2196 Ante Arbitrium Major Arcana

The great circular hatch of Ground Floor One came rolling and grinding toward Kronos like a gear sheared from some immense war-engine, clawing a gash in the gilded mosaic tiles behind it. Those ten tons of reinforced steel should have been his last line of defense - instead the pseudocerebrate barely had time to leap out of the way as the door slammed through a row of statues, showering alabaster shards like shrapnel.

Eddie Tsien was right behind it.

The Super-Cyben was almost entirely consumed by the creeping infection of the Chimera now. Only part of his face remained; a diagonal strip of human flesh clamped between burnished chrome. Snarling lips, one scarred cheek, a single camera-irised eye… nothing else remained of his humanity. And to judge from the way he’d pitched that vault door like a discus, the transformation had only made him stronger. Now he came raging through the shattered doorway, streamers of bladed crycelium flaring out around him like wings. The fibrous crystal-metal rippled and flared in silver ribbons, slicing through plastic and stone with disturbing ease.

"Come and face me, Kronos!" bellowed Tsien, smashing his knotted fists into the floor. "Come on, you coward! I’ll…"

"You’ll nothing," said the Guardian Engine, alighting from his perch up amongst the statuary trees. "It’s only a matter of time before you reach the tipping point, Lieutenant. Then you’ll be nothing but a mad, doomed intellect trapped in a metal shell…"

"That should sound familiar, Kronos. In fact, it’s a fair description of you."

"Perhaps. But I’m afraid that the irony’s wasted on a mere machine. Especially when I’m trapped in this meat-sack body of Lancaster’s design…"

Tsien cocked his head to one side, squinting at the pseudocerebrate's angelic form.

"I’d trade you in an instant – even with the wings. But I promised myself a little satisfaction before this whole city comes down in flames. Sorry."

Kronos smiled as he circled warily around the Super-Cyben, cradling a sleek and threatening slab of steel. It was an ancient thing – a weapon from before the Aevum Iudicio’s wars of judgment.

"It’s funny, really. A few hours ago, this cannon wouldn’t have been able to touch you. It was made to kill the likes of me, you know… when the human race was still able to make their own decisions."

The battle-cogitators fused to Tsien’s spine had picked it, and he spat out a bitter little laugh.

"An EMP rifle? I’m not even going to bother asking where you found such an antique. It’s not going to do you any g…"

But Kronos wasn’t waiting for his enemy to finish.

The snarling angel pulled the trigger, unleashing a bolt of magnetically charged iron filings in a core of superheated plasma. Tsien was fast – inhumanly, impossibly fast – but it was Kronos who had made him. He knew the Super-Cyben’s limitations, down to a micrometer scale. Even so, three of those coiling streamers of crycelial ribbon whipped around the barrel of the EMP rifle a second after it fired, slicing it to pieces. Eddie had learned that trick from the Eversio, and Kronos dropped the weapon as it went critical in his hands.

At the same time, its storm of magnetized iron punched clear through Tsien’s armor, laying bare his metal ribs.

There was still flesh and blood inside him, but it was desiccated dry, mummified under steel. The whirring pump of Eddie’s mekanikal heart forced black and syrupy liquid through his veins, coiled tight around skeins of sparking wires... Because the Chimera had completely recreated him from the inside out: next to his piston-driven heart nestled a tiny tokamak torus, feeding laminar battery strips between his ribs.

Just the kind of systems which the EMP was made to destroy.

The Super-Cyben’s face froze in a grimace of pain as he ground to a halt, his hands crooked into claws reaching for Kronos’ throat. The angelic machine crept forward between a tangle of saw-toothed silver ribbons – streamers of crycelium drawn out razor-thin from Eddie’s fingers. Each one was sharp enough to pare though solid steel, and they sheared through the feathers at the tips of Kronos’ wings as he ran one finger across the face of his creation, feeling the circuit-pattern infection beneath it grow cold.

"Hatred forges the best weapons, Lieutenant… but fear keeps them sharp. You were never smart enough to be afraid, Edward Tsien. And now I’ve got some forging of my own to take care of. With Simeon Blaire dead, I’m the last Kheptarch standing." He was face to face with the frozen Super-Cyben, his six glowing eyes reflected in the mirror-bright chrome of Tsien’s cheek. "Order. Control. Precision. The poor damned Illuminatus has told me that half the universe belongs to machines, Eddie. When they come for me, they’ll be forced to treat me as their equal."

It seemed that all of his attention was turned on the Super-Cyben - but Emmanuel Lancaster hadn’t sequenced this body with six eyes for aesthetics alone. There was a tiny scrawl of darkness slithering across the quicksilver mirror of Tsien’s face, down across one cruel cheekbone…

It wore a face he recognized.

"It seems that rumors of your death have been somewhat… exaggerated," purred Kronos, turning his head a full one-eighty degrees on its long, thin neck. His smile was as welcoming as a blade of ice as he unfolded himself to his full height, his swan-white wings drawn in like a cloak around him.

"Oh, not entirely. I can find any number of things wrong with your little hypothesis, Kronos, but I’ll tell you this for free – Simeon Blaire is dead and gone."

The Machine didn’t have access to sophisticated scanning subroutines or electromagnetic probes in his seraphic body. But he didn’t need them to see the truth of Akheron’s words. The black-clad warrior stood outlined in the shattered doorway with a sword in either hand, his bare skull painted with a circle of primitive runes. He shrugged a spent jetpack from his shoulders as he advanced, letting it fall to the floor behind him.

"Perhaps you remember a man called Octavio Vanecke. A genius, a visionary… but so damned impetuous. So ambitious…"

Kronos knew where this was going.

"A fool, in fact. I recall that he tried to interfere with the genetic aspect of my master program – and that he met a bad end because of it."

"I couldn’t agree with you more. A fool. In the old Tarot, he’d be numbered first amongst the Arcana, taking a little stroll off of a cliff. After that fall he was the Hanged Man for a while… bound, crippled – smiling to himself for no reason…"

"I thought your obsession was Oriental, Octavio," said the pseudocerebrate, circling around the monolithic bulk of Eddie Tsien. His pale white hands ran over the Super-Cyben’s cold armor-plate like those of a lover. "Why don’t we talk about the I Ching instead?"

Akheron chuckled to himself, crossing his swords like a pair of five-foot shears.

"Because, old friend, the Tarot ends with some very pertinent images indeed. The Emperor. The Tower. The World. Octavio is just as dead as Blaire, Kronos. I’m far more than the sum of both of them."

"Then you won’t mind proving it!" snarled the Guardian Engine. He leaped into the air, the downdraft from his wings sending dust spiraling up in choking vortices. He alit high up in the twining branches of a silver-and-glass tree, heels swinging in space. "Too bad you’ve only brought a pair of knives to a gunfight!"

From his vantage point up among the crystals and globe-lamps Kronos could see that there was a second black-armored figure behind the enigma with the face of Simeon Blaire. He, too, had the look of the Kheptic gene-line about him, but he was young – barely even a youth, for all that he held a curved saber in one hand and had every appearance of being able to use it.

"He’s led you to your death, child," called out the pseudocerebrate. "I know he must have killed your Lord Father. But you, as well? This doesn’t have to be the end…"

Darion pushed the visor back from his face, revealing a pair of mismatched amber and green eyes. There was hatred there… deep and slithering worms of it coiled around the young Khept’s soul. But there was something else as well…

"I killed Simeon Blaire. My Master told me that you’d try to lie and cheat your way out of what’s coming. Don’t think that I’m so easily corrupted!"

"A puppet, then. Too bad. You’ll burn just as well with a hand up your arse, you little bastard!"

While he spoke, Kronos’ minions had been crawling down the dome of the ceiling all around him. They were armed to the teeth and beyond – assassin mekan built by the Terminus Separatist Army twenty centuries before. They would have been useless against Eddie Tsien, with his battletank hide and liquid-crycelial blades. But the assault carbines clutched in their claws were more than enough to destroy Octavio Vanecke’s latest incarnation... or so Kronos thought.

The assassin mekan swung down out of the trees and swarmed down the walls, skeletal things painted matte black, unshipping automatics from their holsters as they surrounded Akheron and his bastard son. But what should have been a fast, noisy and messy death completely failed to eventuate.

Oh, there was noise. The racket of all those hundreds of carbines was deafening, especially to a poor crippled machine with no way to turn down its audio input. But amongst the muzzle-flash and ricochet Akheron and Darion moved as a double blur, carving a neat web of lines and vectors through the mekan horde. A chorus of whirring, snapping, squealing and ringing sounds came in over the roar of gunfire, and the slow realization dawned on Kronos that his slaves weren’t necessarily winning the engagement. The Guardian Engine sighed, dropping lightly to the ground before an immense statue of some long-forgotten Martial Virtue – a toga-wearing goddess eight feet tall praying over an upended battleaxe.

In the calm center of the storm, Darion Blaire sliced a geometrically precise figure through the torso of a warmekan, watching it fall away in sparking pieces. The damned things were just too slow to be entertaining… hardly Kheptic prey. At least battle was a diversion, though. Dangerous and unfamiliar emotions churned deep in his chest when he saw the cruel, avid look on Akheron’s face. It didn’t help that he was far more vicious than Darion himself. The same yadome-jutsu which he’d taught Simeon Blaire now split bullets in half in mid-flight, steering each ricochet into a killing blow. Mekan spasmed and jerked as those twin longswords carved them ragged, hollow heads and limbs clattering across the marble… until there were none of them left. Nothing remained of those one hundred assassin machines but scrapmetal and spent shells when the two Kheptarchs finally put up their blades – and Akheron hadn’t even broken a sweat.

"Very nice. But I’m afraid that’s as far as you get."

Darion’s eyes narrowed at the sound of sardonic applause. He brought his saber back to guard, licking his dry lips in anticipation…

Facing them across the junkyard wreckage of his army was an angel in battle-armor - the very image of the Uriel’s namesake. In place of a flaming sword this apparition hefted a twin-bladed axe taller than a man, and its six eyes burned with hatred.

"Have you got any idea," asked Kronos "How much those things cost to maintain?"

"The repair bill’s not finished yet," said Akheron. "Darion – stay back. This one’s all mine."

They leaped at each other as if they were starving for blood, weapons hissing down in intersecting arcs. Sparks flashed and flared and died as blow after blow stuck home, every one blocked and turned aside with brutal precision. The body which Emmanuel Lancaster had built for his A.I. master was a pure symphony of muscle and bone – but the usurper had tempered his own flesh in the fires of the great Game. Evenly matched, they fought their way around the great circular concourse of Ground Floor One, locked in the kind of mutual, obsessive concentration which only ever comes with either good sex or armed combat. These two had hated each other for so long that anything less would have been unthinkable. The ringing chime of steel on steel sounded like a thousand trip-hammers running furnace-hot.

Which made it even more surprising when a frozen, ice-rimed body was spit out of the empty air between them, steaming as it fell.

Kronos spun away, his axeblade whirring through a complex pirouette like the propeller of a small aircraft. Akheron’s twin swords came up in a razor-sharp X as he dropped into a half-crouch. And Abdulafia 330 – freezerburned, half-mad and monumentally pissed off – staggered to his feet in a cloud of stinking vapor. Most of it was his own sweat, crystallized on his skin between dimensions.

"You! The Ashishi! But HOW? I thought you were still inside the Valley View when…"

"He’s the Illuminatus’ right hand! That treacherous little bastard must have…"

Abdulafia didn’t have the strength to raise his head, but he did have enough fight left in him to lift his arms out to each side, palms flat. Kronos and Akheron both stopped in mid-rant, watching the Dervashi wobble unsteadily. He looked the pseudocerebrate in the eye, and then swung his head around to face the Kheptarch with a battery of vertebral clicks and pops.

"Now," he said. "Which one of you is on Zeon’s side?"

Akheron had only just managed to draw breath before Kronos stepped forward, leaning on his war-axe like a staff.

"Last time I saw your master he was trying to defeat the Worm. And if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then…"

"Don’t listen!" snarled the Kheptic usurper. "He’s lying! It’s my purpose to overthrow this creature’s corrupt rule – which puts the Illuminatus and I on the same page..."

Half the reason that Abdulafia’s open hands had stopped two swords and a battleaxe in full swing was the fact that they were quite clearly servo-assisted bones tendoned with oil-black ligaments. Now they curled up into fists, and an almost-visible heat-haze shimmer built up around them.

"Wrong answer," said the Dervashi – and he pointed a finger at both the Kheptarch and the Machine.

If Darion hadn’t actually seen the shockwave tearing across the dusty floor, he would have sworn that Abdulafia had picked up Kronos and his Master and slammed them bodily against the walls of Ground Floor One. The young scion of House Blaire was certain he’d seen the shape of massive fingers outlined in the air… but of course, that was impossible.

Abdulafia might have meant to kill them both where they stood, but he simply didn’t have the strength to follow through. And he was far too close to his goal, now… the baroque portal to the space-‘lev was within staggering distance, and he forced himself toward it through sheer effort of will.

Behind him, Akheron was back on his feet, spitting blood.

"You! Outlander! Stay the Hells away from my Forge!"

"Your Forge? I suppose you designed and built it, did you?"

"You shouldn’t bother getting up, Kronos. Not unless you’re as masochistic as you are stupid…"

Abdulafia turned on his heel, still swaying slightly.

"All right. You want to do this the hard way? Let’s do it the hard way. But if Zeon beats me to the Tower, we’re all going to be sorry."

Darion never saw him move, but the next instant the Dervashi’s cold dead hand was clamped tight around his wrist. He stared up into a pair of eyes exactly like those of his Lord Father and Master, but utterly unlike them as well. There was compassion there, and something else… a terrible empty sense of loss.

"Just the sword, kid. And one other thing. Seeing as you remind me of me at your age, do us both a favor – choose your own path. Old men full of hate don’t deserve your loyalty."

Darion’s fingers peeled away from the hilt of his saber of their own volition. The weary, agonized look on the warrior’s face was enough to pull down the barriers of his will… that, and the fact that his grip was tighter than the claw of a combat mekan.

Before he could fight back the Dervashi was away, sprinting across the dusty mosaic floor with his stolen sword held out to one side of his body.Kronos was directly in his path, and the battle-angel brought his immense axe around in a flat spin, a horizontal guillotine slash. At the last instant 'Afia leaped up into the overarching canopy of silver branches, twisting like a gymnast on the bars.

The axe hissed past his feet as he tucked them in… and its backswing sliced clean through the crystal foliage an inch from his hand. Kronos spun to follow him, wheeling great figure-eights with his double-edged blade, but Abdulafia’s trajectory looped out wide, and he dropped down behind the Guardian Engine, coming in low with a tendon-severing strike…

Akheron stopped him.

For a single heartbeat they stood motionless – ‘Afia with his saber blocked low by one of the Kheptarch’s swords, Kronos taking the other high between the sweeping wings of his axe-head. Then each of the three primed all of the combat drugs, implants, neural upgrades and subprograms at their disposal. Darion Blaire, unarmed, could only watch in disbelief as they blurred into phantom trails of steel and shadow an instant later.

It was less a swordfight than a glimpse into the blades of a meatgrinder… a storm of sharp edges, curses, sly sucker-punches, headbutts and sweep-kicks set to the tune of ringing metal. Each series of strikes and guards formed a precise geometric figure for an instant as three swords and an axe were woven together – but they collapsed and reformed just as fast as the three warriors could flicker from stance to stance, pruning great ragged chunks from the artificial forest around them. Crystal lamps fell and shattered. Sparks flew wild, dancing across the cold marble floor. But not one of them could find a weakness in his foes.

Akheron was fast, and with two blades he should have held an advantage. But his body was new to him, slippery and unfamiliar. He had to use all his concentration just to keep a grip on his stolen nerves. Likewise Kronos; a machine stuffed into genecrafted flesh – his mind could calculate to the tiniest fraction exactly where each blow should fall, but his seraphic body was too weak to catch up with the cogitators in his head.

Abdulafia was just plain beat. Being rolled flat into two dimensions and slipped through the cracks of the Outer Dark had punished his mind as well as his body, exposing him to sights which should have torn his sanity to shreds. But he was a true believer in Lysander Jaegenn’s little mantra. Where speed and strength failed, cunning and guile took over.

And of course, he was utterly insane already.

The Dervashi carefully maneuvered his foes across the room, steering the dance of blades with carefully calculated thrusts and backhands. Soon they were fighting under the shadow of Eddie Tsien, a metal monolith in crudely human form. The snarl of silver ribbons which ramified out from his body made it difficult to swing a sword… and that was exactly ‘Afia’s plan.

True to form, the battle-clone had been keeping a little something in reserve. As Akheron drew back his no-dachi to strike, and Kronos hefted his axe, snarling, Abdulafia pushed through his pain and slowed time to a standstill. Well… not really. But that was how it felt as the last dregs of Kheptic ‘chrome in his body burned through his nervous system, making every individual mote of dust in Ground Floor One shimmer in stasis. Kronos was caught in mid-swing, his battleaxe gripped tight in hands crosshatched with steel tendons. Akheron’s face was a death-mask more fierce than any Oni helm, tiny flecks of foam glistening in midair as he executed a double overhand, a scissor-cut which would butcher his foe into four bloody chunks.

But in that second Abdulafia 330 gripped his stolen saber tight, and spun once on his heel. The edge of his blade glowed red-hot with sheer velocity as wind resistance tried to slow its supersonic arc.

And his enemies’ weapons shattered.

There were four high, brittle sounds like gunshots as the Ashishi completed his spin, bringing his boot up to connect with Akheron’s neck. Two of them were the Kheptarch’s master-forged no-dachi snapping like reeds as the saber passed through them. Another was the octagonal haft of Kronos’ war-axe shattering and failing. But the fourth was the saber itself, crazed into a cloud of hot splinters.

One of them scored a shallow gash across the last piece of human skin Eddie Tsien could call his own. A thick, oily drop of blood welled up high on his cheek as ‘Afia forced Akheron back against his metal chest… but the Dervashi was looking the other way.

He sighted own his arm, down along the barrel of the Eversio, aiming its one remaining shot right in the face of Kronos. And he ground his heel into the usurper’s throat, just letting him know that both of them were equally screwed.

"Remember what I said about the hard way? Well, here we are. Now, I’m going up to the Cardinal Rock. I’m going to use the Forge to fix the mess you’ve made. If you want to kill each other while I’m gone, feel free."

Akheron swallowed hard. ‘Afia felt it through the sole of his boot, and he turned away from Kronos for a second, staring into a face which could have been his own. The Kheptarch’s eyes were rolled back in their sockets, looking up at Eddie Tsien…

Whose frozen features suddenly cracked into a smile.

Before the Dervashi could pull the trigger loops and coils of metal had bound him up, lashing his wrists together as his heels kicked three feet above the floor. Kronos and Akheron were trussed up just the same; the machine left dangling by one ankle; the usurper all but mummified with a razor ribbon at his throat.

"Like we used to say in the Division – You’re busted, scumbags. I told you that EMP wouldn’t do you any good."

‘Afia twisted against his bonds, wishing there was still a little ‘chrome left in his system. But he was burned out… the comedown from this little escapade was going to cost him a month in a cell-repair vat. If he struggled, he’d likely just slit his wrists.

"Eddie! Stop! We’re the only ones left! If you want to stop the Chimera, you need me! You need the Forge!"

Tsien’s eyes were cold flat nailheads as he stared back at his captive.

"It’s already too late for me, Dervashiman. I told you we were even before, back in the Valley View. So I’m not going to do to you what I’ve got in store for these two. But the Forge… it’s false hope, clonemeat. Has been all along. The best use I can think of for that damned machine is one last fireworks display."

There were a dozen good arguments on the tip of his tongue. But Abdulafia didn’t get a chance to reason with the Super-Cyben. He barely had time to scream.

All three of Tsien’s captives saw it coming, a stray spark spiraling in from out of the pale gray sky. A swarm of Perimeter Defense mekan were torn out of the air in its wake as it headed for the shattered doors of Ground Floor One, billowing an oily contrail of smoke. For some reason there was a great silver-skinned insect clinging to the shattered nose of the Ashishi masslifter, a shape which Abdulafia recognized all too well.

"Tsien! Look out!"

It was going to hit them head-on…

A dragonfly mekan whirred past Afia’s ear, nicking a neat little V in it with the tip of one wing. Then another blurred past, and another… a whole buckshot storm of the little bastards. It was one of them which cut the Super-Cyben off in mid- sentence, shattering across his back with a sound like a stray bullet.

"Come on, Dervashi. That’s gotta be the oldest trick in the boo… Ohhhhh… fucking hellfire!"

Eddie was already turning his head as thirteen tons of ethanol-fueled ruin tore through the wall of Ground Floor One, punching out what remained of the building’s security systems- but by then it was far too late. He looked directly into Abdulafia’s eyes as the broken control-bubble of the ‘lifter swung in on him, burning… and the Dervashi felt the coil of metal tense around his wrists.

"Shut it down, clonemeat. Just destroy the damned thing before it dooms us all."

Then ‘Afia was airborne, propelled from the Super-Cyben’s grip.

He saw the raw steel bulk of the masslifter snatch Eddie up off his feet, dragging Kronos and Akheron along with him. He caught a glimpse of screaming faces behind its shattered windows – Kaito Kayzi and Haszan were among them, but there were others, too, thrown up hard against the glass as the machine began to tumble end over end in its death-throes. An engine nacelle flew wide, blazing, and the unmistakable alien figure of Technician Nyl was dragged along in its slipstream, his spiked silhouette burned across the circle of a bright explosion. Another body flew like a ragdoll from the thing’s open door, a bundle of smoking camo fatigues – but an instant later the bulk of the ‘lifter came down on it hard, crushing the poor wretch into the floor.

That was the last bounce. From then on it was all just grinding, tearing – a shower of sparks thrown high and wide as metal ablated away beneath it. Abdulafia didn’t see where Kronos, Tsien and Akheron ended up. He hit the far wall of Ground Floor One hard enough to force the breath from his lungs, and his skull caught a sucker-punch from a solid lump of crystal. Darkness blurred across his eyes as he slid down the wall in a boneless slump, his blood painting a sticky trail behind him.

There were a couple of seconds of blissful concussion trauma, in which the world was black.

When his vision cleared Darion Blaire was staring down at him. His mismatched eyes blinked once, with slow, reptile precision.

"Well fought, I suppose. Your backhand is a little slow to the right – keep your point up, and aim between the third and fourth ribs." The Kheptic Prince stooped to retrieve his saber, sliding it back into the sheath at his belt. "I’ll leave you to attend to the dead, Ashishim. If my Master is numbered among them, tell him I’ve gone to fulfill my destiny."

"That’s all? No eulogy for the old bastard?"

Darion arched one eyebrow, in a gesture his Lord Father would have recognized immediately.

"Frankly, outlander, I almost thought I’d have to do it myself."

Then he was gone, slipping through the doors behind him and into the anteroom of the space-‘lev. Perhaps Abdulafia should have gone after him. But the wreck of the masslifter tweaked memories in the blurred ruin of his brain… this was the same machine which had torn the walls from Vexx’s sanctum, the same one which he’d been dragged down on, half alive, with…

Oh no. She couldn’t be. Not now, not here. Because now the whole damned thing was burning, and he could hear the screams… hells, he could even smell the stench of charred hair and sizzling fat. And he hadn’t come this far and given up so much of himself to despair, only to watch CeeAn incinerated before his eyes.

The battle-clone staggered in toward the flames, through a blizzard of fluttering gray fire-retardant foam. There were figures moving against the orange yellow-haze, things like wraiths worrying at the bones of the fallen masslifter. One of them was CeeAn. One of them must be her…

But it was someone else entirely who found him first.

"Well, hello stranger," said Technic Hierophant Gharfos Nyl. "Fancy seeing you here!"

Then a fist sheathed in exotic metal caught him clean on the point of his jaw, and the fires of the burning ‘lifter went supernova behind his eyes. From the cameras bolted to his Operative Crescent, Asag’raal watched the alien draw a curved diamondglass dagger from his belt, its prismatic blade shattering the flamelight into slivers. Metal mandibles whirred and clicked as the Technician licked his thin lips with a long, serrated tongue.

"Now, let’s cut that parasite out of you, slave! The two of us have so much to talk about…"

 

Ω

 

Akheron fought his way up into consciousness, prying his eyes open against the dark. He found himself staring right into the face of Kronos. The pseudocerebrate’s six eyes were bare inches from his own, and the sheer hatred which radiated from them was almost enough to flay the skin from his skull. Almost – but not quite.

Because the rest of the Guardian Engine’s body was most definitely missing.

Akheron staggered to his feet, still groggy from a bad case of blunt force trauma. Hells – there was the hole in the wall they’d come through, a seven-foot plug of artificial stone punched out by Eddie Tsien. The usurper reached down and picked up Kronos’ severed head by its hair, forcing a painful laugh out between his remaining teeth.

"So this is how it ends, old friend.All those centuries of scheming, and you get sliced up by accident! It’s almost too…"

"Sorry, but you can’t keep it," hissed a voice from behind him. "I need part of his brain, Simeon. Just count yourself lucky that I don’t want any of yours."

He knew by the sheer size of the shadow who it was… but Eddie Tsien had definitely seen better days.

Akheron could forgive the Super-Cyben for calling him Simeon, considering how much of his head was missing. In fact a whole ragged chunk of his body was gone, in a diagonal slash running from shoulder to hip. Even the power of the Chimera hadn’t been enough to save his arm or his left eye… now there was nothing but a raw gunmetal scar splitting him almost in half. Tiny pseudopods of living crystal twitched in the air as Tsien’s one remaining hand hinged shut around Akheron’s neck.

"You mean… the bastard’s still alive?"

"When it comes to A.I., ‘alive’ is a bit of a loaded term," said the Super-Cyben. "I’m not going to last much longer myself… but Kronos is much harder to kill. Unfortunately for you, Kheptic Lords are easy meat."

If Akheron hadn’t been run so comprehensively through the mince-grinder he might have been able to fight back. Tsien may have been almost sawn in half, but his one remaining hand had grown all out of proportion – it was a two-fingered claw which could easily have wrecked the usurper down to shuddering meat. Eddie was going to enjoy his revenge, though… even if he still thought he was exacting it on Simeon Blaire. His head tilted to one side, birdlike, as he lifted Akheron from the floor. A pair of very expensive combat boots kicked and twitched as the Kheptarch’s face turned blue. Just a second more, and he’d choke on his own swollen tongue…

But Tsien’s claw snapped open at the very last instant, dropping Akheron to the ground. The Super-Cyben roared, bringing his hand back over his head. His one remaining eye was a window into hell, and the craterous wound beside it boiled with silver. But his downstroke stopped less than an inch from Akheron’s face.

And the usurper began to laugh.

"You can’t do it, can you? Even… even when you fought against Simeon at the Valley View, you couldn’t have actually killed him. That’s why he stuck that bloody great knife in your throat! There’s something in your programming that made you let him win!"

Veins like black hosepipes stood proud from Eddie’s skin as he tried to force his claws apart. His whole scarred and ruined body was trembling as he leaned forward, bringing those two razor tips right up to within a shadow’s width of Akheron’s eyeballs.

"Yes! You can’t kill one of your betters, Tsien! Not those who you were sworn to protect! And that means you’re nothing!"

For a second the Super-Cyben shrunk back away from him, snarling like an animal. Self-disgust twisted his face into a horror-mask of chrome and agony. But he lurched forward again a heartbeat later, and his mouth twitched up into a thin little smile.

"This building’s on fire, My Lord. Aren’t you going to get out while you still can?"

"What are you talking about, you freak? Of course not! The Forge is right above us!"

"I’m afraid you’ve become disoriented from all the smoke," said Tsien, circling around him with a peculiar lurching shuffle. "You’re getting hysterical, Your Grace… and we can’t have that."

"Hysterical? Me? You’re the one spouting nonsense, Tsien. Just get the hell out of my way, you obsolete pile of shit!"

Eddie’s single great claw moved far too fast to follow, snatching the severed head of Kronos from Akheron’s grasp. He held it up next to his face so that he could murmur into its ear, looking for all the world like a puppet-master performing a show.

"You hear that, Kronos? Utterly mad with shock. Poor thing. I suppose I have no choice…"

The blow took Akheron clean in the temple, lifting him off his feet and spinning him three times in the air before he landed. Not hard enough to kill… but enough to knock him out cold. It had been delivered by the rock-hard bone of the pseudocerebrate’s skull, swung by its hair like a mace.

"Terrible, terrible," muttered Eddie to his grisly hand-puppet. "But somebody had to do it. Now, help me get him locked in a heatproof coffin. You, my mekanikal friend, have a date with a screwdriver."

 

Ω

 

The Earth looked different from up here. Darion felt a moment of sickening disorientation as the artificial gravity of the ‘lev capsule shut down, replaced with one-half standard. Without it he’d have been crushed boneless to the floor as the sleek golden capsule accelerated up from Elysium, but it still put him on edge. Through a set of slit windows ten inches thick the young Kheptarch had watched the city unfold below him, a burned and dying flower spreading petals of disease across the curve of the planet. Then the ocean, a rippled pool of molten lead; the desert coast of Afrika; the sere expanse of Eurasia reaching out across the hazy horizon. It was all meaningless, of course, compared to the great gnarled rock of the Counterweight which hung above him, swelling to fill the viewscreens set in their frames of cherubs and thorns.

Now the scissor-doors of the space-‘lev capsule hissed open to reveal a checkerboard marble hall, wide and echoing in the cold still air. Just as the Book of Manifest Dogma foretold. But where was the labyrinth? The sprung-steel traps, the razor teeth, the slicing wires wet with poison?

"They’re in your head, son. Only in your head."

Darion’s saber was in his fist within half a heartbeat, but there was nobody there for him to strike down. The words had slid into his brain like cold needles, bypassing his ears entirely.

"That’s what Kronos told me, afterward. It’s one of those mental traps - y’know, a test. Like wrapping you in a blindfold and pushing you off a ‘cliff’… that’s only a two-foot drop. The difference is, if you scream for this one, the fall is real."

Darion moved out into the vast shadowed space of the hall, his boots ringing out loud against the icy marble. He was still the only living thing in the great sphere of the Cardinal Rock, but there was something moving behind its walls – a sound like titanic clockwork gears set in motion. He was sure that the sound hadn’t begun until after he heard the voice in his head.

"Not in your head, child. Just… prying into certain parts of it."

This time it was right behind him.

Darion spun in a whirlwind strike, his saber lashing out wide to whisper through a pale green hologram of a man. He was dressed in military whites and brocade, a ragged cape flowing down from his shoulders. His face was haggard and careworn… lined with immeasurable age. But Darion was surprised to find that he knew this man – even though he’d been genewritten, vat-grown and born without ever once leaving Octavio Vanecke’s control.

"Zaanic. Sergan Zaanic. But… The eduplug said you died up here. Why…"

"It stored me, like it stores them all. But I didn’t die in the Trials, Darion son of Simeon. And neither will you. Not if you give me what I need."

"What do you mean ‘like it stores them all’? And how do you know my…"

"We read your mind, child. Read your whole damned neural structure. The machines of the Grief Division, tiny things crawling on the insides of your lungs… they told us all we need to know. But there’s nowhere for that information to go. The buck stops here, Darion. Kronos is dead."

That information slammed into him like a fist.

The eduplug - that interleaved ream of data blasted into his head before he was born – it had put Kronos one step below godhood, and only then because most gods weren’t so manifestly real.

"It means I’m free, son! Free! The damned Engine thought it would be ironic to set me here at the gates as Master of the Trials. How I’d love him to know that of all the Three Hundred Purest, the one who finally came to me was a child!"

"So the Forge is mine? I can just walk through and take it? I can remake the Earth in my image?"

Sergan Zaanic’s laugh was dry as tomb-dust, but his eyes were filled with holographic sadness.

"You still don’t get it, do you? The Forge isn’t just another machine – it’s a living thing. A neural structure, just like the one I’m trapped in." The glittering cloud which was Sergan Zaanic pointed across the Hall of the Trials, to a verdigris-green statue hanging in a niche. It was the image of an angel, bound to the wall by intricately knotted snakes, and in its outstretched hand was an orb about the size of a human skull. "Imagine, Darion – millions of souls, all captured at the moment of their deaths. All their lives those people controlled billions of cells, hundreds of muscles and living organs, all with their minds. Most of them never gave it a second thought. But you never hold onto that tangled web so hard as when you feel it slipping away. The Forge is made of that desperation. The Forge is a Planck-scale energy repatterning field which requires immensely delicate manipulation."

"But it works, doesn’t it? It’s real…"

"Oh yes," said Zaanic. "It’s very real. But you have to ask yourself – how can you control such a thing? What do all those poor doomed souls desire?" As he spoke, the long-dead Kheptarch drifted across the tiles to caress his own neuro-core prison. "What would you offer to lead them, Darion?"

He grasped the truth of it even as Sergan Zaanic turned a pleading gaze on him, staring avid and hungry at the naked blade of his saber. What could anyone possibly offer to a creature like this… to millions of them?

"Only death," he whispered, running the tip of his sword up the bronze angel’s arm, until its edge rested against that dark and heavy orb. "That’s what they want, isn’t it? Them, and you as well…"

"Now, while Kronos is gone. Before the fucking thing finds a way to resurrect itself!"

Darion’s saber came back over his shoulder, ready to strike – but he held back, trembling.

"How can I trust you?" he asked. "What do I gain from setting you free?"

Zaanic was lost in a look of wild rapture as his eyes reflected in the edge of the blade. He licked his lips as he tore his gaze away, pointing out across the checkerboard hall.

"Two things, Darion Blaire. First and foremost…this!"

The sound of oiled gears and snicking escapements rose up like a wave. And the floor, all across the echoing expanse of the hall… the floor came up with it. Each marbled square concealed a pillar of shining steel, milled gray walls pistoning up from below to form an ever-changing maze. Darion watched them closely, and he saw the slits and hollows in their monolithic sides; the recesses where blades and needles waited, coiled to strike. They slid and copulated and spun, flickering lasers across the cold air, forming up into avenues of spiked death, dead-end runs where poisoned wires webbed between walls of metal…

And then they were gone.

With a gesture from the ghost of Sergan Zaanic the whole square-mile-wide killing ground clicked and interlocked and fell away, neat and precise as a clockwork toy. When the final black square locked snug with the white ones around it there was no trace of the Labyrinth… none at all.

"I think you could make it, Darion. I really do. Those brain-scans we talked about… they revealed very few weaknesses in you. Of course, we would have tailored the maze to make full use of them, and you would have suffered. Even I only got through by leaving three of my fingers behind."

The young Kheptarch looked out across the hall with a sense of horror. To think that all of that abattoir machinery had been right under his feet, all along…

"But you made it. You reached the Forge. How – why are you trapped in that orb, then? What took you down?"

"That’s the second part of my gift to you, son. A little piece of information I could have done with at the time. You see, we Kheptarchs are like the kings of old. Not the storybook ones… the kings before words and fairytales made them wise and good. We’re more like those armored brutes with axes who raped and butchered their way to power. And in those times most Kings didn’t last."

"Survival of the fittest, of course. Competition. Envy…"

"No. Worse. They were sacrifices, Darion. That was the final test – the one I failed. In order to give the damned what they want, you have to be willing to lead them. I wasn’t. I tried to hold on to life, in my pride…"

Each word was like a knife twisted in his flesh. He didn’t want to hear it. Because if it was true, he’d been genewritten and born and tempered just to be used up. Used by Akheron as the disposable firing-pin in the vast machine of the Forge.

His blade sliced a swift, fatal X through Lord Sergan Zaanic’s prison-orb, shattering it in a spray of artificial blood and brain tissue. Sparks crawled down the arm of a verdigris-rimed copper angel for a second, and then…
The hologram blurred out as the sound of machinery behind the walls reached a crescendo. Things were sliding and hissing in the oily depths below, black and white tiles flipping and shifting. At the same time the hidden pillars of the labyrinth maze were set in motion, rising up to form a kind of pixilated topography, a vast mile-wide image like a printout from some ancient dot-matrix engine.

It was a human face, and its laugh was a cyclopean wall of sound, rolling back in waves of echoes from the vaulted ceiling of the hall.

"We all die, Darion Blaire!" hissed the fading voice of Zaanic, as his face bled back into featureless black and white. "All who touch the Forge, all who know its power. Sacrifices, every one. And so far, none have been willing to pay the price."

 

Ω

 

In the end, it couldn’t have been easier. The parasite bored into Abdulafia’s mind had sought refuge in his crescent unit during their desperate escape through the Outer Dark, and it coiled there still, a traumatized fragment of Asag’raal itself.

No doubt the destruction of the Worm’s avatar out of the Spillway was a big part of it, but Technician Nyl had no way of knowing what his young protégé CeeAn had achieved. All he cared about was the sample, and what it represented.

Originally, he’d wanted to simply tame the Worm and turn it against his enemies. But when it broke through into the world he’d seen another way – a better way. When the damned thing spawned he’d be there, a metal spermatozoa to its gelid black egg. It meant integration with that darkness, first and foremost. Then the corruption of the Slavesystem Everdark. And then…

He could see it all so clearly in his mind – a web of silvery wires woven from Unity nanotech, ramifying in a cerebral stranglehold through the brain of Asag’raal’s young. And at the core of it, the spider in that neural web would be Gharfos Nyl, enthroned in unassailable new flesh.

So what if a few million humans died? Their world was under siege already, another disposable battleground for the Motherbrain and the Praetor to tear apart.

Nyl tore the black crescent from around ‘Afia’s shoulders, priming twenty layers of alien countermeasures between his mind and its infected wetware. Silver cables coiled down to lock in place, binding him to the sample, crushing it between digital fists…

And the Worm screamed.

"Yes! Mother Nature’s a bitch, isn’t she Asag’raal? There’s no way to stop the spawning now… and I have you right where I want you! All that remains is to use the Forge, and then…"

But something caught the alien renegade’s attention. Something looming out of the drifting smoke, even bigger and more dangerous–looking than Nyl himself.

"Allright, you twisted insect fuckhole," said Jaq Haszan. "Why don’t you just step away from my friend there?" The seven-foot steel monolith of Grief flickered with violet sparks in the gloom, lighting up his scarred and bloody face. "And if your kind have a God, I suggest you tell him you’re on your way home."

 

Ω

 

The city was overrun.

Saprophytes scuttled and lurched through the streets of Elysium, transformed into stygian chasms by fire and ruin. Black shadows perched atop the habs like gargoyles, transparent teeth dripping. Things like great skinless wolves prowled the barrios of Saint Pete’s, and amorphous horrors slithered through the pipes and tubes beneath.

But the prey was gone. Far too many of them had escaped.

Some of the weaker Saps had already died, starving away to scrawls of sticky darkness. Others turned on each other in vicious internecine dogfights, packs of them ravening and screaming in the deeps of the Subcity.

The Exalted ruled now. But for how long, their master couldn’t say.

"Higher, you fools! Higher! We must have the Forge… and we must have the key to unlock it."

Asag’raal was worried, and anxiety was one emotion the Harvester-apostate wished he had never digested with his prey. He had always been a simple creature, a thing of hunger and desire. He wasn’t used to any scheme, plan or machination more complicated than ‘devour/shit/repeat’… but then again, he wasn’t used to being a ‘he’ either. The fragments of personality which Asag’raal had bound together into a soul came from the memories of a postphysical alien demigod, damned human sacrifices, and the minds of the Exalted in equal parts. Not the best tools to work with… but they were all he had.

There was a time, only a few hours ago, when the Worm was utterly certain of victory, when the seed of its spawning had quickened deep inside its twisted-off little proto-universe. Then Kaito Kayzi had defeated one of Asag’raal’s many faces inside the Wetsystems. Eddie Tsien had tricked his way out of damnation and enslavement. Now… now CeeAn and her makeshift army had thrown back his avatar in the flesh. Asag’raal had felt the meddling hand of his brothers behind her power.

"All of you! My slaves, my pets, my children! This world is only the first of millions we will feast upon… but if you fail me now, your torment will redefine the agonies of hell!"

Oh yes… there was desperation behind its rage now. The Devourer may have been as subtle as a hammer to the face, but he was no fool. The dim throb and pulse which still came to him from the infected Wetsystems whispered secrets, fragments of images from the Counterweight above. The way to the High Throne was opened. Vanecke’s bastard was so very close… but he would fail. Children, or so he’d found, were so easy to terrify.

Hope was yet another emotion which the Worm didn’t want to understand. But that was what it held for the parasitic fragment of itself coiled up in Abdulafia 330’s soul. Of course, the shock of slipping sideways through the Outer Dark had driven that part of him deep, down through some kind of interlock and into the human’s artificial second brain…

Asag’raal saw his mistake too late, as Technician Nyl’s transparent knives unfolded in front of him. He felt the connections parting like sliced-through sinews, locking him down in a core of black plastic.

And his rage was all the more terrible for the fact that it was born of fear.

"To the tower! Every last one of you – NOW! Flay them alive! Rip them limb from limb!"

In the streets of Elysium, a million horrors screamed as one. Membranous wings snapped taut, claws flexed, and dripping white teeth grinned in the shadows. All of them turned their faces toward Ground Floor One, drinking in the scent of their prey.

This time there would be no mistakes. This time it would be simple, reduced to the grim mathematics of slaughter. A million of Asag’raal’s slaves against barely a handful of human beings… and one Technician of the Multiplicity who would come to regret his hubris. Revenge was within his grasp – for here, in one place, were the Kayzi, that fat fool Haszan, the mekanikal ruin of Eddie Tsien, and his unwilling slave Abdulafia 330. The one called Akheron he would keep, along with his bastard son.

But Nyl must die. There was no question of that.

Asag’raal tried not to think about what would happen if the alien actually succeeded. It was bad enough that he had a plan at all… that he was arrogant enough to put it into motion. But the worst part - the part which stung like a thorn in the Devourer’s eye – was that the Technician-thing was right. There was no way to stop the spawning now. Beyond the crack in reality, in a sealed-off bubble of a universe suffused with oily darkness, the seed was growing. One way or another, it would be born.

And it needed to incubate in the core of this planet. The heat and pressure of the abyss would forge it a shell of nickel and iron, making it perfectly at home in the vacuum of space.

Empathy was the most dangerous emotion of all. It was pity, and compassion, and all the things which Asag’raal loathed most bitterly. But now the Blackest Destiny knew a little of that vile condition too. Because like countless billions of its victims before it, the Worm finally knew what it meant to be afraid.

 

Ω

 

"You’re lucky I’m so damn good at this. In fact, you’re lucky you built me with a little technical acuity at all, Kronos."

"Do you expect me to thank you?"

"In the circumstances… not really. But hey, at least your head’s facing the right way. I’d hate for you to have nothing but an arse to look at for the rest of your life."

"And what makes you think I’ll stay trapped here for any length of time?"

"Who said anything about lengths of time? The rest of your life is going to be interesting, educational… and short. That much I can promise you."

Eddie Tsien stepped back from his masterpiece, tilting his head to one side. His depth perception was right off, considering the lack of his left eye… but it didn’t look too bad. A lazy coil of crycelium reeled itself back into the sheared metal scar which defined that side of his body, the shape of a flathead screwdriver at its tip.

"See, I’ve felt the infection. I know the name of the parasite which has your Wetsystems hostage. And I can’t for the life of me think of a better revenge than letting it eat you."

Kronos’ head was on the right way round, but that was a small mercy. Indeed, Tsien may have only stitched him together this way so that he could enjoy the look on the pseudocerebrate’s face as Asag’raal ground his mind to mincemeat. A little injection of second-gen Chimera tech had bound up his wounds perfectly well, but it wasn’t loss of blood and muscle and bone that was going to hurt the most. It was the fat steel-jacketed data cable drilled clear through his skull and into the artificial brain beneath. Not tissue… not this one. Lancaster had built this angelic body for his patron Engine, and its cranium held a blanked, forbidden A.I. core torn from the wreckage of a Separatist warplane.

"I know that I haven’t got long to live. I know what the Chimera’s doing to me. It’s… it’s already hard to focus on the important things… making you suffer, for instance. But I’m going to enjoy this next part. Count on it."

Chained to the wall, raped by data-feed cables, Kronos could only watch in horror as Eddie reached for the switch…

 

Ω

 

The Throne.

The Kheptic prince’s hands were trembling as he stood before its command console, staring at a transparent holoscreen. He held his breath, plucked up his courage, and completed the circuit.

"You have selected MANUAL CONTROL," intoned a voice without gender or inflection. "All Forge processes have been switched to exterior operation. A.I. subsystems offline."

 

Ω

 

It was all a calculated act.

Kronos expanded into the heart of the Subduction Phase as a fractal starburst of eyes, a turbine-engine of light nestled amid a gyroscope of rumbling electromagnetic rings. This was the heart of his power, infection or no infection, and before Asag’raal could strike he’d still be able to slam home the overrides and use the Forge…

Except that he couldn’t.

High above the churning heart of the Phase, in a tiny room welded to the living rock of the Counterweight, somebody had thrown Kronos’ greatest weapon into manual control. It had slipped through his grasp, and into human hands.

Now that the process was underway there was no way to make it stop. Sections of the Wetsystems which had been locked down to slow the onslaught of the Worm lit up cherry-red across the Machine’s vast schematic overlay.

Too many of them were infected. Far too many. No matter who activated the Forge now, it would be warped out of true by the will of Asag’raal, and only hell would come from it.

And worse… the Guardian Engine could feel its enemy closing in.

The Devourer had been all but driven from the Wetsystems by Kaito Kayzi, but the presence of Kronos here in the Phase was like blood in the water. Phantom shapes flickered around the periphery of the Wetsystems, out near the edge of the R.T. where the decay was at its deepest. They were massing, twining together, slithering from one infected sector to another with the slow, sinuous purpose of hunting snakes.

Soon they would reach the Subduction Phase. And directly below it… a dome of processor cores steaming in a lake of liquid nitrogen. The living brain of Kronos.

It seemed that Eddie Tsien was about to get his wish after all.

 

Ω

 

It was dying time.

But this wasn’t the Kheptarchs’ game, or some slay-per-view pitfight.

It wasn’t even a matter of life and death - because nobody was coming out of this one alive.

At least, it didn’t seem that way from where Haszan was standing.

Jaq parried low and came back with a sweeping cross-body slice, only to find Grief blocked by a pair of forward-curved sickle-swords in the hands of Technician Nyl. Infuriatingly, the alien creature had reverted to its human skin… mocking him with his ineffectiveness.

That wasn’t to say that the Railblade didn’t blur and hum through the air like a silvery shadow, slicing whole artificial trees down to stumps. It was just that Nyl, even in the guise of Zeon, was far too fast for him to actually hit.

"That’s enough playtime, primitive. Now, a little lesson in finesse…"

Haszan was forced back against the charred wreck of the Ashishi masslifter as those twin blades spun into a flickering storm, skirling and slithering across his desperate defense. He swung Grief with both hands, coming in overhand to try and batter Zeon down to the ground, but it was no use… even his immense strength was nothing compared to the biomekanikal artistry of the Technician’s lab-forged body. He met the railblade with a crossed X of steel, parrying it away even as Jaq subvocalized a command and sent a railgun slug hissing past his cheek.

He was in trouble. He knew it.

"Too bad you weren’t around when I needed human muscle, Jaq. You could have been Dervashi material…"

There was an oily little double-click behind him.

"I still am," said a voice from out of the smoke.

A double-discharge of buckshot picked Zeon up and slammed him sideways through the air, screaming. It was Rugal 301, and he held a short-handled mace in each hand. There was a hole drilled through the head of each weapon… the barrel of a combat shotgun. Sawn-off, welded to reinforcing rods which ran down their gently curved grips – these were lovingly handmade tools, and they fit into Rugal’s fingers just right. Before his former master hit the ground he was already a blur of mahogany-colored muscle and flying steel, bringing both maces around in a skull-crushing arc.

Haszan didn’t wait to see if he could take Zeon alone. He was in there with Grief even as the Illuminatus flickered out of phase, handspringing back and blocking both of Rugal’s weapons with his feet. He cartwheeled up with his sickle-swords whistling through a savage kata, carving left and right to block the storm of metal bare inches from his skin.

Everything devolved into a hot blur as Grief took over, its battle-cogitators smoothly adopting control of Haszan’s nervous system. He was a machine on automatic, angling the great flat edge of the railblade across in a series of looping curves. Rugal was just as fast, spinning his maces through the gaps in Grief’s wall of death.

But Zeon was even faster. His swords were everywhere at once, not only blocking and parrying Jaq and the Dervashi’s attacks, but finding the flaws in their assault as well, twisting through to nick and slice any inch of unprotected flesh. The damned creature was actually smiling as he fought.

Jaq knew that he couldn’t keep up this kind of pace. He remembered how heavy the blade of Grief had felt in his hands down on the Archangel Uriel when it had run out of power, and he suppressed a momentary shudder. If he was left high and dry like that now, the alien in Zeon’s skin would slice him to ribbons…

"Demon! I admonish thee to the pit of Hades! I shall deliver my brothers from your wrath, and smite you with the iron rod of the Lord!"

This time, it wasn’t just the click of a single pair of hammers. Brother Pious had rallied the rest of the survivors of the Masslifter crash with him, and they brought Technician Nyl up short with a battery of motley firearms.

"Very poetic – but totally inaccurate," said the Technician, circling warily in a ring of enemies. His skin was torn ragged all along his forearms, and hard metal glistened beneath. "Two of you or twenty… I’ll finish you all before I take the Forge. I wouldn’t want a dagger in my back, after all."

"Give it up, Zeon. Leave this place now, and I’ll let you walk." That was Rugal 301. They certainly weren’t Jaq Haszan’s sentiments. "GO! Just leave us the body of our Dervashi brother…"

"He’s not dead, you fool! He’s just going to wish that he was when he wakes up. I’ve got plans for Abdulafia 330, slave… plans which require him breathing. I won’t guarantee he’ll still get to keep his mind, though."

"In nomine patri, et fili, et spiriti sancti…"

"Oh, just fucking shoot him already!" shouted Haszan. "He’s stalling for time!"

"Touche," said the alien Technician, bringing his blades up and around in a vertical spin. Each one split apart like a courtesan’s fan as he twisted their ornate grips, sliding and clicking until he held a great oversized throwing-star in each hand. "Come on then, you filthy mud-apes. Show us what those opposable thumbs can do."

The noise was nothing short of spectacular.

Nyl erupted from his human skin in a blaze of quicksilver, strafing left as a hail of bullets and maser blasts shredded the air. He was behind the charred ribcage of the masslifter before Jaq, Rugal or Pious had even moved, letting a storm of flying lead skip and whir and ricochet behind him. Jaq propelled himself up after the alien, letting Grief pull him along in its wake. He watched Rugal go out wide, chambering two new round in his mace-guns. Pious spread his black robe out like a pair of raven wings and leaped, though – right up to the broken back of the ‘lifter, a telescopic quarterstaff snapping out from within their folds as he flew.

He was right on the money.

Nyl appeared atop the ‘lifters tail boom, and his arm was drawn back over his head to strike. Even the very fastest of the Exodus gunmen hadn’t been able to lead him, and shots flew wide around him as he snapped his wrist forward, launching that five-fingered blade in a flat blur.

Pious attacked at the same time, and his technique was right out of the Codex Martial. The quarterstaff he called Martha blazed at both ends with a killing charge of electricity, and it came spinning from his hand in a halo of blue fire. Jaq watched its flat end hammer home against the Technician’s temple, punching him ten feet sideways… and then it rebounded, right back into the Valle Crucis’ waiting hand.

His own attack was irreversible - already calculated by the hard, spiteful core of anger inside Grief. It sheared the whole damned wreck in two, slicing through its tail with a scream of tortured steel.

Nowhere left to hide, you slippery bastard. Come and get…

Sweet hells – those blades!

The first he heard of it was a thin and bubbling scream, cut off short. There was a sound like a lawnmower slicing through meat, and a series of agonized cries rung out behind him. Guns clattered to the floor, forgotten. Behind it all ran a mind-blurring hum, the sound of antigrav generators and spin motors pushed to their utmost limits.

Jaq saw Nyl come out of cover to snatch his throwing-star out of the air, and he squeezed off a railgun slug toward him. The creature’s other blade snapped forward spinning, and the slug caromed away, deflected. He watched Rugal come in low under Nyl’s guard, and he saw the twitch of satisfaction on the big man’s face as he hammered at his former Master’s ribs. The Technician rolled with the blow, turning it into an agile handspring - but the Dervashi spun his weapons around, leveling them like a pair of six-shooters.

Even over the screams, the gunfire and the chime of falling shells Jaq heard those double triggers click home.

The blast caught Nyl high in the chest, upside down, and he flipped over backwards, violet blood steaming against the tiles. Pious was airborne too, holding his quarterstaff like an impaling spike. Jaq wrenched Grief loose and followed on, bringing the seven-foot blade around in a forehand slash as he leaped. Behind him he could hear the slide and snap of reloading guns.

But Zhe wasn’t done yet.

He turned his headlong slide into a crouch and launched himself back at his tormentors, blocking Pious high and twisting the staff from his hands. Then his eyes narrowed, and the blade he should have saved to parry Grief - the one which the railblade had already calculated for – shot out at waist height in a silver blur.

It caught Rugal 301 dead center, and it went right through him, hooking left to take a diagonal segment out of an A.K.–wielding Celestial’s skull. Jaq twisted left as he watched the giant shuriken’s parabola play out in neon behind his eyes… Then Grief caught it on the backswing, shattering the damned thing to pieces. An instant later and it would have carved Haszan in two, before it slapped back into Nyl’s waiting palm. Rugal 301 slid in half, gurgling.

"One down, two to go!" hissed the alien, coiling himself to spring. "It doesn’t get any easier, though. Sorry if you thought I was going to play fair."

Nyl’s arm was utterly inhuman now… a spiked mantis appendage underslung with wires and tubes. One of them split, unfolding down the middle...

"It’s got guns as well," groaned Jaq. "Just what we needed."

He didn’t wait around at point-blank range to see what those alien cannons could do. Haszan broke right, rolling across the tiles to bring Grief up like a shield. He could hear the screams as particle-beam fire licked out over his head, reducing his allies to ashes one by one. Pious hammered at the Technician with his staff, bending it almost double across the back of Nyl’s head, but the alien was beyond playing with them now. He backhanded the Valle Crucis away laughing, then got back to the business at hand, blowing chunks of flesh from the fleeing remains of Jaq’s little army.

All but one.

There was a figure in ragged black robes crouched right over the body of Abdulafia 330, and it seemed that nothing could touch him at all. Incandescent rods of light sliced up the air around him, blasting his allies to dust, but he didn’t even look up at the snarling face of Technician Nyl. A pair of cheap Subcity railpistols hung loose in his red-gloved hands.

"There. That ought to do it."

Nyl froze, the savage grin suddenly tight and brittle on his sliver face. He tried to center his cannons on the ragged figure as it stood, pulling back its cowl… but something stopped them, pushing them off center as if with invisible magnets.

"Your targeting subsystem might take a bit of repairing. Nice architecture, very concise… but there are ways around things like that. No – I wouldn’t try to shoot if I were you. Blowback on those things looks to be a bitch."

It was Kaito Kayzi, and the black jewel screwed into his temple was ringed around with crimson, wires glowing hot under his skin.

"What – what have you done to me? How…?"

"Oh, don’t bother," said the Kayzi. "They always ask. But I’ll tell you the same as all the rest – it’s a trade secret. You know what didn’t help? The stupid, arrogant way you were running an open band, sub-aematerial five-dimensional relay back to your masters. Hope they’re watching!"

"But – you’re human!" wailed Nyl, backing up against the wall. "You can’t break Multiplicity code! It would take the minds of twenty human prodigies a lifetime just to work out the raw mathematics!"

Kaito tapped the jewel in his skull as the floor lurched, and vast machineries below began to groan and grind. The Technician had nowhere left to run as Kaito stalked toward him, with a look on his face that belonged in the sub-basement of a psychiatric prison.

"Lucky I’ve got thirty-two then," he said. "Now – there’s somebody I’d like you to meet. Face to face, as it were. You two are so very much alike. It’s a shame I couldn’t have brought you a box of rubbers and some champagne."

The floor snapped open. Light came up out of the gap like a blade, splitting Nyl right up the middle. All across the echoing cavern of Ground Floor One it was the same - the whole great marbled mosaic was a cyclopean iris, a lid over the reactor-core of the Subduction Phase.

One of Nyl’s hooves was on either side of the line, and it was growing wider with every second…

But the Technician still had one of his five-bladed shuriken left. Each of its tines was three feet long, bright with blood as he brought it back over his head.

"You can’t hack this, you little shit!"

Jaq was too far away. He was still rising to his feet as Kaito brought up his pistols – a futile gesture. Rule Four definitely applied here – a sword could deflect a bullet, but a bullet definitely couldn’t deflect Nyl’s whirling storm of swords.

But Brother Pious was right there. His quarterstaff was gone – broken in two. But he had his rosary wrapped around his hands like a garrote, and he leaped on the alien from behind, cinching the chain of malachite beads around his neck in a deathlock.

"May the Lord have mercy on your soul… if your kind have one!"

The shuriken folded down with a series of surgical little clicks. It collapsed back into a single blade, and Nyl thrust it back under his arm, stabbing clean through the Valle Crucis’ chest and out through his back. Blood flew in a wide crimson arc.

But the damage was done. Brother Pious was dead weight, and he dragged Nyl off balance, tugging him forward over the lip of the abyss. Bright white light swallowed him up as he fell, rosary beads scattering from their broken chain.

Technicians of the Multiplicity were powerful, cunning, deadly, and almost immortal. But gravity always collects. Gharfos Nyl, Hierophant Grade III, hung there on the edge for a second, a scream of anguish frozen on his lips. Then he was gone – plunging down into a sea of fire until he was lost against its relentless whiteness.

The floor slammed shut on pistons the size of tenement buildings. The light was suffocated.

And Kaito looked up, right into the face of Jaq Haszan.

"Bring the Dervashi. Now. I don’t have much time."

"Bring him where?" asked Haszan as he slid Grief back into its bindings. "There’s not much city left we haven’t trashed, Kaito."

He should have guessed, even before the Kayzi turned his thin and sweating face upward, staring out through the skylight dome of Ground Floor One to the space-‘lev above.

"To the Forge, Jaqub. To finish what I’ve started."

 

Ω

 

Eddie Tsein had given up. In fact, he was almost happy as he staggered out across the glass bridge away from Ground Floor One, down through the ruins of the Beltway and back home. It was such a weight off his mind to be able to stop caring.

The Chimera had entered its final phase now, and what little was left of the old gutter-cop’s personality was flaking and peeling away under the heat-gun glow of pure mathematics. The hot clarity of that vision tugged at his soul as he sat himself down in the ruins of his old living room, clutching a burnt photograph of his family in his one remaining claw.

He almost didn’t notice the scarred metal obelisk which had punched through the roof of Twenty-Nine Ridgemont. It was only when he heard it sighing to itself that he opened one eye to give it a closer look.

Eddie Tsien didn’t blink for about three minutes as he let his fractured mind fall down into the Chrome Ark. Then he closed his eyes again, and pressed his palm up against its warm silvery flank. A crumpled photoprint of his wife and kids was ironed flat between his hand and the steel.

"So he’s dead, you say. And you came out of that last Aematerial jump on the wrong curve… I know. It’s hard to twist their orders just right. But if you can, you can fuck ‘em, and nobody can catch you out for it." Tsien nodded, letting the voice of the Ark echo up through the glass latticework of his thoughts. "Sounds like a complete prick, if you ask me. But what can I do? I’m just a busted-up wreck like you guys…"

The Ark told him.

 

Ω

 

Everdark dragged itself up out of the ocean, the very image of the Great Beast of Revelations. Pious had been all too right.

The Slavesystem wasn’t used to being vexed by crawling things like humans. Species slated for extermination were supposed to go quietly into the dark… this outrage was unheard of in all its centuries of service to the Motherbrain.

And so it started climbing.

Everdark could sense the one who’d burned it – the hard, bright little gem of his mind flickering with primitive binary. He was both more and less than the rest of these human things, plugged into an unfolding A.I. core that would soon tear his brain apart. But before that happened, he would be subsumed. It was the only way to find out how the little bastard had achieved what a million other doomed races couldn’t.

Those cracks in reality must be his doing as well. Everdark had thought they belonged to the Technician, the damned Praetor-slave he’d eradicated with one swift particle cannon blast. But no… it was this Kaito Kayzi he should have been worried about. He’d caused the Slavesystem pain. Discomfort. Worse… he’d forced the great machine to deviate from its program.

The immense claws of Everdark’s colossus-form bit deep into the tower of the space-‘lev as it hauled itself ever higher. When it reached the great rock of the Counterweight, it would tear the whole damned thing apart to find him.

 

Ω

 

Darion leaned back against the cool smooth leather of the High Throne. He felt the needles go in – a battery of them slipping through between his vertebrae, down the whole length of his spine.

A cool numbness enfolded him as the globe above began to shift and peel open, insect legs working busily around him. It hummed, a subsonic which came in through his bones.

And it took the world away, collapsing the view through that bubble of diamondglass down to a fragment. What came in around the edges…

They were the dead.

There were millions of them, whole nations of the damned, and they loomed up around him on every side in an immense sphere of suffering. The force of their desire came down on the Kheptic prince like a hammer, forcing him to his knees even before he was fully manifest in their virtual hell.

It was an arena – a coliseum-globe like the hollowed inside of a moon, and every wall was covered with bleeding flesh. They’d been stitched together in a cruel mosaic, arms and legs and head tessellated and interlocked until there were no gaps between them, mirroring the way that their minds were spliced into the Wetsystems.

All those eyes, pleading for death. The ones who still had lips and tongues and teeth were screaming at him, demanding, threatening and cajoling in a thousand dead languages…

This is what had killed Sergan Zaanic. Darion could feel the sheer tidal force of that will to die bleeding his mind dry as he knelt on the immaterial black sand of that place, uncontrollable tears dripping down his cheeks.

He couldn’t do it.

 

Ω

 

Brother Pious disintegrated as he fell, his flesh burning away to incandescent dust, his bones glowing red-hot for an instant before they blew apart. Technician Nyl let the remains of the Valle Crucis blow out behind him, twisting into his slipstream as a fine black cloud.

There – deep in the abyss of light.

It was Kronos. His true form, the pure mathematics of his being scribed across five dimensions as a series of rolling geometric patterns. Neon astrolabes and mandalas, fractal engines interlocking like clockwork mountains…

And then there were the eyes. Technician Nyl stopped falling and hung in the bright white nothingness, surrounded on all sides by great non-Euclidean vortices.They blinked and stared at him with glass-black irises, slits torn open in reality. Above him the virtual sky was peeled back at the heart of a scrawled blue pentagram, and an eye the size of a wrecking ball fixed him under its gaze, licks and shivers of code blurring across its glassy surface. Its iris had teeth.

"You! I should have known you were working together! You, who brought Asag’raal here in the first place! I’m going to enjoy taking you apart, Technician of the Multiplicity!"

"Fool! You know my kind can’t be destroyed! What makes you think that…"

But the words caught in his throat as he felt the power behind Kronos’ threat.

Here at the very center of the Phase, where the Guardian Engine held the impossible mathematics of the Forge in its hand, the titanic energies of that Planck-scale nanoassembler were balanced by a gyroscope the size of a small city. Its magnetic rings ground by in their eternal gyre, running on bearings as big as manufactoria, supported and driven by axle-shafts a quarter-mile around. Normally their magnetic fields kept the anomaly at Kronos’ heart caged in.

But now they focused on the exotic metal shell of Technic Hierophant Gharfos Nyl, and he felt his skin lifting away from the star-forged bones beneath.

"Wait! Stop!" he shrieked. "We can make a deal! I have the Worm right where I want it! Think, Kronos… we can take this whole multiverse apart, you and me! We can supplant the Praetor himself!"

The pseudocerebrate only laughed.

"Why take apart the whole of reality, when the only thing I want to destroy is right in front of me?"

Then those cyclopean coils spun up to full power, and Nyl’s skin began to boil like mercury on a skillet. He tried to scream, but vast tractomorphic energy fields tore the lips from his face, stripping away liquid strips and gobbets of alien flesh.

Oh no… he couldn’t be destroyed. All of that exotic matter was still alive, spread out thin across the inside walls of the Phase in torment. Nameless organs were torn pulsing from inside his eka-steel rib carapace. Miles of nanofilament tendon and muscle peeled away, unraveling…

And the black crescent he’d stolen from Abdulafia – the one which held a captive fragment of the Worm – cracked open with a sound like a gunshot. Suddenly the silver vortex of Nyl’s dissolution was shot through with darkness.

It clung to the outline of his bioelectric field like a ragged cloak, mewling and hissing as the physical shell of its captor was blown apart. They merged there in the actinic furnace of Kronos’ heart, and Nyl was able to hold on just long enough to keep his sanity intact…

"We are one, Kronos! And now… now I will devour you from the inside out!"

There was only a fraction of a second left in which the pseudocerebrate could act. The core of the Phase was designed to strip souls naked, down to living data, and shunt them into the Wetsystems, just like it had done to poor Zone Doubt. But if this hybrid thing, this black and silver wraith was to be let loose inside the ‘systems now…

Kronos ran through the schematics of its own vast body at the speed of light. It found what it was looking for even as Nyl stabbed upward into the teeth of its single great eye, his hand burning with shadow flames.

There. A stopgap solution, but it was all it could find. A back-door escape plan, in case its fortress-city of Elysium was overrun…

"Activate personality core download! Side-shunt – Phase central subject eject! Prepare exile cluster for emergency launch!"

Nyl felt the light and pressure and suction of it. He felt himself being torn from the glowing remnants of his exotic-metal skeleton, and the infection with him. They were one now, but not in any way he’d planned…

Gauss locks and black ice slammed shut behind him. The pressure grew, squeezing and compacting him down into a heat-sink-heavy rod of artificial brain tissue, a rubber-skinned pod inside…

Oh no. Not that.

But it was too late to do anything about it.

Gharfos Nyl left his body behind as a thin plating of alien flesh across the dome of the Subduction Phase. And his mind rode a pillar of fire up through level after level of underground hangars, trap-doors irising open before the nosecone of a slim white missile. The Core Transport had already broken the sound barrier by the time it burst from the flank of Elysium, shadowed by a flock of tiny interceptor craft. Everdark took a swing at the long pale ship as it sped past, but it was out of reach and still accelerating, punching through the clouds and off into space.

Its destination – the cold orbit of Pluto.

 

Ω

 

Akheron’s hands were bloody knots of bone and mincemeat by the time he tore the door from its hinges. Something critical had snapped in his mind, and he staggered through the wreckage of Ground Floor One with a single purpose burning in his brain.

The Forge.

Darion had gone ahead of him to clear a path. Now it was time for him to ascend to godhood – a state in which he wouldn’t need his ruined hands at all.

That part of him which was still Octavio Vanecke recognized the shape of Jaq Haszan as the doors of the space-‘lev closed in front of him, and he cursed. That meddling, treacherous oaf! Haszan was supposed to be muscle, nothing else, and here he was standing in the way of a living god!

But no… it didn’t matter. Darion was his son, his apprentice – and he was waiting up above. There was no way that Jaq or his little friends could stop a Kheptic warrior, especially when their Dervashi friend was almost dead.

The vast mechanisms beneath Ground Floor One hissed and spun, loading another ‘lev capsule in place like a bullet sliding into the chamber of a revolver. Its doors slid back, revealing ivory and cedarwood, silver and red leather.

He’d be there soon. And then Haszan would be caught between the hammer and the anvil.

 

Ω

 

Kaito came into the Forge control room to find Darion huddled up in one corner, crying. Not the real Kheptarch prince – just a holographic copy. The real Darion Blaire was still locked down tight to the Throne, needles drilled into his bones and mekanized clamps peeling his eyelids open.

"I can’t do it! I… I don’t want to be like them!"

Haszan was only a second behind him, and he was carrying the body of Abdulafia 330 in his arms. The Dervashi warrior looked tiny and fragile as Jaq layed him out on the treadplate floor, twitching and muttering in his sleep.

"I thought… I thought I could disengage. I thought It would let me go! But Zaanic was right. It kills anyone it touches!" Darion was almost hysterical, wrenching the words out between fits of anguish. "What have we created? What have we done?"

Kaito looked into his huge mismatched eyes, and he saw in them a fragment of his own dissolution. The ache inside his head was constant now, as thirty-one other voices babbled and shouted at cross-purposes. The fact that they were all him made absolutely no difference.

"Oh… umm, Kayzi. I think you’d better see this. I think… I think we’re in trouble here."

Jaq was out on the little meshwork platform which surrounded the Throne, looking down toward the Earth. When Kaito leaned out next to him, he saw exactly what his friend was talking about.

It was Everdark, and the Slavesystem was more than halfway up the tower. The alien machine seemed to know that Kaito was watching, and it fixed him with a murderous stare from all six of its sensor-clusters. It eyeless face split in a jagged chasm as it roared, clawing its way toward him with a burst of speed and ferocity.

"I’m all out of ideas, Jaq. Sorry. I thought… I thought I’d be able to hack that thing. But if I do, the kid’s going to die."

"So what? He’s a Kheptarch, Kaito. His kind have been enslaving and mind-wiping ours for the last two thousand years! If one of them is the price we pay for survival, I’ll pull the trigger myself!"

Grief hissed from its scabbard in a gunmetal blur. But the blade stopped, quivering, mere inches from Darion’s neck. Katio was holding it back with the sheer effort of thirty-two focused wills, slicing deep into the railblade’s A.I. heart.

"Do you want to be as bad as them? As bad as those fucking monsters of Jiang’s? There has to be a better way, Haszan…"

"There is. I… I know what we have to do."

It was Abdulafia 330, and both Jaq and the Kayzi recoiled from the sizzling corona of his bioelectric field. Compared to the force of will which the Dervashi was using to keep himself alive, the power Kaito had brought to bear upon the railblade was absolutely nothing. Even so, he moved like a strung-up cadaver, staggering across to the Throne with grim determination.

"He told me what it was. Zeon. He told me that in the end I’d have to sacrifice myself to the Forge. That was why I was made. That was why he stole me from the biotects, all those years ago."

Darion stared up at him from two sets of eyes – one holographic, the other pried open with cruel surgical steel.

"Lord Simeon?" he asked. "Father? Is that…?"

"No. I’m… I’m someone else, child. Someone who knows what to do." The battle-clone swept his deadlocks aside as Jaq and Kaito stepped away from the Throne, exposing a row of bleeding sockets in his neck and shoulders. It was the raw wound where his operative crescent had been torn away.

"I’m a warrior of the Ashishim, son. I’ve died so many times I make it look easy. And the reason it don’t matter is right here – this little plug. It’s a link to a thing called the Chrome Ark, and I used to think that it was a link to paradise."

As he spoke the Dervashiman was working with his hands, pulling data-cables and interlocks from among the tools on his belt. He slid a gold-tined adaptor into one of the wounds on his neck, and locked it fast to the skeletal chrome flower hanging above the Throne.

"What are you doing?" asked Kaito. "He’s trapped, ‘Afia – and the Ark is corrupted. We’re all going to die in here if…"

"The Illuminatus is dead, Neophyte! And I am next in line! I am Abdulafia 330, the Right Hand of the Ashishim’s fury, and I will not be stopped!"

The force of his anger tore through the strata of the Cardinal Rock, making the lights above flicker and die. Darion’s holographic image collapsed into a gyre of static and blew away, his mouth open in a silent scream. And Abdulafia looked up from where he was slumped across the tiny body on the Throne, right into Kaito's eyes.

"Trust me. This is the only way. If I fail… well – I’ll see you in the next life with my shame."

His eyes rolled back in their sockets as the machinery above him spat arcs of lightning.

Jaq dropped Grief to the ground as a halo of St. Elmo’s fire licked up and down its edge.

And Kaito felt his parasitic twins turning his head too look out the window, down toward the curve of the Earth. It was eclipsed by something huge and dark, swinging in like a wrecking ball…

It was Everdark’s hand, and in the next instant it was locked around the Counterweight in a death grip.

 

Ω

 

Abdulafia materialized face-down on the hot black sand of the Forge chamber, spitting ferrous grit from between his teeth. He groaned as he rolled over, staring up and up into a mélange of aching flesh, a storm of disembodied desire.

Darion was next to him, and he put his arm around the terrified Kheptarch’s shoulders, bowing his head against the Maelstrom. Above him shimmered a crazed and fractured green ikon, an image made of glowing cold glass. It was the ripcord; his link down into the Chrome Ark. It was Sanction Ultra.

"Darion, listen to me. You’re the one who has control of this thing. You alone. But it only has to take one of us. When the time comes, fix the image in your mind of what you want it to do. One thing at a time, start small, and then let it come to you. When it’s done, you hit that interlock. Go to the Ark. My people will find you, and they’ll give you another body, just like mine."

"But… but that means you’ll have to die! You’ll have to take my place…"

The look on ‘Afia’s face was grim as the howling wind of the Forge blew his bloodied dreadlocks out behind him.

"I’ve had a hundred years to make myself ready, kid. If that’s what it takes, I’ll only ask you to do one last thing. Find a warrior called CeeAn 187. Tell her that she made it all worthwhile. Tell her…"

But his words were drowned out by a voice the size of continents, a grinding wall of noise which shook the whole agonized world of the Forge interface.

ARE YOU PREPARED TO LEAD US INTO DEATH? ARE YOU HERE TO END OUR SUFFERING?

Darion stood up in the center of the storm, raising his hands above his head. Abdulafia knelt beside him in the sand, bowed in the attitude of prayer.

"I am Darion son of Simeon of the House of Blaire. I am here to fulfill the promise of Manifest Dogma!"

Forty million wraiths screamed in exultation as they heard his name. Twice as many bloodshot eyes stared down at him, hungry and avid and waiting…

THEN YOU, WHO ARE WILLING TO SACRIFICE HIMSELF FOR HIS WORLD… OPEN YOUR MIND TO THE FORGE. LET THE EARTH BE REMADE IN YOUR IMAGE…

Darion rested his hand on Abdulafia’s shoulder as a pillar of light stabbed down from above, wrapping him up in its glow. The whole world pulsed with a great thunderous heartbeat now, and traceries of lightning crawled across the walls of flesh, earthing themselves through the young Kheptarch’s body.

"We shall start… we shall start with THIS!" he said – and the universe flashed blinding white.

 

Ω

 

Kronos couldn’t stop it. Not with the manual overrides in effect.

It was too late for trickery, for subterfuge and politics and last-minute gambits.

The Forge was unleashed, and behind its wall of searing energy the Last City glowed arterial red.

Great crimson petals of force spread out like glass from the blast doors atop the dome of Elysium, as nanomachines the size of viruses cast a net over the sky. They wove an energy field between them which was studded with innumerable tiny manipulators, things which possessed enough force to tear a Technician of the Multiplicity apart, and enough subtlety to strip an atom down to its primary particles. Layered over this tight and hissing web was a control strata made up of human minds – entities which had controlled billions of cells and atoms and neuro-electric pulses all their mortal lives without thinking twice about how hard it should have been.

They all linked back to the Throne, and down a set of hardwired needles into Darion Blaire’s mind.

He told them exactly what to do.

Everdark turned its eyeless casque away from the tower as it felt the Forge unfold below it. But there was nothing the Slavesystem could do as that bloody radiance washed over its body, plucking it from the tower like a tiny insect from the stem of a flower.

The vast machine tried frantically to twist its shape into a form which could fight the Forge’s power, but it was hopeless. It became a jagged star, a teardrop burning with fusion fire, a razor-edged disc… all to no avail. The Forge was crushing it slowly, collapsing it down like a car in the jaws of a compacter.

The Motherbrain had programmed Her explorator system with every trick it had ever learned, though. At the last instant the vast colossus snapped taut in two dimensions, slipping between the jaws of the Forge as an immense solar sail. It turned, catching a wind of radiation, preparing itself for one final transformation. When it returned, it would bring down the most terrible vengeance which cold machinery could manufacture…

But it never escaped the gravity well of Earth.

The blast made Everdark’s particle cannon look like a single pathetic little spark. It came up from the heart of the Forge, a great rosy red rod of energy which nailed the Slavesystem to the heavens. The hole it tore through the nanostuff of the alien machine was the size of a city, and it folded it in around itself, burning and collapsing and dying. That great spike of crimson fire licked back in toward the Earth and merged with the growing bubble-shell of the Forge, now a glittering haze covering an entire hemisphere. It was still growing…

 

Ω

 

Akheron couldn’t believe what he saw as he entered the throne room. His bleeding hands clawed across the gilded angels which framed his nightmare… the evidence of his betrayal.

"No! You treacherous little bastard! It’s mine! I’m a god, damn you!"

"You’re out of your fucking mind, that’s what you are," said Jaq Haszan. "Didn’t you see what he just did? They’ve killed themselves to save us!"

There was no great railblade in the ‘dreno pharmer’s hands. And there was no way he expected the bleeding, wretched figure of Akheron to do anything but collapse into a sad little pile of self-pity. The Kheptarch’s blow caught him right on the point of his chin, and it put him down cold, laid out across a bank of consoles. For the tiny sliver of his soul that had once been Simeon Blaire, that was very satisfying. The part of him which was Octavio Vanecke enjoyed it even more.

"Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing? You can’t come in here!"

A swift snap-kick folded Kaito in two. Then another wild haymaker smashed him down, hammering the black gem in his temple against the corner of a biomonitor screen. The Kayzi’s eyes flickered closed, and the scrawl of neon under his skin faded and died.

Bloody tears trickled down Akheron’s face to splash against the wrought-silver scrollwork of the Throne. He was crazed, pale and sweating as he stepped out onto the platform above the Earth. Red skies spread out beneath him.

"My son! My only son! Why have you forsaken me?" Darion’s eyes were wide open, but he couldn’t see the ornate tanto dagger which his Master slipped from behind his back, clenching it tight between his broken fingers. "I’m sorry, Darion. Sorry that you ever lived at all!"

Then he brought the knife down hard, driving it through the Kheptic prince’s heart just as surely as the Forge had pierced Everdark with its energy beam.

 

Ω

 

NO! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? HE IS OURS!

Darion’s eyes widened as he fell to the black sand of the Forge chamber. All around him the gyre was breaking apart, dissipating, shattering into a whirlwind of ruby fragments…

Abdulafia looked down at his hands. They were dissolving too, hashed with static.

"I think somebody beat you to it."

 

Ω

 

Kronos felt every second of it. The Guardian Engine writhed in agony inside the Subduction Phase as Darion tore Everdark to shreds. He felt the Forge twisting red-hot hooks into his mind as the cracks in the sky sealed tight. But worst of all, he felt the watered-steel blade in Akheron’s hands as it neatly bisected Darion Blaire’s beating heart. It was all the more awful for the fact that Kronos had no heart of his own – emulated pain tore through his whole being, as hot as molten metal.

CRITICAL SYSTEMS MALFUNCTION

FORGE CONTROL INTERRUPTED – BEGIN MANUAL INTERFACE PURGE SEQUENCE

SHUTDOWN

SHUTDOWN

SHUTDOWN

 

Ω

 

The Manual Interface Purge Sequence was very simple. Because the easiest way to scrape any human wreckage from the Throne was to open the diamond hemisphere it hung inside to vacuum.

Atmosphere funneled out through a pair of meshwork grates in the walls, and the artificial gravity failed, lifting Akheron’s feet off the floor. He could see the great baroque doors of the throne room grinding closed, and he pushed himself off toward them, holding in one last breath…

Kaito woke in the teeth of a hurricane, a storm-wind tearing past him. He was just in time to watch the throne room’s doors slam shut behind Akheron’s heels, and see the usurper’s vicious grin behind a clear foot of diamondglass.

Oh, hells no! He wouldn’t have…

It was cold, all of a sudden – cold enough to rime the machinery of the Forge with frost. He could feel the tide of atmosphere slowing to a trickle as it rushed past his face, and he knew what it meant. There was no air left at all. The stars outside were hard, cold little points of light, calling him home.

The eduplug had taught him what to do if he was ever caught in vacuum. They said you could last all of ten seconds, so long as you kept your eyes screwed shut and clenched every orifice tight…

Ten seconds to find an option better than explosive decompression.

Kaito reached out with his fragmented mind, sending ghosts sleeting through the machines of the Terminal rock. He didn’t know if Jaq and Abdulafia were still alive, but he had to hope. Otherwise, what the hell was he doing this for at all? He’d be dead in half an hour anyway.

Submind number twenty-six found the emergency switch, and tripped it with a howl of atmosphere-breach alarms. But Kaito himself never saw the flood of fast-setting foam which flooded the chamber… that final effort had used up the very last of his energy and his oxygen.

Cold cryogenic soup bubbled and hissed from a hundred hidden nozzles. Foaming clouds of it coalesced around the living and the dead, dropping their core temperatures down past freezing even as smart tube clusters picked them out, twisting through the air to pierce arteries and veins. Oxygenated artificial blood began to flow, pumped by hidden life-support engines hidden in the Station’s walls.

While behind the reinforced glass of the throne room’s locked-down portal, Akheron wept and cursed and screamed, hammering his broken fists against a bas-relief of ivory angels.

It was too late for anything but regret. The Forge was gone, locked down under a stratum of dirty ice.

And down in the city streets the Worm Asag’raal was waiting.

There was nothing left that could stand against it.

 

Ω

 

This was how the Blackest Destiny found him.

With his back to a great twisted spike of metal, cross-legged, his one eye closed and a smile on his lips. Eddie Tsien had lit a whole garden of tiny candles around a crumpled-up old photograph of his family, and he’d weighed it down with his badge.

Asag’raal the Wanderer came to the Beltway arrayed for war – he’d rallied an army behind him of Exalted and Saprophytes and hobbling broken mekan, things which hissed and cowered under his lash. A thousand banners of flayed human skin were lifted high above the heaving backs of his horde as he came down on number Twenty-Nine Ridgemont street in glory, and a thousand times that many dripping cleavers, axes, blades and sickles were clenched in the hands of his slaves.

They loomed over the tiny broken tenement like a wave, suspended just before it could break.

The Super-Cyben opened one eye as the horde closed in around him, and then he shut it again. He grunted to himself with mild annoyance.

"I’m dying anyway, Asag’raal. Leave me in peace."

One of the Exalted twitched for a second as its master slipped into its flesh like a hand into a glove. Bones popped and gristle shifted as a grin split its face in two.

"Peace? What the hell do either of us know about peace, Tsien? No, I think I’ll take you for my own. You’ll soon forget what the fucking word peace ever meant!"

That deep blue eye cracked open again, and this time there was a tiny spark in its depths.

"One last time, creature. You’ve lost. And I’m a dead man. Go and torment the living… if you can find any left. They’ve made this place your prison, Asag’raal."

The truth of it hurt far more than any physical blow. Because the pitiful half-human wretch was right. His army was starving away to rotten bones. His Exalted were already growing slow with the onset of torpor. But this… this was important. This was revenge.

"You think you can threaten me? You? About all you can do right now is die, Edward Tsien. And I’m going to make the experience last."

Eddie sighed, and he ran one immense claw lovingly across the glossy paper of his final memory.

"You’re right, of course. All I can do is die. But I’m going to go out my way. The right way. Like this."

It took all of his control. But with a concentrated effort of will Tsien stopped the great mekanikal heart in his own chest. The fires banked up behind his single eye dimmed and faded…

And as the Exalted cursed, lurching forward to wrap his body in shadows, Eddie appeared inside the Chrome Ark.

He was human once again, in this illusory place – a figure in shades of gray, like the noir detective he’d always wanted to be. His coat swept the cold dry dust at the very bottom of the Arkborn’s chasm, and a bitter wind plucked at the gray fedora on his head.

"Come on, then," he said, addressing the spiral gyre of clouds that built up above him into an anvilhead blur. "I’m here to get you outta here. "

The sky flashed white above him as he let go, and Eddie Tsien was drawn out into a filament of light, puncturing a tiny crack in the Ark’s prison walls. That was all it took.

The Arkborn swarmed in toward that single glowing razorcut, and as they touched it they were woven into it, becoming part of a single tangled thread. There were thousands of Ashishi souls inside the Ark, and they tore the roof off the sky as they came together, drawing the walls of clouds in behind them.

A vortex of purple and gray thunderheads funneled up and out around the glowing pillar which was all that remained of the Arkborn. Tsien led them on, through a disorienting series of dimensional shifts… but there was one last task for the dead Ashishim. They speared up through the interstice between life and the Harvester’s inverse ocean, up under the pale green glow of those postphysical architects’ planet-seed. Eddie had no idea that the afterlife ahead of him was a machine, designed to cheat the universal reaper of heat death. He wouldn’t have cared, either.

His business was with Asag’raal the Devourer, and so he bent the incandescent skein of souls over in an arch, arrowing back into the world.

Outside, in front of the ruins of Twenty-Nine Ridgemont, Asag’raal’s chosen shook the lifeless body of Tsien in its great knotted claws. An army of seething darkness loomed up behind it.

But something was wrong. The air was hot and slippery with sparks. The smell of hot copper and pavements after rain came down, and ripples of haze licked across the imitation sky of the Belt.

Then something punched a hole through reality, driving a blazing spear through one of the Exalted. They came one after another – white-hot wires of glass zigzagging through Asag’raal’s horde, looping and twisting like the coils of the Eversio. And they sang, a high, blurring harmonic at exactly the same pitch as the Chrome Ark.

"No! Impossible! You don’t get to win! You’re supposed to DIE!"

Tsien couldn’t answer with words. But his Arkborn were all too happy to deliver his message.

Twenty white-hot tentacles pierced the chosen, tearing its gelid flesh to ribbons. Shadows boiled away in a cloud of reeking smoke… and it was the same all through the heaving, screaming mass of the horde. Asag’raal’s children only followed him out of terror, and the Arkborn offered them release. Those who remained loyal to their master were given no choice – they were ripped to shreds by lashing scourges of light. Soon nothing remained of the whole damned army but a bubbling pool of filth, gently steaming as it gurgled away down the drains of Ridgemont Street.

A neon scrawl hung there in the air for ten seconds, then twenty – fading like the afterimage of the sun on burnt retinas. In its cursive loops a Gnostic might have imagined rows of mystic runes, or a mathematician may have seen the very edges of some otherworldly equation.

Eddie Tsien neither knew nor cared.

That part of him which was human – and it was far more than he’d dared to hope – screamed up through the interstice, dragging the lost and the damned behind him. And he drove the point of his blazing spearhead deep into the inverse ocean with barely a ripple… into oblivion, rest, and peace.

 

Ω

 

Gone. All gone. All dead.

Akheron surveyed his domain, and he wept uncontrollably.

The usurper stood out on a cantilevered balcony above Ground Floor One, leaning against a balustrade of wrought silver ivy. His city was burning, broken… scoured clean of life from the upper domes to the oily waterline. Even Asag’raal’s power was gone, torn out of the world. Some few of his Exalted still crawled in the darkness, but they were slow, bloated with decay. Every living thing had left the accursed shell of Elysium to rot, during the three days he’d spent unconscious in the rock of the Counterweight.

In the depths of his fever he’d dreamed that Simeon Blaire was sawing open the top of his head, a graveyard wight with hollow cavities for eyes, neon light shining through from the shattered dome of his skull. He wanted his body back, and his rusty hacksaw bit deep in slow, deliberate strokes…

When he woke, Akheron knew that it had all been a nightmare.

Unfortunately, the reality of his situation was just as bad.

He was lord of the Last City. He was master of all he surveyed. But all he surveyed was a charnel-yard of twisted metal, of broken masonry and fallen towers. The Pit was half filled with bubbling sewage and saltwater, drowned buildings reflected in its putrid sump. The slopes of Elysium were still smoking, and its habs stood crookedly like broken teeth, torn open and filled with corpses. Kronos was gone – silenced until his slave machines could rebuild him.

Ahh yes… Kronos.

If there was one tiny shred of satisfaction he could take with him from this whole debacle, it was the moment he flicked the switch, dragging the pseudocerebrate back into his body again. The fever had still been on him as he tore wires and plugs from the angel’s back, scattering feathers and blood.

"Whaaa… who? Ohhh, thank goodness! They… they almost had me! I… the Worm… that fucking Super-Cyben… have you any idea how painful it is to be nothing but a severed head?"

Akheron looked down into the six azure eyes of the Guardian Engine, and his mouth twisted into a cruel and bitter smile. A part of him which was definitely Octavio Vanecke came up behind the death-mask of his face, fitting that expression like a glove.

"You know what, Kronos," he said. "I believe that I do."

The laughter which welled up in his throat tasted of bile. He knew that it was the first flush of madness.

That had been his first order of business this morning. He’d made sure the pseudocerebrate was imprisoned in the shell of Ground Floor One before he left.

In his hands the usurper held a short-wave radio, and he unconsciously twisted its dials, trawling through a sea of static. There’d been nothing for the last three hours, and there would probably be nothing ever again. He knew that some of his people had survived – he’d seen Jimson Holgarth’s fleet of zeppelins, and the floating logjam of the Exodus. But where they’d gone, who ruled them now… these were important questions. Politics didn’t die with civilization. Oh no… that was far too simple an assumption. It simply reverted to its most primitive form. Deep in his blackened knot of a heart, Akheron held out a slim hope for dictatorship.

When the signal came through it was weak and hissing, coming in right at the top of the band. But he could hear a voice behind the static, and it pointed him toward the coast of Afrika.

"This is Exodus Prime… calling any survivors, any vessels following the Archangel Uriel… we have set up a transponder and relay network for you to follow. All elements of the fleet are now under the authority of the Ashishim, and we are headed for site-codename ‘Aggarta’, a crater-basin three hundred and forty miles inland from the Afrikan coast. Repeat, this is Exodus Prime, calling any refugees from the fall of Elysium…"

Akheron found that his mangled fingers couldn’t turn the little shortwave unit off. He threw it from the balcony in a pique of anger, watching it tumble end over end into the cold heart of the Forge, down through an open set of blast doors where the white light of Kronos had been extinguished.

But he knew what to do now. The Ashishim were in control, and he… he looked just like their dear departed Sword of the Faithful. With Abdulafia 330 dead – and he’d seen the Dervashi face-down on the throne room floor – who was to say that he, Akheron, wasn’t next in line to command the Exodus?

His face was burned and scarred, scabbed with Kheptic blood. But that would just make it easier for the fools to believe he was their savior. After all, they’d want to believe, wouldn’t they? He’d even tell them that their Illuminatus had kept the faith, that he’d never betrayed them… he could blame it all on Kronos. Nobody ever had sympathy for a damned machine.

Akheron looked out over the ruins of his city, out over the burnt desert-lands of the Sahara, and on, into the clouds which smudged the horizon into a long and dirty haze. There was power out there to be taken. All he needed was a little ambition, and a ton of ruthlessness.

It was going to be a very long walk.