Chaos Cipher (20 page)

Malik Serat
understood at once that he wasn’t looking at the islands, but one
of a countless set of layers in a reality too complex for the human
mind to grasp with eyes alone, stemming from simplicities not yet
captured in the imagination, a simple formula to explain
all.

He was
looking hopelessly for a phantom, a strange tangible difference in
the fabric of reality that shied away when mankind tried to
confront. Much like the seemingly random shifts of time on the
Erebus, it was crazy, moments catching up and over lapping, warping
in an out of each other. Back on the ship, one could look over
their shoulder and catch their reflection facing the wrong way.
That’s when you knew you were in trouble, and it was time to mark
the floors and walls with markers.

‘
Malik look
at me!’ The voice demanded.

Slowly he
looked down from the observatory window of the planet above him.
The interview room was large, cylindrical, sterile and evenly
illuminated. They’d provided him with a jumpsuit, a black, grey and
orange padded suit with zippers and pockets at the thigh and ribs.
Across from him stood two security personnel armoured in dense
black suits, they looked pristine. Each of them had some kind of
device attached to their lower jaws that he didn’t recognise and he
imagined it was for communication. The speaker was a tall dark
skinned man named Duval who told Serat he was the station owner. He
spoke with stringent tenet, strong authority carrying years of
experience within his tone. He was wearing a grey suit and white
shirt, a strange cravat that seemed to be shifting with soft pencil
lines, mapping out shapes and dots. His jacket had collars that
flared up and neat black epaulettes. Beside him stood the station
Ambassador, Rory Felix, a shorter man with aged and wrinkled face.
He had thick dark red hair that was turning grey at the flanks. He
wore what looked like a standard uniformed jumpsuit for the
station, the kind he’d seen Yerma wearing on her off-duty
hours.

‘
Doctor Serat
you will understand,’ Duval was saying, ‘that speaking in riddles
about what happened on the Erebus will do nothing but condemn you
as guilty to its destruction. We need the truth.’

The black box
recordings were purged into the black hole, along with half the
ship’s mass. They’d gotten too close to the singularity, far to
close.

‘
You haven’t
told me about the survivors,’ said Malik Serat fiercely. ‘Where are
you keeping Penelope Hurt?’

‘
Doctor,’
said Felix softly. ‘I’m sorry but there’s no nice way to say this.
Penelope Hurt is dead.’

‘
No,’ Serat
sulked and shook his head, desperate to control his buoying
emotions. ‘I saw her go into cryonics. I remember.’

‘
We found
her,’ said Duval ‘in a million pieces of ice.’

‘
No!’ Serat
cholerically snarled, vexed by Duval’s lack of
sensitivity.

‘
We found
Captain Zemi,’ he continued, ‘frozen, but when we thawed him out
his internals were covered in tumours and partially liquefied from
radiation exposure. We concede there was an effort to try and
preserve him for recovery but there’s no bringing him
back.’

‘
As for the
other crew members,’ said Felix, ‘their whereabouts is a mystery
but there’s eight unaccounted for including three state-of-the-art
AI units.’

‘
What about
Scott Barnes?’ Malik said indignantly. ‘Is he alive?’

Duval and
Felix shared a solicitous glance, wondering whether to tell
him.

‘
Actually our
Canaries found him wondering around the ship.’ Felix divulged. ‘He
was dazed and half crazed. We still don’t know how he got out of
cryonics.’

Malik Serat
had retired to his thoughts. He sat there broodingly, looking at
neither man, yet both saw a process occurring behind his eyes, a
process he had stopped relaying suddenly.

‘
We were
hoping you could tell us how you think that might have
happened?’

Malik Serat
looked up.

‘
A miss-timed
wake-up,’ he uttered, ‘a malfunction in the cryonic sarcophagus
perhaps, emergency revival to control the subject’s return to life
rather than thawing at the incorrect rate. Maybe the computer
calculated a quick decision to save him using a controlled revival.
Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘
Extensive
damage has been done to the Erebus,’ Felix documented. ‘Naturally
the ship’s original investors are now deceased and some of the
companies since have gone through changes. Honestly nobody expected
you’d return once you had gone past the deadline. But there is one
investor who is still alive. He’s particularly interested in what
happened out there. He’s especially concerned about you Malik. He
wants the best treatment for you.’

Malik Serat
lifted his head again, wincing in confusion.

‘
This
individual bought out many of the original investors of the Erebus
project and personally took over many of the project debts.’ Felix
said.

Malik still
had no idea who this could be.

‘
We need to
know what happened out there.’

The sun fell
fully behind the great earthly body, the last of its blue light
edging off the stratosphere like a polar wind sweeping snow gusts
from a cliff edge, before fading behind the eclipse.

‘
Malik,’ the
station Ambassador re-joined from the far side of the room. ‘I’m
sure this is a difficult time for you, but there are only two
survivors of the Erebus, you...and Barnes.’

He let that
sink in before continuing.

‘
Back when
you accepted this mission you contracted yourself subordinate to
the requirements of the participatory enterprises at the time, the
Old Oligarchy…’

Malik was
laughing.

‘
Accept the
mission?’ he said. ‘We were born for it. We were all genetically
altered to survive cryonic stasis. We were all developed for the
Erebus. It was our purpose. Our one and only calling. I accepted
nothing. I never had a choice. The Erebus was my life.’

Duval and
Felix had both overlooked that point. Neither was privy to quite
how the operation was begun.

‘
Well,’ said
Felix. ‘A lot has changed since that period. And we have to prepare
you for these changes so you don’t experience chronoshock. Almost
every known nation involved in the Erebus and Osiris projects
agreed to respect a safe home when you return. But today...most
people scarcely even remember the Erebus project. This means we
must set you through these stages, constant psychiatric profiling,
constant adjustment programs, constant didactic updates on history
otherwise you’ll have quite a shock when you return to the
surface.’

‘
You and
Penelope Hurt were very close, I assume?’ asked Duval.

‘
I had a deep
respect for her,’ Malik said dreamily. ‘We had an understanding I
shared with nobody before.’

‘
Eight of
your crew have died out there and we want to know how and why...’
said Ambassador Felix, ‘she wasn’t the only one.’

Malik Serat
removed a black marker pen from the pocket of his black and grey
jumpsuit, the one given to him by Yerma.

‘
Rest assured
gentlemen,’ Serat smiled, kneeling down to mark an X on the floor.
‘Nothing truly dies in the eye of chaos. Things are merely
reborn.’

‘
Well eight
of them have done so very successfully.’ Duval vexed. ‘We have to
document the full story for your debriefing. Even the Erebus was
top of the range technology in its time and is still admired today
for its sophistication and engineering. With that in mind, why have
your flight records been deleted? Why is your black-box literally
torn from its place and missing? Where’s your research data? What
on earth did you do to the bridge? It’s a toxic radioactive hell up
there. And all you came back with is a single temporal anchor
test.’

‘
Not that it
matters,’ Serat adduced, ‘not that any of it matters now. The world
has already forgotten our sacrifice. All but one investor
apparently knows who we even are and what we stood for.’

‘
What you
stood for?’ Felix asked. ‘What was that, exactly?’

‘
That no
depth of knowledge must go unexplored, no-single thing unaccounted
for in the sphere of our empirical wisdom.’ Serat began, dictating
as though it was a speech logged in his memory, burned there
through years of repetition. It was his solemn vow. ‘Should such a
thing exist, it does so against our reason and accord. Be it the
deepest oceans and dead stars, to the clockwork of the heavens and
the mechanics of the atoms, all must be known. This is the oath we
take in the name of new horizons.’

‘
The Second
Horizon is a myth, Malik Serat!’ Duval seethed. ‘Now would you
kindly stop doodling on my station?’

Malik Serat
stood over the marked X. He waited patiently, and then looked back
to the two men, his radium eyes slightly aglow.

‘
Yerma Holts
informed me about your graphomania.’ Felix said. ‘Why do you feel
the need to do that?’

Malik Serat
wrote another X on the floor beside the first and popped the pen
top back on the marker. He turned back to the window and watched
the glowing orange and emerald cities patterning the Earth’s
islands and coast lines in the nocturnal oceans below.

‘
Malik?’
Felix voice asked from the distance, a growing distance created in
his mind. An overpowering sound now invasively blotted out the
calls as he slid into that space of consciousness he reserved for
his nightmares. A space of retreat that was cultivated on the
Erebus, listening to the radiation frequencies of the Charybdis
black hole translated into static sounds-

‘
Malik…?’

-a space that
grew louder, darker, more real. He let the static feedback crash
into his mind. He heard the Charybdis sing to him as it did from
the Erebus computers like a hissing snake with the deep bass
rumble, audio translators feeding back from the radiation sensors
outside. It was a sound that never left him. It had been his
lullabies when he thought the end was close. It had long ago
stopped being a field of study and transformed into a habitual
craving.

‘
Malik…?’
Felix shouted with a voice small and far. But Malik Serat was lost
now. He regarded the lonely planet through the observatory window
above. From outside, Malik imagined he was a single head occupying
the window space on a huge lenticular counterweight, one of
thousands of windows where station members went about their
quotidian order. On the outer fringes the station harbours received
shipments, and above elevators fired up and down on columns of
light between
Orandoré
station and the earth’s clouds. Malik felt the movement of
everything as his hyperactive mind tracked it all like irregular
clockwork. And everything was in motion.

-12-

D
ak chopped around the root with the
blade of his trowel as Kyo clawed the soil to get at an onion bulb.
The UV light above their heads had been switched off temporarily in
the aquaponic lane where they both laboured carefully between the
drainage chutes.

‘
I hate
onions,’ Kyo grumbled.

Dak raised
his head and smiled. ‘Lot-a-goodness in them onions. You ought ’a
be glad we have them even if just to hate em.’

Dak was
wearing his white loose shirt today. It was smudged in parts where
the soil had found it, and he was wearing jeans that were torn at
the knees. His father had to use a cooking knife to stab a hole
into the back of the jeans so Kyo could thread his tail
through.

‘
How’ve you
been Kyo?’ Dak said, ‘apart from waking up and coming home late
your mother and I don’t see heads or tails of you.’

‘
Har har har,’ Kyo said to the pun.
‘I’ve been helping Laux deliver some equipment. He says I’m a
great runner.’

‘
That’s
good,’ Dak noted. ‘You and the professor have gotten quite friendly
since he came here.’

‘
Pania too,’
he said. ‘She’s always at Hangar-Fifteen.’

‘
She got
something going on with Edge? They dating or something?’

‘
I don’t
think Edge is really her type. Sometimes they fool around I
think.’

‘
Fool
around?’

‘
You know,
sometimes they fuh-’

Kyo stopped
himself and saw his father’s stern and disapproving face. It was
the look that didn’t need words, the silent killer.

‘
-fu-fool
a-around.’ He continued. ‘Mostly I think they’re just
friends.’

And Kyo
hooked his prehensile tail around the wicker basket’s arching
handle and pulled it into his hands to snoop inside.

‘
Okay I’ve
got the beans,’ he said.

‘
Good,’ said
Dak.

‘
And I’ve got
more beans,’ he smiled, ‘five leeks, parsley, two cabbages and
brussel sprouts.’