The Omega Solution

by Peter J Evans

  "No shit. Otherwise he'll get as far as the Conclave and his whole army will be glowing in the dark..."

  They had exited jumpspace a long way from the rest of the fleet, about an hour from the designated return point. Red had shut down the Banshee's IFF transponders and communications, just in case. She didn't want anyone to know she was back, or even that she had escaped Kerioth alive. Martyrdom might be the most convenient state for her, at least for a while.

  Tisiphone had been growing on her holos for the entire hour, and it just kept getting bigger. Red had seen cities that didn't cover that much area, that much volume. Drawing close to it, she could see that Godolkin had been right about that, too. There was no way such a titan structure could have just carried troops. Dathan could have fitted a small country's armed forces in there.

  Maybe if it contained other equipment, too. Tanks, aircraft, other spaceships... But that still couldn't explain why he thought putting them all in the one hull was a good idea. "He's too smart for that," she whispered.

  "Holy one?"

  "Hm? Oh, nothing. Look, Jude, I don't think there's anything we can do but dock with that crate and see what's inside. Problem is, my unilateral decisions have gotten us nothing but trouble so far. So what do you think?"

  Harrow was silent for a time. Finally he said: "What are our choices?"

  "Well, we could bug out right now. Take this ship and Godolkin's and go. They aren't exactly comfortable, but they could get us a good distance away."

  "Or?"

  "Or, we could head back to Emissary and confront Dathan. Use my saintly reputation to haul him up in front of the other commanders, maybe broadcast it to the rest of the fleet. But you know what? Both of those choices ends up with us still not knowing."

  "Holy one, you could never leave the situation as it is. You would feel as though Dathan had beaten you." He glanced back up at her. "Somehow, I don't really see that as an option."

  "You know me so well."

  They were close enough for the surface of Tisiphone to begin resolving itself. What had looked like a continuous rust-brown shell had started to look mottled, then broken up into vague areas of colour. It was only now, a scant few kilometres away, that the areas themselves were showing their detail.

  Tisiphone was a patchwork.

  Its hull wasn't put together like that of the other ships in Dathan's fleet. Emissary and the other Umbrae Nova ships looked as if they had been moulded in one piece, put together from quality components of the same, shadow-grey material. Like most vessels in the Accord they were an odd mix of the hugely advanced and the terrifyingly primitive; smoothly lethal from the outside, complicated and labour-intensive on the inside. But at least they looked good. Tisiphone, this massive, mysterious centrepoint to Dathan's fleet, had been welded together out of sheet iron.

  The Banshee was coming up on Tisiphone from the stern, past the drive bells. Red could see now that the opening for the drives was ragged and unfinished. From a distance she had assumed the opening to be a complex, yet deliberate shape. Now she could see it was just where someone had stopped putting metal plates together.

  It didn't stop the troop ship from being a stupendous sight, though. Each one of those varicoloured metal plates was bigger than Crimson Hunter.

  Harrow was scanning the surface. "Holy one, there are a series of airlocks at the midpoint, on the opposite side to the pulsar. If we dock there, Tisiphone's mass should provide some protection from the radiation."

  "Got them." Red had the locks on her holos now too, three circular openings at the vessel's exact equator. She triggered the lateral thrusters and spun the gunship around its long axis until Tisiphone's hull was scanning beneath them like a landscape. With the pulsar's brilliant jets obscured by the troop ship's bulk, the Banshee descended into shadow.

  The patchwork below them looked like an endless succession of arable fields.

  Red used the forward thrusters to slow the Banshee, tapping at the collectives to reduce the velocity until the gunship hung motionless above the airlocks.

  "So," breathed Red. "Door number one, door number two, or door number three... Pick a door and win a prize."

  "Do you have a preference?"

  Red scanned the flight board. None of her instruments was showing activity - the troop ship was dark, and it was cold. There was no sign of life at all. "Doesn't look like anyone knows we're here. Yet, anyway. Door number one."

  As it turned out, the airlocks all opened up into the same chamber anyway. Red experienced a moment of vertigo when she climbed down through the gunship's floor and out through a wall, but as soon as she was through the artificial gravity took over, and suddenly it was the Banshee that was hanging sideways.

  The locks were arranged along the wall of a large, rectangular chamber, welded together from the same pitted steel plate as the ship's hull. It was pressurised, but frostily cold. Red's breath steamed in front of her as she watched Harrow closing the lock. "Okay. So far so good. Did you bring a gun?"

  "I was expecting to be using those built into Janet One."

  "Good point." She unclipped her particle magnums and handed him one. "Here. You realise I don't look half as cool with just one of these, don't you?"

  There were three hatches in the far wall of the chamber, opposite the three airlocks. Red looked at them suspiciously. "Open a door, win a prize."

  "Door number two," said Harrow. Red stepped forward and keyed it open.

  "Oh," was all she could say.

  Of all the things she had been expecting to find behind the door - armies of Umbrae Nova troops, ranks of grav-tanks, chamber after chamber of stasis tubes - she could not have expected this. She walked forwards, gingerly.

  Beyond the door was a small room. The floor was a dark mesh, the ceiling similar, although set with lumes. There was another door at the far end, a small control panel on a stand next to it. The walls of the room were transparent.

  Outside the room was nothing at all.

  She peered carefully through the nearest window, feeling the unnerving way the room bounced slightly as she walked. There was light outside, shining mistily from a source ahead of her, and in that hazy glow she could see the outside walls stretch dizzyingly away in every direction.

  Tisiphone was a hollow shell.

  Behind her the wall of the shell curved down and away into gloom. To either side the curve was shallower, the awesome scale of the whole place making it as flat as made no odds. The walls would meet each other again seven kilometres ahead of her, on the other side of the ship.

  Harrow stepped into the room, making it bounce even more alarmingly. "Why?" he gasped.

  Red pointed. "That."

  The shell had a core, a slender, gleaming horizontal bar that stretched from the front tip of the shell to the back. It was from this that the light came: the surface of the thing was studded with lumes.

  With no walls in the way, Durham Red could see the entire length of it.

  It was a starship, of a kind. The drives poking from the back of the shell were real; a great cluster of them met at a flared section of the bar, joining three enormous spheres arranged in a line. Ahead of those, as big as space stations tipped on their edges, were a series of massive metal rings - fixed to the bar with wing-like supports, they reached almost to the top and bottom of the shell. Ahead of those, the bar flared again, broke into a series of complex rods and panels, narrowed, flared one final time at the forward tip of the shell.

  Harrow was shaking his head in wonder. "Have you ever," he whispered, "seen anything like this before?"

  She had, but only in nightmares. There was only one reason for a central column so long, for reactors and collimator rings so vast. Only one reason for the whole structure to be fitted with drives and hidden away from those who might realise what it was.

  Tisiphone was no troop ship. It was a planet killer.

  The room was a cable car. Once the door was closed it locked with a hiss of equalising pressure, and the c
ontrol panel lit up. Red had no trouble operating the car. The panel only had two buttons, and they were arrow-shaped.

  She pressed the one that pointed forwards.

  The car moved fast, but in that enormous space it was still five minutes before they reached the core. As they drew close Harrow pointed out their destination: an armoured structure fixed to the top of the flared section, just before where the rods and panels started. The cabin was big enough, but from the other end of the cable it had been invisible.

  Behind it was fixed a more rounded bulk, rust-brown. "That," Red told Harrow, "looks a lot like a ship to me."

  "A Tenebrae shuttle," Harrow confirmed. "Quite an old design, but reliable. Probably for inspecting the inside of the shell."

  There were three cable cars, and like the entrance to the shell they all ended up in the same place. This chamber was much more conventionally built, though, with high ceilings and lume-panels and rubberised mesh underfoot. There was one hatch ahead. Magnum raised, Red walked silently towards it and keyed the lock.

  The hatch slid open. There were two Umbrae Nova guards behind it.

  One shouted and raised his frag-rifle. Either he had reacted too fast to recognise his saint, or was under orders to blast anyone that came through the door regardless. Red shot him anyway. The bolt took him just below the throat and blew his torso in half.

  Arms spread wide by the blast, the guard's rifle chattered out a stream of frag-shells as he tumbled backwards. The second guard was too close: the rifle stitched a line of holes up his side, from hip to armpit. He span away, already ripped to shreds inside his armour. Frag-shells were designed to go some distance inside a body before exploding.

  Red stepped over the corpses, careful not to slip in the blood. "That's it for a stealthy approach, I guess."

  She was in a short hallway. There were a couple of blood-spattered doors ahead of her, and one to the right - that would be closest to the forward end of the ship. It was also the biggest. Red moved across the hall and checked out the two smaller doors, but they led to a small guardroom and a galley, respectively. Both were unoccupied. "Hm. Okay. This time it's door number three..."

  "That makes sense."

  "I wonder what the prize is?" Red went forward, gun outstretched. The door slid open as she approached, so suddenly that she almost fired on reflex.

  There was no one there either.

  Red stepped through, trying to look everywhere at once. She couldn't hear anything save her own and Harrow's breathing, but she was hungry, and the smell of blood from the hallway was making it difficult to think.

  "The bridge," said Harrow, moving past her.

  Half bridge, Red decided, half control room. The chamber was large, about the size of the briefing hall on Emissary, and six-sided. Dathan was a man who liked to keep a theme.

  The chamber was ringed with control boards, and more were set closer to the centre in two angular half-rings. At the far end, facing aft, was an imposing control throne on a stepped dais.

  "Well," Red muttered ironically. "I wonder who gets to sit there?"

  Harrow was already checking out the boards. "Most of this equipment is shut down, holy one. Give me a few seconds to start the data engines."

  "Just don't hit 'fire' by mistake, yeah?" She was still watching the hatch.

  "I'll do my best." As he spoke, a holo-projector lit up, lume panels glowing green around its shallow edge, and a translucent model of Tisiphone appeared in the air above them.

  "Nice going..."

  "Thank you, holy one. Ah..." He tapped at the board. "I have a schematic here."

  The model went colour-coded. Red saw that Harrow was frowning. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing, exactly. But this is puzzling. There is a schematic of the pulsar, and the two are linked. Now why would Dathan need that?"

  Red shrugged. "Bring it up. I'm not sure what you mean."

  The model of Tisiphone moved to one side, and a whirling globe grew alongside it. Twin jets of light and smoky matter stormed out from its poles. As Red watched, parts of the pulsar model began to run the same colours as the diagram of the ship.

  Suddenly, it all made a horrible kind of sense.

  "Aw, sneck, Jude. Look!" She pointed. "Magnetic field on the pulsar, magnetic field generators here. Gravitational focus there, collimator rings here..." She put a hand to her mouth.

  "Jude, this thing's an artificial pulsar!"

  The planet killer wasn't designed to blast a world - there were plenty of weapons in the Accord that could do that already. After all, the Iconoclast immolation of Pyre had taken slightly less than fifteen minutes. But Tisiphone was something very different. Moved into planetary orbit with the light-drive, it would charge up its reactors and unleash a beam of radiation so lethal it would cook the flesh from any living creature in its path. Those on the rest of the planet would die more slowly, as the radiation propagated out through the atmosphere.

  Xandos wouldn't need a fleet to destroy a world, and he wouldn't need fifteen minutes. He'd drop Tisiphone out of superlight, fire it, and go. The survivors would be dying a day later, and most of them wouldn't even know why...

  "Sacred rubies, holy one... He means to irradiate the Conclave world? What would that achieve?"

  "Nothing to do with peace, that's for certain." Red ran a hand nervously back through her hair. "I thought he was a lying bastard all right, but sneck, I had no idea! How many of his people know about this?"

  "It can't be all of them, or he'd not hide Tisiphone beneath a shell. I think-" He froze. "Holy one, I do not believe we are alone."

  She moved quickly to join him. "Can you see something?"

  "A power drain." He glanced back, through the hatch. "Coming from that shuttle."

  At first there seemed no way from the hallway to the shuttle, but a little searching, plus some hefty kicks from Red, showed up a concealed panel in the back wall.

  Behind it, a narrow tunnel led away. Red put her head in and saw the outer surface of an airlock. It was rust-brown, obviously part of the shuttle.

  Not rust, she realised, walking carefully down the tunnel towards it. Paint. The dried-blood shade favoured by the Tenebrae.

  She still had the data-pick. It chattered faintly as she placed it next to the lock controls, and there was a substantial thumping sound from behind the metal. The outer hatch began to swing inwards. Red brought the magnum up, but the chamber was empty. "This is probably a bad idea."

  "We might be vulnerable. You can't sneak through an airlock: if someone hostile is waiting for us on the other side, we must subdue them quickly."

  "In other words, frag 'em."

  "That too."

  Red took a deep breath, made sure the magnum was primed and that her finger had the trigger already halfway back, and keyed the inner hatch. It slammed aside and she came through fast, on the deck and rolling, the gun centred unerringly on the face of the shuttle's sole occupant. She just managed to stop herself pulling the trigger.

  "Sneck," she hissed.

  "You're here," said Lahmi Dathan. "Would it be horribly clichéd to say that I've been waiting for you?"

  There was little family resemblance between the Dathans. Xandos was tall and strong, his voice commanding, his manner regal. Lahmi could not have been more different.

  The support chair which cradled Lahmi Dathan was fixed to a long beam that pivoted in the centre of the floor, allowing him to move in a circle around the room's edge. "Xandos has been generous, in his way," he told them, moving the chair's joystick with one tiny, withered hand, sending it scooting past them. "He's given me enough toys to play with, if nothing else."

  "Toys," muttered Red, scanning the room. "Back in my day we had MagnaBrix and dolls that peed themselves."

  "Your days were happier ones, my Saint."

  Lahmi had more technical equipment ranged around his cavern of a room than Red had seen in one place since Hermes Alpha. Half the perimeter of the room was workbenches, each fitted with a whol
e range of fabrication tools: sense-scopes, microcutters, light-drills of every size and shape. There were data-engines, bookshelves, a food dispenser, some kind of entertainment system. "Jesus, Lahmi. How long have you been in here?"

  "In this shuttle?" Lahmi blinked at her with his tiny, metallic eyes. One of the few features he shared with his brother. "Fifteen years. Inside the shell of this monster, six."

  "He's been building Tisiphone for six years?"

  "Tisiphone? Is that what he calls it now?" He tittered. "One of the Erinyes of pre-Bloodshed legend, a Fury. The avenger of murder. He probably considers that apt."

  Red couldn't help looking past him, to the twisted skein of cables and pipes that ran from the support chair back along the beam, disappearing into the floor through the central pivot. The space under the floor was probably full of Lahmi's life-support system.

  How such a wasted, crippled thing could ever have survived in the harsh realm of the Accord just beggared belief.

  His body, clad in a shapeless robe, was no bigger than that of a small child. His legs were twisted twigs twitching below the robe's hem, his arms not much more mobile. Even his face was small, wrenched and tilted back in the chair, pulled out of true by the huge weight of his awful head.

  Lahmi has the brains, Dathan had said. This, Durham Red could see, was true. He must have had fifty kilos of them.

  "And you designed it for him."

  Lahmi's expression, such that it was, darkened. "It was a thought experiment, nothing more. A way to construct an artificial pulsar. The technologies of the Accord are so stunted, so hidebound, constantly geared towards weapons and the defences against those weapons. Look at me, Durham Red! In your day, would I be like this?"

  She shook her head, helplessly. "I don't know."

  "There is no pure research any more. It's all I wanted to do, all I could do." He flapped a tiny hand. "As you can see, I don't get out much."

  Harrow stepped closer. "But Xandos has made your research a reality."

  "Xandos is mad." Lahmi took a long, sighing breath. There must have been oxygen fed directly to his brain through the pipework, she realised. His crippled lungs could never have fed that massive brain otherwise. "There was a time when he was sane, and still capable of love. The fact that I am alive is a testament to that. But the Tenebrae took him, and then abandoned him. That was the beginning of his madness."