Zhe 02_Chains of Tartarus Read online

  “I just hope whoever opened the gateway can close it in time.”

  Then the world flashed yellow and black, curled up into a sphere of blazing white light; a cube of darkness peppered with green strings of numbers...and the Wetsystems spat him out.

  From the other side of the pitted steel airlock door where he slumped Technician Nyl could hear the sound of triumphant laughter.

  As soon as her hand reached out into the Node CeeAn blacked out. She was lined up with Abdulafia, their energy fields coiled tight into a stabbing spiral databore as he ripped the defenses from the tiny photonic array.

  She watched those last seconds in slow motion – the metal around the node cut away, melting and evaporating in a perfect sphere as the tip of the bore struck home. A gelid black liquid crawling all over the thing in her Vision – a living disease surging up, hungry, like no kind of ice she’d ever seen. No human countermeasure at all, she realized - far too late.

  Their final leap left them no choice but to stab the databore in to the hilt, and as it slid into the node she caught sight of Abdulafia’s face in a flashburst of black light. He KNEW what was in there. He’d felt it before...

  All that in the moment before it reached up into her brain with razortipped claws, showing her what was happening to Magus Verlaine – and promising to do the same to them all.

  'Afia fought it for a second longer – his desperation and resolve pushing him beyond the limits of his flesh as he struggled to excise the horror from Verlaine’s tortured mind.

  By the end of that interminable instant he was just trying to kill the poor doomed Magus. Then he was trying to sacrifice himself to stop the infection from bursting out...

  It was his shame which undid him – the knowledge that he had failed, that the foul sequestrator within Verlaine had won – despair seemed to feed the beast, and it ripped through his brain with a howl of triumph, tearing apart his concentration. His whole being felt forced between whirling black grinders and hooked flensing rollers, shredded piece by bloody piece...

  It had needed him. He was the key – and he was so much better than the Worm had hoped for. Abdulafia’s power held together the entire Valley View Mall – with all its wetsystem components, all its data cabling, all its connections to the rest of Elysium. It leaped out from his bio-onboard, coursing across his expanded energy field like filthy liquid corruption, porting into a thousand vulnerable points and out across the Last City.

  It was all too much for the Ashishi’s body to bear – the ‘Chrome in his system was running dry, fading out into the brutal ache of a planet-sized comedown. In the Vision he saw his carefully constructed energy shell crack and shatter, rolling back and peeling away from the tottering hulk of the Valley View.

  Bolts sheared as ‘Afia reeled on the edge of unconsciousness, mocking laughter ringing in his head. Girders, pushed beyond breaking point snapped like dry tinder, sending cascades of concrete and glass flying.

  He saw CeeAn falling, her own energy field shattered, down through fire and smoke and ruin...

  The field folded up like glass origami, back into the ball of pain and humiliation which was Abdulafia’s aching head. Blackness clamped down on him like a fist.

  Then the tipping point came, and the floor heeled up and over. A rumbling noise was coming closer, rising up through the foundations as he lashed out blindly in the choking dark.

  And with the roar and crash and scream of a tightly localized apocalypse, the Valley View Mall ceased to exist.

  Peace Through Extinction caught a delicate nuclear explosion just as it began to blossom from its warhead core, wrapping it in unbreakable shells of energy. With a flick of one quarter-mile tentacle it flung the deadly little sphere back toward the Aegis, snapping its three cruel beaks in drooling hunger.

  Another gigaton bomb exploded off above the plane of the ecliptic, up where its sibling-ship Hegemonic Destiny was preparing its own assault. The Excisor thralls who operated its bonded weapon systems were swarming and seething across its broad arrowhead back, preparing its battery of masers and plasma cannons to carve through the upstart primitive’s paper-thin hull. The Destiny slipped sideways through superspace for a second, curling neatly around the edge of the blast, surfing its shockwave to ride in closer to Aegis, into shooting distance. A blaze of hard radiation stitched the side of the human ship, bursting pods of liquid oxygen and vaporizing

  delicate heat sinks, but to no avail. There was no living thing aboard the dreadnought to suffer the assault, and now Aegis was in the perfect position to counterstrike...

  First, that incoming stasis shell – the vast Assemblers in the heart of the Aegis hummed for a brief second, spinning out a thick cable of silver silk. The seething nanostuff shot from a turret in the ship’s flank like liquid lightning, wrapping the frozen nuclear explosion in clinging thread. Then mutating, reforming, using part of itself as reaction mass – slinging the little energy shell out on a new course, right into the path of the Hegemonic Destiny. This time there was no room for maneuver, no time to weave its vast energy fields and slip sideways. The full brunt of the nuclear explosion punched into the living ship’s back, the blast shaped by a silver cocoon of nanofibers which howled exultantly as they disintegrated.

  Of course a mere gigaton strike wasn’t enough to fell a fully-grown Teuthis Princeps; but the poor unprotected Excisors manning its nonbiological weapons were far less resilient. Hundreds of the little black-suited homunculi were scoured away in the heart of the explosion, reduced to molten metal and roiling gases along with the bonded masers they tended.

  Destiny’s three-foot-thick shell blackened and cooked, while gamma radiation blistered the living substrate beneath, forcing vast nervejam blocks to clamp down across the whole area. They let just enough agony percolate through to the thing’s brain to whip it into a snarling fury.

  Inside the great diamond bubble which replaced one of the Teuthis’ eyes its slave-bonded Captain bucked and writhed in his zero-gee straps. A pair of hulking Bastarnae-caste warrior thralls clamped his body in their scissor pincers, while tiny meditech creatures scuttled over his bulging cranial dome.

  The Hegemonic Destiny slewed around in a tight arc, its one eye rolling and its beaks snapping vacuum. The Captain’s battery of tiny black optical sensors bulged wide as he recovered from the shock, hundreds of hypodermic mouthparts and probes sluicing his brain with alien endorphins.

  “Ready the Bores! Ready the Grapples! Bring her up to ramming speed!”

  Aegis was already rolling up and away from the pair of sentient fighting machines, its huge bulk rising out of the ecliptic plane on jets of ion fire. As it maneuvered its Assemblers were busily pumping out a cloud of twitching, shifting drone-things – needles and discs, spinning cubes and pulsing pyramids of gleaming chrome. Most of these were foils to counter the swarm of chitinous smart torpedoes which rose from the shell of the Peace Through Extinction like an oily black cloud, living things controlled by slaved ganglia all homing in on the Aegis’ vital systems.

  They met the cloud of countermeasures head-on, some exploding in bursts of deadly radiation, others gnashing and chewing into the nanoassembled munitions with diamond-hard teeth, yet others whiplashing and twisting hard to win through to their prey.

  Once again the lack of a human crew saved the Aegis – the most agile smart torpedoes contained supertoxic gases, flesh-melting viruses and hordes of deadly parasites built up from the Multiplicity’s knowledge of terrestrial biology. In the airless vaults and corridors of the Aegis they were worse than useless – and the drill-tipped living siege-engines which delivered them were dissected and examined within seconds by Zhe’s merciless A.I.s. Deadly information hissed across the subether, sparking mutations in the nanomechanical drones Aegis had spawned.

  A blazing broadside of plasma blasts raked them as they fell in toward the Peace Through Extinction, shredding hundreds. But there were thousands now, as the Aegis tapped its entire bulk elemental mass in a single despe
rate gamble. Living submunitions suffered explosive decompression as silver discs sliced them clean through, dipping and weaving between the two vast combatants like a haze of static. Now the cube-form countermeasures were breaking through the Extinction’s defenses, extruding cruel barbed spikes as they sunk into the space creature’s unnaturally tough outer shell. Excisor thralls rushed to pry them loose, swathing them with chains, burning them with hand-held x-ray laserbeams, battering at them with hammers – but all in vain. The chrome parasites made themselves firm, studding the broad back of the Extinction like mechanical ticks.

  The A.I. cores inside the Aegis counted down as the swarms did battle, watching their drones burrow into the alien ship’s flesh. Below that oil-black crust of horn and chitin the ship’s complex nervous system ramified through acres of hot meat – all the way down to the tiny slaved brain which was welded to the Captain’s extended skull.

  Now it was just a matter of hacking the system - a task to which the A.I.s were uniquely suited.

  Their preoccupation nearly cost them their tenuous existence, then, as the Hegemonic Destiny slammed into the side of the Aegis with a force like planetary collision, its prime feeder tentacles scoring deep gashes in the dreadnought's metal hide. Their bone hooks hissed with monomolecular sawteeth, parting steel and aluminum like paper.

  The great space predator howled silently in the vacuum as it tore through a cluster of fuel tanks, and jets of searing gas bathed its body in agony. Its smaller tentacles slammed home and twisted, crumpling the skeletal superstructure of the human vessel. The combined strength of their gravitonic fields and tons of heaving muscle almost snapped the Aegis in half.

  With their secret weapons spent the A.I. cores were forced to more primitive means of defense. Autoturrets raked the Teuthis with heavy explosive, massed gatling cannons tore chunks from its nuke-burned and blistered hide in a bloody swathe. Arterial clamps slammed down as the few remaining Excisors aboard scrabbled to fill in the wounds with fast-setting foam.

  Amid the blaring alert sirens and flickering neon of the Aegis’ bridge one tiny green icon snapped to the front of a shuddering digital display screen. The parasites had reached a critical mass as they battened themselves onto the body of the Peace Through Extinction. Vital systems fell one by one to the rapacious databores of Zhe’s A.I. slaves below the space-creature’s shell, even as the hordes of Excisors which swarmed over its body like lice battled to pry the throbbing silver cubes loose.

  There – the mind of the Teuthis Rex was cut free from its tethers, severed from the spinal nervebridge which plugged it into its Captain’s bloated skull. Now it just needed the right motivation...

  The A.I.s knew they had to act swiftly – the Hegemonic Destiny would soon shear the narrow waist of the human-built dreadnought in two, cutting off its weapons and command modules from the drive systems out in the ship’s tail. Critical cables and tubes floated limp in the vacuum as the great beast’s tentacles tore chunks from the Aegis, driven on by the spur of its Captain’s rage.

  The prow of the Aegis split open as the A.I. systems made their final gambit, shutting down one by one as their ship was torn apart around them. Within the stubby nosecone, nestled between massed banks of smart torpedo launchers and squat multi-masers lay the heat-sink studded barrel of an immense cannon – a straight tap from the dreadnought's immensely powerful drives. Those titanic engines could fold space like paper, punching the massive bulk of the Aegis clear through to the orbit of Neptune in a single jump. Nothing, of course, compared to the delicate gravitonic manipulators of the Multiplicity, but enough savage brutality to erase whole asteroids when

  belligerently applied.

  This was to have been the final argument against separatism for the mining nations of the belt. Now it’s arcing, spitting muzzle was trained right at the bulging violet eye of the Peace Through Extinction, poised to evaporate that otherdimensional creature in a heartbeat.

  Without it’s Captain’s voice, with all its cybernetic shackles broken, the Extinction followed its blind instincts. With a complex knotting and twining of tentacles the living starship tore space open and slipped sideways, out of the firing line of that deadly beam.

  And the countermeasures struck, fouling its gravitonic field, unbalancing the titanic forces unleashed – ripping the poor creature in two as the rift it had opened scissored shut, a blade as sharp as the edge of reality. Its psionic screech ripped through the mind of every Mitochondriate in the solar system.

  Even Zhe, racing through the darkened streets of dead Elysium felt it like a icepick through his skull.

  The Hegemonic Destiny went wild, lashing out in a fit of primal fury, tearing its own immense tentacles to ribbons as it’s captain howled in pain. Too many memories came seething up through his vast cerebrum at the sound of the Extinction’s demise –

  whole armadas of living ships incinerated off Gahg’raaal Tho, the feeling of his bonded vessel’s skin being ripped and torn by the cruel saws and lasers of Blacksteel Voidhunters...

  The pain of a thousand years of war and loss came down on him like a sledgehammer, and it spread through the ship and its Thralls like a virus. Hopelessly entangled, burning with rage, the Destiny didn’t even notice the clutch of tiny escape drones which burst from the ruined hulk of the Aegis, each one carrying a pared-down but very self-satisfied A.I. core. They dropped into subspace, ten tiny ripples on the face of the sun, just as the Aegis began building up a charge in its drives to self destruct.

  “ENOUGH!” roared Kataphrakt Yrr, pounding his battle-claws down on the arms of his command throne hard enough to shatter the intricately carved bone. “This really DOES look like the work of a Technician! Only one of those slimy little g’gghakkiin could use primitive tools like those against us so readily.” Of course, in his considerable pride the Kataphrakt wouldn’t even think about the awful alternative...

  “Open the portal and bring that vessel through, before it can erase itself! I want to take it apart down to the atoms! I want EVIDENCE of this Zhe Aurham Gexxis’ TREACHERY! He’ll be begging for death before the Subpraetor in mere hours!”

  “Oh yes master! What a delicious command!” burbled the Effortless Subjugation, it’s tiny mind suffused with glee. “Shall I separate the Hegemonic Destiny from the human craft before I bring them into stasis?”

  Yrr twitched and snarled, his smaller, more gracile secondary hands flickering over the control boards of his ship.

  “No – let that overgrown mollusk stew for a while in the null. I want both the Destiny and its Captain to think about how they’ve let mighty S’Stho and their Praetor down toady – and what those worthies might do about it.”

  With a grim little smile on both his mouths the Kataphrakt manipulated a pseudopod of light out from the carrier-ship’s portal, sending it writhing across the vacuum to envelop the Aegis, along with the great Teuthis Princeps which clasped it in a death-embrace.

  “Perhaps they can whet their appetites on the two of them before they begin punishing this damned Tecnhician Zhe.”

  DOCUMENT INSERT – MULTIPLICITY ARCHIVES DEPARTMENT

  There is a world in which it has won. One reality sideways, in a place which failed to exist due to a single tiny twist of probability.

  It broke through back in the dawn of history - when men still defined their nations by the strength of steel and the fortitude of stone; when superstition and credulity named the Worm as the enemy of God, the architect of sorrow, the harbinger of extinction....

  In a universe only glimpsed by the great skrying lenses of the Multiplicity another Earth lies under the thrall of another Adversary. The subpraetors have decreed that this reality is compromised – the interstice locks have been sealed tight, and the doomed denizens of that parallel Earth will never be released from their torment.

  It swept across their world with the most deadly tools its slaves could muster – the sword, the axe, the hulking siege-engine. It preyed on their religion, and came in the form
of a heaving horde of the dead, an army which blackened the land like an earthbound locust swarm, firelight glinting from their bloodied blades.

  Cities fell across countless petty kingdoms as people of every creed and color became fodder for the hungry dead, prey to the cruel appetites of their Exalted, those who welcomed the Adversary in its might.

  It gave to them the darkest desires a twisted mind could conjure, and screams echoed across the globe, prayers in a thousand tongues went unanswered.

  In time, those tongues were torn from broken jaws, whole plains were forested with the twitching crucified, and the vast pyres rose like smoking mountains, seeding the clouds with reeking ashes.

  The survivors fought grimly, but with dwindling hope. They had seen things which made it all the more simple for the Adversary to crack open their minds. Cannibal feasts under the blood-red moon. Howling massacres of the feeble and old, women and children fed into black iron machines...

  Death was no respite as it ran rampant across the scarred face of that other Earth, raising pyramids of skulls to its own glory with a billion cold dead hands, lashing its psionic whips to goad its servants on to new atrocities.