Zhe #02 - Chains of Tartarus Read online

  Chains of Tartarus

  I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

  Albert Einstein

  You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.

  Will Rogers

  Health and Safety Warning - As the last document in this series was graded as a class-three primitive memetic virus, it should be impossible for you to be reading this disclaimer. A thorough mind-scrub was ordered for every being who came into contact with that pernicious assemblage of lies and half-truths, so the very fact that you know of this sequel hints at treason. However, if you must persist, know that this document is even more virulent than the last, and that the Multiplicity Mental Hygeine Department has imposed a mandatory brain-wipe order on anyone who in any way copies, disseminates or discusses its contents. Really, people, it's for your own good...

  Subpraetor Kweel, Departmental Hierophant

  DOCUMENT INSERT - MULTIPLICITY ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT

  Progress Report

  Uploaded by: Technician Zhe Aurham Gexxis III

  Location: THREE-DIMENSIONAL SPACE GRID REFERENCE LJ-9032487529087-298478-XX-9

  Standing Orders:

  * Track and trace missing Technic Hierophant Gharfos Nyl Meraxxis IV.

  * Research the possibility of appropriating the primitive weapon alluded to in Operative Nyl's communiques.

  * Undertake said appropriation, if viable.

  * Maintain the structural cohestion of reality at this location until such time as local lifeforms can be inducted into the Multiplicity.

  My Lord Praetor; Subpraetors Major and Minor; Hierophantic Councilbeings and Esteemed Fellows of the Technic Academy -

  It is my sad duty to report to you the defection and quite probable madness of our brother-in-servitude Gharfos Nyl.

  As you well know, the lure of being worshipped as a local deity by primitive species is a powerful temptation for creatures such as ourselves. I fear that Technician Nyl has, to borrow a term from the apes who infest this rock, 'gone native' in the worst possible way.

  My initial investigations revolved around the sequestrated memories of one

  Kaito Kayzi, Human, age twenty-seven; Jaqub Yaqub Hassan, Human, age thirty-one, and Abdulafia 330, Gene-sequenced warfighter, age one hundred and twenty-five.

  Through them, and diverse records from closed-circuit cameras, spy satellites, biomechanical surveillance drones &c I have been able to piece together a very troubling picture of Nyl's actions leading up to the present crisis.

  It is his stated intention to utilise an energy-patterning system known as 'The Forge' to effect a synthesis between our blessed Multiplicty and the benighted Unity of the Motherbrain - and one other, a Denizen of the Planes Beyond.

  This last entity is able to exist here only due to the threadbare nature of time and space at this location; in it's own world it is powerful beyond imagining.

  My only heartening piece of news is that Gharfos Nyl has been captured; though not by myself. He remains in thrall of a human faction he once led in the role of a primitive theocrat.

  Otherwise the news is grim - I beseech you to call off your fleets and stand down! This grid-location is far more fragile than even our own savants and skryers ever imagined, and all-out war would likely begin a Metatemporal Fray that could unravel this entire universe.

  My research remains ongoing and duly dilligent - I hope to find some way to disable the Forge and thus render the need for conflict null and void. As to Technician Nyl; his current incapacitiation should make him an easy target for an Inux Shorg snatch-and-grab team.

  It is my sincere hope that this world may one day achieve upliftment into the ranks of the Praetor's grace; to that end I must now press on with my investigations.

  Yours in the Light of His Power,

  Technician Zhe Aurham Gexxis III, Exoethnological Specialist

  The edge of the Shaman's obsidian knife bit deep, through skin and flesh, all the way down to the bone. Blood welled hot and wet around it as the shaman's apprentice looked up at him expectantly, her eyes as round and white as moons in the firelight.

  She pulled her leather torniquet tight as the knife slipped free, black blood dripping from its blade.

  "See there, child. See the taint of the darkness in him. That is why I must do this thing, to win back his soul from the Devourer."

  He didn't want it to end this way. When the winter wind came skirling down off the peaks he felt every one of his sixty-seven years as a dull ache in his bones. And it took strength to wrestle with the Devourer, in the outer dark where no mortal foot could tread...

  "I see it, Father." whispered the young girl at his side, her face smeared with soot and ochre. "With the Spirit Eye, I can see it... breathing. Coiling like a serpent in him..."

  The old man grunted to himself; as near to praise as he'd ever come. If she truly saw, perhaps she was ready. After all, he must have been a green youth once too.

  "Then hold him, and begin the invocation. His soul has gone deep, and it will take some time to set him free."

  If I can do it at all. Unless this is the last time, the time when it has me in his place....

  A man lay between them, swaddled in deer-hide and wolfskin, wrapped up as tight as a baby but for the gap in the skins which exposed his bleeding chest. Thongs of hide clattering with bones and uncut gems lay unlaced there, a neat circle in which the black blood twisted and boiled, dripping upward from the knife-cut and evaporating into

  smoke.

  He had been wounded in battle, cut down when the bloodthirst had him in its jaws. And now his body incubated horrors - he would awaken as a monster, a soulless one, if the ritual failed.

  Or he'd never wake at all, taking his foolish savior with him. If that happened, the girl's first task as shaman would be to cut their blackened hearts out...

  "Be careful, Old Father." she said, pressing his gnarled old hand between hers. "This one - "

  "This one is the same as all the others. The Gods walk with me, child."

  But in his soul he knew he was a liar, and a dead man. It didn't change a thing. The shaman of the tribe wielded power beyond the dreams of petty warlords, but in the end he had to pay his due.

  His apprentice's hands were shaking as she passed him a cup of bluefire, the heady aroma of the broth igniting sparks behind his eyes. He'd fasted all day to be ready for this moment, and used up half of his supply of rare herbs and powders to make the

  sacred potion.

  Now he put the cup to his lips and felt the hot, slippery flame of the bluefire coiling down into his belly, awakening power from the earth below him. It blazed up his spine like summer lightning, pouring down from the sky and falling across his upturned face like rain.

  His Spirit Eye cracked open, the lids peeling back as it swelled bigger and bigger, stripping away his mortal flesh as he hatched from his body like a newborn snake from its leathery egg. And he stepped into the outer dark, naked, his years cast aside as galaxies of blue tattoos lit up across his skin.

  There was the man he had come to rescue, bound to the darkness with thick, dripping webs of shadow. Hunched over his fevered body was the bent and twisted from of the nameless one, the Devourer, its hands working madly like black spiders as they marked the fallen warrior as its own.

  "He is not for you." said the shaman, in a voice of grim authority. "Not tonight, or any night, or ever, until the sun is drowned beneath the ocean."

  The thing turned to face him then, its bones cracking and popping as it's head twisted around on an impossibly long neck. Its face may have once been human, but
now it was contorted with evil glee, a slick black mask slashed with glittering teeth.

  "Then you know the price, old man. You know the wager your ancestors made. You'll fight me for him, with your soul as forfeit?"

  In this place between worlds the shaman was young again, young and strong for one last time. He stepped forward, clenching his fists as the Devourer peeled itself away from its prey, leaving the crawling purple tattoos it had been etching into the man's skin unfinished.

  "I'll fight you for him, with my soul as forfeit. But you and I both know, demon, that even if I win I'm not going back. My life ends tonight, so I offer you a deal. You'll have a second chance at me if you take a blood-oath now, to leave my people be for ten more winters."

  His apprentice needed time, time to learn and to earn the respect of the tribe. If he could buy her ten whole years...

  The Devourer picked its way toward him on stilted legs, sniffing at the air as if to scent out any duplicity in his words. Blue radience from the shaman's tattooed skin lit up its oily face as it leered down at him.

  "Oh, I'd gladly take a second bite at this morsel, Old Father. So many years we could share together with your pain...." it giggled obscenely, drooling with anticipation. "Done! I swear, by all things vile and unholy, ten winters shall your people have without knowing my sweet touch. And your little one... will ripen into a fruit all the sweeter to taste."

  The look on the shaman's face was grim as he brought his hands out to either side,

  conjuring up a circle in which they would fight. The half-scarified warrior looked down on them from his tangled web, his eyes wide and terrified. Half of his face was flayed bare to the bone, and iron needles studded the raw meat of his lips and cheek.

  "Enough of your games, demon." grated the shaman, balling his fists and crouching in a wrestler's pose. "Come and take me if you can. I promise, the only pain tonight will be your own."

  Then the blackness blurred, a snarl of wet white teeth and sizzling claws, and the Devourer was on him, eclipsing the spiral swirls across his skin. Light and dark, distilled in essence, knotted and twisted in a death-embrace as old as time itself...

  One last time.

  And this time, for keeps.

  Part Three- Saprophyte

  If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism.

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts.

  Anais Nin

  You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

  Eric Hoffer

  This ain’t rock n roll – this is genocide! David Bowie

  DOCUMENT INSERT: MULTIPLICITY ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT

  Onne The Practyse Of Demonologie;

  Bynding Of Denizennes Of The Planes Infernal

  Thirteenth Century Folio,

  Ascribed to the Alchemist Cornelius Gracchus Trismegistus, Executed for the practice of witchcraft – 1322 anno domine, Kingdom of Aragon, northern Spain.

  “Having scribed ye pentacle, for to contain thee malicious fiend, great care muste be tayk’n to preserve and gird aboute this vital forme! Much fell affront hath been donne unto the careless wretch who, thynking himselfe ward ‘gainst the Demonne he hath rais’d, will tread apon the ‘scribed lines of bloode, or yet topple but a single blacke candle, to hys miserie!

  For truly I entreat ye, the spawne of Lucifer be cunnyng and vyle, wont to feaste apon the flesh of those who entrappe them.

  Hie ye also to my warnyinge – when thou must excise the possessed, touch them not by your fleshe, for the fiend within will not shy from enslavement of a more potent forme, indeed, the earthy frame of a Magister is to them the most toothsome of repasts...”

  Technician Zhe considered the sun – a vast and bloated thing squatting at the centre of its merciless gravity well. It had them in its grip now, relentless.

  Aegis wasn’t just in free-fall, however - a battery of vast sublight engines powered the immense ship down toward Mercury faster than any sunbound comet, while its razor-sharp suite of electronic scanners and probes quartered the void ahead for any trace of the Multiplicity. Zhe had taught it well what to expect; the A.I slaves he’d socketed into its command systems were advanced enough to know caution - and fear.

  They’d shunted a clutch of faster-than-light drones into superspace as Aegis roared through the orbit of Venus, popping open in the target zone like silicon and aluminum flowers, each one a mass of interrogator systems.

  And now they screamed their warning, lighting up the combat screens in the airless vault of Aegis' command deck.

  There – skimming through the radioactive soup of the sun’s corona - a gravitonic distortion which twisted up the fabric of space and time. It was a living creature the size of a small moon – a vast hollow sphere which the hastily tutored Aegis picked as a Multiplicity portal unit. Output models painted the sentient carrier-ship as a knot of burning red in the minds of Aegis’ A.I. commanders, crosschecking schematics and battle reports to isolate its weak points.

  They were depressingly few in number.

  But the human-built death machine had a few surprises of its own to share with the Effortless Subjugation. Aegis had been built just after its hulking sister ship – it was just a little more advanced, a little faster, its weapons systems that tiny increment sharper than those of Abraxas. During the centuries it had spent mothballed in dry-dock Kronos had worked it over remotely, using the semi-autonomous systems of Terminal Station to upgrade its titanic armaments – a little surprise for the Blacksteel Explorator System known as Everdark.

  Of course, that whole situation didn’t exactly pan out smoothly for the great machine – and if the very final demise of the Xerxes was any yardstick of comparison, it wouldn’t have lasted very long in pitched battle with the Motherbrain's finest.

  Let alone the Battle of Mars... that debacle was too painful to think about.

  All of this would have worried Technician Zhe if the A.I.-slaved destroyer were his last line of defense – but Aegis was expendable. He just hoped that the spaceborne fortress packed enough stopping power to slow the advance of the Multiplicity - for an hour at the outside.

  Enough time to recover the Chrome Ark.

  Why the damnable renegade Nyl hadn’t gone straight for that potent artifact was a mystery in itself but everything about his erstwhile colleague pointed to a total breakdown of neural functions. The poor twisted, crystallized thing was as mad as a

  veteran of the Hallucigenia Wars.

  Tactically (a fact backed up by several of Zhe’s slaved subprocessors) the Ark was his best chance of stopping the two alien fleets from clashing in Earth orbit – an event which would no doubt tear this whole universe apart at the seams.

  Perhaps after having a few of their precious Sentient Combat Systems shot out from under them the Kataphrakt commanders of the Multiplicity fleet would even deign to negotiate.

  Well, anything was worth a try ...

  “Attention, Mitochondriate Vessel ‘Effortless Subjugation’ – this is the Authorized Multiplicity Technician for this reality, Zhe Aurham Gexxis III!” bellowed the comm systems of Aegis. “Please stand down and shut off your portal unit immediately!”

  All this was delivered in the clipped Codespeak Twelve of the Technic Academy, the multiversal patois of the Technicians. Static looped and howled on the open band for a second or two, the song of solar flares and hard radiation. Then;

  “Primitive Vessel, you are in breach of Praetorian Accord 1119/c – impersonating a registered Technician of the Multiplicity. Although I must say you’ve piqued my curiosity – just how did you manage to capture one of the slippery little silver bastards?”

 
Back on Earth, draping another bandolier of bullets across his chest, Zhe gritted his multitude of teeth in frustrated anger. Typical bloody Kataphrakt! Never any faith in the other castes!

  “The punishment for your crime is, as usual, complete obliteration. We’ll scoop young Zhe Aurham Gexxis out of the wreckage when we’re done.” purred Yrr, untwisting the cloak from about his bulbous ship.

  The rippling, pulsing surface of the portal at its core glared out at Aegis like an accusing eye.

  “Kataphrakt Commander, I assure you, this vessel is officially commandeered by a registered Technician! YOU are in breach of Praetorian Special Order 9092/d – Unlicensed Military Action in an Unstable Reality! I must ask you to shut down your portal IMMEDIATELY.”