Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  ‘Then thou were a very cruel and troubled and unfeeling youth.’ Raven muttered, eyes still shut.

  ‘Yeah,’ Nitro agreed. ‘One day, I joined the Syridan army, fighting to protect the Atominii states and the hardlands. I was part of a peacekeeper division. I always wanted to help. My wife…she started getting involved in hardland politics and they took her away. I never saw her again. This child…our child was just six years old. I don’t get it…I never understood why they took the kid, y’know.’

  The Olympian warrior slowly opened his green eyes again as his contemplative meditation grew disturbed.

  ‘I have advice for you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You must learn of the value of personal privacy,’ Raven revealed. ‘You tell too willingly about yourself and speak with pride, yet you see not this characteristic in you as weakness. You above all, must know, as an intelligence officer, that some things are sacred. Thou reachest out to thine enemy for kinship. But, the divide is too deep and too far now to ever heal over such a cloven abyss of morals, and since you devote on calling me out on such stigmas like big guy, I see no need to seal this divide. Be advised, my naive Titan nemesis. What one can do with information so private and vital to you, can be used to harm you, Nicholas Harbeck. Never entrust that all people hold dear to altruism and benevolence.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Nitro smiled wide and proud. ‘You see, that’s good advice. You’re a virtuous fellow, Raven.’

  ‘It is here,’ Raven suddenly stated, leaning forth in his seat. ‘The object of our expedition, ATLAS lies ahead.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Raven had been looking at his palm where a series of small twinkling blue lights were amassed.

  ‘I just know.’ He said lugubriously.

  Nitro also sat forth in disbelief as a series of unregistered archipelagos appeared on the radars and runway strip clearances lit up across the island airstrips, clearing them for landing.

  ‘Jesus,’ Nitro exclaimed. ‘You’re right, and it looks like this place still has auto-landing guides engaged. That, or somebody is expecting us.’

  ‘Commander Harbeck,’ Chief Claudia Noble neuromitted. ‘SkyLord Kent Gallows has permitted you access to ATLAS to retrieve artefacts from the Kyklos disaster. There are conditions.’

  ‘Sure, name the terms,’ said Nitro.

  ‘No matter what you see in there you are entitled to only what is in the artefact containment facility MS, four, zero, eight.’

  ‘Copy that,’ said Nitro.

  ‘One more thing,’ said the Chief. ‘Once the mission is over you’re due for a memory screening.’

  ‘Is that really necessary?’ Nitro asked.

  ‘It will be.’ She promised. ‘It was part of the arrangement I negotiated for getting you in this place. Nobody is to know what is in this facility.’

  ‘Sure,’ Nitro smiled, ‘just out of curiosity, have I ever have my memory screened before?’

  ‘Please take this seriously, Nitro,’ she reminded. ‘Remain vigilant until the mission is over.’

  ‘Not a problem, Chief,’ Nitro assured, ‘I’ve got the ever so mirthful captain kill-joy here to make sure of that.’

  The Nova Storm hovered low, sliding its wheels across the wet asphalt spraying a rooster-tail of water in its path as it cut along the runway strip. The burning embers cooled in the duel engines, vermilion flares bright enough still to reflect on the dark surfaces of wet trees and greenery and shimmer through the dazzling rain which pelted down across the island as the storm raged on. The propulsion engines were capped and doused with coolant as the passenger doors opened between them at the back of the cadonavis and Raven stooped into the rain, followed by a much shorter Nitro. They looked around for a control tower or facility entrance but there was nothing obvious at first.

  ‘Where’s the welcoming committee?’ Nitro complained.

  Raven slogged through the rain and the faint and untraceable pulse of lightning momentarily webbed everything in its transient light, and with a twelve second delay a very distant and angry thunder peeled through the sky.

  Nitro stayed close to the cadonavis as the large warrior made his way slowly down the runway, and a few moments later they saw motion at the end of the path. It was the gradual rise of something concrete emerging from the earth, spilling dust and torrents of water from its edges as it pushed beyond the surface, unsettling the plants that had learned to grow on its head throughout the years it had remained inactive. At around twenty feet it stopped with a loud crash; and they beheld a short cylindrical tower, walls clawed from where it had risen up. Light began to glow around its circumference, and the cylindrical tower parted down the middle and opened to reveal an iron cage, illuminated with spot lights that skimmed the silvery gossamer of webs behind which an elevator awaited.

  Nitro took hold of the iron locking-bar and hauled it vertically up. It came free, he angled it into a horizontal position and pushed the gate sideways along the rails. Once past the gate, they walked through an empty and dusty elevation space. Raven stepped into the middle and waited for Nitro, who stood by his side and pulled the gate closed again behind them.

  There was an electrical buzz as the gate met with the locks and the elevator platform slowly began its descent into darkness. Nitro’s oculars automatically shifted into night-vision, enhancing the squared contours of the pallid elevator shaft against dark scratches and vertical abrasions lining the walls. Motes of dust clawed from the concrete surface as the elevator descended into the depths and they felt the process vibrate through the platform, on which they stood.

  The elevator fell deeper for another minute before clanging to a stop almost sixty metres below the earth. And as the gates unlatched several dim lights shone upon a bare and concrete wall, where in its centre was a wooden door with a brass knob. The paint had started to peel off, decaying and dry flakes curling around fissures throughout the texture. Nitro unbolted the latch and hauled it into an upright position, then slid the gate aside. He and Raven stepped out of the elevator. Pensively, Nitro twisted the handle to a following gate and pushed the stiff and creaking door open, and it swung into the darkness and activated a sensor. They heard the droning buzz of electricity from somewhere in the blackness, and dull amber bulbs began to blush, caged in their dusty pendant fixtures, like saucers hung from lines, spotting the dark hallways in dull segmented apricot light. Motes of dust pollenated the air, and they saw door-less rooms along the hallway, and in them the endless crates and dusty boxes of emptied provisions, or dunes of salt and the bones of meat preserves once stored there. They stalked deeper inside, their shadows veering throughout the hall as they passed under each warming bulb, inactive for a time neither could guess.

  The Olympian warrior opened his palm, and signatures of opalescent light were coordinating into circular patterns, a clear sign that they were drawing close to the hidden artefacts of Kyklos. The bulbs ahead flickered irritably as electrical contacts failed on their supports, a place clearly unmaintained for centuries. Raven stared into the blackened rooms to descry the motion of rodents scurrying under dusty desks in a conference room. Their feet crunched as they moved across shattered glass, once an observation window that positioned as an entire wall for a general meeting room. Raven’s boots crushed the glass deeper under his weight as he approached a new door at the end of the corridor, he coiled his long ossein fingers around the handle and shoved it open.

  Here, the space was much larger. A vast open grave of secrets, iron freight containers stored on high stacks and marked with radioactive hazard symbols, stacks for steel drums and bulk fluid containers, half-filled with unknowable contents marked in symbols of a language long ago forgotten. And a huge gantry construction was built into the roof with a crane that looked like some stock operation, once used for loading and unloading equipment. They moved quietly through the massive space, between towering stacks of wooden cargo boxes and freight containers that stood almost sixty meters, hove
ring just below the tapering stalactites of the dark, cave ceiling. Nitro pointed ahead of them to a huge ocean liner floating in a section of the subterranean building. It rested hauntingly, massive, in a great black lake. A long, poorly lit harbour ran around it, filled with armaments that hung from higher defence purpose gantries. It was an enormous space, surrounded by towers, loading davits, cranes and all kinds of machinery for loading and unloading. Nitro imagined that the large pool must lead out to sea level by a series of enormous locks, beyond the unknowably dense walls of rock. It was surrounded by cranes and loading davits and all kinds of machinery.

  ‘Big fucking tomb.’ Nitro whispered with syllables amplifying through the capacious storage hull. ‘That thing must be hundreds of years old, look at the size of it!’

  They started into the open space with Nitro eagerly leading the way, staring around with inquisitive regard at the many items littered on the floor, of cables and the bones of shattered boxes and uniformed clothing.

  ‘What do you think this place was?’ Nitro asked loquaciously. ‘Looks like people lived here once. Powerful people, judging by the shit they left. Why hadn’t I heard of ATLAS before now?’

  ‘Thou should ask thy venerable directors.’ Raven whispered.

  ‘My neuro-ligature isn’t picking up a signal down here,’ Nitro replied. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Raven. ‘Nor do I care enough about the trivialities, secrets and plunderous histories of this ruined world.’

  Then, Raven stopped walking, his palm burning with a red indicative light. He’d not seen this particular hue of light in his nanology since the Kyklos. Raven turned his head, his pale green eyes, spying through strands of his grey hair, a large steel freight container suspended upon one of the stacks. He started towards it; ears tuned to Nitro’s activities as he kicked an empty steel drum in the distance and listened to the echo of his own claps.

  The crimson light pulsed brighter in his palm now, arranging a symbol that in his language meant an emergency of great immersion.

  ‘Hey!’ Nitro barked suddenly, reaching into his holster to retrieve a Chaos-Eagle. And he pointed the electro-magnetic handgun at Raven and asked him where he was going.

  ‘Steady thy nerves,’ Raven said calmly.

  Nitro lowered his aim and approached.

  ‘What’s the plan, big guy?’ he asked. ‘Did you find your things?’

  ‘Tis not the artefacts,’ Raven explained morosely, looking up at the dark steel container coated in dust.

  ‘No?’ Nitro asked. ‘So what’s in there?’

  Raven stared at the glowing red mark on his palm, signals that resembled death and pain.

  ‘I fear to know,’ he confessed.

  ‘That thing on your hand, what does that mean?’

  ‘Tis the mark of Olympian Genetics,’ said Raven with utmost contrition, ‘those of us who lived on Kyklos; when we near we know our own by the nanologic signatures emitted. This means that some of my people are...here.’

  Nitro grew despondent and set his sights on the freight container and had thought about what horrors lay within.

  ‘Some things are best left unknown, buddy,’ Nitro sighed.

  ‘Some things are,’ Raven sneered.

  ‘Get the artefacts from MS, four, zero, eight,’ Nitro instructed, ‘get the fuck out of here. That’s the mission. We’re to touch nothing else. SkyLord Gallows has permitted this on these terms. You, I think, are under very close watch. You’re an asset to helping us stop this Serat guy.’

  ‘The SkyLord!’ Raven chortled, ‘the very man responsible for authorising an attack on the Kyklos in the first place. Gallows! I’ll see that he fits his moniker. I’ll tailor the noose myself!’

  And with an indignant turn Raven marched away from the steel container, within which only sadness and pain could dwell.

  *

  They’d wondered the labyrinths of cargo containers and steel freights for a further twenty minutes before Raven could get a good fix on where the artefacts lay. He held out his palm, feeling out the concentration of things ahead, like needles they prickled his skin until the hot sharp sense of focus came upon him and he snatched back his palm and stared solemnly in the direction from where it came.

  ‘This way,’ he stated. He led them through security doors long ago left open and exposed, through laboratories abandoned for at least a decade. And finally, they’d gone beyond the structure’s storage facilities and into the heart of ATLAS, a newer and although inactive, much less messy place. Here, industrial fluorescent light strips blinked to luminosity and walls came to life with initiation start-up protocols demanding access keys and input codes to begin the laboratory initialisations.

  Ignoring all else, Raven followed the glowing compass of symbols in his palm as the nanology worked beneath his skin to light a large walkway at the end of which stood a twenty foot high cylindrical safe door. Edged into the steel was the name MS 408 – Ragnar’s Safe.

  ‘MS four, zero, eight,’ Nitro said aloud, his voice echoing through the chamber. ‘This is the place. But who the hell is Ragnar?’

  ‘I bethinks the name is irrelevant,’ Raven scoffed.

  Within moments of them reaching the area the locks began to turn. Access codes and initialisation sequences were being input from an external source. And with a groan of steel on steel, the huge safe door hinged open to reveal a well-lit safe-room, filled with compartments and scattered files and papers.

  Raven stepped inside while Nitro kept watch by the door. The giant Olympian followed his palm and found what he had been looking for. A glass cabinet, within which stood a long and broad blade, almost as tall as Raven and as dark as the Olympian’s name professed.

  ‘The Shadow Goliath,’ he gasped in astonishment.

  ‘What is that?’ Nitro asked, looking around his arm. ‘Just an ornament, right?’

  ‘The Shadow Goliath is no object for mere admiration,’ Raven declared as he gazed at the blade with a sense of bereavement and ignobility. ‘Tis the mark of our culture. A weapon gilded with Obsiduranium coating, whose counter-particles were dropped into the core of a black hole, forging an almost unbreakable structure. One who wields it, can manipulate its mass; one who wields it, can put into it their energy. I see now why my family were here. Whoever owned Ragnar’s Safe, wanted also to find an Olympian Genetic as I, capable of using such a weapon.’

  ‘But it’s just a sword,’ Nitro laughed. ‘When up against a gun, what damage can it do?’

  ‘Naïve Titan,’ Raven smiled, green eyes still avariciously beset on the displayed weapon. ‘The weapon cannot be wielded by any mere Olympian, but one trained to be frugal about their bio-nanology. Bullets alone will not kill such life forms. Armed with the Shadow Goliath, bullets to me will be not but used led.’

  Beside the weapon was a gauntlet, the very same kind of glove worn by his brother when he powered the Obsiduranium catalyst with his own nanology. Finally, amongst them all were three black spheres, perfectly opaque and mirroring everything in their curved reflection. Raven saw his nose bulge in their mirrored centre as he stood before them, his head shrunken and the room’s eight corners caught in the perfect curvature.

  ‘Well, good,’ said commander Nitro Harbeck, ‘grab them and go.’

  Raven drew back his fist and smashed the glass cabinet to pieces. He tore the gauntlet free from its recess and fitted his palm into the glove, its auto tightening systems clamping down. Nitro watched in astonishment as with it, Raven picked up the black sword and brandished it over his shoulder casually. He reached out for the three spheres and they assembled into his palm where they circled like Baoding balls, and Raven glared at their hypnotic motion, contemplative.

  ‘Raven’ Nitro said looking around. ‘Be quick, we need to get moving.’

  ‘Hast thou ever been honest with thyself, Nitro Harbeck?’ the Olympian asked as he turned. ‘Hast thou ever taken glance upon the mirror with truth in thy aspiration?’

&nbs
p; ‘What the fuck you talking about?’ Nitro asked suspiciously, lifting his aim. ‘We have a partnership, Raven. Don’t forget that I had to put a lot of trust in you to bring you here. We have to work together.’

  ‘It might to do thee well first,’ said Raven, ‘to know thyself. For if all relationships are based on trust, and then certain truths must be the syndrome. Since thou art receiving a mind screening after this mission then it couldn’t hurt to know some things first.’

  From his palm one of the spheres jumped into the air between them and a flash of spurious light filled the void. Nitro tried to shield his face but the light bled through his bones and skin, seeping into his mind unabated. It caused no pain, but dazzled his senses in overwhelming surges of emotions he’d never before experienced. And Nitro saw her face again for the first time in years. She had been weeping. She had been carrying the baby who was also hysterical and he was telling her it was for the best. She pleaded, but he was indifferent, sworn to duty, proud. There was no other way, he had told himself. There can be no other way, because any other way would jeopardise all that our great society has worked so hard, and sacrificed so much for.

  Don’t go…

  Had he said that? Had he really thought that?

  Don’t take her away…