The Omega Solution

by Peter J Evans

  Not impossible, just difficult.

  "Speak," said Godolkin. "Who are you working for?"

  "Go to hell, heretic."

  "I do, on a regular basis. Don't throw your life away, agent. If you are working against Xandos Dathan, our objectives are not dissimilar."

  While Godolkin spoke, Harrow quickly collected Red's equipment, bundling the guns and ammunition into a silk pillowcase. He heard Enostine hiss out a laugh.

  "Matteus Godolkin, you are the worst kind of fool. The Umbrae Nova are a greater threat to mutantkind than they will ever be to humans. All they need is a push in the right direction, and we have them slaughtering their own people on our whim!"

  "On Broteus?" asked Harrow quietly, standing over her.

  Her eye narrowed slightly. "Not such a fool, it seems. But this is beyond you, mutant, and your bitch-saint. Trust me, as I look up this blade, you'll be looking up the barrel of the Omega Solution before you know it!"

  And she raised her head.

  Before Godolkin could pull the blade back, Enostine had snapped her long neck forward, impaling her own eye. The poison on the blade must have been unimaginably powerful. She went instantly stiff, then limp. Her head fell back against the deck.

  "Sneck," said Harrow. "When you put that blade down, Godolkin, do so with care."

  Their journey back to Crimson Hunter was made without further surprise. The surprise was waiting for them when they got back aboard.

  There was a message waiting for them on Harrow's crypt-key.

  Godolkin retrieved it while Harrow brought Hunter's systems back on line. Dathan's technicians, obviously afraid of angering Durham Red, had made an expert job of repairing the damage done on Orteus and the journey to the pulsar. The vessel had even been refuelled, and the twin flayer missiles replaced.

  The landing deck had its membrane activated, to facilitate the sheer number of ships that were entering and leaving the bay. Harrow engaged the grav-lifters, lifted the landing spine, and shut off the enraged burst of shouting from the comms board. Traffic control could roar all they liked, for all he cared.

  "Godolkin, the message. Is it from Red?"

  "No." The Iconoclast tapped a key on the comms board, bringing a holoscreen up. "It's from Fortune and Glory."

  That was the Harvester vessel they had met on Elam. Harrow eased Hunter through the membrane, then triggered the main drive. He brought up a rear-view holo and saw Emissary shrinking behind him.

  On Godolkin's screen, the face of Tola Sineon appeared.

  "You're not answering my calls," she said. "So I'm leaving a recording. I hope this doesn't mean you're already in trouble. You saved my life, and whatever you might think of Harvesters, we pay our debts."

  "Seems to have regained her voice," said Harrow. Godolkin held up a hand to silence him.

  "I spoke to Captain Langstromm," the girl continued. "He said that you were looking for someone to read some old data, and might be thinking of taking it to the Aranites. Please, don't go to them! We did, and something went terribly wrong. They had us wait around for ages, and Matthias could feel they were trying to double-cross us. And then the Tenebrae came after us."

  She took a deep breath, as though steadying herself against the weight of that old horror. "You know about that. But the captain says he once dealt with the Aranites, and won't again. They have some sort of arrangement with a mutant organisation, something like the Tenebrae but worse. He didn't know their name, but their leader is a man with metal eyes. The captain only just survived the deal.

  "So please, be careful. And if there's any way you can let me know you've received this, please do. Godspeed, all three of you."

  The holo faded out. "Full circle," said Harrow.

  "This has been a plot since the beginning," replied Godolkin, sitting back. "Dathan has manipulated us, through the Aranites and beyond. And all the while, Iconoclast intelligence has been manipulating him."

  "You know what I think?" said Harrow. "I think someone's trying to start a war."

  Ahead of them, the battlefleet was moving into a new formation. Harrow raised the drive thrust and headed for the dark bulk of the battleship Persephone.

  16. WAKE-UP CALL

  Lahmi had designed most of his data-engines himself. As a result they were massively more powerful than anything else in the fleet, almost up to the standard of basic home computers from Red's own time. She had to admit she was impressed. "Let me get this right. You've got everything from Hermes Alpha in here?"

  "It's true, Saint. After the assault on the hub, Xandos arrived with an armful of data-parasites. Some of them had even been used correctly."

  "Only some?"

  "Unfamiliar technology." He waved a withered hand dismissively. "To some, closer to witchcraft. I had Xandos tell the tech teams that the more parasites were connected to Hermes Alpha, the more data we would gain. It would have done no good to let them know just one was enough."

  "I'll bet. How long did it take you?"

  "No time at all." He must have noticed her expression. Those tiny eyes saw far more than she gave them credit for. "That's not a boast, Saint. The location of the Conclave was not hidden. It lay in plain sight."

  "Blimey." Red was at one of Lahmi's workbenches, turning a parasite device over in her hands. "Xandos had one of these in his bedroom. He'd taken it apart."

  Lahmi laughed his soft, tittering laugh. "Had he indeed? As though he could learn from it. Ha!" He swung his chair a little further around the room to look at her. "And of course, it begs the question what you were doing in my brother's bedroom."

  Red grinned at him. "Don't get any funny ideas! I was spying."

  There was a long silence. Then he said, "There was a time, Saint Scarlet, when I used to dream of you."

  Red found herself oddly startled. "You did?"

  "There is a part of me that always dreams, Saint Scarlet, even when I am awake. And that part convinced itself that one day you would save me."

  "From Xandos?"

  "From this." He moved his hands, slightly. "In my dreams, you would descend like an angel, pluck me from my cage of flesh and lead me up to that place where I could walk outside, hold a loved one, taste food."

  Suddenly, Red couldn't speak. There had been a time when she'd thought her life was bad. Bad enough to throw away by climbing into a cryo-tube. Once again, she realised that when push came to shove, she didn't have a snecking clue what she'd been on about.

  "A foolish fantasy," he said. "I was young."

  "Sorry," she said finally.

  He sighed. "All us mutants, at one time or another, have dreamed of you. Whenever we were persecuted, whenever our crops were stolen for tithe, we prayed to Saint Scarlet of Durham, that she would rise up and lead us to victory."

  "And then it happened for real." She smiled sadly. "Not what you expected, huh?"

  "Hardly. You rose up and told us you wanted nothing to do with us. Imagine how we felt!"

  "It wasn't like that, Lahmi!" She put the parasite down on its bench, rather hard. "What happened on Pyre wasn't worship, or freedom. It was slaughter. You don't fight for freedom by killing innocent people."

  "Xandos used to say that the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist depends entirely on your viewpoint."

  Red put her hands on her hips. "No, it doesn't. A freedom fighter goes up against people who might have a chance of fighting back. A terrorist eases a greased stick of detonex up his jacksie and wanders into a bus queue full of schoolkids. That's the difference."

  Lahmi blinked at her, his eyes gleaming strangely in the gloom. "And my brother?"

  "No offence, but lets just say he walks a little funny."

  The mutant looked at her for a full second, then laughed breathily. "Well, my Saint! I always knew Xandos had something up his arse. I never thought it to be high explosives!"

  There was a gonging sound from one of the data-engines. Lahmi swung around to it. "A transmission," he reported, tapping at the ti
ny keypad. "From Judas Harrow."

  "Result! Put him through."

  Harrow's face appeared on the holoscreen. "Holy one! Is everything all right?"

  "It's quiet, which is a good thing. What's been happening? Have you talked to Jubal yet?"

  "We've not even landed on Persephone - we were diverted to Emissary on the way in."

  "Sneck it." Red gnawed her lip. "This is going to push us for time, Jude. Where are you now?"

  "On our way there. But holy one, there is much you need to know. We ran into a friend of yours..."

  After Harrow had finished, Red thanked him and told him to continue heading for Jubal's flagship. It was now more important than ever that he contact the commander and let him know the truth.

  Her mind was reeling. From what Harrow and Godolkin had discovered, it seemed more and more likely that she'd been played for a complete fool from the beginning, from the first time Harrow had told her what he had found in the Tenebrae data-stream.

  Harrow's present links with the Tenebrae were tenuous, to say the least. He had never been a high-ranking member of the cult - an "over-enthusiastic novice" was how he had once described himself - and his own part in the catastrophic fall of Pyre had been entirely eclipsed by that of Durham Red herself. Harrow was more than happy to find himself sidelined, and he'd been very careful since then to remain forgotten.

  However, the value of good intelligence, as Godolkin had reminded them both on more than one occasion, cannot be underestimated. Harrow still had access to certain channels of information used by the Tenebrae, information that could prove vital to Durham Red. So every few weeks she would let him dip his hands into that stream of information and see what he could catch. From a heavily-ciphered terminal, of course, and usually just before a series of randomised superlight jumps.

  On his last trawl, he had found references to Lavannos technology being discovered by the crew of the Venture.

  If the Harvesters had tried to sell their finds to the Aranites, the spidery mutants would have called their partner, Xandos Dathan. And if Dathan wanted some bait to draw in Durham Red, he would have put the location of the Harvesters onto the Tenebrae grapevine. The only trouble was, the Tenebrae had seen it too. And the Iconoclasts.

  Bad luck for the Harvesters, and Xandos Dathan. He must have been overjoyed when, after losing her in the carnage on Gadara, she'd walked right back into his arms on Weaver of Paths.

  No coincidence, really. When it came to ancient technologies, everyone ended up at Lyricum sooner or later.

  "But why did he want me so badly? If all he wanted to do was start a war, why did he go to all that trouble?"

  "Revenge, possibly," said Lahmi. "It is beginning to make a strange kind of sense."

  Red spread her hands helplessly. "What did I ever do to him?"

  "There was a war already going on, my Saint. And you stopped it."

  "I don't-"

  "Your words on Pyre. Your disgust at the mutant appetite for destruction. To Xandos, things had just started to get interesting during the Second Bloodshed. Five years previously he had been ejected from the Tenebrae - his methods had been too extreme, even for them. When the Tenebrae rose up against Pyre, Xandos thought he was about to be vindicated. The Umbrae Nova were hyper-extremists, then, and he was certain their day had come. When you sent the Tenebrae scurrying back into the shadows, he went mad."

  "Oh, my snecking Christ." Red could see it all, finally. Xandos Dathan, slowly building up a group of mutant terrorists so hard-line that the Tenebrae had thrown them out. Hiding around the pulsar, starting to build his monstrous weapon. Enostine behind him, pushing, always pushing, in the direction her mysterious masters wanted him to jump.

  And in those brief, bloody few days after she had woken up, he had readied his troops, telling them that the hour was finally at hand, that the destruction of the human race could finally begin.

  Red had seriously ruined his fun. "God. He hides it well, doesn't he?"

  "He's had a lot of practice."

  There was a faint pinging noise. Red looked about, trying to trace its source, and saw that an indicator on the shuttle's control board was flashing. "What's that?"

  "Proximity alert. Your companions?"

  "Not unless they've got their directions totally wrong." She ran to the board and brought up the relevant holo. "Oh, crap. Vampyrs."

  "We've been detected."

  "Really? You think?" Red threw herself into the control throne and grabbed the collectives. "Bring up the main power, Lahmi! We're going to make a break for it."

  "Away from the Vampyrs?"

  "No, right towards them." The lights in the shuttle came up, and the boards began to fill with icons. Red triggered the main drive, twisting the collectives until the forward holos showed the Vampyr assault craft heading right towards her. Six of them, in two attack wings.

  The range between them began to drop, fast. "Lahmi? I need your help. Get the schematics of Tisiphone ready to broadcast."

  "Durham Red, if I could broadcast anything from here, do you not think I would have done so years ago?"

  "You can patch them through to the comms board up here. Don't worry, I'm going to be sending enough of my own."

  The Vampyrs still hadn't fired. Red worked the comms board like a maniac, frantically hitting icons to set up a broadscan transmission and link it to Lahmi's data. Ten kilometres from the assault craft, the Tisiphone data came through.

  She hit the broadcast key. "To all ships in the Umbrae Nova attack fleet. This is Durham Red, the Scarlet Saint. And to anyone who still believes that the Tisiphone is a troop-carrier, my message is to you specifically."

  The lead wing of Vampyrs opened fire. Red jinked the shuttle hard to port and saw a string of antimat bolts rip past. The collectives fizzed with static.

  She forced herself to keep talking. "I'm now transmitting detailed schematics and sense-engine readings of what really lies beneath that metal shell. Xandos Dathan has spent the last six years building a planet-killer. He is going to use it on Irutrea, to wipe out the Conclave."

  The Vampyrs spread out. Red hauled on the controls, sending the shuttle wildly sideways. Another barrage missed it by metres. "At the same time, he is going to use five killships stolen from the Kerioth shipyard to decimate the planet Broteus. An atrocity will, in the eyes of the Accord, have been committed by both sides. The result will be war, and not just an uprising like the Second Bloodshed. If you think Pyre was bad, just imagine every mutant world attacked by Iconoclast fleets, every human colony blasted by Tenebrae warcraft. When this is done, the Accord will be lucky if it can make bricks, not starships."

  She was past them now, but they were spinning on their axes, firing their main drives to decelerate. In a few seconds they would be on her again. That would be the really dangerous time. She'd not be able to see them coming.

  "I know many of you joined this cause to fight for peace. Look inside Tisiphone, and know that the fight for peace isn't with Xandos Dathan, it's against him! You fought alongside me, and I know what savage warriors you are. Together, we can avert this, but I can't do it alone!"

  A bolt struck the shuttle aft, a glancing blow. "Please, all true Umbrae Nova fighters, join me! Stop this war before it begins..."

  She was almost at the fleet now. She could see the great mass of ships ahead of her, side-on, gleaming metal splinters that were growing by the second. She would be among them in just a few seconds.

  The Vampyrs were closing.

  Antimat fire sizzled past. For a second she thought that the Vamprys had her, but then she noticed that the energy bolts were flowing the wrong way. A second later, the rear-view holo lit up with a brilliant fireball.

  Persephone was taking out the Vampyrs.

  Instantly the surviving assault craft began to peel away. Another barrage from Persephone shattered one into pieces, each section tumbling away before their internal fires consumed them. Red flipped the shuttle over, letting the main drive kill so
me of her speed. She glanced at the rear holo, now that it was showing her direction of travel.

  The fleet was starting to fracture.

  A corvette was firing at Persephone, taking multiple antimat hits in return. Several other vessels were dropping back, changing course. Lines of light flickered between ships that, a few minutes ago, had all been on the same side.

  Persephone came up fast, its landing bay covered by a shimmer of green light. Red took the shuttle in backwards, the main drive blazing up until the last second, and then belly-flopped it onto the deck.

  The battle, such as it was, did not go well for the rebels. Less than a third of the ships turned away from Irutrea. Many didn't believe Red's story, or believed it but decided to go with Xandos Dathan anyway. Others, of course, had known the real plan from the beginning.

  Eventually, the main fleet moved ahead. Red's rebels, battered and shell-shocked, could only watch them go.

  Red spent a few more minutes with Lahmi in the shuttle, making sure he was all right, then using his data engines and his help to find one last piece of information. "Don't tell them about this, Lahmi, not even when I'm gone. They won't understand."

  When he agreed, she opened the airlock and stepped out onto the landing deck.

  Jubal was there waiting for her, with Harrow and Godolkin. Sibbecai, too. His wreck of a face creased in rage. "Is this true, Saint? He's been using us?"

  "Yeah. Tisiphone's been a planet-killer from day one." She turned to Jubal. "Commander, is there a spare Vampyr around here?"

  "I don't understand, holy one." The round mutant looked thoroughly miserable, his forehead creased above his ever-present goggles. "What do you intend to do with an assault ship?"

  "I have to go somewhere." As the chorus of disbelief rose, Red put up her hands. "Please, guys! I'll be back, but you have to trust me and let me go, okay? There's something I need to do, but I've got to do it alone."

  "Blasphemy," grated Godolkin, "I am sure I know what you are going to attempt, and I warn you, it is a fool's errand."