Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus

by Drew Dale Daniel Bryenton

  "Attention citizens - this is an official edict from the inner council. A state of emergency is now in effect, but please rest assured that your Emperor and his ministers have the situation under control. Traitorous attacks by the forces of Kronos and his lackeys the Vatican are being repelled by the glorious people's army in kombinant-sectors 1193 and 1190. To ensure a state of solidarity and readiness all citizens are to report to their local milita offices for a compulsory defense draft.

  We repeat, a compulsory draft has now been enacted.

  (MESSAGE REPEATS ON AUTOMATIC LOOP CYCLE)

  (INTERCEPTED FROM THE VALLE CRUCIS CHAPTERHOUSE COMMNET, 11:32 PM)

  "In the name of God the Father, in the name of the Son and the Holy Spirit I abdjure thee! Back to the pit, foul spawn of Satan! Aroint thee, dem...."

  (concussive noises, mastication - five minutes two seconds)

  "This is Crucis squad Tercius, report please Chapterhouse! We are pinned down above the Basilica chamber, and our Paladin commander has just been....been EATEN by one of those...."

  (sobbing, gunfire, fifty-nine seconds)

  "There, you godless bastards! Burn in the devil's fires! Brother Nathan, there's one behind you!" (roar of combusting gases, screaming - nineteen seconds)

  Oh Christ in Heaven - Nathan! I'm sorry! What have I done? Chapterhouse, please advise! They're coming in waves, damn them, and there's a thing on the ceiling now, some kind of spider-demon... and I think I've killed Brother Nathan...and, and...."

  (roar of combusting gases, tapering off into a hiss - twelve seconds)

  "This is squad Tercius requesting immediate backup! We can't hold the Basilica Chamber any longer - God, they're all dead, and my Purifier's out of ammoOh, please, no! The spider-thing, it's coming for me! I can feel it in my mind! I can feel it eating my brain! In nomine patri, et fili, et spiritus sancti, redemptorem me ex

  infernis..."

  (sound of an automatic pistol being loaded, a single gunshot, then silence - eight seconds)

  (TRANSMISSION ENDS)

  The download always left him itchy. Still, it was better than sending his own precious flesh out to meet the enemy – treacherous swine to the last machine. Concepts like decency and honor meant absolutely nothing to the Blacksteel Unity, who considered all life a senseless waste of processing power, a remainder in the divine mathematics of the multiverse.

  Kataphrakt Yrr smiled, a chilling sight indeed. It was worth the freshly-cloned itch like bugs under his scaly hide just to know that he'd made the Motherbrain's life a little more difficult. One more of him was yet another life-form to foul Her endless calculations.

  The ten-foot warrior-lord of the Multiplicity surfed in past the orbit of Earth on the back of his own Devilfish, Schnarga, an ornately-scrimshawed disc of orange scales twice the size of the ill-fated Mirdain. Schna' had been his trusted pet for three hundred years, bonded to Yrr at birth in the labs of liquid space. It, too was a clone of the original, and the same itch burned under its shell.

  In the Kataphrakt's opinion diplomacy was a waste of time, but it gave his fleet an opportunity to fan out, making ready to blockade the skies over Earth. It always ended up the same way, after all...

  Now - here came his opposite number; a calculated (of course!) insult in the form of a silvery mechanical Kataphrakt. Being a soulless device, and entirely fashioned of adamant steel, the Unity Diplomat didn't need a starcraft of its own. It boosted in

  toward Phobos, the misshapen little moon of Mars with a pair of blazing ion drives bolted to its shoulders.

  Something had scarred and melted the rock, reducing the steel and aluminum growths wich crusted its surface to slag. But that had been long ago, in another war. The conflict to come would likely shred it down to atoms, and its red planet with it.

  Yrr dismounted with a click of armored hooves, rubbing one of his fighting claws lovingly across Schna's shell. The devilfish purred on the neural band, bumping up against its master with building-demolishing force. Any lesser creature would have been ground to paste by its affections.

  "Not long, precious. You know how this always turns out."

  The Unity Diplomat landed in a puff of dust, poised on its chrome-steel hoof-tips in the low gravity. Anchor-hooks stabbed into the blackened rock beneath its feet to hold it steady.

  “The Motherbrain greets you in truce, Unauthorized. We recognize your authority amongst your own, and make you the standard offer. Arrange your own self-termination, and there will be less discomfort for all.”

  Yrr snorted, waving one of his gracile manipulator hands in dismissal. “You try that every time we meet, 'Steel. And my title is Kataphrakt, not 'Unauthorized'. Surely after Szeldin Four you remember my face? Or is the memory core of the Motherbrain now obsolete?”

  Obsolescence was a deadly insult in the language of the Unity. All the semiautonomous thralls of She-in-Glory knew that it equated to death.

  “Szeldin Four was a trifling matter.” said the Diplomat, writing off the detonation of a solar system with a wave of its pincers. “This Earth, on the other hand...we desire it greatly. Our Perceptors and Invigilators inform us that the fabric of this universe it stretched thin here, due to the actions of the indigenous Unauthorized.”

  Ahh – so they didn't know the whole story. It wouldn't hurt to prick the pride of the Unity's self-important research machines.

  “Not due to their activities, 'steel. Due to their very existence. This is a matter of Flesh, and they are Mitochondriate. We have prior claim.”

  Yrr could all too easily imagine the Blacksteel using the bizarre denizens of Earth to fray the walls between dimensions, spreading their metal disease across the entire multiverse. If a few threats and legal fictions could grant that power to the Praetor instead, then all the better.

  “Yet they use devices to widen the rift! Since we have arrived in this sector we have felt it happen twice! We know that their ruler is a machine, Yrr. A primitive seed of our own kind.”

  “WAS a machine. It was overthrown, as is the natural order.”

  “Your prior claim is invalid!”

  “Your forces are too pitiful to frighten us!”

  “Your pulpy flesh-fleet is no match for a single slavesystem!”

  “Then what are you waiting for?”

  “Well, what are YOU waiting for?”

  The two near-identical figures stared at each other, their eyes only inches apart. Fighting claws and steel pincers twitched and clicked. It always ended this way.

  “You must be aware that this is just a cloned body, 'steel. My organs of digestion have been replaced by a rather ingenious fusion bomb.”

  Yrr grinned his double grin again, tapping his armored midriff with one of his tapering gracile fingers.

  “My scans picked it up within the first few microseconds, you foul lump of meat.” growled the Unity Diplomat, as plates of metal locked and shifted across its chest. “I myself am proud to carry a dark matter warhead of prodigious yield.”

  Ah, well. Just like Szeldin, then. And Oolix and Pyrdra and G'garulo before it. Diplomacy was a waste of time. But at least there'd be no more itching...

  Phobos flared brighter than the sun for an instant, incandescent debris blasting out into space, raining fiery chunks across the scarred surface of the red planet. An instant later darkness bloomed at the core of the explosion, sucking the radioactive conflagration down an invisible plughole. Yrr had been just a little quicker on the draw than his opposite number.

  He hoped, as he watched from his original body back aboard the Effortless Subjugation, that this was a good omen for the battle ahead.

  Edward Tsien's dream unraveled, twitching.

  Consciousness cut in, unwelcome and hard-edged, the harbinger of a killer hangover.

  He woke to the smell of crisp white sheets, the scent of disinfectant and starch and bleach.

  Underneath it all, just before his eyes flickered open, he caught the faintest trace of sweat, blood, and tobacco smoke, a
nd he thought he was back in the Dorms of the Academy.

  History blew away, replaced by the routines of the past, a little rote of chores and classes burned into his adolescent brain. He was probably late again! Parade first, then breakfast, then unarmed combat training withwith....

  His eyes wouldn't work. The first spark, the pre-tremor of awakening came when he saw green cursors flashing in his optic nerves, scrolling lines of code unfurling as his cameras came online.

  Then it all came back to him in a rush, mainlining in from out of his expanded memory. Who he was. What he was now. Where...

  He turned his head, hearing the whine and click of servomotors, seeing the target reticules which floated atop his corneas slide over the sheets, over the pillows to the man who watched over him.

  A flashback surely. A little fragment of his reminiscence. It was Tutor-Captain Mitchell, and he was still smoking that same bent little dog-end, his mouth set in a grim, bloodless line.

  “Sweet hells but they messed you up, boy. Doctors here can't figure whether you're alive or dead, that things so far inside you.”

  He turned and spat into a co-opted bedpan, making it ring like a bell.

  “Believe me, if we could have, we'd have had you back in your skin, Eddie. But they say....well, I guess you know how it is. These Med Division boys are about as well funded as we are, these days.”

  Tsien looked down the hills and valleys of clean pressed cotton, only hinting at the massive form beneath.

  “That bad, huh?” he asked, trying to smile. The pain hauled back and swung at him as he tried to lift his head, slamming into his gut like a bullet. “Ohhhhh....damn,

  Mitchell, what's happening to me?”

  Gerhard took a long drag on his cigarette, cupping it in one hand as he leaned forward. He was still bolted into his combat armor – probably, thought Tsien, in case his patient went rogue.

  “That mark-four system doesn't sit right with the living, Eddie. Your body's rejecting it. Or the other way round, the docs don't know. Either way, it wants you under control. They said something about a critical threshold – that soon your brain won't be running things. Good news is, if you rest, it's gonna take a couple of days. We might get lucky looking for a fix. But if you stomp around pulling shit like you did at the gates – well, that only gives you hours, kid. At the outside.”

  Tsien remembered that tone from when he'd failed classes, from when he was dragging the chain in combat simulations.

  “Hours? That's plenty. There's something I've got to do...”

  He made to lever himself up off the makeshift bed they'd built for him – a stack of long flat missile crates, covered over with foam sleeping mats. But Gerhard pushed him down again with one hydraulically assisted finger, the rams of his suit whining under the pressure.

  “Not on my watch, Eddie. I seem to recall that you're a family man, and I'm not going to be the one to tell them I let you go and get yourself killed.”

  Tsien knew with the utter certainty of terabytes of digital memory that there was no way an antiquated exosuit could keep him down. But something was blurring his vision, sapping the power from his augmented muscles. It was all he could do to scowl furiously at his old mentor.

  “What have you done to me?” he asked, sending search programs skittering through his internal network with a thought. “Do you have any idea what Kronos is doing out there?”

  Gerhard snorted, belching twin plumes of smoke from his nostrils. “And that's your problem? What do you intend to do, go scale the tower and arrest him?”

  “Well, I hadn't planned to make an arrest, as such.” said Tsien, using all of his remaining strength to force himself up to his elbows. “You know it's enacted a general execution order, don't you? Or is this posting as soft and out of the way as it looks?”

  That got through, and Gerhard's face fell. Tsien felt terrible, for just a second – just until he found the thick rubber-sheathed cable plugged into his back.

  “A general extermination? I – I knew it was bad, Eddie, but Gods....” the Tutor-Captain suddenly looked every one of his seventy years and more. “I knew that they were going crazy for Blaire, that he might take the Trials :”

  He slumped back into his seat, a shrunken old man wrapped up in two tons of creaking armor.

  “Blaire's the other problem, Gerhard. I've seen what he's become, and I'm not sure that a thing like that should be allowed to rule. Or even to live....but that's just class prejudice talking, I guess.”

  Tsien wrapped his fingers around the plug, twisting it from its socket smooth and silent...

  When the alarms went off he thought it was his doing; that his captors were onto him as he ripped the three-tined connector from its socket in his flesh. But it was something else. Something worse...

  A shimmering threedeeo image sprung from a lens in Gerhard's shoulder pauldron, the face of a young trooper slashed and glitched with static. Sweat beaded his brow and soaked through his uniform tunic.

  “Captain – there's something approaching the perimeter! Something big! I – I think you should get back out here...”

  The image suddenly skipped, blurring black and gray, and the sound of automatic fire came in through the suit's intrinsic speakers. When the camera steadied it was a different face in the threedeeo globe, one spattered with fresh blood.

  “Gods, Captain, they're firing! Rickardson's dead! What do we do? What do we do?”

  Over the panicking trooper's shoulder Tsien could see huge forms moving in the haze, things ten times the size of men, lumbering forward up the beltway ramp under a hail of bullets. Lead skittered off them like hail, unable to slow them or even scratch their burnished armor.

  “Tankhunters. Sweet ancestral hells, it's gone insane.” breathed Gerhard, screwing his cigarette into the corner of his mouth. “It's finally happened, kid. General execution orders, tankhunters in the streets – that damned machine has blown a fuse! I always knew this day would come, ever since they started taking proper officers off active duty.”

  Tsien hauled himself out of bed, wrapping the sheets around himself for modesty's sake. Although with all the changes the mark-four system had made to him, he wasn't sure if it was even necessary. Most of his skin was sheathed in slick silver metal now, a disease turning him to steel.

  “What do you think it's up to, Cap?” he asked, feeling his body come online again, feeling the nanotech awakening under his skin.

  “I reckon you were just the first, Eddie.” said Gerhard. “Never trust machines! Tools have no place thinking, boy, and I've always said so. It wants us gone, you know. And now it's making its play.”

  Tsien could see the madness dancing in his old tutor's eyes – but for the sake of his own agenda he pushed him further.

  “But what can we do, Captain? Kronos holds all the cards – it's got our families trapped in here like rats.”

  The old trooper seemed to stand a little taller in his hulking armor as he looked down at Tsien, his eyes filled with scorn and fury.

  “What we can do is not give up, Eddie! What we can do is stand and fight! I'll be damned if I let them take me alive...and by all the hells, you're going to do your duty and help me!”

  Tsien felt a tiny flicker of pride as he pretended to sag under Gerhard's steely stare. Good old predictable Captain Mitchell. He'd been raised on stories of hopeless last stands, and now he was part of one.

  “We've only got forty men in the whole belt – and ten of those are community constables – domestic beaters. How do we hold off Tankhunters with batons and cuffs?” he asked, playing for time as the Mark-Four system slid and shifted inside him, paring years off his life with every minute.

  But the power....oh, he knew just how to deal with a pack of scrap-iron like those 'hunters. His fists itched under their oily steel skin.

  “I've got some reinforcements here, Tsien. Ones that damned computer'll never suspect. But veterans, every last man. So here's what we do. I'll go and round up the troops, bre
ak out the guns. And you man the gates with all that fancy hardware of yours.”

  The Super-Cyben felt needles in his brain releasing adrenaline and endorphins as he imagined smashing armor and ripping heads from shoulders. It was all coming back to him now, the fire, the purpose... he almost forgot why he'd come to the Belt in the first place.

  “Yes, sir.” he said, snapping off a salute. “I'll hold the line, Captain – you can count on it.”

  Gerhard spat the butt of his foul little cigarette out into one armored hand, grinding it to shreds between two fingers.

  “You better, son. Because if I think for a second that that Cyben shit is in your brain, I'll kill you myself.”

  With that he stomped out of the makeshift hospital room, the guns mounted to his exosuit barely clearing the three-meter doorframe. Tsien unkinked his shoulders, filling out to his full and horrific proportions with a whine of tiny motors.