Zhe 02_Chains of Tartarus Read online

  Soon, it was only the dead who remained – no rest for them, no respite from the bondage of the Worm, only an endless stumbling nightmare as they dragged themselves across blasted wastelands under blackened skies.

  For this other Earth, this place where even the Blacksteel Unity in all its artificial might dared not go, was more than just a feeding-place for the Adversary. That dimension-spanning creature had cracked open time and space around the poor doomed planet for a reason – one which even the hardened skryers of the Multiplicity regarded with sick horror.

  Deep in the dying fires of the accursed Earth something stirred, as the seething energies of the Adversary were poured into its wasted shell. It could never heave its entire impossible bulk across the threshold and into three-dimensional space.

  It would never bridge the voids between the stars and feast on alien pain. But its seed was growing. And its young would awaken perfectly adjusted to this ripe new reality.

  It would be born insatiably hungry.

  Regarding the Instability at: THREE-DIMENSIONAL SPACE GRID REFERENCE LJ-9032487529087-298478-XX-9 - Supervising Technician: Gharfos Nyl

  The Black Technologists believe that there's an afterlife like this. Just fire and pain and fear, on and on, eternal....

  Damnation was the thought foremost in Kaito's mind as he fell screaming into an abyss of fire, the sweat evaporating from his tortured skin. He cursed fate and fortune and every god he knew, figuring that no imaginary hell could compete with his current predicament.

  It was all he could do to keep his Bio-Onboard running slick as he plunged down behind Jaq Hassan, that great ogreish maniac’s hand clamped around his arm like a trash compactor’s jaws. He could hear a scream over the roar and piston-thunder of the great beast – it was almost certainly his, but little details like that were out of his control.

  Everything – all the concentration and focus he usually used to carve through the wetsystems – was bound up in the point of a needle now, the barbed spike of his sequestrator pistol. His upgraded eyes blurred with salt tears as they fell, flames blazing up around the red-hot edges of their metal slab, through a threshing tangle of tentacles... and into the grinding maw of the Kraken.

  Just when he was sure they’d never make it, that he couldn’t possibly hit the hubcap-sized interface plate inside the thing’s gnashing, blazing craw, the world flashed white. The plugs which studded his skin and the back of his skull buzzed as if they'd all been jacked into separate ‘mersive rigs, and for a second he felt the power of Abdulafia 330 - juiced to the eyeballs and beyond on potent ‘chrome.

  Time slowed down for them in that blazing, crystalline instant, and he could feel the Ashishim guiding his hand, lining up the concentric crosshairs in his eyes with the barrel of the pistol, with the gleaming circle of his target. Even the flames were sluggish now, curling up around the metal slab like seaspray, jagged and glassy smooth. He could see every drop of sweat, every pore on Hassan’s skin as he surfed down the maelstrom, his teeth gritted in a rictus of determination and savage joy.

  It all lined up just as the white strobe-blast faded; a trio of target locks blinking green, his finger squeezing the trigger... and the world came back online in a blurring, howling rush, the Kraken squealing in ultrasonic pain as ‘Afia lashed out at it with raw power.

  It was one of those sweet shots that seemed to guide itself – the needle lancing out through the smoke and flames and heat-haze, trailing its wire behind it, curving in to pierce the very centre of the interface...

  A direct hit. Microscale wires unfurled from the sequestrator's tip, tearing into the Kraken's mind. And back up the wire it came, a virtual contact shock, rolling Kaito's eyes back in their sockets. His body went limp in Jaq's grasp, flying out behind him like a battle-flag.

  Hassan kicked off the panel of cherry-red steel, leaving the soles of his boots behind as smoking puddles of rubber.

  The Kayzi never saw the massive chunk of metal jam in the rollers and blades of the Kraken’s craw, shutting down its onslaught with a screech of tortured bearings. Jaq dragged him along, dead weight, as he leapt up and away from the smoking, sparking mouth of the metal beast. He clambered up between twitching mandibles tipped with drills and saws, using them as a makeshift ladder, desperate to be out of the way when they whirred back to life...

  Finally, the great bullet-shaped brow of the thing. Jaq manhandled the Kayzi up and over, dragging himself up between the black glass blisters of the Kraken's eyes. Kaito slammed down onto its hot metal skin like a sack of meat, his eyes white and blank. He was inside the mind of the machine now, fighting for control. A slim loop of wire spilled from the muzzle of his sequestrator pistol, still clutched in one white-knuckled fist, a silver thread trailing down into the Kraken's maw. And the giant machine was silenced.

  “Kaito! Hey, Kayzi! We made it, man! We’re still alive!” yelled Jaq, shaking his buddy’s limp body with one massive paw. “How about that shit!” Below them the Kraken groaned, working the indigestible chunk out of its furnace maw with the tip of one tentacle. “Are you there, Kaito? Oh, hells...” Hassan’s fist came down on one of it’s bubble-dome eyes as he stared into the slack, lifeless face of his associate, blistered and red from the heat.

  He was barely breathing, but a febrile pulse still beat in his neck, and lights flickered in waves across the bio-onboard monitors set into the flesh of his wrists.

  The heat down here was life-sapping, and Hassan could feel his own skin pulled tight and raw across his skull. No doubt he looked just as bad as he felt – but not half as bad as he’d look if Kaito couldn’t finish what he was doing inside the Kraken’s mind soon.

  Beneath Jaq’s feet the plated hide of the beast shuddered, and a fountain of blazing shards spewed out from its mouth – the remains of that huge metal plate, reduced to splinters. The pistons were hissing and thumping again, the great grinders and saws spinning up as the machine recovered from it’s choking fit. Even the disrupting blast of power which had come down just before Kaito took his shot had only injured the Kraken – and now it was searching for its tormentors, sliding the tips of its remaining tentacles around the walls of the shaft as it tried to discover their hiding places.

  It would only be a matter of time until it’s tiny computer brain thought to check in its one blind spot – right behind its optic battery, on top of its head. And when that happened, they’d likely suffer the same fate as the metal slag which slopped and hissed in the creature’s furnace belly.

  Hassan could see from his vantage point the thousands of jointed steel legs which protruded from its bloated body, inching it ever upward out of the pit with jackhammer-tipped claws. The sound of metal clattering on concrete echoed down in the dark as the Kraken shat out ingots of alloy, the by-product of its insatiably programmed hunger.

  All he could do now was keep a firm grip on his friend, try to recall the fragments of childhood prayers which still echoed in his drug-burned brain - and wait.

  This wasn’t like the Wetsystems at all. To say that the interface through the sequestrator pistol was primitive would be a gross understatement – the thing had been designed on the fly during wartime, made to be operated by the crude cyber-enhanced field ops of the Terminus Separatist Army.

  Kaito had seen pictures of those ancestral warriors in historical twodeeos, and their integrated systems were to his bio-onboard what a wooden club is to a machine pistol. You’d think that it would be easy, working through such an ancient cutout, but the Kayzi was used to level upon level of sophistication holding him up above the raw code of the Wetsystems. The sequestrator opened a channel between the antiquated microchip brain of the Kraken and his own mind, bridging the gap with bare mathematics.

  This was the kind of stuff that the electromagi ran as practice, as a tactical fall-back position, or just for kicks. Now he had to run it like some kind of twentieth-century hacker, wrestling with actual alphanumerics. Lucky, then, that there was a wide streak of savant in his chromosome
s – he was almost as fast as the Kraken itself, and he was far more enhanced.

  Kaito gritted his teeth and punched it up a few levels, twisting and shattering the endless white-on-black datafield as he forced the interface to meet him halfway. He was blind for a second, and then the resolution dropped in, hazy, a mess of jagged polygons scattered across endless darkness. Shift up again, and again, the pixels shrinking down, vertices multiplying, and his world became a primitive videogame, a scene out of some two-k vintage shoot-em-up. The Kraken’s tiny cluster of electric ganglia weren’t meant to mesh with modern systems like his – this was the best they could do. But something about the place was familiar.

  He could feel it like dull toothache – the same whispered echo of suffering which had come through from Zone Doubt, the grating background agony of a mind enslaved.

  Now that he knew what it was, he could remember it rubbing up against him in the Wetsystems hundreds of times. It scared the hell out of him – but turning back was worse.

  Kaito’s avatar slipped through the corridors of a badly raytraced little maze, a grey metal warren studded with crude sixteen-bit icons, access ports to the Kraken’s myriad subsystems. He was getting warmer – the blurring ache was in his bones now, drawing him onward almost against his will, through sliding, clicking bulkhead doors painted in only one pixel thick. Zone had suffered enough in just those few months, tied down and vivisected to control PDR 909. But this machine was ancient – a millennium old if it was a day – and all that time someone had been held in a crude parody of life to sustain it.

  “One thousand, one hundred and three years.”

  The voice came in from everywhere at once, as Kaito stepped through a final flickering virtual door and into the heart of the machine.

  “Twenty seven days, three hours, fourteen minutes, and nine seconds.”

  Even with his mind torn out of his body down a skein of wire, Kaito tasted bile in the back of his throat. This was how the poor damned thing chose to show itself?

  “So many years alone...” hissed a voice of bubbling decay, sighing up from out of the blackened throat of a corpse. “I’m quite mad, you know! Quite utterly mad, or so the monitor programs tell me. They shut down my body for seven hundred years, but... they left my thoughts on standby.”

  The room which Kaito stood in was a globe, a vast sphere of rusted metal almost a quarter full with steaming virtual sewage. From the doorway where the Kayzi stood a thin catwalk of steel mesh arced out over it. The foetid liquid writhed with repetitious fractals, a crude program which also tried to shunt an artificial stench directly into Kaito’s olfactory nerves.

  He counted himself lucky that the ancient code was so crude– otherwise he may have been able to smell the room’s denizen, a thing less human than a vast teratoma, a cancer with a lopsided face strapped and chained to the very centre of its prison-chamber.

  “Twenty-seven seconds between resets, for all those years. I haven’t had a thought more than half a minute long in all that time – and of course, most of them started with ‘what am I?’...”

  The thing screamed then, as a red-hot lancet stabbed slowly into its heaving side, venting a stream of poorly-rendered blood and pus. Rings of cruel surgical tools orbited the unfortunate creature, now and then poking and slicing and shocking it, forcing it to concentrate on working the Kraken’s massive bulk.

  “Who....who were you? What’s your name?” asked Kaito, his revulsion tempered with pity.

  “My name?” slobbered the slave-mind of the Kraken, its face lost amid rolls of doughy flesh “I...I had a name, once. But I was a fool, you see. I thought that immortality was within my grasp.”

  Kaito cursed silently to himself – a name would make this a whole lot easier. He certainly didn’t like the way that the creature’s one good eye was fixed hungrily on his avatar, flickering back and forth along the bright silver trace of his cable link to the sequestrator.

  “I couldn’t wait to shuck off my old flesh, back then. The sales pitch from BionLab Gaudi was too slick for me, what with the cancer eating away at my bones... But now – I’d do just about anything to taste again. To breathe, and sleep, even just to shit again! Bliss!”

  The Kraken was utterly fixated on that little twist of wire, now, its milky white eye brimming with overwhelming lust. Kaito tried to cram down his disgust, to see the poor pitiful thing for what it really was – the result of centuries of slavery.

  The foetid mass was nothing but the self-disgust of a mind enslaved and tormented; beneath it was a human being. One which - if he was any judge of character - would sell what remained of its soul to steal the Kayzi’s body. As the Core Drone had pointed out so eloquently, the sequestration line ran both ways.

  “Don’t even think about it.” he said, letting a blaze of gleaming black ice swirl up around his virtual form “We’ve come a long way since your time, ancient – if you try to take me down it’ll be suicide.”

  True enough – the viral countermeasures which seethed and dripped from Kaito’s pixilated skin would tear this whole feeble shell to ribbons in a heartbeat. Except that then there’d be no way to control the machine which it empowered...

  When the creature at the Kraken’s heart spoke again there was a note of pathetic pleading to its voice, a petulant whine which sickened Kaito almost as much as its bloated and rotting visage.

  “Please... please, sir – if you’ve come so far, can’t you spare some flesh for me? Just a little body, please – a cripple, a child, I don’t care! Just....just set me free! A thousand years of slavery, kind sir – that was never in the contract ...”

  Its mewling pleas were cut off as another red-hot spike slid into its flesh, eliciting a howl of anguish which tapered off into screeching modem noise.

  “All I can do is store you.” said Kaito “They’ve compressed you down to such a small size – I’d be surprised if they even let you run your subconscious in such a tiny system. But even if you survived years of reintegration, the best we could offer you is a mekan body. BionLab Gaudi was nuked to ashes centuries ago, and they’d have had your full template.”

  That was definitely the wrong thing to say.

  “Storage! Stasis! NEVER AGAIN!” roared the mind of the Kraken, its diseased bulk shuddering with outrage. “At least awake I can destroy! I can use this filthy thing they’ve slaved me to, and punish the living!” Its one weeping eye narrowed with animal cunning as it leaned forward in its creaking harness.

  “There were two of you out there, weren’t there? So where’s your friend, hmm? Shall we take a look?”

  In the air between them a shimmering screen snapped open, a twodeeo feed wracked with static. The image jumped and slewed wildly as the Kraken’s parasitic brain switched from camera to camera, scanning the video feeds from the tip of each coiling tentacle. It didn’t take long for one of them to spot Jaq Hassan, crouched atop the head of the mechanical beast out there in realspace, holding onto the barely living body of the Kayzi with his bionic hand.

  “I wouldn’t want to crush him, now, would I?” hissed the abomination, as ropes of glistening drool spilled from its black-lipped mouth. “But the choice is yours, friend. Give me your flesh, and he'll be spared. Otherwise....”

  The tentacle which hovered over Jaq like a cobra whipped sideways too fast to follow, its wickedly hooked tip carving a yard-deep furrow in the solid metal wall of the shaft. Slick, sinuous, it curled back again, the tip of its hook weaving in the air inches from Hassan’s pallid face.

  “Just think....you’ll be immortal! Immortal like me! I’m a god, little man, a power beyond reckoning!” it was utterly crazed now, whatever humanity it had left subsumed beneath its rage and bile. “They told me that I’d work for a few years, ten at the most, just until the bioengineers got their cloning procedures right. By now they must have, hmm? So you’ll just be stuck here a little while...”

  It must have read the look of fury and revulsion on Kaito’s face; must have guessed that he’d
never give in to its obscene demands. Over the cold centuries the man who BionLab Gaudi had tricked and enslaved had built this cancerous shell for his mind – and he’d grown out to fill it with sick, hateful despite. The thought of that thing pulling his body on over itself like a glove was too much to bear.

  There was no mistaking his look of utter loathing as he stared into its single bulging eye – and while he imagined horrors the creature struck.

  The trick was so simple a freshman neophyte could have deflected it with a thought – but Kaito was still reeling with shock. The Kraken threw him a loop, a glitch shuddering through the system, fouling his connection for an instant. And in that instant it changed, swelling and twisting as the crudely raytraced world fell back in, as the Kayzi scrambled for his precious countermeasures.

  Mouths like bleeding wounds opened in the heaving belly of the beast, studded with teeth like triangles of flat white light, flickering about the edges. A battery of polygonal grins which hinged open, each one lashing out with a red and rubbery tongue.