17 Aevum Oblivio Keys

CeeAn could already see the war from here. All through the long ride up the space-‘lev she’d watched tiny stars sparkle and fade against the velvet dark – the little candle-flames of alien dreadnoughts being torn apart.

She’d walked the labyrinth of the trials alone, leaving her companions in the great echoing basilica of the lev-dock, and the black hall with its sliding pillars and traps and snares had let her pass unchallenged. Defused, she knew, by Kheptic hands seventeen years ago.

CeeAn went unarmed into the woven steel spindle beneath the Cardinal Rock – unarmed because she’d seen Everdark wrapped in ever-shifting coils around the great rock of the Station, and she knew it was no use trying to fight a thing like that with bullets. All she needed was in the palm of her hand, in a glass core drilled from Technician Nyl’s living flesh. That glistening slug of alien meat was marbled through with the stuff of the slavesystems, and Cee knew that it was the key to unlocking the Forge. That – and the similar tube of glass taken from the flesh of Simeon Blaire.

Now she faced the rippling dark wall of the Explorator System – a veil drawn across the corridor which pulsed and twisted like silk in the wind. It could devour her in a heartbeat, she knew… but the war unfolding outside the diamondglass windows of the Station was even worse than the shadows within.

Those explosions were coming closer. One side or the other – Zhe’s people or Everdark’s – one was driving the other back, closing in on the Earth.

Cee stepped up to the barrier, arms held out at her sides cruciform. In each palm he held a bleeding core of glass, two dripping rods of sequestrated flesh.

"Hear me, guardian system!" she shouted, her words swallowed up by the wall of blackness. "I am the one who has been sent to take the Forge. Sent by my master and yours – the final integration of the strains!"

That got the Slavesytem’s attention. She was sure, now, that it was infected and controlled by Nyl. It had to be, or the tangle of black pseudopods erupting from the wall would be the last thing she’d ever see.

They hovered over her like snakes, tasting the air, keeping a cautious distance as CeeAn’s heart pulsed hot and urgent in her throat. The neural interlocks were primed. Pseudomorph flooded her system, branching down through her arteries like cold wire.

Cee took one sharp glass drill-core in each hand, screwed her eyes shut…

And she stabbed with all her strength, driving the alien flesh deep into her cloned body.

Dormant systems burst and intertwined, unfurling into her bloodstream in thorny coils. The Chimera in Blaire’s blood, the Blacksteel in Nyl’s… slithering over each other like mating serpents, twisting and ramifying through her living tissue…

The wall gaped open like a great vertical mouth, its fangs made up of innumerable nanorobotic tentacles. They caressed her arm, her cheek, the tips of her fingers as she stepped inside, fighting with all her mind to contain the human and alien machines in her blood.

The Blacksteel flowed like water as she opened her eyes, one now dark as night, the other silver. It peeled apart before her, closing at her heels, drawing her into the sanctum of the Forge.

CeeAn didn’t even feel the two tubes of glass unscrew from out of her body, sheared off neat and razor-edged by the hybrid tech-flesh inside her. But it wasn’t the Forge which called to her, out of the blackened core of the Cardinal Rock. She could feel the brittle spark of life at the very heart of this place… the slow and regular pulse of bodies in hibernation.

Abdulafia was here.

And if it cost her humanity to wake him, then that was a price she was willing to pay.