Chaos Cipher (4 page)

Seven
tactical warheads knifed through space at tremendous speed
behind
The Cereno
, an inescapable approach without a saltus-carrousel. The
first three hadn’t managed to make it through the falling debris.
Multiple explosions burst in Amora’s atmosphere, static cracks of
super-lightning jumping between charged points in the upper
mesosphere. The forth warhead was sent hurtling off-course, its
propulsion drives extinguished, spinning it aimlessly into the
stars. Rynal launched the stern chasers. Hundreds of thermal flares
scattered out to distract the warheads behind the fleeing Cereno,
while broadside beam cannons lashed into space, garish stabs of
light zipping along the flight paths of the missiles, unable to
lock their erratic twists and sidewinding turns. Rynal was forced
to make a dangerous manoeuvre.
The
Cereno
dove, rolling into a lower
altitude. Intense friction of air particles blasted over the nose
of
The Cereno
in
white hot streams of fire as her velocity pushed way over safe
re-entry protocols. He exerted the engines, parting the thickening
atmosphere like a red hot knife in a fog, competing against the
heated attrition with the approaching missile.

Temperature
critical
, warned
The Cereno’s
AI.
Stabilise velocity now. Acceleration over-ride engaged.
Manual re-entry incorrect, drop speed and adjust articulation
immediately.

Rynal kept
the nose down. The AACS alarms began signalling objections, klaxons
bleating into the bridge. It was now a game of chance. If the two
warheads hit they would certainly be dead anyway. Something had to
give.
The Cereno’s
hull shielding peeled away at the nose, tearing back slowly
like banana skin under the ablation of the thickening
atmosphere.

Suddenly
there was a breakthrough. The warhead overheated in re-entry and
reached critical mass, exploding with enough violence to throw the
sixth missile off-course. The moment it happened, Rynal gasped out
a cry of long held aspiration and cut the acceleration, angling the
starnavis star-ward again and levelling an appropriate escape
velocity. The red hot Cereno returned to a safe altitude then
cruised away from Amora once more like a firefly to the inky night.
Scanners searched assiduously for the seventh warhead but there was
nothing in range.

‘
We did it,’
Osmond’s voice spluttered through the bridge, wheezing from the
stress of the gee-forces. ‘By the gods we did it.’

The tactical
computer alerted him to take immediate attention to the radiators,
and quickly he discharged the lethal heat into a conduction
cylinder and purged the white hot element into orbit. He hadn’t
much more of those.
The Cereno
was in deep trouble without thermal purge units,
the whole core could overheat at this rate.

Guided
projectile identified,
The Cereno’s
AI once more alerted.

LOCK. LOCK.
LOCK. LOCK

No!

A single fuel
pellet was released in that moment falling into the focus-fusion
caste. It pulsed into full flux, the pellet’s reaction triggering a
resplendent stream from the aft engines. Yet even with the
starnavis’ reactor jacked fully into the engines
The Cereno’s
inertial
weight was still too great for a quick getaway, and the warhead
slammed into the fuselage. The impact cleaved through the external
MLI resin shielding and a flash of plasma momentarily shone
inside.

Malla and
Raven jolted forth, the cabin pressure tearing through the hole.
Her ears rang. The breath snatched from her screaming lips on a
gust of air racing into the blackness outside. She felt pinned into
her seat as
The Cereno
spiralled through space, inertial forces pushing over forty
rpm. And although the moveable seats adjusted to reduce the
inertial strain, Malla, Raven and her child were thrown
unconscious.

Emergency
sprinklers activated, jettisons of foam racing into the hole
punctured in the ship. The foam started collecting, sticking,
gathering and growing around the wound. It quickly piled there,
travelling on the evacuating air, expanding, sealing everything up
in an instant. But the air was faint. Once the foam petrified the
oxygen tanks stirred, releasing a fresh mix of air into the cabin
again.

The lethal
blow cut the engines and
The Cereno
powered down, catapulted through space on its own
directionless momentum. The auto-pilot immediately recognised the
crew was unconscious and emergency thrusters worked to counter the
ship’s spin. Radiation and dangerous overheating was the remaining
problem. The whole thing desperately needed to cool, and Rynal had
been too cautious with the conduction elements while he was awake.
The auto-pilot injected a new element into the core, conducting
tons of super-hot exposure into the charge, and dispelled the hot
cartridge into space, a thermal flare that gave away their position
to
The Deathwind
.
The Cereno
drifted now through the silence. The damaged starnavis was
easy pickings.

‘
Target is
neutralised!’ Ripley reported impassively.

The daring of
the pilot intrigued him. His gutsy dive into Amora’s atmosphere
told him he was a risk taker and a born survivor. There was more
going on here than desperation, he thought. The weaving through the
debris field told him he was skilled, that he understood how
Newtonian motion carried his bulky starnavis. Even now as they were
dead in Amora’s apoapsis, he hoped there was still some fight in
them before the maser surgery unpieced their vessel.
The Deathwind
stayed on
course, levelling its long canopy steady with
The Cereno’s
orientation, matching
her angle before firing its main engines up. Gee-forces pressed
Ripley back into the cushioned seating. His engineered bones flexed
and his veins fattened up as his geobacter supercharged the
nanoctors, working hard to keep the oxygen where it was most
needed, a job his lungs were unable to perform at such speeds. The
approach time was a little under five minutes. They’d already
covered a great distance, which meant
The
Cereno
was a racer class starnavis. He
thought her unusually large to have racer class engines.

The infantile
screaming and wailing in his mind had now abated. He could no
longer hear the child screaming. It was a relief they all shared,
but the network had fallen eerily silent; his boys were clearly
spooked by the phenomenon. This was no radio frequency trick or
clever network hacking. The child had been coughing, light hacking
coughs, punctuated between the fierce wailings. They all knew that
this sound was in their heads, that they all shared its invasive
presence and felt its utter distress.

‘
Ripley, destroy
that starnavis,
’ said the commander.
‘
The crew members are gene-freaks and
they’re breaking morale.
’

‘
Copy,
ma’am.
’ Said Ripley, emphasising her title
with some mild indignation for the derogatory term. ‘All
gene-freaks to be processed.’ And with that, he returned focus on
allies in his close proximity. ‘Fall in all strike-ships,
target
The Cereno
, finish the job.’

-3-

W
hen Rynal finally came to, he saw
the entire starnavis had been sequestered in darkness. The
atmosphere lingered, hot and metallic, making his eyes rheumy. Each
shallow breath inhaled the corrosive air as though it was spiced
with the vapours of fried chilli-pepper. Only the radium pads were
left to light the emergency escape routes. His antennae began to
glow softly as he searched out the starnavis for his wife and
child. They were safe, but the forces of the blast had knocked them
unconscious. Raven too had been knocked out cold by the explosion.
But he hadn’t the time to worry about injuries just now. Their
survival was paramount.

‘
Rynal!’
Osmond whimpered from somewhere below.

Rynal reached
out, floating towards the inertial bed where the old man
lay.

‘
You’re
hurt,’ he noticed.

‘
My ankle,’
he groaned with wince of pain, ‘Just my ankle. Listen son...you
have to get the starnavis moving again. Not for me, you understand.
You know how important she is.
The
child
. We all share her
dreams.’

Rynal
understood the gravity of this. He had once doubted the existence
of clairvoyants and mystics. But since
she’d
been born everything changed.
Even the Elixir had changed.

‘
She’s a
Chronomancer. She must survive.’

‘
She will,’
Rynal vowed determinedly. ‘She will, if you can pilot
The Cereno
.’

‘
Not as good
as you.’

‘
Go straight.
I’ve locked onto one of the saltus-carousel zones in the velox
quadrant. I got us pretty damn close to the nearest station. Couple
the starnavis with one of the saltus-carousels and make the exit
velox. I’ll hold them off.’

‘
How?’

For a moment
he glared stolidly at the old man, his narrow face sullen and
determined. ‘The catalyst.’

‘
Rynal,’ the
old man gasped. ‘You mustn’t.’

‘
There’s no
other way,’ Rynal breathed heavily. ‘Our culture is out there,
dying!’ Rynal turned to the dead circuits and began to unlatch wall
panels, drawing out crystal boards from their place. ‘We got this
thing too late. We need to use it.’

‘
My god…what
if that’s why they’re here?’ Osmond asked. ‘Did we take the bait?
Did we give them an excuse to wage this war?’

‘
I don’t
think so,’ said Rynal. ‘I doubt they’d hand us something that can
make a quanti-magnus. They’re here for something else.’

‘
You can’t
use it.’ Osmond said. ‘There’s no power source…’

‘
I’ll engage
the macro-gravity on the Obsiduranium catalyst and over-mass the
material to critical singularity. The catalyst isn’t fitted with
micro fusion cells and vacuum energy won’t work near a Lagrange
point; I’ll have to power it manually. I have just enough geobacter
in my blood to maintain over-mass. The Catalyst will do the
rest.’

‘
What about
us? What about the Elixir?’

Rynal sprang
towards the core terminal and unlocked more of the crystal circuit
boards, the glowing nanology in his blood scintillating like tinsel
over his skin, communicating with the circuitry.

‘
I doubt they
came here for the Elixir.’ He said softly, his face cast in moiré
tones of blue white fluorescence. ‘You told me about this Titan who
came to buy the system. Well I think it’s like you said, they’re
here to mine the Suntau.’ he explained.

‘
Oh god,’
Osmond gasped, shifting his ankle painfully. ‘I can’t move Rynal.
It’s bad.’

‘
Stay there,’
said Rynal. ‘So long as my daughter lives, we might have a chance
of at least saving the Elixir.’

Emergency
lights illuminated the bridge command again and Rynal operated a
diagnosis check.

‘
The Casimir
plates are misaligned,’ Rynal reported, ‘molecular diodes are out.
That missile also tore up our photoelectric fusion core. This is
bad. Right now I’ll run the ship from whatever is left of the
fusion cells. It’ll take a while for the nanomes to get the
molecular diodes online, but the second they’re operating again,
you get to the nearest saltus-carousel before those bastards find
them. There’s a storage station nearby. I’ve programmed the
coordinates.’ Rynal checked the basic radars and sighed. ‘We’ve got
Arrowhead strike-ships in-bound.’ He reported ‘E.T.A, six
minutes.’

Rynal eyes
illuminated with facets of light and information as he toyed with
delicate plates of crystal. A moment later a hatch opened in the
middle of the bridge command. He floated over and grabbed hold of a
large lever, pulling it down once.

Alert,
dormant research catalyst exposed. Obsiduranium material purged.
Potential fatality detected, vacate the area
immediately.

‘
That should
deter them for a moment,’ said Rynal with a glimmer of joy.
‘They’re probably wondering what the hell that thing is we just
ejected. They’ll be in for a shock when their scanners are done.’
He looked at the old man affably and offered a febrile smile, drawn
tired eyes glistening with sweat. ‘You’re her only hope now,
Osmond.’ He said. ‘Get them out of here.’

‘
Good luck
Rynal Protos.’ He heard his voice through a semi-transqualia, just
enough to feed the thought without sharing the full sensorium that
included his painful ankle.