Chaos Cipher (76 page)

‘
Mu-my
side?’

‘
Yeah.’

‘
The chaos
cipher is a blue-print.’

‘
A blue-print
for what?’

‘
I can’t even
imagine,’ Scott sniggered. ‘I know that there is more than one use
for it. Penelope Hurt developed it with Malik. The code helped us
to establish a breadcrumb trail out of a temporal maze. Penelope
Hurt had the whole thing mapped out in her mind; she understood its
shape in several dimensions. If we followed her calendar, the code
would have stopped us from bumping into our future and past selves
in the temporal Doppler.’

Max was
listening earnestly, he’d been patterning a voice scan to Scott
Barnes to play back later for his own research.

‘
What’s a
temporal Doppler?’

‘
The effect
is, quite simply, how time radiates through superluminal particles.
I’m told you are very much aware of this phenomenon,
today.’

Max shrugged,
‘I’m no expert on it.’

‘
I’m told you
use this process to build exotic materials like Obsiduranium for
your velox drives. Gravito-magnetic charges? Ring any
bells?’

‘
I’m not an
astro-engineer, Scott,’ Max Elba responded, unequivocally. ‘My
specialties are in people management.’

‘
In laymen’s
terms,’ Scott started to explain. ‘Two entangled particles, one
stationary, the other dropped into a black hole, behave and
communicate with each other instantaneously. One can put space
between them but their relationship is locked. We wanted to relay
real time information this way, to extract the secrets of a black
hole from beyond the event horizon. Initially, we suspected it was
impossible and that our temporal anchor tests would only show how
vast the gravitational differences are closer toward the event
horizon. Because there’s a paradox, you see. Gravitational forces
in a black hole cause time to move slower, yet the entangled
particles communicate as a constant. Why? How?

‘
What we
found is that the gravity leaks through to the stationary particle,
slowing things down dramatically around it. Once that radiation
conducts through the quantics of a ship like the Erebus, through
gravito-magnetic and electrogravonics, you’ve got yourself a
Starnavis existing in several moments in time, split into confusing
and random segments. Penelope called this a temporal Doppler.
Essentially, imagine the Erebus is a labyrinth, only the space is
constant, what you’re journeying through is time rendered to
extreme differences. The ship is old and new, corroded and painted,
it is present and absent all at once. There is only matter as its
constant; time is obfuscated, corrupted by the communicators. So we
marked the walls and observed how the matter vanished and
reappeared. The chaos cipher was a calendar that we mapped in order
to escape the time phenomenon and keep up with the present. But I
fear Penelope Hurt understood the map in terms we cannot possibly
keep up with. She, like Malik, was a five dimensional thinker. For
her…why she didn’t even assume our perceptions on reality were to
be taken literally.’

‘
Who was
she?’

‘
For now,’
Scott nodded. ‘That is all I can tell you. As for who she was…it
doesn’t matter. Who she became in the end was something quite
different.’

‘
What are
the
Orandoré
staff seeing in the Erebus?’ asked Max. ‘Are those
communicators still radiating this temporal Doppler?’

‘
Yes,’ Scott
nodded. ‘The Erebus is both docked at the station
Orandoré
and at the same
time it still orbits the Charybdis. The whole thing is
spaghettified superficially. Although, you can’t tell, the effect
only takes place once the power is on. The second you turn on those
quantics, you’re lost on that thing.’

‘
Can Malik
use the chaos cipher?’

‘
No,’ Scott
shook his head. ‘He didn’t understand it as well as she did.’ And
Scott moved over and sat beside Elba. He stared at the paused birds
up in the air and thought to himself. ‘The only other way you could
get around that ship is if you perfectly knew your destiny. If your
fate was written out in front of you, if the next hour was crystal
clear in your memory.’

‘
Why do you
say that?’ he asked. ‘Could Penelope Hurt see the
future?’

‘
Of course,
she could,’ Scott chuckled ironically. ‘All Chronomancers
can.’

-60-

C
onvulsions and shivers got Malik
Serat shaking like a leaf, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy serenaded his
misery. Beads of perspiration wept from his pours and saturated
strands of hair clung to his pale grey skin. Out before him a large
table of food had been arranged with silver cutlery and exquisite
golden candle holders and boughs and wreaths nesting beneath ornate
silver treys of fine crystal glass. There were bountiful platters
of Cray fish and shrimp in succulent steaming cream sauces and
roasted vegetables were next to construct around the table. Malik
could smell the many savoury herbs and he leaned forward to analyse
the detail. None of this he knew was real. The artifice wasn’t
quite convincing. There was something spurious about the way the
table’s settings received light from an inaccurate angle to where
the dim sun was shining out in the cloudscapes where the large
panoramic window of the sky city was. It was good, but not fully
credible.

‘
Aren’t you
going to indulge?’ Vance asked, walking around the table’s supposed
dimensions as not to disturb the illusion.

‘
Indulge?’
Malik almost laughed sickly. ‘Indulge what? There’s nothing there
to eat.’

‘
Come come,
Malik,’ he said sympathetically. ‘For us Eternals, nostalgia is the
only way to satiate the human cravings for food. The Nexus can
supply the illusion. You’d better get used to it. We do not waste
up here. It is more economical not to eat real food, you see. The
tablets and nanoctors do everything for us. And, I really wouldn’t
want to see you reduced to having to defecate like those hardlander
scum.’ And Vance grimaced at the thought of it. ‘Indeed…when I
think about the brutes that used to maul through their own faecal
matter to examine their health. Quite vile, don’t you agree? Do you
imagine staring at that mushy brown paste as it nests in cold
water? Quite disgusting.’

Malik’s
febrile gaze lifted from the table to find Vance again and he
stared at his lank and venerable sibling.

‘
You’ve never
been human enough to imagine much.’

Vance
deactivated the Nexus, and Malik’s illusion fell apart to the dank
and mechanical reality of the Atominus Phalange. He was confined to
a wheelchair, the neural functions of his legs interrupted by a
steady stream of electrons perturbing his muscles. The wheelchair
automatically began to drift forward, Malik had no control over
this either. He had at some point unwittingly become Vance’s
exclusive prisoner. And, as Ode to Joy reached its harmonious
crescendo Vance stood simpering at Malik.

‘
We’ve played
games long enough,’ he said, deactivating the music at last. ‘The
chaos cipher -’

‘
Am I to
assume your team are unable to crack the code?’ he asked. ‘Why not
just venture to the Erebus? Switch on the superluminal
communicators like I told you? Want your answers…experience is
quite informative.’

‘
I’m having
trouble finding the volunteers,’ Vance confessed. ‘Seems the Erebus
has many people afraid, the
Orandoré
personnel see it as
somewhat of an omen. Not that it matters. The
Orandoré
Canaries are being
recruited to map out temporal areas of the Erebus, but I’ve not
made it clear what they are looking for.’

‘
What are
they looking for?’ asked Malik weakly.

‘
They’re
tracing your steps,’ said Vance, ‘analysing where you have been on
the Erebus, watching how you slip through wormholes in time,
jumping from moment to moment in seemingly random patterns so we
can match it with the chaos cipher. The algorithms are undeniably
too complex for me and many of my team to figure out alone.
Fortunately, Adamoss is helping.’

‘
But you will
not crack the code,’ Malik forced a laugh.

‘
Can you?’
asked Vance.

‘
Only one
person ever knew the code,’ said Malik. ‘And she is
dead.’

‘
That’s
right. Penelope Hurt, am I correct?’ Vance deliberated, sauntering
up the long stairway to the large vistas of the Nimbolantis storm
clouds. ‘You and she worked closely. I believe you can navigate the
chaos cipher.’

‘
Much as I
pleasure in taking credit for saving the Erebus with my genius,’
said Malik, ‘I’m afraid I was an ultimate failure. I was unable to
plan as far ahead as she was.’

‘
Doesn’t it
make you feel inferior?’ he asked. ‘Is it not humiliating in the
echelons of brilliance to rank below a woman?’

‘
Stifling,
perhaps,’ Malik confessed. ‘But I must admit she had me
impressed.’

‘
Adamoss will
crack the code,’ said Vance confidently. ‘Adamoss designed the
Atominii, turned our scientific theories into actualities for deep
space travel. As a matter of fact Adamoss is quite literally the
last invention mankind fathomed. He’ll crack the code…’

‘
You don’t
get it,’ Malik chuckled. ‘Adamoss may crack the code. But he’ll
never see the future.’

Vance Serat
squinted as something came in through his neurophase and he
accessed the semi-qualian link with Filipe.

‘
Vance, there is
something extraordinary occurring around the orbit of
Mars.
’ He started, his face contorted with
excitement as he spoke giddily. ‘
You
should see the reports and those rotten Martians are having a hell
of a time. They’re requesting a full scale emergency
assistance.
’

*

Restfully,
the Martian world had rolled below the onset glow of dual moons, as
shipments of extracted rocks dragged from the asteroid belt were
dumped onto the surface of Phobos and Deimos in an effort to
increase their mass. Yet, the Martian’s automated towing units had
stopped returning from the asteroid belt and a phenomenon of pure
chaos was making itself known as the Xenotechs chased the Martian
world. Colonies gazed up, the shrunken Martian humanoids craning
their heads from the portholes of their habitation zones to analyse
the incandescent and ethereal glow of death’s fearsome scythe
cutting through the heavens on high. At once the wheeling
centrifugal shuttles docking with the orbital elevator bared
witness to the grave threat entering their orbital space,
gravitating colony migrants took to the windows to see for
themselves what bright mystery did approach.

They heeded
no message or warning from the colonies and showed no signs of
stopping, and station operators gazed on in horror as the three
machines ploughed interminably forth towards the elevator docking
station at thousands of miles per hour.

From a fiery
spark on the red planet’s horizon to a raging ball of energy, the
Xenotechs made their presence palpable for the frightened,
screaming and helpless Martian colonies, and now set within their
targets, they aimed to destroy them.

Like missiles
they tore through the elevation station, and shattered the shuttles
and centrifugal spindles into cosmic dust and a fire that spread
like the coils of a luminous burning oil spill. The devastation was
maximum, and all that was left of the orbital elevation platform
descended out of orbit, its tension belt curling as it chased the
counterweight through the caustic atmosphere, hundreds of thousands
of tons of debris turning to fire and crashing down on the
defenceless colony below. By the time a distress beacon had been
initialised, the colony was well on its way to irreversible
obliteration.

And the
Xenotechs passed, leaving more carnage in their wake as they
circled the inner well of the heliosphere, chasing down their next
target.

Chasing down
the planet Earth.

-61-

T
hrough the intersecting bridges and
highways where the neon lights of vehicles roamed, between the tall
standing towers of habitation centres housing thousands of
individuals, Syridan automatons and drones swooped into position.
Intel fed back to the hidden combat centres as they surveyed the
situation from clandestine locations around the world; the
Commander and Chief regarded the data decisively, listening to
various intelligence reports dictated by Adamoss.

The world
leaders, associates and corporate elites, along with some anonymous
Eternals, sat in the huge pentagonal room, the walls active with
luminous displays of information concerning strategies, code-names
for teams, territorial possession, enemy combatants and isolated
areas. Their seats all back to back as they regarded the
view-screens rather than each other, neurophased with the
information in a digitally induced trance. They saw fires and
explosions in the holographic projections, the remains of colonies
strewn over the Martian rocks.