Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  In a few moments the doorway opened again, and a tall, white faced young man stepped through. He paced quickly over to where Red was standing. "Lady Yalishanna Trier?"

  "That's me."

  He drew close to her and bowed. "Oray Abd Durwan, your trademaster." His bow wasn't deep, and it was skewed sideways by the device he carried slung over his left shoulder. This was no coffee pot, but a glass cylinder of greenish, bubbling fluid, capped with brass filigree and terminating in a curled metal tube. The tube was hooked through a small loop, so that its end lay close to Durwan's cheek. It smoked very slightly. "I believe you are eager to begin work?"

  "The sooner the better."

  "Very well. In that case, allow me to summon a gravity sled."

  Red put a hand up. "Let's walk."

  "Walk?"

  "Yeah. Move forward by putting one foot in front of the other? You remember." She started ahead, leaving him to catch up. "Come on, it'll be fun!"

  It felt good to stretch herself out on the walk from the lounge to the trading halls. She moved fast, legs swinging under Yalishanna's robe. Oray Abd Durwan, obviously used to slower customers, almost had to run to keep up.

  The journey took them even deeper into the deck, into large, open areas that teemed with life. Within a few blocks of the arrivals lounge, Red found herself in a wide internal street, pushing her way through crowds. The street was roofed with ornate girders and hanging lumes, but in all other respects it might just as well have been in the open. It certainly smelled that way; its air must have been pumped in from outside rather than created internally like it was in so many Accord buildings. It had the tang of sea salt to it.

  Before long, stalls began to appear on either side, and soon Red was in the middle of a market. The crowds around her - an almost equal mix of human and mutant, she was pleased to notice - were plainly here for their own kind of trade, a smaller, more intimate version of that taking place in the lounge. This was the kind of bargaining Red could relate to. Not fat businessmen squinting over the shipping costs of refined molybdenum, but a frenzied personal interplay of barter and bargain.

  The goods around her were a wonder. Silk sheets hung next to brassware and jewellery, sense-engine parts alongside meat and dried fruit. Red slowed her pace a little, just enjoying the show. Next to her, Durwan seemed quite bewildered by it all. "Forgive me, my lady," he said as they walked. "I usually take a sled or monorail."

  "And miss all this?" Someone was trying to sell her live chickens by thrusting them into her face. On her other side, a furred man was offering her baskets of oranges, spiky fruit, hashish. "What is this place, anyway?"

  "We call it the Lesser Suq," Durwan told her, waving traders away with each step. "The stallholders set up here in the hope of attracting custom from the traders. There is little of that, of course, but they don't seem to mind."

  "I'm not surprised. No shortage of customers, is there?"

  "A surfeit, I'd say. Please, lady, follow me. I know a short cut."

  Durwan was as good as his word, and within a few blocks Red was being shown into a large, low ceilinged hallway that bore no resemblance to the outside world at all. Durwan took her through a set of security doors at one end, using a small crypt-disc hung around his neck on a gold chain, and into an even larger area. This one was circular, richly carpeted, the lights discreetly low. Around the circumference of this new hall were doorways, most standing open. "Please," Durwan invited her. "Pick one."

  "Any one?"

  "The choice is yours, lady."

  "Um. Okay, that one." The doorways were all identical, anyway.

  Inside was a small room, sparsely furnished. There was a small, round desk, two chairs, and a side table on which stood a pot of mint tea and two glasses. Red could smell the strong mint, mixed with the musky chemical aroma rising from Durwan's shoulder tube. Out in the market she'd not noticed it, but in the closeness of the trading chamber it was hard to ignore.

  She sat on one side of the desk, and Durwan took the chair opposite her. As he did, he turned his head and placed his lips around the end of the tube, drawing a long breath of its vapours. His eyes closed for a second or two, and when they reopened, his pupils were very large. "Now," he smiled. "We begin."

  "Great," Red replied, sitting back. "Before we start, I'd just like to say what a great place you've got here. I mean, I've been to a whole bunch of planets in the back Accord, but Dedanas is way more fun."

  "Thank you, Lady Yalishanna."

  "And your prices are really good. You beat anywhere else hands down on refined minerals."

  He nodded graciously. "We are fortunate. Taxation rates here in the Periphery are less than half of those on worlds under Iconoclast control." His voice was odd now, strangely cadenced. It reminded Red a lot of the recorded sales pitches in the lounge. "In addition, our mining technology is quite revolutionary, which also serves to keep costs down."

  Ah yes, she thought. The mining technology. She wondered if Oray Abd Durwan knew how revolutionary it actually was. "I'll bet. Oh, one last question."

  "Yes?"

  "That gas you're breathing." He was taking another puff as she spoke. "What is that?"

  "It's called Tajar, my lady, or barter musk. It's a neural enhancer."

  Red blinked. "What, it makes you smarter?"

  "It improves my memory and mental functions, especially in the fields of mathematics and economics. It reduces my reliance on data-engines and electro-abaci during trade."

  "Right." She nodded. "So it's not essential to your life, then. If you were asleep or unconscious for a while, and couldn't puff on it, you wouldn't be in trouble."

  He frowned. "No, my lady. Why do you ask?"

  "No reason," Red replied, and punched him hard in the nose.

  Durwan flew over backwards, the impact of the blow flinging him clear out of his chair. He struck the wall, bounced off, and collapsed in a heap.

  Red was already out of her own chair. She hauled Durwan up and sat him back against the wall, putting two fingers to the side of his throat. She'd not invested the blow with a fraction of the force she could have, but hitting people was never an exact science. Red was glad to find a steady, if rather brisk pulse under her fingertips.

  Blood was threading down from Durwan's swelling nose. He'd be out for an hour, maybe two, which was probably going to be long enough. Red reached under his robes, taking out the crypt-disc and lifting the chain over his head. "Sorry about that," she told him.

  It was a pity she'd had to strike him at all, but she'd been searched quite thoroughly before getting onto the clipper. There had been no chance of bringing any drugs or weapons onto Ulai.

  Within a few moments the disc was slung around her own neck. She took off the veil, then stripped off Yalishanna's hood and outer cloak, bundling them up tight and shoving them into the teapot. The fabric was fine, strong yet gossamer thin, and she was able to get the lid back on without too much trouble. That just left her in a loose tunic and trousers of black silk, and a pair of boots that were a lot more practical than they looked.

  The veil went back around her face, tied on like a mask with a knot behind her head, under her hair. Her face was different at the moment, her hair colour similarly disguised, but there were some things she couldn't cover as easily. The fewer people who saw her fangs the better.

  Red stopped for a second and took a deep breath, letting her own pulse slow down. Things had gone well so far, but the plan could go badly wrong at any time. She needed to be doubly careful from now on.

  For a moment she was almost tempted to take a sniff of Durwan's trade musk, but she decided against it. There was no telling what the stuff would do to her. Besides, a chemically induced degree in mathematics wouldn't help her now. All she really needed was an elevator, or the local equivalent. A way of getting down to sea level, and beyond, before the trademaster woke up.

  She stepped outside, locking the door behind her, and set off to find the quickest way into the ocean
s of Dedanas.

  3. MINE SHAFT

  The bearded man, whose name Durham Red had never found out, had been right about the fin and how it turned. The massive flared base of it sat not on the seabed itself, but on a titanic disc of metal and polished stone a full kilometre across. Hundreds of concentric rings were set into the disc, gleaming in the greenish light from underwater searchlights: bearings and gear tracks, on which the Ulai fin would rotate whenever the ocean world's weather got severe.

  It was an impressive construction, and slightly worrying. As she tooled the little submersible past the fin's base, she found herself wondering just how far down into the seabed the axle extended, and what might happen should it ever fail. She certainly wouldn't want to be anywhere nearby if it did.

  Traversing the disc at one-quarter thrust seemed to take an age, but Red didn't want to attract attention by opening up the vessel's drives this close to Ulai. Stealing the thing had been easier than she had been expecting by a long way, but there was no sense pushing her luck.

  So far, things had gone very well indeed. Durham Red, who seemed to attract ill fortune like a magnet draws filings, was beginning to find that just a little suspicious. However, she forced herself to stay positive. Surely there was no reason, she told herself, easing the throttles up a few degrees, why would her luck change. After all the woe she'd seen, why shouldn't things go her way, just for once?

  The fin was behind her now, fading into the sea's murk. Within a few minutes it would be invisible to the naked eye, for all its size and searchlights, although the submersible's sonar still showed it with perfect clarity. Eyes were not the best way to see down here, Red knew. Not under two hundred metres of ocean.

  Red didn't know if the submersible belonged to Oray Abd Durwan personally, or if it was just one of the vessels he was authorised to use, but in either case his crypt-disc had led her right to it. The coin sized identification wafer had proved amazingly useful on her way down through the fin, getting her through locked doors, giving her access to interactive maps and guides, even getting her into the submersible pen and almost to the mini-sub's hatch. Things had taken a slight downturn at that point, due to a couple of dockyard techs who had spotted her and tried to raise an alarm, but they would be sleeping off that mistake for a couple of hours yet.

  In her rear, view holoscreen, the great fin vanished completely into the haze. Red took that as a signal it was safe to speed up, and eased the throttles forward to one-half thrust.

  The submersible accelerated smoothly, its impellers powering up with a shrill hum. It hadn't taken Red long to get to grips with the vessel's controls. Although her experience of undersea travel was quite limited, the combination of throttles, pedals and control collective was not a great deal different from those she had used in dozens of different kinds of space vessels. The sonar took some getting used to, and the sub's complete lack of weapons made her nervous, but that was only to be expected. Heading into danger without a gun in her fist was something she had never felt comfortable doing.

  Ahead of her, slightly distorted by the sub's domed forward canopy, forests of weed and coral rose out of the murk.

  Red pulled back on the collective slightly, lifting the submersible another twenty metres above the seabed before levelling out again. She checked the sonar, using her free hand to extend the range, and the holographic patch of seabed in front of her flickered and smoothed out as its dimensions increased by a factor of ten.

  Objects appeared, spun from threads of light.

  With the range increased, the sonar now showed Red all the structures within a hundred kilometres. The fin was still there, oddly truncated at the point where it broke the surface, but it was no longer alone. Red saw the pyramidal bulk of the manufactory over to the far right, and ahead, almost at the sonar's limit, a spider of lines and domes that made up the mine complex and its refinery. A slender cylinder extended from the refinery, pointing straight up towards the surface, and Red corrected her course slightly to aim at it, taking the speed up to three-quarters. The sub surged forward, impellers humming madly, and the cylinder - the refinery's hoist tower, designed to carry tonnes of purified minerals up to a transfer platform on the surface - began crawling towards her.

  "Not long now," she whispered.

  Her left forearm was beginning to itch again, and sent hot needles of pain up to her elbow. She grimaced and waved the arm about a few times to try to ease the discomfort. There wasn't much room to wave anything inside the submersible, but the movement helped somewhat. She hoped that it wouldn't trouble her too much before she reached the refinery. Now was not the time to be distracted.

  Chimes sounded from the control board. Red found herself looking up towards the distant surface. There, the instruments told her, something enormous was churning the waves into froth, carving a channel in the water as it passed. One of Ulai's mighty transport barges, laden with goods from the refinery, was on its way to the spaceport.

  When Red looked back at the sonar, the hoist tower was drawing close to the middle of the screen. She set the device to threat mode, decreasing the range, but upping the resolution and the rate at which the sonar took soundings. Instantly, the tower's representation dropped back, but began moving more quickly. Red throttled the impellers back as the mine complex began to resolve itself from the blue green haze in front of her.

  She saw the tower first, or rather the warning beacons that studded its surface. Then the refinery itself became apparent, first as a random sprawl of lit windows, then gradually growing an outline. It was immense, like everything here, built to a huge scale. The processing towers rose above her like volcanoes, the pipes and gantries were forests, the domed reactor behind it a looming mountain.

  Tubes extended from the base of the tower; pressurised tunnels, braced to the seabed with arched steel girders. Red took the submersible down to the nearest, and swung the vessel around to follow it.

  She was checking the sonar every few seconds, but there were no other subs in the water.

  The tube extended for about ten kilometres before it met the mine. There was little to see above the seabed, of course, just a great cap of metal so wide it went off the edge of the sonar. Next to it, attached by another tunnel, was a cone shaped building of dark metal, its top flaring out into a wide disc.

  Red was just wondering how deep the mine went when the sonar outlined that flared roof in crimson.

  Instantly the board came alive with chimes and alert lamps. Red cursed and hauled on the collective, swinging the sub over and around. Someone down in that building had locked onto her power signature. If they fired at her from this range she'd be too close to dodge.

  Security here, it seemed, was a lot tighter than back at the fin.

  Red throttled one impeller up to full, the other into reverse, spinning the submarine about and then dropping it towards the seabed. Sand and grit whirled up into the cones of her forward searchlights, flying behind her as she poured on the power.

  The comms board lit up. "Submersible Sumuk Nine. Disengage your power train immediately and await pickup. You are in a proscribed area!"

  The board was set to audio only, but Red gave it the finger anyway. "Disengage this."

  "We won't warn you again, Sumuk Nine."

  "Fine by me."

  She was answered by a new chime from the board, a ragged, insistent gonging, rising steadily in pitch. Whoever was on the other end of the comms channel hadn't been kidding. Red slammed both throttles hard and began yanking the collective about, trying to throw up as much seabed muck as she could, and then dragged the stick back. The submersible rose fast, creaking in protest at the pressure changes.

  It was a good try, a valiant attempt at escape, but there was no way it was ever going to work. The first torpedo hammered into the seabed and detonated there with a brief flash and an expanding sphere of shockwave, but the other wasn't fooled. It sizzled past Red's submersible, trailing bubbles, and arced around to port. She could see it on the so
nar, a bright point of yellow light outlined in threat warnings and velocity markers, homing in on her with awful speed.

  The chiming became a continuous tone. Red threw her arms over her head just as the second torpedo detonated fifty metres behind her.

  Whoever was in control of the weapon had timed the blast perfectly. The explosion tore into the submersible's rear like a hammer blow, slamming Red forwards in the cabin. She was strapped in, heavy pressure webbing holding her into the seat, but the torpedo's destruction still threw her about like a bead in a rattle.

  Blearily, she saw the seabed spiralling up to meet her. Pieces of metal, some of them glowing with heat, were whirling down past her to meet it. That was what was left of the impellers, she realised. The power core was intact, but the drives and control surfaces were history.

  Trademaster Durwan would not be pleased about this.

  Ulai traffic control sent out two more submersibles to pick her up - big, armoured things, their lumpy hulls dotted with torpedo launchers and sonar pickups. Red's own sonar had been knocked out by the blast, but what was left of Sumuk Nine had come down with part of its canopy facing largely upwards. She saw the other subs dropping through the swirling murk, lit by their own running lights.

  They took her back to the refinery, the submersible's twisted frame held tightly in powered grabs. Red could only sit, strapped into the seat, bracing herself against the pressure cabin's walls as the armoured submersibles dragged her up through a horizontal water lock, into a docking area that dwarfed that of the Ulai fin. The lights there seemed blazingly bright after the sub's dim cockpit indicators and the cloudy darkness of deep ocean, and Red winced, shielding her eyes as her captors extended their grabs and dropped Sumuk Nine unceremoniously onto a nearby deck.

  The wrecked sub teetered, then rolled over onto its side, bouncing Red around some more. "Hey!" she yelled. "Try being a bit more careful."

  "We're done being careful." It was the same voice she'd heard before. "Now unseal the hatch and come out."