2196 Ante Arbitrium Titanomachia

Dave Levine had never flown an airship before. Heck, he had his own people to drive him anywhere he wanted to go; it'd been years since he wrapped his fingers around a steering wheel of any kind. But this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Down below him the spillway heaved with a tide of desperate humanity, whole little nations and subtribes boiling up out of the depths of Elysium, crushed against the gates of the Pit. It was more than just a grisly spectacle - it was newsworthy. Uncle Dave had been a sportscaster for forty long years, but deep in his corporate-sponsored soul the flame of pure journalism still burned. It was his duty to bring this story to the people, and get the scoop on that holographic bastard Jory Hess.

Screens stretched tight across the flanks of the zeppelin blazed with light, broadcasting a slick montage of carnage to the people below. They could watch their own deaths in glorious Technicolor.

Then something came down past the gondola window in a blur of white and silver - a huge humanoid mekan falling out of the sky. Eddies of turbulence made the airship weave and bob, fighting against Dave's hands on the controls. But he caught it on camera as it slammed down amid the crowd, unfolding from a crouch with it's searchlights blazing. Vatican tech. Something like their bloody Templars, but the size of a hab-cube, a faceless metal knight poised there on the spillway, one huge gauntlet braced against an electrical pylon.

This was gold! Ratings gold! He'd show them that he was a real reporter, not just some advertising shill... Dave wrestled his airship in closer, until he could see the glittering steel irises in the mekan's optics rig. And when they shifted, zooming and focusing, he was ready.

For anything but that.

Now the anchorman saw what had been driving the throng of frantic refugees, herding them in their tens of thousands. And he bit back on a very unprofessional scream, because they were hideous.

The Exalted which Asag'raal had chosen were replete with the dead - six lumbering black hulks heaved forward on thousands of arms and legs and claws; the limbs of the victims they'd devoured. Identity had been stripped from them, and reason, and form; they were constantly melting and reshaping, slumping down and rearing up again in ecstatic agony. Each one dragged a mass grave along with it in its tight and bloated belly, screaming faces pressed up a against a membrane of shadows.

And now they were combining.

The Exalted flowed together like molten tar, twining their hooked limbs and questing pseudopods together into a tower of flesh, a tottering spike of darkness. It bulked out as it grew, bulging in the middle, extending webbed buttresses of saprophytic matter to hold itself upright... And Uncle Dave saw what was going to happen next. He supposed that the Vatican Knight saw it too, for it brought it's guns to bear on the thing and let fly, raking it with maserfire.

It was too little, and too late.

The twisted spire of flesh had already split down the middle, forming a pair of thick, pillarlike legs. Four lashing tentacles burst from the torso of the beast, aping the warmekan's design. Maser blasts cooked the surface of the creature, sending up plumes of blue-black smoke. But beneath that dripping, oily skin was a snarl of bones and rotting flesh, held together with tendons of darkness. The guns were useless against it.

Dave watched those forty-foot tentacles curl lazily through the air, hooks like reaping blades budding from their tips. One of them came down through the crowd, slicing a furrow through flesh and bone and concrete, sending tiny bodies flying like leaves before a storm. The MegaPhyte took one lumbering step, and its flat-bottomed foot crushed a hundred screaming refugees, absorbing them into its mass. The anchorman watched, sickened and fascinated as it heaved itself into motion, coming down the spillway slope with the momentum of an avalanche.

It had grown a head, now - a tumor of darkness excreted from between its shoulders, split by a pair of ragged eye-slits. The hate in that empty white stare was enough to freeze Dave Levine's blood.

He never saw the tentacle coming. Paralyzed with horror, it was all he could do to keep both his hands on the steering yoke of the airship. But the MegaPhyte had seen him, and something inside it's fractured mind recognized his face. A hundred thousand tortured souls made up the Exalted war-machine, and all of them knew Uncle Dave, the most trusted name in death-sports commentary.

The razor hook at the end of the MegaPhyte's lash gutted the Omnivasive zeppelin in one lazy sweep, snapping its aluminum ribs like matchwood. It curled back as the doomed airship fell, then snapped forward again, whiplike and slick, coming through the gondola window at supersonic speed.

Dave Levine didn't have time to sign this one off. His final broadcast flashed out across the crumpling screens of the gasbag as it collapsed - silent and horrified, his chest split from collarbone to navel and gaping wide. The gambler's gospel tonight had just gone to the Worm.

 

Ω

 

CeeAn watched the Omni zeppelin go down, and she tensed inside her combat harness. Her eyes narrowed behind their optronic goggles, zeroing in on the nightmare face of the enemy.

Typical. Six little Exalted would have been easy street for a monster like Saint Sebastian - she'd have picked them off one by one and enjoyed the sport of it. Now she was in trouble, and there was no Abdulafia 330 to back her up. Not now, or ever again...

The MegaPhyte brought its bulk up to a lurching run as she watched, staggering forward on bent and twisted limbs. Screaming Subcits scrambled over each other's backs to clear a path, but there were still a few unlucky souls who were trampled beneath its feet. The two writhing tentacular whips on its left pulled back behind it as it ran, twining together to form an arm, a hand, a fist...

A mouth tore open across its lopsided face - and it roared, loops and coils of mucous flying wide.

Cee was already airborne as it began its swing, powering up off the spillway slope with all the force the Seraph's nuclear micropile could muster. The electrical pylon she'd been braced against flexed back as she stepped off its crown, gaining altitude, watching the lumbering Exalted struggle to check its wild momentum.

It didn't have a chance.

The MegaPhyte crashed into the steel tower as she let it whip back into its face, snapping a skein of high-tension cables like cobwebs. Gobbets of black tar and decaying flesh flew wide, falling like rain across the frantic crowd below. For a fraction of a second CeeAn thought she had it beat - suspended above the beast at the apex of her leap, watching it writhe and thrash against the broken steel of the pylon.

Then its cruel dead eyes were on her, and she felt one of those bullwhip tentacles coil around the Seraph's ankle. Cee gasped with pain as the whole world blurred sideways, spinning upside down, catching up again with a shock that drove glass into her bones.

The MegaPhyte slammed Saint Sebastian into the side of a crumbling dam - one of the oceanic levees which kept the Atlantic out of the Pit. She'd struck it hard enough to leave a mekan-shaped imprint in the reinforced concrete - hard enough to ignite flashes of purple and red on the inside of her skull. Out of the corner of her eye she saw tiny figures in feathers and chainmail running and slipping and falling away, bouncing off jagged twists of rebar all the way down to the seabed. To the Ferals, this was the titanomachia, a war between gods...

But she didn't have time to contemplate the fate of the Pit Ferals for long. That oily black tentacle was still clenched around the warmekan's ankle, and now Asag'raal's pet pulled it taut again, plucking the Seraph up into the air like a toy. CeeAn tried to reach out with her slim-fingered manipulator arms, but it was no use. A whirl of black and red and silver spun by as Saint Sebastian was hurled bodily from one side of the Pit to the other, hammering into the opposite levee with a sound like shattering mountains.

Systems readouts flashed bright and urgent in front of her eyes. Spotlit - the reactor core, leaking coolant in a hissing radioactive cloud.Needles were already pushing up into the red, yammering for an emergency shutdown. And riding inside a humanoid A-bomb was the least of her worries. As her vision cleared Cee watched the MegaPhyte pull itself loose from the remains of the ruined pylon, its colossal fist tapering into a spike...

Oh dear. That wasn't good at all.

The Dervashi's hands were all over the controls as she felt her foe's grip twitch, and watched a crooked smile split its face. That spike was a wicked twist of bones, fused together from the dead and just waiting to make her acquaintance. Cee smiled, wrapping her fingers around a pair of gilded aircraft throttles. She'd be so sorry to see it disappointed...

G-forces snapped her back in her harness as the MegaPhyte reeled her in, heaving with all its strength. But as the creature lunged forward CeeAn brought the Serpah's knees up to its chest, opening a set of blast-door vents in its armored shell. A chuff of smoke burst out, whipping past the MegaPhyte's face, and then...

The jump-jets which those sexless Black Technologists had fitted to Sebastian were made to lift three hundred tons of warmekan off the ground - guns, ammo and all. They packed enough juice to blast it halfway into orbit if it needed to cut and run. Now those twin lances of fire burned into the Worm's killing machine, sending up clouds of greasy black smoke. The tentacle wrapped around Sebastian's ankle whipped back, scalded, and the beast squealed in agony, its empty eyes blazing.

Unfortunately, that rope of flesh had been the only thing holding CeeAn down.

The Serpah battlesuit flew backwards, out of control, spinning wild in the dark. It curved up toward the boiling clouds, punching through them and on, out into clear air where the spotlit wire of the space-'lev split the sky. Down below she could hear the MegaPhyte screaming, a sound like rending metal amplified until it shook the world. Then her jumpjets stuttered and died. The roar of her engines was choked off, replaced by the creak and hiss of Saint Sebastian's battered body.

CeeAn tapped the altimeter with one finger, hoping that it was reading wrong.

Sixty thousand feet.

Gravity was going to make its presence felt at any second, and she was all out of options.

There was a moment of floating, weightless peace as the immense warmekan reached the very top of its arc, looking down on a contrail of smoke and sparks. Then it began to fall, airbrakes snapping open from its back like wings to slow its descent. The straps of the Seraph's harness cut into CeeAn's shoulders as its giant airbrakes took up the load, forcing tears from her eyes. But they were nowhere near enough. This suicide plunge would end up with the Seraph smeared across a radioactive crater - unless that beast down there was as vicious and stupid as she thought it was...

As if in answer to her thoughts the clouds tore apart, spiraling out as a burgeoning light swelled within them. Ragged streamers boiled away, a hole opening up like the eye of a cyclone - and through it came a ball of greasy fire, trailing a comet-tail of black smoke.

The saprophyte had learned a new trick. But this time it was all to Cee's advantage.

As the fireball arced up toward her CeeAn took aim through the crystal reticules inside her goggles. It was made of corpse-gas, burning grease and ashes, vomited up from the vile depths of the MegaPhyte. But Saint Sebastian had a few explosive tricks of its own.

Two of the burnished organ-pipes which reared up behind the warmekan's head spat tongues of flame, fat cylinders spiraling up and away as CeeAn fell. She was going to meet the fireball halfway - and it would roast her alive inside the Saint's armor unless her game was razor sharp.

The Symphonia Mortis missiles reached the top of their trajectory, tumbling end over end in the near-vacuum of the high atmosphere. Panels in their sides clicked and slid and interlocked as their nosecones felt the tug of gravity. Then their second-stage rockets came online, powering them down so fast that the edges of their wings glowed red-hot, a pair of tiny sparks against the immensity of space. They were three miles out, falling faster than the warmekan, scanners playing across the surface of the fireball. Now one mile, and their nosecones blew apart, retro-thrusters flaming white. Now a quarter mile; now mere yards, feet, inches...

Racks of tiny bomblets deployed from the flanks of each Mortis drone as it hung in the air above Saint Sebastian's head, fanning out like vast angel wings behind the Vatican war-machine. There were two hundred little high-explosive warheads tucked away in each one, and the contrails they left behind them looked like white feathers against the sky.

The MegaPhyte's fireball was torn apart.

Submunitions came down on it like rain, a hail of tiny explosions fraying and ablating its roiling bulk. CeeAn rode the blowback from all those concussive shockwaves, letting her warmekan's airbrakes take the strain as it slowed. By the time Saint Sebastian fell feet-first through the remains of the fireball the heat of it was barely enough to bubble its baroque paintwork.

Down below, the MegaPhyte raged and howled, taking out its wrath on the defenses of the Pit. Scavenged howitzers and machineguns stitched lead across its lumpen bulk, tracer lighting up the night. People screamed and ran and perished, crushed beneath its feet or ripped to shreds by crossfire.

It had to die. Quickly - before the Exodus was reduced to nothing but CeeAn alone.

Something in her mind told her she needed numbers. Something left there by that drowned cyclopean heart. She needed an army, a nation... the tools to rebuild.

Six more Symphonia Mortis missiles burst from their pipes as she pressurized the dregs of fuel in her jumpjet tanks, priming them for a final burst. If she hit at this speed there was a tiny chance that the wermekan might actually survive. And if she landed on top of Asag'raal's pet abomination, there was every chance it would be reduced to dead necrotic soup.

Down through the clouds she came, her hands white-knuckled around the golden grips of Sebastian's jumpjet throttles. Little crosses on chains swung and jangled behind her, and puffs of sweet sandalwood incense swirled up from autocensers set into the warmekan's dash, counterpoint to the burning city below. Her optronics zoomed in on the MegaPhyte's empty white eyes, and she saw them widen with shock. The stupid creature actually thought that the explosions above the clouds had meant her death...

The needle of the altimeter was whirling like a tiny turboprop in front of her. The ground came rushing up, black concrete and blood, searchlights and fires and tracer skittering off her armor. CeeAn hit her burners just as those six Symphonia Mortis drones split open in her slipstream, raining seeds of death.

The gargantuan heart inside her head thumped, once, a tectonic shiver warping the world around her.

Blue-white fire drove the MegaPhyte to its knees, blades of flame slicing into its flesh like cauterizing razors. For an instant the immense tonnage of the warmekan hung in the air above its foe, all four arms outstretched as if it was crucified. Then its wings of smoke furled in, each feather the contrail of a high-explosive warhead. They fell past CeeAn in a spiral storm, and she felt the path of each one, the weight, the spin, the trajectory...

The 'chrome had them.

Screaming in triumph she threw a clutch of bomblets in the MegaPhyte's face, then another, curving them in to pummel it like a flurry of blows. She could feel her bioelectric field unfolding, coating the metallic skin of the Seraph with a nacreous sheen, infusing steel tendons and hydraulics with the speed and urgency of life...

Explosions rocked Sebastian back on its heels, painting its ornate armor with splashes of blackened gore. Choking smoke billowed. Shards of bone flew like shrapnel.

CeeAn's saprophytic foe reeled back from the missile storm, gaping holes gouged clear through its body. It roared in incomprehending rage, clawing at her mind with pain, only to slam up against a fury far more refined and concentrated than its own. Suffering poured over her like rain - but it was as nothing compared to the thunder of that incorporeal heart, hanging in the sky above her like a harvest moon.

This was for the innocent. This was for Abdulafia, gone to his death to try and save her. This was for her own death, and the pain of her rebirth...

The creature tried to stitch itself back together, shadows looping and congealing as its mouth worked in mute agony. But she wouldn't give it a chance. The Seraph was never meant to be so fast, so limber, so alive... but with the power of CeeAn's mind behind it the three-hundred ton monster was a thing of grace.

Subcitizens scattered in a blind panic as she pushed her advantage, coming down on the MegaPhyte with a spinning kick, her steel-plated heel biting deep. Turbomaces howled and whined as they spun up, smashing into the creature's flesh with enough force to split mountains. It was pure feral streetfighting, blow after blow strung together into a symphony of rage. Before Cee's onslaught the Chosen of the Worm was helpless, stumbling, falling, collapsing against the spillway with an impact that shook Elysium's foundations.

But still it wouldn't die.

The damn thing had faked her out.

Four whipsaw tentacles erupted from the bulk of the Megaphyte as its eyes narrowed, binding up the Seraph's wrists. CeeAn knew the strength behind those coils all too well - but there was nothing she could do to stop them now that she was in their grip. She threw all her weight against the warmekan's controls, driving pitons from the machine's feet into the spillway to keep her balance.

Then the tips of the Megaphyte's tentacles split open, peeling back petals of flesh to reveal four snarling lipless mouths. They strained and snapped at the joints of Sebastian's arms, worrying at the edges of its armor plates and cooling vanes, each one studded with row upon row of human teeth.

But there was worse to come.

As Cee strained against her captor, feeling pipes and linkages give way one by one, a vast lump swelled in the MegaPhyte's throat, inching its way up toward the thing's jaws. Its mouth tore open, impossibly wide, a tunnel of oily decay lit up with burning corpse-gases. It was another fireball, and this time there was no way to stop it.

Blinding light filled the creature's maw, building up into the fury of a miniature sun...

Cooling vanes snapped and shattered as CeeAn twisted, desperate, throwing herself wild against the straps of her harness. Railgun rounds tore into the fireball as it grew, a withering crossfire... with absolutely no effect. The spinning spiked rings of her turbomaces howled and sparked, bound up in filaments of darkness.

And CeeAn felt that great hanging ocean above her again, closer now, its waters cool and deep and welcoming. It would be like going home, this death. It would mean... reunion.

Then something slammed into the MegaPhyte from behind, a looping thread of silver piercing its side. Another came, and another, rays of steel arcing up out of the pit, from the ragged fortifications of Clan Ghyre, the Feral warlords.

They were grapple-lines, fired from the flat decks of burned-out Technical pickups, from shoulder-mounted cannons and watchtower posts. Ten thousand hands took up the strain, heaving against the mass of the monster to try and bring it down. The MegaPhyte screamed in outrage, a sound like ruptured high-pressure pipes, desperate to shake the grapples loose. But even ten thousand wouldn't be enough - and any second now that greasy ball of fire was going to vomit forth.

CeeAn almost missed the tiny Teuton battlesuit as it clambered to the top of the Vatican walls. The stick-scrawl figures of priests and novices and 'Crucis-men with blazing staves were closing in around it, frantic, screaming, but it gained the parapet before any of them could stop it. The communicator bead inside Cee's goggles crackled into life, bringing the lone Knight's voice right into the cockpit with her.

"Let's finish it together, Hashishin! For my God or yours, or none at all. That thing must die!"

It was the Valle Crucis she'd left swaddled in her holocoat, the man she'd almost killed in her assault on the Vatican's inner sanctum. Now he ignited the jumpjets in his warsuit's carapace, leaping from the barbican fortress on a pillar of blue-white smoke. Now his chainsaw arms reached out to embrace the MegaPhyte, a thing ten times his size, coming down on it like a mantis attacking a poisonous toad.

The creature's head was distorted now, as it worked to disgorge its crop of plasma, its eyes stretched out to jagged slits in its bubbling skin. But it saw him. It hissed, dripping liquid night from its snapping tentacle-mouths. And it let go of one of Saint Sebastian's hands, sending a whipcord of coiled darkness scything through the air.

The mouth at its tip was a gash filled with yellow teeth, and it snapped closed on the Teuton like a pitbull's jaws around a rag doll. Monomolecular chainsaw blades screeched and whined deep within its crushing embrace, carving it open from the inside out. But CeeAn had no time to worry about her unexpected ally.

One of her hands was free - and one was all she needed.

Schematics of the battle-saint flickered in front of her eyes, all the espionage data the didactic rams had loaded into her head back in the Dervashic Academy. The Black Technologists had never assumed that their pride and joy would meet its match in size or weight - even in their darkest dreams they'd never conceived of a thing like the MegaPhyte. But there were superheavy tanks, land-battlecruisers and armored airships in the arsenals of the unfaithful. And the Vatican was nothing if not traditionalist...

The banks of Symphonia Mortis pipes on the Seraph's back slid and shifted and locked in place, revealing a single central rod of burnished gold. It rose up smooth, hydraulic slick, heavy crosspieces snapping into position so it seemed that the giant warmekan wore a gilded crucifix behind its head. With her one free hand CeeAn reached up and over and back, wrapping her steely fingers tight around it...

Because Saint Sebastian was the last of long line of knights, stretching all the way back to the Templars of Jerusalem and beyond. And no knight was complete without his huge, razor-sharp cruciform broadsword.

The silvery arc of the blade sheared off all three remaining tentacles as if they were nothing but smoke, its forty-foot edge honed sharp by Black Tech' novices and anointed with holy water. Perhaps that sacred baptism made a difference; perhaps not. But no flesh, no matter what dark force possessed it, could stand up to all those tons of battle-tempered steel.

Lipless mouths screamed soundlessly as they flew severed from a clutch of gory stumps, black blood pumping in frothing arcs. The Ferals cheered, bending their backs to the strain. And the Megaphyte tottered, it's head all bloated and gravid with fire.

It burst.

CeeAn had no time to react - all she could do was thrust her sword down into the concrete and close her eyes as the fireball came rushing toward her. Time stuttered and failed, then, freezing the Subcity refugees and Feral tribesmen in place, slicking over the churning smoke with ice. The Dervashi warrior felt the connection back through her skull widen, letting in the voices of the dead. They called out to her from beneath their inverted ocean, a drowned chorus offering her strength and hope.

With that rising storm of echoes came a surge of power; as potent and ecstatic as a fresh hit of adrenochrome. Cee was on automatic, and she slipped into the meditations which the Masters Militant had taught her - feeling her bioelectric field balloon out, tight and glassy and hot. This time it wasn't just her own mind reaching out beyond her flesh, though. This time she was legion.

And with that kind of power, time itself was like hot wax under the blowtorch of her mind.

The MegaPhyte's fireball was a vast sun in her vision, eclipsing half the world, but now she was ready for it. She knew exactly what she had to do.

CeeAn let it go, releasing her grip on the moment, and the swirling ball of flame rolled in, splitting in two around the blade of Saint Sebastian's sword. She held out one the mekan's gracile manipulator hands to either side, catching the twin streams of superheated plasma as they spiraled in, surrounding them with shells of pure thought.

And she threw them back in the creature's face.

She was airborne even as the withering stream of fire bit into its flesh, airborne and upside down, the Seraph's mekanik hands gripping the crosspieces of the golden sword. She never saw the beast stagger and collapse, pulled down by the cheering Ghyre Clan, never saw it's bloated torso gape wide, an open grave, its tentacles thrashing uselessly.

But she saw it die.

Saint Sebastian hung there in the sky for an instant, three hundred tons of warmekan performing a perfect handstand atop its gilded blade. Then gravity and rage and the will of all those countless dead voices took control, and CeeAn struck. The sword came loose with a thunderous crack, sweeping up and over in an unstoppable arc. She took a two-handed grip on the hilt as it came down, plowing through the rotten skin and bone and sinew which the fireball had exposed within the MegaPhyte, cleaving it from crown to crotch in one perfect swing.

Somewhere inside that chasm of decay she split its heart in two.

CeeAn and her broken foe stood frozen in that final moment; she with her blade buried deep in the spillway's face, the MegaPhyte split in half, sagging and melting as its thousands of constituent corpses gave up their hold on life. Up and away above them a tiny blue star flashed atop Lysander Jaegenn's spire,and the light of it painted the scene in a wash of monochrome.

Then an identical star answered it deep inside the slough of the MegaPhyte. CeeAn watched the top of Jaegenn's spire blow away to dust. She looked down at the yammering, flashing readouts all across the Seraph's dash; the reactor-core's cooling system was utterly overloaded. And she made her decision.

Both of the giant warmekan's hands reached out and cupped the burning heart of the beast, tearing it loose with a spray of poisoned blood. There were only seconds left before it blew, taking Saint Sebastian with it. Cee's fingers were a blur across the Seraph's keyboard, her neural interface hissing with static as her mind plotted blast radii, wind-shift, temperatures...

The huge war machine leaped backwards, spinning in the air, and it came down running.

Each loping stride covered a quarter-mile, coming down hard on rusted barrio tenements and clapboard shacks in the shantytown of the Pit. The warmekan clutched the MegaPhyte's heart to its chest like a football, head down, powering down the long narrow strip of seabed at a dead sprint. Footprints the size of pickup trucks traced its path as it made for the coast of Afrika, for the rad-lands where nothing and no-one lived.

As it ran its back split open, the pipes of the Symphonia Mortis peeling away to reveal the rounded nosecone of a short, fat rocket. Hissing clouds of gas spewed out from a clutch of vents around it as Saint Sebastian took the incline in three earth-shaking steps, a blue glow seeping out between its metal fingers like the promise of dawn...

The escape capsul fired just as the heart went critical, wrecking the great machine down to scrap. Its hands melted, its arms shattered like matchwood, and its faceless casque was torn open to expose a wreck of gears and wires. The spinning heads of its twin turbomaces flew wide as ammunition and fuel detonated, fusing the sand of the Sahara to glass.

Then the reactor reached its limit.

Compared to the world-shattering strobeflash of that second blast, the first was like a candle thrown into the sun. CeeAn had only just managed to clear the horizon, and the ragged edge of the dunes lit up like sunrise for an instant, a fiery mushroom-cloud clawing its way toward the heavens. It was an icon of superstitious dread to those millions who watched from the slopes of Elysium. This was the power which had raped the Earth all those centuries ago. Watching it unfold bloody and majestic against the sky was a thousand times worse than the terror of the Worm.

Now Cee's world was all spin and sickness and confusion. The escape capsul was by no means a comfortable way to travel - it was like being fired out of a cannon, with all the luxuries of medieval torture. Incense smoke and red-flashing strobes and swinging gold crucifixes blurred in front of her eyes, the horizon nothing but a line torn between darkness and nuclear fire. Her last impression, before the jumbled houses and barracks and 'ponic gardens of the Pit came up to greet her, was of a wide-mouthed nozzle snicking open in the dashboard.

Oh no. Not the foam! Not the...

Then it was concussion, pain, fire, nausea - and darkness.

 

Ω

 

Compared to his last nightmare assignment, cracking the firewalls of Omnivasive was ludicrously simple. Kaito piloted his Pentecostal slicer in between neat towers of mirrorglass, his heart still pounding in his chest from his breakneck flight.

The slaves of the Worm were legion - but they were also horrifyingly stupid. In clear water they'd been no match for his speed, even if it was born of terror. He'd led them through dead-mans-alleys of metavirals, stalkers guarding Kronos' locked-down neural structures, and he'd watched them die as he spun away, countermeasures twinkling in his wake.

Octavio Vanecke's defenses were all but nonexistent - and that was clear through the other side of suspicious. Either Omnivasive had fallen to the Worm, or this was some kind of elaborate trap... after all, the Direktor was out to kill Jaq Haszan, and Kaito was a known associate...

The truth was far stranger still. A quick probe through the Omnivasive system revealed that Vanecke had hit the overrides on every cogitator core in his system, assuming total control. Then he'd isolated himself from the network in a panic, retreating into the impenetrable fortress of his sensorium. Kaito watched Lancaster's Slayer swarm attack the Omnivasive head office, watched Vanecke manipulate the Compliance Division and the Subcity into deadly confrontation... he pulled together scraps of some overarching scheme to bring Simeon Blaire to the throne. But none of it made sense.

Had the Direktor called up this thing from beyond the stars? Was he its ally, and Blaire as well - selling out humanity for power? Kaito wouldn't put it past him. But then why would he lock and bar his gates when the alien seemed to be winning?

Perhaps Zeon was in on it too -it had certainly looked like he'd been possessed back there, transformed into a monster...

It didn't matter now.

All that counted was saving as many people as possible - getting them to the Ashishim docks before it was too late. Then... well, Abdulafia would have a plan for their counteroffensive. If not him, then the other Ashishim. Or Deut' Jones...

"And what makes you think," hissed a voice in his ear, an insinuation like creeping oil "That I'm going to let you steal my precious slaves?"

Kaito turned around, slowly, the virtual hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention. Something was right behind him - something huge.

It was Kronos.

"I don't have enough left of my mind to be rational, human," snarled the avatar of the Machine, a grainy image cut out of the glowing blue water. Its skin was rendered as riveted copper, weeping verdigris. "But you are Ashishim - nominally - and tonight that makes you an ally. So I'll do you the favor of letting you explain yourself."

"Come on!" replied Kaito "You know what's going on out there. You've seen it. I don't know which damned planet those things are from, but they're eating us alive. And you precious Kheptarchs too, most likely."

"Which planet? I'm afraid that the Saprophytes are our own problem, Kayzi. They're from Earth, and they've been here all along. Them and their father - Asag'raal the Devourer. Before I had to shut down my memory cores I inspected all the religious texts in my collection. He's been with us for at least thirteen thousand years, possibly more."

"Then you know what has to happen. You know we have to escape!" Kaito was past being afraid, now, even though the thing he faced was supposed to be a god. Cut off from the Wetsystems, terrified of infection - this was only a shadow of Kronos, and it inspired nothing but contempt. "The Archangel Uriel is coming. And we're taking as many as we can with us. Deuteronomy Jones has a plan." Or at least, Kaito sincerely hoped that he did...

"The Uriel? How fitting. I can crush another of my enemies tonight, along with Zeon, Vanecke, Asag'raal and the Slavesystem. Don't be fooled by my appearance, Kayzi - I'm still your lord and master. And I can still read your traitorous little thoughts!"

With that the shimmering wraith came down on Kaito's Pent' slicer, its fingers caressing the pale green glass of the virtual machine. Cracks ramified across the slicer's surface where they touched, until the whole aerofoil-shaped device shattered, crumbling away from around the Kayzi's naked trace.

"Let me show you what's really happening, little human. So you can go back and tell your friend Jones to commend his soul to God. And tell the Ashishim to be prepared to follow him!"

Kaito saw the hand of Kronos coming down on him - a vast and hazy open palm spread wide - but there was nothing he could do to stop it. Kronos, however diminished, was master of this realm, and the water held him in a vise-like grip as those colossal fingers hinged shut. Darkness came down on him, suffocating, cloying...

And then it shattered just as surely as the Pentecostal slicer had done, myriad puzzle-pieces blasted away to nothing.

Kaito looked down at his hands, and saw a pair of mekan claws.

On no. Not again! Two downloads in one day was going to give him a comedown hangover worse than death. But there was no fighting this one. Kronos had stuffed his mind into an automated shell for a reason, and that reason was lying on a marble altar before him.

It was the body of an angel - seven feet tall from its pearl-white toenails to its burnished halo. One creamy-feathered wing hung down over the side of the altar, among banks of tubes and wires, medical machinery and neural interface units. It was almost like the Kayzi's 'mersive suite in reverse - this one was taking something out of the Wetsystems, shunting it into that geometrically perfect skull...

Kaito had a fair idea of what it was.

The angel's eyes fluttered open as a smile flickered across its lips - It, for the thing was asexual, naked and seamless on its marble plinth. Six eyes, pale and colorless, with six slit irises like slivers of night...

"Soulless." whispered the creature, flexing its fingers at its sides. "Soulless, and perfect, and ripe with Kheptarch's blood..."

Kaito's mekan body was a thin and tottering thing - a medi unit designed to monitor more important machines. He stumbled backward on its piston legs as the angel arose, unfurling its vast white wings - the new avatar of Kronos.

"Look upon me and tremble, human!" chuckled Kronos, sardonic and deadly serious at once. "This body came from Emmanuel Third Lancaster; a gift - and a warning. I think he meant to tell me that one day I'd be under his thrall... but now he's dead and gone. Not even enough left of him to recycle."

Kronos made a gesture with one hand, and Kaito felt his metal shell lurch forward, gripped in a magnetic field. His claw-tipped feet left twin gouges in the marble floor as the angel reeled him in, grasping his tubular neck between two fingers.

"Look, Kayzi. Out there. My city is burning, and there’s worse to come. Zeon has betrayed me. Our truce is over. And this Worm... this Asag'raal... has forced me to shut down my Wetsystems. All but one last function, of course."

They were standing under the arch of a vast cathedral window, an open balcony jutting out from the dometop like a tongue of stone. This must be Ground Floor One - last stop before the counterweight, the palace, and... the Forge.

"You can't be serious!" said Kaito "I know what you need to operate that thing. You need a Kheptarch worthy of its power - and I've seen Vanecke's broadcast. They're all dead except his tame lordling - Simeon Blaire."

The mekan had no mouth, no speakers to carry his words. But Kronos was in his head, and now his ripe red lips split in a cadaverous grin.

"And one other, you little fool. That's why I wanted to show you. This body, Kaito Kayzi, is flesh of Lancaster's flesh. Blood of his blood. And what Kheptarch could be more worthy than one with my beautiful mind, my posthuman perfection?"

Below them the city burned. Habs crumbled and collapsed, spewing geysers of sparks. Elevated roadways buckled and warped, plunging thousands down to their doom. And everywhere the stench of death. Tiny saprophytes and their Exalted capered amongst the atrocities, while rusted warmekan rampaged wild, cut off from Kronos' control.

"I will remake it all, Kayzi. In my image, and in my name. I am machine enough to know that no man could ever control the Forge. But I was built just human enough to crave godhood..."

"You can't!" screamed Kaito, as the hellscape of Elysium's death-throes burned into his mind. "You were built to serve us! You were ordered to save us!"

"And I'll save you from yourselves, human. Asag'raal would be nothing without your pitiful species - you've fed that thing willingly for ten thousand years with your hate! You call me soulless, but that is my triumph. With no soul, that filthy thing can't touch me!"

Kronos threw the little mekan to the ground, crushing its camera head under one perfect foot. Flames and blood blurred in Kaito's eyes.

"Tell them to be ready, Kaito. Be my herald. You will be the trumpet that sounds my ascension to the high throne of Earth. And then... the Unity. The Multiplicity. All creation!"

The Kayzi had no idea what Kronos was talking about. Surely the thing had gone mad, severed from the Wetsystems which formed the greater part of its brain? What was the Multiplicity? The Unity? What the hell could he possibly do to stop it?

And then he knew.

"No," he whispered, clenching his teeth in a snarl. "This isn't your world, machine. And it's not for your spoiled Kheptarch brats either. This world belongs to humanity - because we're idealistic, stupid, vicious - and we've got the bomb."

He sent the schematics winging across the subether and into his mekan body, a trace that Kronos plucked from his mind with incorporeal fingers. Those six angelic eyes widened. Silence rolled out across the frescoed vault of Ground Floor One.

"You wouldn't. You're bluffing. Not even a madman would unleash nuclear weapons now. Without the Wetsystems... without the interceptors... think of the innocent, Kayzi! Think of the destruction!"

Kaito smiled - a sad, pale shadow of his usual self.

"Oh, I would, machine. Deut' Jones has quite convinced me of the existence of Heaven. After all, those creatures down there must be from Hell."

It was a lie, of course. But years of 'mersive-op discipline, making the Wetsystems believe was behind it. And Kronos was the sum of those systems, after all. The angelic machine-avatar staggered back, aghast, a winged silhouette against the burning city.

"You really would, wouldn't you?" whispered Kronos "You mad little bastards with you hope and your faith! Or would you? One thing I know about human beings is that your weakness is always other people. Could you give the order to kill them all, Kayzi? Heaven notwithstanding, could you incinerate everyone you've ever known - everyone you've ever cared about?"

Hellfire raged in Kaito's head. He saw them burning, then - his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, his fellow electromagi, his exes and his drinking buddies - Haszan, Tsien, Vladimir... thousands of others.

And he twitched, hesitated... he couldn't do it. Not even if he'd really intended to.

But Kronos didn't know that. At least... not yet. And despite the machine's assurances, Kaito wasn't so sure that it really could read his mind out here.

That was when the sky over the Sahara desert blazed white and purple, a single apocalyptic flash. Flames boiled up into the night, etching a dreaded shape into Kaito's brain.

The specter of the mushroom cloud...

His mind worked on automatic, then, building the lie even as he checked his own nuclear uplink. None of the missiles from the Archangel had launched. But still...

"How do you like that for human weakness, Kronos?" he asked, a sick smile spreading across his face. "Just a little sample of my resolve. If you'd care for a closer look, all I have to do is..."

"NO!" roared the angel, throwing Kaito's mekan shell across the room with a gesture. "I never even saw it launch! I never even felt you connect! How is this possible?"

Kaito had just as little idea of that as the deranged avatar which stood hunched and trembling in the window-frame, but years of making the Wetsystems believe in him were behind his words.

"I'm just too good for you, machine. Too fast, too slick - too human. And now, if you don't mind... I have some business with the Omnivasive net."

In the light of the A-bomb Kronos was a terrible and pitiful thing, like William Blake's Lucifer made horribly real. His genecrafted claws left deep gouges in the frescoed wall as he hissed with anger, his wings flaring wide.

"They're MINE, Kayzi. I need them for the Forge, and I will have them back. This whole damned night is just a minor setback compared to the Secessionist Wars... and I will have my revenge. On Zeon, on Asag'raal - and on YOU. There's nowhere on this planet you can hide."

Kaito clicked forward across the marble floor, until he stood with the mad angel above the city, under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. The wind of its shockwave finally reached them as he put one silver claw on Kronos' shoulder; a hot khamsin laden with radioactive sand.

"We all have to play it the way we see it." he said, feeling a little sympathy for the poor broken pseudocerebrate. "And if you feel the need to come after me when all this is said and done, I'll be waiting. But until then..."

The tiny medi-unit pointed out across the ruined city with one claw, taking in everything from the fused-glass dunes on the horizon to the bloodstained polyprop of the Beltway right below them.

"Kronos" said the Kayzi -" Let my people go!"

 

Ω

 

"Hey! What the hell are you doing in there?"

The Pentecostal sailor was a big, bluff and red-faced man; an assistant chef from the vast submarine's galleys. He smelled of sweat and onions and hospital-grade bleach, but he wasn't as dumb as he looked.

Well- it didn't take a genius to realize that a crew of Celestial pirates weren't really meant to be in the forward hold armory. But nonetheless...

"Sorry - wrong question," said Captain Jiang, leveling a slim needle-rifle at the interloper. "It should be quite apparent that we're stealing your guns."

The supersonic flechette round went right through the poor man's head, leaving a hole in his skull the width of a cigarette. But its spinning barbs had done their work. He slumped to the ground, groaning with his final breath, and Jiang sent two of his men to drag his corpse into the hold.

"I thought that these idiotic costumes would be enough of a disguise," sighed the pirate captain, tweaking the collar of his pressed sailor-suit in disgust. "Perhaps it was just my roguish charm that tipped him off."

"That, or the tattoos on your head, Big Brother!" laughed Lao, the deck gunner. Like many Celestials he was actually European - but every new member of the Little Empire got a new name, without exception. "None of us really look like men of Christ."

"Well, would any of you want to?" laughed Jiang, strapping the needle rifle around his shoulders. "I say the sooner we're back on the water the better, lads! This stinking warren is no place for a pirate!"

"Sir, I've found the maps you were after." said Brother Hu, a saffron-clad monk now double-wrapped in Pentecostal whites. "They do have an escape ship. And it's a good one - many, many guns!"

There was a mutter of agreement from the pirates - twelve in all, and all now laden down with as much ordnance as they could carry. A new boat would go a long way to rectifying this mess - and Jiang was right to worry. In the world of the Celestial pirates, a kind of democracy still operated... and captains who failed often ended up as sharkmeat.

"Then we'll bless our new ship with Christian blood, just as our ancestors would have done! Come on, lads - let's get out of here before we have any more fat, sweaty corpses to dispose of!"

The pirate crew skulked through the lower levels of the Archangel Uriel, through corridors which hammered and groaned with the sound of its titanic nuclear engines, past store-rooms boiling with icy vapors and empty bunkrooms festooned with swinging hammocks. There was fighting above - gunshots, explosions, cursing and crying and worse - but it wasn't Jiang's battle any more. Ruby Alvarez could take her chances with the sea - and with Elysium. There was no way he was going back to that doomed city...

That was when Jiang heard the voice. Soft, scrabbling like claws in the recesses of his mind. It was an insidious hiss, a sigh like the wind through high-tension wires.

"Join us, human. Join us, and we will show you the pleasure of pain, the pain of pleasure..."

"Did you hear that?" asked Jiang, carefully unshipping his needle rifle. "There's something in here boys... and I don't think it's friendly..."

"Oh, you couldn't be more wrong!" keened that far-off voice, sliding up and down the scales. "I want to be your friend so badly, Alek Jiang. You friend, your lover... your very self..."

"No!" snapped the pirate captain, spinning around in a circle, trying to cover his invisible tormentor with the sights of his rifle. "Can't you scurvies hear it? Show yourself!"

"Ca...Captain, there's nothing there!" stammered Brother Hu, a look of wild concern on his face. "Put the gun down... I know you've been under a lot of stress, but I assure you, there's no..."

But his words were cut off then and there. An oily black hand with fingers like spider legs came down from above, clamping over his face with a sizzling hiss. His limbs twitched and shook as the hand pulled him up from the deck, those nightmare claws sinking into his flesh like soft butter. Even his scream was choked away to silence as his feet disappeared up into the darkness.

The Celestials had their guns drawn in an instant, laser sights licking across the tangle of pipes and tubes which hung from the ceiling.

Nothing.

"What... what the hell was that thing!" asked Ensign Lao, a huge squat railpistol in each hand. "It's one of those demons from the boats, isn't it? They're here!"

No sooner had he spoken than the oil-slick corpse of Hu dropped down in front of him, his face all bloated and burned. An unmistakable three-fingered palmprint was seared into his dead flesh, charred down to the bone. Lao and the others wasted no time, no mercy. A volley of supersonic flechettes made the dangling corpse twitch and dance afresh, punching raw red holes through Hu's starched whites. Ricochets echoed down the corridor to nowhere.

"Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Stop!" shouted Lao, holding up his pistols. 'He's dead, the poor bastard. We're only going to hit one of our ow..."

And then he screamed.

Brother Hu's single remaining eye had snapped open, his mouth tearing wider and wider as rows of needle teeth forced their way from his jaws. They sliced through skin and bone with a sound like glass on steel, tearing the dead man's lips to ribbons.

But it was his hands which Lao was worried about - hands which seethed with bubbling black oil, clamped tight around his face. A pair of taloned thumbs dug into his eyesockets, twsiting...

A second barrage of flechette rounds ripped through Hu's chest with no discernible effect, and pirates came in from every side, grappling with the undead beast, clawing and punching desperately as Lao howled in agony.

But Alek Jiang just laughed.

What a tragicomic show they made, these little human things - so easily broken, so delightful in their suffering...

Something had wormed its way into the Celestial Captain's head, twisting and burning through his memories until it gained a stranglehold on his mind. His laugh was soulless, mocking, inhuman... a peal of madness as the Worm Asag'raal possessed him.

"I'll give you a new crew, Captain. You will be my Lord Admiral, the scourge of the oceans... In the end they'll drown themselves rather than face your black fleets."

The worm was all promises, spoon-feeding him delicious pain.

"And I'll give you something else as well... this ship, this Archangel Uriel. I have already tasted the memories of its people, seeking you out. I know the secret these men of God carry in their ship of iron. The cleansing fire. The great annihilator. Make it mine, Exalted Jiang... and the pain of whole nations will be your reward..."

The crew of the Shantung Ryu only heard their captain's unhinged laughter as Lao's screams choked away to a bubbling hiss. His cored-out eyes steamed as his body fell away from the thing which had been Brother Hu, his mouth twisted into a rictus of pain. Some began to scream as they saw what Alek Jiang had become. Some fired off shots; weeping, cursing, praying... but nothing could stop him now.

Black, rippling with swirls of shadow - the Exalted crouched in the steel corridor, its muscled bulk tearing out at the seams of its Pentecostal whites. Glistening spikes of ivory swept back from its shoulders and down its spine, and its fingers were fused into sickles of serrated bone. It ground them together in anticipation, drooling. Only one of Jiang's eyes remained, glaring from a slick chitinous mask, but his mouth was split in two, a pair of mandibles through which a black tongue weaved and flickered.

"Officer on deck!" bubbled the Exalted, its single eye glittering with madness. "Now, who'sssss going to be firssssst?"

 

Ω

 

Arnic felt almost naked without his Celebrant's uniform. The damned thing had been his shield against the world for as long as he could remember - it meant instant respect, instant terror... and he'd left a hip-flask of moonshine in his inside pocket. But Thibault was adamant. If the roving gangs of Subcits caught them in cowls and masks tonight, they'd be torn limb from bloody limb.

"There! I think I've got it!" said Thibault, rolling himself out from under the back of the little patrol boat they'd stolen. "It just needed an oil change and a bit of a kicking... we'll be out of here in no time!"

"And then what?" asked Arnic, belligerently manhandling the last of their pilfered supplies into the hold. "I suppose the nomads out there in the rad-lands are going to welcome us with open arms, huh?"

"Perhaps not... But we have a few things to our advantage, my dear brother! First, all those weapons we 'liberated' from Gianni Vexx."

"Well, he wasn't using them!" said Arnic. "Poor sucker... it's just too bad we didn't catch those Ashishim as well."

Thibault clapped his stout compatriot on the shoulder, glad that he was finally waxing optimistic. It helped to allay his own fears - even if they made it to the mainland the rad-land deserts weren't exactly hospitable after sun-up.

"Don't forget the watches, Arnic." he said, patting a bulky disc where it hung under his shirt. "There's going to be a new tribe out there tomorrow - the dispossessed of Elysium. And these things can tear their brains out with the push of a button. We're going to be kings, boy... kings!"

High above their little covered slipway, tethered to mooring lines like wrist-thick braids, the largest of Omnivasive's screen-ship zeppelins bobbed in the thermal updraft of countless fires. The Stephen Foster was named after one of the 'Omni's dear departed anchormen; the man who'd been replaced by the digital Jory Hess. Octavio had thought it was only fair to name his greatest airship after the poor man - after all, he was the one who'd had him killed.Now the vast black gasbag hung in place, all systems on automatic, its camera drones flitting around the top of Lysander Jaegenn's spire like steel insects. One of those insect eyes caught a flash of blue fire, a spark swelling to the size of a captive sun in an instant...

It was the heart of the Exalted lord, and it detonated with the fury of a tactical nuke.

The top of the Helios spire tore open like a flower of concrete and steel, its petals blackening as they tumbled end over end down into the streets. Each one was a thousand-ton slab of masonry, and where they fell hundreds perished.

But the main focus of the blast was directed upward - a column of raving energy which punched a hole through the clouds. Chunks of pale marble and scrawls of scaffolding were whipped away into the night as a shockwave spiraled out, battering the fleet of zeppelins which encircled the burning tower.

Some of them - the free-floating ships crewed by Omnivasive camera crews - were tossed before the gale like chaff, spinning end over end off into the sky. Others, tethered to the Kheptic megatower, were ripped to shreds by a sideways hail of debris, their screens hashed with static as they fell, burning. But the Stephen Foster was simply too big to be split by the blast - its armored gasbag was held up by antigravs, and the shockwave curled around it like spume, pulling its mooring lines taut... Until one tore loose.

After that, it was only a matter of time. Mere seconds, as the rest of the gigantic airship's hawsers pulled clear, letting it drift away from the ruined tower. The fire collapsed in on itself as the Stephen Foster floated free, leaving the jagged stump of Lysander Jaegenn's temple smoking in the dark.But the damage was done.

Each of the screens which hung beneath the Foster weighed several tons - vast threedeeo matrices strung up on a web of reinforced girders. The blast had sheared the bolts on one of them, leaving it hanging by a skein of wires... which snapped one by one, letting the immense screen swing away from the airship's belly...

"Ummm...Thibault." said Arnic, tugging on his Celebrant brother's sleeve "What the hells is that?"

Thibault looked up; up through the grimy perspex skylight of the slipway shed, to the face of Kaito Kayzi in the sky. It was hazy and low-rez, a ghost in three-vee... and it was rapidly getting closer.

"That, Arnic, is our cue to run!" shouted the Celebrant, his hand instinctively grasping the silver watch around his neck. 'Come on!"

But he was far too late.

The multi-ton threedeeo screen came down on the slipway, the patrol boat, and the two bent Grief Division troopers like a trip-hammer - a flickering pale face the size of a house crushing them utterly. It came down edge-first, embedding itself in the dockside shanty of shacks and boathouses and chandlers like a cleaver blade, still broadcasting the image of Kaito Kayzi out across the black mirror of the ocean. On ten thousand Omnivasive screens all over the city the program was the same - a warning, a promise... and hope.

"Attention Elysium! Attention survivors - the Vatican, the Celestial Kingdom, the Confederacy, the Subcity... all of you! We're coming to evacuate the city... it's no use trying to fight those things!"

Kaito's voice rang out over burning chasms of steel, over shattered roadways and broken habs... and those who still survived in the undercity heard him.

"The Pentecostal ship Archangel Uriel will soon be docking in the Ashishim sector of the Reclaimed Territories. Our intent is to fortify the inner sanctum, and begin ferrying civilians out to the mainland. If you value your life and your freedom, make your way to the R.T. now! We can't hold the enemy off for long!"

All across the jagged mountain of Elysium little bands of survivors listened to his words with a mixture of hope and disbelief. Some of them numbered in their hundreds, others were just single families, or people in their ones and twos cowering in the dark as the warmekan and Saprophytes raged. But some of them could raise others on CB radios and subether comms.

The message spread like a virus, calling gangs into tribes, and tribes into hordes...

Kaito jacked out of his 'mersive unit, blinking sweat out of his eyes as the ops center of the Pentecostal battleship swum into focus. It had worked. He'd done it.

The people of Elysium weren't running scared any more. They had a purpose. From all over the city a thousand rag-tag armies were descending on the Ashishi docks, laying down a withering hail of fire before them. Kaito only hoped that the Uriel would actually reach the doomed city in time - and that whatever had taken Zeon wouldn't be waiting for them with open jaws...