Chaos Cipher (6 page)

Slowly, the
Jackal Dreadnought tore itself open on its own momentum, billions
of tons of material drifting against the immutably dense object
like a python sliding over broken glass. The Catalyst smashed
through the star-sail beams and nanotube riggings, its position
fixed in space; its infernal surface feeding.

The Jackal
was forced to a full stop as electrical failures flickered and
burned on multiple levels throughout the starnavis where the micro
black hole feasted parasitically within. The radioactive light of
the quanti-magnus shone through the darkened windows of the
powerless Jackal. The parts of the Dreadnaught that were pulled
into the quanti-magnus event vanished forever, and Ripley watched
the enormous starnavis implode. He watched it disintegrate into a
million fragments as strangely shaped fires burst out of the armour
and dropped into reverse, back towards the greedy event horizon.
All that lay outside the influence of the gravity collected in the
fiery accretion disk, swirling down into infinitesimal nothingness.
Like dry sand the Dreadnought fell apart. While distress calls bled
out across the network, evacuation capsules vacated the devastated
war cruiser.

‘
Get
to
The Cereno
!’
Ripley commanded to his remaining strike-ships. ‘Don’t let her get
away!’

‘
Sir, that
device is too powerful; we have to go around the quanti-magnus
event until it dissipates...’

‘
Whatever it
takes!’ Ripley shouted. ‘Whatever it damn-well takes!’

*

Arrowheads
streamed quickly towards their target.
The
Cereno
began slowing down now as it
approached a small field of saltus-carousels, a hundred chrome
rings perfectly aligned and awaiting duty. The damaged starnavis
slid through the centre, slipping down the tunnel created by the
alignment of rings, shielding them from potentially fatal blasts of
beams and throwing off the tracking systems of javelin-missiles in
hot pursuit. Osmond activated the starnavis ski couplings, and two
parallel skis descended beneath the ship as a third reached out
of
The Cereno’s
mount. The starnavis slowed as it approached the end of the
aligned tunnel of saltus-carousels and passed through the last one.
As it did, the three ski couplings sprung like extending wings from
the body of the ship and latched onto the huge torus device. With a
blast from
The Cereno’s
thrusters Osmond hauled it from the assembly and
drifted towards a velox point.

‘
Saltus
connection established.’ He reported to the bridge logs.

Initialising
Gravmex spatial distortions, electro-gravity online. Moving to the
velox point
, said
The Cereno
.

The newly
acquired saltus-carousel quickly began generating gravito-fields.
Conductions of power from
The
Cereno
pulsed through the ski coupling
into the toroid’s circuits, spinning the electro-magnetic
superfluid into rapid oscillations and rotation beneath its thick,
platinum shell. Osmond returned thrust to the main aft, and in an
instant
The Cereno’s
speed increased dramatically, distorting space around the
starnavis.

‘
Velox in
sight!’ Osmond shouted.

Spatial
target confirmed.

He took a
brief moment to look back on Amora and the salient destruction of
his home and he tacitly bade farewell.

‘
Main engines
on!’

The main
thrusters blasted from behind the starnavis, and in a magnificent
lustre, it vanished through the violate nebula, the sole survivor
of a cosmic genocide.

‘
Negative
kill, commander,’ one of the Arrowheads reported. ‘Target’s
away.’

Ripley took a
deep breath and sighed.

‘
Fuck it all
t’hell.’

‘
The
singularity distortions from the quanti-magnus are messing up my
trackers...shit!’ Another Arrowhead squalled. ‘SHIT! I can’t see a
thing...’

‘
The Nexus
interface is down, sir,’ said a voice over the audio. ‘That
Dreadnaught was our main network hub. We’re flying
solo.’

John Ripley
dropped out of the neurosphere interface, changing
The Deathwind’s
cockpit
windows limpid to finally observe the disaster with his own two
radium green eyes. He watched the black hole shrink and gradually
disintegrate in a cloud of molten matter and radiation.

‘
Sir?’ the
voice said again. ‘This is dead air sir. Do you copy?’

‘
Start a
hunt,’ said Ripley despondently. ‘Find them before they escape the
nebula. I want all wings on this mission. Our cover mustn’t be
jeopardised. Grab whatever saltus-carousels are compatible with
your strike-ship and get after them. Once we overmass the SunTau
star, relative time dilation will hold this place to centuries of
silence before news gets out. By then nobody will give a shit what
happened here.’

‘
Copy sir,’
said one of the pilots.

‘
What about
the commander?’ said another. ‘She was on that
Dreadnaught.’

Ripley
watched it burn and wheel around the empty space where the black
hole had been, now a mist occupied by forks of lightning, pulsing
silently within the junkyard strata. With a lugubrious silence he
decided to himself that he would resume command.

‘
Keep to
objectives,’ he stated, ‘round up the survivors for processing.
Find
The Cereno
and terminate everyone on board.’

-4-

S
teps of sterling emerald led the
way in their thousands, from the Yenisei River up through the
infinite spread of conifers, to lower region mountains and the
gates of the abandoned city Onyx Waters. Towering above the city
was the head of one of the valley’s tallest mountains, and into the
rock buildings were forged. They had been smoothed and rendered
over the years to form geometrically precise structures, ardently
crafted by the grafters of their time.

At the top
step, Dak Gibson craned his head and beheld a vast rectangular lake
of great magnitude, a man-made reservoir for boaters, and to breed
a variety of fish. The gutters were a three foot wide opening in
the surrounding perimeter, catching the overspill of water in its
dark subterranean reservoir. One could jump over it with a little
running skip and land in the cold black lake, but to fall down the
drainage space between the basin’s wall and the surrounding
pavement would be potentially fatal. The chasm was deep, overgrown
with thick vines and had things living in there Dak didn’t even
want to imagine.

The draining
water could be heard constantly over spilling from the lake’s
superior basin into the darkness below. Dak gazed at the boats
sailing leisurely in the distance, regarding them as though they
were far-off shreds of paper. Some were anchored around the middle
of the lake, unreachable without another boat to journey with.
Behind their sails was the city, partially carved from the rock of
the mountain, free-standing emerald pyramid structures and chrome
glass parabolas. Onyx Waters once had a population of fifty
thousand inhabitants, yet today, its silence made audible the
frolicking of rodents in the foliage, and the hawk of soaring
eagles on high.

They didn’t
have eagles where he came from. Nostalgic geneticists from the
Ameritropolis Atominii had tried in vain to clone them but the
weather conditions were too violent for their survival. Like the
eagles, everything living on the fringes of the Atominii’s cruel
borders was dying.

Dak was now
one of a growing black Ameritropolis demographic in the Siberian
precariat worlds. Mostly, impoverished black indigenous people on
the fringes and racial segregation lines were getting forever worse
in the police states. Reciprocally, the Precariat people were eager
to recover their communities; the more people living in the new
colonies meant one less person plugged into the Atominii. It took
him a while to get used to the cold but it was easier than trying
to adapt to three hundred mile per hour winds and frequent floods,
famine and the genetic viruses programmed to wipe out anyone
without a medical nanome update.

Dak sauntered
cautiously beside the lake, his spiky short hair and black
dreadlocks swinging at the back of his head, reaching down behind
his shoulders and lower back. He had a necklace around his
dark-skinned shoulders that jingled lightly with wooden carvings
and beads, a gift from the Minerva Meadows. Dak could see Sonja’s
avatar in his ocular display field, it was synchronised with the
Quantic-E device that coiled around his earlobe like a silver hook
sending micro-vibrations into his inner ear.

‘
Can you see
anything?’

‘
That’s a
negative, Foxtrot,’ said Sonja Jenner, playfully feigning her
military jargon ‘nothing on the West flank either, sir.
Over.’

‘
Ten four,
soldier.’ He said with a widening grin, a smile he usually put to
one side of his mouth more than the other, something conscious he’d
learned to do in order to hide his missing left dental. He knew by
now Sonja didn’t care for such things, but the habit was long ago
set. ‘What’s your twenty, over?’

‘
I’m about
East...erm...West something, got a big steaming pile of bear crap
under my foot, over.’

‘
Roger that,
watch out for those Siberian grizzlies.’

Dak looked
across the lake, his ocular relays, the almost unnoticeable
nano-tech contact lenses they both wore, now amplified the distance
to zoom in on his partner. She smiled at him and gave a little
wink.

Sonja was a
slim young woman from the Megalo-Britai. Her father was Japanese
and her mother had been from Anglican origin and although she was
bilingual she mostly spoke the global language of Neo-English. Her
dreadlocks were very long and thick and she tied those at the front
back around her head and over the lower threads that hung around
her bosom.

They wore the
same orange smart suits, optical information sliding and spinning
around the material. The one-suits were spotlessly clean, aqua
phobic sequins and nano-tech scales made the clothing impossible
for dirt to cling to, giving them an unusual splendour against the
background.

‘
Eerily
quiet,’ said Dak, ‘hard to believe fifty thousand people once lived
here.’

‘
Hard to
believe fifty thousand people were killed here,’ Sonja added
grimly.

‘
Maybe,’ said
Dak, ‘I’ve heard when you see the bloodstains left in the caves and
buildings...it’s not that hard to believe.’

‘
Just focus
on the signal, Dak,’ she piqued with a strong disturbance in her
tone. ‘I don’t like talking about that and being on the other side
of this lake alone, okay?’

‘
Why’d you
start it then?’

‘
I can’t help
it,’ she said looking about, ‘just thinking out loud I
suppose.’

‘
Don’t
worry,’ he said, kneeling to spy a group of tulips growing by the
water. ‘I’m right here.’

‘
That’s
comforting,’ she muttered sardonically. ‘You being here or, rather,
there, is not exactly close to my here.’

He hadn’t
seen tulips in decades, and he was quite sure that neither had
Sonja. He wired the photograph to her and a second later she
chuckled.

‘
Tulips!’ She
said joyously.

‘
I know,’ he
smiled.

‘
Beautiful.’
She said. ‘That’s a rare find.’

‘
Then I
better go around them.’ His voice sailed, gently stepping around
the plants, careful not to disturb their growth.

The signal
was growing stronger as they closed in on the city. Dak lifted his
arm and checked the map on the Quantic-W device. The translucent
blue meta-material displayed locational information across its
smooth electronic surface.

‘
Alright. The
signal’s East of our location,’ said Dak, ‘you need to get across
the lake.’

‘
How about I
just swim, huh?’

‘
We’ve got
time,’ Dak casually divulged, eyes fixed on the ruinous cityscape
ahead. ‘Could be fun.’ He added with his slanted smile. ‘I’ll meet
you halfway, girl…’

‘
I’ll meet
you at the city harbour,’ Sonja pressed taking umbrage. ‘We’ll meet
there and find the target together.’

It took
almost twenty minutes on foot to reach the centre of the city. It
was clear now to see all manner of plants pushing their way through
the perimeter gap of the walkways and the lake’s lip, where algae
had carpeted the water’s skin and stained the surfaces of nearby
yachts moored into the reeds were murky green, dotted with
barnacles. Verdure reeds had sprouted between the fissures of the
paving and concrete, chaotically overrunning the once controlled
harmony of architecture and plant life. Dak stared into the grimy
windows of the yacht to spy any signs of activity within, but there
was only a scattering of unused parts littered about in a nest of
papers and maps and powerless devices.