‘Glad you remembered I saved you assholes back near Omicron,’ he basked proudly. ‘Don’t forget it because, since I’m going to have the screening and everything…I’ll forget how awesome I was. But I think I’ve done my time.’
‘Damn right, you did,’ Kelly smiled. ‘Good luck, Ethan.’
‘And you, Kel.’ He winked, doffing the peak of his baseball cap. ‘Have a nice life.’
‘Exactly.’ She laughed.
*
Duval had been stood patiently in the observation room of Orandoré where the Chronomancer sat beneath a large open view screen of the planet Earth. Even now as the crevice of light dawned on the penumbral, curve Avenoir was revising the chaos cipher’s patterns. Duval had broken the news to her lightly about Raven’s death and since that time, she’d fallen into a strange silence that wasn’t quite grieving, but more tenuously related to guilt and depression. He didn’t understand what was so shocking, had she not seen his death coming? Distractedly, she traced the lines of code with her finger, uttering unknown words to herself as she worked, doing her best to occupy her mind.
Not a moment too late, did Claudia Noble finally turn up at the studio and Duval moved to shake her hand.
‘How is she?’
‘Well,’ Duval sighed. ‘Difficult to say. She knows about the Olympian terrorist she came here with.’
‘His name was Raven,’ Claudia announced. ‘We respect dead members of Shield of Spheres.’
‘Of course,’ Duval nodded, looking over to where Avenoir sat in the distance of the observation room. ‘He came through for you in the end, didn’t he?’
‘He didn’t do it for us,’ Claudia answered. ‘But he did it knowingly, either way. He had a lot of faith in the girl’s vision.’
‘Do you?’
‘Cautiously,’ she implied, remembering her past experiences with Chronomancers. ‘We’ve lost too many of our best and brightest. I’ve been looking all over for Nitro and he’s literally vanished. I don’t think he’s dead. But one doesn’t quit the Shield of Spheres without recourse. As for the Plato Wing…Ace Ripley was our finest Olympian pilot. That was a painful loss.’
‘But you may have gained Cassandra,’ he whispered. ‘With a Chronomancer on your side, you’ll never be out of work.’
‘Indeed,’ she smiled. ‘The child will be focussing on cracking open the mysteries of the Erebus and that chaos codex.’
‘I saw the pilot neuro-stream visual feedback from the desert,’ Duval stated, leaning in and lowering his voice. ‘Do they know what that thing was?’
‘The Hypermekhos?’ she asked. ‘Not yet. Theory is that it’s some kind of inter-dimensional machine or station or something. Speaking of which, what’s the news on the whereabouts of the third Spydrone?’
‘The Orbital Guard lost track,’ said Duval. ‘They believe it came down over the Pacific Ocean somewhere near Fiji. But almost every station in the Solar System in presently in too steep a crisis to commit to an effective search effort.’
The last Xenotech spelled trouble for humanity and she didn’t need to convince him. In the wake of their arrival, all that was a proud and rising space Empire now rained fire through the skies, burning up on re-entry as it all spiralled out of orbit like a falling domino economy. It was a fact that depressed her, that there were forces outside their knowledge which they were not ready to face. What troubled her most, was the existence of a machine like the Hypermekhos, a machine that was even now all around them, perhaps as big as the Earth itself, perhaps bigger yet, a machine that was dynamic and transformational, able to reach into their reality and snare them like fish. It was becoming apparent how small their neck of the universe was starting to look. They really were in it.
Claudia Noble dismissed herself and began to walk slowly towards Avenoir. She ascended the stairway leading up to her platform by the window and sat beside the Chronomancer with the diamond freckled head. Claudia smiled amiably.
‘Hello Avenoir,’ she greeted. ‘You probably already know who I am, don’t you?’
She turned to the woman and nodded.
‘I’m sorry about Raven,’ she said. ‘He was a brave Amorian. And as I promised I will reveal what happened to your culture. Those responsible for the destruction of the Kyklos will be brought to Atominii justice.’
Stoically Avenoir watched the stars rotating out the window and slowly continued to copy the lines of the chaos cipher into an e-pad.
‘Can’t get that code out your head, huh?’ she asked. ‘You still working on cracking it?’
And Avenoir nodded, determined, angry.
‘Any closer?’
But she didn’t respond, simply bit her lips and glowered.
‘I’m going to look after you now,’ she promised. ‘Not as a warrior. Not as an instrument of Atominii national defence. But as a promise to honour what Raven did. I will uphold my end of the bargain.’
Avenoir nodded.
‘You can already see that I will, can’t you?’
And again Avenoir nodded, keeping stiltedly mute.
‘I think you and I will be good friends,’ Claudia smiled.
Avenoir turned to her and scowled, then slowly shook her head.
*
The weeks that followed saw some very quick changes aboard the station. Security had tightened for one, it was impossible to move as easily around as before. Shield of Spheres, however, had a limitless access to the base. Colonel Max Elba and his Canaries were in charge of station security, nothing went on without their knowing it. They had the place sealed as tight as a drum.
As Avenoir and Scott continued to work on the enigma of the chaos cipher, Orandoré had meantime assembled a team of mechanics to modify The Griffin’s Claw, fitting the starnavis with an updated pyro-catalyst fusion core and five Temporal-Inertial-Cycles, which now occupied the space of the cargo
hold. Kelly had been worried about the large capsules until the Orandoré Spanners assured her the pyro-catalyst core would produce enough energy to operate them while in a long transit velox. The Shield of Spheres had delivered on their promise, and The Griffin’s Claw was starting to look indeed like a state-of-the-art craft. Their training had been intense.
Kelly settled into one of the inertial seats on the bridge and pulled the webbing polymer across the fabric of her space suit. Pawel stood in the centre, surrounded by nodes of light which interacted with his pulsing suit. Caspian climbed up through the main conduit and walked onto the bridge, moving to settle down in a command seat.
‘Pawel, dunt forget da cargo calibrations men, weir nut carrying Obsiduranium aneemore, boetie.’
‘Of course, Captain.’ He said, analysing the interplay of augmented holographics.
Caspian Mowser had settled in beside Kelly and smiled excitedly, clapping his hands.
‘Whoduyah thinke?’ he said opening his arms. He was referring to his new rags, no longer business rags but the attire of a professional deep-space captain. She smiled.
‘You look well cut for the job.’
‘Fukken roite aie do,’ he smiled, fist bumping with Kelly.
‘Scuttle, Pawel, you guys sitting pretty?’ Kelly shouted to the bridge’s network. Pawel channelled her voice through to the lower levels of the Starnavis.
‘Ready captain,’ Scuttle said.
‘Alright,’ Pawel announced, relaxing into his pilot seat and taking manual control of The Griffin’s Claw. ‘This is your pilot speaking. Orbital debris field at minimal orientation, leaving Orandoré’s Shield of Spheres in approximately thirty seconds, prepare to detach.’ And Pawel realised a communications request filtering through his neuro-ligature. ‘Erm, Captain. The Chief is on the line.’
‘Petch ‘er through,’ said Caspian.
‘Good luck, Griffin’s Claw.’ Claudia Noble said as she displayed her voice pattern in the augmented field. ‘Unfortunately, your shuttle is not fitted with superluminal communication. We’re about out of time for starnavis updates so The Griffin�
�s Claw is as good as she’s going to be. However, there will be stations in Cygnus from where you can contact me, set-ups made by our distant base allies.’
Silently, The Griffin’s Claw unlatched from the station and pulled away, drifting out of orbit pulling a five gee acceleration. Pawel locked onto one of the lunar Lagrange points and began an approach vector, and he felt himself becoming weightless in the micro-gravity, as did the rest of the crew.
‘How long are we going to be asleep?’ Scuttle’s voice croaked through the network.
‘There’s a shield velox point at your first destination,’ she said. ‘There’s a maintenance crew waiting to attach the deep-space impact ovule. That is when you’ll need to put yourselves under for TIC sleep. I think you’ll be out for almost a year Earth time. When you arrive at Cygnus,’ Chief Claudia went on, ‘you’ll rendezvous with Jules Wade near the colony moon, Syndruss. He’ll take it from there.’
‘Roite!’ Caspian shouted, pointing ahead to the stars. ‘Operation Bulaweyo is a goh!’
‘We’re not calling it that,’ Kelly argued.
‘Eets moy meeshon, Keyl, weir kawleenke et Bulaweyo.’
‘I tentatively leave this in your hands, Griffin’s Claw.’ Said Claudia Noble. ‘Good luck. Shield of Spheres – out.’
The Griffin’s Claw’s long tapering bow aimed for the new astro-location. Shifting into the sun’s gravitational neutral zone, the expanding belt of adapted saltus-carousels snapped into position, starting up the electromagnetic toroid. Dense superfluid within stirred, warping the Higgs field around the starnavis. With a resplendent haze the engine nacelles burst to life and the celestial shuttle reached into the expanding voids and veloxed away from the Solar System, home to a manufactured chaos.
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