Atlantia Series 1: Survivor (31 page)

Hevel’s hair was falling out, the heat from his overactive brain killing off the skin of his scalp, and his ears, lips, hands and eyes were distorted and sheened with thin metal plating, enhanced for superior senses.

‘My brother is long gone,’ Qayin snarled. ‘What’s left is nothing more than a glorified slave.’

‘Come now, Qayin,’ Hevel smiled, his lips catching the light and his teeth flashing silver and graphite grey. ‘You were always the strong one, always the fastest, always the toughest, and me, I was always the academic. But look at me now, brother. I am stronger than you, faster than you, and I still have the intelligence that you so often ignored as you cowered in your cell with the scum of society.’

Qayin smiled, although it felt like more of a sneer. ‘Funny, how easily people describe convicts with the same words they use to describe politicians.’

‘You wasted your life, Qayin,’ Hevel went on. ‘Do you know how our mother and father wept as they learned of your each, successive failure? How they mourned your incarceration? How they begged for answers to why they had not done enough to help you?’

Qayin’s blood ran hot through his veins. ‘I made my own choices.’

‘And that’s supposed to calm them, to console them?’ Hevel asked. ‘They are with the Word now, just like all humanity, and they now no longer worry about you Qayin. I doubt they’d even recognise you. This life,’ he said, gesturing to himself, ‘is so much better than the one that went before. There is no pain, brother. No regret, no illness, no suffering. We are at one and our cause is universal.’

‘What cause?’ Qayin asked.

‘The perseverance of mankind, of course,’ Hevel chuckled. ‘You believe us to be evil, a conquering force, but the Word saw the potential of mankind long ago. People used to say, didn’t they, used to ask: “imagine what we could be if we didn’t spend so much time at war, or fighting crime or tackling disease? Imagine what we could be if we all worked together?”‘ Hevel pointed to his own chest. ‘Now, we can find out.’

‘You’re not a man.’

‘And I’m all the better for it,’ Hevel snapped back. ‘I’m more than a man now, Qayin. You could be to. Would you like to see our mother again, our father?’

Qayin ground his teeth in his skull. ‘They’re gone, Hevel, just like you.’

‘No,’ Hevel said. ‘They are back home, walking as we do, a part of the Word now but alive none the less. The Word killed nobody, Qayin. There was no apocalypse that your captain speaks of, no genocide, no killing but for our defensive posture against your feeble efforts to stop us. We protected the best of human life, Qayin. It survived
because
of us, not in spite of us. Now it is your turn.’

‘I’d rather die.’

‘That would be a shame, Qayin,’ Hevel said as he took a pace closer. ‘There is no need for you to die. There is no need for any of us to die, ever.’

‘I didn’t hear you sayin’ that when you murdered half the prison block.’

‘Come now, Qayin,’ Hevel soothed, ‘the mercy I would show you does not extend to the scum who have scoured your life of decency. Human garbage, the dregs of your kind deserved no such consideration. Our mother and father are waiting for us, Qayin,’ he urged, ‘and your vessel is doomed anyway.’

Qayin hesitated and Hevel smiled.

‘Yes, brother,’ he said. ‘All this time you’ve hated me, but I was infected long before the Word arrived. You would have been too had you not been imprisoned, beyond my reach.’

Qayin’s mind raced. Hevel’s callous destruction of life in the prison block, an act beyond even him. Hevel had not shown any such signs of genocidal thought in the months after the Atlantia had first fled the disaster that befell mankind, which would mean…

‘Who?’ Qayin asked. ‘Who infected you?’

‘Come,’ Hevel replied, ‘and I will show you.’

‘No,’ Qayin growled. ‘My brother was not a killer. He was a victim. I know you’re still in there, Hevel. No machine could ever take all of any of us, any of our family. Fight it, Hevel.’

‘Why fight?’ Hevel asked rhetorically. ‘I like it too much.’

Hevel held out his hand, the fingernails black like polished obsidian and the veins lacing the back of his hand throbbing with the minute devices seething through his bloodstream.

Qayin looked at his brother’s hand and slowly he reached out toward it. The glossy black nails reached for Qayin’s bigger hand, Hevel’s demonically glowing eyes fixed upon Qayin’s and filled with an emotion that Qayin had not recognised before, something between hope and regret, as though whoever his brother had once been was now incarcerated forever more in a prison far more insufferable than anything Qayin had been forced to endure: alive, but no longer in control of his own mind and body.

The tip of Hevel’s fingers touched Qayin’s, cold and hard, and Qayin’s rage broke free.

Qayin twisted aside and snatched his hand away as he lunged forward and behind Hevel, drawing a pistol from where it was concealed in the pocket of his uniform. He grabbed Hevel from behind and leaned back as he hoisted him off balance and buried the barrel of the pistol into the small of Hevel’s back, right against the base of his spine.

‘Call if off, brother,’ he growled into Hevel’s metallic ear. ‘Do it now or I’ll blow you wide open.’

Hevel, his warbling digitized voice utterly without concern, replied.

‘Do it,’ he said, ‘it makes no difference. I will be gone but the Word will be forever.’

‘Once you would have done anything to protect your fellow man,’ Qayin growled.

‘I
am
protecting us,’ Hevel replied. ‘That is what we do.’

‘No,’ Qayin snapped, ‘you take lives and you turn men into machines. You’re nothing but an overgrown piece of circuitry.’

‘In some ways so are you,’ Hevel replied, almost sadly. ‘The difference is, I am stronger.’

The blow came from nowhere, Hevel’s elbow jerking with hydraulic force to thud deep into Qayin’s rib cage with a dull crunch. Qayin’s body convulsed reflexively from the blow, momentarily crippled from the impact as Hevel spun with impossible speed. One arm scythed down to smash the pistol aside hard enough that Qayin’s entire arm went numb as Hevel grasped Qayin’s collar and hurled him aside.

Qayin flew through the air and smashed into a pillar, his huge body crashing onto the deck as he gasped for breath. He looked down and saw the pistol still in his grasp, but he could not make his hand work to lift it and pull the trigger. Hevel’s blow was placed with biological certainty, the inherited knowledge of the Word, hitting nerve centres and pinch–points with deadly precision to disable Qayin’s arm.

‘My brother,’ Hevel sneered as he walked toward Qayin’s crippled form, his every footfall sounding like metal upon metal. ‘Such a shame, in so many ways.’

Hevel reached down and grabbed Qayin’s collar, lifting the giant man’s body up the pillar until his feet dangled off the floor. Qayin gagged, his throat collapsing inside Hevel’s iron grasp as his brother stared at him with those cruel glowing eyes.

‘If you cannot join us by choice,’ he said, ‘then you shall join us by force.’

Qayin saw Hevel open his mouth. His tongue sparkled as metallic filaments caught the light, and from within his stomach poured a flood of tiny metal creatures like insects that scuttled from his mouth and down his chin. Qayin stared in horror as the miniscule machines rushed across Hevel’s naked arm toward Qayin’s chin and mouth.

‘Do not fight them,’ Hevel said, smiling, ‘for they will not harm you.’

Qayin stared at the tiny machines, and in a panic he heaved his damaged right arm across behind his back and grabbed the pistol from it in his uninjured left hand. He jammed the weapon against Hevel’s arm and fired.

The plasma round blasted through Hevel’s arm, exploding outward in a bright shower of searing metal, energy and burning flesh. Hevel screamed and leaped away as the blast melted the flood of horrific machines, gusting them away like glowing sparks in a breeze as Hevel grabbed his damaged arm and hugged it.

‘So you can still feel pain,’ Qayin growled as he took aim.

Hevel screamed and charged at Qayin, his arms outstretched and one of them trailing sparks from the remains of its ragged elbow as he ran. Qayin fired again, the plasma charge hitting Hevel straight in the face and blasting his head from his shoulders in a cloud of smoke. The stench of scorched flesh and burning metal filled the air as Qayin watched his brother’s lifeless body collapse to its knees on the deck before him and then slowly topple sideways.

Qayin lowered the pistol and looked around at the bridge.

Hevel’s bridge crew remained at their stations, their hands moving as though of their own accord across the control panels. Rage seethed through Qayin and he strode across the bridge, aimed and fired at the nearest of them, a bearded man who ignored Qayin’s approach. The shot blasted his head from his shoulders.

Instantly, the other bridge crew members left their posts and converged on Qayin.

Qayin whirled and fired upon the nearest of them, a pretty young girl with blonde hair whose face vanished in a blaze of plasma. She collapsed as Qayin turned and dropped two more of them before a fourth leaped with astonishing speed and smashed the pistol from Qayin’s grasp as another plunged into him from behind.

Qayin hit the deck on his side with a bone–jarring crash as the infected officer landed on top of him with incredible force. Qayin howled as pain ripped through his fractured ribs, and he saw the infected crewman straddle him and pin his arms in place with his knees.

The crewman opened his mouth and a flood of machines poured forth in a torrent as they flowed down his chest toward Qayin. Qayin seethed and writhed but the crewman’s weight and strength were far too great.

The blast came from one side, a plasma charge hurling the crewman off Qayin in a shower of sparks that scorched his skin. Qayin turned as he saw C’rairn, Cutler and the other two convicts burst onto the bridge and fan out, firing as they went.

Qayin rolled over, scrambled to his feet and grabbed his pistol as he saw the tiny machines spill from the fallen crewman’s chest and onto the deck. He turned and fired at them, the plasma round blasting them into tiny pellets of glowing metal.

Qayin looked up as Cutler, C’rairn and the two convicts cleared the deck. ‘I tol’ you all to get out of here,’ he snapped.

C’rairn popped his visor open as he turned to Qayin.

‘Yeah, well I don’t much like taking orders either.’

Qayin grinned without warmth, his teeth bright in the gloom, and then he looked down at the corpse of his brother. He knelt down, the headless remains smouldering at the neck where the shot had severed Hevel’s head.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ C’rairn said. ‘We never knew.’

Qayin nodded. ‘Nor did he.’

‘Sir?’

C’rairn turned, mildly surprised that Cutler would address him as “sir”. The convict was standing at the communications console as he pointed at the main screen. There, filling the view, was the Avenger.

‘It’s signalling us, Qayin,’ Cutler said. ‘It wants to talk.’

Qayin raised an eyebrow, his luminescent tattoos glowing. ‘Well, let’s talk.’

‘We should wait for the captain,’ C’rairn advised. ‘He’ll know what to do and…

‘Captain ain’t here,’ Qayin replied, anger still seething like acid through his veins, ‘and we’ve got the bridge.’

C’rairn stared at Qayin for a moment. ‘You’re kidding?’

‘Can the War Room be shut off from here?’ Qayin asked Cutler.

The old man nodded and flipped a couple of switches on his console. ‘Already done.’

C’rairn looked at the two convicts in despair.

‘After all that’s happened?’ he wailed.

Qayin’s men swung their rifles to point at C’rairn as Qayin stepped down off the captain’s platform and reached out for the soldier’s weapon. C’rairn reluctantly handed his rifle over as Qayin spoke.

‘I tol’ you not to bother comin’ in here, didn’t I?’ he said.

***

Evelyn watched as Captain Idris Sansin reached the War Room and keyed in both his access codes and a voice and facial recognition program. The War Room’s heavily shielded doors hissed open and with Andaim she followed the captain inside as the lights flickered on.

The War Room was the same basic layout as the bridge, but smaller and with fewer stations. Designed to act as a secure secondary command post should the ship be boarded or otherwise compromised, the entire vessel could be run from it if required.

‘Stations, everybody,’ the captain commanded, Bra’hiv’s men keeping their weapons trained on the captain and his crew as they dispersed to their posts. Evelyn, suddenly feeling a little left out, stood near the now closed shield doors and watched as the ship’s defence systems came on–line via the War Room.

‘Start the scans,’ Andaim ordered Bra’hiv. ‘No exceptions, just to be sure.’

‘Where is Qayin?’ the captain demanded as Bra’hiv began passing a microwave scanner over him.

‘The bridge,’ came the reply from a station nearby as Lael surveyed the instruments. ‘I’m detecting gunfire residue.’

‘Are they okay?’

Evelyn waited tensely as the data streamed in from around the ship.

‘Qayin is alive,’ came the response from Lael, ‘as are his human companions. I’m detecting several dead bodies with unusually hot core temperatures.’

‘Hevel and his bridge crew,’ Andaim guessed, ‘he must have infected them all.’

‘Put me through to them,’ the captain ordered.

Lael flipped a few switches before her and then frowned. ‘We’re shut out,’ she said.

‘We’re what?’

‘All communication links have been isolated,’ Lael repeated. ‘Logs suggest it’s only just been done.’

The captain stared at the blank monitors before him, and looked at Evelyn.

‘You got any idea what he’s up to?’

‘None,’ Evelyn said as she shook her head.

Bra’hiv stepped back from the captain and examined his scanner’s screen. ‘You’re clear,’ he reported, ‘no nanobots inside you.’

Bra’hiv spent the next few minutes scanning Meyanna and each of the bridge crew. They waited as he examined the results of the scans.