Kaito saw them for what they really were primitive icebreakers, virals designed to exploit loopholes in code now centuries obsolete. Still – they had to be countered. Even if his own bio-onboard was sharp enough to shrug off such a pitiful assault like rain, there was no guarantee that the sequestrator was so advanced. And if his link to the outside world was broken, he’d have this thing as a roommate for millennia.
Perhaps, he thought as he activated his suite of countermeasures, this would be a mercy. If he had been bound and tortured for endless centuries, would he still posess the luxury of morals?
As the thick ropes of oily muscle wrapped themselves around his arms and legs he let the ice go live, almost feeling sorry for the abomination which was trying to kill him.
The countermeasures had been programmed by somebody with a geek’s sense of humor – they manifested themselves as an actual sheen of black ice over his avatar’s fleshtone skin, a crystal matrix built of chunky polygons. They came up over him like glass armor, encysting the tentacles of the Kraken and sprouting a forest of delicate crystal spikes. This was tech’ the likes of which the machine’s creators could never have imagined – and it hit the feeble virals which attacked Kaito like a flamethrower playing over fresh snow. The tortured screams of the creature reached new heights of rage and agony as its writhing tongues froze solid, the ice crawling like a disease ever closer to its cancerous body.
“You’re....killing me! I can feel it! The monitors are shutting down!”
Now the ice was creeping across its pasty flesh, freezing its slavering mouths open. The single vast eye darted back and forth, still dripping mucous which turned to crystal shards as it met the oncoming wave.
“I’m dying! This....is what it feels like...this”
The eye stopped as black ice closed in on it from all sides, a coruscating sheen like rainbow oil playing across its raytraced surface. It stared directly into Kaito’s own as the disease gripped it, moving in relentlessly toward that gaping black pupil.
“Thank you.”
Then the cracks tore through its skin, through the virtual flesh which it had encysted around itself. The cracks shot out like little hair-thin lightning bolts, widening, shaking loose chunks of pixilated meat already fading out to grey.
There was a sound like a single great intake of breath.
And the thing shattered, the world shattered, and the walls came down around him, curtains falling away from endless walls of whirring machinery.
All he had to do was reach out his hand, spread his fingers just right, and slip them in between the wheels...
Jaq felt the shock as every one of the Kraken’s jackhammer claws bit into the concrete at once. He saw the lights shut down in the battery of evil little eyes right beneath his feet.
As the lamps and the flames of the great machine flickered out he watched its thrashing tentacles stop dead in the air, and then seem to wilt, lifeless, coiling back up around its steaming maw. The grinders and rollers and saws were silent.
A last ingot of glowing alloy clattered from the thing’s rectal chute to hiss away into the dark. Then there was only a ghastly moan, a rattling, choking sound in the gloom like the noise of the living dead.
Kaito groaned and rolled weakly onto his side, his hands making feeble clutching motions as he pulled his nervous system tight around himself. His shaking fingers found a little light-bubble on his cyclewear and popped it on, illuminating his pallid face with a tight galaxy of LEDs. Then he spat out a lump of something indescribable and swore.
That, at least, was a good sign. Jaq had seen his friend come up out of a wetsystems run before, and the dreadful hangover face and bleary eyes were just the same. Too bad there wasn’t any coffee to smooth out the bumps this time around.
“You had me worried there for a second, you crazy little bastard.” growled Hassan as his buddy levered himself painfully upright. “Especially when that thing nearly took my head off. You might want to tell me if that’s gonna happen again.”
Kaito shook the sequestrator pistol off his hand – useless – and the one-shot miracle of ‘tech slithered over the skin of the Kraken and off into free-fall. He looked like a three-day corpse, like that hairy guy in the Vatican iconographs.
“YOU want to try it next time, meathead?” grated the Kayzi, massaging the chrome bumps at his temples as though his skull were eggshell-thin. “I really didn’t need to see that thing in there. Kind of puts me off using this old scrap-heap altogether.”
Jaq grunted, noncommittal – all that magus shit went right over his head.
“So what, we wait for a lift out of here? Your Ashishi buddy already left, about the time we were halfway down this thing’s throat.”
The Kayzi lay back on the rusted composite plating, his black-rimmed eyes still twitchy from the disconnect.
“There’s no way I’m going back in there.” he whispered, and the look in his eyes was enough to wipe the smile from Hassan’s face. “I say we just climb up and out – then we call up a favor from those R.T. boys, ride out the trouble down in some bomb shelter. I’m good for a couple of weeks credit on hard rations and canned water. Things are likely to be a little crazy in the Subcity for a while.”
Hassan nodded – strategy was Kaito’s department. And with Blaire running around up there, it would be best if he kept his face away from Omnivasive’s cameras.
“So we take a vacation deep downtown. What happens after we get b...”
His mouth kept moving, but the words were drowned out by a noise so vast it came in through his bones, leaving his eardrums out of the loop. The pit shuddered and heaved as girders and plates sheared away from above them, falling in slow-motion to rattle and slam off the concrete walls. One or two punched into the tough hide of the Kraken itself, sending up showers of incandescent sparks.
One look up the shaft was enough to convince them both of the worst. The Valley View mall had stood up to a lot of punishment in the last couple of hours – war and fire and worse. Now the tormented structure was coming loose all over – hawsers snapping like twine, bolts shearing away, welds tearing asunder. Far above, up through a tangle of twisted girders and sparking cables the roof of the mall split open, and flames licked up toward the low ceiling of clouds. A dirigible laden down with immense twodeeo screens caught the full brunt of the explosion, igniting like a paper lantern as its thin plastic gasbag flashed into flame. Flickering rags of molten LCD matrix hung from its blackened skeleton for a second – the laughing face of Octavio Ascher. Then it fell from the sky, broken, hammering into the shell of the Valley View with a sound like a death-knell.
Hassan saw the mooring antenna from the airship’s nosecone come down the shaft like an impaling spike, whispering through the smoke, miraculously missing the snarl of broken masonry and wire which choked its concrete throat. It hissed past into the depths while the big biker watched with a mixture of awe and horror. Kaito, ever the practical one, was busy down among the Kraken’s eyes, a rusty old screwdriver clutched in one hand. Jaq recognized it as the one he’d been given by poor little B-Zerk, what seemed like weeks ago.
“Hells, Hassan, are you just gonna watch the fireworks until something brains you, or are you gonna help me with this hatch?” yelled the Kayzi over the cacophony of sundering steel and concrete. “C’mon, get your back into it!”
Jaq stooped to where Kaito was working, feverishly pulling the screws from a painted-over access hatch. Sure enough, there were two inset handles cut into the scarred metal. He planted his feet as sparks and ashes fell like rain around them both, and wrapped his fingers tight around the rust-scabbed steel.
“I thought you said...you didn’t....want to go back....in there!” he grunted, shifting the slab from side to side, sending up a spray of powdered rust. “That’s got it!”
With a sudden lurch the ancient hatchway came open, popping up on four telescoping rails to let loose a foetid exhalation of stale air. Hassan peered inside as Kaito wedged it open, jamming B
-Zerk’s screwdriver deep into the mechanism. A ladder disappeared down into the gloom, a warm and oily chasm which echoed with the sound of thumping machinery.
He nearly lost his footing and fell in as the whole city shook, sending another shower of debris down the pit to shatter and thunder all around them.
“See, that’s the kind of thing that can change a person’s mind.” said the Kayzi dryly, swinging his legs over the edge and onto the ladder. “I’ve got all the schematics in my head, Jaq, and this thing is pretty much invulnerable. Which I can’t say for your skull, no matter how thick it is....are you coming, or what?”
Hassan scowled, squeezing his huge frame down the hatch after his friend. “Just pull the screwdriver out when you’re inside. It’ll seal itself.” came Kaito’s voice out of the dark.
“Sure, sure – lead on, why don’t you!” muttered Hassan, working the little tool
loose with his chrome fingers. “You want me to carry your goddam luggage while I’m at it?”
Then the hatch clanged shut, and darkness swallowed him up. Bolts rammed home, locking them in with a horribly final clicking sound. Jaq sighed, fumbling with one boot for the next rung of the ladder. Hopefully there’d be some emergency rations inside this damnable thing – perhaps even some medicinal alcohol. It couldn’t be all bad news...
Outside, a support girder the size of a semi-trailer sagged and bent, twisting and cracking away from its mooring bolts, sending an avalanche of concrete chunks and broken metal cascading down the pit. The sounds of the Valley view’s death throes were muffled by the thick composite armor of the Kraken – a hideous chorus of rending and tearing and screams.
Then it gave, and even the sound was torn apart, riven by the deep bass rumble of vast destruction.
Tons of debris slithered down the side of the Last City, an artificial rockslide, plowing whole neighborhoods under as it went. Looters and rioters, R.T. gunjacks and Comp Div troopers were buried together as the Mall died, taking a swathe of the borderlands and a slice of the Celestial Kingdom with it as it cut a path down to the oily waters of the Atlantic.
Tons of broken rubble piled up over the Kraken, denting and scarring its sncient hide and smashing its searchlights dark. Its lifeless mechanical tentacles were tangled up with twisted steel and smoldering wires, a choking plug of debris hundreds of feet thick.
Inside its belly, sweating as they climbed, Hassan and Kaito were buried alive.
The years had been unkind to Kronos.
None of its precious specimens must ever know, but its power had become far less than absolute as rust and decay took their toll.
Every year there were less and less acolytes trained to repair its labyrinthine insides, and every year there were less crucial parts, less wire and silicon and steel to spare.
Where once the guardian of Elysium had been omniscient, with a billion robot hands slaved to its seething mind, now it was a shadow of itself, only able to concentrate on a paltry ten or twenty tasks at once.
It had given so much of itself to the Forge...
Too much, perhaps... but Kronos hadn't been programmed to emulate emotions as foolish as regret.
Hence, of course, its ever-growing reliance on personality constructs torn out of the wetsystems.
Now even those had failed. The Cyben weren't enough. Even its human thralls weren't nearly enough. Kronos had no choice but to lash out with every last mekan and slaved war-droid in its arsenal.
Swift brutality was the only option - because if Kronos' mind frayed any further the machine which sustained it might suffer a catastrophic systems crash. Inside its great cogitator core dials pushed into the red as lights flickered and died one by one...
Luckily flesh was no match for steel.
Wherever the rusted war-machines went they drove the rioters before them in howling, screaming waves, reaping the slow and the sick and the old with blades and cannons.
The few hard-bitten commandos of the Reclamation who still held out against Kronos' army were being picked off one by one by things the world had thankfully forgotten – thing that the machine had hoped to never revive again after the global holocaust had all but destroyed humanity.
Some were gigantic, Tankhunter mekan and Demolishers with guns for faces, things which were meant to be unleashed on cities from the air, unfolding from their drop-cocoons to cut bloody swathes through whole neighborhoods. Others were infinitesimal killers, insects of steel and carbon fiber which could paralyze with a sting dipped in toxin, or even enslave the bio-onboard systems of their prey with cruel databores in their needle-tipped feet. Yet others made up for their rusting obsolescence with sheer weight of numbers, steamrolling over battalions of rioters and R.T. warriors in a clicking, whirring advance which left nothing alive behind it.
And with the Chrome Ark on shutdown, its power hoarded by a Illuminatus insane with fear, the machines marched unopposed.
The crude weapons and fists of the subcitizens - many of whom were only out for what they could steal in the wholesale sack of the city – were no match for military hardware, no matter how many centuries out of date. At least the Cyben, grim as they were, had been designed to uphold the rule of law. The things which Kronos dredged up from the secret chambers and long-forgotten storage tombs beneath the city were made for war, often blasting each other to pieces in an excess of electronic fury.
It was brutal - but it was efficient. Looters and rioters, traitors and R.T. zealots, followers of Simeon Blaire and Pope Joan and the Confucian Emperor - all of them were swept away before the storm.
Part of Kronos - the Devil’s Advocate program which perched on its virtual shoulder - whispered that Simeon had a right to attempt the great Trials, no matter how he had ascended the bloody hierarchy of the Game. By fair means or foul, he had proven himself to be a consummate predator. If he pulled through, against all odds, then the blue-ribboned malcontents who fought for him would be patriots. If he shared the fate of Lord Aristotle Reilley, they’d be nothing but a smear of charcoal and grease across the treadplate.
And if Octavio Ascher thought that he was playing the system by championing young Blaire's cause, he'd be in for a world of disappointment...
Kronos turned its attention to a lurching camera-feed, the cybernetic eyes in the head of a giant warmekan, striding down the centre of the Transdome Highway with its immense cannon arms swinging ponderously at its sides. There was time, now, for the machine to take care of some loose ends – to indulge in a little humanity. It had been built to emulate emotions, to share the condition of its makers. That’s why it was able to know the pricking of frustration, and the joy of revenge.
Up in the pale plastic world of the Belt, Kronos’s currently most hated living thing laughed as he watched the city come apart at the seams. The twitching chunk of flesh named Direktor Octavio Ascher was slated to die tonight – although no doubt he had some kind of tedious scheme in mind to prolong his existence. To think that mere hours ago Kronos had praised his resourcefulness!
No matter – the hulking war-mekan could be spared, now that the riots had been suppressed. Octavio Ascher was smart, certainly – but no amount of guile would save him from an entire war-force of city-leveling automatons bent on his destruction.
As the lumbering colossi swung about, cutting up a switchback and falling into stiff formation behind their leader, the machine caught sight of a capering human figure, dodging the piledriver feet of the tankhunters, brandishing an expensive longrifle as he ducked and weaved. The man was well past his prime, no battle-hardened R.T. gunjack, but there was a furious light in his eyes and a bloody bandanna cinched tight around his head.
With precisely emulated shock Kronos recognized Centurion Benoic, a dry old policy analyst from the Direktoriat.
Let him come along, thought the machine. Tonight it felt a little empathy for the obsolete, after all...
Over a thousand years of vigilance and planning, and it had come down to this - rusted machines, insane perso
nality constructs leeched from its precious Forge, and even human beings doing the work of its lost sub-totalities. The city must never know. Faith was powerful, but paper-thin, and if any of them realized how far Kronos had fallen...
Now came the hardest part. Now it would have to reduce itself even further to contain the infection of the Worm. Vast banks of switches flickered before Kronos' eyes, each one connected to a live sector of artificial brain tissue. If the otherdimensional disease were to get inside then all those years would have been for nothing. It may have only been a machine, a pseudocerebrate, but Kronos still felt a stab of fear as it cycled the access codes and shut the first switch. Part of it died then, narrowing its mind even further than years of decay had already done. And that was only the first... there were fourteen hundred more to go...
Simeon had been waiting all his life to hear that mocking voice come up out of the dark.
Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus Page 7
