Chaos Cipher (3 page)

‘
Raven, what do
you see
?’

Rynal was
looking at the burning habitat ahead of him through the bridge of
their starnavis. In the same moment, he shared Raven’s eyes. He had
been glaring at a similar vision through
The Cereno’s
small skull-sized
porthole, affirming their doomed home. Raven saw huge burning
embers raining down into Amora’s verditer sky below. The large
saturnine Olympian opened his palm where nanology trackers threaded
throughout his skin, glowing. He saw there a map projected by the
electronic bacteria in his blood, assembling to detail what was
going on outside. Like stars they shifted across his skin, from a
pale blue to a crimson red as the mortal coil of each life found
its final moment. He watched the blemishes of light in his palm; he
saw the growing freckles of red spots amassing before twinkling out
forever, more and more. Hundreds of thousands of people, a culture
gone in an instant, their history, their creations all wiped out
forever. Raven closed up a fist as the main mass of spots died out
and squeezed the fury through trembling white knuckles. He turned
away from the view of his burning habitat with deep remorse. Rynal
felt his emotions, he sensed the fury, he had momentarily become
Raven.

‘
I see no more
than thee, my kin
.’ Raven thought, adding
the final word through their psychic transqualia as an emphasis.
‘
Death
.’

Rynal
retreated from the transqualian merger back into his own mind.
Then, without warning
The Cereno’s
roll thrusters turned the starnavis on to a new
coordinate. It banked with such abrupt urgency that Raven’s legs
buckled. Vernier thrusters hissed out jets of gas and positioned
the bulky ship into a launch bearing. Raven grabbed tightly to a
ladder and pulled himself along the rail, chasing it to higher
decks where the main cabin was. His ears picked up the disgruntled
caterwauls of Malla’s child from near the galley as she soothed its
wails with motherly croons.

He floated
over and reached out to her as she settled her baby into an
inertial bed. Restlessly, the child’s shrill cries pitched. The
baby opened her eyes to set them upon Raven as she reached her
stumpy distressed arms for him. Raven reached back and the baby’s
hand grasped at his finger, clinging tight. He could see those two
jewels staring into Raven’s soul, eyes like ruby and emerald, her
left eye green, the other red. Malla turned to Raven contritely,
eyes damp, and her pretty young countenance greying to a nervous
pallor.

‘
I don’t know
if she’ll make it,’ she declared, ‘she’s too young for evasive
space flight, the inertial forces may kill her.’

‘
Your child
doth harness Olympian genetics,’ said Raven securely. ‘There are no
stronger beings than we. Be steadfast Malla. I trust in her
wellbeing.’

‘
You can’t be
sure,’ said Malla. ‘Not even Rynal is sure.’

‘
It’s the
only way we can reach the saltus-carrousels from here.’ Raven urged
softly. ‘Secure thyself, time is deficient.’

As he
stretched the webbing across her front the baby continued to scream
and buck lightly against it, her ruby emerald eyes catching faintly
in the dim light. Satisfied they were both secure; Raven kicked
away from the side wall and fell over to the adjacent inertial bed.
Once there he pulled the webbing across his chest and tried to make
out Malla’s fallow face in the darkness. Her red eyes shone back at
him, before the beds rotated them in the direction of
travel.

‘
Thy family
are secure!’ Raven confirmed aloud, adding along the transqualia.
‘
We may depart now, my
kin
.’

He had heard
his brother’s assurances and prepared for launch.
The Cereno
angled its
nose to Amora’s horizon. Holographic gimbals swung around on the
bridge command and aligned with the horizon like the layered
divisions of Saturn’s rings. Then, Rynal settled back into the
inertial support, in the same moment initiating the starnavis into
a fierce acceleration. He pressed back into the material in the
high-gee acceleration, the webbing snapped around his body to
embrace him in its sticky elastic as the ship raced for freedom.
Vibrations shook their bones and velocity pinned them throughout
the acceleration. Rynal synchronised his mind with the ship. Vector
displays networked through the sensorium of Rynal’s neurosphere
interface, imprinting images through his visual cortex, mapping
projections his eyes could no longer see under duress of such
pressures. He watched the life signatures, sedulously balancing the
tolerable condition of his daughter while maintaining maximum
acceleration. They were at the peak now, any faster rate of
acceleration and the baby’s fragile bones might fatally break. He
knew that soon the inertia would taper off as they approached full
speed, but he couldn’t get them there any faster. External sensory
feedback from the starnavis warned Rynal of the advancing Jackal.
Their decision to flee had drawn attention. Arrowhead Strikers
darted and weaved ahead to intercept them. Their radiation beams
slicing apart the floating pods as they gave pursuit.

‘
Bastards
,’ Rynal issued through the
neuro-ligature’s on-board network. His antennae shone as his neural
processes issued to the passengers.

‘
You’re right
Osmond; they want this to remain covered up. What are they
planning? Surely they can’t know about the Elixir. Surely they
can’t know. They cannot possibly know!
’

‘
Nobody knows
about the Elixir, Rynal
,’ old Osmond
reassured. ‘
If they knew...they wouldn’t
have been planning this sort of assault that’s for sure. The fools
will doom life as we know it
.’

A salient and
malachite flash emanated at last from the
Kyklos
axel sphere, shattering the
resin-nano-tube structure like a frozen spindle and lighting up the
cotton clouds and barren mountains of the planet Amora below.
Arrowheads dove into the silent explosion with rapturous zeal. The
fires set their photovoltaic alloy aglow as they wheeled and bathed
like cosmic vampires in the blood of their latest kill.

Rynal felt
the explosive light through the neurosphere. The super-structure
had finally fallen apart. An historic Earther arc station destroyed
in a matter of minutes. He needed to reach the Galileo Coterie;
people had to know what happened here.

*

For John
Ripley it was simple; this was a heat, beat and treat mission.
Unlike the other strike-ships in the starmada, his was a
Solitaire-Class,
The
Deathwind
. A remarkably reliable
interplanetary craft suited for duel pilot capacity and armed with
the most sophisticated weaponry courtesy of Ampotech Industries.
The needle canopy of
The Deathwind
arrowed sleekly from the Jackal’s launch tunnels,
propelled on a body of magnetic propulsion, it raced into the void.
Once the launch was complete, the engines fired and
The Deathwind
soared
ahead into the endlessly vast distances. Ghostly images imprinted
into his neurosphere as
The
Deathwind’s
TCAS mapped out the flight
vectors of his co-pilots’ transponders.

They cut
through the debris field like shark fins. Sleek, arrow shaped
photovoltaic fuselages, slipping into fire and litter, yawing
through gaps in the drifting debris. The on-board computer mapped
out potential collisions and Ripley cruised and curved between
ruinous particles, blinding pulses of jets bursting silently from
above and below the canopy, twisting the craft through the
vacuum.

‘
Downlink
complete,’ said the mission commander through the communications
network. ‘Start your mission CDRs.’ She further instructed, ‘I need
you to be my eyes here.’

‘
CDRs
online,’ John Ripley reported.

‘
CDRs are a
go, quantics calibrated’ said another voice. ‘Mission is now
recording.’

‘
Maintain
optical solar reflectors,’ she re-joined, ‘the Suntau is a spicy
meatball and she kicks up some fierce solar gusts. Nothing you
wanna get caught up in.’

‘
Confirmed
commander,’ said one of the masked assailants.

‘
Target any
life boats and destroy, apprehend any potential
escapees...’

‘
Commander,’
one of the Arrowhead pilots reported. ‘Racer class starnavis
leaving orbit,
The
Cereno
, increasing velocity at a steady
percentile.’

‘
All pilots,
target that ship,’ she ordered, ‘we mustn’t let anyone escape from
this area to report it. They must be heading to a nearby
saltus-carrousel. Find any of those distortion-toroids in the area
and destroy them! Scout every Lagrange point. That starnavis
mustn’t velox out of here. Cut...her...DOWN!’

The
Deathwind
dipped into the southern part of
the debris field leftover by the destroyed ring habitat. Ripley
channelled his thoughts through a neuro-ligature marked by a series
of tattoos on the nape of his spine, a micro-channel for neural
information, allowing his psychological reach to manoeuvre and
change the behaviour of his strike-ship. He saw the combat
sequencers in his visual cortex, a series of codes and
abbreviations. He joined other strike ships as they targeted their
victims. Powerful beams of concentrated maser light diced up
helpless escape capsules. Flashes of radiation stabbed into the
burning habitat’s debris field as the other co-pilots asserted
their joint belligerence. In their assault their neuromissions
merged, they shared information to form a single consciousness
known as the Nexus interface. The pilots were aware of multiple
visuals; they felt blunt emotional discipline seeping from the
stronger and less empathic killers to overpower compunction in the
more empathic pilots, who vacillated over the killing of unarmed
targets. In the Nexus Ripley felt like a huge entity, able to see
everything at once, he felt like a creature beyond human, like the
panoptical Argus.

Suddenly,
Ripley heard screaming.

‘
Wh-what’s that
noise
?’ someone reported across the
Nexus.

‘
Receiving...audio
phenomenon I think...
’

‘
That’s a
negative, there’s no audio phenomenon, no radio signal in my
vessel, and I’m getting no transmission detection
what-so-ever.
’

‘
It’s not an
issue with the neuro-ligature’ another said, ‘or the Nexus
interface either. I’m running communications through laser
transmission, no interference detected. Shit...I can hear too! Oh
god it’s in my head!’

‘
Keep the mission
together
,’ the commander austerely
directed from the interface, ‘
target those
pods and destroy them.
’

‘
Can’t you
hear that?’ said another voice, this time coming through the audio
network. ‘What the…what is that?’

‘
Ma’am,’ said
another pilot through the audio coms, ‘I shut down my
neuro-ligature for manual piloting. I pulled out of the Nexus
interface but the noise...it’s in my head!’

Ripley tried
to blink away the obstreperous cries lancing through his mind. At
high speeds, a mere blink could cost a striker-pilot their lives,
which was why neurophasing with the strike-ship was vital. The
visual field of the neurosphere revealed to Ripley the heat
signatures, the burning ring system, the filigree spins of vector
lines with omnidirectional projected vectors and calculations and
radiation waves and random debris all interpreted by his flight
computer in the four dimensional space of his mind. He was able to
see in every location in real-time. He shut his eyes tight, a
reaction to the pain that didn’t disturb his cortically enhanced
visuals. But the screaming went on and he focussed intently on the
formulating ordered patterns of spatial chaos. But nothing he did
eased the pain; impossible to focus. It was like a thousand drawing
pins had found their way into his skull and learned how to
swim.

‘
They will
trick you’ said the commander, ‘they have ways of breaking our
morale. Stay focussed. Purge them all!’

Ripley
continued to target the pods, blasting them into bubbles of amber
and gold as he hunted down and raced after
The Cereno
.

‘
I’ve got a
lock!
’ He reported.

‘
Me too,
ma’am
,’ said another
pilot.

‘
Lock
confirmed
.’

‘
Warheads
authorisation confirmed. Your warheads are now
armed
,’ said the Commander,
‘
engage the target!
’