BlackOnChrome

ELYSIAN FIELDS 

Martial law. Discipline. Neat, marching columns in olive drab uniforms.

Instead – well, it was less warfare than a great orgiastic violent party, out of control and wild. Half the city was looting and burning, the other half drinking a whoring.

Yes, they needed soldiers out there, but what they got was broke-down mekan, raw police recruits, drunken police commanders and the walking dead.

Benoic dropped the rose-etched thermalscope from his eye and took a quick nip of brandy from his leather-bound flask. There were no more soldiers in Elysium, and he’d better not forget it. His wife would never let him hear the end of it if he started re-living old glories tonight.

Since the disaster and decimation of Reclamation Day Elysium hadn't kept a standing army. The only threat to its security came from he warlords of the pit, after all, and they were buffered from the last city by the fortifications and zealots of the R.T.

Now they, mused Benoic, had some discipline. Irregulars, most of them, yes, but fighting men, dammit. Warriors you could be proud to call your enemies. A hundred Ashishi riflemen, or just ten armored Vatican Confessors, and he could sweep the streets clean.

Even the berserk tribesmen of the Pit were better than soft civilians and rusted automated defenses which were as likely to shoot you as the foe.

He would definitely settle for a warband of Pit Ferals tonight; even with their iron maces and antique guns they were still proud, fearless fighters. He was one of the last Elysians to ever see a tribesman, though, and that was years ago, when he had been known to them as the Voice of the Machine.

The clan chiefs of the pit had pleaded with him, when he had worn the three arrows of a general. They'd suffered for the gold and archaeotech they had taken as payment from the Ashishim and their allies.

The families of those savage chieftains had been wiped out, their heads paraded through the pit in cryogenic coffins as an example to any other ambitious fools among the Ferals. They had feted him like a conqueror, and laid bronze swords and ancient assault rifles at his feet...

The machine had promised itself that there would never be another Reclamation day; not only were the new Warlords under its direct control, but it had worked hard to infiltrate the R.T. and fill the nomad ranks with spies and counteragents.

So there was no army, only the Cyben, and the pitiful few hundred living officers who were supposed to keep them tame.

The Subcommissioner Centurion would have settled for any kind of warriors right now, but what he had ...well, it was best not thinking about.

While the fervor and the fires spread through the Subcity some of the more upscale neighborhoods had organized citizen’s militias, arming themselves with whatever weapons were at hand. Benoic had shared out his trophy armory to his neighbors, and was busy regretting his pride - and his public relations strategy. He was busy regretting other things too – his vapid society wife, his yes-men friends, his sagging gut and rheumy eyes. Politics had been hard on him, and in the end it had come down to guns, not diplomacy.

Centurion Benoic had grown old and fat and bitter, but he was still smart enough to regret it. The other men and women on his roof didn’t even have the sense to know that it was their stupid choices that had brought them here.

To help him win re-election the Centurion had chosen to live outside the safety of the Beltway, in one of the better areas of the Subcity proper. It was murder convincing Athene and her godawful parents to accept the move, but in the end being a big shark in a little fishbowl had appealed to the woman. That and a new Yardley and Benson’s chargecard.

They had moved to Redcastle when it was new, a picture in a magazine.

Even then, behind the advertising hype it had seemed a little tawdry, but Athene had been paid off, he was up in the polls, and at least the new hab had its own quarter-dome to keep the rain out.

Their new home was a cluster of elegant pre-formed concrete houses clustered about the bottom of Lord Kelvan Vail’s spire, gated and autogunned, accessible only with a passkey card and a hefty paycheck.

Benoic was one of twelve subcommissioners, his ministry perhaps the least important now that the R.T. stood between Elysium and the pit. But in Redcastle, a cloister for accountants, lawyers and financiers he was royalty. Up in the belt he would only have made the middle ring, cheek-by-jowl with his hated colleagues in Sanitation, Wastewater and Public Health.

St. Jules Benoic, with his tweeds and his ruby-pinned cravat, his platinum cufflinks and his Consolidated town car, was nothing if not proud. He still dressed in his best for the death of his upwardly-mobile dream, out on a terrace overlooking ruin.

Tonight, the cops had failed, the city was in open riot, and the machine did nothing. He would have loved to be up in the belt, beneath a blue polyprop sky; if not for the safety, then at least so he could pay a visit to the Subcommissioner Justiciar and slap the sorry old fool silly. Instead he was standing on the roof on his villa, trying to keep his rifle steady while his neighbors held a little cocktail party behind him.

Most of them were self-confessed cowards who were better with a corkscrew than a gun, anyway. What was his excuse?

Benoic had been promoted by dead man’s boots on Reclamation Day, after he had watched the previous Centurion lose half his head to a Vatican sniper’s bullet. He had been a soldier before he'd been a politician, but the other residents of Redcastle seemed to think that the riots were nothing more than an excuse for rooftop drinks and a barbecue. More than one of his militiamen grasped a rifle or pistol in one hand and a bottle in the other. Two or three were already too drunk to aim straight.

Benoic scowled into the sights of his antique longrifle, trying to blot out the sounds of laughter and clinking glasses, hissing steaks over the coals, and the small-talk of middle managers. Out over the walls of Redcastle the mob ruled, and he could hear screams and distant crashes.

He could see gouts of flame rising up from the lower levels, and drifts of acrid black smoke obscured the neon logos of the Lords’ spires above. He knew that it was only a matter of time before the blue-ribbon army was at the gates of this little enclave, and the Sons of Blaire decided to overthrow the old order by looting and burning Redcastle one house at a time.

Most of the rioters were laborers, some of them even uplifted thugs from out of the pit. They had no time for the servants of the machine – some of them even believed that their new Emperor would let the Reclamationists take over.

There was wild talk of some kind of miracle to come, brought about by bloody Saint Blaire, when he would turn the blackened world green again. The threedeeo networks were full of wild speculation, violence, and political broadcasts urging calm. But so far no word had come from the highest of the high – no word had come from Commissioner Slade, speaking as he always did for Kronos itself.

Loudest of all among the screeching pundits and blazing advertisements of the networks was the voice of Omnivasive, giving the people of Elysium what they wanted and the city itself exactly what it didn’t need. One of Direktor Ascher’s screen-sided zeppelins was cruising by overhead, casting a deep shadow over Redcastle as it slipped through rags and streamers of oily smoke.

From its immense threedeeo projectors the florid face of Dave Levine bulged obscenely, slick with sweat and ten storeys tall. Behind him the one hundred and fifty remaining lords and ladies of the aristocracy milled about, tense and skittish in their finery. Despite the threats made by the Direktor, the game must go on. Tradition would be served.

Centurion Benoic wasn't so sure that Ascher’s bizarre claims were as hollow as the other networks would have him believe. Perhaps this was the end of the nobility, and perhaps Simeon Blaire would become the new Emperor of Elysium. He would still need to have a hard core of political specialists around him, even then.

Even an Emperor’s touch could not turn sewerage into clean water, and magic away garbage. He would need his subcommissioners, and that meant Benoic would have to live through the night. His pitiful little army of stock traders and courtroom fops would just have to hold out until the game was over.

Benoic pulled a little silver flask of brandy from out of the pocket of his tweed coat, and was about to take a surreptitious nip of the fiery spirit when the building trembled beneath his feet.

The shudder was so faint that at first he thought it was just his own frayed nerves, but then a second temblor rocked the hab-block, sending cracks skittering across the quarter dome. Behind him he heard wails of dismay and the sound of breaking glass as his neighbors’ cocktail party came crashing down.

“Form up! Form up, damn it!” he roared, fumbling at the action of his longrifle. “They’re coming for us! Get to your positions, lock and load!” In a second he had been transformed from a tired old politician back into a soldier of the line.

“Wendell, Ohara, get your sorry butts to the parapet! Romily, if you’ve lost your weapon so help me I’ll shove it up your ass!”

And amazingly, under the lash of Benoic’s voice the well-heeled citizens of Redcastle stood to their guns, aiming out over the deserted streets and into the smoke.

It took him a few seconds peering through the scope of his rifle and blinking nervous sweat out of his eyes to realize that there was nothing to shoot at.

Perhaps it had just been an aftershock from some catastrophic explosion around the dome? On the threedeeo news it had looked like the Valley view mall was in bad shape after the riots had raged around it – maybe the whole damned thing had slipped off into the ocean. If so, it would be one less place for Athene to use that bloody Yardleys Card...

The next shock came up bigger and louder, a grinding and rattling which made the tiles skip beneath Benoic’s feet, and jammed the reticule of his sight hard into his eye socket. Black and red stars erupted across his vision as he staggered, tripping over the sprawled body of another one of his little militia. Good Lords, it was probably that lush Romily, puking his guts out...something hot and damp was seeping through his expensive tweed pants.

Voices and gunshots echoed and roared in his head as the world spun. He couldn't be sure if it was just the concussion or if the whole of Redcastle was being torn apart beneath him.

The soldier in him bit down on the pain and forced it back. Benoic shook the shadows out of his head and stared down at the man he had tripped over.

It was Romily, and he'd found himself a gun. But he wasn’t drunk. The Centurion reckoned he would never need another cocktail again.

That last tremor had cracked the hab-block open like an egg, and the fissure had swallowed Romily to the waist, slamming shut like a demon jaw as the tons of masonry settled. The fluids which Benoic was kneeling in were spilling and pooling from the wreck of the militiaman’s torso, a coil of burst intestines venting a graveyard stench. All at once his mouth was filled with vomit – it had gone down as beef bouillon and brandy, but it came up as bilious terror.

He had no time to spit the filth from his mouth before the chasm gaped open again and the building tottered, huge chunks of the rooftop garden falling away in a spray of concrete shards. Romily’s corpse disappeared through the fissure as if the tortured structure had swallowed him whole.

The Reclamationists were underneath them! It must be! They had sapped the defenses just like they had done on that bloody day so long ago, and soon holocloaked Ashishi fiends would come up through the ground, and the armor-suited Templars would come stalking through the rubble, their benedictor cannons blazing as they mowed down the survivors.

Benoic’s mind swam with horrific images, dragging him back to the battlefield where he had earned his title and his soft civilian’s life. They hadn't forgotten him, and they were coming back to finish the job!

But it wasn't the Celestials or the Ashishim or the Aryans who were tearing Redcastle apart. As the building sagged, and the rest of the civilian militia fell away through the floor and into darkness Centurion Benoic clung grimly to the parapet, his rifle forgotten.

And he saw the welded-shut blast doors in the dome beneath crack open; doors so long disused they had been forgotten and built over. He hung on with aching fingers as the doors ground apart, and as half of the doomed hab-block stripped its bolts and cascaded away down the side of the dome in an avalanche of concrete and steel and designer homewares.

A cavern of rusted metal gaped in the side of the city like a wound beneath Redcastle, and from out of that corroded maw came a legion of forgotten machines, staggering and wheezing, their infra-red eyes glowing like cinders in the dark.

As Subcommissioner Centurion, Benoic knew what they were. That didn’t stop him from goggling in disbelief as the huge mekan came marching out from under the city. He had kept the dusty ledgers and glitched, flickering datafiles of Elysium’s armaments up to date during his tenure – a job which primarily involved writing off all the doomed, broken and irreplaceable pieces of ordnance which had been consigned to the crusher after Reclamation Day.

Each year when the records had gone up to the Subcommissioner Quartermaster there had been a sheaf of yellowed printouts clamped at the back of the official folder, documenting these ancient weapons.

They were signed for each time, although no living soul in the whole administration knew where they were kept. After all, this was the last and only city on Earth. They had to be here somewhere.

He had never expected them to come lumbering up out of their abandoned bunkers, even tonight when the city burned.

Benioc watched as the column of mekan - maybe twenty in all - reached the gates of Redcastle, which fell before them as if they were built of ricepaper. Now the nomads would suffer! Kronos hadn't unleashed the steel legions on Reclamation Day; a fact which still rankled with the soldiers who had survived the Seven Hours War. Now it seemed that it had had a change of mind.

Perhaps it was the blow to his head, perhaps the smoke. But as the warmekan marched by something snapped in Centurion Benoic’s mind, and he was back amid the flames and flying bullets of Reclamation Day. For the first time in years he was himself again – a soldier, clear in his purpose, free from policy meetings and weekly reports and society dinners with sneering Lords and Ladies.

He threw off his tweed jacket and ripped the satin cravat from around his neck, grabbing his rifle from off the parapet and jamming a pistol into his waistband. The canted side of the hab-block would have seemed too steep and sheer to climb for St Jules Benoic the politician, but he was a soldier.

His aches and pains forgotten, Benoic scrambled down to the cracked and crazed surface to the street, the fires of Elysium reflecting in his pince-nez glasses.

The Steel Legion were marching – corroded and dilapidated, their paint flaking and their joints creaking. Centurion Benoic, his brain spinning with visions of death and glory marched with them as the ruins of Redcastle lay shattered behind him.

Ω

In the cool darkness of the Mendelev-Singh spire, at the heart of a security grid of rooms nested together like russian dolls, an exowomb hung weightless in its magnetic cage.

The elastic walls of that articicial organ had expanded a hundredfold since Melchior had come here with his needle - now the child within was accelerating through the years as hormones surged and seethed, and cells replicated feverishly, dancing to Emmanuel Lancaster's tune. He already looked to be six or seven years old, his hairless skull studded with sockets and ports.

A tangled skein of wires fed him information, an entire false childhood woven by Direktor Ascher's machines. At this rate he'd be grown before his Lord father even knew he existed...

Neon lights popped and crackled into life as a Universal Wetsystems mekan split from its storage cel in the wall, its empty ribcage swinging open on oiled hinges as it unfolded to twice human size. Dextrous android fingers disconnected the little Hierarch's exowomb from its intricate meshwork of tubes and datafeeds, sealing it up inside its empty chest cavity like a biomechanical heart.

The mekan was surplus to requirements now - it's kind were used to securely transport the force-grown clones of the Razor Clique to their revels, armored vessels for irreplacable wetware. This one would have one last run to make before it was scrapped; down into the Beltway, to the mansion of Octavio Ascher.

His agents had already stolen an indentical force-maturation system from poor dead Lancaster, and mediteks from the Liquid Tong stood by to help deliver young Lord Darion Blaire into the world.

The first face he saw would be that of his Uncle Octavio. But his earliest memories - well, they were being arranged even as he slept, rocked in his artificial womb by the long-limbed stride of a stalking silver mekan.

Ascher would make sure that they were simply impossible to forget.

Ω

Lysander Jaegenn brought his icepick down across Lady Daena Shaye’s shoulder in a merciless arc, the flashing steel catching the light as it plunged home. A spray of chipped ice scattered from the blow and he caught it expertly in his drink, leaving the icepick stuck fast.

As he turned away one of his scuttling servants struggled to work the blade free. It would be difficult; Lysander’s combat nanonics were fired up and the blow had been struck with the strength of ten men.

Daena’s blue-tinged face stared down at him blankly, tiny droplets of water running down her cheek like tears. In the shimmering ice he caught sight of his own reflection - genecoded to perfection, his black hair worn in a jeweled topknot slick with oil, his tiny pointed beard studded with ruby piercings.

Like all his line, back to the ancient CEO of Helios Fusionetics he was olive-skinned and blue-eyed, with a cruel mouth set in a permanent snarl. His own son, frozen in an exowomb would be just the same... if Ascher could be stopped, and he made it out of his temple here alive.

Lysander had arranged the ice statues around the outside wall of the temple, between the silver-veined marble columns. They were not just the images of the fallen lords and ladies who had failed in the first round of the game – that would be simply passe. In the depths of the spire more of Jaegenn’s white-robed serfs labored over a great cryogenic engine, feeding the broken bodies of the slain into its steaming maw and pulling the statues out one by one with hydraulic tongs.

The ice was pink around Lady Shaye’s neck where her head had been expertly sewn back on.

Lysander had been a player with the Razor Clique since his fifteenth birthday, the day that he had first drawn blood, the day that he'd first died beneath the blade of that redoubtable old warlord Count Grigory Severn.

He'd never felt the atmosphere in a gaming room so tense, or seen his fellow players so skittish. Personally, he put no store in the rantings of the half-crazed Direktor Ascher. He was one of the few privy to the whispered secrets of the Grief Division, and he knew that tonight was the end of the broadcasting mogul’s span. This was his final curtain, and he was probably trying to boost the ratings through the roof as his swansong.

Others weren't so assured. He caught half-whispered snatches of conversation as he moved through the room, his bare feet leaving bloody tracks across the tiles. Behind him crawled a little cleaning mekan, its shell inlaid with silver and mother of pearl, cleaning up each crimson print as he walked.

“.....has he really killed dear Lord Lancaster? Such a shame, such a good boy...takes after his father...”

“ ...and my driver says that the crowds are growing quite rowdy – they can never get in here, of course, but still ..."

“...and there’s nobody working the machines! I can’t wait for that bloody Kronos to sort it out, if I die here tonight I have to be back in the office tomorrow for lunch with Lady Highhampton...”

“ ...really, the man is such a damnable peasant! Nobody should ever have let him near our circles, let alone allowed him to befriend young Blaire ...“

“...and even if he wins, you can be sure that the Machine will never let him through the trials. They’ll just have to put the whole Game on hold while they get Lancaster or whoever is running the show up there to bring us back...”

The lavish feast on the mahogany sideboard was all but untouched. The morbidly obese Earl Blacktower was piling his plate with choice cuts of salmon and cream cheese, but the rest of the spread was going to go to waste. The one hundred and fifty remaining aristocrats were huddled together in twos and threes, darting suspicious glances between each other, huddling over brimming glasses of champagne and cognac.

Even Lysander himself was acutely aware of the flitting camera ornithopters which buzzed about the heads of the Clique, their insect wings blurring and winking rainbows.

What they thought was immaterial, anyway. Whether they died at the hands of their peers or under the guns of the ever-vigilant Referee, only one would walk out of the spire tonight. Which made it all the more surprising that the focus of so much speculation was missing.

Lysander had been trying to hunt down Simeon Blaire since the end of the first round – and he had no doubt that he wasn't the only one. One or two of the flitting camera mekan weren't decked out in Omnivasive livery, and some of the aristos were less than subtle in their stares, their constant buttonholing of the thankfully mute servants. Lysander was never as grateful as he was right now for the magnetic piercings which locked his serfs' tongues in place while they toiled.

The only way out was through the service doors, and no highborn could possibly slip through between his hulking cyborged bouncers. All the guests were clad in nothing but their skin, their modesty protected by hovering strips of cloth buoyed up by ornate floating cherubim. A naked, bloody Simeon Blaire could no more have sneaked by under the eyes of the Lords, the servants and the omnipresent cameras than he could simply dissolve into smoke.

Lysander scowled, snatching a glass of wine from a passing servant’s tray. He knocked it back in one gulp and ran his eyes over the crowd again.