The Omega Solution

by Peter J Evans

  At the top of it, over the back of the throne, she could see Xandos Dathan's head.

  Red darted forwards, up the stairs, and halted with the barrel of one magnum resting against the back of his skull.

  "Ah," he said.

  An expanding wave of silence passed out through the cylinder, staring at the techs at the closest workstations and spreading, as each man or woman heard the shocked gasp of the one closer to the dais, and gave one of their own. Within a few seconds the chamber was hushed and still, save the chattering of data-engines and the harsh clatter of frag-shells being chambered.

  There were guards on the galleries, aiming directly at her.

  "Shut it down," said Red, very quietly.

  He turned his head, just enough for his gleaming eye to catch hers. "You don't actually think you're going to leave this ship alive, do you?"

  "That depends on how dim your guards are. If you've chosen the smart ones, they might realise they can't hit me without fragging you, too."

  "Don't count on it."

  "It's over, Dathan. Broteus is safe, Enostine took the easy way out and I'm a gram's trigger-pressure away from taking your head off. And if anyone else in here even moves," she growled, raising her voice so no one would fail to hear, "I'll kill them, you and everyone else on this whole snecking ship. So I repeat. Shut it down."

  "Think of what you're throwing away, Saint!" He twisted further around to her. "We're so close!"

  "You're not close to anything, you dipstick! Except for murdering a planet full of innocent people, just so you can start a war you're going to lose anyway!" She ground the gun-muzzle into his skin, hard. "Enostine was a human agent. She's been yanking you around for six years, working you for an Iconoclast!"

  "The tactician? Oh yes, I know about him."

  Red blinked. "What?"

  He smiled his metal smile. "Poor Enostine. Bounced between two masters, never knowing who was feeding information to who." He shrugged. "Saulus was useful, to a point; easy to manipulate. His hatred of mutants is so overwhelming, you see..."

  "Like your hatred of humans."

  "Yes. But the difference is, mine is justified."

  Red stiffened. There was something in Dathan's voice that she didn't like at all. "Why do I get the feeling you're trying to keep me talking?"

  His face twisted in sudden rage. "Because I fired Tisiphone ten minutes ago, you whore!"

  There was a flare of green light, a jackhammer of searing pain up Red's arm. She screamed in alarm, the magnum spinning out of her grasp. Her boot heels twisted on the smooth steps, and she fell, tumbled back to the deck.

  She came down hard on her backside, brought up the other gun and sent a particle bolt screaming towards Dathan, but it slammed into the light and whined away.

  There was a forcewall generator in the back of the throne.

  The chamber was suddenly full of running, howling techs. Red saw a guard levelling his rifle at her, over the gallery rail, and blew him in half left-handed. Her right arm was numb from the elbow down. She turned, took out another guard, and then the rest of them opened up, hosing the deck with frag-shells. It was a bad move: most of the shells hit the workstations and the techs, ripping across them like sawblades. The machines exploded in flames and shot sparks and components, the techs screamed and died as the shells detonated inside their bodies.

  The control deck had turned instantly from a calm centre of white light and focussed activity into a blood-soaked battleground.

  Red felt a blade of shrapnel strike her forearm followed by a spray of blood. She cursed and killed the firer without even seeing where he was, then sent another shot screeching off the back of Dathan's throne - he was keeping it between him and her, the rippling disc of the forcewall deflecting every blast.

  "Dathan!" she yelled. "Get out from behind that thing and let me kill you!"

  "Keep shouting, Saint. While the Conclave dies and your traitorous little fleet burns!" His hand emerged from behind the throne, holding a plasma derringer. Red dived aside as the wall behind her flashed apart. She came down hard, and rolled messily, her dead arm spoiling her balance.

  She shot another guard, the last one, and watched him tumble off the gallery in two burning sections. "Find an override, Dathan! For God's sake, don't do this!"

  "There is no override, you idiot! How do you think a process like this works? The reactors have been charging since we dropped into realspace. Even if I wanted to, you think I could just press a button and close them down?" He fired again, high. Red ducked aside as a great chunk of gallery blasted free and imbedded itself into the deck. "Go back and freeze yourself, cretin! You'd be more use to us!"

  Red came up on one knee and sent a barrage of magnum shots at Dathan that howled off the back of the throne. "Oh yeah, you'd like that! Go back to being a symbol, so you can slaughter untold millions in my name? No chance."

  The steps behind the throne were smoking, burning. Red saw sparks flickering in the smoke, and realised that her chance had come. She aimed at the sparks and fired.

  The back of the dais shattered, steps and the structures below them blown outwards in shards by the force of the particle bolts. For a second Red saw the fat cables there, feeding power to the forcewall emitters, before they detonated in a blinding shower of light and melted optical fibre.

  The forcewall died.

  Dathan roared and leapt away. He was fast, far faster than Red was expecting. She fired two shots, missed, and saw where he was going. A hatch had popped open at the far end of the chamber.

  Red lined up on the hatch with the magnum and held the trigger down. Dathan tried to stop, but he was going too fast. His boots skidded in blood and a magnum bolt hit him in the side. It span him hard over and he spilled through the hatch.

  "Damn!" Red snapped. "I wanted to make it last longer than that."

  She looked about. Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. The magnum had been horrifically effective, as had the frag-rifles of the guards. There were survivors on the control deck, but none that hadn't been injured or mutilated.

  Even Red had taken a hit or two. She was bleeding from cuts on her arms, and there was a jagged tear in the skin of one thigh that made her wince in pain. Red reached down, found a metal edge embedded in her flesh and pulled. A blade of hot steel the size of her thumb slid agonisingly out of the wound. She let it drop and then glanced up at the holodisplay.

  Irutrea was there, the two fleets, Tisiphone. A thin cylinder of red light, with a sliver of green at the bottom. "Oh crap..."

  That was a time indicator. She had a minute or two, maybe less.

  Red ran up the steps of Dathan's dais, through the smoke and the flames, and dropped into the control throne. There were instrument panels on both of the wide arms, mainly for comms, manipulating the holoview, broadcasting his voice to the faithful. But the right hand panel was larger, more complex. The firing key was there. Of course, he'd want to press that himself.

  There were other controls, too. Red stared at them for a second or two, then started pressing buttons at random. Most of them didn't seem to do anything - she wondered if she'd blown out all of the control cabling as well.

  Then, as the holographic bar clicked down another level, Tisiphone groaned.

  It was a horrible noise, a long, drawn-out sigh of distress, as if the whole mighty length of the ship was protesting at some inner pain. Beneath Red's backside, the control throne shivered.

  It was eerie, ghostly. For a long moment Red didn't have a clue what it meant, until she looked up at the hologlobe, and saw that the model of Tisiphone was moving, turning. Orange triangles had appeared around it.

  "Shit. The thrusters!" Red studied the controls again. She must have hit a command override, set off attitude thrusters all over the ship. Out of sequence, they were putting that insanely long hull under catastrophic stress. Given time, it might even break Tisiphone in half.

  But Red didn't have any time.

  She pressed more co
ntrols, in the correct sequence. Everything aft of the collimator rings went to starboard, everything forward went to port. She reset the holo, switching from tactical to the real.

  Circled by blackness, Irutrea was still dead in her sights. It was moving, but slowly.

  She could see the length of the main barrel stretching away like a golden road, jets of flame sparkling along the port side. The planet-killer was beginning to swivel.

  The shivering was growing worse. Red snapped the comm-linker free of her belt, almost dropping it. She was getting feeling back in her right hand, but not much. "Jude?"

  Static, in waves and sporadic screeches. In the midst of it, she heard his voice. "Holy one?"

  "Jude, tell Jubal to move his fleet! Get everyone away. There's nothing more you can do here. I'm swinging this thing over as fast as I can, but I don't know when it's going to-"

  Light erupted from the prow.

  She yelled, twisted away as blinding glare flooded across the control deck. The holo darkened seconds later, dimming the view: Red looked up through watering eyes, saw a pulsing stream of white-hot gas powering away through space. It wasn't straight, like the beam from a fusion lance or laser, but a narrow cone, hosing out in an uncontrolled fountain from the planet-cannon's flared forward end.

  Irutrea was off to her left. The beam had missed it by several degrees, not even scoring the hazy curve of its atmosphere.

  Tisiphone was still swinging around, still vomiting light. Something came into view on the holo, a broad delta-shape in shadow grey. A battleship, its drive flaring. It was trying to get out of the way of the stream, but the jet was too wide, spread too far. The light crossed the ship's path, enveloped it and passed on.

  The battleship's drive faltered and went out.

  "Oops," said Red quietly.

  The beam was scanning right across Dathan's battlefleet. Red saw it pass over battleships, heavy cruisers, any number of assault ships and Banshees. Some of the smaller vessels detonated after the beam was gone, breaking apart in billows of white flame, but most simply fell silent, their forward momentum carrying them on. Unless they hit something, they would fly forever. Ghost ships.

  The beam faltered, and went out. Red sagged over the controls.

  Her comm-linker chirped. She lifted it, wondering why it felt so heavy. "Yeah?"

  "Red, you've done it!"

  "Have I?" She blinked at the holo, blearily. "Is it over?"

  "Not entirely, holy one. Jump points have started to open up on the far side of the planet. I suggest you get to your Vampyr and leave Tisiphone to the Iconoclasts."

  "Nice of them to finally get here. Okay Jude, head back to the Pulsar. I'll meet you there." She switched the linker off, put it back on her belt, and then Xandos Dathan's fist slammed into the side of her head.

  He was amazingly strong. The impact smashed her clean out of the throne, down the steps of the dais and back onto the deck. She rolled over, her head livid with pain. Dathan was already on top of her.

  He kicked out hard, the toe of his boot catching her in the thigh, right where the shrapnel had penetrated her. She yelled, ducked aside as he stamped down, his foot missing her head by millimetres.

  Red raised her magnum halfway up, but he ripped it from her grasp. "Again!" he snarled, aiming it at her face, his finger pale on the trigger. "You little slut, you've destroyed me again!"

  "Yeah?" She whipped a foot around, caught him in the back of the knee and sent him sprawling. "How many times do I have to do it before you'll finally lay down and die?"

  He scrambled away, one arm clamped over the wound in his side. Bone glittered there, silver amidst the blood and meat. "That's just what they want, don't you understand? The humans! They want us all to lay down and die!"

  "So what's your solution? Butcher innocent people by the million, start a war that will take humans and mutants right back to the dark ages again? How stupid are you?"

  He slumped backwards, hauling the magnum up. "Peace is worth any price," he gasped.

  And fired.

  Red dropped. The bolt tore a track through the back of her bodice, scorching her spine. She dived forwards, punched him hard in the throat, slapped the gun away as it came up again and punched down a second time. Then she hauled him up, bit hard into the sinewy flesh under his right ear.

  He was strong, and it took him a long time to die. He didn't struggle, although maybe that was because Red's blows had shattered his spine. But at the end, just as his heart stilled, he said one last word.

  "Lahmi."

  Persephone was still burning by the time Red's Vampyr caught up with it. Half of the ship was a wreck, torn open by fusion blasts. There were a few other vessels around the pulsar, but from what Red could see, none of them were in much better shape.

  She didn't feel all that good herself.

  Crimson Hunter was in a landing deck on the intact side, along with Lahmi's shuttle. Apart from those two ships, the deck was empty, and Red was quite glad about that. The Vampyr was a ruin; its drives overloaded, its thrusters burned out. If any of Jubal's assault craft had survived the battle, Red would almost certainly have flattened them on the way in.

  Harrow was waiting to catch her when she tumbled down the ramp. "Holy one! Sweet God, you're injured!"

  "You should have seen the other guy." She forced herself upright. "Calm down, Jude, it's nothing that won't heal. Well, apart from the outfit..."

  Godolkin was striding towards her. "It seems you survived, Blasphemy."

  "Don't look so pleased about it."

  "I shall celebrate later. And Xandos Dathan?"

  "We had an argument." She took a deep breath, and winced. Her back hurt like hell. "He lost. How are things here?"

  "I have been monitoring Iconoclast transmissions. It appears that their comms net is slowly coming back online." He folded his arms. "Your powers of persuasion are indeed great, Blasphemy. Broteus was saved."

  "And Tisiphone is destroyed," said Harrow. "The Iconoclasts blasted it after you left, along with many Umbrae Nova ships. Some have survived, but they are scattered, leaderless. The war will not happen."

  "Not today, anyway." She sighed. "What happened at Broteus?"

  "We cannot be certain." Godolkin's expression was unreadable. "However, it appears unlikely that Admiral Antonia could have survived the engagement."

  Red nodded. "She knew she wouldn't, I think. She didn't say it, but... I could tell. Funny. A hardcore Iconoclast like her, dying to save mutants."

  "Many died today, holy one." Harrow was looking at her, sadly. "And none for the right reasons."

  Red blinked at him, "What?"

  "Lahmi," he said.

  Later, on Hunter's bridge, Red watched Jubal's broken fleet fall away behind her. "What do you think they'll do? Once they find we've run off?"

  "Commander Jubal is a capable man," Godolkin replied. "For a mutant. And Sibbecai is a warrior of great skill. They will regroup."

  "They joined Dathan to build a peaceful Accord." She eased herself back in the systems throne. Harrow had applied a biodressing to her back, but it still throbbed in pain. "I wonder if they'll keep at it?"

  "They might," said Harrow. "With an appropriate leader."

  She looked at him sideways. "Drop it, Jude."

  "But I thought-"

  "How many times do I have to tell you? I'm not the messiah." She grinned. "I'm a very naughty girl."

  "The light-drive is charged," Godolkin reported. "We can leave at any time."

  "Time..." Red suddenly felt old and sad. "Jude? When did Lahmi die?"

  He shrugged. "I'm not sure. About three hours before you arrived."

  "Figures." The jump from Irutrea to Persephone had taken her three hours, more or less. "They were twins, did he tell you that?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Nothing." She turned to Godolkin. "Okay, big fellah. Let's hit it."

  "What course shall I set?"

  She thought for a moment, and then smiled. "
Somewhere I can walk in the sun, hold a loved one and taste food," she said quietly. "Know anywhere like that?"

  He looked a little nonplussed. "I'll check the database."

  "Good lad." And she closed her eyes.

  It would quite some time before she opened them again.

  EPILOGUE: REQUIEM TACTICUS

  Threads of light crossed the bedchamber; hair-fine, invisible to the unaltered eye. Nira Ketta's eyes, however, were very much altered. She saw them as clearly as golden cords stretched across her path.

  Smoothly, without hesitation, she moved through them, stepping over one, ducking under another, an unconscious ballet that took her past the alarm beams and beyond without even breaking stride. She moved straight to the desk, found the control that removed the beams and the other security devices, and keyed it. That done, she slipped a thin dagger from her belt-sheath and started towards the bed.

  The shape beneath the sheets moved fitfully. Ketta paused. There was a nightstand next to the bed; a small book of scripture lay there, a glass of plain water. Ketta ran her fingertip absently around the rim of the glass, across the pages of the book. Strange, that such a devious man should have such basic tastes.

  Still, it took all sorts.

  Ketta lifted the sheet and placed the sharp blade of her dagger to the throat of Lord Tactician Saulus. "Wakey, wakey."

  His eyes flickered open. "Major Ketta. How nice of you to drop by."

  "A last quip before dying, Saulus?"

  "No one will die this night, major, least of all me."

  She pressed the blade in a little harder. "I suppose that all depends on how soft your skin is."

  "Enjoying the touch of a man's neck, Ketta? A first time for everything, I suppose." His eyes glittered above a faint smile. "It would appear that your purification wasn't entirely successful. You still have a little of the Blasphemy about you."