Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  And Vadim pressed the nozzle of his rifle into Pierce’s forehead harder as Krupin continued to talk. ‘But I don’t have room for a sot, drunk fuck like you!’

  ‘NO, DON’T!’ Kyo screamed again. ‘Don’t do it! DON’T! He can work! HE CAN WORK!’

  ‘I can work,’ Pierce nodded miserably, blubbering suddenly as he faced his terminal moment.

  ‘I don’t need workers,’ Krupin shouted back with a shake of his fist, ‘I need fighters. You are as baby. You are mess. You cry like bitch.’

  ‘He can fight!’ Kyo shouted. ‘HE CAN FIGHT! HE CAN!’

  ‘He couldn’t fight, he’s only shit,’ Krupin said slapping Pierce across the face and causing him to jump and gasp for air as though he was drowning. Pierce held up his quivering hands and dared to look down the barrel of Vadim’s rifle.

  ‘I’ll do what you need me to do.’ Pierce stammered.

  ‘What I need you to do?’ Krupin asked, bending over to breathe his terrible breath down Pierce’s ear. ‘I need you to motivate your son.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Say it now.’

  ‘Alright...’

  ‘Tell him to be strong,’ he said.

  Pierce turned to Hattle, eyes mink and bloodshot he spoke through shivers and jitters to his son on his knees down beside him.

  ‘Be strong,’ he blubbered. ‘Been preparing for this all your life. All your life, alright son?’

  Hattle shook his head quizzically, shocked at seeing his father reduced to fear this way, and sick with the fear of death himself.

  ‘Jhu-just be strong.’ He said. ‘Understand why I was tough on you. U-understand…I wanted you strong. That’s it.’

  ‘Tell him to fight like champion.’

  ‘F-fhu-fight like a champ,’ Pierce said with a dithering nod.

  ‘Tell him to fight everyone I ask him to.’ Krupin sang.

  ‘You have to fight everyone,’ Pierce agreed, ‘don’t let anybody question you. You are strong son. Ru-remember when I told you you’ve more to - to fear from me than anyone?’

  ‘I remember,’ Hattle whispered.

  ‘Well,’ and Pierce braved a smile. ‘No need to fear anyone anymore.’

  And a widening grin eased across Krupin’s twisted face as he leaned back into the darkness.

  ‘That’s good, Mr Lewis’ he said, and gave Vadim the nod.

  And Vadim Raw Dog shouldered the weapon tight and aimed at Pierce’s head. And Kyo continued to scream objections while the rifle chattered and flashed.

  -52-

  Gliding through the clouds and high altitude winds, Cedalion cut above the murky cold tundra which rolled beneath her wings as she surveyed the areas, feeding back the transqualian data through an optical neurophase with Artex. She sensed a powerful electro-magnetic disturbance on the horizon, a visible generation of forces layering the magnetic waves like an incandescent and lurid onion slice.

  Artex dropped the relay and leaned on the jeep, looking up and consulting his compass. Gus was loading supplies onto the back of the vehicle, while Pania already occupied the driver seat, lodging her rifle by the door.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ said Gus, hurling a supply box into the jeep’s compartment, ‘if we’re spotted out in the Novus, this vehicle won’t be armoured enough to withstand any velociter round. If one a’them Blue Lycans is packing heat, like a rail gun or something, our armour’ll put up about as much resistance as paper Mache.’

  ‘We don’t aim to be crossing those guys,’ Pania said over her shoulder, checking the electrical display on the dashboard settings.

  ‘It’s not the finding them that bothers me,’ said Gus, jumping up on the back. ‘It’s them finding us.’

  ‘You say it like there’s a difference.’

  ‘I got eyes in the sky,’ Artex assured. ‘Cedalion has seen the Blue Lycans a few times. She knows their general movements. We just stay clear of those areas and we’ll be fine.’

  ‘I thought they were drifters?’ Pania said.

  ‘Even drifters have habitual haunts.’

  Artex saw Enaya and Daryl approaching from the nearby garrison. She seemed shocked by the large sniper cannon on the back of the jeep where Gus was sat smoking.

  ‘Come to say farewell?’ Artex asked.

  ‘No,’ Enaya said. ‘You’re coming back. We need you Artex. You’re the best and I don’t want you to go out there pessimistic.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said neutrally. ‘I’m realistic, gotta prepare for the worst.’

  She smiled faintly and handed him something. ‘Laux said you should have this. It’ll help.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Targeting laser,’ said Daryl.

  Artex analysed the slender cylindrical device and closed his hand around it, impressed with the gift. ‘He’s right, it’ll help.’

  ‘Good luck Artex,’ Daryl said shaking his hand. ‘Get back to us safely. Bring back our friends.’

  ‘I will,’ he nodded.

  Artex Valdek checked with Cedalion’s semi-qualia once more and matched a compass orientation. As he hopped upside the jeep, Artex dropped into the seat and dug into his pockets to fish for a map. Pania stood over her seat to salute Daryl and Enaya as they waved and she started up the engine. With Artex pointing the way the jeep rolled into the forest. Gus bobbed and rocked in the back, smiling and holding up a farewell hand to them as they bounded over the fields down the off road path. Pania watched them vanish from the wing-mirror as she steered over the terrain. Artex had a foot up on the dash, reading the map from a large sheet of paper. She saw the animations sliding seamlessly over the paper as he zoomed in and out of the touch-adjustable map. He’d put his own symbols and markings on it and she saw motion there that was significant only to him. Gus suddenly leaned over the seat and passed Pania a newly rolled cigarette. He popped it in her lips and lit the tip as she drove.

  ‘Do you smoke Valdek?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Artex responded.

  They followed the river north, trailing upstream past old abandoned villages and cities. After the first three hours of driving Pania was completely reliant on Artex for directions. To her, this was all new, the whole Novus a place unknown. She knew there had been hardlanders out here, torn apart by a war that once fired up between the Oligarchs and state rebels. She’d known the Blue Lycans were all that was left of those times, the only things roaming the Novus between the rubbles and ruin and skulls and bones. The forests gradually became fewer, the trees becoming more sporadically spread until the land evened off and flattened into an endless chase. She followed a long asphalt strip that lay across it, splintered into islands as myriad vines and roots pushed up out of the unused roads to overwhelm it. Out here, the air was thinner and the land was hostile. Temperatures in the day could hit thirty-eight degrees, and flip to minus sixteen towards the evening, dropping to negative forty on some winter twilights. A haemorrhagic sun bled crimson light around the horizon and turned the streams of cloud to a salmon flesh, and Pania activated the jeep’s hood as a canopy hunched up over Gus from the rear, sheltering the sniper weapon and hunching over them until it connected with the top of the windshield and locked out the cold air. Artex was not taking the quickest point from A to B. He was tactically avoiding Blue Lycan hotspots, leading them as safely as possible to where they needed to go.

  ‘So what do you think happened?’ Pania said as the cold wind whispered through the fissures of the jeep’s cabin.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Artex asked, folding up the map.

  ‘I mean with Kyo,’ she said. ‘Why do you think Krupin took him?’

  ‘He thinks he can train him as a fighter, so I heard,’ said Artex. ‘But all that isn’t worth thinking about. We just need to get them back.’

  ‘Think he killed them?’

  ‘No.’ Artex said with a sniffle, rubbing his hands from the cold. ‘I don’t think so. He wants that kid to use as a weapon.’

  ‘Why?’ Pania asked. ‘Tho
ught Olympians were illegal.’

  ‘They are,’ Artex smiled. ‘Don’t stop people working with them. Since when did legislation stop anything? Fact is Krupin is banking on people keeping their mouths shut. Anyone associated with gene-freaks are liable to be killed.’

  ‘I never understood that,’ said Pania. ‘I never understood what everyone’s so worked up about. Ain’t nothing special about Kyo.’ She frowned thoughtfully. ‘You know what I mean, right? He’s special to me. Special to his family and stuff. But he ain’t no harm.’

  Artex nodded, staring ahead at the long broken road.

  ‘Blue Lycans are adult Olympians,’ he said. ‘All I know is they kill without discretion. I guess the fear is the kid will turn out like that.’

  ‘Those things are different,’ said Pania. ‘They were trained to be like that. Kyo doesn’t even care to fire a gun.’

  ‘You ever heard of the tabula rasa?’ Gus suddenly shouted from the back.

  ‘No,’ said Pania, turning momentarily. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s the idea we’re all born blank slates,’ he said, looking at a cigarette as it burned down, the only light in the darkness of the jeep’s rear.

  ‘We are,’ Pania said. ‘We’re all born the same-’

  ‘We’re all born the same and we learn our prejudices,’ said Gus. ‘But we’re not born blank slates.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Well, we’re doing all this for your love of Kyo, right?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Even if it’s sibling love, it’s still love. You don’t learn your emotions they’re innate. They’re already firing through us. You don’t learn what a smile means…it’s a language you already know.’

  Artex turned back over his seat.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gus noncommittally. ‘I haven’t decided yet. But my guess is there are not absolutions. Do we learn our emotions? I don’t know. It’s worth thinking about, that’s what I know. Especially, now.’

  -53-

  ‘I am number two, one, nine. SAY IT!’

  ‘I am nh-number two, one nine…’

  ‘LOUDER WORM!’

  ‘I am number two, one, nine!’

  The rings he had collected over the years, carved delicately by creative artists in Minerva Meadows, slipped off his tail gently and rattled as they landed into a plastic box. Trinkets of brass and silver, fishnet bandages all unwound from the long appendage and joined the collection. He had removed his necklaces, gifts also made by his friends, bracelets, leather wrist straps delicately woven and watched as they were dumped into a furnace, shovelled into a fire where inmates had fed lumps of coal to keep the boilers hot. In the darkness, Kyo saw his belongings smouldering to ash as new prisoners just like him also surrendered their possessions to the fire. They were ordered to undress, and to fold their clothes neatly, stacked by the furnace for burning.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am number two, one, nine!’ He shouted again.

  ‘I don’t believe it! SAY IT AGAIN!’

  ‘I am number two, one, nine. I am number two, one, nine.’

  He had watched his valuables perish before being passed the boiler suit and stood in line with a dozen other naked newbies, men and women young and old, pulled from all walks of life and marched for inspection. He had received the same dehumanising treatment as the others, told to squat, told to bend over and spread the cheeks, told to open his mouth to the taste of corn-starch and latex as a so called medical examiner thumbed his lips and shone a torch down his throat. And someone had held his balls and told him to cough and he found a place to stare and did as instructed, five times. Someone checked his tonsils with a wooden stick and told him to say AHHH as clearly as possible while holding his tongue down. After lifting his arms and getting him to walk back and forth on his tiptoes, he had been told to dress into the boiler suit provided and leave the examination room where others had watched him endure the sinister treatment. Where his treatment differed to the others, however, would be the conditioning training to follow. He had only heard them mention it, but Krupin was invested in Kyo more than the other prisoners. They were here for other reasons, hired labour hands, prostitution and human traffic, meat for the neuro-commerce cyber-bio neurology labs at Encybleron’s fulfilment centre. Whatever value Krupin saw in them, he associated appropriately.

  ‘I am number two, one, nine!’

  ‘LOUDER!’

  ‘I AM NUMBER TWO, ONE, NINE!’ He screamed at the top of his lungs.

  Kyo gasped as he was hauled to his feet now for what felt like the tenth time and hurled up against the bars of a prison cell. How he envied the other prisoners, who by his standards seemed well treated and relatively happy. Kyo’s face pressed fast against the cold steel, looking in at the other boiler suits eating in the canteen on the other side of those bars, glaring at his maltreatment and laughing as they ate. The aching vertical bars all but stopped his head from being eaten alive by one of the fierce inmates standing by the cell. The big glaring inmate snarled, promising Kyo he would cut him up, promising he would beat him like he was tenderising meat.

  ‘You looking at me?’ the tattoo profaned mammoth seethed as he came up to the bars to meet Kyo. Vadim pushed Kyo’s face tight against them on his side as the inmate on the other threatened to bite off Kyo’s nose.

  ‘LOOK AT HIM!’ Vadim shouted into Kyo’s ear, forcing his head harder against the bars.

  ‘Are you looking at me, girly boy?’ the inmate glowered back, slamming his palms on the steel.

  ‘Tell him who you are!’

  ‘I am number two, one, nine,’ Kyo wept.

  ‘LOUDER!’

  ‘I am number two, wh-one, nine!’

  ‘On your fucking knees two, one, nine!’

  And Kyo dropped, heaving deep breaths in shock, bewildered eyes glaring around until Vadim grabbed the back of his hair and forced him to stare at the prisoner’s crotch.

  ‘STAND UP FAGGOT!’ The inmate bawled.

  ‘Stay on your fucking knees!’ Vadim ordered.

  ‘Do gene-freaks suck dicks? I SAID STAND UP! Face me, you little shit!’

  ‘STAY DOWN!’

  Kyo convulsed with fear, hearing a shrunken voice cry out and whimper. It was a voice he did not know as his own now escaping his lips, a cowering voice that lacked all he had ever thought of himself. The inmate clapped his hands and began hollering and laughing, glad he had successfully broken his victim. He reached out of the bars and tried and snag Kyo, but Vadim pulled the boy away from the bars and out of danger.

  ‘Why not you stand up?’ Vadim asked with a sinister smile. ‘You enjoy being on your knees?’

  ‘No!’ Kyo hollered.

  ‘Then you should have listened when he said now STAND!’

  He clambered to his feet, legs like jelly, stomach in somersaults.

  ‘You’re lucky I don’t throw you in there,’ Vadim laughed sadistically. ‘Aren’t you? Know how lucky you are?’

  Kyo nodded, wiping his eyes and shivering.

  ‘Wanna go back to your cell?’ Vadim asked, feigning a baby voice. ‘You wanna go for a little nap two, one, nine?’

  Kyo wasn’t sure how to answer. He stared at Vadim ambivalently, and the Raw Dog smacked the top of his head.

  ‘MAN UP two, one, nine, or I’ll have to show you how.’

  ‘That’s enough now,’ said Krupin.

  Kyo’s ferromag-cuffs then magnetised to the floor and he dropped to his knees, brought down by the force. Krupin entered the cell and handed something to the inmate on the other side of the bars. The big man smiled, nodding appreciatively as he received his gift, and disappeared somewhere into the large mess hall of the prison where others laughed and joked and shouted their remarks.

  ‘Do you like your new home, little one?’

  Kyo didn’t respond, he stared at the ground, shivering, afraid to even look Krupin in the eyes, and the whole thing delighted him. />
  ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Now, don’t tell me your spirits are broken already? But we’re just getting through introductions. You have many numbers to remember in here, starting with your own.’ And Krupin knelt beside Kyo and lifted his head to face him. ‘Two, one, nine, you better get tough, or in here, you will die. I give you good opportunity to be strong and you sit on your ankles wasting it.’ Krupin sniffed at something sulphurous and grimaced, looking disgusted with the boy. He moved away to stand beside Vadim.

  ‘He pissed himself,’ Krupin noted. ‘I might leave him in those uniforms until he’s had enough of the smell.’

  Kyo suddenly lurched forth and purged a large pile of grey soup spewing onto the floor and collapsed. Vadim cursed and stepped back.

  ‘Disgusting,’ he uttered as a roar of applause broke out from the din of the inmates in the mess hall. Kyo’s eyes shut out the horrors of the environment, but he could still hear the harsh reality, the sundry whistles and jeers with the clatter of plates and cutlery and the farting glide of chairs shifting over laminate. He lay in his vomit, overwhelmed by the shock and horror, heart racing, exhausted. He could hear their discussion but he was at their mercy.

  ‘We’ll kill him, if we keep this up.’ Krupin sighed. ‘Get him to infirmary. He’s ready for conditioning.’

  *

  ‘I will fight to survive and earn my name!’

  ‘I will fight to survive and earn my name!’ Hattle repeated.

  ‘On your knees!’ Vadim roared, kicking Hattle’s legs. He fell to his knee and screamed in pain as something sprained, and Vadim leaned over him.