Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus

by Drew Dale Daniel Bryenton

  Abraxas never saw the vanguard of the Blacksteel fleet detonate in a chain of vivid explosions – the sequestrated dreadnought was blasted to ashes and molten metal as forces able to disintegrate whole cities collided around it. Asteroid Nine-Theta simply ceased to exist, ablated away to nothing in an instant. Even the Motherbrain of the Unity never knew that the Abraxas had existed.

  Zhe winced with sympathetic pain as he watched the whole sorry spectacle played out in one of his optical reticules. Fifty ships out of five hundred – if anything the Abraxas’ stealthy ambush had fared worse than Aegis’ full-frontal assault. And he had only just reached the gates of the R.T. – an immense barred portal which was still blazoned with the rusted arms of the Ashishim. There was only one problem, and it squatted in front of the gates like a bloated sentinel, its tiny eyes burning red as hot coals in a face like liquid bitumen.

  It seemed that not everything in the city was dead. And not every shred of the Adversary was trapped inside the crystallized tomb of Technician Nyl.

  The thing which waited at the Ashishim gates was a Saprophyte – an eater of the dead, slave to the Worm. By its size, and the contorted faces and bodies which made up its patchwork bulk, Zhe guessed that it had been one of the Exalted, those who had welcomed the coming of the great beast.

  Perhaps – if Zhe was lucky – it was cut off from the Adversary now, dormant. If his current luck held, though, it was awake again after seventeen years of torpor, and it didn’t need it’s master to survive. Just food.

  Zhe had no more time to waste – his defenses were down, and the fleets of his people and their enemies were converging on the Earth. Unless he wanted to see many, many more Saprophytes in the near future, he’d have to deal with this one, now.

  DOCUMENT INSERT: MULTIPLICITY ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT

  Revelations 11.6:

  These have the power to shut up the sky, that it may not rain during the days of their prophecy. They have power over the waters, to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with every plague, as often as they desire.

  “Of course, you have to realize that all the plagues and wars and hellfire of the Revelations are just metaphorical – we wouldn't have it any other way. If all of the things in that book were absolutely certain to happen, do you think we'd have bothered with the Reclamation? Do you think, with that kind of future ahead of them that our people would have any interest in our Kingdom on Earth, instead of in Heaven? I mean, come on, people! It's not likely to rain blood tomorrow, but we'll still have to meet our quarterly output quota.”

  Father Zaccharias Morton, Ecclesiarch/Accountant of the Vatican's Monastic Manufactorium Department.

  He came at it fast, unseen, a just a flicker across the dead air, a pair of winking blades in his hands. He knew all about how useless bullets were against the Saprophytes – the damned things were already dead, after all...

  All he knew about the vile creatures came from Nyl – from his meticulous records compiled in trying to capture one. And there was a single fact in those terabytes of data which matched up exactly with the myths of this horrible little world – cold iron would stop them, even if hot lead wouldn't.

  The Exalted was much bigger up close than it had seemed from his hiding place.

  Still, Zhe was committed to his attack, now – the huge lumpen creature had spotted him, and its immense jaw creaked open in a toothy smile as it flowed around to face him. There were hundreds of arms and faces smothered under the oily skin of the beast – fragments of the victims it slowly fed on. They'd been trapped there, rotting for seventeen years, preserved while it languished in torpor.

  But there was only one mind controlling the whole foetid mass of the Exalted – the tiny human head which swelled like a pustule from its hulking shoulders.

  Scarred, misshapen, a thing with black pools of tar for eyes and a mouth stretched out wide and toothy like that of some abyssal anglerfish.

  Zhe leaped, the blades spinning in his hands, too fast for the sluggish Saprophyte to follow. The Worm may have given its favored ones autonomy but they needed its presence to live. And now it was coiled up like a parasite inside the false Illuminatus, encysted in crystal.

  This should be too easy...

  One knife went in, smooth, carving open the Saprophyte's neck in a spray of hissing black blood. The other was aimed for its eye – and it almost got there. Then the Exalted lashed out with its tongue, wrapping it in burning coils around Zhe's wrist.

  It was no use for him to struggle, the great oily loops of flesh only cinched tighter as he tried desperately to saw at them with his knife.

  “Yessssscome to usss, feeed ussssss!” rasped the voice of the Exalted in his

  mind, using the dripping black arms which burst from its chest to bind him in a suffocating embrace. “We knew you would c-comme fffffor the Ark. We – we have beeeen waiting ffffor you!”

  Now Zhe's boots had disappeared into the bubbling slime of the Exalted's body – he was slowly being fed into its boiling depths by a dozen rotting hands.

  “Who – what were you?” he asked, trying to buy a second or two's reprieve. The knife was slippery in his hands. “Can you remember when you were human? Any of you?”

  The sick, heaving laughter which echoed in his head put paid to any thoughts of compassion.

  “We werrre the sssssacrifice of the Ashishim, outworlder. We are a living monument t-to theirrr fffailure. Now you can join ussss...”

  He felt the despair, the self-loathing which came in on the same frequency as that sick laughter, and he knew that it was true. This thing – this abomination was built from the flesh of those who had been left behind. Their sacrifice had allowed thousands to escape – but the horror, as the Saprophyte horde descended on them...

  That would have made them sweeter prey, in the end, and nothing more.

  He was up to his waist now, and he could feel the unnatural rot of the Saprophyte eating away his camo-optics mesh, ablating away his armor. Soon it would reach his quicksilver skin, and then the pain would start. When that happened, there would be no turning back. He'd be wide open to the Exalted, a feast of suffering which would last forever. Technicians of the Multiplicity could never be destroyed – but it seemed that there was a fate much worse. Zhe could suddenly see exactly why Technician Nyl hadn't wanted to subject himself to integration. Not when he could use Zhe as a decoy.

  Up to his neck, now, and the hands were unclamped from around his body, melting back into the black melange of the Saprophyte. He could feel the armor cracking and boiling away, the underlayers of thermal weave beginning to dissolve as he struggled to find....

  There! The Exalted was different from other Saprophytes – just a little more alive than its oily, rotten brethren. And despite its bloated, horrific body, it still remembered what a human being needed to live.

  Zhe gripped the creature's beating heart in one clawed hand, feeling the great football-sized organ thump and twitch in his grasp.

  “No! Noooooo! You musssst be devoured! You mussssssst....”

  But what Zhe must do, apart from become a meal of suffering for the Exalted he would never know.

  In that second the knife went in, just as the seething stuff of its body came up to Zhe's eyes. Once, twice, hacking away the rotten meat and twisted tendons, ripping and tearing like a mad beast....

  Zhe took one final breath as he went under, wrenching with all his might at the Exalted's heart...

  And it fell apart around him just as he felt his aching lungs could endure no more, burst like a balloon of filth, spilling brittle bones and steaming sludge all over the gateway plaza.

  Zhe was left gasping, naked, a skinny little silver homunculus draped in corroded weaponry, befouled from head to foot with black slime. In one hand, the jagged stump of a combat knife, rusted down to almost nothing. In the other, the still-twitching black heart of a Saprophyte Exalted, which deflated as he watched with a sad little hiss of escaping gas.

  He really hoped
there weren't too many more of those things down below.

  At the age of nine, Dravin Coyle was pushed off the swings in the scrappy little wasteland park behind Hab-Block 18a-North. He walked away with his head down, while the jeering laughter of the other kids sleeted off him like rain.

  Seventeen minutes later he returned with his father’s quaint old under-and-over shotgun and blew a hole in the bully responsible the size of a hydroponic watermelon.

  From that day on, his future was sealed. The judge at juve court had given him two choices – exile, or Comp. Div. academy. Even a messed-up kid like Dravin knew that he’d be raw meat in the Pit – so he zipped up his blue boilersuit and started his training that very afternoon.

  Eleven years later he’d finished framing up the rest of those cruel little bastards who’d laughed at him, popping them one by one for narco busts and seditious activities. His chief found the file, did the maths, and sent the whole mess up to Admin for processing, thinking he’d be glad to see the back of his most volatile, screwloose officer.

  The upper hierarchy didn’t drop him, though. They knew raw, vicious talent when they saw it. That’s how Dravin Coyle got bumped up to the Special Squad.

  CDSTS - Compliance Division Special Tactical Services to their friends - were the elite of the elite. Out of the skeleton crew of living officers on the force, these were top hundred tooled-up psychopaths who could still point a gun in the right direction. They were the kind of people who, as children, wore camo paint and brought along buck

  knives when playing hide and seek. In Elysium’s meaner habs this was probably not a bad idea – but in principle it was still creepy. Being selected for the CDSTS was a mark of some distinction on the force, akin to being the first Viking berserker onto the beach during a raid.

  Tonight the ‘Tac (as they liked to call themselves) were hitting it hard, reveling in the chaos which gripped the city. All kinds of random carnage seethed and crackled across the open band – collapsing buildings, crashing airships, running gunfights, massive explosions – but the elite strike-force of the Comp Div were taking the opportunity to settle some fairly long-standing scores.

  They were trying to crack Hab 99.

  Senior Sergeant Crenshaw had put it best, thought C-Tac Constable Coyle. Let the automated systems and the Cyben hold down the R.T. Let the rank-and-file keep those rioters in check – hells, all they were doing was shifting stolen property around from one hab to another. But the Rude Boys, well, they had been top mongrels in the lower levels for a few years now, almost like a little reclamation all on their own. The other gangs in their criminal strata were whipped into submission, and the bigger players were, as usual, sitting on the sidelines waiting for each other to move. Meantime, the Rude Boys had ‘retired’ a number of cops – on and off duty – loudly proclaiming that hab 99 was safer with them as the law.

  Pure bad publicity, that. Fighting words if ever any existed.

  That’s why Dravin and his little squad of Special Constables were crouched in the dark, in an alleyway off Rockwell Plaza. This was the no-mans-land which encircled hab 99, and in the hazy gloom which filtered down light-wells in the metal ceiling the entire ‘Tac force was creeping into position, silenced machineguns ready, night-vision rigs clamped tight around their grim faces.

  Nobody, the Senior Sergeant had told them, would think it was personal tonight. There were any number of perfectly legitimate reasons that the stronghold of Grady Townsend and his band of thugs could accidentally catch fire, or collapse, or explode. Choosing one would be a job for the deskbound slugs back in Central Administration.

  As far as he was concerned, this was all like the swing-pushing incident, on a much grander scale. Everybody in the ‘Tac had the same psych profile as Dravin Coyle, and now they were actually given guns by the Direktoriat and turned loose on the city.

  Now they chain-smoked, and waited, and muttered their little prayers... for what? Any God worth his halo would spit on C-Tac and all its bloody works...

  The signal came through hot, just as cramp was setting into Coyle’s legs.

  A jolt of adrenaline and power blazed through his body as the autoinjectors on his wrists pumped him full of blue meth, and he screamed as he sprinted across the rubble-strewn plaza toward his squad’s insertion point. Scribbles of rusted razorwire and blazing oildrums were the only obstacles out in the killing ground; the only cover as well. Dravin jinked left and right, expecting snipers’ bullets to chew up the concrete at his heels, but nothing came down from the steel-clad cube of Hab 99 except a confused shout, then the mournful bellow of a salvaged foghorn.

  By the time any gunfire came popping and rattling from the slit windows above he and his men had already slid in tight to the wall, their jumpsuits smeared with grey dust. Coyle ticked them of one by one. Clements, Fitch, and the huge, balled-up form of Junior Constable Gormann, his whole body like a clenched fist. The matt-black slab of his standard-issue automatic looked tiny in his giant hands.

  Some criminals, SS Crenshaw had told him, were so bad that the force needed them. Hence the explosive collar lovingly embraced by the meaty folds of Gormann’s neck. A little aerial poked up from his shaven skull, linked back to fire support.

  “All right, men – we’re going to go in hard, hit them while they’re still confused, and dust off before any of those little bastards can link their CCTV into the datanet. The public want this to be the work of some other gang, and the brass want them to believe it. Then next week we’ll have a mandate to wax those poor suckers for mass murder. So, badges off, safety off, and shoot any little chemhead scum you get in your sights. Junior Constable Gormann – you’re along to provide collateral damage. So try to break everything you get your hands on. Really mess the place up...as if you’d do it any other way.”

  The big man’s face split in a blood-curdling grin then, a gash of blackened teeth opening in a cross-hatched nightmare of scar tissue.

  “Sure thing, boss. Gonna mash ‘em up funtime!”

  Dravin shuddered a little – the Junior Constable was a bit much, even by the standards of CDSTS.

  “Clements, Fitch, I’ll take point, you lay down covering fire. Room by room, gentlemen. And if any of us bag Grady Townsend, we split the reward four ways. That’s teamwork, that is.”

  The squaddies mumbled their assent, checking and rechecking their weapons as they waited for the tech boys to blow the doors of the Hab. Grady’s Rude Boys may have been nothing but a street gang, but their bullets were as good as anyone else’s – the last thing any trooper wanted to hear when he drew down on one was his weapon jamming. The radio feed buzzed and popped in Dravin’s ear.

  “Two nine, two nine, this is fire support. We’re primed to roll on three, two, one...”

  The crackling voice was cut off as a slim, four-winged rocket grenade came scudding in over Rockwell Plaza, one of a hissing swarm controlled by the wireheads of the support branch. By now the big guns had opened up from above – scavenged military junk belching out high-explosive shells.

  They’d never hit anything with those ancient bangers – the C-Tac boys were already in place, waiting for the doors to pop. Still, the clouds of smoke and the thunderous roar of guns drowned out the staccato burst of explosions as the battering-ram munitions struck home.

  Fitch was through the door before the last shreds of burning fiber-foam hit the deck, tucking and rolling, going in low as Clements went high, their combat torches snapping on as they quartered the room. Dravin went in at a half crouch, right down the middle, with Gormann lumbering along behind him. The place was cavernous a whole floor of apartments knocked out into a maze of crumbling drywall and dripping exposed plumbing. Dust billowed and seethed in the gloom, setting up grey phantom shapes which twisted in the air under the beam of the squad’s gun-mounted torches.

  Then the shooting started.

  It was Gormann who caught it – the big, meaty target – a clear shot right through one melon-sized bicep. The big man howl
ed in frustrated pain, raking the murk with a blast from his machine-pistol. If he hadn’t lashed out the next one would have drilled him between the eyes – instead it took a chunk out of the doorframe right next to Clements. The three Special Constables hugged the floor, torches off, as a volley of shots skipped off the concrete around them.

  “Fitch, flank them! Gormann, dammit, get down! We’re gonna lay down some covering fire for him, circle round to the right. Switch your headsets to amplify, and maybe we’ll even see something in this bloody dust-storm.”

  But when Dravin flicked the switch on the side of his goggles the complex target-acquisition software built into them did precisely nothing. Glitched sprays of green pixels and jagged lines of static blazed in front of his eyes.

  Typical bloody wirehead shite... lucky those boys don't make our guns...

  Then from behind him he heard a sound he wished he hadn’t – a kind of gurgling, slobbering sound, like a toothless man trying to suck the meat off a bone.

  Gormann? Was he lung-shot? Coyle had heard that noise before, and it usually came with far more screaming. He came up to his knees in the dusty darkness – he didn’t dare light up his torch, but something was definitely wrong here.