‘What now?’ Another voice issued.
Kyo tasted onions as blood filled his cheeks. He hated onions, everybody knows that. He lay still, drunkenly on the floor as things started to spin, and his stomach began convulsing. And he could smell the subtle corn starch of latex gloves as a medical person shone lights into his eyes and started probing his dry, plastic fingers around his teeth.
‘Nothing broken.’
‘Check his nose…’
‘He’s fine…nose is busted. One eye swollen. Possible concussion.’
‘So take him.’ Krupin’s voice stated. ‘Get him some nutrition and path him up.’
*
Two large men in black uniform and padded armour dragged Kyo with his arms bound behind him. His head was down and weak, his bare feet sliding over the floor, the backs of which cut and grazed. They put him down on a bench as he was starting to come to. He heard a racket of voices, a din of mean laughter and a commotion of jaws chewing and talking around their food. The old fart smell of rotten meat and onions, a thick odour of something dead lingered in the air of the canteen. Kyo was separated from the others. He had a table to himself, and it provoked sneers and leering from the other inmates. One of the guards stood behind Kyo and unfastened his shackles but didn’t remove the ferromag-cuffs. Like permanent bracelets they stayed with him always, ready at any moment to magnetise him to the floor or a wall. The second guard slid of bowl under his bleeding face and Kyo stared into it and grimaced.
‘Eat!’ The man said.
In the bowl he saw all the wretched soft rotten meat swimming in watery gravy veneered in thick, brown, oily juices and fat. He saw thick chunks of onions in there, as though to spite him, however, he was sure they didn’t know all that much about him. Kyo toyed with the fork, saw the gelatinous balls of spam and tiny bones swimming around in the bowl and felt immediately like adding his own stomach bile to the mixture.
‘I don’t eat meat,’ Kyo complained meekly.
‘Eat!’ The guard demanded.
‘No!’
One of the guards stepped behind Kyo and seized his head. He cried out furiously as the man tussled with his aching, beaten face, and every movement caused pain to tear through his nose and eye. The other man was trying to force the meat into his mouth and Kyo choked and spat and growled in refusal, any bit that found its way past his teeth was quickly spat out again. After a minute of this, Krupin shouted for them to stop. He came wading over, full of anger, and sat in front of Kyo.
‘What is it now?’ He said. ‘Well? Why can’t you just accept what is happening to you? Why are you making things so difficult?’
‘I don’t eat meat!’ Kyo gasped weakly.
‘Then just eat the onions.’
‘I hate onions.’
‘What would you like to eat then, your majesty?’ Krupin hissed through tightly clenched teeth.
‘Nothing,’ said Kyo. ‘I don’t want to eat anything.’
‘Then tell me when you are hungry,’ Krupin offered, ‘perhaps I’ll be able to get you some gene-freak food.’
‘I’m done eating,’ said Kyo, ‘I’m done eating. No more. That’s my choice. It’s my freedom.’
The guards laughed a little and Krupin was shaking his head in dismay.
‘Here, the word freedom is like anathema.’ Krupin caustically reminded. ‘Taboo words like this can give you big trouble, Two, one, nine. I could dangle your feet into a bucket of water and throw in electric wires, if you want?’
Kyo didn’t doubt Krupin would do it. He looked down at the meat soup and shook his head.
‘I won’t eat.’
‘No more food?’ Krupin said with an inflection of feigned disbelief. ‘Fine. Then starve if you can. I’ve seen people try it. I’ve seen people wasting away, boy. Let’s see if you still think same when you’re a skeleton and your teeth and hair is falling out.’ And Krupin snapped his fingers to the guards. ‘Get him to his cell.’
*
Kyo’s feet shuffled forward, ankles laden with magnetic manacles trailing a chain, squeezing his orange overalls into muddy flares around his feet. The guards led him to a large gate with a security feature.
‘That’s a big fucking bird,’ the second guard said, looking up and noticing the large hawk perched on the wire fencing. Cedalion twisted her head, discerning Kyo between them and slowly, he raised his eyes to see the animal for himself. Cedalion cawed into the sky, opening up her great wingspan and flapping to balance. And he saw it. The Three Circles marked upon the bird’s wings. The constitution of Cerise Timbers; Cognition, Liberty and Ludus!
They found me!!!
Kyo smiled at the hawk with numbed jubilation. Whoever it was, they were letting him know they were close. Then a loud electronic buzzer sounded, disturbing Cedalion and setting her off flapping into the dull sky. Access to the prison’s hidden confines were confirmed and the buzzer diminished the moment the gate was pushed open by the guards. Kyo was led down a long muddy path towards the facility, a corridor of mesh fencing and canvas covers, but he couldn’t take his eye of the sky.
They’re coming he told himself close to tears, they see me. They see me!
*
The sun had not long been over the Novus, but the Cerise Timbers search team had found a renewed motivation.
‘Faster, come on!’ Artex was yelling as Pania lowered the jeep’s hood and started the engine. Gus threw the covers and camping equipment into the back, folding away the last of the armadillo tent. He jumped into the back with the sniper rifle and patted the cabin hard.
‘Go!’ He shouted.
Artex was already pin-pointing Cedalion’s position on the map, giving Pania the coordinates.
‘He’s alive?’ she gasped with a wide and excited smile. ‘HE’S ALIVE?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Artex shouted, ‘Foot down, eyes forward!’
The jeep threw up a hail of stones as it raced over the talus side of the tundra, screeching up the vast wastelands. They bounded on, roaring full speed towards their destination and Gus was thrown momentarily into the air as they bunny-hopped a small hillock.
‘Easy, easy!’ Gus shouted expressing his indignation.
‘He’s alive!’ Pania wailed close to tears. ‘Hold on Biter, we’re coming. We’re coming for you, just hold on.’
-66-
Pawel had encountered various problems while navigating the orbital planes of the exo-sphere’s flight paths. Demands were being made on The Griffin’s Claw from every direction.
‘They want me turn left, they want me turn right,’ Pawel glowered angrily from the pilot stand.
‘Take it easy,’ Nitro instructed, ‘I’ve got us clearance. Remember, you’re flying now as a Plato Wing crew member. Special privileges, Mr Adamsky.’
‘Shit...there is a lot of this mess everywhere,’ said Pawel.
On the view screen, below earth’s lambent horizontal plane where the clouds obscured the lands; they saw the scatterings of fire and debris, and explosions still burst there.
‘Open all channels,’ said Nitro. ‘I want all channels, unfiltered.’
‘Moment,’ said Pawel, his eyes flickering with digital incandescence as he neuromitted the order with the ship.
The bridge command became imbued with various sounds, the distress calls of ships, the beacon of SOS signals and the distressed screams for help and the unknown alien signals emanating from the Xenotech still floating around somewhere in orbit with a small fleet of Stymphalions ensnared by it.
‘Jesus,’ Nitro Harbeck uttered. ‘What the hell is going on out there?’
As The Griffin’s Claw reached across the sky, a coherent network opened with Orandoré’s orbital station and the starnavis shuttle moved gradually towards the large disk shaped structure. Nitro allowed the view of the station to magnify and he spotted the harbour designation purchased by the Shield of Spheres for private use. Around the disk shaped station a swarm of orbital starnavis were travelling to and fro as the elevators clim
bed along the almost invisible carbon ribbon that tied the station to the Earth.
‘Alright, meridian compellers locked and Periapsis set,’ said Pawel, ‘making a coordinated approach for docking, matching station’s velocity, awaiting automated tethers.’
‘Nitro, is that you?’ Chief Noble’s voice channelled through.
‘I’m here, Chief,’ he said solemnly. ‘We’re bringing The Griffin’s Claw in for a landing.’
‘Jesus, where’ve you been?’ she asked her voice tight with stress, ‘our orbital defence has fallen to hell. How could this have happened? People have been requesting the use of our harbour. You better dock with the station fast. There’s a lot of people pissed off that they’ve not been able to run emergency services through our port. Our harbours are currently in high demand.’
‘Almost there, Chief,’ said Nitro. ‘Where the hell is Ace Ripley? I need to speak with him about his past missions with Solar Navy Bravo and the Kyklos...’
‘He’s dead, Nick,’ she said.
Nitro Harbeck scratched behind his ear like a wild dog, almost unaware of what she’d just said.
‘Good, so let him know I’m on the station and...’
‘He’s dead!’ She repeated.
‘- Dead?’
‘We lost him, Nick,’ said the Chief, ‘he sacrificed himself taking out one of those Spydrones.’
‘Not Ace,’ he said shaking his head, ‘no fucking way. Ace is indestructible...’
‘Apparently, not,’ said the Chief lugubriously, ‘and he proved that neither are these things. He ejected but not long after that there was an explosion. We lost his reading.’
‘What about Dwight?’
‘Gone.’
‘Estelle?’
The Chief’s silence was answer enough, and Nitro huffed and puffed in disbelief, cheeks filling with air.
‘I’m sorry, Harbeck,’ she added.
‘...Plato Wing is down,’ he realised. ‘Guess our years of terrorist bashing is over...huh?’ and Nitro bit his finger hard to control himself. ‘Son of a bitch.’ He uttered. ‘Son of a fucking bitch...I can’t believe it.’
‘Harbeck, I want you to dock The Griffin’s Claw with Orandoré. We’ve got a Dreadnaught arriving at the station shortly. They’re assembling another orbital fleet to nuke that Xenotech, there’s one still hovering around orbit.’
‘Ace Ripley destroyed one of those things, right?’
‘That’s right. It was heading for an archology.’
‘And the other two?’ Nitro inquired, ‘I mean there were three, right?’
‘The biggest made a crash landing in the Nevada Desert near Heavenband Province,’ Chief Noble explained, ‘we’re still not entirely sure what it’s doing, intel suggests it’s collecting resources for something. The other is fighting us off in orbit making global loops and transmitting some message on replay.’
‘What message?’ Nitro sniggered, ‘take us to your leader?’
‘Nitro...there’s something else you ought to know,’ said Noble, ‘they’re not alien.’
‘They’re not?’
‘Before he died, Ripley updated our intelligence. The Deathwind was able to carbon date them. It’s man-made. They’re extremely advanced.’
‘Wait...wait what?’
‘They’re man-made, off-worlder technologies. We’re looking at a potential off-world manufacturer called Ampotech as the main culprit.’
‘Jesus…they supply our resources. I got the damn Obsiduranium edge drills from them.’
Pawel had been doing his best to close his ears to the surfeit of abstruse information openly debated in the dialogue, feigning a stolid interest on the view screen of concomitant information raining from the ship’s sensorium. He thought if he heard too much, they might kill him.
‘Need us to heat n’ treat some off-world colonies?’ Nitro asked.
‘No,’ Noble allowed, ‘this matter is too sensitive for that. It’s political. The Megalo-Britai deal with off-world colonies,’ said the Chief, ‘advanced hardware manufacturers like Ampotech Industries, for example, are protected by the Britai political vehicle.’
‘So, what’s our bag?’ Harbeck folded his arms and shrugged.
‘Our mission?’ she asked, ‘well, get on the station and we’ll brief you on that. Because that message those Spydrones are issuing has just put a whole weird angle on all of this.’
*
The Griffin’s Claw glided over the sea of unpieced astro-debris, where brittle segments of metallic junk seemed to endlessly shower and collect. Frequent collisions with the solid shell of the Orandoré orbital station rang out dull vibrations and set off alarms, prompting staff to attend defence positions at the hammer-cannons. The station’s large lenticular perimeter was amassed with evacuation carriers, and starnavis desperately seeking aid after leaving the Orbital Guard’s retaliation effort. Some of them were burned and severely damaged, while others were still afire and crumbling apart even as they chased after the station’s spin, sections of which fell into the Earth’s pull and drifted with the debris into the sky.
The station’s alarms triggered targeting lasers to direct high powered beams onto flaming capsules which had long since lost control and was now on a dangerous approach. The lasers quietly directed invisible and powerful rays through space, heating the careering vessel before hammer cannons smashed into its hull and corrupted the core. The starnavis exploded into a million pieces crumbled into the sky, slowing down as it spiralled out of orbit far behind the station and spilling into space like a dried up sandcastle.
Pawel could scarcely believe his eyes. The fire and shrapnel spread behind Orandoré in a benign splash of white light that seemed to spray over the camber of the station like water, fading away in fulvous serrations as parts collided innocuously of its armoured carapace.
‘Griffin’s Claw, mandate approach vector...’
‘It’s fine,’ Pawel neuromitted over the interface. ‘We are arranged to dock with Shield of Spheres harbour. Liaising details now.’
‘Copy,’ the voice returned, ‘you are clear to embark.’
As the starnavis slowly shifted in towards the docking harbour, he watched the mechanisms transforming to receive the kind of shuttle that was unusual for Orandoré Orbital station. In the other harbours, the carriers had a very universal design to them, but The Griffin was irregular in shape, requiring the harbour to quickly alter its holding mechanisms and adapt to receive the atypical shuttle with a suitable apparatus. Pawel matched speeds, and they all felt the station’s centrifugal inertia upon them as the engines carefully aligned with the harbour and the merger was agreed.
Retractable titanium claws reached out to slow the heavy ship and magnetic fields interacted with the Griffin’s exo-magneto-nodes, stabilising its approach until load bearing pressure bumpers met with its tapering arms and brought the massive shuttle to a gentle stop. The clamps gradually turned the ship, drawing it deep into the station’s reception, until the hatches and bulkheads were sedulously oriented.
*
The shivers began to tingle through her skin and Avenoir felt the fabric of her being breaking apart again. The fissures of light were vibrating, everything reduced to undulations and waves that interacted in complexities made clear to her vision, her hearing, her skin, all of which was one and the same, and for that brief moment of enlightened sentient profundity all her divided preconceptions of reality coalesced to a less manageable, more chaotic and complicated artifice of faceted material unity. Despite the vertiginous complexities, it was a dimension she understood well, one of tones, quantum vibrations and marginal separation. Their voices were a billion microscopic waves, a multitude of particles shaking the environment, disturbing the arrangement of atoms and molecules to shape their meaning, vibrations cascading against her skin, flowing through her ears, forming interference wave patterns for her eyes and she could feel now what the crew were discussing. They hadn’t noticed her like this, in a state of heighte
ned awareness, but their voices bickered.
‘You’re protected!’ Nitro promised Raven.
‘I am no fool!’ Raven snapped. ‘There is no protection for Olympians on Earth. None! All who are associated are considered treasonous.’
‘I told you, we know of loopholes,’ Nitro winked. ‘And technically, you’re not on Earth, son. You’re on an orbital station, that isn’t Earth. You’ll be on our property.’
Avenoir became suddenly aware of the myriad devices in motion beneath them, the complicated skeletal web of metallic structures holding in place simple and elegant technology designed to create oscillatory waves of energy that powered different sections, the kaleidoscope of diaphanous quantum-matter tunnelling through starnavis crafts on the station periphery like sands designed to fall through the hourglass, pulling at the fabric of things she had no words for.
‘I have thy word.’ Raven sneered.
‘You got it,’ Nitro promised.
‘What about us?’ Kelly asked, looking nervously over to Pawel.
‘You made it aboard as well,’ said Nitro. ‘Didn’t you hear? Half my team are dead and we’re recruiting a new ship. Welcome to the Shield of Spheres.’
*
Pawel was astonished at the new high-tech military equipment stalking the passage conduits. He hurried through the various sub-levels of the starnavis as the dozens of Opilion robots scurried around like crystal harvestmen cantering on long and frail looking arachnid legs, like quadrupeds ambulating on glass stilts, their lights and scanners buzzing and sweeping, their lasers targeting, their various optical lenses resizing. They hopped and fell through the conduits of The Griffin’s Claw like cybernetic cephlapods, spreading their legs like umbrella frames to pin themselves at security doors while they worked, others skittered underfoot as small as hands spread, others stalking the halls as large as Olympian warriors. A myriad different models of the Spydrones operating on many levels to make detailed scans of The Griffin’s Claw, all for reasons he did not know, but it looked like a thorough investigation was going down. One by one, the team made their way to the Shield of Spheres department down in the station’s habitation zone, with Nitro Harbeck leading the way.
Chaos Cipher Page 56
