‘I hope you ate lightly, Olympian.’ Nitro said.
‘Thou art ever the jester, Harbeck,’ Raven smiled nefariously through the silver strands of his floating hair, fangs stabbing down thirstily. ‘Mine feast awaits me yet. And I have not fared the banquette for months.’
-74-
Malik flashed his smile rapturously as explosions tore through the sky. He understood it all now, the complexities of the Hypermekhos, the beautiful perfection of it. He was neurophased with it, a machine that existed in multiple dimensions reaching beyond their own, permeating several realities at once. That was why They came here. To give him the key so he could pull one corner of the machine into their dimension. She did it! Penelope Hurt had done the impossible. She had reached beyond the limits of their universe, beyond time and space, all by understanding the chaos cipher.
Malik held his palm to the sky and watched as the Xenotech’s tendrils lowered the precious cargo into his hand from high above, stored all this time somewhere inside the machine’s giant metal head. The key touched down into his palm, a small rhodonite cube no bigger than a fist, and heavy too. He clenched his fingers around its vertices and felt the depths of the machine reaching beyond the visible three dimensional world. It was massive, falling into realms he had never known existed, the key was just the tip of the ice berg. He felt it shifting and it reminded him of Yerma’s haptic tests on the Orandoré station. He remembered feeling those shapes, the four dimensional ones being passed through the three dimensional world, the shifting and warping tesseract and complex geometrical orders. And Mekhos Serat wanted to pilot it into this world.
He held aloft the cube and in front of him, a large black marble horseshoe began to manifest. It widened, as though hidden behind some curtain this whole time and he stepped up to the floating device like it was a podium. Upon its surface he beheld the complex carnelian markings of the chaos cipher’s codex, scratched into the machine like cuneiform, its code vanishing and reappearing in seemingly random occurrences. And bombs suddenly flared through the sky above, battering the armour of the droning Xenotech. He had the controls now. Malik opened his palm and watched the cuboid key shape shift into a sphere, then sink into a thinning plate until it was a vanishing wafer, slipping out of the universe. With his hands now at the helm of the horseshoe device, Malik sensed more of the Hypermekhos slipping into their dimension. And as a shower of bullets rained down from the speeding Arrowheads above, a long black triangle opened up in the sky like a kilometre sized knife blade twisting in the sun. The ballistics rattled against the plate, shielding Malik from the potential hazard, and as the Arrowhead swept by the large black shape, the mysterious thing rolled and vanished in the sky as though it never existed.
The wingmen were horrified. All around them, they reported strange black shapes appearing in the sky, miles apart and slipping in and out of existence. Some Arrowheads burst into fire as they collided with unexpected physical boundaries, and the flat edges of these shapes cut off the wings of passing strike-ships, sending them veering into deathly spirals. And pilots ejected, witnessing the ethereal phenomenon of colourful shapes appearing, surfaces like crystal and brecciated jasper. In and out of existence they sailed through the sky as parts of the Hypermekhos complexities passed through the three dimensional world.
Ground troops opened fire on the Xenotech machine, a desperate support to the pilots. Maser-breakers and rocket launchers and hammer-cannons let loose with everything. An assembly had set up a stronghold in an armoured tank and they worked together to load a velociter shell into the breech. And unbeknown to them an Icosahedron shape had opened in the sky, a depth to which continued for kilometres into the Hypermekhos machine. During the window of its opening, it swallowed an Arrowhead in a split second, the pilot screaming with surprise. And in the next instant the Icosahedron shape vanished, folding away like origami and reappeared again closer to the ground, unfolding and opening up the tubular throat to release the Arrowhead at sonic speed into the tank and its troops. ZZZYYPOWWWSSSSHOA! Billowing fire erupted from the crash, the speed and velocity of it throwing shrapnel out for miles.
Malik raised into the sky on a floating elliptical plate, hovering over his glorious chaos, perpetuated upon a chrome surface growing into a wider and fuller platform the higher he ascended. The randomly appearing shapes cast solid shadows into the crater below, like defragmented rock chips thrown into free fall, appearing, twisting, clock winding in and out of reality. And below he saw his brother, Vance, glaring in horror at the unexplainable transformation. He saw Vance down by the Chinook, a mere dot from the heights, on which he now elevated. Then a huge black cube began to render in from the blue sky in front of Malik. It was twisting, each segment rotating in Rubik spins. Until the central column faced him and sank backwards into the cube, leaving a large square tunnel that led down into the realms of other dimensions. Malik stepped into the sky, feet supported by a bridge of shapes that appeared before his toes and vanished behind his stride. He entered the cube, stalking slowly into the long vertices of the tunnel and the whole structure closed up after swallowing him, and vanished from the sky.
Down below, Vance witnessed a strange emergence of octahedronal shapes come together, tessellating in three dimensions to form another cube. The black marble device hit the ground and threw up gusts of sand, making its presence palpable to a congregation of surviving troops. And Vance could only stand before the solid object and witness as one of its square faces slipped backwards into an aperture and descended down into the cuboid vertices of a vanishing point miles away, further even than the curving earthly horizon. And he saw the walls inside the cube transforming, shifting, as though the space within it was far greater than its boarders. And a platform descended, carrying upon it his brother Malik, who stepped out of the cube doorway to face Vance nose to nose.
‘Malik,’ Vance whispered fearfully. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Malik is not a name I care to hear,’ he admonished. ‘This is how the birth of a God looks. I am Mekho Serat.’ And Vance beheld his black glassy eyes, a pit that swallowed all light, glassed with an immaculate surface.
‘Mekho Serat?’ Vance said, his face twitching into an irritable blinker.
‘If the Serat name is to make any more legendary frontiers, should it matter if the name is Malik or Vance when both are Serat? I am now the limits of this world, Vance. My world!’
‘The HELL you are!’ Vance bellowed.
But the Mekhos Serat monster was not a beast tamed by the superficialities of Atominii order. Vance was hurled off the floor as a black cube appeared out of nowhere, hitting his exo-suit like a truck. It seemed to come from Malik’s chest, or the space in front of Malik, vanishing a moment later as though it had crossed a dimensional road into their world on its way to some other area. Vance was thrown back, and the same cube reappeared behind him, flying now in a vertical direction, this time hurling Vance to the side before it slipped out of the physical world. Vance huffed as he hit the floor, the whirring mechanisms of his exo-suit strained from the impact. He’d been tossed around like a child’s play thing, glissading to a stop in the sand, almost forty feet from his origin.
‘VANCE!’ he heard Filipe call.
Vance Serat lifted his head in time to see the cube appear in the sky, sliding down towards Filipe at an angle as he ran to help. Its shape changed the lower it got, narrowing into a thinner and thinner plate as it shot obliquely towards him and by the time it reached Filipe’s shoulder level, it was roughly the size of a fast moving wire. And Filipe dropped to the floor dead, his head rolling from a spill of blood, the shape gone.
Vance’s exo-suit was low of power, much of it expended bolstering shield responses to sudden impacts. Crawling now Vance, gasped for air, desperate to make distance. He looked back at the Mekho Serat that was his brother, the large cube construct disassembling into random shapes behind him, slipping out of existence. And the V-TOLs and Chinooks in the area started to implode, crushed i
nto fireballs by the compacting motion of opposite moving obsidian blocks slipping in and out of the world he knew as reality. Mekho began walking towards Vance.
‘Malik,’ Vance screamed back at him, unable to shift the massive exo-suit now. ‘I know you’re still in there, Malik. Don’t kill your only brother. Don’t let this happen, Malik. We can do this together. You are a Serat. I’m proud of you, Malik. I had no idea what your discoveries meant to our world.’
Mekho Serat’s feet crunched through the sand. He was orbited now by tens of small black spheres the size of marbles. They spun around him in a belt, playfully changing pace and direction, each caught up in the spin of the other, deviated by the space of the last.
‘What are these things I see?’ he squalled in the dusty wind. ‘Are my head wires corrupted? Are you somehow interfacing with my neurophase? Is that what the chaos cipher does? ANSWER ME!’
‘It doesn’t matter either way,’ Mekho Serat’s voice sailed, orbited by the shape shifting black multiforms. ‘We are on the precipice of evolution, Vance. And Evolution does not favour our perspectives on reality. Every time you interface with the Nexus have you not been even vaguely aware of that fact you silly little infant?’
Vance backed away fearfully, crawling and pushing his palms into the sand as his brother’s cybernetic apparition closed.
‘It matters very little how reality presents itself to us on the surface of things. Do you really wish to try and discern the complexities of what lies beneath this surface? You couldn’t grasp it, Vance.’
‘But if nothing’s real,’ Vance whimpered, ‘why should I fear you?’
‘You should not take your perceptive outlook on reality literally, fool,’ the Mekho Serat grinned. ‘But do take it, seriously.’
‘I was ignorant, Malik!’ He screamed, closing his eyes and bowing into the sand. ‘I could not have known. Alright? I was ignorant.’
Mekho Serat’s feet stood into the sand now inches from Vance and he opened his eyes again to see them, black veins threading under pale skin, obsidian toe nails glittering with some ethereal technology.
‘Forgive me, Malik,’ he squalled, craning his head to his new God. ‘Please. I’m old and I thought I had experience. I thought the years I gained on you, gave me all I needed to rule. I was short sighted, brother. I had no idea. Forgive me.’
Mekho Serat looked disgusted. His face grimaced into a scowl as though he’d just trodden bare foot into dog shit. His pure crepuscular eyes told of no sympathy, they told no direction of sight, they were only forever unlit caliginous orbs.
‘I forgive you, Vance.’ He finally stated. ‘I forgive you again…and again…and again. I am for giving.’
Vance bowed his head dolefully back into the sand, knowing the irony in his tone had made his own words seem like a foreshadowing of this very moment, a moment Vance was coming to believe was his final destination.
‘I’m only sorry you would not let me give you so much more.’
‘You are so great,’ Vance pleaded. ‘You are so very great, Malik. You are my brother. You are truly a Serat.’
‘You’re a great disappointment to me Vance,’ said the voice of the Mekhos. ‘Do you respect me?’
Vance raised his head, eyes brimming with shock and awe. He ground his teeth and pushed against the technology of the exo-suit that had since powered down to become his inextricable cage.
‘Respect you?’ he reverentially opined. ‘You are the great Mekho Serat. You have surpassed the limits of space and time. I worship you.’
Mekhos began to laugh, his bemused features regarding Vance as an unusual specimen.
‘Perhaps, you’d like to lick my feet as well?’
Vance looked wearily at Malik’s feet and felt obliged to make the attempt and then Mekhos Serat stepped away from him.
‘Don’t,’ he seethed angrily. ‘You cowering pathetic clod. The things you do for power sickens me. All these years, your ideologies have been based on the premise of belief. I’m here to tell you Vance the age of belief is at an end. There will be no more of it. No more philosophy. No more pretentions to pseudo thought. No more ignorance. There will only be painful agonising truth, unabashedly in its purity, not truth as an aspect filtered by belief. Belief will have no room in my world. My world is the age of knowing. And in my world, there will be only enough room for one Serat. He controls the Hypermekhos.’
Vance pleaded for mercy as the black orbs that circled Malik’s body shot out to support his suit. Each black sphere began to stretch and warp into long metallic spires, wedging his listless melded body up from the floor, standing him at last. They fired around him, smashing against the armour, and each collision castellated the casing, prying it open, reposing Vance of his protection. He dropped out of the armoured suit and kowtowed unctuously, as it tore away like tin foil in the warping moving shapes of the Hypermekhos, a machine he was coming to understand had full advantage over their three dimensional world. And as he abased himself obsequiously before the Mekho Serat, Vance began to tear.
‘I’m sorry, Malik. I should have listened. You are my brother, Malik. My brother.’
‘Remember how we were raised, Vance?’ Malik said. ‘You were always so clean, so neat and tidy. I took pleasure in destroying your things. I took great pains to adjust to our parents regime of order and tidiness and routine. Oh how I craved disorder. - Ode to Joy,’ Mekhos remembered suddenly, holding his hand aloft. And two parallel plates ascended from the ground, black metal yawning into the air like sheet-steel drawn out of water. And the square parallel plates closed to Vance’s shoulders. Suddenly, Vance was piggy-in-the-middle to parts of a super dimensional machine with no chance of escape.
‘What sort of brutish philistine endures such an ironically joyless symphony in an attempt to impress his own sibling?’ said the Mekho Serat. ‘Have you never heard Rossini? Or Vivaldi? Even the mocking flirtations of Mozart have more class than such dead-hearted pleas for veneration.’ And Mekhos waited a moment as Vance glared on, eyes watery, simmering with fear, paused in the confusion of a long silence. But the Mekhos did not hear silence, he heard the La Gazza Ladra overture, now parading through his mind, a final and befitting fuck you to the cyberlord of a sterile and static world. For Vance, the waiting was excruciating, those two huge parallel mirrors at either side of him, shifting amorphously in size and depth, yet always those two flat sides facing to each of Vance’s shoulders.
‘I was born for greatness,’ he told Vance. ‘The Erebus crew was meant for the veneration you stole from us. They grew me in a laboratory so I could fulfil the destiny of heroism, returning to answer all fields of scientific inquiry. Even though your world has forgotten me, I’ll make them remember. They’ll see our sacrifice again. And they’ll call us heroes.’
A zephyr shifted the sands around them and beneath the hovering impossible objects, and Mekho Serat sighed, growing weary of Vance who cared only for his own survival and not the profundity of his words. So, Malik Serat decided then.
‘We’re done…’
-And clenched his fingers into a tight fist. Instantly the plates obediently magnetised, compressing Vance between them in a splash of bodily fluid that sprayed out a crimson strip across the ground. Everything that was once a man vanished with the plates into some unknowable corner of the Hypermekhos, down in the invisible folding sub realities. A thin strip of Vance’s blood had painted a narrow vertical red mark down Malik’s face. The pressure of the compression sprayed a red line for almost eight hundred meters. With laden eyes Mekho Serat glared at the vast white desert baking in the blue skies ahead, a plane now absent of Vance Serat and indeed all other life, as he let Rossini’s overture conclude. All he heard now was the pulsing droning beat of the Charybdis black hole.
‘Au revior, Vance, the Eternal.’
-75-
The Nova Storm eased down through the fierce winds and Raven and Nitro stared pensively from the view screen as streams of rainwater blasted over the canopy. They
bobbed and rocked in the turbulence.
‘We’re close to the position,’ Nitro informed.
‘Any SAM’s?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Nitro said, ‘no missile defences, no sky-mines, nada.’
‘Keep thine eyes attentive,’ Raven said, his strands of grey and white hair thick like frost in front of his bright and cold green eyes. ‘Our mission has yet the vicissitudes of vulnerability.’
‘Don’t worry about it, big guy,’ Nitro smiled confidently. ‘We got this.’
The Nova Storm’s scanners swept the pelagic black waves that rocked and bulged as far as the naked eye could see and yet nothing else was visible on the ocean save the occasional basalt atolls peaking beyond an unstable surface.
The canopy had grown unsettlingly silent, only the whir of the Nova Storm’s engines filled the space as the warrior allowed Nitro the time to reflect.
‘Sometimes, I wonder, what the hell’s keeping me here,’ Nitro confessed loquaciously while sitting back. ‘Nothing,’ he told himself forlornly. ‘Nada.’
Raven shut his eyes again.
‘Do you have any kids, Raven?’ he asked, but the Olympian maintained his discretion.
Raven did not reply.
‘I grew up in Chicago suburbs fostered by many father figures. People at war with themselves who found uses for my talents. I learned how to make explosives. I used to blow up small fury animals, squirrels, rats, birds.’
Chaos Cipher Page 64
