Zhe 02_Chains of Tartarus Read online

  <> said the Tin Man, his voice a crudely synthesized whine. <>

  Now he was really glad that he was only woven light – the look that Ruby Alvarez focused on him was enough to incinerate asbestos.

  “So it’s blackmail, then? You should have just cut to the chase, Octavio – I totally understand that kind of game. The only question is – what do you want from us?”

  Ascher snapped his glowing fingers in midair, and a glossy photograph appeared in his hand, animated ink writhing across its surface.

  “This guy was one of mine – just like Mister Straw there. But he’s interfered with my plans one time too many – not to mention associating with some very undesirable folks who you may have issues with.”

  Ruby leaned forward, squinting at the photograph as it rippled and morphed through frames.

  “Ashishim? That one’s wearing an operative crescent unit – and those guns are definitely R.T. ordnance. But who’s the main target?”

  “I’m sending a through a bio file right now – get a printout from your metal friend.” said the Direktor, pinning the photo to the air in front of Ruby’s face.

  The grainy black-and-white picture showed a trio of blurred figures firing huge revolvers up at the camera – a little dark-haired man in cycle armor, a dreadlocked Ashishi in a ragged cloak, and, centre-shot, the hulking figure of Jaqub Hassan.

  “Now - get cleaned up here, and get to it, team.” said Ascher, rubbing his hands together with mirth. “I sincerely hope that our little chat hasn’t affected your morale – I expect utter professionalism from all of you on this one, or else...” his thumb hovered over the red button, mocking them. “What happens between you afterwards – well, that’s up to you.”

  The holo blinked out, then, leaving the Emerald City Gang standing shellshocked amid the rubble and ruin of the secure chamber.

  “Well, I guess we’ve got no choice.” sighed Ruby, her shoulders sagging. “Aitken, don’t look at me like that – he’s played us all for suckers, not just you! Leon, get in there and fetch those flamethrowers for the Celestials. Tin Man, start scanning the datanet for a trace on Jaqub Hassan. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can start planning how to get that shit out of Straw, and how we can put the hurt on that damned Direktor Ascher!”

  The disease was spreading behind the sealed airlock of Illuminatus Zeon’s sanctum, propagated by the tiny rat-thing which had first slipped the chains of his control. Crawling, seething, probing, the black mass of the Worm had found its way into the bodies of those unfortunates which had been bait for it – the broken and the damned who had suffered through the Illuminatus’ alien experiments. Now they were subsumed beneath the awful power of its dimension-spanning hunger, their skins slicked over with black ooze as they crawled and staggered from their containment pods and slithered out of their manacles. They were a ragged band of the undead, their humanity compacted down to a mute prayer for death in their eyes. But the Worm loved them – they were the perfect hosts, feeding it on suffering as they jerked at the end of its psionic puppet strings.

  Of course, in ages past the vast creature hadn't known emotion – it had fed blindly, out of necessity. The joy of inflicting pain, the exultation of control, the delights of torture and slow death – these were all utterly human traits it had absorbed along with its food. For some reason it was invariably the wicked who feared the transition through death where it hunted.

  Now it experienced other human emotions through its vassals – the things it called Saprophytes. If felt frustration and anger, locked in a cage girded about by the impenetrable fields of the Illuminatus’ vivisected Devilfish. That long-suffering thing’s tiny brain was kept deep behind the walls of foot-thick steel that formed the sanctum, and there was no way that the Worm could possess it. There were only two ways out of the little laboratory – through the triple-sealed airlock door, or out through the Wetsystems, through the tortured mind of Magus Verlaine. Unfortunately he, too was locked down tight – something would have to come in from outside of him to open the gates and allow the Worm to escape. The little trick which the Illuminatus had taught it – how to jump into a hardwired mind through the datanet – would let it devour whomever it desired if it could only force its way through...

  To this end a trio of ghoulish, dissected things were hard at work on the captive Magus even now, two of them holding his metal body down while another (the original little rat-homunculus fused to its shoulder) sent rippling tendrils of dark matter in through the gaps in his armor, prying and twisting at his biological systems. So far, they hadn’t even gotten so much as a twitch from the torpid Ashishi, but the trying itself was so satisfying – practice for the torments they would soon visit upon every living thing in this pitiful place.

  Then Verlaine’s eyes shot open, and his body convulsed as if lightning coursed through his metal frame.

  “No! Please! Don’t open the node! It’s already here! You can’t help me...save yourself!”

  Oh, it was just too sweet! Through the seething, nourishing waves of pain which flowed from Verlaine’s tormented mind the Worm could feel something scratching at the other side of the portal, trying to open a path into the Magus’ head. Oily black teeth smiled from a score of twisted faces, and ichor-dripping tongues licked cadaverous lips in anticipation. Thorny tendrils quested blindly from gaping wounds and hollow eyesockets, tasting the psionic signiature of the fool who would release them. All they needed was a single crack in the door...

  When the mind of a magus sped through the glassy labyrinth of the Wetsystems, through the reefs of data beneath their seas of light, it blazed a trail behind it like the map of a telephone message through a vast antique switchboard.

  Some of the best - the elite Dataslaves of the Liquid Tong and the sleuths and hacks of Omnivasive - could split themselves at critical junctures, tracing two or three paths at once. A handful of masters and savants were disciplined enough to fragment out ten or twelve times; operators like Kaito Kayzi and the hosts of the SubMagi. Watching them cut ice was like watching a shoal of fish trailing liquid fire behind them, weaving a net through the network.

  These veterans were the most precise and careful of their brethren – because losing your trace meant losing your mind into a hungry melange of the recorded dead.

  Operators who survived learned that you had to pull all those speeding fragments back in before you hit eject – or a part of you would never come out of the machine. If you were lucky it’d just be some of your memories – if not, it’d be the parts which kept your vital organs ticking.

  Anybody inside right now would be amazed at the skill and recklessness of a certain mystery operator – right up until the curling fractal backwash of his run blew them right out of their ‘mersive rigs. This guy wasn’t leaving a single trail behind him – not even the tight little meshwork of a seasoned vet. His trace, dripping hot-pink virals, ramified out through the wetsystems like a jagged burst of coral, now twenty traces, now two hundred, now twenty thousand...

  Behind it the seas flickered with static, and the pastel glass of a million interface connections iced over hard-candy pink, thrashing with pixilated cilia. The thing was a spreading shutdown, and it was utterly desperate.

  Kronos felt the paralysis tearing through its vast bulk, slicing off a thousand servitor mekan and semi-autonomous systems in an instant before the great machine could even react. The supercomputer hesitated for a millisecond or two, disbelieving, as the viral explosion mushroomed out from the R.T, out from the very core of Ashishim territory, blacking out the entire zone where the reclamationists were fighting. Some kind of metaviral from the Vatican’s Black Technologists? Perhaps a digital smokescreen conjured up by the Illuminatus himself? It scarcely mattered – it was
eating into the tender pseudocerebrum of the Wetsystems at an alarming rate, and it would have to be stopped.

  It was only as the massively powerful avatar of Kronos came hammering down through the salty blue depths that it noticed the burning core of life within the writhing heads of the great coral – this thing was no A.I. program, no matter how complex.

  It was the Illuminatus himself, a presence the machine hadn’t felt since Reclamation Day.

  Illuminatus Zeon – now stripped back to his true form as Technician Nyl – brought his millions of blazing traces back together as he felt Kronos descending on him, a hammerhead the size of a city.

  The great machine was pure godlike here, but he was a Technician of the Multiplicity – a being who had fought so many foes that even the mightiest seemed trivial. The sinewy silver alien flexed his claws, calling his foe’s fury down with a toothy sneer.

  Kronos punched through the intricate filigree of Nyl’s pink coral in a raging storm of corkscrew fractals, shattering the bed of the virtual ocean, a black glass abyssal plain stretching out flat in every direction. Below that shimmering barrier, Nyl knew, the imprisoned minds and souls of millions writhed in nigh-eternal bondage, waiting to be mercifully disintegrated as fuel for the Forge.

  Now fissures skittered out from the machine avatar’s impact point, ripping the smooth black glass apart left and right, speeding out towards the horizons in an eyeblink. Now the entire Wetsystem shuddered with precisely emulated hydrostatic shock as the crack began to grind open, an impossible maw gaping wider and wider, letting the tiny figure of Nyl glimpse the roiling lava beneath.

  It was a blood-red heart of throbbing pain, a vision of uttermost hell.

  From out of it, something began to rise...

  Kronos loomed up out of the system core like a nation-bestriding colossus, bigger than mountains, his face a flickering patchwork of stolen features stitched together with searing light. Before him Nyl was like a tiny child before a god – it seemed as if the machine could snuff him out between two fingers.

  But instead of cowering, the Technician began to laugh, a noise like metal plates grinding together deep in his otherdimensional throat.

  “Oh, you’re such a showman, Kronos! What an entrance! Am I supposed to be impressed? I, who have seen the living suns of the Multiplicity feeding on whole planets?”

  The giant avatar of the Machine looked down on him with a petulant scowl on its

  colossal face, its mismatched teeth flickering with static about their edges.

  <> it rumbled in a voice of

  steel and thunder. <
  to interfere with my Wetsystems! Ten thousand dead, you alien fool, and for WHAT?>> Nyl sighed, his shoulders sagging.

  “If I had enough time to explain it to you – and to explain the mathematics of what I was explaining – then I still wouldn’t bother. Something’s coming through that makes what I’m doing here look like...like some human metaphor for NOTHING!”

  Kronos’s huge eyes narrowed, suspicious, as his vast mouth clamped down into a furious grimace.

  <>

  “Not THAT! Not even CLOSE! Something infinitely worse, Kronos! And if it wins, the Unity can have your damned planet. This whole Dimension will have to be quarantined...but you’ll be dead and gone long before the interstice locks are welded shut.” said Nyl, his silver skin bubbling and boiling with rage. “I thought I could bend it to my will – I thought it could defeat the Blacksteel. But I...may have miscalculated...”

  <> roared Kronos, slamming his fists against the glass seabed. Red light flared from between a million cracks. <>

  The machine avatar brought its hands up and out, splaying its immense fingers over Nyl’s head as if to crush him. <>

  Kronos slammed its palms together, twin walls collapsing in like the jaws of a hydraulic crusher. But Nyl was ready for it – his defenses here in the Wetsystems were slaved to the core of the Chrome Ark, and now he drew upon a little of its power. Of course, there were nowhere near as many dead souls within the little prototype as there were inside the shell of the Last City – but Nyl could afford to burn his reserves up like cigarettes, while Kronos needed his for the Forge.

  Nyl made a gesture with one clawed hand and twenty glowing spheres of white ice sprung from his virtual flesh, swelling and bursting from his quicksilver skin like boils. Each one rotated slowly in the turbulent water, studded with wickedly sharp transparent spikes.

  They spun about him in a tight helical orbit, glowing from within with an eerie green light, and where they touched the hands of Kronos they clawed ragged tracks of static across his flesh – eating away at his very substance. The huge avatar pulled back in shock and pain, howling wordlessly as the virtual seas were whipped to storms and whirlpools around him.

  “Just let me finish, you stupid pile of scrap-metal!” shouted Nyl, all his frustration and rage crackling between his ice-spheres as a chain of cerulean lightning. “I won’t hesitate to feed you to the Ark piece by piece if you try to stop me – and that’ll be MERCY compared to what the Worm will do to you!”

  Now Kronos was a little smaller – part of his monstrous form had been leeched out by the touch of those Arkborn things which whirled and spun about the twitching body of Nyl.

  <> said Kronos, flexing his knuckles. <>

  As the Technician watched each of the avatar’s fingertips split in two, then in two again, and again, branching out until the thing’s immense arms ended in thrashing rootwork of coiling tentacles.

  <> it spat. <>

  Below them the chasm gaped wide, great pseudopods and tottering towers of red plasm heaving and shuddering within. They burned with a palpable hunger, willing one or the other of their tormentors to fall.

  Nyl focused his power, and his claw-tipped fingers made a series of passes before his face. Each of his Arkborn spheres split down the middle, and then once again, multiplying like fecund bacteria.

  “If you really must do this here and now, machine, I suggest you get it over with. I have a lot to do out in the real world, and you’re still in my way.”

  Between the two foes the virtual waters of the Wetsystems began to flicker and coruscate with red, as though gallons of blood were billowing up from the chasm below. Jagged strobe-flashes of darkness leaped from Kronos’s writhing fingertips, from Nyl’s claws, from the icy spikes of his Arkborn.

  <> bellowed the machine avatar, as a million upon a million saw-toothed mouths snapped open and shut at the end of his maze of tendrils.

  “What do you mean MY theatrics? Aren’t YOU doing that?” asked the Technician, narrowing his blazing white eyes in suspicion.

  Then both of them felt it at once – the sensation of a demon claw slitting the taut skin of reality open, the sound of squealing and popping and grinding glass...

  “Too late! Too late! It’s gotten through!” howled Nyl, gathering his Arkborn up around himself in a seething spiral cloud. “I’ll have to finish this delightful little conversation later, Kronos – It’s about time I quit this sinking ship of a planet.”

 
; For only the second time in its existence Kronos felt actual pain – the pain of a thorny black parasite ripping through its steel and concrete flesh. Somebody had opened a door for the Worm.

  <> stammered the machine, its pretension of godhood crumbling and sloughing away.

  “Shut down every sector of the Wetsystems you can still control. It’s not fully manifest yet – but when it is, you don’t want it in there. That kind of meal would make it almost powerful enough to destroy me.” Nyl was in his element now – poised on the razor edge of disaster that Technicians of the Multiplicity lived to navigate. “That’s

  what I was trying to do, until I was so rudely interrupted.”

  Kronos’s entire body was flickering through colors now, its outline hashed with static, the supercomputer’s stolen face crazed with empty patches of null blackness. It screamed, silent, breaking down in shards and flickers of code.