2196 Ante Arbitrium Hacked Up

Kaito reached the 'mersive deck out of breath, stopping at the bottom of its pipework stairs as his pulse pounded in his temples.

It took him a moment to realize that something was wrong.

There was a walkie-talkie hanging from the rail on a thin plastic strap, hissing static. Blue light flickered around the edges of the door, but there was no sound from inside - perhaps the full complement of Pent' ops were plugged in, trying to crack Elysium's locked-down datanet...

That theory went straight to hell when Kaito pushed open the door and came face to face with a corpse.

At first he didn't even recognize the two Pent sailors as human. They were fat cocoons of bubbled plastic swinging on a pair of hooks, blood pooling and dripping beneath them in the dark. When he picked out what remained of a face sagging upside down from one of them the bile rose up in the back of his throat.

Whatever had worked this butchery had taken time with its art. It had sliced their lips open from ear to ear, stapling them back into hideous grins which erased their other features... all but their hollow and empty eyes. This wasn't the work of an assassin or a wet-ops specialist. It was the calling card of a psychopath.

The Kayzi's mind twitched, flashing back to the waking nightmare of the Worm - that alien sequestrator which had promised hell on earth.

But no. This was cold, calculated. These bodies were trussed up neat and tight, a warning and a promise. The thing which the Core drone had seen, that crawling darkness which terrified even Abdulafia 330 - that could never conceive of such sick artistry.

It would never let so much fresh meat go undevoured...

Kaito crept across the tiny guardroom, his shadow stretched across the plasterboard walls as he stepped in front of the guards' tiny twodeeo set. He could feel their dead eyes following him as he reached the great hole in the wall, a gaping mouth of darkness.

Hells! Even Haszan would have trouble causing this kind of damage... the cheap wood was smashed to splinters, and the two-by-four studs as well. You could have driven a bus through into the 'mersive deck, an echoing chasm lit with blue sparks and frantic red touchscreens.

He pulled a pencil-torch from his belt and swept its light down the cold metal cylinder, playing over bloodstains, over reams of torn-out cables, smashed screens and bulletholes...

Then he caught the first headless operator full in his beam, a blood-soaked torso slumped across a 'mersive couch.

Kaito's hand scrabbled for a lightswitch, slipping and sliding over the smooth metal curve of the wall. White neon sputtered weakly to life overhead, one solitary tube swinging on a single wire, illuminating hell.

Three Pentecostals had died here, though the sheer volume of blood spoke of a massacre all out of proportion to the bodycount. They lay headless in their rigs, as though some kind of vicious new ice had torn through their 'phones and goggles, detonating their skulls. Kaito felt vomit rise in his throat. It could just as easily have been him.

The luckless hackers had been crucified on their own rigs, desecrated after death with skeins of wire and plugs rammed down their gaping throats. One of them even had a twodeeo cube balanced on his bleeding stump of a neck, blazing white with static.

And something more...

As Kaito watched, fighting back his nausea, a face began to coalesce out of the churning pixels; a smooth white face with red-raw eyes and a snarling, lipless mouth. It hung above the body of the Pent' operator like a phantom, laughing silently at the carnage around it.

Then the sound kicked in, crackling through a battery of hidden speakers.

"Hello, Kaito," said the Scarecrow. "Kaito Kayzi, the little wannabe Magus. Jaqub Haszan's inconvenient shadow... I've never met you, Kayzi, but I already hate you. Nothing personal, of course... I hate all of you equally. But I have a particular loathing for your type."

Now the other screens - those left unbroken - were switching themselves on one by one, all showing the hateful visage of Aitken Straw.

"You know what I mean, Neophyte. You're everybody's best friend, the bloody wunderkind with an answer for everything... just tripping blithely from one disaster to the next with all Elysium happy to take care of you. Jaq, and Abdulafia, and even the damned Compliance Division!" The Scarecrow narrowed his lidless eyes, seething with malice. "You think I couldn't do what you've done? That I'm any less deserving of the adulation of your precious Illuminatus? But oh no... he turned me down. His nomad filth-tribe wouldn't have me! They said I was unstable, psychotic... but I know better..."

Now a pair of bladed hands came up into the shot, peeling back Aitken'smask with a sound like crusted bandages torn from a wound. Underneath the eggshell plastic he was a horror, a nightmare of veins and raw muscles radiating pure hatred.

"Who wants to be friends with a thing like this?" he hissed, as blood spattered from his flayed face and into the upturned cup of his mask. "Who needs my mind, and my skill, when it comes with a face like mine?" He pushed the shell back onto his skull with an obscene liquid sound. "Don't bother to answer. Don't worry about it. Just know that even the most charmed life has its bad days, Kayzi. This is gonna be one of them."

Now the screens were changing, switching over one by one to a shot of Jaqub Haszan, a black and unmistakable silhouette lashed by sheets of driving rain.

"See, you're not the one we came here for. And by we, I mean the gang - the Emerald City Gang. We're a media sensation, or so I'm told. We're here for your big ugly friend out there, but I thought I'd do you the courtesy of explaining."

Only the screen perched above the ruined cadaver of the Pentecostal op was left now, filled to the edges with the maniacal face of Aitken Straw.

"Seems his old boss wanted him dead pretty bad. And Ruby is nothing if not accomodating... especially when she gets to exercise her mean streak. As for you - you just piss me off personally. So I thought I'd make this whole situation a moral conundrum for your edification - like this. You could run off after him, try to stop us... not that it would do you much good. Or you could try and save a whole bunch of useless humps back there in Elysium. Your choice. Either way, there's gonna be blood. And that, my friend, is enough for yours fuckin' truly."

Kaito was shocked into silence, hardly breathing as he wrapped his hands around the little twodeeo cube. He dashed it to the floor to shatter amid the blood, digging his fingers into his eyes as the room began to spin. There were voices outside, curses, the sound of boots on steel... and then hot white light flooded the 'mersive chamber, pinning the Kayzi in a crossfire of torch beams.

"Oh my God. Oh, sweet Jesus Christ..." said one of the silhouettes on the other side of the light. "What has he done? What the hell happened to them?"

Kaito slumped to the floor, feeling broken glass under his hands and knees. He heard the bolts snap back on a dozen submachine guns, the scuffling footsteps of Pent' marines moving out to encircle him.

"All dead, Sir. All of them! And he's torn up the whole 'mersive system, the war-engines... the whole damn thing."

The Kayzi felt the muzzle of an antiquated plastic automatic pressed up against his temple, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a sardonic smile. It was a setup, a meatspace hack, and Aitken Straw had played him like a fool. Any second now one of these pious thugs would decide to let God sort him out...

"Don't be a goddamn idiot, Burton!" barked a voice all barbed-wire and hellfire. "Haven't you filthy maggots ever seen a warzone before? You think a pencil-neck runt like this one could do all of this? Him and which god-damned army, soldier?"

"S-sorry, Sergeant," muttered the man with his gun to Kaito's head, easing off the pressure by a tiny increment. "But he's an outlander, an Elysian. And he's the one 'Deut said was a hacker - one of them Hashishin boys."

"That don't give him super-powers, now, does it Burton?" sighed the Sergeant, swaggering forward through the blinding light. He hunkered down next to Kaito, digging his callused fingers into the Elysian's shoulder. "Look here, boy... c'mon, I'm not gonna kill you - what the hell did you see here?"

The Sergeant's face was a weatherbeaten roadmap of creases and scars, with two black crucifix tattoos carved into the topography of his cheeks. His hair was an iron-gray stubble, cropped back to a severe line against his olive skin.

"Contract killers," croaked the Kayzi, struggling to his feet. "Four of them. Bad sons of bitches... they're here for... for the other outlander. Jaqub Haszan."

"So you are the Electromagus. Good. You think you can get this mess up and running again?" Something in the hard-bitten old soldier's tone made it obvious that 'no' wasn't an answer he wanted to hear. "Well?"

Kaito looked around at the ruin of the 'mersive suite, the torn-out wires, the shattered screens, the headless bodies and the blood... but his trained eye saw that Aitken Straw and his friends hadn't had time to truly wreck the Archangel Uriel's electronic weapons. It seemed that the Pentecostal marines had answered the Scarecrow's moral conundrum for him.

"I can probably salvage one working interface. Given time, and the right tools... but it's going to be difficult. And Jaq..."

"We'll worry about your friend - and our uninvited guests. Everyone has his place and his part to play, outlander. We're the ones with the guns."

Kaito's mind was freewheeling on automatic now, his bio-onboard probing for wireless links into the hardware of the 'mersive suite. It wasn't beyond repair... but it was just this side of scrap.

"Are any of you guys engineers?" he asked, walking over to the one remaining interface couch. "I'm going to need another couple pairs of hands here, and a whole lot of spare parts..."

The Sergeant clapped him on the shoulder, his mouth twitching into a tight little grin.

"That's the right attitude, soldier! Klaus, Freeman, you're under this man's command now - get him what he wants, no questions. If those Ashishim don't know we're coming we're going to get caught in the mother of all crossfires."

The two marines didn't look too impressed with his command, but they snapped off crisp salutes before they shrugged off their backpacks, unloading an array of toolboxes and datablocks in tidy rows.

"And outlander - we'll take them down. Don't worry about that. If your friend can hold out another ten minutes he's going to have enough fire support to take out an army."

Kaito didn't see them leave - he was already deep into the guts of the last 'mersive system, an electric screwdriver in one hand and an analytical scanner in the other. Somewhere in here was the key to the Uriel's nuclear arsenal, and once he found it...

The scumbags who were after Jaq Haszan might feel more inclined to negotiate if they were riding on a multi-megaton bomb, and Kaito's hand was on the trigger.

 

Ω

 

The first blow blindsided him, coming looping in out of the rain like a stray bullet, a fist the size of his head decked out with gold-plated knuckle-dusters. It lifted him off his feet and slammed him up against the cold steel of the Uriel's hull, knocking the breath from his lungs. Black and purple fireworks popped and blurred behind his eyes as he scrabbled at the rain-slick metal, twitching sideways just before a second king-hit staved in the plating beside him.

Good gods! Such power! What the hell was it - some kind of mekan? That super-Cyben freak Tsien gone bad on them again?

But when his vision cleared all he saw through the hissing spray was a hulking giant of a man, bulked out with raw slabs of muscle, his face hidden behind a stitched-up leather hood. Little beads of rain trickled down his massive arms, over his painted-on smiley-face as he stood there, panting, blood dripping from his skinned knuckles.

Then a blaze of crackling electric fire lit up his face from below - from a steel shock-collar clamped tight around his almost non-existent neck. The man-beast howled, throwing his hands up over his head, leaping forward to slam into the wall with both fists.

Jaq had never known that he could dodge so quickly.

Back behind him in the rain he could hear screams, cries, the sounds of battle. Guns cracked loud and urgent in the rain, and a bloodied Pent' sailor fell from above, swallowed up by the heaving ocean.

"Dammit Leon, you missed!" yelled a woman's voice, loud enough to carry even over the creak and slam of the Uriel's lumbering progress. "Do I have to do everything myself?"

Jaq glimpsed a shimmer of red in the haze, a blurred and liquid-fast form which leaped up to perch atop a section of rusted pipe. Just in time he saw the twin laser-sights of Ruby's pistols, picked out by falling drops of spray. He faked right and then rolled left, feeling the hull of the great ship shudder as it was pierced by flying steel.

Haszan heard curses behind him, and the sound of agile feet picking their way from pipe to girder to beam high above him. That red shadow was fast - inhumanly fast - and he could all but feel the hot breath of the masked giant on the back of his neck as he ran.

"Pentecostals! Marines! Aitken, get back there and stall them."

Jaq wasn't built for running. So he didn't know that old adage about never looking back over your shoulder. Along a swaying catwalk, down a flight of stairs...

They're right behind me! But who the hell are they? Confed? Omnivasive? Wh...

He slid around a corner, his boots skating out wide on the slick treadplate, and came face to face with the Tin Man.

The scarred old mekan was locked to the heaving deck with magnetic clamps, his twin heavy rifles switched out for a more assault-friendly package. Jaq stared down the four cold black barrels of an automatic shotgun to his left, and the hissing muzzle of a flamethrower on his right. His eyes widened, his breath caught in his throat... and then the Uriel slammed down into a trough between the waves, throwing off the Tin Man's aim for just a second.

A blast of caltrop shot and a tongue of purple-blue flame tore through the air right where his head had been, but Haszan was already off and running again, ducking under the stairs as the Tin Man's laser-sights licked at his heels.

"There he is! I see him, I see him!"

The voice came from behind him - the giant had doubled back, closing the trap on him. Jaq flexed his chrome fingers, snapping the tiny blades out from their tips.

If only that mad old freak 'Deut Jones hadn't taken his guns...

Footsteps were approaching from either side now; the lumbering tread of that great imbecilic giant, and the whir and thud of the Tin Man's magnetized piston-legs.

Then Haszan saw the firehose bolted to the wall under the stairs - and with it the bright red extinguisher, the axe, and the fire-blanket...

Especially the axe.

The Tin Man caught it first.

Jaq slid out from cover, snarling as he brought the wicked fire-axe up over his shoulder like a tomahawk, one-handed. The ancient mekan's head tilted to one side, quizzical, lining up his thoroughly modern weapons to counter the blade.

In all his years of warfighting, nobody had ever tried to go so low tech! What was...

Haszan's arm blurred as he released the axe, sending it whirling end over end to bite deep into the Tin Man's shoulder. His scarred armor-plating peeled back with a shower of sparks as the blade struck home. Rain and spray dripped and sizzled across the exposed circuitry there, and when the old war-machine tried to unload a clip of shotgun shells into his tormentor he found his left arm paralysed - useless.

The flamethrower, on the other hand...

The Tin Man's burning green eyes narrowed, his painted skull-face grinning in the haze.

A stream of purple fire erupted from the muzzle of the flamer, evaporating the rain in its path. Jaq had ducked back under the stairs, but they were no protection. The fire played over his cowering shadow, hot enough to peel the paint from the walls, hot enough to roast him alive...

The pressure dial on the flamer's underslung fuel cannister dropped down to zero. With a hiss and a whine the fire guttered out, leaving a fan of charred devastation behind it, a killing-ground in which nothing moved but a few curls of blistered paint.

Then something under the blackened stairwell shifted, unfurled, threw off its protective skin of flame-proof armor...

Jaqub Haszan came up from behind his fire-blanket shield like an avenging angel, swinging a fat red cylinder with both hands.

"I see you now! I'll get you, little man!"

A voice was roaring behind him, but Jaq was single-minded in his determination.

And the Tin Man, both of his weapons rendered utterly useless, was powerless to stop him as he brought the extinguisher down in a blurring diagonal stroke, colliding with his head like a wrecking ball. The backhand sent the mekan reeling, his clamps sprung loose from the heaving deck. For a second the two combatants felt gravity fall away as the giant ship reached the crest of a wave. Then the Uriel came down, and Jaq's staved-in makeshift weapon swung back, synchronized. As the twin hulls of the Pentecostal sub slammed into the churning gray ocean the fire extinguisher came in sideways, lifting the Tin Man off his feet. He slipped back up against the rail, his green eyes blazing in the rain... then the blunt end of Haszan's weapon slammed full into his face, and the rusted pipework gave way.

Those glowing green eyes irised open in sudden surprise, and the Tin Man's deadly hands scrabbled in vain for purchase. With guns instead of fingers he was utterly helpless...

The splash sent a wave of seething water up over the deck, and Jaq swore, hunched over his ruined fire extinguisher. Behind him he could hear the thunderous tread of heavy boots, a howl of outrage and pain as ten thousand volts lit up Big Leon's shock collar. He checked the safety, pulled the ripcord, and prayed that he hadn't battered the poor thing too far out of shape...

Big Leon was hardly a weapon of finesse. His charge had all the unstoppable force of continental drift, accelerated to the pace of a speeding juggernaut. When Haszan stepped out in front of him he smiled behind his mask, spreading his arms out wide, ready to mash his prey into unrecognizable jelly.

Then the world went white...

Freezing, blinding white, a localized blizzard playing across the mutant's face from the high-pressure cylinder in Jaq's hands. When the stream finally tapered off Haszan pressed his advantage - he threw the spent extinguisher with all his strength, hurling it overhand against Leon's chest.

It knocked the wind from the giant's lungs, but even blind and breathless his momentum carried him on. Leon went from a lumbering run to an uncontrolled roll and slide, roaring incomprehensibly as he fell.

Jaq leaped over him as he slid across the slick metal deck of the Archangel Uriel, tucking his knees up to his chest as Leon's hands lashed out wild. The vast twin-hulled ship was canted upward, riding the swells, and the deck was a slippery slope, all the way down to...

Jaq winced as he watched Leon's ponderous bulk slam into a solid steel bulkhead door - head first, the sickening crack of broken bone carrying even over the storm. Still, the giant wasn't dead - a groan, a twitch of his great hairy hands... that was enough to get Jaq running again. After all, there were at least two more of these freaks out to kill him.

If he'd stood there admiring his handiwork for a fraction of a second more they would have finished the job. As it was, Ruby's railpistol blast tore two perfect holes in his ragged trenchcoat, tugging at his shoulders as he ran. The animated flames which played across its fabric stuttered and blurred in the rain, throwing a dirty halo up around him.

Dorothea Alvarez wasn't entirely sorry she'd missed.

The renegade Kheptarch smiled, looking down from her haunt up among the pipes and wires, and she slipped her guns back into their holsters. A tiny voice hissed and crackled from her earpiece - Aitken Straw, reporting in from the bow of the Uriel.

"I'm done here," whispered the Scarecrow, and Ruby could imagine him standing amid the shredded ruin of that luckless Pentecostal squad. "How's the hunt? Did Leon get his hands on that Subcity rat yet?"

"The rat appears to be quite a resourceful beast. Certainly more of a package than Vanecke's usual goons could handle. I think our dear Direktor was actually afraid of this one."

"But Leon? Tin Man? Last I checked, they were right on top of him..."

"Leon's a twitching wreck. And that outmoded old mekan is probably walking back to Elysium on the seabed. He took them both out in a matter of seconds, Aitken."

There was silence from the other end of the wireless link for a second, then a low whistle of appreciation.

"We haven't had a live one since I don't know when, Ruby. I was almost starting to think we'd weeded them all out..."

The renegade's luscious lips pulled back into a smirk as she watched Haszan duck in through an open doorway, red light flashing from his chrome hand.

"This one's mine, Scarecrow. All mine. You just keep these Pent' freaks out of our way while we play our little game..."

"You and your entertainments!" laughed Straw. "You can take Ruby out of the Kheptarchy, but you can't take the Kheptarchy out of Ruby..."

Her smile turned bitter, then, twisting into a snarl as she dropped lightly down to the heaving deck.

"Save the homilies, Aitken. A girl's got to have her distractions... or she might just remember who got her into this mess in the first place."

The Scarecrow cursed under his breath, looking around him at the dismembered bodies of his foes. The old one, the warrior with the iron-gray stubble and the black crucifix tattoos - he'd fought well, but in the end they'd all tasted his steel. In the end, everybody did. The thought of a live one, of worthy prey...it almost made him excited, even after all these years.

Ahh well. All wasn't doom and gloom. At least that little shit Kayzi had gotten his comeuppance. Oh, to see the look on his face right now!

 

Ω

 

Kaito's face was bathed in flickering blue light as he eased the 'mersive goggles up to his eyes, squinting into two tiny slivers of another world. Six gleaming mekanik arms reared up around his head like metal cobras; their fangs were the tiny gold plugs of intracranial nervejacks. Already his bio-onboard was socketed in tight to the single Ops suite they'd been able to cobble together - and the vast translucent shape of the Pentecostals' slicer system was beginning to haze in over reality, warping the faces of his two marine companions.

"Mister Freedman, bring up the power to the transmitters. I've just got to pray that we've put this pile of junk together right..."

The Pent' sailor slowly eased the final lever home, and Kaito settled back onto the bloodstained leather of the 'mersive couch, dropping the rubber goggles over his eyes. With a series of tiny clicks and hisses the cranial plugs slotted in, and their attendant arms peeled away. Now it was just the Kayzi and the machine, the unfamiliar thunder and hum of the Uriel's electronic war-engines throbbing in his skull...

There was no denying the power of Deuteronomy Jones' jury-rigged wireless transmitters - the connection, when it dropped in, was a crisp and smooth as the one from Kaito's own downtown hab. But instead of appearing on the mirrored surface of a virtual ocean, this time the Kayzi materialized high in the air, looking down on the absurdly foreshortened curvature of a liquid planet...

It was the whole of the Wetsystems, laid out before him as if he was some archaic astronaut surveying the Earth from orbit. The sky he hung in was a swirling melange of black on black, textured whorls of night licking up against each other like colliding galaxies. That, at least, was normal.

But down below it was a whole other story - the azure sphere of the Wetsystems was no longer tranquil and calm, blazing from within with the ghost-lights of living glass coral.

Now the sea was dark, choppy and heaving, exactly like the ocean which crashed against the Uriel's bows. As Kaito watched another great jagged accretion of blue-green light went out, extinguished deep under the waves. Something was shutting the systems down, throwing their artificial brain-tissue into torpor. It could only be the work of Kronos.

Kaito willed himself closer, stooping like a falcon down through the atmosphere, through fractal swirls of cloud feathered away to mist. The surface of the boiling sea sped by beneath him, blurred with acceleration - until he picked out a red light welling up from below.

Something had infected the Wetsystems here - something which stank of that vile possessor the Vilicus had shown him. It had taken the sunken gardens of the 'systems and turned them inside-out, revealing their cruel secret...

A city-sized web of cracks and fractures spread out from the pulsing heart of it, spiraling up into great cancerous growths, trees of pain upon which thousands of souls were crucified. They were the dead, personality constructs harvested by Kronos to drive the Forge. That bondage was cruel enough, but now...

Once, this had been purgatory. Now it was Hell.

The terrors of Magus Verlaine had nothing on the things he saw down there... it was beyond description, beyond comprehension, a horrorworks of throbbing, bleeding flesh, stitched and pinned and stapled together. The stench of decay reached him even through the firewalls of the Pent' slicer. And despite of their torn and broken state the poor things were alive - alive and suffering for the delectation of their master.

So it was true. This was the sequestrator, the thing which had promised Abdulafia 330 a place as one of its Exalted. The thing which he'd released into the world...

Kaito bit back on his fear, his hands flying over the virtual controls of the slicer system. It stripped the view below back down to glowing wireframes, wiping the scenes of brutality and torture from before his eyes. There was nothing he could do for them. Nothing. He was here to save the living, nothing more...

He followed the edge of the infection as it ramified through familiar conduits and reefs of glass, deeper into the dark zones. Toward a star guttering beneath the imaginary ocean - the war-room of the Ashishim.

It was besieged on all sides, surrounded by towering fractal pinnacles of light. Kaito was sure that if he peeled back his protective filters he'd see things impaled on those frozen lightning-bolts which would break his mind.

He concentrated, feeling the Pentecostal slicer solidify around him, a green and white missile of translucent code with four swept-forward wings, its databores and countervirals manifest as a payload of cannons and missiles. There'd be a target for every one of them if his search programs were telling him the truth - the water between him and the Ashishi fortress was a boiling sea of carnage.

As he upped his magnification he saw just how bad it was.

The toughest metavirals and H-K systems the Reclamationists could throw out were holding back Asag'raal tooth and claw, blasting his creatures apart in waves. The alien possessor was by no means subtle, and the Electromagi were light-years beyond it in terms of technique and skill. But the delicate balance of the Wetsystems meant nothing to the Saprophytes, and they were legion.

The slave-virals of the Worm weren't artificial programs, or even slicers piloted by desperate operators. They were the damned, and they screamed as they attacked, seeking oblivion. The poor once-human things had been transformed into nightmares, their bodies intersected with blades of bloody glass. The weeping teratoma at the heart of the Scourge was almost beautiful by comparison.

As Kaito watched, a beast cut in slices and held together with wheels of light broke through the Electromagi lines, screaming a one-note song of agony. Its arms and hands were sawn down the middle with razor glass, and it swung them like axes, butchering a pair of H-Ks in its path. The Ashishi ops were on it in seconds, their serrated slicer-blades flashing in the crimson light, blood billowing out from its butchered body... But the damage was done. Kaito watched the H-K units collapse into a haze of static as the disease tripped their failsafes, leaving a hole in the Ashishim defenses.

That was all he needed.

The Pentecostal machine was slower than his own custom Ops unit, but it was still far faster than the clumsy, brutal thralls of Asag'raal. Kaito screamed out his Magi designation as he powered for the gap, broadcasting his identity to the slicers who were lining him up in their sights.

Databore missiles streaked out from a dozen insectoid machines, and for an instant the Kayzi thought he was done for, that his allies had marked him as infected. Then the brace of warheads spiraled past him, pulling together in his wake, and he was through the breach. They detonated behind him with a deep subsonic concussion, amid the delighted screams of Asag’raal’s children.

Back on the 'mersive deck of the Archagel Uriel Kaito's body was trembling and pale, his face sheened with sweat. The Pent' marines hunched over his biomonitors cursed as his heart-rate and blood pressure spiraled up and up, pushing needles into the red.

But inside, under the waters of the virtual sea Kaito Kayzi was still in control. He'd made it through to his allies; to the only clan in the Last City who could hope to prevail. The Illuminatus would know what to do, even if Kronos himself was blind with panic...

Kaito flipped switches, peeling away the translucent skin of his slicer, the polygonal panels folding in upon themselves like impossible origami. He hung weightless and naked in the warm dark water, staring down the guns of a thousand Ashishi Ops.

"Stand down! Stand down! He's one of us!"

A voice lashed out across the open band, and the Reclamationists turned back to their bloody task, leaving the Kayzi alone before a single immense slicer-system, a machine like a great glass crab. The Ashishi eye-and-dagger was etched into its deep green shell.

"Welcome," said that disembodied voice. "Kaito 131. Kayzi, if I were to use your outland name... but surely this is all wrong? Your trace goes back too far - far outside the city. How can this be?"

The young neophyte knew then that he was in the presence of a master - one of Verlaine's brothers. Only they could see the lingering trace of an Operator's wake through the virtual ocean, and only an ancient would be able to pilot a slicer of such size and power, his quicksilver mind breathing life into its pincers and hooks and cannons.

"I... I'm coming in from offshore, My Lord Magus. From your allies, the Pentecostals. From Deuteronomy Jones."

The crab's intricate mouthparts fluttered and twitched at the mention of his name, and Kaito had to remind himself that this was the Magus' true form - his human body was just a cybernetic husk.

"Deut' Jones is no ally of mine, neophyte!" rumbled the beast of glass. "Perhaps, before the reclamation, he had certain... arrangements with our blessed Illuminatus. But now - now it is politically expedient to deny them. The Vatican are good neighbors, and terrible enemies."

The Kayzi was choked up with indignation for a second - the city was tearing itself apart, and this pompous fool was worried about politics! But then he realized who and what he was addressing. The High Magus had lived through innumerable petty wars, through the Reclamation and the Long March... such a creature knew nothing of urgency.

"My Lord," he said, "expediency aside, we have with us the means to save tens of thousands of people. The Archangel Uriel is coming, and we must tell the city. Jones is going to dock alongside the Ashishim Territories, and you need to be prepared."

"Preposterous!" replied the crab, clicking its pincers in frustration. "Any such breach of protocol would have to be voted on by the council. The Illuminatus would have to..."

"Then ask him! I have to do something, or they're all going to die!"

"Very well. So long as matters here are kept in hand, I can't see the harm of it... The Marshall of the Spillway is the one you need. I'll patch you through to a drone in the War-room, and you can put you case to her directly."

The crab reached out with one of its immense translucent pincers, its blades creaking open around Kaito where he hung suspended in the water. Behind him the frantic battle continued, as the legions of the Worm threw themselves up against the Ashishim barrier with unabated fury.

Just as he thought the claw was about to shear him in half a tiny hatch irised open near its base, and a thin tentacle of jointed glass slid out, human fingers unfurling at its tip. It touched the haze of code which blurred around Kaito once, twice, sliding and clicking sections of the Pent' slicer system, reforming its delicate architecture. Trying to resist the vast, insistent mind behind that touch would be like trying to drink the ocean dry.

One last shift, and it was done.

Kaito's field of view ballooned out wide as his consciousness was imprinted onto a camera drone, one of hundreds lost in the panic and bustle of the Ashishim command center. His mind slipped as he tried to grasp at the controls of the little mekan, sending it stumbling forward on a handful of insect legs. He spun the lens globe atop the drone as he went, drinking in his surroundings.

It was utter, seething chaos; a vast riot of men and machines somehow working toward the same goal. It was the very heart of the Ashishim.

He'd never seen this place before; an amphitheater cut into the bedrock beneath Elysium, its wall of patched-together monitors racked up in scaffolding, its sunken rows of op suites manned by sweating, twitching Submagi...

This was the powerhouse of his chosen clan, the engine room of the Reclamation. There was no time for awe or curiosity, though. He had to find the Marshall of the Spillway before the Archangel Uriel came into range. The last thing they needed was friendly fire, especially considering the Pent' sub's nuclear cargo.

Kaito's little mekan scuttled between the legs of Dervashi and Ashishim techs, under desks and around 'mersive couches, picking its way carefully across the thick carpet of wires and cables which covered the stone floor of the war-room. Luckily the camera-headed machine came with limited bio-onboard access - he was able to query the Ashishi datanet as he went, lighting up every one of the toiling revolutionaries with a tiny neon halo.

Ranks, names and serial numbers glittered above them like a swirling galaxy, and it only took the Kayzi a moment to pick out the Marshall - a tall woman, her iron-gray hair caught up in braids, pacing the length of a mezzanine balcony as a cluster of mekan swarmed at her heels. Every now and then she'd turn to one of the scuttling robots, and her fingers would blur across the keyboard it lifted up on insect arms, conducting her own little part of the war. Lower-ranking officers of the Spillway staff were seated at desks below her, keeping up a constant stream of orders and codes into their hanging microphones.

Kaito ducked and swerved between them, teetering on the edge of the mezzanine for a second before he checked his momentum. Then he was right in front of her, a tiny insignificant thing pinned to the treadplate by her stare.

One of her eyebrows arched as he struggled with the mekan's systems, its legs twitching and clicking in place. His hologram unfurled from it like a glass flower, blurred around the edges.

"Marshall Eysha - Eysha 209," he began, his voice sounding small and far away through the drone's speakers. "I am Magus Noviate Kayzi, here with important news. His Lordship guarding the Wetsystems access sent me to you directly."

Well - it wasn't exactly the truth. But it wasn't quite a lie either. Kaito counted himself lucky that the drone he inhabited didn't have a high-rez face.

"And what could Magus Belakim possibly want with me, neophyte? Our war is flesh and blood - all of which is too precious to waste. There are things out there that we're only just holding back! The spillway side is a bloody massacre. And the docks... we have to just kill them all, you know. We can't sift out the refugees from the infected..."

There was a haunted look in Marshall Eysha's eyes for a second, but it flickered and faded as one of her slaved mekan clattered around in front of her, mewling and beeping for attention. She scowled as she saw what was displayed on its little screen, her fingers liquid-fast across the keys.

"So tell me, Magus Noviate. What's so damned important that talking to you has just cost me another ten lives?"

Kaito took a deep breath, a gesture utterly lost between his flesh and the camera drone's processors. Then something clicked over in his skull, back down a thin and fragile link to the bloodstained 'mersive deck of the Archagel Uriel. Icons lit up in his head, dancing before his eyes in a blur of hot red trefoils.

Nuclear trefoils.

He really didn't have any time left for explanations.

"Deuteronomy Jones is coming," he began. "The Archangel Uriel is headed for your Ashishi docks, and he means to save as many people as he can before the... the infection spreads too far. Tell them to be ready, and for the sake of your Gods and his, hold your fire. There's enough nuclear ordnance on that boat to blast Elysium to ashes."

Enough for that and more... and now I've got hold of the switch...

The Marshall's brow furrowed with anger, and she reached down, plucking Kaito's mekanik avatar from the floor with one hand. His vision blurred as she shook the little machine by its telescopic neck, her eyes burning into its camera dome.

"We don't run until we're beat, neophyte. And we don't take kindly to threats, especially from traitorous little..."

"Do you have any idea what I've been through to get here?" cut in the Kayzi, shocking Eysha into silence. "Do you have the slightest conception of how fucked up today has been? Well, let me tell you. This little message I'm bringing you comes courtesy of Abdulafia 330 himself, the poor bastard - it's the last thing I ever heard from him. And he told me to pass it on - we can't fight these things."

That shut her up. Kaito was willing to bet the Sword of the Illuminatus was something of a folk hero down here, ten feet tall and bulletproof. He took the opportunity to press his case, struggling in the Marshall's grip.

"He tried to stop them, you know. Your best and bravest, and they left him crying and broken under what's left of the Valley View. Now, I'm just a Subcity scumbag, a novice - not even sworn to your clan. But I had a lot of respect for 330 - at least he led from the front instead of cowering in a gods-damned bunker."

That hurt. He saw it on her face, the hard lines which spoke of years stuck behind a desk, carrying the burden of leadership. But there was more.

"I've managed to convince that mad old zealot Jones to save your sorry asses. I've managed to stay alive long enough to get this message to you. Now, I suggest you get to integrating this new information into your battle strategy. Because the next place I'm going is up to Omnivasive, where I plan on slicing their firewalls to shreds. I'm going to tell everyone left alive in the city that their ride is pulling up to the Ashishim docks - so you'd better be prepared for a few visitors."

Kaito's anger seemed to drain all the fight out of Eysha 209, and she slumped down into a swivel chair, her little horde of mekan rushing in to support her. Without that tightly-wound rage behind her eyes she was just a tired old woman with far too many responsibilities - one who hadn't slept for far too long. Her fingers unclenched from around the slim metal neck of the camera drone, letting it clatter to the floor in a tangle of limbs.

"So he's dead, is he? Abdulafia 330, the eternal youth... You know, I was in the Academy with him. I was in Gray Nine squad, he was in Seven..." Her eyes were glassy, looking back into the past, into the fires of Reclamation Day. "I saw how he looked at that Jhenna, and I wished... but no, he was destined for better things. He was a born Dervashiman, and I was just another solider. So he stayed young, cloned fresh each time they cut him down, while I got old, and frail, and desk-bound. I don't suppose they got his crescent this time, did they? Not out from under that mess at the Valley View..."

Kaito wanted to tell her that it was alright, that Abdulafia was still alive and fighting. It would have been quite a scene - the stern-faced Marshall of the Spillway being consoled by a camera drone in the shape of a virus, an eight-legged machine all wires and bulging lenses.

But then the screens behind her lit up with something huge, a black silhouette outlined stark and raw against a mountain of fire. It took a second for Kaito to fix the image in his mind - the scale seemed all wrong, the shape of the crouching, four-armed creature was all out of proportion to the screaming humans who boiled and seethed around its feet. Then the battery of lights hanging from the Vatican walls played across its armored skin, and everyone on the mezzanine froze, shocked into silence.

It was a warmekan bigger than any the Marshall and her officers had ever seen, a hissing mechanical beast shrouded in steam. A great rack of burnished organ-pipes thrust up like a collar behind its helm, and six burning green eyes smoldered in the polished metal there. Two of its fists were clenched down in front of it, in shadow, but its second pair of more gracile hands were outstretched in a fighter's stance, beckoning an unseen enemy.

The image was beamed in to the war-room from an Ashishim aeromekan, a remotely piloted drone with dragonfly wings. It panned tight around the giant machine where it stood at the base of the spillway, taking in its great pistons and artificial muscles, its hand-painted reactive armor and its battery of terrible weapons. The Seraph must have landed from a great height - the concrete was cracked and broken around its steel-shod feet, spattered with the blood of those who hadn't been able to flee fast enough...

Then one of those delicate, immense hands lashed out, too fast to follow, and gripped the little floating camera between its rubber-tipped fingers. The mekan brought the drone up to its faceplate, and the whole war-room squealed and crackled with modem noise.

"Hi there, everyone!" said CeeAn 187, coming in live from the core of her armored Seraph. "I just thought you'd like to know that this thing isn't following the Pontiff's orders any more. I'm going to clean up this gods-damned mess on the spillway, and then we'll see what happens next. Just whatever you do, get your soldiers off the walls, Marshall Eysha. Keep your head down, 'cause it's gonna get ugly!"

Spontaneous cheers, whistles and applause broke out among the Techs and Ops of the Ashishim as CeeAn's voice echoed across the great underground amphitheater. She'd brought them hope amid panic and destruction, and the Vision crackled with the sheer power of it, blazing through the Ashishim like a living spark. Even Kaito could feel it, a wave of emotion which surged up to the jagged ceiling, falling back like rain.

Then the screen went out, the image of Saint Sebastian ripped in half by static.

Frantic technicians hammered their keyboards, checked their connections, cursed... but now it was two screens, now ten, now a hundred. And still the wave raced outward, shutting down terminals and popping sparks from 'mersive rigs as it rolled across the hall. Even the neon tubes stuttered and failed, casting the room into phosphorescent half-darkness. The babel of panic and fear spread like a plague.

Then Kaito's borrowed lenses saw the light.

Eysha had seen it too, and she rose to her feet, shielding her eyes with one hand as it swelled, blossoming from a curving side-corridor until it cast thin, flickering shadows from every surface. The green silk pavilion at the heart of the war-room seemed to catch the light, draw it in... It pulsed with radiance, the black silhouettes of the magi dancing across its sheer fabric like Balinese puppets.

"It's him. He's done it. He's raised the Ark..." breathed Eysha 209, gripping the handrail of the mezzanine tight. Kaito's little drone clattered to the edge, pushing and shoving against the other mekan in the Marshall's entourage. And he saw it all, the instant that Zeon came through the archway, a tiny human shade painted across a storm of white fire.

The Ark's pale corona collapsed in on itself as he crossed the threshold, the light hissing back to its source like water caught up in a riptide. The shadows flipped inverse, streaming away from the Ashishim in shreds, and even the breath was torn from their lungs, the tears tugged from their eyes. The radiance collapsed down in glowing shells, tighter and tighter, down to a glittering haze, a second skin over the vast levitating bulk of the Chrome Ark.

Zeon stood below it - hard, benevolent, stern and wise, a white-haired prophet with the visage of an elder god. He held the Ark up above his head, spinning an inch from his upraised palm. And he smiled.

"My friends. My people. My children. The hour is at hand! Kronos staggers and falls in his hubris, the Celestials and Confederates are undone, the Vatican priests cower behind their walls! Tonight we achieve our destiny - the birthright of mankind!"

Now he stepped forward, down into the amphitheater, down the broad stone steps between the crowds of his faithful. There was something in his eyes of Deuteronomy Jones, then - something of the wild preacher touched by fire. But Kaito swore there was something else, too - the look he'd seen deep in the eyes of Chemheads in the gutter, the greedy, soulless look of a junkie who'd kill for his fix.

"It won't be easy, my devoted ones. It's never been easy, not since I took the very first step on this narrow and twisting road. But I promise you this. Not one sacrifice will be in vain."

It was something in the way he said the word 'sacrifice' which made Kaito prime the interlocks and disconnect his mind from the camera drone. Some kind of terrible premonition, a burning black aura which bloomed around the Illuminatus' head even as he smiled his fatherly smile.

Then the Chrome Ark flashed once, a single thunderous silent heartbeat of light, throwing the war-room into blistering monochrome.

And the strategists and soldiers of the Ashishim simply ceased to exist, blown away in a storm of radiance.

Kaito saw it all in the brief instant before he fell away down the wireless connection and back into the Wetsystems - the Operators on their couches screaming as their shadows fluttered out like black banners, tearing loose to swirl up and away. The fleeing officers and techs were caught in mid-stride, flashing to incandescence as their shades were swallowed up by the ravenous core of the Ark. He saw Eysha 209's hands gripped tight around the railing, her fingers ablated away to bones as the light rushed up and over her. The Marshall of the Spillway opened her mouth to scream, but in that instant the light ripped her soul from out of her throat; burned her skin and flesh to ashes. Her jawbone fell to the floor, shattering, crumbling, even as every other Ashsihi warrior in the amphitheatre crumbled, dying, enslaved...

They were all thralls to the Ark, all bound to it in the hope of resurrection. Instead they were delivered into hell, rendered down into a writhing maelstrom of plasma which shrieked and moaned as it was drawn into its prison.

The last thing the Kayzi saw was the true face of Illuminatus Zeon - an alien visage, all quicksilver and phosphor, its needle grin like that of some abyssal predator. He was sure that the alien thing was staring straight into his soul as the war-room fell away - mocking him, promising a similar fate to that of his poor doomed 'children'...

Then he was back in the flickering red womb of the Wetsystems, hanging naked beneath the waves. Before him was the great crystal form of Magus Belakim, his pincers half open, his eyes wide and blank at the tips of their stalks. As Kaito watched, tiny cracks skittered across the half-human thing's shell, growing wider and deeper with every breath. There was no spirit left to power the ancient slicer which had been Belakim's surrogate body - he, too had gone to feed the Ark, his centuries of loyal service repaid with death.

It only took the gentlest eddy to shatter him to pieces. The crab splintered, breaking into a million flashing slivers which fell away into the darkness, leaving Katio utterly alone.

Or perhaps... not quite...

He turned around slowly, the hairs rising at the nape of his neck as he felt a thousand malign eyes boring into him. Their hunger was almost palpable in the bloody water; they could sense his connection back to the Uriel, back down the wire to all those ripe and innocent souls...

Kaito looked up, and up, and up, into a wall of tortured flesh, slavering, rabid things filled with the power of Asag'raal. The green and white shimmer of the Pentecostal slicer-system unfolded around him before he even had time to curse, but there was no way he could stand and fight.

There were simply too many of them. Before the first demon could slip its chains and dive in to the attack Kaito cranked all his throttles wide open and spiraled up and away, running for his life - and for his very soul.

 

Ω

 

The sea foamed and crashed in great curling breakers over the starboard bow of the Archangel Uriel, hammering the Pentecostal ship's hull with a wrack of flotsam and wreckage. There was nobody left alive to help the stricken survivors who clung to their makeshift rafts now - Aitken Straw had seen to that. The bulkhead doors were shut tight, locked and braced from outside to keep Ruby Alvarez's precious kill-zone clear of intruders.

And so there were no lookouts to spot the capsized hulk of the Prosperity as it came in on the oily swells, jamming in hard against the platforms and railings which girded the Uriel's bow. The Confederate star-and-hammers painted on her flank was ripped open, and lights still burned beneath the water from her drowned superstructure. But there were no refugees on board the Prosperity - none living, at least.

Cannon rounds had torn the belly out of the Confed' fisherman - flipping it onto its back to drift in the storm. But the artillerists of the Archangel Uriel hadn't quite finished the job, and now something stirred in the cold wet womb of the broken ship, scenting blood in the air...

If there'd been marines or Purity teams with their flamethrowers down on the starboard platform the single saprophyte would never have survived. It was weak, pitifully weak - its dripping flesh diluted by seawater, its host faltering and rotting in its vile embrace. Perhaps, had the Prosperity foundered for a minute longer...

But now the thing smelled fresh meat. Now it tasted the pain of a single tortured soul, trapped in a body beneath a pile of the dead...

The saprophyte pulled itself out through the hole in the ruined ship's hull, a slow and painful birth which left it slashed and bleeding from a score of wounds. It dragged itself across the deck of the Uriel, slick, graceless, a drowned insect scrabbling for purchase on the slippery steel.

So close... the smell drew it onward, the scintillating prickle of pain against its mind.

It collapsed across the steaming pile of bodies which Aitken Straw had left in his wake, seeping through cloth and flesh and bone, down to where a tiny heartbeat still thundered in a punctured chest.

And it sobbed a prayer of thanks to its master, who had led it to sustenance even across the horror of the great salt ocean. Where there was one, the way could be opened for more. Whether from the damned beyond the veil of death, or the chained souls inside the Wetsystems... it no longer mattered. A tipping point had been reached, and soon (it shuddered with delicious anticipation) the Master would come among them, to sow its seed upon this carcass world...

The Pent' marine had been praying for death for quite some time, gut-shot and bleeding beneath the remains of his squad. Sergeant Malachi had walked right up to that...that... thing with the blank white face, the knives for hands, and...

After that it got a little blurry. He remembered the glittering trails of knife-blade fingers in the air, the whiplash splatters of blood, the pain as his ribs snapped one after another and the steel came out through his collarbone.

Then the hot red dark. The sense of fading out... of striving to be one with God.

Then the saprophyte found him, and his prayers took on a new urgency.

 

Ω

 

Haszan's first impression of Ruby Dorothea Alvarez wasn't exactly hardwired straight to the higher functions of his brain. He'd run into a dead end; a chapel, vaulted and gothic and stark, hung with tapestries and crosses before a black stone altar.

At the center of the granite slab rose a steel crucifix, a slab of pitted metal the color of molten lead.

Fitting, perhaps, for his funeral. The railgun slugs had been nipping at his bootheels all the way, and he was sure that the next pair would rip right through his chest. Escape? Forget it.

There was nothing here but death.

The chapel echoed with his labored breath, with the sound of his thunderous heartbeat. Shadows pooled and shifted behind the black iron columns, rolling back and forth across the floor in waves as the Uriel battled the storm.

There - up in the rafters. A deeper darkness, a shape framed for a second in the eye of a stained-glass window.

He turned at bay before the altar, tearing a black candelabra from its mountings with his servoed hand. Hell, that rebar had done fine against Simeon Blaire. Perhaps that red-clad assassin was out of bullets. Perhaps this one was just as dumb as the giant and the mekan...

There was a tiny click behind him, and he felt warm breath on the back of his neck, the scent of jasmine and vanilla in the air...

"You've had a good run, Jaq," breathed a voice like a razor across silk. "Better than some Lords I've known. Certainly better than you should have hoped for. You're quite the tough customer."

He didn't turn around - he gripped the thick stem of the candelabra even tighter, waiting for his assailant to make a move.

"Yeah... that's what I told Simeon Blaire." He tensed, every nerve singing like piano wire. "He didn't take the hint. But I hear he's gone on to greater things."

"Little Lord Blaire? What's he doing hanging out with a magnificent brute like you?" This time the voice was a whisper, right in his ear, accompanied by the tiniest prick of a stiletto at his temple. "Still, it's good to know you keep such rarefied company. It'll almost make you worth the trouble. Now, turn around, nice and slow. If I'm going to do this, I want to look you in the eye."

Jaq turned. And stared. And kept staring, even while every instinct in his body told him to swing that fistful of iron.

She was beautiful.

Oh, sure... this girl was here to kill him; she'd been shooting at him for the last three minutes, and she was friends with things like Leon and the Tin Man... but still. Ruby Alvarez was a petite little killing machine - even standing atop the altar she was only just taller than Jaq himself. He found his eyes (which by all rights should have been looking for a tactical weakness) drinking in her curves as if he was a teenage schoolboy watching dirty threedeeo. The red riotmesh bodysuit didn't matter - neither did the knee-high boots with their skull-faced buckles, the little cutoff topcoat with its silver chains, the great gleaming cabochon jewels in her hair. And Jaq could have punched himself in the groin at that moment, because neither did the pair of glittering knives in her hands, aimed directly at his throat.

What annoyed him the most - more, even, than the way he felt suddenly awkward and speechless and ten degrees too hot - was the fact that she was looking him up and down in exactly the same way.

"Sweet gods, you're like Leon with a brain." she said. "Kind of shame to have to do this, but a contract's a contract..."

Haszan's second impression of Ruby Alvarez was that she was fast. She'd twisted the candelabra from his hand even before he was sure she'd moved.

The fallen Lady was just as quick as Simeon Blaire had been; slicing left and right with those winking blades mere inches from his head. She probably lacked the power of the psychopathic Lord, but Jaq was sure that she knew just where to strike...

He retreated before her attack as she leaped down from the altar, smiling, each wild swing missing his skin by a whisper. Jaq was no paragon of chivalry, and if this had been anyone else he would have been trying his damnedest to drive his fist through her face. Part of his brain was screaming at him to do it, to break this demoness before she grew tired of her sport. But it was the other part that noticed what was really going on - even through the soft-focus blur that misted his eyes.

She wasn't trying to hit him. Hells, if any one of those lightning-fast ripostes had been serious he'd be nothing but bleeding meat by now. She was playing with him... and that's when years of watching threedeeo caught up, hard.

She knew who Simeon was... personally. She was playing games with him because that's what her kind did...

Jaq waited for her next attack, a wheeling figure-of eight cut through the air with the tips of those bright stilettos, and he brought his hand up to meet them. His two chrome fingers snapped shut over one of the knives even as the other grazed his jugular, pricking a tiny line of crimson from his skin. Then his other hand was around her wrist, and the renegade Kheptarch was pinned. Jaq looked down at her steel-capped boots, and then at his unprotected groin. It was probably best to say something before she made the obvious move.

"Ruby Dorothea Alvarez. I know who you are, and who your friends are. I've seen you on three-vee."

She kicked out against his instep, and tore her left hand free as he stumbled. For a second she pulled at the end of his arm, as if they were dancing, and then she came back in, her stiletto aimed at his chest. Jaq spun her into the crook of his arm, deflecting the knife away with the back of his mekanikal hand.

"You really are just like Leon with a brain, Jaqub." she said, locked in his embrace. "But not nearly so... controllable."

Her knife was still in her hand, and she reversed it, stabbing at Haszan's kidney. He unwound his arm from around her neck and stepped back just in time for the razor-sharp steel to cut another gash in his ragged coat, spinning her out wild. She landed with all the poise of a dancer, bringing her knives up again, circling around him to the right.

He followed suit, and the pair matched each other step for step, wary as predators, tracing the circle of the stained-glass window's pool of light.

"I suppose I couldn't convince you that I'd never hurt a lady?"

"I haven't been a lady since they kicked me down to the Subcity."

"It could never work out between us... at least, not unless you drop those knives..."

"Huh! As if I'd be interested in anyone who has to ask politely!"

That was her cue to spring to the attack again, stabbing and wheeling and ducking out of reach, cutting away the seams of Haszan's greatcoat. The heavy black fabric fell from his shoulders in strips, its intrinsic LCD pattern of leaping flames blurring out.

Jaq was left with only his riotmesh overalls - and the hope that Ruby's next attack wasn't quite so precise. She stood just out of reach, one knife pressed to her lips as she appraised her work.

"Definitely an improvement - but I think I can go one better. You'd look about ten years younger if you were clean-shaven."

Jaq's eyes widened in horror as she flew at him again, spinning those razor knives between her slim fingers. This time he really tried to stop her - her blades were far too close for comfort, and he was running out of clothes. But his wild backhands and grapples managed to catch exactly nothing, as the renegade Kheptarch drove him back against the altar, forcing him to bend over backwards.

The crucifix in the middle of the granite slab pressed up against his skull, and now he saw it for what it really was - a giant broadsword sunk halfway into the stone. A whole lot of good that was going to do him now...it would take a warmekan to smash it free.

Ruby arched her back above him, letting her silken hair cascade down to brush his bare shoulders. Then her knives came down on either side of his face, and Jaq felt them pare the tiny hairs from his cheeks, making good her promise. One of her knees was up against his chest, and her hand...

Her hand was coiled around the three-foot whipcord of his precious goatee beard, her fingers tangled up in the charms which dripped from its leather bindings. With a single swipe of one glittering blade she snipped it clean away, right down to the skin.

"Much better, Jaqub. You're almost handsome enough to pass for human - at least in this light."

Now, tonsorial elegance was never Haszan's biggest concern. Fashion, to him, was a foreign country - one inhabited by effete morons with more money than sense. But this was just too much. How would they know who he was now? How would the Aryan bootboys know they'd been butchered by one of the Hand of Fatima?

The red mist came down, and through it Haszan could see Ruby smiling, cartwheeling back across the floor of the chapel out of reach. So, she wanted a proper fight? Was that the way of Khept romance, to stab and smash the life out of your paramour? Well, predictable old Jaq Haszan was back. Blind with anger, and happy to be there.

He sprung up from the altar quicker than even he could believe, charging like a mad bull as the ship lurched and heaved beneath them. His shadow streamed out before him in the crimson light of the stained-glass windows, and his chrome fist cocked back beside his face like a wrecking ball, arcing in with all the force of his rage behind it.

Of course she was too quick to stay in its path. But Jaq savored the look of surprise and admiration on her face as she sidestepped straight into his other hand, a jarring uppercut which knocked her off her feet. She staggered, and slipped, fetching up with her back to one of the chapel's iron pillars. But before she could catch her breath Jaq's chrome hand was tight around her throat, lifting her toecaps a foot from the deck. If it had been anyone else, those fingers would have hinged shut, snapping her neck.

But that damned soft-focus blur was burning through his anger, and he dropped her to the floor, horrified, staring at the thin line of blood which trickled from her perfect lips. She looked up at him from behind a loose tangle of black hair, pulled free from its jeweled clasps.

"That's more like it," she said, grinning through the blood. "That's the killer Octavio promised me..."

Then she was snarling, pouncing, her knives flashing out wild in the gloom of the cavernous chapel, tearing through Jaq's riotmesh in great looping slashes. The pain re-ignited his anger, and he fought back savagely, snapping Ruby's head back with swift mechanical punches, once, twice, raising livid bruises across her olive skin. No excuses this time, no romantic cotton-candy fuzz to slow him down...

But try as he might, he still wasn't fast enough. When he'd bested Simeon Blaire (and even then, only for a moment) the Lord had been newly transformed by his illicit crycelium, aching and burning inside. Jaq had been hyped up on a fresh fix of Stunn, layered with triple platinum to slow the world to a crawl. Without his narcotic helpers he was utterly outmatched.

Ruby Alvarez fought him back across the chapel, through the crimson light of the stained-glass oculus above. She was incandescent now, elated, brought into her own by the sheer joy of battle. This was what she was made for, and why she'd devoted herself to a life of terror and crime once the Council had cast her out. Before that kind of genewritten skill Jaq Haszan was just a talented amateur...

Now his back was to the altar again, and this time Ruby wasn't playing. His hands scrabbled for a weapon, for anything, another candelabra, a scepter or a good thick bible... too late. There was only time for them to come up and shield his face as the red demoness brought her stilettos down, slicing into his palms. Blood spattered her face as she smiled, and blood reflected in her eyes as she hooked one hand behind Jaq's head, pulling him to his feet.

"That's the most fun I've had all year, Haszan," she said, curling the knifeblade around his neck to tickle his throat. "And it's a sorry shame you weren't born a Lord. With a little augmentation, they could have made an Emperor of you."

His hands were sliced open to the bone, weeping crimson stigmata across the cold granite. But he dared not move, dared not tempt the razor edge at his neck. Jaq clenched his eyes shut, anticipating the final blow, the warm blood pumping from his jugular...

Instead she kissed him.

And the burning intensity of it was so powerful, so all-consuming that he didn't even feel the knife pull away from his throat, or sense what was coming next.

"Too bad, baby. But a contract's a contract."

The knives came up between his ribs, twin lances of red-hot pain. Ruby struck home with all the power in her augmented arms, and the foot-long double-edged blades went in to the hilt, just below Haszan's jagged pectoral tattoos. The force of the blow brought him up to the tips of his toes and spun him around, his vision blurring red as Ruby Alvarez turned away, leaving the knives crossed through his chest.

Jaq fell across the altar, driving the stilettos home as he landed on their twin gilded hilts. Darkness was closing in, black bleeding into red, and he could still taste her blood on his lips, still smell jasmine and vanilla...

His hands twisted and fluttered against the stone like broken birds, one flesh, one steel, smearing blood down the cold metal shape of the crucifix sword.

Something connected.

In the blackness, a trace of green.

Pixilated numbers coursing down like rain, awakening something deep in his bones...

And through the tight hot pain he remembered the face of Eddie Tsien, leaning in over him as he lay bleeding in the ruins of the Valley View Mall. His hands were overflowing with liquid, living mercury... Then the scene changed, and Tsien's ravaged half-human face was replaced with the grim death-mask of Simeon Blaire, silver threads looping and curling from his broken jaw like worms...

It was inside him.

Not enough to transform him into a living tank like Tsien. Not even enough to make him invincible, unkillable like Blaire. But just enough to keep him alive for a few seconds more. And enough of the ancient Chimera organism to recognize its mate locked up in the crucifix sword - the Railblade embedded in the stone.

Tiny crystal viri in Haszan's blood sunk down into the metal like rain into sun-baked earth, activating the A.I. of the sword.

It had been dormant for centuries. It couldn't see, or hear, but it could sense - its whole surface picked up the vibration of Jaq's faltering heartbeat, and felt the knife-blade tight up against that pulsing knot of muscle in his chest. It didn't know who he was - his name, his rank, his designation... but it knew what it was built for.

This was a member of the Separatist Army, a wet-ops commando, and it was programmed to keep him alive. So it gave a little of itself to Haszan, even as he slipped into unconsciousness.

Deep in the stone a million tiny filaments of steel ramified out from the edges of the Railblade, locking it tight to the altar. The Pent' marines who'd found the thing down on the seabed had no idea that the metal could ever unbind from the stone - but it did now. Those molecular roots melted back into the blade, leaving it with an edge as sharp as reason.

Things synchronized. Things assessed and clamped and rewired nerves. Things in Haszan's blood, left there by Eddie Tsien, heard the voice of the Railblade and overrode his faltering brain.

His eyelids snapped open, even though his eyes were rolled back to bloodshot whites. And his hands slammed shut around the hilt of the ancient sword, drawn in as if by powerful magnets. Electricity crackled and seethed through Jaq's body, arching his back, pulling his lips back from his teeth in a fiendish rictus.

Ruby missed it - she was almost to the chapel door when the unmistakable screech of steel on stone heralded Haszan's rebirth.

But Aitken Straw had seen it all. Up in the rafters of the chapel, perched atop a bat-winged gargoyle, he'd slipped in through the shadows just in time to see her kiss the Subcity filth. Jealousy and rage transfixed his heart just as surely as Ruby's wicked knives, and he hissed to himself, biting down hard on the back of his hand.

A contract was a contract, and a kill was a kill, but still...

Then the dead man twitched. Then the dead man rose up, and pulled that impossibly huge sword from out of its granite sheath, his blank eyes brimming with murder.

Aitken Straw smiled, flexing his claws in the dark.

Let her learn her lesson before he came to her aid.

Let her learn who really cared...