Hattle circled, jabbing into the air, his technique unsullied even with the fresh injury. The bell rang and the first round came to an end, dividing the fighters to their corners.
Edge Fenris laughed and applauded with the plangent mob. Kyo however, hadn’t been pleased by what he saw, even though he knew Hattle was hurting, it wasn’t enough. His pride was still intact; he wanted to see this shattered. But he couldn’t bring himself to fully enjoy this bloodshed despite his hatred for Hattle. Some injuries he knew left indelible scars. He wondered if his loss would make him an even more insufferable bastard.
The bell drew the fighters back to the centre of the ring and the Russianomai kid balled his fists and upped the tempo. Hattle had to hop around more, forced to the corners by powerful blows to the ribs, on the ropes, taking more hits. He launched some hard hooks and a roundhouse, all hitting the unyielding Russianomai kid’s arms and blocks. At one point, the kid almost locked Hattle’s leg, but he managed to reverse the hold and escape before it got out of hand. Hattle laughed joyously as he bobbed on his toes, his guard still down, tempting the Russianomai kid to break his nose. The kid lurched forward, slinging his punch like a spear, sliding into an uppercut that skimmed the bridge of Hattle’s nose, almost catching him. It was all that Hattle needed.
In one mighty swoop, Hattle lambasted the Russianomai fighter with a hulking blow to the chin and the kid stumbled back, blinking away the blinding stars clouding his vision. His guard came up, great bulwark arms locked in before his face, but Hattle’s next punch slipped between the arms like a missile through a canal lock, and the blood gushed from the Russianomai ‘s nose. The kid sallied forth, feckless punches rising over Hattle’s head as he dropped beneath them, returning the blows with a redoubled ferocity. Hattle stomped on the kid’s ankle and head-butted his forehead and finished it. The Russianomai kid fell to his knee, castellated, forced down as Hattle threw up his arms and walked a lap around the ring as the finisher bell tolled. It was all over for the Russianomai hardland fighter now keeling backwards like sawn timber. Hattle stood on his chest, before the referees burst in to drag him away. Hattle couldn’t hear the bells for his own hubris, he roared with laughter and scorn in frightening and psychopathic gusto.
Psychopathic gusto and bleeding lips.
-22-
Colonel Max Elba entered the anchor base accommodations. For military personnel like himself they weren’t too shabby. He didn’t exactly have a minibar but there were some brilliant neuro-ligature channels. He’d set himself down in the small and dimly lit room after getting unchanged and decided to access the local neurosphere interface. The Nexus server was like a large blue triangle with its tip pointing down. It displayed a holographic of a brain on the wall, as he pulled a hair-like wire from one of its feeds and patched it to the tattoo on his neck. A feed-back holographic displayed the Colonel’s cranial activity and general mental health. It looked positive. He lay down on the bed and accepted the Nexus link. The information flooded his mind, digestible nodes of data spinning and shifting through his visual cortex stimulated by the neurophase with the anchor base server. He jumped from point to point until he found the access node he was after titled communication outlets. And Max Elba channelled a communication bridge to Mr Duval on the orbital station Orandoré. Once it was set, the neurosphere enclosed and almost instantaneously Duval was aware of everything Max had done regarding the mission. He’d administered his usual semi-qualia setting; allowing Mr Duval to review limited visual fields relevant only to the mission. Satisfied, Duval confirmed the update registration.
‘Mr Duval, there’s something about these foot-finders that seem to be incomplete.’
‘What’s the problem, Colonel?’ Duval asked.
‘As you can see, sir, these ambulation patterns are corrupted. Medina thinks there may be a problem with the Erebus internal chronometers.’
‘Well, nobody is working on the Erebus right now,’ said Duval. ‘Most of the crew flatly refuse. They said they’re seeing things, losing track of time and what not. One of my engineers went missing in that place yesterday. Whatever it is about that Starnavis it has got people spooked. We send drones in there and they never come back. We just lose them; we’ve no idea where the hell they are.’
Max felt his field of vision suddenly cloud over with optical visuals of engineers working in the Erebus. He saw strange shadows and images of hollow translucent figures stalking the corridors of the haunted Starnavis. Max blinked away the images and closed the visual quale neuromitted from Duval’s sensorium.
‘What do you think it is?’
‘Until we investigate further we’re holding off on speculation. Ultimately until we tear it up from the outside in, we’re staying out of that place. Everything started going screwy the moment we began starting up the core and electronics again. So we’re powering it down for the time being.’
‘So there’s no chance I can get the timers?’ Max requested.
‘Unless somebody already has that information I’d wager no.’ Duval said. ‘But by all means inquire with the spanners.’
‘I’ll do just that.’
‘Yeah, well I suggest you do it personally. I want you back on the station with your team. Got a job for you.’
‘What job?’
‘Seems an anonymous Erebus investor wants you to speak with Scott Barnes about your research findings. This individual is willing to let you in on some classified information about the Erebus provided you use the limited information wisely.’
‘Of course, sir.’ Max Elba nodded. ‘What sort of information are we talking about here?’
‘Something called the chaos cipher,’ Duval said. ‘Our investigation team have been trying to put it together. We’ll let you look at the briefing first. Our anonymous Erebus investor wants to know if your foot-finder information can be useful towards helping understand the code’s syntax and bring us closer to delineating what it does. Like I said, you wanna speak to the spanners have at them, but according to what we know our research team is saying the same thing about the chaos cipher as you are about the foot-finders. That there’s a missing piece, something is corrupted. Maybe Scott Barnes can fill the gap.’
‘We shall see,’ said Colonel Elba. ‘We’ll be departing ASAP, expected arrival nineteen hours. See you soon, Mr Duval.’
Max left the communications semi-qualia transmission and retreated back into the sensorium. He allowed the soft palliative information of this neural space sooth over his mind, its calming and tranquil images succouring his thoughts in the gentle neural rhythms before he shut it down at last. Max found himself lying once more in his bed. He reached behind his head and pulled the magnetic patch away from the tattoo markings of his implant and the neuro-ligature wire retreated back into a Nexus server mounted on the wall. Max put his hands behind his head and found a spot on the ceiling to stare at. What the hell had those Chrononauts been up to?
*
Three thousand million miles from Earth, not far from the orbital path of Neptune a dark chrome shell hurtles towards its destination. Before the carrier was launched from the Solar Navy Alliance orbital construction base, its saltus drive rings were already being constructed out by Pluto’s locality. It was a project that had been under initiation for over sixty years. Now the carrier Hephaestus One, a two kilometre long tower of fuel tanks and maintenance equipment and provisions, loomed at last towards its drive rings. Its huge convex dish held the warped reflection of the stars, ready to set forth into the shrunken giants of light. The equipment was set to reach Kepler-186f, where a colony called Garisk was based there in the constellation system, Cygnus. Exhaust casts flared with lustrous brilliance as it drifted on the catered force of its antimatter engines. The provisions ship was well serviced by an AI known to the Earth as Adamoss.
He was a singular and sophisticated AI contemporaneously operating a network of avatar models, adroitly synchronising the many convoluted functions of the vessel’s complexities. Some
of his avatars were designed with more strength features, others designed for improved dexterity, only some of them anatomically humanoid in appearance. They were composed of light-weight plastics and rubber, of silicon and of carbon composite skeletons and meta-polymers. His functional software spread throughout the cranial processors, remarkable state-of-the-art quantum links. The vessel was destined to connect to its three saltus-carrousel rings to begin its sixty eight million mile velox from the fringes of the solar system, through a warp path known as the Nebula Bridge. Yet it was at this point, about the orbit of Neptune, the AI first encountered a unique spatial phenomenon.
Originally Adamoss had plotted a course to steer the provisions ship away from the presumed asteroid, but then the phenomenon also altered course, realigning to meet with Hephaestus One.
Now poised on the reefs of the solar system, Adamoss gazed out at the Kuiper belt’s capacious and sable expanse of stellar dust. He watched the asteroid clusters and the backdrop of photonic maelstroms where waves of radiation blustered out from the sun like the spores of fire crashing through the dusty reaches of a borderless serenity. His complicated optics changed to inlet the tiny dots unseen by any good human eye, exposing the swirling red-shift galaxies afar. He would blink and find another, eyes switching in a manner that was all too similar to the physiognomy of his human creators yet much more dynamic, contemplating far greater ranges than the human eye. His fingers reached out to touch the glass where beyond was the edgeless horizon of space, his black plastic nails meeting the window surface to ignite with nanology, webbing the micro silicon circuits with light, conducting a current from the transparent material and operating a target crosshair onto the windowpane. Adamoss shifted the crosshairs to align with the mysterious dark patch of space from where the disturbance emanated, and then used his other hand to expand the circular bubble and magnify the location. Sure enough his eyes were not deceiving him. The disturbance was real, and there were three of them.
The three silver machines pursued in advance, dropping out of an incredible pace and slowing to an approach vector. Adamoss was joined by the windowpane with another one of his identical bodies, then another, and another. Each of his avatars reached out their limbs and also touched the observation window glass, each performing a different function for the ship’s communication systems. The satellites began to broadcast their signal and the android began his speech. His voice was hollow, synthetic, labouring a natural human tone.
‘I am Adamoss, maintenance operator AI for the human resource vessel Hephaestus One, destined for Kepler-one-eight-six, f. You are on a collision course. Identify the nature of your intentions and coordinate a new trajectory.’
The three objects showed no sign of compliance. They showed no signs of a change in direction and their approach speed remained consistent.
‘I am Adamoss, Artificial Intelligence and representative of Earth. Speak your purpose.’ This time the message was intended to encompass a translated encryption of every accounted language.
And no message returned.
Adamoss took a step back from the glass, then one at a time so too did the other feet of his multiform duplicates. They looked at each other blankly, and then focussed their attention back on the advancing phenomena. At sixty kilometres from impact, the leading vessel began to drop speed drastically and at just five hundred metres came to a sudden and impossibly static position, as though somebody had just hit the pause button on Adamoss’ optical sensors, and they synchronised a reverse speed that matched the huge provisions ship as though hovering in parallel superposition. Though Adamoss had never seen a spatial body stop with such alacrity, he remained unperturbed despite its infallible knowledge of human physics. Such motions in Newtonian physics were yet unheard of and by all human accounts impossible. But Adamoss knew better, this was indeed a design far greater than Earther capacities.
The two orbiting vessels joined the central leader and stayed within a synchronised spin like two pale moons circling their barycentre. And he beheld them unflinchingly, unfeelingly, regarding the unidentified vessels with indifferent analytical eyes. Adamoss stepped up to the glass once more and sequenced a new communication signal. It was coded into computer language, his other duplicates working hard to scan and check the vessels and they synergised their work efforts and began to broadcast an entirely different message.
Images began to display onto the screen before Adamoss, images of human Archivology; the flicker of a billion book titles and texts and journals in hundreds of different languages, a compendium of archived human knowledge and art since the dawn of civilisation. The Greek philosophers, the history of antiquity, of holism, of Babylonia. The first recorded black and white videos, the farcical comedies of Chaplin and the launch of NASA’s Apollo missions and then later The Solar Alliance’s construction of saltus-carousels. From the symphonies of the greatest musical compositions, and the expanse of documented human culture since the industrial era, of modernity and civilisation, of rock n’ roll and revolution, of warfare and assassination, the stars and constellations and atomic energy, political speeches, of conquest, of ingenuity and the design of the first walking automaton; Asimo, to the birth of Adamoss himself. Images of religions, symbols, of equations in maths and geometry, from the first moon colony of Epicurus to the Martian missions aired online as a popular reality show, to the first laser-fusion reactor to online for societal use; a whole wake of war and discovery and development and economy and government and leadership and power and enlightenment. It covered the creation of the Atominii, of the black hole programs, of the quanti-magnus designs, to Willow Kruger’s Gravmex theory.
The very last image was of man and woman side by side, and the stellar position of Earth.
‘If you are not of this world,’ said Adamoss, ‘know we have been searching for others for a very long time. For humanity, this is an important reach; the knowledge that we are not alone presents to us a sense of meaning. Together may we write a new chapter in Archivology. I welcome you to our humble planet.’
Then, in deep amaranth pulses, paling and glowing like hot coal embers lumped in a soft wind, the contours of the three Xenotechs were alight, lining an intricate net of alien symbols across the surfaces, like cuneiform proverbs marked in fire across the ossified spikes of their chrome shells. The two satellite orbs stopped wheeling and positioned themselves into a horizontal flank. Glowing brighter now, the Xenotechs broke synchronicity and fired like missiles into the defenceless provisions ship. Adamoss followed the trajectory with his perfect eyes, his many heads watching below their feet emotionlessly as the first Xenotech cruised beneath them somewhere into the axels of the centrifuge, smashing the delicate spokes like a cannonball slamming through the body of a whale. Violent vibrations then thundered through the structure. Pale plasma fires sawed through the engine rooms and the second Xenotech whirled around the side of the Hephaestus One like a Catherine wheel. Their shapes changed from a teardrop radiolarian analogue, and peeled open to form a quadruped vessel, and it coiled its limbs tightly around the Hephaestus’ particle fuel containers and pulled away the antimatter fuel cells and swallowed the containers enclosed into its teardrop shape again, flying away with them like some cosmic magpie.
The third and final Xenotech fired from its position. Adamoss recorded every moment and experienced the quantic neuromission live on Earth as he did in space. The giant alien vessel crashed into the Hephaestus One’s provision riggings and shattered the ship and its android crew into a billion fragments. And as the matter-antimatter fusion cores ruptured a bright atomic flare inflated through the void and swallowed over two hundred miles of it in a second; an engulfing solar flare with enough power to cast a momentary daylight on Neptune’s clouds, a fierce ball of fire from which only the three menacing Xenotech emerged, wheeling in their destructive orbit as they drew ever closer to their next target.
-23-
Malik Serat stared at his own image with prudent expectancy and forced a loathing
smile. He’d watched his thick, jet black hair grow back in moments as the bio-salons engaged the active growth hormones and sped up the process. The micro-mechanical nano fibres, anchoring into the roots of his head, drew out the long individual hairs in an electro glow. They buried into the follicles and, like the endless handkerchief trick, drew out the hairs as though they’d been buried into his scalp this whole time. Malik was unsure when the fibres first buried into his head, but it was as though it had all simply transformed into hair, gradually blackening. Without even the snip of scissors the micro-mechanical fibres and had even cared to style it. Out in space hair was a real issue sometimes, especially in the micro-gravity. Some of the Chrononauts preferred to wear head caps, but hair was burned off during sterilisation before the cryonic sleep anyway.
Chaos Cipher Page 21
