Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

A searing nuclear dawn had burst above the high orbit of planet Amora and from the ring habitat a thousand shocked faces issued up to its corrosive light. For a few nanoseconds the pernicious radiation bled through the station’s surfaces before the dome filters adjusted. It wasn’t much exposure, but ample enough to burn thousands and completely vaporise those in the full exposure. And it was in that moment the dreams of the Kyklos culture turned to sand.

  From the explosion’s epicentre, a coronal shockwave washed over the Kyklos station’s armour in blazing tides, shaking off defensive mechanisms above and blasting away the station’s polarised field potential. Hundreds of starnavis already docked with the spherical core disintegrated into metalliferous segments, fragments of material dragged on a nuclear gust. They collided into exposed domes on the radial sides of the habitation ring, spinning off into space. Then, long range astro-javelin missiles cut through local space and smashed into the Kyklos shield plating, marking the start of a second wave assault on the arc station. Soon, a third salvo slammed into the circular habitats, and again as one of the turbo elevator spokes leading down from the spherical harbour shattered, a frozen string reposed of tension.

  Fires sluiced through the micro-gravity. Red hot nanotube riggings exploded and tore up the vast superstructure, swallowing desperate citizens vying to flee. From the carnage they watched helplessly as herculean slates of orbital debris clattered into yet more exposures, further weakening the material and causing it to crack. Large shells of viscera hurtled along the direction of the station’s centrifugal spin, as others returned on centripetal forces, turning the whole locality into a death wheel. Boiling water spilled out of the reservoirs and flared into the backdrop of the nebula, a faint rainbow set aglow in the spectral vapours. The Kyklos had become a Catherine wheel, a burning aureole reducing everything living to cinder, fragments getting smaller, ground to pieces as the spin increased.

  Emergency escape modules dropped from the huge ring habitat and fled into orbit, chasing the early evacuees. Falling with the debris they lit the Amorian twilight like napalm raindrops.

  Helplessly they watched this from The Cereno, a disaster unfolding in the silence of space. Only their confined breaths and gasps now filled the bridge command. Rynal lurched forth as the initial shockwave spread far enough to finally reach them and passed over The Cereno with a turbulent rocking. Without another moment to lose old Osmond rebooted the power nodes.

  ‘SIT TIGHT!’ He raged, fastening himself into the seat. ‘Full throttle on the retros. Repositioning our orientation.’

  ‘Malla, get to the cabin,’ Rynal told her, taking her shoulders in his grip. ‘Make sure she’s safe and sit tight. We have to get out of here fast.’

  ‘Rynal!’ She gasped fearfully, her skin tanned from the kiss of nuclear light. ‘My god! What was that?’

  ‘We have to go we have to go!’

  ‘The Kyklos!’ She uttered frantically. ‘Jesus! Our home!’

  ‘Malla! The cabin!’ He shouted, throwing himself toward a pilot seat.

  Malla hurried towards the ladder and disappeared into the lower levels. Rynal secured himself in the inertial material and the pilot seat reclined into a laying position.

  -2-

  At almost two million kilometres from the Kyklos orbit, the four assailant battle ships emerged from their force-envelopes. The starnavis slithered in from a pseudo-horizon like warping metallic eels. The long Jackal starnavis began to power down, huge toroidal rings shielding the vessels, relinquished electromagnetic gravmex field-distortions to bring them from faster-than-light speeds, and by half a million kilometres the saltus-carrousels appeased. The huge prismatic machines cruised toward the devastation in a tactical approach, each an immense five kilometres long. They were narrow vessels, frosted chrome platforms, each encompassed by three large and thick toroidal saltus-carrousel rings from bow to stern like a cage.

  The Jackals targeted their diamond shaped bows on the burning Kyklos station in predacious advance. The leader raced ahead, cuttlefish pulses of light blinking across the windowless fuselage. The long machine detached from the saltus-carrousels, ski couplings pulling away from the inner circumferences, folding towards the body. Boosters fed the heavy starnavis forward, leaving the three warp rings to hover in a local Lagrange point. The three remaining Jackals arranged a tactical approach vector, also leaving their saltus-carrousels in far orbital positions of the planet Amora. As they moved, huge conduction points spiked from the backs of the ships, glowing to a heated red as thermal radiation was drawn from the super-hot cores to be purged into space. And as the rods glew white hot they detached into space, shedding the internal heat from the ship’s massive energy cores.

  They coasted forth, ready to destroy any targets meandering from the devastation. Giant exhaust casts cooled, leaving vapours of liquid oxygen behind them, as scores of Arrowhead Strikers sprang from their launch runways and swarmed out to meet with the life boats fleeing from the Kyklos disaster.

  *

  Rynal’s face was tight with anger, camphor beads of sweat collecting over his desperate and pained expression.

  ‘They’re from Sol!’ He barked, turning back from his ship’s display field. ‘I’m seeing deep space starnavis. Jackal Dreadnaught class! There’re four of them.’

  ‘It’s not possible!’ Said Osmond. ‘No! No they must have been waiting here for years!’

  Rynal dashed around to the main bridge console. A multitude of holographic display fields enclosed, gloaming around him and interacting with the dendrites of nanology trafficking through his luminous, opalescent veins. His electric, green eyes dilated to absorb data traffic projecting through the bridge. Osmond glared up at the huge holographic orrery projected around on its digital gimbals in the domed roofing of the bridge, orienting their position in space. Rynal could sense his brother by the airlock. His long antennae merged with his brother, a full transqualia request.

  ‘Raven, what do you see?’

  Rynal was looking at the burning habitat ahead of him through the bridge of their starnavis. In the same moment, he shared Raven’s eyes. He had been glaring at a similar vision through The Cereno’s small skull-sized porthole, affirming their doomed home. Raven saw huge burning embers raining down into Amora’s verditer sky below. The large saturnine Olympian opened his palm where nanology trackers threaded throughout his skin, glowing. He saw there a map projected by the electronic bacteria in his blood, assembling to detail what was going on outside. Like stars they shifted across his skin, from a pale blue to a crimson red as the mortal coil of each life found its final moment. He watched the blemishes of light in his palm; he saw the growing freckles of red spots amassing before twinkling out forever, more and more. Hundreds of thousands of people, a culture gone in an instant, their history, their creations all wiped out forever. Raven closed up a fist as the main mass of spots died out and squeezed the fury through trembling white knuckles. He turned away from the view of his burning habitat with deep remorse. Rynal felt his emotions, he sensed the fury, he had momentarily become Raven.

  ‘I see no more than thee, my kin.’ Raven thought, adding the final word through their psychic transqualia as an emphasis. ‘Death.’

  Rynal retreated from the transqualian merger back into his own mind. Then, without warning The Cereno’s roll thrusters turned the starnavis on to a new coordinate. It banked with such abrupt urgency that Raven’s legs buckled. Vernier thrusters hissed out jets of gas and positioned the bulky ship into a launch bearing. Raven grabbed tightly to a ladder and pulled himself along the rail, chasing it to higher decks where the main cabin was. His ears picked up the disgruntled caterwauls of Malla’s child from near the galley as she soothed its wails with motherly croons.

  He floated over and reached out to her as she settled her baby into an inertial bed. Restlessly, the child’s shrill cries pitched. The baby opened her eyes to set them upon Raven as she reached her stumpy distressed arms for him. Raven reached back and the baby’s han
d grasped at his finger, clinging tight. He could see those two jewels staring into Raven’s soul, eyes like ruby and emerald, her left eye green, the other red. Malla turned to Raven contritely, eyes damp, and her pretty young countenance greying to a nervous pallor.

  ‘I don’t know if she’ll make it,’ she declared, ‘she’s too young for evasive space flight, the inertial forces may kill her.’

  ‘Your child doth harness Olympian genetics,’ said Raven securely. ‘There are no stronger beings than we. Be steadfast Malla. I trust in her wellbeing.’

  ‘You can’t be sure,’ said Malla. ‘Not even Rynal is sure.’

  ‘It’s the only way we can reach the saltus-carrousels from here.’ Raven urged softly. ‘Secure thyself, time is deficient.’

  As he stretched the webbing across her front the baby continued to scream and buck lightly against it, her ruby emerald eyes catching faintly in the dim light. Satisfied they were both secure; Raven kicked away from the side wall and fell over to the adjacent inertial bed. Once there he pulled the webbing across his chest and tried to make out Malla’s fallow face in the darkness. Her red eyes shone back at him, before the beds rotated them in the direction of travel.

  ‘Thy family are secure!’ Raven confirmed aloud, adding along the transqualia. ‘We may depart now, my kin.’

  He had heard his brother’s assurances and prepared for launch. The Cereno angled its nose to Amora’s horizon. Holographic gimbals swung around on the bridge command and aligned with the horizon like the layered divisions of Saturn’s rings. Then, Rynal settled back into the inertial support, in the same moment initiating the starnavis into a fierce acceleration. He pressed back into the material in the high-gee acceleration, the webbing snapped around his body to embrace him in its sticky elastic as the ship raced for freedom. Vibrations shook their bones and velocity pinned them throughout the acceleration. Rynal synchronised his mind with the ship. Vector displays networked through the sensorium of Rynal’s neurosphere interface, imprinting images through his visual cortex, mapping projections his eyes could no longer see under duress of such pressures. He watched the life signatures, sedulously balancing the tolerable condition of his daughter while maintaining maximum acceleration. They were at the peak now, any faster rate of acceleration and the baby’s fragile bones might fatally break. He knew that soon the inertia would taper off as they approached full speed, but he couldn’t get them there any faster. External sensory feedback from the starnavis warned Rynal of the advancing Jackal. Their decision to flee had drawn attention. Arrowhead Strikers darted and weaved ahead to intercept them. Their radiation beams slicing apart the floating pods as they gave pursuit.

  ‘Bastards,’ Rynal issued through the neuro-ligature’s on-board network. His antennae shone as his neural processes issued to the passengers.

  ‘You’re right Osmond; they want this to remain covered up. What are they planning? Surely they can’t know about the Elixir. Surely they can’t know. They cannot possibly know!’

  ‘Nobody knows about the Elixir, Rynal,’ old Osmond reassured. ‘If they knew...they wouldn’t have been planning this sort of assault that’s for sure. The fools will doom life as we know it.’

  A salient and malachite flash emanated at last from the Kyklos axel sphere, shattering the resin-nano-tube structure like a frozen spindle and lighting up the cotton clouds and barren mountains of the planet Amora below. Arrowheads dove into the silent explosion with rapturous zeal. The fires set their photovoltaic alloy aglow as they wheeled and bathed like cosmic vampires in the blood of their latest kill.

  Rynal felt the explosive light through the neurosphere. The super-structure had finally fallen apart. An historic Earther arc station destroyed in a matter of minutes. He needed to reach the Galileo Coterie; people had to know what happened here.

  *

  For John Ripley it was simple; this was a heat, beat and treat mission. Unlike the other strike-ships in the starmada, his was a Solitaire-Class, The Deathwind. A remarkably reliable interplanetary craft suited for duel pilot capacity and armed with the most sophisticated weaponry courtesy of Ampotech Industries. The needle canopy of The Deathwind arrowed sleekly from the Jackal’s launch tunnels, propelled on a body of magnetic propulsion, it raced into the void. Once the launch was complete, the engines fired and The Deathwind soared ahead into the endlessly vast distances. Ghostly images imprinted into his neurosphere as The Deathwind’s TCAS mapped out the flight vectors of his co-pilots’ transponders.

  They cut through the debris field like shark fins. Sleek, arrow shaped photovoltaic fuselages, slipping into fire and litter, yawing through gaps in the drifting debris. The on-board computer mapped out potential collisions and Ripley cruised and curved between ruinous particles, blinding pulses of jets bursting silently from above and below the canopy, twisting the craft through the vacuum.

  ‘Downlink complete,’ said the mission commander through the communications network. ‘Start your mission CDRs.’ She further instructed, ‘I need you to be my eyes here.’

  ‘CDRs online,’ John Ripley reported.

  ‘CDRs are a go, quantics calibrated’ said another voice. ‘Mission is now recording.’

  ‘Maintain optical solar reflectors,’ she re-joined, ‘the Suntau is a spicy meatball and she kicks up some fierce solar gusts. Nothing you wanna get caught up in.’

  ‘Confirmed commander,’ said one of the masked assailants.

  ‘Target any life boats and destroy, apprehend any potential escapees...’

  ‘Commander,’ one of the Arrowhead pilots reported. ‘Racer class starnavis leaving orbit, The Cereno, increasing velocity at a steady percentile.’

  ‘All pilots, target that ship,’ she ordered, ‘we mustn’t let anyone escape from this area to report it. They must be heading to a nearby saltus-carrousel. Find any of those distortion-toroids in the area and destroy them! Scout every Lagrange point. That starnavis mustn’t velox out of here. Cut...her...DOWN!’

  The Deathwind dipped into the southern part of the debris field leftover by the destroyed ring habitat. Ripley channelled his thoughts through a neuro-ligature marked by a series of tattoos on the nape of his spine, a micro-channel for neural information, allowing his psychological reach to manoeuvre and change the behaviour of his strike-ship. He saw the combat sequencers in his visual cortex, a series of codes and abbreviations. He joined other strike ships as they targeted their victims. Powerful beams of concentrated maser light diced up helpless escape capsules. Flashes of radiation stabbed into the burning habitat’s debris field as the other co-pilots asserted their joint belligerence. In their assault their neuromissions merged, they shared information to form a single consciousness known as the Nexus interface. The pilots were aware of multiple visuals; they felt blunt emotional discipline seeping from the stronger and less empathic killers to overpower compunction in the more empathic pilots, who vacillated over the killing of unarmed targets. In the Nexus Ripley felt like a huge entity, able to see everything at once, he felt like a creature beyond human, like the panoptical Argus.

  Suddenly, Ripley heard screaming.

  ‘Wh-what’s that noise?’ someone reported across the Nexus.

  ‘Receiving...audio phenomenon I think...’

  ‘That’s a negative, there’s no audio phenomenon, no radio signal in my vessel, and I’m getting no transmission detection what-so-ever.’

  ‘It’s not an issue with the neuro-ligature’ another said, ‘or the Nexus interface either. I’m running communications through laser transmission, no interference detected. Shit...I can hear too! Oh god it’s in my head!’

  ‘Keep the mission together,’ the commander austerely directed from the interface, ‘target those pods and destroy them.’

  ‘Can’t you hear that?’ said another voice, this time coming through the audio network. ‘What the…what is that?’

  ‘Ma’am,’ said another pilot through the audio coms, ‘I shut down my neuro-ligature for manual piloting. I pulled out
of the Nexus interface but the noise...it’s in my head!’

  Ripley tried to blink away the obstreperous cries lancing through his mind. At high speeds, a mere blink could cost a striker-pilot their lives, which was why neurophasing with the strike-ship was vital. The visual field of the neurosphere revealed to Ripley the heat signatures, the burning ring system, the filigree spins of vector lines with omnidirectional projected vectors and calculations and radiation waves and random debris all interpreted by his flight computer in the four dimensional space of his mind. He was able to see in every location in real-time. He shut his eyes tight, a reaction to the pain that didn’t disturb his cortically enhanced visuals. But the screaming went on and he focussed intently on the formulating ordered patterns of spatial chaos. But nothing he did eased the pain; impossible to focus. It was like a thousand drawing pins had found their way into his skull and learned how to swim.

  ‘They will trick you’ said the commander, ‘they have ways of breaking our morale. Stay focussed. Purge them all!’

  Ripley continued to target the pods, blasting them into bubbles of amber and gold as he hunted down and raced after The Cereno.

  ‘I’ve got a lock!’ He reported.

  ‘Me too, ma’am,’ said another pilot.

  ‘Lock confirmed.’

  ‘Warheads authorisation confirmed. Your warheads are now armed,’ said the Commander, ‘engage the target!’