there and offal had boiled and solidified
in their boned cage long ago, like the fossil remains of some
unwrapped ancient pharaoh.

‘
Shit...we’ve
got a dangerous radiation leak in here,’ said Max stepping
backwards. ‘Leave the bridge...’

‘
Who did
this?’

‘
Whoever he
was he’s toast now,’ Max observed. ‘I have to isolate this section
and make a report. This requires specialists.’

‘
Right,
sir.’

‘
We can’t be
in here. Too much exposure and our cells will decay.’

‘
Colonel
Elba!’ Tanya said at the main door. ‘The ship’s data logs will
still have basic records. We’ll be able to trace the positions of
the crew members on the ship throughout its voyage. It won’t be
detailed, no dialogues, but it may give us a blue-print of who was
where on the ship and at what time. They’re called ambulation
patterns, or foot-finders.’

‘
Good call,
Tanya,’ he said closing the door’s access switch which brought the
huge bulkhead shield down. ‘Do you know how to get that
information?’

‘
Aye sir,’
she nodded.

‘
Do it,’ he
said. ‘For now come with me. We’re checking the damaged
compartments on the anchorage decks.’

‘
What the
hell for?’ she said over the loud thump of the heavy door finally
anchoring down into its contour.

‘
Do you
remember that man on the screen? That red figure? I’ve seen it
before somewhere. In briefing I think. I just want to check
something out down there.’

*

Riffles of
light shimmered across the surface of the piezoelectric floor,
racing ahead of their steps and they reached the large air-chamber
pressure lock, a permeable vault separating the passenger walkways
from the vacuous exposures of space. Here, Max manually accessed
the door’s locking mechanisms and then pumped the power handle
several times. The moment new energy was stored he opened the door
and it rolled gradually back to reveal the air-chamber. A pew of
seats to the left and right of the chamber held a sense of
preparatory arrangement previously taken up here, and quickly
abandoned. The floor was littered with tools and scattered
equipment boxes left opened and mounting its own containment trays
in one corner. A Chrononaut space suit was left slumped on the
seat, like the armour of a giant mechanical gladiator. A huge
faceless helmet gazed back unblinkingly; head turned to their
direction and slouched at some twisted angle.

‘
That’s it,’
said Max, ‘that’s what we saw.’

‘
It’s just a
suit.’

‘
It’s
specialised,’ said Max, ‘Chrononauts have electro-gravity shielding
and intense gamma ray resistance fields, top of the range
protection from the intense radiation given out from the black
hole.’

Tanya soon
discovered the airlock had been sealed and patched up from the
inside, and a gory splatter of blood had long ago dried around
structural repairs as though someone had lifted a fist full of
eviscerated animal entrails and pitched them full slap against the
solidity of the airlock. They saw floor panels bolted and welded
over the doorway, made now inaccessible.

‘
Looks like
they tried to seal it up,’ she said. ‘Structural leak?’

‘
Possibly,’
Max adduced, ‘but that’s solid titanium, what the hell punctured
through it?’

‘
Asteroid?’

‘
No, not at
this angle, and with no further damage visible it’s highly
unlikely. Until we look from the other side we’ll never know,’ he
explained. ‘Let’s get a team together, see if we can get to the
anchorage bay from the external access.’

‘
Roger
that.’

‘
You get
those foot finder thingies,’ he ordered, ‘it was a good
suggestion.’

‘
Oh you mean
the ambulation pattern histories? Sure, I’m already on it. The
Erebus investors have requested research teams to look into
whatever they can so as soon as I have a full record I’ll send it
to them.’

‘
Good.’

‘
But, sir,
erm...what about the frozen crew members? Are we going to extract
them from deep freeze?’

‘
Certainly
are,’ said Max. ‘Got a few questions, we should hope they’re not as
insane as Professor Barnes.’

‘
Lead the
way, sir.’

*

Over the
hours that followed, teams moved in and out of the Erebus on
rotation, following the safe zones as mapped by Max and his team.
From eight cryonic sarcophagus’s, only two were functioning, the
two containing crew members Malik Serat and Captain Arthur Zemi.
Like other locations on the Erebus, cryonic containers had been
sabotaged and looted conspicuously for parts. The solid steel
cylinders buzzed as minimum power fed morsels of life support to
the freezing process. Max followed the glowing path through
security layers and passed into the containment room. Tanya
followed while opening and closing her fists to keep the static
shock foci stimulated.