Chaos Cipher (84 page)

Auto-tanks
came to life, stomping and crawling, their huge armoured
turtlebacks shifting as they lumbered over the vehicles, crushing
the infantry cars and smashing the convoys with close range blasts
from their rocket cannons, throwing out blinding snaps of fire and
stone and devastating shockwaves that evaporated the blood within
the bodies of those too close to the carnage.

The bipeds
came online, responding to the chaos cipher signal, and began
hunting human and cyborg infantry troops, picking them off where
they saw them.

And the
infantry uphill were screaming for retreat as sonic-grenadiers used
their acoustic cannons to levitate explosives over the approaching
android-combatants, dropping bombs on their positions from
above.

And H. V
snipers fired into the putrid black smoke, their bullets shattering
the elegant combat androids as they leapt and jumped gracefully
from place to place, unpiecing mid-leap to scatter components and
sparks across the floor. As they rolled and bounded towards them,
personnel carriers from higher vantage points aimed their emerald
laser beams upon the android avatars to make them quietly and
spontaneously combust into flames. Even as they burned they marched
on, picking off cyborg and Titan soldiers until consumed beyond
function.

And in the
welter of it all, radiation waves spread from the emission of the
Xenotech, like diaphanous sheets of light curtaining a sinuous,
moving, Calabi-Yau manifold of light around the area. Those still
alive and caught within its field lost all perspective of time. As
temporal symmetries spun together, they began to experience things
yet to happen, paralleled with things that had already occurred and
jumbled with intermittent moments of the present. Some had
discovered their own corpses moments before they were themselves
killed; or had seen their companions die moments before death
occurred. They saw androids appear and vanished and reappeared in
new locations where they would vanquish their pray quickly. And the
dead would reappear to discover their own bodies again, before
fading like an echo.

Since the
landing of the Xenotech, the fate of the infantry was inevitable,
they were dead from the very beginning.

It was all
just a matter of time.

-68-

A
damoss reported that all the units
had been destroyed. Some of the avatar models had been usurped by
the pernicious chaos cipher coding, rendering them slaves remotely
controlled by the standing Xenotech. He listened heedfully to the
androids messages, whispered voices relaying information between
one another in the large room as Malik could only watch in his
paralysed state. He glared at them, breathing heavy, irritated by
the nerve harmonics. His brother was stroking his own pointy beard
and nodding as the glowing avatar android discussed with him by the
large circular window. The sun was going down now behind them,
falling into the clouds. Malik felt like he’d been imprisoned here
for months like this, though he knew it had only been a few days.
He stared at the floor, gasping and choking, his hand shaking as he
desired so much to be able to write something upon it, to scratch
his tag, his mark of the chaos cipher. Vance turned his head,
stepping aside the android to see him.

‘
Do you need
something?’ his voice echoed.

Malik
continued to choke.

‘
Excuse me
would you,’ said Vance, walking around the android to hurry down
the stairway. He ordered Malik’s chair to meet him half way and the
mechanical vehicle began rolling towards him.

‘
Ah, Malik I
do hate seeing you this way,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you now?
Want some water?’

‘
Puh-puh-pen!’ He stammered, salivating like a rabid
dog.

‘
Adamoss, get
my brother a pen would you?’ he asked the android. Obediently the
avatar walked away to fetch and pen, returning not a minute later
with a round fat marker pen, the one confiscated from him earlier.
The android opened up Malik’s fingers and rested it in his hand but
the pen dropped to the floor. Vance sighed.

‘
I’ll take it
from here,’ he smiled to the android.

Adamoss bowed
and left them alone.

‘
What was
your sign again?’ he asked. ‘X-marks the spot?’

Vance knelt
down and marked a large black X onto the floor and Malik gasped,
finally allowing himself to breathe again. He kept his eyes on the
mark, his hand quivering, eager to feel the pen. And Vance wedged
the marker back between his fingers.

‘
Now
let’s…see, what we can do here,’ said Vance, guiding Malik’s hand
to draw his own X on a part of the wheelchair. They managed it
together, a spidery wriggly X printing into place.

‘
Better?’ He
asked.

‘
Better,’
Malik sighed.

‘
I’ve some
very exciting news for you Malik,’ he said, moving behind the
wheelchair and carting him over to the ramp, that led up to the
main observation window. ‘But first…do you know what a Spydrone
is?’

They reached
the top and Vance applied the brakes, leaving the chair inclined
the top of the ramp. Malik looked confused.

‘
No?’ he
asked. ‘Well…I’ll tell you, shall I? They are excavation machines
for exoplanets in different systems. We used smaller ones as
maintenance machines too but, mainly these are varying models.
They’re very strong, made of our best manufactured alloys forged by
the most sophisticated nano-metallurgists. They are designed to
explore automatically, relaying information as they come by it.
They’re not made for war. But you can imagine, if they were somehow
modified, they would pose a considerable threat.’

Vance leaned
back on a railing staring at his brother. The golden distant
sunlight was in Malik’s eyes and he had to wince to make out
Vance’s silhouette.

‘
I see you’re
still confused.’ He said. ‘Adamoss…play the relayed message from
the Xenotech source.’

Malik heard a
strange crackling sound, the rustle of static. His eyes widened in
horror. It was a sound he knew. The crispy dense and distant hiss
of a super massive body in space, its radiation condensed and
translated into sound. It was the Charybdis!

And then a
voice he knew very well. A voice that sent shivers down his spine
and set his heart racing and pours leaking with
perspiration.

‘
Malik…’ she
said, almost a whisper.

‘…
PEN…!’ He
almost screamed it, unable to crane his neck. And Vance watched him
carefully as he sat there, forced to listen. The window began to
display the image of blackness, visuals scattering in static,
coalescing to forge something within the display, creating
patterns, patterns that Malik knew very well, patterns of X’s and
zeros, of coloured markings and symbols designed by himself and one
other associate. It was the chaos cipher. Gradually, the symbols
formed into a face, the face of the deceased Erebus crew member,
Penelope Hurt.

Her pale and
angelic features were made sinister by the advanced nanomes she had
somehow on this recording acquired. She had red markings upon her
skin, cosmetic appearance likened to claw marks, as though a
tiger’s paw had drawn deep and even furrows down her pale long
neck. Her eyes were like sparkling black jewels in the shadow of a
blood red mist smudged below her brow, fading into her pale skin
around the high cheekbones, her lips, thick and plush blackened
with a cosmic red. She wore a crown upon her head, darker than the
photon traps of the Charybdis itself, forming large curling spikes
like the horns on a demon’s helm. In the darkness, she was scarcely
visible.

‘…
I can feel
you out there. Waiting for me. Waiting for our inevitable unity
again. They have come a long way to find you. They have reached
beyond the limits of time. Crossed centuries and starscapes all to
give you the tools you need to unite us again. Embrace greatness.
Fear not destiny…seize it! We are not here to write the future,
Malik. The future is determining what we do now. It calls to me.
And it’s time to endure, to transcend, to become the gods we have
dreamed of becoming.’

But it was
her parting statement that gave Vance the chills and made his own
temper start to buoy with blood boiling rage too hot to
hide.

‘
It’s time
for the Second horizon.’

‘
Penelope!’
He cried. ‘NO! NO! WHERE ARE YOU?’

Then, the
image scrambled into static and disappeared. Vance promptly
unlatched the braking mechanisms on the wheelchair by remote and
Malik glided into reverse, toppling sidelong into a painful crash
that carried his momentum tumbling down the steps. He hit the long
edges limp, his head awkwardly angled into the bottom step with his
body sprawled agonisingly across the hard ledges. And Vance hurried
down to sit on the step beside his head.

‘
There are
things you’re not telling me, Malik,’ Vance incensed. ‘Things that
are causing me great pains and I’m starting to wonder why I can’t
get it out of your mind.’

‘
I don’t know
anything.’ He promised, spitting onto the floor.

‘
She sent
those things here…’

‘
What
things?’

‘
Those
Spydrones. They came from Cygnus. I know it because there is a
manufacturer out there refusing to share information about them. I
also know they’ve started doing their own research on these things,
which means they’re watching them. How? Where is she
hiding?’

‘
She’s
dead!’

‘
Did she jump
ship?’ Vance said, ‘did she hop off the Erebus at some point on the
way home?’

‘
You
told me she was dead!’ Malik roared. ‘I don’t
know. I don’t know where she is.’

‘
Sir,’
Adamoss suddenly interjected. ‘The DNA samples in the Erebus
cryonics suggest irrefutable evidence that Chrononaut Penelope Hurt
is indeed deceased.’

‘
Then, how?’
Vance asked again. ‘When did she make this message? What does she
mean by being united again? Why is she talking about the second
horizon?’

Malik knew
then what he feared the most. He feared the loss of control. He
feared change. Vance reached out to his disabled brother but
thought twice about touching him and instead moved away from the
steps.

‘
Adamoss, put
him in the chair,’ he ordered.

Two of the
androids soon appeared, one to collect the wheelchair from where it
had crashed and the other to collect Malik, easing him into place.
The android righted Malik’s head and cushioned it still, leaving
him to gasp in place, eyes rolling and spinning with distress.
Vance put his hands over Malik’s wrists and leaned into face him
close.

‘
Where is
that fucking bitch?’ he scowled, face twitching.

‘
I know,’
Malik gasped weakly. ‘I know what it means. I understand
now.’

‘
Talk.’ Vance
starkly ordered. ‘Tell me this and I can very quickly arrange to
have you back at my penthouse fucking those odalisque meat feasts
again. And you can put all this horrible stuff far behind you, even
live in the Atominii’s Nexus, if you wish. But you will explain
this first.’

‘
She means
the chaos cipher,’ Malik said tiredly. ‘She has the other half of
the code. The part you can’t find. She has brought it here for me.
I can get it for you.’

‘
And what
then?’

‘
You’ll
understand all dimensions of space-time,’ he promised. ‘I’ll show
you how. But I have to see this thing. I have to see it. You have
to take me there.’

Vance
considered this for a moment. He looked to one of the Adamoss
avatars and the android nodded.

‘
You’re
suspicious,’ he noted. ‘But Malik does not appear to be
lying.’

‘
Do you know
what Penelope is planning?’ Vance asked.

‘
No,’ he
whispered meekly.

‘
Do you know
what she means by embracing greatness? Or the Second
Horizon?’

‘
No,’ he said
again.

Vance checked
with Adamoss who had been carefully analysing Malik for any
micro-expressions that could indicate deception.

‘
His candour
is verifiable.’ The android confirmed.

‘
How do you
know she has the rest of the chaos cipher?’

‘
What else
could it be?’ Malik asked. ‘You heard her yourself. She crossed
centuries and starscapes to bring it.’

‘
So, we can
be like gods?’ Vance questioned.

Malik
swallowed nervously, his eyes moving to look at Vance and they
solemnly contained the answer. Vance looked to the android, his
countenance sober and his body language a tall example of his
gravitas.

‘
You heard
him. Ready my ship.’ He ordered the android. ‘My brother has a job
to do.’