Chaos Cipher (91 page)

And Avenoir
clung tightly to him, throwing her arms around Raven one last time
and he knew this was goodbye.

‘
You will
always be the pride of
Kyklos
.’ Avenoir whispered
tenderly.

-73-

T
he Nova Storm was prepped and ready
to go. With a large carriage area the cadonavis was no small craft
by any means, and its streamlined nose and canopy was long enough
to house two pilot seats. The Nova Storm cadonavis had four wings
over lapping, the ones more to the rear were the longest, but the
ship’s main feature were the duel thrusters, long and powerful
engine nacelles reaching from the front of the ship to tail far
behind the carrier section. It was held in place by couplings and
cranes clamped to its slightly hunched back, positioned over the
stars and ready to be released, hurled out and away from the
station’s spin.

Encompassing
the drop-ship carrier was a walkway with a transparent surrounding
wall so that station personnel and Adamoss units could view it
during maintenance and flight preparation.

Nitro and
Raven approached the machine, circling around the observation walls
they gazed on at The Nova Storm commandingly as they followed the
path to the airlock leading into the back of the ship. There, the
large titanium loading door awaited them. Its surface tainted by
radiation burns and scratched from the weathering of cosmic
collisions from different atmospheric conditions.

‘
This is the
Nova Storm,’ Nitro introduced, ‘it’s a cadonavis class combat
carrier. Adamoss has already prepped her, we should have plenty of
weapons so let’s hope all that ordnance training will come in
handy.’

In his usual
laconic manner, Raven grunted, speaking only when he thought there
was something of importance to say.

‘
You remember
everything?’ Nitro asked.

‘
Of course,’
his deep voice growled.

Raven stooped
under the airlock as he followed Nitro into the carrier section of
the Nova Storm and took a moment to admire the ship’s
arsenal.

‘
Doth thou
knowest who shalt keep watch of
The
Griffin’s Claw
and her crew while thou art
absent?’

‘
Adamoss
keeps watch,’ Nitro explained, climbing into the leading pilot seat
and settling down.

‘
And thou
trusts so readily in clever animatronics?’ Raven declared, ‘and
with the same redoubled naivety thou demonstrates trust further in
thy enemy?’

‘
Oh come on,
Raven,’ Nitro smiled, ‘lighten up big guy, we’re friends now. Also,
those guys are in better hands with Adamoss than they ever were
with you. Strange…didn’t know you care so much for you hostages,
big-guy.’

‘
Big-guy.’
Raven repeated. ‘Thy should imagine prudence in distastefully
drawing attention to one’s differences.’

‘
Raven, you
are big, right?’

‘
Indeed.’ He
reminded. ‘I could crush thy skull with my palm.’

‘
So, you’re
the one drawing attention, pally.’

‘
Thou art a
disparaging and repugnant creature, Harbeck.’

‘
Thanks, hot
shot,’ he said with his most debonair smile. ‘See, now you’re
getting it. A little fun and name calling and a few stabs, this is
team building, we’re bonding, big-guy, we’re bonding.’

Raven
grimaced and uttered another indignant grunt as he climbed into the
seat and pulled down the harness. A whole array of esoteric symbols
and holographic layers encompassed the seats as they settled back
and Nitro began working the operations.

‘
Here’s where
we are headed,’ said Nitro pointing to a map projection on the
heads-up display. ‘ATLAS, Advanced Testing Laboratory for
Applications of Science. That’s where you’ll find your artefact.
They stored loads of shit in there from the
Kyklos
disaster.’

‘
T’was not
defecated remains thou stored,’ Raven reminded. ‘T’was a culture,
my culture. Do not refer to it as shit again.’

‘
Okay, sorry.
Just being colloquial.’ Nitro adjusted himself into his seat and
began initiating launch sequences. ‘This is Commander Nitro Harbeck
from the Shield of Spheres requesting confirmation of reserved
launch window.’

‘
Copy
commander,’ said a voice on the network, ‘
Orandoré
Orbital station clearance
granted, window is now open. Standby, two minutes.’

‘
Copy.’

Chief Claudia
Noble’s symbol pulsed through the hologram fields and Nitro held
out his hand to touch it and answered an audio only frequency with
an oscillation graph that peaked and troughed to the patterns of
her voice.

‘
Okay,
Nitro,’ she said, ‘good luck with your mission. And Raven, don’t
worry about Avenoir. She’s completely safe on our base on
the
Orandoré
station.’

‘
She would be
safer in my care,’ he insisted. ‘So, let my hands be sullied in the
blood of thine enemies. T’will be the last time I affiliate my
interests with devils worse them myself.’

‘
I doubt it,’
she said levelly. ‘I’m sending over your coordinates for the ground
base ATLAS. Be careful on approach, it looks dormant but who knows
what security measures it has. I’m working on getting you full
access but I need to reach certain high officials to do so. It
could take time, there’s an international emergency going
on.’

‘
Roger that,’
said Nitro, setting up the Nova Storm for flight and locking the
carrier door. ‘If that place has any SAMs, then rest assured I’ve
boosted the ion-shields to a ten meter range. Magneto-tailoring on
this baby has some purely splendid features, don’t you honey?’ he
asked the cadonavis rhetorically as he petted the flight
deck.

‘
Right,’
Claudia sighed irritably. ‘Good luck, Commander. Update me by
neuro-ligature, when you land.’

‘
That’s if
I’m able to get the Nexus servers up and running when we’re down on
ATLAS, but sure thing, Chief. Over-and-out.’

The window
was cleared and green lights shone around the circular launch
cradle. Couplers that were attached to the Nova Storm’s back
released and the ship eased down belly first out of the cradle and
into the high orbit of Earth. Silently, the thrusters blasted at
the rear of the ship and gave them a gradual acceleration towards
the curved horizon which hung above them until they rolled the Nova
Storm belly down in preparation for re-entry. Raven did his best to
compose himself, he didn’t wish the human Titan to know he was
feeling sick but he wanted to tell him his manual flight skills
were sloppy. Nitro plotted the flight course and sat comfortably as
the cadonavis took them down the rest of the way on
auto-pilot.

‘
I hope you
ate lightly, Olympian.’ Nitro said.

‘
Thou art
ever the jester, Harbeck,’ Raven smiled nefariously through the
silver strands of his floating hair, fangs stabbing down thirstily.
‘Mine feast awaits me yet. And I have not fared the banquette for
months.’

-74-

M
alik flashed his smile rapturously
as explosions tore through the sky. He understood it all now, the
complexities of the Hypermekhos, the beautiful perfection of it. He
was neurophased with it, a machine that existed in multiple
dimensions reaching beyond their own, permeating several realities
at once. That was why They came here. To give him the key so he
could pull one corner of the machine into their dimension. She did
it! Penelope Hurt had done the impossible. She had reached beyond
the limits of their universe, beyond time and space, all by
understanding the chaos cipher.

Malik held
his palm to the sky and watched as the Xenotech’s tendrils lowered
the precious cargo into his hand from high above, stored all this
time somewhere inside the machine’s giant metal head. The key
touched down into his palm, a small rhodonite cube no bigger than a
fist, and heavy too. He clenched his fingers around its vertices
and felt the depths of the machine reaching beyond the visible
three dimensional world. It was massive, falling into realms he had
never known existed, the key was just the tip of the ice berg. He
felt it shifting and it reminded him of Yerma’s haptic tests on
the
Orandoré
station. He remembered feeling those shapes, the four
dimensional ones being passed through the three dimensional world,
the shifting and warping tesseract and complex geometrical orders.
And Mekhos Serat wanted to pilot it into this world.

He held aloft
the cube and in front of him, a large black marble horseshoe began
to manifest. It widened, as though hidden behind some curtain this
whole time and he stepped up to the floating device like it was a
podium. Upon its surface he beheld the complex carnelian markings
of the chaos cipher’s codex, scratched into the machine like
cuneiform, its code vanishing and reappearing in seemingly random
occurrences. And bombs suddenly flared through the sky above,
battering the armour of the droning Xenotech. He had the controls
now. Malik opened his palm and watched the cuboid key shape shift
into a sphere, then sink into a thinning plate until it was a
vanishing wafer, slipping out of the universe. With his hands now
at the helm of the horseshoe device, Malik sensed more of the
Hypermekhos slipping into their dimension. And as a shower of
bullets rained down from the speeding Arrowheads above, a long
black triangle opened up in the sky like a kilometre sized knife
blade twisting in the sun. The ballistics rattled against the
plate, shielding Malik from the potential hazard, and as the
Arrowhead swept by the large black shape, the mysterious thing
rolled and vanished in the sky as though it never
existed.

The wingmen
were horrified. All around them, they reported strange black shapes
appearing in the sky, miles apart and slipping in and out of
existence. Some Arrowheads burst into fire as they collided with
unexpected physical boundaries, and the flat edges of these shapes
cut off the wings of passing strike-ships, sending them veering
into deathly spirals. And pilots ejected, witnessing the ethereal
phenomenon of colourful shapes appearing, surfaces like crystal and
brecciated jasper. In and out of existence they sailed through the
sky as parts of the Hypermekhos complexities passed through the
three dimensional world.

Ground troops
opened fire on the Xenotech machine, a desperate support to the
pilots. Maser-breakers and rocket launchers and hammer-cannons let
loose with everything. An assembly had set up a stronghold in an
armoured tank and they worked together to load a velociter shell
into the breech. And unbeknown to them an Icosahedron shape had
opened in the sky, a depth to which continued for kilometres into
the Hypermekhos machine. During the window of its opening, it
swallowed an Arrowhead in a split second, the pilot screaming with
surprise. And in the next instant the Icosahedron shape vanished,
folding away like origami and reappeared again closer to the
ground, unfolding and opening up the tubular throat to release the
Arrowhead at sonic speed into the tank and its troops.
ZZZYYPOWWWSSSSHOA! Billowing fire erupted from the crash, the speed
and velocity of it throwing shrapnel out for miles.

Malik raised
into the sky on a floating elliptical plate, hovering over his
glorious chaos, perpetuated upon a chrome surface growing into a
wider and fuller platform the higher he ascended. The randomly
appearing shapes cast solid shadows into the crater below, like
defragmented rock chips thrown into free fall, appearing, twisting,
clock winding in and out of reality. And below he saw his brother,
Vance, glaring in horror at the unexplainable transformation. He
saw Vance down by the Chinook, a mere dot from the heights, on
which he now elevated. Then a huge black cube began to render in
from the blue sky in front of Malik. It was twisting, each segment
rotating in Rubik spins. Until the central column faced him and
sank backwards into the cube, leaving a large square tunnel that
led down into the realms of other dimensions. Malik stepped into
the sky, feet supported by a bridge of shapes that appeared before
his toes and vanished behind his stride. He entered the cube,
stalking slowly into the long vertices of the tunnel and the whole
structure closed up after swallowing him, and vanished from the
sky.

Down below,
Vance witnessed a strange emergence of octahedronal shapes come
together, tessellating in three dimensions to form another cube.
The black marble device hit the ground and threw up gusts of sand,
making its presence palpable to a congregation of surviving troops.
And Vance could only stand before the solid object and witness as
one of its square faces slipped backwards into an aperture and
descended down into the cuboid vertices of a vanishing point miles
away, further even than the curving earthly horizon. And he saw the
walls inside the cube transforming, shifting, as though the space
within it was far greater than its boarders. And a platform
descended, carrying upon it his brother Malik, who stepped out of
the cube doorway to face Vance nose to nose.