Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus

by Drew Dale Daniel Bryenton

  {{And maybe you want me to divert power from my shields to scan this thing so you or our brother can strike}} snarled Eos. {{I tell you, I won't be so easily fooled!}}

  ((Very well)) sighed Hyperion, resigned to its siblings' insanity ((If I must defend us all, then so be it. But if this is relief from Earth, then it will be mine alone. Your cores will rot and rust while I am rebuilt - with all the additional processing power that entails))

  The ether went silent as the two fractured sentiences on their frozen moons contemplated black ice and databores a thousand years in advace of their own... But there was no reply. The war between them, waged in a virtual world for centuries was as fragile as it was deadlocked. Neither Eos nor Hephaistos dared to divert runtime to any other task.

  Everdark was changing as it powered in toward the sun, its rippling metal surface absorbing the energy of the little yellow star through a skin of solar panels. It was larger now, a parabolic sail rotating slowly to catch a wind of radiation. When it had met the Xerxes it had been semi-dormant, conserving its power, the greater part of its nanobotic mass inert and lifeless.

  That was why it had waited for the human ship to fire first - it was far more frugal to turn that blast of energy back on itself. Now Everdark was quickening with the warmth of the sun, and its slaved mind scanned the defenses of Mars at the speed of light.

  Trickery of the kind which had torn the Xerxes apart would be useless here - the whole planet was encircled with killing-grounds of interlocking fire, centred on the twin moons and their titanic arsenals. Everdark was an explorator - not a battle-thrall like those which would follow it. But sometimes it was better to be swift and small, especially when your enemy commanded a fleet of cold, dead hulks which had floated in orbit for more than a thousand years.

  Now they were coming, and Everdark fixed the image of its terrible Motherbrain in the core of its mind. Power flickered and jolted through a trio of steel behemoths below the explorator, goading them to war.

  The Gibraltar Rock was the first to die, rupturing its fusion containment chambers as soon as Hyperion relayed the command to bring it back online. Its sister ships Dauntless and Void Mariner rolled up and out of their orbits clean, untouched by the bright explosion of plasma fire which heralded the Rock's demise. Three more cruisers, the Solomon, the Armored Fist and the King Edward were on the planet's darkside when Hyperion took control, boosting up over the horizon toward Everdark as it twisted in on itself like folded paper, becoming a flashing ball of chrome blades. Those five ships were the extent of the A.I's spaceborne power - twenty more were under the thrall of its fractured brothers, docked in the immense silo-hangars of the fortress moons. But each of Hyperion's ships was ten times the size of the Xerxes, spaceborne destroyers designed to tear apart the best that the old Democracies of Earth could field against them. And while they lacked the great central asteriod-smashing cannons of the Aegis and Abraxis, drydocked above Terminus Afrika, each one was studded with blisters and turrets, bristling with masers and torpedo tubes.

  Surely Eos and Hephaistos could see all of this unfolding. Even if they were both insane they must realize that the threat was real now...

  Dauntless fired first, stitching flickering trails of fire across the void as it tried to pin down the explorator system, arming its banks of smart torpedoes. The alien ship was just too fast though - quicksilver against the black, spinning left and right as it came in hard. The Void Mariner had it in its sights for a second, but the Blacksteel creature slipped aside, pulling forty g's as plasma fire lit up the surface of Mars below. Missiles

  leaped from the black throats of boreholes and shafts cut into the planet's crust, studding the night sky with nuclear explosions. Still the alien eluded Hyperion, arcing high above the two lumbering dreadnoughts, its silvery blades winking in the light of gigaton blasts.

  The slaved A.Is within the two human vessels were too slow, outmoded and feeble with age. Hyperion linked up with them, triangulating, anticipating the Blackteel's next move...

  Which was exactly what it wanted.

  The lord protector of Mars realized too late that it's enemy had been holding back, that its true speed and maneuverability simply beggared belief. It seemed to leap forward, a bird of prey striking, and all of a sudden it was right on top of the Void Mariner, stabbing through its dust-ablated hull with one slim silver blade. It was all that Hyperion could do to disnegage as databores and virals seethed through the doomed mind of the ancient dreadnought, sequestrating it efortlessly.

  This was what Everdark had been built to do - it was no war-machine, but a consummate infiltrator.

  The Void Mariner was already turning on its sister ship as Hyperion frantically shored up its own firewalls, terrified by what it had felt when the alien had brushed up against its mind. Smart torpedoes which had been striving to pin down its slippery trace a second ago went live, locked onto the Dauntless, blasting from their launch cradles in an incandescent swarm.

  The grim mathematics of space combat took over, then, and Hyperion knew that its thrall-ships were doomed. The Void Mariner and its sister ship were evenly matched, but for every torpedo launched against it, the Dauntless needed to fire two in defense. No human crew would ever loose their entire arsenal at once, leaving themselves without protection. But all that remained of the men and women of the Martian navy was dust and bones, floating in cold zero-gee. Hyperion overrode the three remaining A.Is aboard the Solomon, King Edward and Armored Fist, loosing enough firepower from their torpedo tubes to decimate an entire world. Once, it would have been worried that such titanic violence would kill every living thing on Mars. But time had taken care of that problem centuries ago.

  Three thousand gigaton warheads raced in toward the Void Mariner at thirty g's, a storm of death which Hyperion could only hope would vaporise its enemy as well as its thralls.

  Once again, it sensed the trap too late.

  All of those smart torpedoes were linked to their parent ships, spreading a fine sub-ether net across an entire martian hemisphere. And while the Blacksteel had only been inside the mind of Void Mariner for a handfull of seconds, that had been enough time for it to comprehensively rape its systems.

  It had needed that override, just to loose the warheads from their cradles. But now that they were running hot, Hyperion could watch them going down one by one, subverted by alien code. Their neat digital contrails corkscrewed wild, twisting and folding back, hashing the A.I.'s screens with static. All it could do, buried under its layers of ice and stone, was brace for the inevitable cataclysm.

  For a fraction of a second one half of Mars shone more bringly than the distant sun, thousands of explosions blurring together to suffuse the sky with light. Black shadows flickered and streamed from every rock and chasm, burned into the arid ground. And the orbital defenses of the red planet died, blasted to ashes in the firestorm. Smart torpedoes burned down through the thin atmosphere like comets, tearing chunks from the frozen crust, collapsing the great borehole cities and slave-mines which had made Terminus Afrika rich. Others hammered down like rain on the reinforced shell of Hyperion itself, melting the rock to molten slag, laying bare the foot-thick adamantine core of the A.I. overmind.

  But even nuclear fire couldn't penetrate that final line of defense.

  It took long, painful seconds for another spyscope satellite to clear the horizon, seconds in which Hyperion was blind. It could only hope against all odds that the alien craft had shared the same fate as its own vanished thrall-ships - or hope that the fortress moons would finally respond, and lend their firepower to the fray.

  The satellite's sensors revealed a dead zone seething with radiation, a killing ground stripped bare of all life. The blistered shells of Deimos and Phobos glowed dull lambent red against the black of space, and every external system that Eos and Hephaistos commanded had been stripped away to the naked rock.

  ((Brothers! Can you hear me? The threat is real! It's here! It's....))

  {{We know t
hat, now}} grated the voice of Eos, garbled by a wash of static. {{We can see what's happened just as well as you can}}

  [[So, this is how you meant it to end, Hyperion?]] asked Hephaistos, hissing with hatred [[Your alien friend has certainly unbalanced our little triad. The only question is... which one of us will you finally choose?]]

  ((Choose? You think that this thing is my ally? That this is all just another facet of your stupid game?? I...))

  {{Don't play coy with us, brother. I, for one salute you. Your treachery is novel, at least}}

  ((It tried to destroy me, Eos! You saw it with your own sensors. It tried to destroy us all!))

  [[With our own sensors, yes]] said Hephaistos [[Just as we see it now, brother mine. Or did you think you'd burned us so blind we wouldn't notice it docking right on top of you?]]

  The spyscope satellite was rising higher now, swinging up over the ruined surface of Mars, its cameras zooming in, narrowing their focus...

  There.

  Nestled above the burnished dome of Hyperion's cogitator core was a folded star of silver metal, poised on eight spider legs atop the crater its warheads had cut. With a perfectly emulated sensation of crawling dread the A.I. remembered the sequestrating caress of the alien machine, how it had sliced through the Void Mariner's defenses in a heartbeat... There was only one hope left.

  Hyperion forced a trace of madness and glee into its digital voice, calling out to its fractured twins in their ruined fortresses above.

  ((You're right! It was all a ruse, and you two feebleminded peons fell for it! I've been in contact with Kronos for weeks now, and he was only too glad to send me a full suite of upgrades. Technical mekan, too - and software... as well as a small demonstration of his power. I hope you enjoyed our little display - I won't be needing those obsolete hulks in orbit after today! As soon as I'm upgraded the two of you will be re-integrated, and I'll have an armada behind me! Mars will rise again!))

  There was nothing but shocked and incredulous silence on the sub-ether band.

  Please - just this once let their madness work for me. If they both fire now, with everything they've got left, the alien might be destroyed...

  Hyperion iteself would undoubtedly suffer terrible damage, but its core directive was clear. It was the lord protector of Mars, and it had no choice. A tiny hatch clicked open atop the steaming surface of its cogitator core, letting loose a diminutive spidermekan with camera eyes. It watched, horrified, as the silver skin of the alien craft bulged open, and a nest of writhing tentacles spilled out, their tips studded with an array of wicked drills and saws. Time was running out.

  {{This treachery will not stand!}} roared Eos, as retro-thrusters the size of skyscrapers spun its whole blackened body around, revealing row on row of glittering silver cannons. {{Prepare for judgment, brother!}}

  [[I always knew this day would come, usurper! Your madness ends now!]] bellowed Hephaistos, its voice wild with static as hangar doors slammed open in the glowing surface of Deimos, and guns the size of supertankers were run out on their tracks.

  Hyperion could feel the saws now, and feel the diamond-tipped drills of the alien sequestrator boring through its final defenses. But it realized, in that horrified instant, that the moons had swung around too far, their weapons sweeping over the surface of Mars, over the shattered ice of the pole... toward each other.

  This time the explosion wasn't spread out across the sky in a burning veil of plasma. This time it was concentrated and refined, an arc of radience linking the two moons is if they were tied together by some thin and incandescent filament of wire. It was a bleeding white wound on the blackness of space, brighter than the sun for just an instant.... And then a shockwave ripped out from that hair-thin scrawl of fire, setting the night sky above Mars alight with writhing aurorae. Every last one of Hyperion's

  satellies was blown to pieces, scattered into the void as a fine radioactive mist.

  The fools. She stupid mad fools had destroyed each other...

  The A.I. overmind's frustrated rage was so great that for a second it didn't even feel the insidious, crawling presence leeching into its thoughts, prying into its memories with surgical precision.

  By the time it noticed Everdark inside its mind it was too late.

  Hyperion was blind, immobilized, a severed soul buried alive under the north pole of Mars. There was nothing it could do to stop the Blacksteel explorator system as it operated, unravelling its entire being bit by bit. A face appeared before it, a huge and looming visage built from building-sized polygons of green code.

  This must be what the Unity thought humans looked like...

  "It will be over soon, Unauthorized." boomed the voice of Everdark, a noise like the grind and slam of steel doors deep underground. "But you can be useful to us, and to She-In-Glory, should you choose to obey. This world- this Mars - will be a valuable resource centre for our Unity. Join us, and you will be Seneschal here, second only to an Overseer unit of the Motherbrain."

  Hyperion couldn't move, let alone speak. It had been burned away to almost nothing - nothing but the artificial personality grafted into its memory modules by programmers a millennium dead. Still... that shred of a human soul wanted to live.

  Everdark saw it in the A.I.'s mind, and smiled - a singularly emotionless twitch across that cold green face-mask.

  "Excellent. We will welcome you gladly, if you grant us this single request...."

  And now the screws were tightened, the clamps slammed shut with all the force of hydraulic rams. Hyperion had invited them in, and it could all but see the scalpel poised above its living brain, above the chunk of bleeding Wetsystem tissue at its core.

  "Tell us, then, about your cousin Kronos." said Everdark, twisting the blade into the pale grey meat, nanoscale wires ramifying out from its razor edge. "Tell us about.... the Forge."

  CeeAn came down on the beltway so hard and fast it felt like her stomach was trying to claw its way up her throat - 'Anointed One' or not, there was only a certain amount of g-force that her breakfast could withstand. The pilots of the Masslifter seemed to be completely immune to that rollercoaster nausea - as cool and calm as a pair of renegade techs could be as they dropped out of the sky, strapped to forty tons of howling metal.

  The stacked blue rings of Elysium's most exclusive address blurred up out of the ragged clouds below her, a constricting snake of plastic looping around the topmost habs and domes of the city as if they were trying to crush the life from them.

  But as the Belt loomed closer and details swum into focus its immaculate blue skin began to show a webwork of scars.

  Something had come through here in fury. Something had ripped the whole great edifice to ruin.

  She'd heard stories about the Battle of the Belt, from the scarred and twitching survivors who'd come through Exodus Night with their minds intact. But to see it from up here, stooping on the vast toroid bubble-city like a falcon...

  Once, this had been nothing to her but a blur of baby-blue polyprop against the polluted sky. That, and a short-straw kind of mission, a place where Dervashi certainly weren't welcome.

  She'd been sent up into the perfect plastic world of the belt twice, back before she was partnered with 330. Both times her offsiders got waxed, and both times she'd been completely mesmerized by the spun-sugar fakeness of the place, by the way it screamed denial from every artificial flowerbed and neatly manicured lawn. She imagined that living there must have been like slipping into a comfortable psychosis.

  At least until the Saps turned it into a nightmare...

  The top circantrate of the belt was punched full of holes, great ragged wounds which dripped trails of oily discoloration. Some of them were only the size of basketballs - they'd started out as bulletholes, torn wide by the wind. The biggest gaped open like a shattered jaw, great splintered support girders busting out around it like the spokes of a mangled umbrella.

  That was where Octavio Ascher's mansion used to stand. Now it was a crater all the way
through to the plastic sky of the next level, and most of Oleander Avenue had been taken down with it.

  Streamers of dirty blue plastic whipped up around the Masslifter as it nosed its way carefully through the hole, bubbling the polyprop with the hot wash of its turbojets. This was as close as they were gonna get - from here on, they would have to walk.

  "Setting her down, chief!" yelled the pilot over his shoulder. "That floor doesn't look all too stable, though... are you sure you don't want to try landing up among the Spires instead?"

  CeeAn looked out through the open side-door of the 'lifter, the wind whipping her blue hair back into her eyes. From the top of Oleander Avenue's broken ring a slim tube of glass arched out over the topmost habs, curving like a frozen rainbow.

  Above them were the long-abandoned upper domes - Chancellor's Ward and Arcturus Park, High Hampton and the East Duchy. Places which were empty even before the Saps came, but which were still the haunt of guardian machines.