Chaos Cipher (85 page)

-69-

K
yo lay in the dimly lit cell.
Another mouldy, stinking mattress coated in blankets stained with
dry blood that no matter how often was washed just never seemed to
give up the stains. He was in a large warehouse, his cage one of
many below strips of light that cast the black zebra shadows onto
everything below the obscurity of the steel bars. And he saw moths
batting around the lights, circling blindly in hopeless search of
the moon’s light. Distantly, he could hear laughter, the more
liberated inmates chortling and japing, the buzz and whirr of
motors and electrical gadgets resonating in the
workshops.

Kyo turned in
his sleep. His heart rate was up again, beating at the inside of
his bruised ribs.

He almost
felt the agony again as he desperately tried to defend himself in
his nightmares. He’d wake, twitching and wrestling with himself.
Yesterday, they had thrown him into a boxing ring with some other
sprite young fighter. He didn’t win, but he didn’t exactly lose
either. It was nothing personal, he’d felt bad for hurting the
other guy as much as he did. But Kyo sensed the feeling wasn’t
mutual. Nobody feels bad for a gene-freak. Here, Kyo would have to
fight harder and harder. He’d have to be tougher than Hattle,
wherever the hell he was. Maybe they killed him.

He had more
nightmares as the evening wore on. The slapping sound of knuckles
flapping against burst lips. He remembered the blinding flash that
happens when your brain gets nudged from the heavy impact of a
punch and the hard smack of the floor where the warm smell of
asphalt and grit and sweat is all that’s there to cushion your
fall. Kyo rolled and tussled, wrestling with his blankets, his
bruises aching, old wounds opening up in the night, bleeding onto
his pillow.

He woke to
the sound of metal scratching across the floor one night and in a
panic, he scurried to the far end of his room in a cold sweat. Two
armoured guards were walking slowly, leading a person between them.
They were moving gradually, as though the prisoner they were
guiding to a cell was elderly. Maybe his ankles were tied up, Kyo
thought. But no. He knew his face the moment it came into the
light.

Hattle!

He watched
nervously as they walked Hattle by. He hadn’t even noticed Kyo in
his prison cell. They stepped him inside and lay him on his back,
closing the gate with a heavy slam. The armoured guards marched out
of the facility, the buzz of another electronic gate sounding from
somewhere deeper in the darkness, further away where cold air
howled into the corrugated facility. The crash of cross-wire
fencing could be heard as the footsteps gradually faded away. Kyo
hurried to the front of his cell.

‘
Hey!’ He
called over, trying to keep his voice low. ‘Hattle! It’s me!
Hey!’

But there was
no response. Hattle didn’t even budge. And Kyo suddenly became
aware of motion in another cell just beside his. It was dark there.
And in the darkness something was moving, and Kyo whimpered as grey
and scabbed fingers coiled around the bars near his bed, just
breaching the boarder of light. And faint features shifted behind
the bars, eyes that shone reflections back at him. Kyo grabbed his
bed and pulled it into the middle of his cell, scarpering as far as
possible from the reach of the unknown prisoner. And he curled up
in the furthest corner and wrapped himself up, whispering comforts
to himself again and again.

‘
They’re
coming…they’re coming… okay Kyo…everything’s alright…they’re
coming….
’

He watched as
the grizzly grey hand reached out to him and littered a small
crumpled piece of paper to the floor before retreating into the
darkness. Kyo stared at the paper, he saw scribbles of writing on
it and blotches of dry blood but he dared not reach for it. He
dared not read its horrible message. Kyo crammed his eyes tightly
shut and pled for his friends.
Please
hurry.

*

Vilen Krupin
had taken a long shower in his private room on the Perigrussia
Skybus. Today was a big day and he intended to look his best. An
associate and business partner was visiting, someone he both
admired and feared. But Krupin knew how to keep on the individual’s
good side. Since meeting him, in fact, Krupin’s own business
ambitions had done nothing, if skyrocket.

He’d been
hoping to present Kyo as a new project to see if the investor would
ready him for military training, but so far the kid had been
uncooperative with fighting. He was beginning to wonder if he
should have broken Hattle’s ribs after all, since he now had no
official back-up fighter in case his client didn’t like the
gene-freak. Kyo was starting to look thin and undernourished as
well. Soon, they would have to force feed him. If they weren’t
interested in Kyo, then Krupin wouldn’t mind personally jamming the
feeding tube down that little bastard’s nose himself. Ever the
optimist, Krupin was still hopeful. If anything, he would get
something out of that kid, even if it meant sending him to the
Encybleron cyber-bio neurology labs. Who knows what those
unpredictable malfunctioning low-budget Synthians would do to
him.

Krupin headed
up to the main watch-tower in his best suit, wheezing and climbing
a flight of steel stairs with fleshy porcine hands plucking at lead
rails and gantries. He climbed to the top where the view was good.
He wore a long black jacket with a right side half-long extension
stylishly reaching to the knee, breaking up the symmetry of the
coat and showing more of one leg than the other. His pants were
black and neatly pressed, the souls of his shoes pulsing under the
pressure of each step. With a high collar white shirt and black
tie, he finally donned low energy jewellery, which clung to his
spine and powered segments of his suit with soft tones of colour
that matched his mood, changing like a chameleon. Krupin frowned as
he noticed a large bird of prey swoop down and land on the
watch-tower’s roof. Settling on a satellite dish, she crowed into
the sky three times and he grimaced at the animal, wondering if it
would shit on his suit, as he passed under it.

Cedalion
followed Krupin stolidly as he entered the watch-tower. A guard
handed Krupin a pair of binoculars and he curled his chubby fingers
around the chrome black device and entered the main surveillance
room. Through the window he, spied a Chinook hovering closer. The
camp’s alarm systems began to resonate loudly around the court
yard, scattering people training there to arrange into assembly
positions, as magnetic fields prepared to deactivate the EMP’s into
dormancy. The stirring engines of the approaching Chinook grew
louder, and as it passed Cedalion arched her wings and soared from
the watch-tower, unsettled by the hot sirocco. The engines directed
long lilac flames towards the ground and the machine came gently to
a touchdown on one of the camp’s landing platforms beside the
Perigrussia Skybus.

Once the
struts and wheels were grounded, the carrier’s rear door dropped
open with troops readily disembarking. Clad in high-tech military
armament, photo-diffraction and nanological Shear-Phasing armour
padded to their guts and chests, they marched orderly into the
yard. With their helmet visors synchronised to their ocular lenses,
they analysed the prisoners, clocking potential threats. They
carried smart rifles slung around their shoulders and yomped in an
informal fashion through the court yard, sizing up the disciplined
and orderly camp trainees. Some rested their rifles on their
shoulders, others rested them beside their leaning legs and they
scattered about, some squatting, waiting confidently, lower
mandibles, grinding, masticating on gum.

Krupin ambled
along the gantry above as the leader was just stepping out of the
Chinook to join the soldiers on the yard. He was a tall and lean
man, powder white skin with a bald head and a sour face. His thin,
almost colourless lips were drawn out only by a tattoo that ran
over his chin and carried tribal designs down the middle of his
neck like a rail-line somewhere beneath his white, neat collar and
presumably over his chest. The pale lank man wore a black,
tailored, luxury vicuña suit which had a white strip vertically
coloured down his centre from collar to groin, following his spine
to return to collar on the other side. The eyes were pure black,
like polished obsidian pearls hampered within the blinking lips of
his hairless eyelids.

The creature
wore black leather gloves and polished black shoes that seemed to
stay clean even as he stepped over the snaking muddy power cables
strewn through the courtyard.

‘
Good to see
you, B’Two’O,’ Krupin shouted down.

The thing
turned its head to find Krupin and didn’t respond. B’Two’O seemed
to be frozen in place like some insouciant Buddhist strolling
through his unabated reality. It always alarmed Krupin. He was
never sure exactly where those black, uniformed eyes were
looking.

‘
I trust your
flight was good one, no?’

‘
Most
comfortable,’ said B’Two’O at last, his voice fair and
level.

‘
Good,’
Krupin was nodding with slight trepidation.

B’Two’O
turned his attention on the assembly of men stood attentively and
well-spaced in the yard, despite the light spills of rain. The
alarms began to once more signal around the camp, sirens bleating
as fulvous lights rotated to caution the personnel that the
magnetic fields were powering up again.

Generation
five Titans like B’Two’O were the Atominii’s replication of an
Olympian Genetic, only with cybernetic upgrades. They were still in
test phase. Since the Olympian uprising, a century or so ago, the
Atominii Eternals weren’t keen to experience another, so these
models are still being slowly fed into the hardlands outside the
Nexus interface in controlled and manageable numbers. They
delighted in pain. Their own pain as well as the pain of others.
And he knew well from experience that B’Two’O’s pain tolerances
were extraordinary. Krupin had seen him once burn off his fingers
in a bet one drunken night in Singapore. He’d laughed it off and
grown them back just two days later, fully forged fingers ready to
burn off another day.

‘
Have you
been keeping these blood bags healthy, Vilen?’ B’Two’O habitually
inquired, ‘are they of much use to you or not?’

‘
They’re
perfect,’ said Krupin happily. ‘The men are all happy here, they’re
fighting strong.’

‘
You’re all
much better here than on the streets, aren’t you?’ B’Two’O called
out rhetorically to the assembly of people. ‘This one,’ he pointed,
‘this one was the last one I brought to you, isn’t he?’

There stood a
young man, hair shaven and shoulders strong and broad, his nose up
as he stared ahead in a disciplined trance. ‘He was the programmer,
wasn’t he?’

‘
He was
programmer, yes,’ Krupin nodded, leaning on the rails of the gantry
above.

‘
Imagine...from useless hacker to a hacked useful member of
society.’ And B’Two’O walked along the line of faces until he was
satisfied.

‘
Is the
gene-freak among us?’ he asked.

‘
That one is
special,’ Krupin offered a wide smile, pointing over to a large
metal facility in the yard. ‘Let me show you.’

*

Krupin led
B’Two’O down the stygian murkiness of the prison halls, through the
several caged gates which opened with the jingle of metal keys as
the guards took to each gate lock attentively.

When they
arrived at the cell Kyo retreated to the back of it, curled in his
blankets, his one eye swollen over with bruising. He was gasping
for breath, insipidly glaring at Krupin from his good eye. The
cell’s gate swung open and Krupin entered.

‘
Still not
eating?’ he asked, looking down at an apparently scattered mix of
soup and dry bread.

Kyo glowered,
a mix of fear and hatred, but he didn’t answer. He then became
aware of B’Two’O’s presence. The lank shadow bowed beneath the gate
and entered the light, its fearsome expression sending pure fear
through Kyo’s bones. He backed all the way up against the far wall
as B’Two’O came face to face with the boy and placed down a small
black suitcase. He had moved like he was floating, those endless
black pits returning Kyo’s own gaze. And B’Two’O allowed a
harmonious smile to inch widely over his thin pastel lips, an
unfitting and unsettling smile for his otherwise sinister
demeanour.

‘
Have these
men been treating you badly?’ he asked benevolently.

Kyo hung his
head forward, breathing heavily, his good eye darting suspiciously
between Krupin and this new tall and vacuous stranger. B’Two’O
realised something was on the floor, a piece of paper posted from
the cell beside Kyo. The creature stared into the darkness as
though he could make out the person on the other side and the
prisoner turned on his bed, pretending to sleep, pretending he
hadn’t seen the fearsome apparition of Krupin’s
clientele.