Godolkin was already striding away.
Harrow ran to catch up, the thermocowl flapping. "What did he mean? About the stars?"
"Old legends, Harrow. Nothing that you'd be wise to think about." The Iconoclast stopped and turned to Harrow. "We must return to the monastery. The Blasphemy is there, trapped beneath."
"I agree. We'll find her together."
"No, Judas Harrow, we will not." Godolkin glowered at him. "I will locate Durham Red. You will return to the ship and await my signal."
"Why me?"
"Because it's your ship."
"Oh. Of course…" Hunter was still slaved to his crypt-key. It would need his bio-signs, or those of Durham Red, to lift off. "It's a long way."
"The dead shocktroopers have integral grav-chutes still attached to their armour. I will adapt one for you."
They set off, towards the broken, burning shape of the Church of the Arch.
17
Hell And Back
Red still couldn't believe how big the Mindfeeder was.
She'd been imagining something the size of Crimson Hunter; massive, but not unthinkable. She'd encountered some pretty large creatures in her time, and most bio-viable planets had at least a history of megafauna. Antonia had made a mistake, she thought at first; the woman must have been looking at the wrong diagram or brought up an erroneous file. But the more data she'd collected from the ops room's systems, the more certain she had become.
This animal was almost the entire size of the Moon.
No. Animal was the wrong word. She had felt much more than mindless hunger when the thing's scream of awareness had hit her. This Mindfeeder, as the abbot had called it, was an intelligence of unimaginable proportions.
If it ever truly awoke, the universe would be in very serious trouble indeed.
"Toni? You still with me over there?"
"In body, Blasphemy." Antonia had taken her helmet off. Her hair, freed of constraint, was shoulder-length and auburn. Her arm was strapped immobile over her chest, splinted by the armour's internal medical systems, and her leg looked as though it was still giving her a lot of trouble. She was, however, a picture of furious concentration, hunting through the ops room's files for something, anything that would give them an edge.
Red would have liked an edge, but at the moment she would have settled for a clue. She trotted over to Antonia's workstation. "Anything?"
In reply, the Iconoclast brought up another lunar cross-section. "This is a real-time scan. The builders of this complex had the entire Moon wired for study—if nothing else, we can track whatever the creature is doing, at all times." She pointed, tapping the glass. "It's moving."
The perimeter of the mass, a few kilometres below the surface, was in constant motion. It writhed and billowed. "Nasty," said Red. "Makes me feel seasick."
"My sentiments entirely." Antonia turned the chair round to face her. "Durham Red, we both know this entity must not be allowed to awaken. The psionic weaponry it uses might not be constrained by distance."
"Don't tell me you've seen thing kind of thing before!"
"Not entirely. But there have been powerful mutants, psychers, able to kill at enormous distances." She raised an eyebrow. "And none of them were the size of a minor planet."
"Point taken. And believe me, I want to see this thing fry as much as you do. But we don't even have a blaster between us."
Antonia turned back to the workstation. "Elementary military tactics, Blasphemy. When faced with overwhelming odds, fall back and observe. Information is power."
"Yeah? When faced with overwhelming odds I normally go in with all guns blazing and kill them all."
"We don't have any guns."
"True."
* * * *
It was Red who found the video files.
She had been working on the map table. Most of the controls in the ops room were extremely self-explanatory. Two hundred years of technical progress had, it seemed, finally taught software designers that vast amounts of surface complexity were not the best direction to head in. The active, constantly self-modifying panels were a help too, as they quite often simply moved irrelevant controls away. Red still found quite a lot of dead ends, but she made far more headway than she had been expecting.
Antonia, used to the baroque technologies of the Accord, was having more trouble. "These systems are a nightmare. They do not respond to any sensible protocols."
"Just press things."
Red had found a library of data files. She was scanning through them, awed at how many there were. "You know, I'm starting to get a feel for this place."
"Meaning?"
"Well, look." Red gestured at the screen. "This thing is chock-full of sensory data. I mean, real minutiae. Seismic readouts to ten decimal places, microwave monitors, lidar, graviton detection… Who the hell would need all this stuff? Two hundred and twenty thousand measurements of the distance between two gold plates a metre away from each other." She gave the side of the table a slight kick. "It's a metre, guys! Move on!"
"Blasphemy…"
"Oh, right. What I mean is, this place is just one big laboratory. They didn't just move the Moon, they had sensors and computers and scientists set up to record absolutely everything that happened when they did it."
"A test bed," breathed Antonia.
Red grinned at her. "Bonus points! If you wanted to move something really important, like the Earth, say…"
"You would test out the theories on something expendable first."
The Moon. These people had thought the Moon expendable.
The Earth must have been proofed against its loss. Possessing the satellite did far more than simply give the world tides. Red was no geologist, but she knew that simply removing the Moon would have dire consequences for the Earth's crust.
She blinked. The file tree she was scanning through had modified, and she'd been so lost in thought that she had missed it. She scrolled back. "Hello…"
"What have you found?"
"Videos, I think. Hope it's not someone's collection of porn."
Antonia had risen from her workstation and was trotting down the ramp. "Of what?"
"Never mind." Red found a file and brought it up. "Holy crap."
A rectangle of black had appeared on the panel, filled with crisp white text. Tycho-Alpha Translation Centre—Synchro Test. 11.00 AM EST 20-02-2395.
"Twenty-three ninety-five," Red breathed. "We were right—more than two centuries after I went into the tube…"
The black rectangle vanished, replaced by a camera-view of the ops room. Dozens of graphs and readouts lit up at the edges, jumping and fluctuating in constant motion.
The ops room was full of people. Every workstation was occupied.
A man appeared on the screen, dark-skinned, young. His hair had been dyed vivid silver and he was wearing a slender piece of technology on one side of his face, a combination data-monocle and microphone. "TA synch test one," he intoned. "Initiating primary sensor array Delta-Tango eleven. Modifying for feedback. Recording. Initiating primary—"
"Dullsville." Red hit the fast-forward. The scene blurred.
"A thousand years," Antonia whispered. "That man lived and died a thousand years ago."
"Mmm." Red had to admit she was impressed. The recording must have been stored in a crystal matrix to have lasted so long intact. But then again, if the complex had been designed to test the translation of the entire Moon, and bring back the gigabytes of sensory data needed to make sure the same process was safe for Earth, they would have built it to last.
They would have built it to withstand anything. Even time.
The recording ended. Red cursed and scanned back a few stops, until the man's face reappeared.
"Synch-test in T-minus five," he told the screen. "Four, all baffles holding. Generator online. Datalink confirmed. Two. One. Mark."
Red held her breath. She could hear Antonia doing the same.
The man smiled broadly. "That's a wrap, pe
ople! Good job!"
Antonia gaped. "That's it?"
"Good data coming in from all the other centres: Mare Marginis, Robertson, Kulik all giving good returns…"
Red stopped the video. "Other centres?"
Antonia raced back up to her workstation, as fast as she could with a dodgy leg. "So that's what it meant."
"What meant?"
"Mentions of those areas." Her fingers blurred over the panel. Apparently she'd gotten the hang of it. A wire frame globe drew itself onto the big screen above her workstation, studded itself with craters and became a hazy, translucent image of the moon as it had once been. Red looked up at it, and felt a surge of homesickness.
Smaller spheres appeared on the screen, under the Moon's surface. There were four of them, arranged in a rough cross, on a tilted equatorial line. Tycho, Robertson, Mare Marginis, and Kulik.
Four translation drives, each with their own research complex. Tycho-Alpha was only one-quarter of the system.
"Once again," said Antonia quietly, "we have been seeing only one small part of the greater whole."
Red was about to agree, and probably to swear, when the floor under her feet shifted. "Oh sneck, not again…" She grabbed hold of the map table and held on.
It was under the floor, close under, just beneath the mesh. She could see the way the ancient foam bulged very slightly upwards, emitting small puffs of blue dust. Bucket seats swivelled on their bearings. A skeleton sagged slightly, and toppled onto the floor.
Red watched its skull roll past her and come to a halt against a ramp. She was waiting for the scream.
It never came. The feeling of motion went away. She let out a long breath and sagged slightly against the table.
Antonia had her real-time map up again. "Blasphemy," she hissed, as though unwilling to raise her voice. She pointed at the screen.
A loop of unknown material was sliding away from beneath Tycho-Alpha, unravelling as it did so. More loops were showing around the circumference of the mass, odd-looking prominences rolling lazily under the crust.
"It's stretching," said Durham Red. "Not long now."
* * * *
There was one more video she wanted to see. The last one.
It was a long file, the biggest one in the list. She scanned down to it and brought it up on the map-table screen.
Antonia had joined her again. "I don't know what this will achieve."
"I just need to see it. What happened."
"What does it matter?"
Red snarled. "It matters to me, okay? Now shut up for a minute and let me watch!"
The text on the rectangle read "25-12-2396". They'd moved the Moon on Christmas Day. Red thought that was quite typical, actually. From Boxing Day 2396 onwards, lovers would no longer have anything silvery to meet under.
The ops room, when it reappeared, was less crowded than it had been before. The dark-skinned man was still there, however, with a slightly more attenuated version of the monocle-microphone at the side of his head. They had been updating the whole time.
His hair was golden, now.
There was a lot of preparation and counting down. Red forwarded through most of that. "Come on, come on, cut to the chase."
"Sequence begins. Final translation in T-minus five. Datalink confirmed. Optimus programme is go. Two. One. Mark."
The screen dissolved into static. "Sneck," Red yelled, slamming her fist into it.
"Wait," Antonia told her.
As if in reply, the screen cleared again. The ops room was in a state of controlled panic. "Control, come in," the man was calling, pressing the headset into his ear. "Control?" He leaned back, yelling over his shoulder: "Does anyone know where the hell we are?"
"No returns! Negative telemetry!"
"Sir, surface temperature is rising, fast. One hundred fifteen, one-twenty, one-thirty…"
"Holy shit, have you seen what's out there?"
There was an incredible, awful sound, and the picture tilted wildly. That was when the screams started. The picture returned to static very soon after that and stayed that way for a long time.
The only reason the file was so big was that there had been no one to switch the recording off.
* * * *
"I've got a ship waiting," Red told Antonia. "On the landing field, about forty kilometres from here. If Harrow's alive, he'll be there. If he isn't, well…"
"We detected no ship," said the Iconoclast.
"You're not supposed to. He'd had some modifications made."
Antonia smiled grimly. "I'll pass the knowledge on. It will prove useful. In the meantime, what's your plan?"
"The key to this is the Optimus programme. I reckon it's the system that links all the drives together, gets them to fire all at once. If we can find that and activate it, the drives should charge, fire, and send this place back where it belongs."
"Which is?"
Red tapped the screen. "You heard those poor bastards. Somewhere hot. Admiral, think about this: the Moon vanished a thousand years ago. Saint Lavann saw it reappear, glowing red, five hundred years ago. So where do you think it was in the meantime?"
"In hell." The Iconoclast nodded to herself. "Five centuries in hell. While this thing grew like a cancer in its bowels."
"I think this orbit was where it was supposed to go—it's too stable to be a coincidence. They must have set the programme up way in advance, to send the Moon somewhere far away, but safe, around a big landmark. A gas-giant. But it didn't go here at first. It stayed in transition, for five hundred years, then finally completed the journey."
"You're guessing."
"Got any better ideas?"
"At present, no."
"Great." Red began adjusting her clothing, ripping away the tattered remains of the bodice, her remaining glove. She took her broken boots off. "Your job is to stay here and get the Optimus programme running. You've worked starship ops all your life. It shouldn't be too much different from a light-drive jump."
"You are insane!" Antonia's eyes had gone wide. "A thousand year old computer programme, on unfamiliar hardware, to trigger four wormhole generators simultaneously? Oh, and with a suitable time delay so you can retire to your vessel! Have I missed any—"
The ops room shuddered. Dust drifted down from the ceiling and three lumes above their heads cracked and went out.
"Yeah," said Durham Red. "Getting it done before this place gets eaten for lunch, and us with it."
Antonia gave her the sour eye. "And where will you be, oh great tactician?"
"In the drive chamber. I've got to make sure those mad monks weren't screwing around with the translation drive while they were feeding their new god."
* * * *
Antonia watched the Blasphemy disappear through the far door, into the maglev car and away.
She snarled a private curse and turned back to her workstation. There were a thousand things that could go wrong with the vampire's plan. The drives could very well be damaged—if not the one at Tycho-Alpha, then one of the others. The Optimus programme might be unusable, encoded, deleted. It might require a simple access code to operate, which Antonia could never know. The fusion core might not have the power to charge the drives fully, or the other translation centres might not have their cores up and running.
A thousand things. It was insane.
Luckily, Antonia had a few more aces up her armoured sleeve.
The mutant was right about one thing—operating the Tycho-Alpha systems was not light-years away from operating a starship. After all, they were both devices for transporting vast amounts of material from one place to another. Technology could, in certain circumstances, evolve and converge.
Not only that, but when the Blasphemy had switched the power back on, the ops room had returned to the same state it had been in when everything had been turned off. Many of the workstation programmes and applications had been in use when the madman in the fusion core had shut the power down, and had sprung back into life mid-command. Ant
onia, while pretending to be having a hard time learning how the ops room worked, had actually learned some very intriguing things.
How the communications worked, for example.
She set her station to search for all references to the Optimus programme, then switched seats. The comms system in the base was a distant relative of the ones used in Iconoclast starships. After all, it had been her own people, albeit a thousand years dead, who had moved the Moon in the first place. Further development had been largely halted by the Bloodshed. All things considered, they were far more similar than she could ever let the Blasphemy know.
It wasn't easy to reprogramme the frequency-swapping systems of Tycho-Alpha's comms to hunt down an Iconoclast crypt-key, but she managed it.
* * * *
The maglev car got Red to the drive chamber in just a few seconds, but there was a hairy moment along the way. The service door she had seen before had been blasted free of its moorings and lay on the conductive track, along with a fair amount of rubble. When the car passed over that, it bucked wildly, and Red had visions of it being slung completely off the track by the electromagnetic imbalance.
It didn't quite come to that. When the base had been new and fully operational there probably would have been some kind of inertial damping system to prevent such a wild ride, even if there was a slab of steel on the track. In these troubled times, it was up to the shape of the car itself, and the way it fitted neatly between its braces, to keep it stable.
It did make Red a little wary of coming back the same way, however. She began wondering if there was a way Antonia could switch off the power on the track and let her run back. Then she returned to her senses. This was an Iconoclast she was thinking about. The two might have been working towards a common goal for the moment, but Red was certain that Antonia would try to double-cross or kill her as soon as the opportunity arose.
It was important that she didn't let herself forget that. She tried to keep an image of Wodan, in flames from core to crust, fixed firmly in her mind.
Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave Page 21