Big time.
They'd built a translation drive powerful enough to move the moon two hundred light years. Although it looked like they had managed to melt the crust in the process.
She rapped the hatch a couple of times with her knuckles. There was no way she was going to get those mighty doors open, Godolkin or no Godolkin. Without powering up the whole base, the last piece of the jigsaw was going to stay well and truly out of sight.
Red didn't like that, but she thought she could probably live with it. After all, she'd just been given the first clue as to what might have happened to the Earth.
She turned away from the hatch and climbed back into the mag-car, wrapped in her thoughts. She was just about to open the door when she heard footsteps on the other side of it.
Her eyes widened. The footfalls were close, very close: she'd been so lost in thought she'd not heard them until they were almost on top of her. For a second she wondered if Godolkin had found her, but that wasn't his steady pace on the other side of the mag-car, nor Judas Harrow's catlike pacing. This was, from what she could hear now, at least twenty people. Some of them were carrying something heavy.
Red darted back through the car, closed the door silently behind her, and realised that she was trapped.
There was only one place to go. She dropped to the floor and rolled under the mag-car, folding herself into the gap between the electromagnets and the conductive metal floor. There was a brace stopping her going all the way under, leaving her only about half a metre to play with. She sucked her breath in, trying to think small thoughts.
The car door opened above her head, and people began climbing down and into the hall.
Red had been right about their numbers—when they were all past her, lined up between the lockers, she'd counted twenty-two pairs of feet. A couple of them were carrying a long, heavy object between them. Red couldn't see where it was, as her field of view only extended a couple of handspans above the floor, but it had a rich, bloody smell.
Nothing in the least bit appetising, not even to her.
There was no talking going on, just a breathless silence. Red heard a faint bleeping, as of some piece of electronic equipment, and then a series of heavy, metallic impacts. The floor shivered under her. A second later, with a whine of ancient motors, the giant hatch split.
Green light spilled out from the widening gap.
Red squinted, trying to see past the feet. The hatch took almost half a minute to open, during which time the hall's occupants waited patiently. Only when the doors were firmly seated into either side of the frame did they begin to file in.
When they were past, Red squeezed out from her hiding place and scampered to the side of the hatch. She peered round, blaster raised and powered.
The drive chamber was vast.
There was a massive construction at the heart of it that could only have been the translation drive: a glossy sphere of black metal wider than Crimson Hunter was long, studded with panels and power feeds and huge, snaking coolant pipes. Only the upper half of the sphere was visible from where Red crouched, the rest was below ground level. The drive sat in what must have been a massive cylindrical shaft, held in place by slender-looking braces. From the gap between the sphere and the shaft walls, vomitous green light poured up.
There was a narrow deck around the shaft. On this stood twenty-two monks of Saint Lavann.
* * * *
There wasn't anyone there she recognised, but there was no mistaking their attire. Apart from the two that were burdened, everyone else had spread out around the drive, a gap of several metres between each monk.
They had started to make a noise.
It was a low, sonorous chanting. Red couldn't make out any words, but it was a discordant, unearthly sound, a fractured register that beat at the ears. There was something familiar about it, yet at the same time it was horribly alien. She winced, and looked a little further around the edge of the hatch, trying to see what the two monks had been carrying.
She was half expecting a body, but it looked like a silver tray, as long as a coffin and high-sided, covered with a grey cloth. As she watched, they set it down on the deck between them and stepped away.
The sound of the chant was beginning to give Red a headache. The floor seemed to be vibrating in time to it, the air shivering around her. She swallowed hard. Her heart was pounding, and sweat beaded her brow, soaked down between her shoulder blades under the leather. Her hands were shaking, fingers slick around the blaster's grip.
Something awful was about to happen here. She could feel it, the breath of it, like the clammy pressure before a thunderstorm. She found herself edging back.
Suddenly, the chanting stopped. One of the monks had thrown back his hood and had stepped up to the silver tray.
He raised his hands. "Mighty one!" he roared, his voice bouncing crazily around the chamber. "Take and receive this offering!"
In response, the other monks chanted a single sentence, in no language Red could name. It didn't even sound as though it had been designed with mouths in mind.
The first monk spoke again, his hands still raised. "Take these memories, these thoughts and souls, grey lilies harvested by we, the devoted! Seed of the Harbinger, hear us! Ia! Awaken, Mighty one! Feed, and rise to glory!"
At that, he reached down and pulled the grey cloth free of the tray.
Red couldn't see what it contained at first; it was a mounded, irregular mass, gleaming slickly in the green light, smeared with dark fluid and dripping greyish chunks over the lip of the tray and onto the deck.
Suddenly, she realised what it was she was looking at, and had to suppress a cry of disgust. Everything that had spilled from the skulls of those poor victims on the wheel, everything that had slopped down that horrible trough, was piled on the tray just a few metres from her.
For a few seconds Red wondered if she was going to be sick. Her nostrils were clogged with the fleshy reek of human brains.
The chanting had started up again. As if in answer, something under the floor moved.
Red had been on an ocean trip, once, in her previous life. On the way back to port it became apparent that the navigator, having enjoyed slightly too long a party with some of the passengers the night before, had mis-set the course. Before anyone could correct the mistake the ship had scraped twenty metres of hull plating free on a submerged rock. That feeling, of a huge and totally destructive object grinding past beneath her feet, was almost exactly what she felt now.
Something was coming up out of the shaft, between the translation drive and the deck.
At first she thought it was liquid, some pale oily stuff oozing up out of the green light and sliming towards the monks. But within a few beats of her hammering, panicked heart she saw that this was no liquid: a pulpy tendril was probing blindly across the deck, colourless and as thick as her forearm, heading for the tray. As she watched, she saw the slender tip of it caress the silver, then reach up to lick the surface of what it contained.
A thousand more tendrils boiled instantly up from the depths.
Red moaned in horror. A forest of lashing tentacles was erupting from the gap, some as thick as her waist, some as fine as hair, all wetly translucent and impossibly long. In seconds they had covered half the drive, coiling and squirming like decapitated snakes. They brushed at the panels, the coolant tubes, even the monks, but the full weight of their frenzy was centred on the tray.
Hundreds of the loathsome things were hammering at the mound of tissue, flicking chunks of grey in every direction. The larger tendrils were sucking the mass down. Red could see slicks of fluid and matter inside them, gulped down and out of sight by some awful peristalsis.
God help her, the things were feeding…
She jumped to her feet, levelled the blaster and began pumping shot after shot into the tentacles.
Plasma slammed into the mass. The tentacles detonated, dozens of them with each shot, blown to spray and fragments and superheated steam, In se
conds her side of the drive chamber was an opaque fog of smoke and exploding tendril.
Half the monks were running for cover, others were belting towards her around the deck. A few were levelling blasters: Red dived back behind the hatch as return fire began howling out towards her. Plasma shots and frag-shells filled the hall, blowing the lockers to pieces. She was surrounded by clouds of burning foil.
It was chaos.
There were too many enemies, and every time she incinerated one mass of tentacles hundreds more billowed into view. She leaned around the hatch, blasted one monk in half as he ran towards her, took another one's head off with a glancing shot, then ducked back as a frag-shell screamed fragments off the hatch next to her head.
She wasn't going to be able to blast everything in the drive chamber that was trying to kill her, not before one of the shots coming back ripped her open. It was time to go.
The hall was a mess, a blazing ruin of shattered lockers and smoke. She bolted back towards the mag-car, using the mess as cover, keeping as low as she could. Shots ripped past her, but she managed to get up and into the car without having her spine punched out through her guts.
She scrambled through the car, hauled the far door open, and came face to face with another army of monks.
Of course the ones back in the chamber would have called for reinforcements. She just hadn't expected them to arrive so quickly.
They were on her in seconds, dragging her down from the car. She lashed out as best she could, crushing a skull here, ripping a jawbone away there, but there were too many of them. Then something cold and sharp slammed into the side of her neck.
Blackness flooded out from behind her eyes. Her last thought, before the world fell away entirely, was the hope that they would not wait until she woke up before they ripped the brain out of her head.
11
The Gathering Storm
Othniel was ten hours out of Shalem when the explosion occurred.
Antonia was on the bridge at the time. She was up on the command gallery, leaning on the rail, watching the bridge crew at their work beneath her. Two hundred men and women, seated behind vast banks of workstations, watching their boards or the massive holographic icons that hung in the smoky, incense-laden air. Fans whirled under the vaulted roof, and prayer-chants piped in through audio panels formed an edgy counterpoint to the chattering of the controls, the muted hum of conversation, the constant background hum of the jumpspace drives.
It was a wondrous sight. Antonia gloried in it. It made her feel strong.
Sub-captain Erastus was at the command board, in control of the ship during the superlight jump. Antonia had been at the rail for almost an hour, watching. She had relaxed into the rhythm of the ship.
Perhaps too relaxed. When the explosion went off she took almost a second to react.
The vibration was distant, but significant. The prayer-chants stuttered for a moment, and Antonia felt a ripple of concern sweep through the crew below. A killship was five kilometres high and massed a hundred thousand tonnes. A vibration you could feel through the deck meant that something very bad was happening.
Antonia straightened. "Hold steady!" she barked. "Sensor ops, report!"
"No hard returns," the operator replied. He tapped at his boards, bringing up a tactical schematic; a huge grid-marked globe sprang to life over their heads, wrought from threads of green light, a model of Othniel at its centre. It rotated wildly for a moment before settling. "Nothing from the sense-engines or precog units. We're alone out here."
"That's a bonus."
The tactical globe shrank to one side, while the Othniel model moved and grew to fill the space it had left. It turned sideways to Antonia, showing her the fishlike profile of the vessel; the hangar cut out in the prow, the drive arrays, the enormous dorsal and ventral spines.
Red spots were blinking at the ship's centre, just down from the hangars and slightly aft. Antonia cursed. "Maintain course. Throttle back ten factors. Looks like a damper's blown."
She turned away from the rail and headed for the exit gates. "Erastus, I need to see this. Keep me appraised."
"Thy will be done." Erastus bowed his head as she went past him.
* * * *
Thankfully, only one of the dampers had failed, and when it had exploded most of the blast had been channelled out through the weakened hull plating on the starboard side. Some damage had been done to the decks above and below, but they were unoccupied. Omri hadn't had time to repressurise them.
Looking at the twisted wreckage, Antonia found herself breathing a sigh of relief. If the blast had funnelled through into any of the other dampers there could have been a cascade failure. Othniel would have had to drop out of jumpspace and limp home.
That would have crushed her. She needed to see Lavannos, and those who had killed Gaius, burn.
She found a grav-lift and headed up a hundred decks, to the communications vault.
The vault was a low, disc-shaped chamber, devoid of furniture or any overt decoration. Only a circular keypad on a stand and a glowing ring of holo-projectors in the concave floor marred its perfection: in all other respects the room was featureless.
Antonia could just have easily made her communiques from the bridge, or the linker in her cabin, but there was something about the vault that helped her to think.
She went to the keypad and typed in a request. The air above the projectors filled with a hazy column of static. She waited for a minute, then another.
She was about to tap out her request again when Tech-Prime Omri appeared in the column. "My apologies, Het Admiral."
"Not a problem, tech-prime. I know how busy you are."
Omri's eye-lenses whirred. "These have been interesting days, admiral, but work has been progressing. Is there a problem?"
Antonia nodded. "We lost a damper. Aleph-twenty."
"Just the one?" Omri paused, and a ring of static darted through his image. "Give me a tactical readout."
"Of course." Antonia went to the keypad and began tapping through the available files: ship status data, internal scans, damage reports. She selected the relevant icons and touched "send".
Omri vanished. The column became a blur of images, blueprints and diagrams and sense-engine output, a chattering succession of light and colour that moved too fast for her to follow.
The images halted abruptly, and Omri's holographic form scanned back into view. "Your appraisal?" asked Antonia.
It would have taken her days to go through that amount of technical information. But then, she wasn't a tech-prime. "There is a continued weakness in the principal charge-capacitor array. Overheat in the ventilation ducts. Microfractures in seventeen vanes of the dorsal heat-sink. The un-pressurised decks above and below the blast dampened the explosive effects, but the mountings on three more dampers must be considered suspect. You were lucky."
Antonia didn't feel all that lucky. "Your recommendation?"
"Continue with your mission, Het Admiral. Then return to Shalem immediately, at a speed no greater than eighteen factors. And try not to antagonise anyone on the way home."
A speed of eighteen factors would get Othniel back in about a week. "I'll transfer the flag to Despoiler upon my return." She smiled. "Thank you, Omri. I needed your reassurance."
"It is my duty to serve, Het Admiral. I look forward to your return."
The holo-ring went dark. Antonia stayed where she was for the moment, pondering, tapping lightly at the edge of the keypad with a fingertip. She wondered, not for the first time, if she was doing the right thing.
She shook herself. Doubt wasn't something that had any place in the mind of an Iconoclast admiral.
Lavannos had enjoyed the ignorance of the Accord for too long. Something had been allowed to fester there, something that had taken the life of a great warrior and respected agent of the patriarch. Antonia, as admiral-commander of Shalem, had enough autonomy from high command to make punitive strikes on any world she considered a threat to t
he security of the Accord.
Besides, according to Major Ketta, Durham Red was on Lavannos. Yet another reason to scour the place.
Antonia turned to go. As she did so, the holo-ring sprang back into life.
She whirled. The image of a man had appeared there: tall and muscular, his lined face grimly handsome. Clad in black armour and white face-paint, his hair covered by a sensory skullcap.
Fleet Admiral Trophimus.
Antonia snapped to attention. "My lord!"
"At ease, admiral." Trophimus was Antonia's direct superior, lord of the battle-fortress Noamon and commander of the fleets of twenty entire temple-stations. He reported only to the patriarch himself. "How fortunate to find you here at such an hour."
Fortune, Antonia thought despairingly, had nothing to do with it. Trophimus had been trying to reach her for days, and with her reports still uncompleted she had been going to ever-greater lengths to avoid talking to him. He must have placed a priority order with the entire relay-station network, telling them to look out for signals to or from her crypt-key, and to piggyback a parasite signal onto any call she made. He'd simply taken over control of the vault as soon as her conversation with Omri had ended. "Indeed, my lord."
Trophimus steepled his fingers. "I'll come directly to the point, admiral. I know your time is precious." He raised an eyebrow. "Too precious to spend completing Curia's reports, in fact."
"About those—"
He waved a hand. "Don't concern yourself, Het. I've got an approval already written. Just get them to here at Noamon and I'll stamp them off." He smiled. "Believe me, I know what a bane paperwork can be."
Antonia felt as though a balloon, inflated behind her ribs for weeks, had just been popped. "Oh," was all she could manage.
"That's not the reason I called, Het Admiral." His smile faded. "I understand you are en route to Lavannos."
"That's correct."
"A punitive strike?"
Antonia nodded. "Yes, my lord. A threat to the Accord has been detected there, and the taint of evil. It must be eliminated before it can spread."
Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave Page 15