The Beast Arises

The transorganic soldiers’ long march brought them to a door, airlock-solid, guarded by another fearsomely augmeticised warrior-build in dark robes and wielding a brass-plated heavy rifle that bristled with deadly technologies. An arc rifle. Perfect for the close-range, narrow-quarters combat that a probability engine might envisage for the labyrinthine laboratorium subplex of Pavonis Mons. The best.

The dim red glow of the guard’s visored sight washed over Urquidex. Sour air, five parts per million perspiration, five hundred parts engine grease, rasped in and out of his cognis filters. The guard brought around his rifle in a nightingale murmur of high-tech servos and synthetics. At that range, with that weapon, with those cortico-sensory enhancements, aim was unnecessary.

They weren’t going to kill him.

Easier to have done it in any one of a hundred different places before now. The three-hour cage descent into the post-industrial hive of Pavonis crater. The skim pad, dust-blown and radiation-scoured, nothing beneath it for miles but stratified piping and still-radioactive sludge. Aboard the dust skimmer, laser-etched with the signum of the 1014 Noctis Maniple, that had swept him over the ancient rust sands and light harvesters of the Martian desert. Or even right there in his plug station in the Noctis Labyrinth where they had come for him. Who would have tried to stop them, or cared if he had been summarily executed even as he ordered his files? The locum trajectorae? His fellow adepts?

As well to expect an impassioned defence from the tech-servitors.

They weren’t going to kill him.

The Assassin, Yendl, must have been unmasked and now Van Auken wanted to interrogate her accomplice in person: that was the only explanation that made sense. Urquidex forced his dry mouth to swallow. His thoughts were of nerve endings and pain receptors: trillions of microscopic sensors, thousands of kilometres of insulated wiring, all evolutionarily perfected by the goal of rendering the hominids of his direct antecedence sufficiently risk-averse to perpetuate Eldon Urquidex. But now, no further.

The guard bared his metal palm to the judgement of the reader by the door. There was a clunk, a ripple through the creaking substructure, then a gasp of air as the doors cracked ajar and then shunted apart. His escorts led him through. They were not unkind.

Force was mass, velocity, and an exponent.

Kindness did not factor.

The chamber on the other side of the door was a short octagonal cylinder, like an expressionistic version of an antique eight-shot’s firing cylinder portrayed through geometry. The ceiling and main walls were a ridged metal, some kind of supplementary ventilation system running along the recesses. The floor was the same loose, rattling metal slats as it had been outside. The angled slants joining the horizontals to the verticals were of a browning armourglass.

‘Stop here,’ grated the skitarius to his right.

He stopped there.

The two skitarii backed away through the door. The guard simultaneously lowered his own weapon and punched the control panel to bring the doors to a shuddering close. Urquidex stared at the solid plasteel for a moment, feeling an utterly illogical sense of panic on watching the two skitarii leave, as if they had been not colluders in his captivity, but protectors, the only thing standing between him and death.

He shivered, the tensile fibres bonding his digitools directly into his nervous system causing them to twitch accordingly. Unsure what else to do, he swallowed and shuffled around to face the opposite door.

There was a clank, as if he had triggered something with his movement, and an intense ultraviolet light flooded in through the armourglass. He grunted in pain. His instinct was to turn away and he did so, optics down, but the light was coming from everywhere. It was purple, piercing, retina-burning, but at the same time little more than bleedthrough, an augur ghost at the edge of his perceptual range. The effect was at once vivid and watery. Biologis adepts designated the treatment as ‘soft’ decontamination: degrade any biological contaminant, while leaving precious technologies intact and without chemical residual.

Urquidex retracted his telescopic eyestalks and dialled their sensitive optics shut, burying his face in the folds of his robes for good measure. He could feel his exposed flesh begin to heat. This biological contaminant did not consider the procedure nearly as soft as it once had.

At the same time, he became aware of an urgent hiss. Some kind of gas was being delivered into the chamber through that secondary ventilation system. His heart rate spiked, a fight or flight reflex that perversely then delivered the command for his lungs to draw deep. Ozone, he realised, sensing the epithelial sting on the lining of his nose. Urquidex felt his UV-reddened skin begin to burn.

The lights shut down abruptly. The hiss stopped.