2196 Anno Arbitrium The Ballad of Octavio Vanecke

Brother Pious owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in. His vows of holy duty forbade personal belongings of any other kind, but in a town where a fair few ran around naked in the acid rain this was considered an 'employee bonus'.

Pious was a Valle Crucis monk, so his free uniform wasn't haute couture. It ran to a habit of carbon riotmesh, complete with a deep and shadowy hood, a simple belt of motorbike chain, and a collection of weapons lovingly and individually named, as per doctrine. The Church considered this to be more than enough.

Under the uniform he was a dour, wide-bodied forty-three year old slugger – a collection of scars and aches held together by the Grace of God and the Technologists Biologicae. Every year at Candlemas Pious thought about transferring to an order less militant – the scriptorians, perhaps, or the missionariat. But every year he signed up for another hitch, because boredom would kill him quicker than bullets.

“Hey, Crucis!” yelled a skinny child from atop a tar-paper shack “Who you gonna kill today? You bring me the eyes, I make you rich!”

Pious chuckled to himself. Chop-shop ghouls, out for gratis organs. They always sent the kids.

“Peace, little brother!” he called, waving out with a hand black with crucifix tattoos. “Not this time, not ever! You know I can't guarantee the quality after Martha's seen to them!” He spun the metal staff out from under his robe, three feet of chrome winking in the sun. Her name was etched into the handle in loops of cursive calligraphy.

The kid flipped him off - grinning, and leaped down out of sight, the surgical tools slung around his belt jangling away through the slums.

“God be with you too, child. Him and the Department of Health.”

Pious was down on the spillway this morning, below sea level in the Pit. Here a concrete incline led from the base of Elysium to the flat bottom of the ocean, made a desert by massive and archaic engineering.

Around him moved a bustling throng of traders and pilgrims, walking the Thousand Stairways up and down from the last city. Pious stepped carefully down the so called Blessed Path, hand-cut from the concrete by Tibetan refugees in centuries past. The builders’ great-great-grandkids hawked green tea and skewer kebabs alongside their franchised staircase, but he waved them away, mouthing apologies. All across the miles-wide face of the incline it was the same; a raft of toll funiculars, dangling ropes, pulley-and bucket relays and aluminum ladders dynabolted down tight. This side of the spillway was in Vatican territory, where their wedge ran low into the sea. Halfway across began the no-mans land of the spillway army, and then a more organized front with the Ashishim.

Their turbaned and dreadlocked pickets could be seen lolling on observation platforms, trading bullshit on the radio with their Vatican counterparts.

“This is Frater three-oh-seven-four, calling in,” said Brother Pious, his voice picked up by a tiny gold cross pierced through his lower lip. “All quiet on the Feral front - I'm approaching the target now. Confirm - do we really want to be taking this contract, Chapterhouse?”

A little malachite angel dangling from his earlobe whispered his Frater Superior's reply. Pious sighed. Politics. And how at odds was that with the will of God?

Ahead of him the concrete ramp fell sharply away, and he could see the tiny spiked security line which separated the Reclaimed Territories proper from the shantytown beyond. Out there was called many things by the ordinary folks of the Subcity, and something different again by each Reclamationist faction. It was a place of exile, inhabited by savages and their war-chiefs.

The Vatican called it 'Purgatorio'; the Burb scum called it 'Beyond Thunderdome'. A lot of folks sent money down there to the families they’d left behind.

Immense dams ran rail-straight into the distance on either side of the Pit, the few functional turbines studding their sheer faces guarded by the tattooed tribesmen of the Ferals.

Far off in the hazy distance the endless Sahara came down into the depths, and with it more sinners eager to win their way up into the shadow of Elysium. Pious squinted into the rising sun, watching a far-off train of steam-carriages rumble across the seabed toward the Ashishim gates. The wind rocked him on his heels, sending tiny chips of concrete skittering away down the incline.

Well - time to do this thing. Not the contract he'd have chosen, but his Frater Superior had been most adamant. Apostasy was still a sin.

The Brother hitched up his chain belt and picked his way down to where a great metal rib had burst loose from the spillway. The gargantuan I-beam was forty feet across, rusted to the color of congealed blood. Its tip had been leveled and there, as if in imitation of the artificial gardens of the aristocracy far above, a broad wooden platform had been erected.

Pious checked the address on his commission slip; this was indeed the place.

A fence of bamboo poles surrounded the platform on all sides, their tips sliced off to fashion a palisade of wicked spikes. Pious was surprised to see any kind of wood used for building this high up the spillway, but bamboo was a real oddity. It wasn't until he was knocking on the door that he noticed that the fence was in fact made from lengths of aluminum pipe, painted by hand and welded together.

A tiny click sounded, right at the limits of hearing.

“Wha…”

The door flew open and a hand grabbed the front of the Valle Crucis' robe before he could even blaspheme. Pious felt three heavy blows strike him in quick succession, starbursts of agony popping behind his eyes.

Reeling, the Crucis-man blacked out on his feet. When the world came back he was lying face-down in a little ornamental garden. Across from him, tilted sideways by the awkward position he'd landed in, was a tiny shrine containing (although he had no idea what they were) a two-thousand-year-old Sony Walkman, a faded plastic Gundam action figure, a pair of ivory chopsticks, and a framed photograph of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

“I was told to expect you,” said a voice somewhere in the bright blur above him. A shadow fell across the raked and patterned sand; across Brother Pious' face under its black hood. “And if I were you, I’d be wondering who gave me the news.”

The voice was old. But there was no weakness in it at all – it was dry and hard, like cured oak. Pious looked up into the sunlight, blinking sand out of his eyes. A wide, conical straw hat like the roof of a silo covered the speaker's face to the chin, but there was no mistaking who he was.

Tadashi Murai, the very last of his kind.

“And why wouldn’t you know the name of the person you stole from? He’s not exactly media-shy, is he?”

The brim of that mushroom-cap hat tipped back, and the red morning sun sparkled in the old man's eyes.

“Clever - and uncommonly insightful.” He laughed, snapping his fingers. “Let me ask you this, then… when Direktor Vanecke is involved, is it really wise to trust your senses? Especially sight.“

Pious rolled the kinks out of his neck, his head still aching from those three hammerlike blows. For a geriatric, this guy packed a mean punch. He was right about Vanecke, too. A few millennia back, they would have called the Direktor a Warlock – or kindling.

“I didn't come here to argue philosophy, Murai. Octavio has evidence, and hard currency. I'm only here for the book… It doesn’t matter how you got it, or how I take it off you.”

To his consternation Murai kept laughing, literally holding his sides.

“I'm the last of my nation, Brother Monk,” he said, dabbing at his eye with the cuff of his robe “Why on earth would that old shrunken head own this particular volume, and not I?” Pious swore he hadn't blinked, but now Murai held a slim leather-bound book in his hand, its cover slashed with alien calligraphy. “You think he can even read Japanese?”

Pious' face hardened as he saw those red brushstrokes, like meticulous razorcuts. It was the same one - the artifact from the security video. His hands were slippery around the center of his quarterstaff as it telescoped outward, snapping smoothly into position.

“His lack of education is hardly my concern – thief!”

The old apothecary stepped back out of the weapon's range. He settled into a fighting stance, hefting fists as brown and gnarled as knots of wood.

“I'm going to be kind a let you take that back, gaijin. Surely you don't believe that Direktor Vanecke is telling the truth?”

Pious narrowed his eyes and tightened his grip on the quarterstaff. From one end of the weapon and then the other came a low hum, followed by the ice-blue shimmer of immense voltage. Martha was getting pissed off with this guy.

“Very well,” said Murai. “You should’ve watched more movies, boy. Then you’d know what happens when you attack an old oriental man who appears to be quite defenseless.”

Murai twitched his fingers, beckoning his adversary on, and the quarterstaff whirled into motion. Pious stepped forward swinging.

But the little man had a trick or two of his own.

Murai's hat burst into flames as it ricocheted off the tip of the blazing staff, sizzling past the Monk's face so close it singed his eyebrows. He caught a glimpse of the razorblades woven into its brim as it caromed away, but he never saw the old man tuck and dive, coming inside the arc of his staff…

Now he kicked Pious' legs out from under him, threw him over backwards, and handsprung back to his feet in a flurry of dun cotton. But he didn’t get away clean. Pious rolled forward across the hot sand and grabbed Murai's foot, snarling a very unpriestly curse. Tightening his grip he spun once, twice, and let his adversary fly. The Valle Crucis spat sand and blood out into the palm of his hand - and a busted molar, shaken loose.

There was a very satisfying thud, rattling the fake bamboo.

Brother Pious retrieved his quarterstaff and turned to finish the job, but Murai was already standing, brushing the dust from his robe.

“We shall dispense with the basics, then,” he said, snapping off a sharpened length of aluminum and striding forward…

He was being watched.

As the ring of metal on metal echoed across the spillway an insect inlaid with jet and gold tracked the fighters' every movement. It sat on the bowed end of a reed, bent into a parabola by its weight – part of the peach-fuzz of wild vegetation stubbling the roof of Tadashi Murai’s shack.

The flycam was the size of its annoying namesake; one of a legion carried by cross-traffic thermals through the vents and shafts of Elysium. Its brothers were sown like seeds from Omnivasive news 'copters and camera trucks; they were placed by a net of operatives. Through them, Direktor Octavio Brandolph Vanecke saw much that others missed. He took great pains to see things which he wasn't supposed to.

The Direktor lusted after that copy of the Hagakure with its real leather and paper, but he was old enough to know that he couldn’t have everything he desired. What he had was information – by the ream, wad, tome, disc and cube. One chunk of it - the Codex Martial of the Valle Crucis – was apparently nothing compared to the sly, antique cunning of Tadashi Murai.

Direktor Vanecke mapped Tadashi's technique with an overlay of glittering wireframes, a skeletal neon scrawl. His computer augmentations chewed up the data, folding and slotting it into place among petabytes of similar code. All in all, his revenge had been a long time coming. It had made him impatient - sloppy. Emotional.

In setting up his little matches he had almost become predictable – this would be the third time the wizened little chemist had been assaulted in the last week. But the time was drawing near, now. His instructions to his tame Lord were becoming more precise. Right now, across the city, twenty altercations were in full swing, meticulously observed by Vanecke's cams.

So much hatred. So much anger. He intended to put it to good use.

The telephone chimed in his head, flashing a little red icon in the corner of one eye. Right on time…

“Vanecke, I know it was you!” growled the voice on the other end as he picked up. “Who else is so damned arrogant? And to use the 'Crucis as well… but of course you'd never let the police get involved, would you?”

The Direktor smiled, clear plastic tubes shifting in his mouth as his nerveless lips twitched. He replied with a thought, winging that smug little grin of his down the wire. He always found threats so amusing.

“Relax, Tadashi. You're still my number-one cultural advisor, even if you are getting paranoid in your old age. The project is our little secret, and you're the only one who has the history to fill it out. As if those pious creeps from the V.C. would ever work for me!”

There was a long, crackling silence, and Vanecke could imagine the withered old fool seething with anger.

“Who else could it be, Direktor?” he spat “And as of now, you can find yourself a new cultural advisor. Your project is a mockery of my heritage, anyhow… Tokugawa was a unifier, not some kind of movie monster! Take your filthy money back, and leave me alone!”

The connection cut with a crisp little guillotine click, leaving Vanecke alone inside his head once again.

Perhaps the next emissary he sent to visit Tadashi Murai would have to be a little less subtle.

He had just the person in mind.

With a blur of encryption code, the Direktor of Broadcasting pushed his mind out from his inner sanctum, down the wires and into a body woven from light. It was time to teach Elysium's most promising young murderer his final lesson.

 

Ω

 

The air in Simeon's dayroom had turned to liquid. He was gone; disjointed - cut off from the wet machine of his body. A pair of eyes stared, blank and wide as the skies over desert worlds. A hand scuttled crabwise, tethered by its arm, until its hungry fingertips ran down their prey.

 

Snap

 

Pop

 

Hiss

 

Ragged breathing.

Numb fingers twitching, coated in pale beige powder…

Raw data crackled through the air, sparking through a set of wetwired points and into the meat of his brain. Slices of the Valle Crucis Codex Martial, images of Tadashi Murai…

“Is that what I think it is?” asked a glowing three-inch manikin in pressed cotton whites, climbing up onto the palm of the drug-fiend's hand. The tiny figure scowled, scuffing one patent-leather shoe in a snowdrift of chemicals. “You damn irresponsible little… Do you have any idea what you're up against tonight? Any concept of that damned machine's lack of mercy?”

 

Snap

 

Pop

 

Hiss

 

Focus. . .

 

Octavio Vanecke's benchtop holo flickered and blurred as Simeon zoomed in through it, down to the seething surface of his skin. His palm was a wasteland of dead tissue, insects and bacteria, each one wearing the Direktor's livid face. Fractalized.

“Blaire! Blaire!”

The Lord of the noble house wasn't listening. His eyes were rolled back behind a pair of diamond lenses, protective combat shades welded to his skull. They gave him the blank dark stare of a predatory insect – a million tiny facets winking back at the Direktor's anger.

The drugs came and peeled his mind back, but Vanecke was waiting.

“Is this getting through to you, you inbred prick? You have to be ready! The Hand of Kronos is real, and he's dying for you to make a single mistake…”

“So you've dealt w… with Murai? What about my sword? And my… and my book? He's… he's my vassal, 'Tavio. Gotta. Gotta do what I say!”

He staggered. A whirlwind of exultation clawed up his spine, turning his handsome face into sweaty mask of flesh, slack and sallow on his skull.

“Blaire! Snap out of it!”cursed the manikin, swiping at his thumb with a tiny rosewood cane. “Dammit, you Kheptic turd, you have to stop fighting the uplink. And stop popping stunn when you're supposed to be integrating code!”

“Rather be code th'n meat, O'tavio. When the power's mine, I'm leaving this sack of organs behind…”

“You still need your brain intact, my Lord. The next phase is vitally important. With too much dope in your system, the Relic might not be able to integrate.”

“Relax, Octavio,” drawled Simeon, his eyes dim with euphoria. “You taught me this. You called it meditation. If I'm not prepared now, I never will be.”

And oh, he was! His so-called peers were the same sweating, dripping meat-creatures as the peasant masses. The city needed cleansing, purifying, scouring away. The whole damn Subcity. But he was still unclean. It irked him, itched under his skin… made him come back to the stunn when his own flesh felt like rotten meat hanging on his bones.

“You've shown me the way, Octavio. I'll finish what you started, I promise you.”

“My ass is on the line for this one too, Blaire,” growled the little holo of Direktor Vanecke, blinking from his palm to his shoulder. “Your noble cousins won't forget what I tried to do. They want me for treason. And your title won't mean shit if the Machine eats you alive.”

Simeon wasn't listening.

He was already imagining the fire.

With his face to the window he stared out over the roofs and arches, plazas and avenues of Elysium, his forehead pressed against the cool glass. It threw back his bitter little smile.

“I've seen the files, Octavio. I'll call you Master when the time comes. But the Hand of Kronos has nothing on me. I'm the best there ever was. You just need to have some fucking faith in your creation.”

Blaire reached behind him to the table, pinching a measure of stunn between his fingers. They were ivory pale - utterly smooth, and marked with tiny scarred barcodes instead of fingerprints. Those digits had the precision of mekan biopsy forceps, rubbing the drug into his gums without so much as a tremor despite the thunderhead bruises which covered his knuckles.

“Trust me,” said Vanecke “I have enough faith for both of us. You just have to remember that this time, the Game is real. Death means forever.”

Blaire's reflection hovered like a phantom in the black glass as he scowled, pensive.

The Machine had given him his father's high cheekbones, his grandfather's sharp nose and blue-black eyes. Something else entirely had filled those eyes with cruelty, then welded them under glass.

“Death is one privilege I've never been allowed, Vanecke. You know that.”

“I know that I've killed hundreds just to train you. That Valle Crucis monk was lucky to get away with a few broken ribs. And as for the endgame… well, there'll be death enough that night. Count on it. “

“I'm grateful, of course. And you will be rewarded, Octavio. Or should I say… Master.”

That made him smile. The same oily, jagged smile he always wore when he got his own way. Satisfied, the little hologram collapsed in on itself. The next time Simeon saw him, Vanecke would be transformed. And so would he.

“Master… for as long as I can tolerate one.”

Slow harpsichord and mournful violins followed him, music projected from flitting microamps crafted to resemble jeweled dragonflies. Their diamond-fiber ornithopter wings rippled the scented air, silent twin rainbows framing brushstrokes of silver. Simeon ran one hand along the glass, leaving fingerprint trails to evaporate behind him.

Visions of writhing bacteria sparked in Simeon’s head.

His reflection lay over the view like a blurry hologram, cut up by the tracks of rain.

With a sudden motion his fist flashed out, impacting with a whipcrack sound, radiating a starburst of fissures across the windowpane. The glass was bulletproof, made to withstand sniper’s micromissiles. But it still domed out in a halo of chips and shards, held together by a net of wires.

Blaire held his stance, shivering with murderous delight. The face he hated so much was gone, erased.

Slivered into a million leering replicas…

Fractal whirlpools spun off of him like smoke. Slow zoom. Sparks behind his eyeballs, burning into soft tissue. He got lit. The pulsing meat of his brain waxed positively neon.

Yet still, impossibly, Simeon smiled, his ego smashed to ruin as the bones in his shattered hand knitted smoothly back together.

And far away, Direktor Vanecke laughed, watching his pet through the kaleidoscope eyes of a jeweled chrome dragonfly.

All was in preparation. It was time to show Tadashi what he'd helped to create – even if it was the last thing the old fool would ever see.

 

Ω

 

There were creatures out on the skin of Lord Blaire's city. Not real people, or the same rarefied beings as the Council of Three Hundred who wanted Octavio Vanecke dead.

Kronos - the Cogitative Mechanism which ruled Elysium - considered them to be somewhere between cockroaches and domestic dogs on the evolutionary scale.

Kaito Kayzi was one of them, along with twenty-seven million others, in a genetic underclass who were not so much oppressed by the Machine as ignored. Oppression required effort, and the Subcitizens of Elysium just didn't warrant it.

But in imitation of their Guardian Engine they were studded and plugged with technology; as much as they could afford. Tech meant status, and just like in every city since a ruminating tribesman slapped one mudbrick on top of another, status meant power.

And unwanted attention.

“A King Value? Is that all we're worth to him?” rumbled a voice in Kaito's ear, coming in courtesy of the wires in his skull “You know how much shit we'll have to go through to make scratch on this one? Vladimir isn't in the habit of taking bags of pennies, K.”

Kaito, sighed, hunkering back into the gelfoam seat of his motorcycle.

“It's not like we have choice, Jaqub. We're disposable to him, and he knows we know it. Eddie Tsien is bad news, for all that he's a little Bimburb shit.”

“He's bad news because YOU gave him the control box to tweak those pet Cyben of his. It's like that old movie, that Frankenstein. You made the monster, and now it's got its hands around our fuckin' throat.”

Kaito swerved and dipped through the traffic, his concussion armor sparkling with a thousand tiny red microsuns. It didn't help that Jaq was right, but still…

“Pointing your fat chrome finger don't play, Haszan.” he spat, skidding wide around the tailgate of a wheezing steam-powered semi. “We're in this together. No tribe, no phyle, no hope… you know how it goes. The closest we have to a clan is being listed as 'bikers' on some government database.”

“Bikers - shit!” laughed the big guy, over the clatter and roar of his own chopper's engine. “There hasn't been a real gang for four hundred years. I thought you were a Magus now, anyhow? Leaves me in a biker gang of one…”

“I'm not official, Jaq,” said the Kayzi, as his bike shot the gap through a tight corrugated iron tunnel, emerging into blinding sunlight. “I'm just good at what I do - and I like to keep religion out of my 'mersive deck. Those Ashishim wireheads are crazy.”

“Better tell that to all your other connections, K.” chuckled Haszan, doing his own dance through traffic clear across town “If Vanecke's boys think you're selling them out, you'll be buried in more than one dumpster.”

“Just be there on time, Haszan.” he said, not even wanting to think about his friend's warning. “Eddie's our main problem right now. And until I can figure a solution, we have to keep stringing him along.”

Jaq grunted and cut the connection, leaving Kaito to concentrate on the road - and on the STX Saber he'd just boosted on a credit scam.

The Saber's front wheel was chrome-wirespoked, hissing across the transdome highway low and long on sprung, stretched forks. Crazy patterns flashed out from its whirling spokes, a shatterburst of neon reflections. Kaito lay back, twisting the throttle up there on the Saber's left apehanger, and he felt the ethanol-powered chopper bust 200.

Neon fragments, hot waves of silver slicked across his helmet visor…

But as usual his mind was elsewhere, only barely scanning the road ahead as he collapsed complex mathematics in his head.

Kaito regarded technology the way other guys his age thought about sex. It was always on his mind; he'd consider paying for anything a failure, and he made his best conquests when he was drunk. It was just that, in a town where the most advanced tech was given the status of holy antiquity, this made him the focus of some very monomaniacal creeps indeed.

Right now, for example, he was worrying at the edges of a problem that had come down the pipe from Octavio Brandolph Vanecke – a piecework contract to rip the viral defenses of a two-thousand-year-old cryo-reliquary. The hints at what was inside gave him cold sweats…

But hence, of course, the drugs. And the scarabs in his veins, to release those drugs to every nerve-ending simultaneously. They also told him how fast the bike was going, because it was far past the speed where a single twitch could snowball into a spectacular wreck. Kaito tuned a mean engine, too.

His mind was just as pared down and streamlined as the chopper; a ball of tissue caged and cradled in intelligent wires. The bio-onboard rig was linked through fiberoptics under his skin to a pair of modern plastic pistols, battery-operated magnetic railguns mercilessly miniaturized by some Reclamation zaibatsu. It began to arm them as Kaito’s intracerebral G.P.S. zoomed in, overlayering reality with a textured wire-frame map of the city.

He ran through the plan again in his head, making sure all the angles were covered while railpistol status readouts flickered in the corners of his eyes.

The Saber bust 250 over a clear stretch of arching support girder, and crosshairs flashed red across the scarred concrete roadway. He trusted that his colleague wouldn't be late…