-13-
He’d named her Cedalion. Each time she took to the sky he saw through her eyes, the colours human eyes were unable to catch, the magnetic waves, the urinous stains of animal tracks plotted like radium spills through the dark and violate woods. This transqualia was for him only, the animal would never experience what Artex Valdek could see or hear or taste or touch.
The animal would never know his thoughts. It would know little beyond the basic commands, as no human experience would ever upload to her sensorium. Rather, the eagle’s sensory patterns were downloaded to his basic neurophase and he would borrow her eyes. Sometimes, he could feel the air bursting through her feathers and it would translate as a strange stroking on his shoulder, sometimes more disturbingly as fingers clawing at his skin depending on the quality of the neuro-ligature. For long durations of transqualian flights, Artex would leave the connection, but would dream in ultraviolet. Byzantium and palatinate washes hung dense below a rich eminent flash of screens constant and phlox. Beneath it, mercurial shades, spills of chartreuse glowing like uranium ore in irregular pools around the blackened expanse, the occasional white and red throb of body heat pulsing below like a faint star. Oh yes, he dreamed her sights, he dreamed her daily voyage, her visions made ever more prescient since he had his own eyes to contrast it with. The dreams grew ever more intense the longer he flew with her.
Cedalion had been tracking movement from the high altitudes, frightening other birds and predators from the runways and flight paths of V-TOL and SkyLark.
But it was not the usual and innocuous bird of prey that concerned Artex tonight. Cedalion saw blood in the fields, freshly spilled and hot.
The wounded victim was veering through the trees and brambles, steered towards the villages in the late evening where the dusky light still bloomed. Artex wondered if this hurried individual had seen the enormous dome despite the optical camouflage, or if it was something he’d heard instead. Whatever caught his attention, he was moving fast and jadedly.
‘Movement,’ Artex Valdek said into the collar of his large trench coat.
‘What is it, number five, sir?’
‘B.E.V confirmation,’ the mercenary detailed with a visual lock still on the maimed individual. ‘Subject is critically wounded and may need medical assistance. Minimal threat, but stay frosty anyway. He’s heading from the West, South, West position.’
‘Copy, Artex. Moving out now, sir. Over.’
*
By the time he reached the hospital, they had brought him in on a stretcher, gasping and clawing at the side restraints. His hair was short and clotted with blood and his eyes were mink and wild, spinning with shock. Deliriously he looked around, sucking in deep breaths through his teeth.
Sonja first noticed the gaping head wound, and then quickly discovered more. She worked with two other doctors to cut away his military clothing. There were devastating lacerations on the young man’s skin, deep and bleeding and slightly cauterised. He had a compound fracture in his right arm that looked urgently in need of attention, and a dislocated shoulder. Infusion guns pumped sedatives into his bloodstream while they operated. Somebody gave him an oxygen mask and Sonja worked to keep him conscious.
‘Take my hand,’ she instructed. ‘That’s it, you feel dizzy, right? Are you dizzy? Just squeeze my hand and stay with me, put strength into it. That’s good.’
‘The…they’re out there!’ He heaved, his dull voice fogged in the face mask.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Fimble,’ he managed, blinking as he stared ahead.
‘What happened to you Fimble? Who’s out there?’
His eyes began to drift, moving away into space.
‘Stay with me Fimble, wake up! Don’t you sleep now! Not yet. You can’t sleep now, hear me?’
‘Keep him awake!’ Another Doctor instructed. ‘C’mon Fimble, wake up, keep talking to me…’
‘Fimble!’ Sonja said again, ‘Fimble, hey!’ And Sonja took his chin and turned his head and Fimble opened his eyes again.
‘Stay awake for me,’ she said, ‘listen. You’ve a deep wound in your abdomen. We need to sterilise the wound before we treat it and it will hurt a little. Keep squeezing my hand, alright?’
‘We’re putting it on now Fimble, okay?’
‘Stay with us.’
‘We got a class three haemorrhage,’ one of the other doctors reported as straps and clot-fabrics layered up on the wound. The medical team unfastened more of the haemorrhage fabric, padding it down on the severed flesh. Nanotech designs in the fabric infused osmotic fibrinogens into the platelets on cellular levels, fusing it with the skin, but the blood-loss was already great.
‘I can hear you,’ he said faintly.
‘He’s in hypovolemic shock,’ someone had shouted over him. ‘The patches will hold him, but we need transfusion, now.’
One of the Doctors swabbed his wound and smeared his medical Quantic wristband with the blood and quickly matched the sample. The program ran through the most immediate potential donors and summoned their quantics for emergency.
‘We’ve three local donors for his blood type,’ he informed Sonja. ‘We’ve two accepters ready for an emergency infusion.’
‘Almost there, you’re doing well.’ Sonja told him. ‘Can you remember what happened? Where did you come from, Fimble?’
‘The Novus…they killed them…’
‘Who killed them…?’ she asked, opening his eyelids to check dilation levels. ‘Stay with me Fimble…shit…he’s slipping.’ She informed.
‘Need those transfusion groups, now!’ One of the doctors shouted.
‘They’re on their way, two minutes…’
‘We don’t have it!’
And Fimble reached out with a sudden yield of strength and a look of terror, arresting Sonja by the arms and causing her to cry out with pain.
‘BUH-BLUE!’ Fimble screamed. ‘BLUE-LYCANS!’
*
For the rest of the evening Sonja stared into the warmth of a camp fire and smoked dried tobacco leaves in the quieter regions of the meadow. Her eyes stared at the hypnotic flailing fingers of lights as they fanned through the air above, where popping and hissing vermilion embers bloomed and spiralled. She’d insisted on being alone, but Dak could only respect that for so long, a fact she noticed when her Quantic-W pulsed with Dak’s signal.
‘Come home,’ he said softly, wrapping a warm blanket over her shoulders. In the distance she could hear the pump and vibe of festival life beating out through Minerva Meadows.
‘Why are you dwelling on it so much?’
Sonja drew on the end of her cigarette and puffed out a cloud of smoke.
‘Because of Kyo,’ she said softly, as Dak sat down beside her. ‘He reminded me of when we found Kyo.’
‘Blue Lycans,’ said Dak.
‘Yes,’ she nodded, pulling the cover around herself.
‘Nobody is coming for Kyo,’ he assured, ‘if those Blue Lycan soldiers wanted him they would have been here years ago.’
‘I’ve a terrible feeling they’re coming for him.’
‘We can’t just assume that every city or precariat start-up zone is going to fall to the hands of crazed mavericks like the Blue Lycans…’
‘They attack every start-up in the area…Bolstered by the Atominii.’
‘There’s been no sign of them near this place, they won’t touch it, there’s too many of us…’
‘The Atominii will find a way…’ She sniffled. ‘Christ what is wrong with those people? Their thirst to control the world makes me sick. You know they send shadow bosses here don’t you? They send people here deliberately, those desperate enough to want to get their homes back in the Atominii. They send them here to confuse our democracy, to try and fuck with our heads, to infiltrate our Q-net with lies and straw men. Every successful democracy like Cerise Timbers is under attack. They want us to tumble and they want to make it look like it was our fault. It works better for the bast
ards than a full on invasion as though it confirms something in their own ideological little minds.’
And Dak took her hands.
‘I will not live in fear.’
What? – She said it with her eyes.
‘I won’t…’ he insisted. ‘It’s what they want. Why should everything have a consequence? Why – why should everything have a condition? I don’t give a damn about condition, girl. I won’t give in to fear, Sonja. I won’t.’
And he turned to the flames.
‘I had lived in fear my whole damn life under those Syridan cyborgs. Ain’t never been as happy as I am here. They only have one power so long as we’re here, and that power is that our freedom can be taken from us at any moment if we break their hardland laws. We’re precariats!’ He reminded, ‘they call us that because we’re in a precarious situation. Delicate grounds n’ shit! We have our freedom, so long as we still fear them.’ And Dak curled his lip with contempt and shook his head. ‘Fuck that!’ He said. ‘To hell with them! To hell with fear! My eyes are open, girl. And they can spray my eyes with mace and burn them out my goddamn skull but I ain’t gonna close ‘em!’ And Dak nodded, assuring himself, and put his arm gently around her. ‘I ain’t gonna close them and hide from truth. And I ain’t gonna fear! People are coming here and we’re winning their hearts every last one of them. And they’re staying, a community growing in peace, anchored. No root, no fruit.’
They watched the flames a while longer, Sonja curled into his arms and she told him Fimble had died of shock.
‘We treated the wounds,’ she said, ‘he died of shock. We got a blood donor to him and he looked like he was going to pull through for a minute.’
Dak nodded, but didn’t respond verbally, he held her a little tighter, lightly squeezing her hands in his own.
‘You’re really not afraid of what they can do?’
‘I don’t even know who they are.’ He said. ‘But you’re a Doctor. You’re a medical professional. You deal with keeping people alive on a daily basis, you practice in health. Now tell me you really fear death.’
‘That’s not what I fear.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’m afraid of losing those I love most.’ She said. ‘That’s the kind of fear that…well it can get to you.’
‘It almost got me too,’ he quietly disclosed, whispering in her ear. ‘But I was lucky, and you know why? You know why I got the word loyalty tattooed on my back?’
She knew, and as she lay in his arms and watched the fires he told her why.
‘It’s because you found me.’ He said. ‘When I most needed you. I’d have long ago blown myself to pieces putting a mark on the Atominii walls just to put a dent in their slowly eroding paradigm…if it wasn’t for you. And you showed me…it ain’t the destruction that leads the way. It’s the healing. It’s the fixing up of things that are already falling, and leaving out that which isn’t needed. People are needed. Those people in the Atominii, they think they’re beyond their humanity by calling themselves Titans. But they’re our brothers and sisters. They need us too.’
As the dull fires cracked they stared at the hypnotic flames.
‘Do you think there will be consequences for taking in Kyo?’ she wondered aloud.
‘Maybe,’ said Dak, ‘we always knew there’d be a chance. But it ain’t because we decided to shelter a kid. It’s because of twisted ideologies that allow folk to solve problems with weapons instead of words.’
And Sonja agreed, she knew this to be true.
-14-
Max Elba had his arms crossed as he watched Malik Serat playing chess with a computer in his quarters. Tanya Medina was sat at the back of the observation room staring through the window when Ed Rufus sauntered into the dark room.
‘What’s the plan?’ he asked.
Nobody answered.
The prolonged silence drew Rufus over to the observation window. He stood beside the Colonel and stared in at Serat.
‘What’s the plan?’ he whispered again.
‘Duval wants us to escort this guy to the surface,’ he said, ‘we’re on security detail so it looks like we’ll be burning the midnight oil.’
‘That right?’ Rufus said casually, ‘shame, kind of like this station.’
‘This man’s crazy,’ Medina pointed out. ‘He’s been playing a computer at chess and he hasn’t lost a game.’
‘Best the computer can do is run out a stale mate situation.’ Max added. ‘It’s either check or loose to Serat.’
‘He’s a good chess player then.’ Rufus noted.
‘No,’ said Max, ‘according to the psych wards…it’s never been done before. Nobody can beat a computer at chess.’
‘That right?’
‘It’s far from right.’ Medina said. ‘It’s damn well freaky that’s what it is.’
Max was biting his nail as he analysed Malik Serat. Something had stirred the Colonel. Ed Rufus had never seen him this way, not fearful, but bothered by something.
‘This one’s unpredictable,’ he said. ‘No slip ups, got it? I don’t want us biting off more than we can chew.’
‘Right sir.’ Rufus agreed.
‘Damn right, sir.’ Medina added.
‘You seriously that worried about him?’ asked Rufus.
‘Scott Barnes wasn’t crying wolf when he told us he’s insane,’ Max Elba explained. ‘He is. Now look at this guy. Cool composure, right? But there’s anger in him. I’ve been watching his conversations with Yerma to get an idea of what I’m dealing with. Duval told me he was a live wire. I can see what he means.’
‘Because he’s playing chess?’
‘No,’ Max clarified. ‘But because he’s smart. And a smart psychopath is much more dangerous than a mere lunatic. I want to know who is in charge from the onset. Moreover I want him to know that it is us.’
‘Right,’ Rufus huffed. ‘Got it.’
‘What’s happening with the other guy?’ Medina said, ‘the one we found wondering around the Erebus?’
‘Barnes is staying here.’ Said Max. ‘He is sedated and restrained. After the way he tore up his own face like that Yerma predicts he’s a danger to himself or worse.’
‘So we’re just dealing with this guy?’ asked Rufus with a devious half-smile. ‘Piece of cake.’
‘Smoothly does it,’ Max smiled back, patting his shoulder. ‘It’s a long trip down. Let’s make it an easy one.’
*
Eight glowing lights activated around the locking hatch to signal the departure of the Erebus crew member Malik Serat. The moment the elevator detached from the Orandoré station’s port, it descended slowly along one of the collimated light beams feeding power into the elevator’s head and the rollers clamped securely around the ribbon. Below the elevator, the nocturnal Earth awaited them; neon lights peppered the dark surface like radioactive dust below the blustering super-cell hurricanes. Silently the elevator capsule cruised down the light column, chasing the ribbon for the planetary surface. Inside, the elevator windows remained transparent while they began the initial descent. Ten seats were arranged in a circle facing out from the centre of the elevator. The few seats facing back were for security personnel, of which Max, Tanya and Rufus were specifically assigned.
‘Please remain seated during the descent,’ the automated voice commanded, ‘as the descent progresses, windows and view fields will be obscured. Earth’s gravity will take effect shortly, until then refrain from removing your harnesses. Harnesses can be deactivated only by a ribbon-drop associate…’
As the sunlight slipped once more behind the Earth, her all-embracing darkness engulfed the view below. Much like the Charybdis black hole, Serat pondered.
Tanya neuromitted her audible thoughts through the sensorium, setting her signal to a semi-transqualia. She wanted Rufus and the Colonel only to hear her surface thoughts, not to have them know she was feeling nervous. Her voice slipped through the basic sensorium and her two peers realised her words.
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Chaos Cipher Page 15
