"It's all right," Caliban told her. "They won't hit us."
A series of metallic sounds issued from the wall as the two airlocks met. Caliban listened for the hiss of equalising pressure. "Here she comes. Be ready."
The lock opened, and Aura Lydexia stepped out, flanked by four Custodes guards.
The doctor-captain was a striking woman, slender and fine-boned, her shaved scalp a network of circuit tattoos. She wore full uniform armour and a long coat of soft black leather. As she stepped onto the deck she stopped, saluted Caliban and bowed. "My Lord Heirophant."
"Welcome aboard, doctor-captain. I've heard so much about you."
Lydexia straightened and ran her hand back over her scalp. A nervous gesture. "I can only apologise, my Lord. I know how irregular this is, and how much you must have sacrificed to make room for me. If there had been any other way..."
"High Command was insistent, as was your chapter savant. The lady Gemello is a formidable woman."
"I believe the correct word is 'terrifying'." Lydexia turned to the Custodes on her right, a very tall man with long hair swept back in a tail. "My lord, this is Commander Iamés Hirundo. He'll be my bodyguard while I'm here."
"Of course." Caliban gave the man a nod. "And this is my assistant, Elu."
There was a moment's hesitation, and then Lydexia nodded to the helot. "Pleased to meet you, Elu."
"I am pleased to meet you, doctor-captain," and Elu herself gave a little nod in return.
Inwardly, Caliban smiled. Elu was learning, and Aura Lydexia had passed her first test, although she didn't know it.
The next few days were going to be very interesting.
Lydexia was quartered on the habitation deck. The cell Caliban gave her wasn't large, but it was probably slightly more spacious than what she'd had on Chorazin. Archaeotechs, for some reason, always seemed to find themselves short of space.
Caliban had also managed, at extremely tight notice, to make a laboratory module available for the time engine. The research that had previously gone on in the module was plainly coming to nothing, so Caliban had closed it down: the scholars there would be returning to their temple-lab on Tripolis, their progression through the Archaeotech ranks stalled. The equipment they had been using would follow them a few days later, once it had been properly inspected and any data-crystals wiped clean. At the moment it was stashed in the docking ring's cargo area.
Lydexia brought her belongings over from Vigilant personally, everything she owned packed into a small carryall. It would take a small army of helots and technicians to move and install the time engine, but Lydexia and Caliban would only need to supervise the last stages of that process. For the moment, there was little reason for either scholar to stand and watch the packing crates being emptied.
Instead, he decided to show her the observation platform.
Commander Hirundo took it upon himself to thoroughly inspect Lydexia's new cell while she was away. In turn, Caliban had left Elu in his quarters, cataloguing some papers, and Lydexia commented on that when they met. "Won't you require her?"
"She has duties elsewhere," he replied, gesturing towards the open elevator. "Menial tasks of a technical nature, but vital nonetheless. You'd be surprised how much of what I do here is paperwork."
"I'm sure I wouldn't," said Lydexia rather ruefully. She had her share of administration too. She stepped into the elevator, moving to one side as Caliban followed.
The woman was tense, almost on her toes. She wanted to say something, he realised, ask some delicate question, but was afraid to. Her body language was obvious.
Caliban was heartened that his reputation reached far past Ascension's walls.
He reached out and touched a control, sending the elevator on its way. "Speak, doctor-captain. No matter what you've heard, I'm actually quite difficult to offend."
"Forgive me, my lord. But Elu..."
"What about her?"
"It's... It's unusual for someone of your rank to have a helot as a personal assistant. Especially one with a name."
"I gave her the name, just before I had her upgraded." He folded his arms. "It means 'full of grace' in one of humanity's ancient tongues. I thought it apt."
"I see."
"Never underestimate the helots, Lydexia. They were human once, and many retain qualities from their previous existence, even if it does require a trauma-spider to retrieve them. Did you know Elu was just eighteen when she was converted?"
Lydexia shook her head. "I could see she was young."
"She lived on Senprad's Planet, a human world with mutant enclaves. Apparently, her parents discovered her consorting with a mutant. One that was very nearly human, but that made no difference to them. They handed her over for the process themselves."
The doctor-captain gaped at him. "What? My God, their own child?"
"Makes you proud to be human, doesn't it?" The lift chimed and slowed to a halt, its doors parting. "Ah, here we are."
He stepped out and led Lydexia onto the observation platform.
Her reaction was rather as he had expected. As far as his research on her could discover, she had lived most of her life on Chorazin, cooped up in the halls and chambers nestling beneath the heat shield. To find herself on an open deck almost half a kilometre across must have been something of a shock.
He gestured her forwards, and together they began to walk into the centre of the platform. The outer rings of workstations were on raised decks above their heads, but there was little that she should see there. Everything that she needed to know about Ascension would be found in the centre.
Even from here, halfway between the core stations and the outer wall, the main holo-displays were vast. They filled the air above the platform's centre, huge globes of gridded light orbiting the cylindrical data-core, and each with dozens of smaller holo-displays orbiting them. It was like a compressed solar system, each world wrought from hazy threads of colour, attended by fleets of tiny moons.
Caliban pointed at the nearest globe. It was filled with a single holographic model, a misshapen dumbbell bisected by a flat circular shield and topped with a huge parabolic dish. "As you can see, this is the main monitoring station for Ascension itself. The docking ring you arrived at is down here, just above the reactor block. Those spines at the far end are the sensorium."
"Amazing," Lydexia breathed. "My lord, correct me if I'm wrong, but the upper part of the structure is familiar. A monitoring station?"
"That's right. When the Bastion was first deployed, thirty long range sensor stations were installed just outside the perimeter. Most of them were decommissioned in later decades, but Archaeotech division petitioned High Command to have one modified for our own uses. We added the spindle, moved the reactor block and the docking ring to the end of it, and built the shield between."
"To protect the sensorium."
He nodded. "Emissions from the reactor were always going to be a problem with a sensorium as sensitive as ours. Even docking starships can force a recalibration."
Lydexia began to move around the core, looking sometimes at the circling globes above her head, sometimes at the screens and holopanels on the workstations below. Caliban followed her, watching carefully, seeing where her attentions lay.
She stopped, indicating another globe. "This is the Bastion itself."
"Well observed." The globe was empty, but for a single indicator at its centre. But its surface was studded with icons. "Ten thousand vessels, spaced evenly over the perimeter of the Gulf. We monitor their formation changes from here."
"Do you communicate with them?"
Caliban shook his head. "It's proscribed, by Patriarchal decree. No one's spoken to them in a hundred years. They are only ever re-supplied by helot ships, and they are vaporised the moment their duties are complete."
Lydexia looked aghast. "What about the crews? How long have they been in there?"
"No one knows." He spread his hands. "We are forbidden to make any kind of contact with th
em. As far as we can gather, they still have active crews, because the formation changes always occur as scheduled."
"That's horrible." The woman had gone even more pale than usual. "My Lord, the Gulf is half a light-year across. At such a range, how could the Bastion be contaminated?"
"Ask High Command. Or His Holiness, if you could ever get his attention." Caliban sighed. "This is a forgotten backwater of the universe, doctor-captain. The Accord has spread away from the Gulf like water from grease. The only reason we are tolerated at all is because we get results."
"I see."
"No," Caliban told her. "Not yet, you don't."
He took her to the Chapel of Sight. The elevator that took them there was faced with panels of transpex, and the gantry that held the Chapel had been left mainly open. It gave a perfect view of the interior of the sensorium as they rose through it, a vast forest of towers and spines, some a hundred metres high or more.
"I've been reading up on you, doctor-captain," Caliban told her when they were halfway up the gantry. "Your body of work is quite impressive."
"Thank you, Lord Heirophant." She dipped her head demurely. "I'm sure that's simply because there are so few others working in this field. Chronotechnology is a less than a lost art, even to other Archaeotechs. Most regard it as superstitious folly."
"Well, that's not how it's seen here." Caliban gazed out through the sensorium. The elevator was already above the lowest spires, and more of the open blackness of space could be seen between those that remained. "We pick up chronoplast emissions every day. Your work and ours goes hand in hand."
"My Lord, there are very few who see this chapter as you do. After Xystus, I'm surprised they even gave me a room, let alone a place to work."
Caliban glanced across at her. "I noted a mention of an incident on Xystus. What happened?"
"Nothing." She shook her head sadly. "There was a massive emission, and I persuaded a senior scholar at Chorazin to run a procurement there. When we arrived, there was nothing, just a chronoplast wave, and nothing to account for it."
"No signs?"
She shrugged. "Very little. An imprint in the sand, just a square about a metre and a half on a side, and some footprints. I have scans of the site, of course, but they reveal nothing."
"And yet here you are..." The elevator was above the highest sensorium spire now, and Caliban caught a fleeting glimpse of pure, uninterrupted space before they reached the Chapel.
The doors parted, and they stepped through the portal and into the Chapel of Sight.
"I come here often," he told her. "Sometimes just to look at this place with my own eyes." He pointed upwards, stretching his arm towards the ceiling. "There, in the centre of the viewport. That's the closest Bastion ship. I can see its drive bells from here, but I don't even know its name."
"And the Manticore?"
"Ah." Caliban lowered his arm and grinned. "For that, you need better eyes."
There was a bank of video panels ranged against one of the Chapel walls. He strode over to them and keyed them on with his crypt disc. Each brightened with a burst of static, followed by a clear picture.
The largest, a metre wide hexagon in the centre of the array, showed the Manticore.
It was a dark, glossy globe of black metal, strangely faceted, as though it had been built in layers, with each surface slightly less complete than the last. Light showed through the fissures and chasms in its shell, myriad points of blue glare, and facing slightly away from Ascension was a vast, shallow crater, glowing dull orange from within, smoothly complex like a series of concentric lenses.
The Manticore looked like a mechanical eye, gazing up and away.
"Two hundred years it's been there," Caliban breathed. "It just appeared, destroyed a fleet of Iconoclast warships without even trying, devastated twenty worlds... and then just stopped. It's been here ever since, and so has the Bastion."
"My God," Lydexia muttered. "What manner of devilry is that thing?"
"Whatever it is, it's our reason for being here, doctor-captain. I've been studying that bastard for thirty years, and my father before me, and just when you think it's dead, that it's got no more to tell you, it twitches. Moves a few hundred metres, turns itself around, and our research goes into overdrive once more." He left the screen and paced back to gaze through the viewport ceiling once more. "It's a treasure box, the greatest source of temporal technology in the universe, and all we can do is sit out here and listen to it snore."
He left Lydexia to go back to her quarters while returning to his own. Elu was there, diligently sorting through parchments and data-crystals, just as he had left her.
He went to the desk and sat down. "Elu, you may stop and rest. Aren't you tired?"
"I will not need to feed-recharge for six hours, my Lord."
"Stop anyway." He put his elbows on the desktop and rested his head in his hands. "She's dangerous, Elu."
"The doctor-captain?" Elu stood up carefully, the servos in her hips and knees whining faintly in the silent office. "Is she a threat to your safety?"
"Very probably. We're going to have to bury those files deeper than I thought. Her research is going to come worryingly close to mine."
"Command me, my lord."
Caliban didn't speak immediately. He lifted his head and sat back, steepling his fingers thoughtfully. "What do you know," he asked after a time, "about Saint Scarlet of Durham?"
"The Blasphemy, my lord. The arch-mutant, enemy of all humankind."
"Do you fear her?"
Elu had to think about that one. Caliban tried not to hear the soft clicking of relays under that metal scalp as she interrogated her own brain. "Yes," she said finally. "I fear her."
"Well, thanks to Aura Lydexia, she's here. A version of her, anyway." Caliban scowled to himself, thinking about the frozen corpse she'd brought onboard. At the moment it was being held in a hazardous waste store down on the lab deck, but if Caliban had his choice he'd feed the thing into the nearest fusion furnace and be done with it.
And what of the real Durham Red? By the sound of things, she had an interest in the time engine too, just as her dead duplicate must have done.
It was an intriguing mystery, but right now Caliban needed no such thing. People with mysteries to solve tended to go digging in dangerous places.
He would have to watch Aura Lydexia very carefully indeed
11. OVERLOAD
"He's late," said Durham Red.
"He's an Iconoclast Prefect," replied Godolkin. "Of course he's late."
They were on the bridge of Omega Fury, along with Judas Harrow. As usual, Godolkin was in the pilot's throne, while Red took the weapons station and the sharp-eyed Harrow handled the sensors. It was an arrangement they had become used to since taking control of the ship, with each of the three companions playing pretty much to their strengths.
Any one of them could have swapped, as Harrow had so ably proved back at Chorazin, but it felt comfortable to fall into a pattern, and there were times when Red would take any comfort she could find.
"According to the schedule," said Harrow, "he should have decelerated just over an hour ago. Could he have changed course?"
"There're other supply dumps," Red muttered glumly. "He could have gone to any one of them. I think we've missed him."
"Should we leave?"
"And go where?" Red glared at her forward holoscreen, willing it to show the flare of a jump-point. "We'll never get near Ascension if we don't do it like this. I mean, it took us two days just to get next to this place, and Ascension's one big listening post."
"Stationed next to the biggest Iconoclast fleet in history," said Harrow. "You have a point."
Thanks to some very careful flying by Godolkin, Fury had managed to approach the Quadrata supply dump without being detected, but it had been slow going. The dump was a town sized amalgam of fuel refinery and ammunition store, studded with weapons turrets, and constantly patrolled by a small fleet of killships. Even with th
e shadow web engaged, Quadrata's controllers would have picked up any hint of a drive burn, so Godolkin had been forced to decelerate from superlight well out of detection range and then coast in. Only when the ship had been a mere hundred metres from the dump's flank had he risked using the manoeuvring thrusters to slow down.
It had been a long, tense flight. Now all they could do was sit and wait, while killships circled just a few hundred kilometres away.
Godolkin sighed. "Remain calm, mutants. Tullus is an Iconoclast Prefect, which tells us several things about him. He will not change his course, because to do so would mean deviating from his original plan, and he lacks the imagination to make such a decision. He will be late, because he will consider it his privilege to make others wait for him. And he will decelerate to re-supply, even if it is not strictly necessary, because he lives in mortal terror of running out of anything."
"Blimey." Red raised her eyebrows. "Sounds like the people I used to work for."
Harrow nodded. "I think most people in the Accord have worked for someone like that. Hello, what's this?"
Red checked her holos. "I'm not picking anything up. What are you looking at?"
"That," said Harrow, as a jump-point billowed into existence ahead of them.
It looked like an explosion at first, a crimson fireball expanding into the blackness, but as Red watched, the centre of it inverted, twisted and sucked itself back like the eye of a tornado. And from the midst of that storm came a starship.
A slab of grey metal two kilometres long erupted into realspace, racing as it left the jump-point, but instantly slowing, its speed dropping to nothing in seconds. That was an illusion, Red knew, a by product of the way light behaved in jumpspace. If the ship had really slowed down that fast the crew would have been smeared over the forward bulkheads.
"Okay, we're good to go." Red checked her instruments as the Iconoclast ship edged close to Quadrata's flank. "We'll move when they start taking the supplies across."
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