BlackOnChrome

CHAINS OF TARTARUS  

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 like a cheap pair of underpants.

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.”

Zhe could just imagine the fleet of the Multiplicity darkening the sky, being blasted to ashes and slivers by the Forge, a weapon which they couldn’t even imagine. One which was impossible anywhere but this fragile, bubble-thin universe...

“I tire of your charade, Primitive!” growled the Kataphrakt, as spiraling vortices began to spin about the portal at the Subjugation’s heart. “We are here under special order of Subpraetor S’Stho Himself, Marshall of the Fleet! If you were a real Technician, you’d know that means our ancient enemy is here too!”

Now a jagged tear ripped through the blinding light of the portal, a gateway into another reality. Through there, in the gelid cold of the Null Storage Strata thousands of ships would be waiting, packed to the gills (literally, in some cases) with the deadly forces of the Multiplicity.

“Hegemonic Destiny – Peace Through Extinction – You two may clear our path. This dry-space toy has wasted enough of our time.”

Well, it had stalled them for a minute or two. Enough time for Zhe to strap himself up with armaments and ammunition, and to plot a path through the broken maze of Elysium’s empty streets to the R.T. Now it was up to the A.I.s to sell themselves as dearly as possible, and hopefully cripple the Subjugation’s portal. He only hoped that Abraxas would be equally successful.

Light flared in a tiny point, visible even against the blazing disc of the sun, a flash which collapsed into an iris of darkness.

The portal had opened.

Aegis watched, wary, as two massive new signatures carved red trails across its gravitonic scanners, arrowhead things tearing through the star’s corona and out, looping in toward its position. Frantic cross-references picked them – Teuthis Princeps fighting creatures, backbone of the Multiplicity fleet. Obviously Subpraetor S’Stho was taking no chances – both the Hegemonic Destiny and the Peace Through Extinction were hardened veterans, crewed by Excisor thralls who’d seen action against the Unity in hundreds of universes.

Just ten minutes, thought Zhe. Just five. Just until I reach the Ark.

He cinched the belt of bullets tight around his chest and ran for the door, while out in the orbit of Mercury space flared hot and bright with gigaton explosions.

Ω

There was nothing in the dark but the clatter and chime of swinging hooks on chains – that and the smell of stale dry blood.

It was shadows on shadows down here in the duel level, down in the shaft where Simeon Blaire stalked his noble prey.

The second round was always this way - a tense and bloody struggle, one-on-one in the cold black nethers of some Lord's spire. Designing and maintaining the razor-wire cages, trap-haunted labyrinths and electrified slaughter-zones was a lucrative business in its own right. The fact that seventy-four other pairs of nobles were pitted against each other in an assortment of tiny private hells all around him did nothing to help Simeon's mood.

He swarmed up a hanging length of chain, hand over hand, feeling the icy steel between his fingers pulling at his warm skin. The shaft was below zero - a chasm which smelled of freon and death, hung with meathook chains and sprouting steel pillars like a nightmare forest.

Somewhere - crouched on a platform atop one of those columns or hanging like a vast bat amid the swinging chains - was Vasily Valchek - his predator and prey.

Simeon's breath hissed out from between clenched teeth as he hauled himself up the chain, trying to keep his ascent silent. It was to be nothing but bare hands this time, the host's rules. Bare hands, and bare-ass naked but for a hovering twist of silk borne up by antigrav cherubs to protect his modesty.

The thin layer of painted-on black latex which clothed him was useless against the cold, but it did give him an edge in the dark. He hoped that the viewers out there in T.V. land could see him – especially that traitorous fool of a Direktor. Now and then he heard the whine and creak of unseen cameras following him, their nightsight threedeeo lenses tracking his every move. This would be ratings gold - Valchek was on his short list, one of the handful of nobles he hadn't yet killed. Out there, gamblers were clutching tote forms to their hearts and praying.

The wires in his head were silent.

Normally the aching, exultant feeling of being utterly lit came down on him right now - right before the knife went in, before necks snapped and blood flowed red. But the Master was silent tonight. The goddamn betrayer was playing this one close to his chest.

He thought Blaire was finished.

He thought that he was safe, and that his lordly toy would be unable to follow through without a snarl of wire and plastic in his skull telling him when to strike, how to angle his hand just so ...

Blaire would teach him hard not to underestimate the warlord of the razor clique.

But first...

He saw it, up above. In a sliver of blue-grey light lancing down into the shaft, chopped up by the whirling blades of a rusted-out extractor fan. A glitter like falling stars, a cloud of frozen breath steaming in the air. Valchek, the little fool. Probably pissing himself with terror. The mat had been ripped out from under these noble dilettantes, and no mistake...

Simeon swung his chain out wide and leaped, arcing in to land on the sheared-off top of a metal column. Razor hooks whispered by as he flew, twisting and rolling in mid air to land with his feet together - perfect, silent, as the chains behind him rattled and clanked in the dark. Valchek whipped his head from left to right, seeking in vain. The black wraith was right across the shaft from him now, watching, waiting.

Blaire would have grinned, but he was sure that his teeth would flash white in the gloom. It was enough to know that even without Ascher's hand on the switch he was still the very best in the Game.

Vasily was whispering in the darkness.

“Oh please no don’t let him find me, please let it all be a lie, it’s a lie, yes, a ratings stunt, we can’t be allowed to die, the machine...the machine wouldn’t let him do this...not now, not in the dark like this...”

Simeon cocked his head to one side, his crystal-black eyes zooming in to focus on the terrified Lord as his fingers reached out to pluck a skull-faced cherub from the air. There, in his hands. A tiny chain of beads, slipping through his fingers as he crouched in fearful anticipation. He was praying.

“Oh God, um...almighty, please, I’ve never believed, not until now, not until they told me that...that we were going to die here...but this relic, it’s yours...your people tried to buy it from my family...”

In the hard blue light behind Simeon’s eyes he could see tears rolling down Vasily Valchek’s face, his hands trembling as they worked the jade rosary. His lips twisted into a snarl of disgust.

“If you let me live, great one, I’ll give it to them! I’ll...I’ll renounce my title, I’ll go and live among them in the R.T! I’ll give all of the riches of House Valchek to your chosen one, God! Just deliver me from Simeon Blaire...”

Such desperation. Simeon knew how it felt, that black pit opening up around you, the sure knowledge that if you were to die there would be no House Lancaster to bring you back, no Kronos to save you. But he was wary as he knotted the black silk about his waist, the cherubs hanging at his hips like guns. Because he remembered what came next, when your one and only life was hanging by a thread. That’s when your raw instincts were ripped bare, and you fought like a demon to stay alive.

That was his edge, and he knew that more than one of his enemies would unlock it too, before this night was over.

Some, of them, at least.

But probably not Valchek.

Simeon hadn’t run bawling to the ghost of a dead god when he faced oblivion. And to even suggest living amongst the filth of the R.T – he would be doing the wretch a favor when he killed him.

Simeon coiled himself up like a panther and sprung out into the cold air of the shaft, descending on the pale and huddled form of Vasily Valchek in a blur of deeper shadow. He lashed out with one hand, avoiding a disemboweling hook by a whisper, and caught a length of swinging chain, pivoting around it in a tight little arc. His other hand snapped up a thinner chain, looping in some slack, feeling the cruel spikes which studded its links cut into his skin.

Valchek had no idea what was coming down on him. All he felt was a swirling eddy in the chill air, all he heard was the chime and clatter of chains. And then it struck - a sudden savage blow hammering him to his knees, jointed steel pulled tight about his neck like a constricting snake...

His head snapped to one side with terrible force, and he heard the crack of sundering bones behind a rush of pseudomorphine. Vasily slithered across the narrow platform, the rosary slipping from his grasp, and his scream of pain and astonishment echoed up and down the shaft as his fingers scrabbled for purchase. The icy metal denied him. There was a brief second in which he thought he would fall all the way to the spiked floor of the pit, that Simeon would laugh as his body twisted on impaling steel. But it was much worse.

As he fell into darkness the chain around his neck snapped taut, almost wrenching his head from his shoulders. His fingers clawed madly at the choking chain which held him up, slowly crushing the life out of him - but to no avail. His body twitched and thrashed like a hooked marlin, dangling in the cold black throat of the shaft.

Then he felt it – a hot exhalation of breath against his cheek, the low and gloating laughter of his nemesis, hanging upside down in the chains right next to him. Valchek’s face was turning purple as he twisted and struggled.

Blaire grinned as he watched Vasily slowly losing his battle to stay alive.

“The Vatican God cares nothing for us, my Lord.” he whispered, his breath steaming an inch from Valchek’s ear. “We are his rivals, not his slaves!”

He twitched the choking chain with one hand, laughing as his victim bucked and heaved, ripping his fingernails bloody on the unyielding metal.

“But it’s your lucky day, Vasily. Direktor Ascher wasn’t lying – if you die here, it’s forever. So you’re not going to perish in chains. I’m going to let you go.”

Blaire waited until his words sunk in – until he saw a flicker of hope on Valchek’s bruise-purple features. Then he flicked his wrist, unlooping the chain from around his neck. For a second the doomed Lord hung there in the air, gasping for breath, and then gravity took hold.

He fell away into the dark with a pitiful scream, down and down, while Simeon’s laughter echoed up the shaft to bounce back in a storm of echoes. Many seconds later there came a final, sickening crunch from below – and a single tiny click from off in the shadows. Blaire would have missed it were he not so impeccably upgraded. It was the unmistakable the sound of a gun being loaded.

His mind jumped back to the threedeeos he’d seen of Ascher’s fall – of the black assassin who had cut him down so close to his goal. Of the vast plasma blast which had torn his body apart in an instant, archaeotech from the wars of the apocalypse...

“Rivals to godhood, are we, Simeon?” asked a hissing, malicious voice in the dark. “Then the ends must surely justify the means – Gods are infallible, you know.”

Blaire was utterly vulnerable – dangling from the chains by one foot while his enemy trained the muzzle of some impossibly destructive cannon on his head. For the first time in as long as he could remember he felt the fear. It crackled along his nerves like summer lightning.

“Allow me to quote from the Vatican’s book, before we finish our business, then.” said the assassin, his voice coming in from all sides as echoes. “ ...For you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!”

For a second the blue strobeflash of plasma filled the shaft, blazing from the razor edges of a thousand wicked hooks, a furious conflagration which roared through the space where Blaire’s shadow had hung.

By then, he was already long gone.

Ω

Kaito Kayzi plunged into the mouth of hell, his rage turning to incredulous fear as he fell. There was almost no way that this plan could work – but incineration in the guts of the Kraken seemed inevitable either way. Kaito had read parts of the Vatican Dogma – just to secure the good graces of the Black Technologists, really – and he knew about the fall of Lucifer from heaven. Now he had a fair idea of how the doomed angel had felt.

The flamelight rippled across his red concussion armor as he plunged down into the maw of the monster, stifling a scream behind his hysterical grin. Lashing tentacles the girth of telegraph poles scythed through the air all around him; he fell through loops of rusted steel, between snapping pincers which missed shearing him in half by inches.

There – only a little further down was Hassan, his bulky shadow reaching out with a silver hand that flashed sullen red in the light of the Kraken’s fires. The I-beam he stood on was sagging now, twisted out of shape as the ravening tentacles of the beast tore the Valley View’s foundations to scrap.

Only an instant’s window, only one chance to grab those knife-tipped fingers...

Kaito’s mind was used to the brain-melting suicide plunge into the seas of blue light inside the Wetsystems – he just had to pretend that this was the same. Calculations unfolded behind his eyes, tracing his trajectory, the arc of his fall...

The jolt nearly pulled his arm from its socket, but Hassan caught him. The fractured I-Beam sagged down as the big biker took up his friend’s weight, arresting his plunge with a grunt of pain.

“Shit, K – you should lay off the junk food. I almost broke a sweat catching you there.”

Down here the heat was intense, and Hassan’s face ran freely with sweat as he grinned, just as manic and doomed as his hacker buddy. The sequestrator pistol spun around one of his meaty fingers as he handed it across.

“One shot, Kayzi. I’ll feed this son of a bitch a meal it’ll choke on, then you hit the controls.”

The steel beneath their feet was definitely giving way now – it dipped alarmingly as something behind the wall gave way.

“Alright – I’m ready.” said Kaito, feeling the pistol jack into his bio-onboard network. Ancient code seethed up his arm from the little device, meshing with the slick interface of his Ashishi-built systems.

“And if this one goes to shit, just let me say...”

Hassan stopped him short, dragging him back from the edge as the Kraken lunged up at them, shaking the whole crumbling structure of the Mall.

“Just don’t fuck it up! Now, let’s GO!”

Without another word the silver-handed giant turned to the broken wall, wrapping his fingers around the jagged edges of a steel panel. The huge chunk of masonry was at least eight feet to a side, riveted in place centuries ago by long-scrapped constructor mekan. But the Kraken had loosened it just enough for Hassan to get a grip. Tendons stood out on his neck like high-tension wires as he struggled against it, gritting his teeth as he took the strain. Seams across his shoulders burst as he heaved, sweat flying as he thrashed left and right.

Then the first rivet came free, skimming past Kaito’s face like a bullet. The next came a second later, and then the Kayzi had to cower behind his friend as the hammered slugs flew like rain.

“Here we go, Kaito! I’ll see you through the other side!” yelled Hassan, pulling the slab of metal free with a grinding, crunching cacophony. The beam they stood on shook as its final welds began to tear loose.

And then he lifted the great panel of metal over his head, roaring like an animal in rage and pain, and cast it down into the Kraken’s horrific mouth.

An instant later he grabbed Kaito’s arm, and leaped after it.