Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave

by Peter J Evans

  A scream that was tearing her mind apart.

  Dimly, she could hear that everyone else was howling too. She lifted her head, the effort almost stopping her heart in her chest, and saw shocktroopers rolling on the tiles with their heads in their hands, Durham Red shrieking and Ketta curled in a foetal position and slamming her head repeatedly against a wall. Only the abbot had his mouth closed, and he was standing where he had been chained, his eyes rolled back in his head, face twisted in a fierce, insane joy.

  It was all she could bear to see. The walls were rippling around her, the very air shaking. The scream was still ripping up around her, and it was getting worse. It was the deafening shriek of a million babes in arms, thrust into searing fires. It was the howl of a billion men as their brains were torn from their heads. It was the death scream, the birth scream, terror, pain, loss and mourning. It was unbearable.

  It was gone.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the scream was over. Antonia collapsed, as if a puppet with cut strings. She couldn't stop shaking.

  Her throat was a column of pain. She'd been screaming so loudly that she'd torn it inside.

  She panted, trying to get her breath back, to spit the taste of blood from her mouth. Some of the shocktroopers were still screaming, and the sound beat at her ears. She got to one knee, then hauled herself upright.

  "What did you do?" she hissed.

  The abbot had his head down, but he was glaring at her under his brows. His mouth was stretched in a wide, vulpine grin. There was blood oozing from between his teeth. "He wasn't even aiming at us," he laughed. "All we got was the edges of it. Don't you see, he's still not awake yet!"

  She slapped him across the face, hard, but it didn't stop him laughing. Then she remembered what he had said before.

  You might even swat it down…

  She ran across the courtyard, and began searching the sky. When she saw Othniel she almost let out another scream of her own.

  The flagship was tilting over.

  Antonia pulled the comm-linker from her belt and flipped it on. "Sub-captain!"

  The image on the screen was wavering, shot through with static. She heard what sounded like a riot in the background—instead of battle-hymns, the bridge echoed to a chorus of shrieks.

  "Erastus! Sub-captain, come in!"

  At that, he fell into view. He had his back to her, and he sounded as though he was sobbing. "I heard Him!" he howled.

  "Iconoclast, pull yourself together!"

  "I heard Him!" Erastus span around to face the pickup. His face was a mask of blood, gouts of it pouring down his cheeks like the tracks of vast tears. "I don't need to see! I can hear!"

  The man had torn out his own eyes.

  Antonia hurled the linker away, so hard that it hit the wall and shattered. Above her, Othniel was still tilting. Lights flickered over its hull, but these were not the staccato flares of manoeuvring thrusters. Those spots of brightness were centred on the weapons emplacements.

  The hunger-guns were blowing themselves up.

  She could hear them past the shrieks of the troopers and her own hoarse breathing; distant thumps, as the sentient weapons tore themselves apart. The daggership shoals were dissipating, ships spiralling out of control. She heard a lash of engines as one snapped past the monastery and into a nearby crater, followed by an explosion that sent fragments of metal and black glass whipping into the air.

  Some of the daggerships were attacking Othniel. Antonia saw one, its drives flaring at maximum thrust, dart straight towards the killship's flank. It hit the weakened hull plating, where the dampers were.

  The entire deck exploded.

  The hull vomited a horizontal sheet of fire and debris, flames blasting out port and starboard, from prow to stern. It cut the ship in half. Just as the noise of that awful detonation reached Antonia, the decks above and below the dampers exploded too. And then the ones above and below those.

  Every deck exploded in sequence, up and down, the entire ship consumed by a series of shattering blasts that filled the sky with metal. For a second she saw the framework of the dreadnought keep its shape, but it was nothing more than a blazing skeleton that broke apart a moment later, shedding vast plates of metal and ceramic, daggership hulls, corpses. Othniel came down like lightning falling from heaven, like a comet, a melting storm of steel and fire that plummeted down into the centre of the Eye of God and was gone.

  Antonia slumped back against the wall. She could still hear daggerships thundering overhead, colliding in mid-air, crashing down into craters.

  One of the shocktroopers wouldn't stop screaming.

  Durham Red was twisting in her frame. It looked like she was having convulsions. Matteus Godolkin was sagging against his cuffs, the mutant Judas Harrow was trying to shake the mental scream from his head. Ketta was still curled in the corner, alive or dead, Antonia couldn't tell. Some of the shocktroopers were lying still in crumpled, ungainly heaps, some were up and trying to help their fallen colleagues. It was chaos.

  There was the sound of a fusion engine, drawing closer; the landing craft. Antonia sagged in a kind of relief, and then heard a sudden report; a metallic shearing noise.

  Saint Scarlet had snapped her frame in half.

  Antonia dropped her hand to her pistol, but it was gone. She saw, as if in slow motion, the Blasphemy break free of one leg-cuff, the lower beam of the frame already broken, her hands still bound to a long T-shape that extended partway down her back. She was running towards Antonia, ignoring the fractured metal bar that was still cuffed to one ankle.

  Above her, the landing craft slid sideways through the air and crashed into the roof of the monastery.

  It was obviously out of control, the landing spine still raised, the wings part-extended. The sound of the drives had risen to a deafening whine, and Antonia felt the down-draft rip at her as the vessel hammered sideways into the church. Hugely armoured, it took off the entire upper storey without trying.

  It was coming down right on top of Antonia.

  There was nothing she could do, nowhere to run. The great slab-flat side of the craft was tilting down at her, bringing down a sea of masonry. The wall below it angled out, breaking up as it did so, falling in a storm of bricks and pipe work and white stone cladding down into the courtyard.

  Durham Red hit her at a full run.

  She didn't even try to move. They were both going to be pulped by the landing craft in moments—at least like this, she would take the Blasphemy with her.

  The vampire hit her hard, bowling her over, swiping her sideways with the metal bar still chained to her arms. The impact was amazing, the pain sudden and incredible. She felt her left arm break, armour or no armour, and then she was rolling across the courtyard tiles.

  Under the landing craft.

  Its shadow covered her, enveloped her. The noise of the drives was absolutely deafening.

  Then the craft, the wall, the upper floor of the monastery and all it contained, came down on top of her.

  And everything went dark.

  14

  Going Underground

  Not for the first time that day, Durham Red awoke in quite a lot of pain.

  It took her a few seconds to work out where she was, and how she'd managed to get there. It was dark, for one thing, very dark indeed. She wasn't even quite sure which way was up.

  The last thing she remembered was the courtyard.

  She had been chained to the abbot's frame, stacked up like firewood and reeling from the after-effects of that awful psychic shriek. She'd seen Antonia, the Iconoclast admiral, across the courtyard and decided that her most dangerous enemy was right there. None of the other troopers had regained their wits, and even Major Ketta was out of it.

  The admiral must have been hard as rocks to have been on her feet after that.

  And then, against all hope, the metal frame had bent.

  It was only the slightest movement, but Durham Red knew from past experience that once something bend
s, getting it to break is only a matter of strength and time. She remembered being up on the wheel, during the Iconoclast attack, the chunk of frag-shell shrapnel that had come so close to embedding itself in her vertebrae. It was still halfway through the vertical part of the frame, poking into her back. For a time, she'd thought of it as nothing more than yet another hardship. As if she didn't have enough to put up with.

  A few good pulls, however, and that sharp little piece of metal had helped her snap the whole frame to pieces.

  The bar above her shoulders was still intact, but the chain around her left ankle had failed at the same time as the lower bar sheared into two unequal parts. Suddenly, she could run. She had begun barrelling across the courtyard, hoping to take Antonia out first, then somehow get hold of a weapon and start blasting.

  Okay, she thought, it wasn't much of a plan. But it was better than waiting around to be loaded onto an Iconoclast landing craft.

  Red shifted in the dark and groaned. Oh God, the landing craft. It must have taken some of the same psionic pounding she had. It had come down right on top of her.

  Why was she suddenly back at the wrong side of the courtyard? She couldn't remember. That was her trouble, she did things without thinking, sometimes. Her reactions tended to be faster than she was.

  Abruptly, there was light. Red squinted against the glare, and turned her head away. All she could see around her was rubble.

  Someone next to her coughed.

  She looked back, past the source of the light. She wasn't alone.

  Admiral Huldah Antonia was right next to her.

  * * * *

  "Well," Red muttered, not long afterwards. "Looks like we're both pretty much snecked."

  From what she could gather, she and Antonia had been under the monastery wall together when the landing craft had come down on top of them. The courtyard had collapsed under the impact. Half the monastery was lying on top of them.

  The space they were in was actually quite large: above them was a hundred tonnes of assorted rubble, below and to the sides a mixture of courtyard tiles, masonry and black Lavannos stone. There had been a void under the tiles, far enough underground to have supported the courtyard for decades, but unable to withstand the massive force of the landing craft coming down on it. Red wondered if it would have given way as soon as the ship had put its landing spine down, sending them all into the pit.

  "How far down do you think we are?"

  Antonia shifted painfully, as much as she could. "Halfway to hell," she replied.

  The Iconoclast was trapped, and in far worse shape than Red. Great chunks of stonework lay across one arm and one leg, pinning her down to the floor. The leg didn't look to be in too bad shape—the foot was still moving at the end of it—but the woman's arm was definitely broken.

  Red had done that. The rubble was just adding to her woes.

  Durham Red, for her own part, was able to get up and walk around, in the space she had. But the rest of the frame was still on her, the wide bar above her shoulders, forcing her head forward, the piece of lower bar dangling off her right leg.

  She tried to roll her head around. Her neck was stiff as a board. "I feel like James Dean."

  Antonia didn't venture what she felt like. A pancake, probably. Red began looking around for a suitably sturdy piece of masonry. She found a slab of marble that looked like it weighed about half a tonne, and began edging sideways towards it.

  "What are you doing?"

  Red glanced over at Antonia. "Gonna try and bust this frame." She nodded at the flashlight in the Iconoclast's armour. "How long's that going to last?"

  "Weeks."

  "Cool." She jammed the end of the frame into a gap under the marble, and heaved down. There was a crunch of stone and the gap gave way, pitching her over backwards. "Ow! Sneck!"

  She got up, and tried again, making sure she was more solidly wedged this time. The metal bent fractionally behind her. "Oh yeah…".

  Antonia was watching her intently. It was staring to get on her nerves. Eventually she rounded on the woman. "What the hell are you staring at?"

  "At you."

  "Well don't."

  "Forgive me, Blasphemy. But here I am, trapped alone with the creature I have had nightmares about since I was a small child, the ultimate enemy of humankind. Can you blame my fascination?"

  Red sagged against the frame. She'd used all her strength for the moment, and pulling down on the thing didn't seem to be having much more effect. She'd try pushing in a minute, when she had her breath back. "Look, admiral, I'm not anyone's ultimate enemy, okay? I just took a wrong turn."

  "Shall I be more clear?" the woman scowled. "To the human race, which I am sworn to protect using any means necessary, you are a danger of unimaginable proportions. Don't you see, you yourself are completely unimportant! You are just a mutant, a woman out of time. But what you represent, that's where the danger lies. Saint Scarlet is a far more potent force than Durham Red can ever be." She twisted under the slabs, obviously in some pain. "That's why you must be destroyed, publicly humiliated. The Tenebrae have to be disabused of the notion that you are their Messiah."

  "I've already told them that."

  "And they didn't believe you," Antonia replied quickly. "They retreated back into the shadows for a time, but they will return, with your name on their lips as they slaughter billions. Durham Red, you were on Pyre. You have seen what they are capable of."

  "Yeah, and I was on Wodan too! Guess what, you bastards are both as bad as each other!" She gave the bar an angry shake. "No, you know what? You Iconoclasts are worse! You don't see them stealing every scrap of food from mutant planets, letting whole populations starve!"

  "Those are tithe worlds," Antonia snarled. "They were permitted to settle there on condition they redeploy ten per cent of their planetary output for the support of poorer worlds. That's what 'tithe' means—a tenth."

  "Screw a tenth! You take it all!"

  Antonia rolled her eyes. "Yes, Blasphemy, in a perfect universe there would be enough ships to take their tenth every standard year, but there aren't—mainly due to the actions of your Tenebrae friends. So we take everything once every ten years. If they had the wit to plan for it there wouldn't be a problem."

  "Ah, sneck it!" Fury gave Red a sudden burst of strength. She heaved, planting her boots as hard as she could and forcing herself upwards. Her legs shook with strain, the marble slab shifted warningly, and then the metal gave way.

  The upper bar exploded, fragments of it whining away and spinning off the rubble. Red found herself sprawling, her back singing with pain.

  But she was free. She dropped her arms for the first time in hours. "Oh sneck, that feels good!" She collapsed backwards, landing hard on her rump, then slumped against the nearest wall. The cuffs around her wrists and one ankle remained, but she would deal with them later. Just for a minute or two, she wanted to luxuriate in not walking around as though crucified.

  After a short time she sat up again. Antonia was still looking at her. "Face it, admiral. You hate mutants. I'm a mutant. We're never going to see straight on this."

  "I hate the Tenebrae. Not every mutant is Tenebrae, just as not every human is Iconoclast." Antonia sagged back. "You are a woman of some honour, Durham Red. I have a request."

  Red raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"

  "When you bleed me, take it all."

  "Erm, look, that 'vampire bite' thing—"

  "Is childish nonsense, I have no doubt. But everyone else must continue to believe it." Antonia closed her eyes. "Faith is a powerful weapon. There may come a time when it is the only thing humans have left."

  "Well, until that day…" Red used a piece of the metal bar to stab down between the links of the ankle-chain, shattering it. "You're not getting off so lightly, admiral."

  * * * *

  It took some effort to get Antonia out from under the rubble. Red probably could have shifted any one of the slabs on her own, but each one tended to be trapped under
something else, forming an interlocking puzzle of weight and tension. If she levered the wrong one away, the entire roof might fall in, flattening the pair of them.

  Eventually she used some of the metal frame to heave the largest slab up a few millimetres, enabling Antonia to get her leg free. The stone across the admiral's arm was smaller and loosened slightly by her actions on the one below. Red shifted that one much more easily, although she was careful to remove the knife from Antonia's wrist sheath before she did. "Sorry, Het Admiral. It's not that I don't trust, you. I just don't trust you."

  "Do you honestly think I would be in any condition to take you on, Blasphemy?"

  "No. But I think you might try anyway."

  While Antonia attended to her injuries, Red began to explore the void. There was no way up through the roof of the cavern, that was for sure. It looked like they had fallen several metres at least, with most of the monastery filling in the gap. She wondered if anyone was left alive above ground. Whether, if there was, they had the slightest notion that Red and Antonia might have survived. "You've not got a comm-linker at all, have you?"

  Antonia was modifying part of her armour, strapping her broken arm down across her chest. "I'm afraid mine broke."

  Red started to probe some of the rubble. At one end of the cavern she had seen some shards of Lavannos stone that didn't look like they had come from the roof. "Toni? Come and check this out."

  The Iconoclast glared at her sideways as she limped closer. "What have you found?"

  She pointed to one of the shards. "If this had come from up there, it would be flat on both sides, yeah?"

  "But that's curved on both sides. Do you think there were two voids here?"

  Red nodded. "Yup. In fact, this planet's full of them. It's a sponge. We can't be too far from the one under the reliquary—if we can get there, we might be able to climb back out. Or into the drive complex."